Michael Spitzer

Author of #TheMusicalHuman Published @BloomsburyBooks 1.4.2021 | History of Emotion in Western Music OUP 2020 | Prof of Music, University of Liverpool

[Michael Spitzer @MichaelSpitze20]

@boulezian My mother, Livia Rosenfeld (Auschwitz 1944-45). Engaged to my father Janos Spitzer at Mozarteum, Salzburg, 1946.

[Michael Spitzer @MichaelSpitze20]

@carolinefrmus @TheTLS @disgwylfa @boydellmusic Many congratulations Caroline

[Michael Spitzer @MichaelSpitze20]

@hering_david In Venice

[Prof Sara Lodge @LearNonsense]

Slightly shy about posting this. But I took on Sir Jonathan Bate in the Scotsman this week. I love some of his critical writing, but he’s wrong when he says that state school students have lost the ability to read long books.

They just need adaptable, realistic curricula.

[Armand Hamouth @AreMond2]

Short Films are required to be under 20 minutes or in some cases under 15 minutes

This film is 3 minutes 53 seconds & still won the Oscar

If you don’t watch this film you’re doing yourself an injustice

If you don’t spread this film you’re doing everyone else an injustice

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Ash Sarkar 🤝 Peter Hitchens

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

The Source has long been a trusted voice in Hip Hop, where a prestigious five-mic rating was reserved for universally acclaimed albums...

Here are the 16 original albums that originally received five mics. A thread🧵

1. Nas - Illmatic

[Paul Mason @paulmasonnews]

The ideology driving fascist violence in Britain is frighteningly consistent, and you'll hear it echoed increasingly by right-wing populists and NatCons. To fight it, understand it. Here's my slideshow on the Fascist Thought Architecture...

[George Monbiot @GeorgeMonbiot]

The obscene thing I witnessed was like a parable: a parable of the madness of wealth, and of how the dead-eyed rich are trashing our lives.
This week's column.
https://t.co/6FQLufeW8p

[George Monbiot @GeorgeMonbiot]

This is really good. I mean REALLY good. Warm, kind, powerful, inspiring. Keep going like this and Trump is toast.

[Paddy Briggs 🇪🇺 🇵🇸 🏳️‍🌈🇬🇱 🇪🇸 @PaddyBriggs]

Nigel Farage and Me
From October 2014

A few years ago, before he became “famous”, I had dinner with Nigel Farage. A mutual friend, also called “Nigel”, invited me to … https://t.co/hHVhn55zw1

[Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi]

About this time last year, if you'll recall, the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer were all the cultural rage. The whole world was put under marketing psychosis on a new, frightening, and totalitarian scale.

I was scared to death. Those two movies, and the freaking deranged marketing campaign attached to them, actually felt apocalyptic to me.

And so, on July 30, 2023, I published this blog post that I will just paste here instead of linking. I titled it

ON ‘BARBIE’ AND ‘OPPENHEIMER’: A RECYCLED PLASTIC ARMAGEDDON IS UPON US

1. I did not watch either Barbie or Oppenheimer. To understand them, I don’t need to watch them (and for my well-being I decidedly avoid them).

2. The American mainstream is about one thing: marketing America as a deserving and unavoidable ruler of earth and humanity. Nothing made in America is an authentic expression: everything is conceived and made for profit and power.

3. The atomic bomb is the pinnacle of military destruction. A plastic doll marketing a plastic psychology, a plastic culture, and plastic waste as a desired way of life is the mass-consumption equivalent of the atomic bomb. Manhattan Project and Mattel continue one another and stem from each other. They are rooted in the same worldview: domination via annihilation (or the threat thereof).

4. Essential to American marketing/propaganda: a strategy of constantly, deceptively repackaging old obscene ideas and archetypes. This way inhumane crimes can be justified by adding a layer of fake complexity or supposed irony when, in truth, the core ideas remain uncontested, which is to say perpetuated.

By placing Oppenheimer (the character) against artsy color schemes and cliché lugubrious surroundings (can anything visual not be a cliché these days?) Nolan’s American propaganda piece masquerading as cinema purports to revisit history. But it does so only to reaffirm America as a country deserving of global domination because it places its heroes against artsy color schemes and cliché lugubrious surroundings.

Similarly, Barbie purports to revisit the eponymous doll, but the only thing that will remain in the viewer’s consciousness once the pink subsides is that Barbie (the doll and the plastic American existential essence it manifests) is relevant, and therefore legitimate. Similarly, the morality and philosophical justice of atom-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remain the sole meaningful lesson from Oppenheimer.

In both propaganda pieces, an ability to fabricate a higher, more advanced point of view serves to justify obvious evils. Morality (or a quest for truth and justice, to employ less ominous terms) and athletics can never be truly united, and it is both unfair and dangerous to demand such unity from creators. But when aesthetics is used to convey and legitimize the opposite of morality (as mass murder and the destruction of the self and the planet surely are), a boding sense of rotten decadence takes hold. This is why people will endlessly opine about ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’, but no one will admit having enjoyed them: we are made to instinctively reject a marriage of elaborate artsysm and sinister content.

5. Oppenheimer was a scientist and America needs to pretend to take mass-exterminating human beings seriously, and so Oppenheimer is made to look elaborate and complex cinematically, and painstakingly morally self-aware as a character and so on and so forth (I bet you won’t be frowned upon anywhere in polite society claiming he’s a Shakespearean figure, which you can surely yada yada 5 minutes about just for sport). Barbie, on the other hand, is a pop-culture icon, and therefore it will be treated with carefully planned, pretend (and therefore depressing and lifeless) frivolity. The former as the later are nothing but marketing. It’s all marketing, there’s nothing else. Marketing of domination, marketing as domination, domination by marketing, marketing for, by and of domination, all the while pretending to be human.

American mainstream culture is dead and at a dead end. Please consume none of it.

[Dr. Justin Williams @jwilli7]

Popular music studies titan Philip Tagg passed away peacefully yesterday. I have taught his material for years and it's been nice hearing colleagues remember him. RIP
@brisunimusic

[Orpheus @OrpheusL]

Happy 200th birthday to the inspirational Ninth!

[Michael Spitzer @MichaelSpitze20]

@nicoleegrimes Congratulations

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

The prestige economy of academia — which rewards you for publishing books or articles read by several dozen people, but not public books or articles read by thousands or tens of thousands — is part of the crisis of the humanities. It’s both an intellectual AND a labor issue. 1/

[Professor Lisa Marie Johnson @elsie33]

Who are more musical, apes, humans, or birds?
University of Liverpool Professor Michael Spitzer asks questions about music and evolution for the Big Think.
https://t.co/CNj7LlzYRk
@MichaelSpitze20 @sotauol

[Michael Spitzer @MichaelSpitze20]

@elsie33 @sotauol Wonderful achievement, Joe!

[Professor Lisa Marie Johnson @elsie33]

Congratulations to Liverpool graduate Dr Joseph Coughlan-Allen for his new article: “Unknown Pleasure: interpretations of the mystery hiss in Feist's 2017 album” | Popular Music | Cambridge Core - https://t.co/icmA5vQUBR #OpenAccess @sotauol

[Lee Mordechai @LeeMordechai]

1/ I’m an Israeli academic. My community is too silent about the ongoing war in Gaza. Here is how I see things based on reading hundreds of articles and watching thousands of videos and images about the war. This tweet chain contains my conclusions as a sort of executive summary.