The creepy clowns shall haunt my dreams

By now you should've heard the words and phrases disillusionment, unconscious, and stream of consciousness several times in class. These were all characteristics defining the Age of Anxiety.  It's like they knew that even though things weren't going well, they were only going to get worse.

"Twentieth century man is a political neurotic because he has no answer to the question of the meaning of life, because socially and metaphysically he does not know where he belongs.”

- Arthur Koestler, 1955

“It is generally accepted that the Great War and its fifty-two months of senseless slaughter encouraged, or amplified, among other things: the loss of belief in progress, a mistrust of technology, the loss of religious faith, the loss of a belief in Western cultural superiority, the rejection of class distinctions, the rejection of traditional sexual roles, the birth of the Modern (in art), the rejection of the past, the elevation of irony to a standard mode of apprehending the world, the unbuttoning of moral codes, and the conscious embrace of the irrational.”

- Stephen O’Shea, 1997

Today we studied the beginnings of modern music. So much like our visual artists and writers, our composers also sought to push the envelope and break away from tradition. This led to the development of new musical techniques - atonality, twelve-tone, and sprechstimme. Two of the greats were the Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg and his Russian frenemy, Igor Stravinsky.

Fun fact: Igor Stravinsky was studying law until his university closed temporarily after Bloody Sunday in 1905 *wink*AP Euro students *wink*, so he couldn't finish his degree and instead focused on his real passion - music. 

If you're still trying to shake off the creepy clowns from the Pierrot Lunaire video in class today, here's a more romanticized piece by Shoenberg, Transfigured Night.  You may like it better. 

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For the lols

No TBT picture for y'all this week, but here's a throwback to some old Beyonce:

- Warrior Princess Siddiqui