World leaders accept Anne-Sophie Mutter as one of their own
mainThe Davos annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) honoured Anne-Sophie Mutter with its Crustal Award last night for ‘her role in helping to shape a better world’.
She shared the honour with the actor Forest Whitaker and the Colombian singer Shakira.
The Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation has, since 1997, offered scholarships, performing opportunities and commissions for young artists worldwide.
I’m glad that Anne-Sophie Mutter is doing good work off-stage, but I would have preferred her to have turned down an “honour” from a group of people who continue to do so much to increase the shocking levels of inequality in the world.
Fully agree, Davos annual meeting of the elite is revolting, a group of privileged people, entirely disconnected from the world, patting each other on the back.
Classical music has long been a preferred method of asserting and justifying the status of the powerful. Has this shaped what classical music is?
Yes brother, it has. Time for a change…
Davos man (or woman) “A soulless person, technocratic, nationless and cultureless, severed from reality. The modern economics that undergirded Davos capitalism is equally soulless, a managerial capitalism that reduces economics to mathematics and separates it from human action and human creativity.” (Samuel Huntington)
All Ms. Mutter needs now is an invitation to the next Bilderberg meeting. The hamburgers there also cost 40$.
As a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and in an influential 1968 article in Foreign Affairs, Huntington advocated the concentration of the rural population of South Vietnam, via a strategy of carpet-bombing and defoliating the rural lands and jungles of Vietnam, as a means of isolating the Viet Cong.
It didn’t work in Nam, but it worked in Guatemala, not so much by concentrating the Mayan farmers in cities, but through their genocidal extermination. About 200,000 were mass murdered by US founded, trained, and funded death squads. So much jungle overgrew the land of the murdered farmers that even the satellite photos of Guatemala were changed.
Huntington, by the way, was a Democrat…
The aristocratic public image of haughty, white superiority Mutter’s publicity machine has created around her is a useful symbol for the Davos crowd. Exploitation must be executed with class, and with an image that conveys a sense that those in power possess a higher knowledge and understanding.
Classical music is often used this way. The image of the conductor as an all-powerful patriarch is an especially useful metaphoric symbol — especially if situated in the context of some sort of higher knowledge (or even a kind of divine inspiration and goodness.)
I think a substantial analysis of this ethos and its history would help us better understand classical music and some of the problems it faces in our changing world.
Why always commenting these things…lets start to work for a better world…ignore them…things will change eventually. May she fiddle in Davos….!