Thursday, May 25, 2017
Cocky Bachy? Nope.
Yesterday I got cocky about sticking with Bach in the '60s while other hippies were guzzling CIA-sponsored musical chaos-toxin.
Decided to check the cockiness. What was CIA pushing in the classical realm? Tried a few keywords. Mostly consistent with the jazz and art preferences. Modern chaOS is good, classical structure is bad. Pierre Boulez was among their favorites, unsurprisingly paired with Leonard Bernstein.
Baroque as a search term didn't yield much, which is sort of reassuring. In the period covered by these Wikileaks documents, CIA was clearly sponsoring 'Crofut & Cooper Folk & Baroque', apparently an academic duo that tried to corrupt Baroque music into folk shit. Lots of attention to this one group, very little else under 'baroque'.
This paucity is especially notable in baseline terms. The 70s, though reputedly bad for pop music, were a GOLDEN era for Baroque. Pinnock, Hogwood, Ehmann and others were restoring crystalline order and precision to the performance of Baroque after a century of muddy blurry variable-rhythm Brahmsian performance.
Seems to be a pattern in CIA's special cultivations. In jazz they were sponsoring Dick Goodwin and the Millikan University Lab Band, in semi-classical they had this Crofut & Cooper. Obscure and academic. In the commercial world sponsors want big audiences, but CIA clearly wasn't looking for maximum propaganda output. Was CIA more concerned with input? Was one of the performers paid to develop contacts with members of the small audiences in various countries?
¶ 5:13 AM 
