Dizzy O'Brian

The Emperor's New Clothes For those who have never heard of it, Hans Christian Anderson wrote a short tale called ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ It’s the story of a vain emperor who gets ‘taken in’ (no pun intended,) by a pair of charlatans, posing as tailors. These charlatans tell the emperor that they are making a very special suite of clothes for him that anyone who is unfit for their position or “hopelessly stupid,” will not be able to see. The trick is there are no clothes and the emperor, of course, parades around before his subjects unclothed and no one will say so because they are all afraid of being labeled unfit or stupid. Finally a young boy shouts out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. This is a bit of an allegory, naturally, of situations which arise when someone keeps himself or herself surrounded by ‘yes men’ who are afraid to speak the truth for fear of losing their job status. It goes on in politics and it goes on in music and the arts. When I was in...

Traditionally Speaking Leopold Auer was a great violin teacher in the late eighteen hundreds who trained such stellar artists on the instrument as Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist, so he must have known a little something about music. He wrote a small book called ‘Violin Playing As I Teach It.’ This little book contains a wealth of useful information about violin technique and music in general. As to the subject of tradition, he had the following to say; “Tradition in reality weighs down the living spirit of the present with the dead formalism of the past…. Beauty we must have, tradition we can dispense with. How is a violinist to conceive the meaning of an older work which he may be studying if his own musical instinct, his freedom of conception, are obfuscated by the dictum: ‘This must be played in such and such a manner, because so and so played it that way two hundred years ago?’ “ He is talking about interpretation here and he makes it clear that any att...

What I Learned in Music School In my earliest youth, I was heavy on the classics; a Mozart and Beethoven man mainly. I definitely was fascinated and curious about the pop music and its culture, especially going into high school and starting to get high with my buddies. It was mostly out of a desire to be ‘cool,’ as violinists and others who played in the school orchestra were classified along with the nerds of the scene. That was tough. Of course, I ended up going to a music conservatory called the Peabody (named after the famous philanthropist who started it, not the dog.) My first acquaintance at the school was my new roommate, Dave (alias ‘Big Nose’,) who became one of my best friends ever. Dave and I shared the desire to learn about and experience all the strange new changes that had gone on in our society. We lost no time in establishing a counter culture to The Peabody. A conservatory is an institution that is conserving the tradition of so-called Classical music as ...

Mozart and the British Invasion In my previous two blog posts; Aleister Crowley And The British Invasion and  Aleister Crowley And The British Invasion Part Two , we examined the connect between Mr. Crowley and many British rock groups such as Led Zeppelin and The Beatles who were, if not followers, certainly familiar with his writings. We showed how Mr. Crowley was involved with revealing the inner teachings of the Masons, which had traditionally been kept a secret. Many things can be said about this but keeping knowledge a secret is unquestionably one of the tools of the suppressors or those who wish to stay in power. We find Mr. Crowley living outside the mores of society, taking drugs and having sexual relations quite freely, elements we find prevalent in the sixties. Unfortunately there was an end result of self-discovery that most people involved did not quite reach. The vehicles of liberation became an end in themselves, got commercialized and the movement also...