AESTHETIC REALISM THEATRE COMPANY VIDEOS

Songs from Musical Performances

BREAKEVEN

From “Rock ‘n Roll, the Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes!”
Singer Bennett Cooperman refers to what Eli Siegel explains in the Aesthetic Realism Lesson of a rock musician: “Is there [in rock and roll] the utmost pain and the utmost assertion? Is it the blare of agony?…The purpose of rock is to make secrets a public delight.”

ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART

From “Rock ‘n Roll, the Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes!”

RUNAROUND SUE

From “Rock ‘n Roll, the Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes!”

BREATHLESS

From “Rock ‘n Roll, the Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes!”

AULD LANG SYNE

From “The Cabaret Show!”

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue 1891, editor Ellen Reiss writes about the meaning of Robert Burns’ poem “Auld Lang Syne”: “It says, If something of the past had value, you should want to see that value; you should want it to stay with you, be part of you.” This is a link to the issue, titled “Philosophy, a Famous Song, & You.”

CAN’T HELP LOVIN’ DAT MAN

From “The Cabaret Show!”

“Carrie Wilson sings—from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Showboat—a song about love that a person ‘can’t help’ having. Aesthetic Realism would say the woman in this song makes the reason she cares for this man more mysterious than need be. “Love,” Eli Siegel writes in Self and World, “is in exact proportion to accurate knowledge.” But the song, with its joy and musical grandeur, can have us see something important: that being able to care so deeply for someone or something that there’s a feeling of inevitability about it, is an achievement for oneself. The song makes a one of opposites that so often fight in people: yielding and assertion.”

CAROL OF THE DRUM

From “THE BEAUTY & URGENCY OF JUSTICE!—A Holiday Event of Music & Vivid Comment”

“In a lecture, Eli Siegel commented on the title ‘Carol of the Drum.’ He said it showed a new point in the idea of a carol, which, like song itself accents the melodious, continuous, while the drum accents the discontinuous. These two stand for rest and motion, and that title, he said, ‘is an attempt to get opposites closer’….The melody, sung by the sopranos and altos, is sweetly continuous—while the end of each line becomes gently percussive: ‘Pa rum pa pum pum pum’…. Tenors and basses keep up the percussion, which both interrupts the continuity and also enhances it….Is there something critical in those slightly explosive sounds, something pointed? And is it in behalf of our waking up, not being complacent? Are we aching to have something narrow, grudging, selfish in us broken up, interrupted? The desire in this young boy to join himself with his instrument, a drum, in order to praise a great happening in the world, is sensible and lovely.”

THE WEARIN’ OF THE GREEN

From “Humanity’s Opposites—Beginning with Ireland”

JOHNNY, I HARDLY KNEW YE

From “Humanity’s Opposites—Beginning with Ireland”

Comment from the presentation: “With our next song we go once more to the opposites of for and against. ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye,’ has sadness and anger, which are forms of againstness. And it has a beautiful melody, which was later adapted for the Civil War song ‘When Johnny Comes Marchin’ Home.’ The song is likely from the beginning of the 19th century, when Irishmen were conscripted by their English occupiers for an imperialist war. And the words present the feelings of a woman as she sees her husband returning home horrifically changed. This song is certainly relevant today. As to the place names mentioned in the song: Athy is in county Kildare, Ireland; ‘Sulloon’ is Ceylon, once a British colony, and now the nation of Sri Lanka. What we’ll hear is anger of a true kind–anger against lying and for justice–presented with an energy that is in behalf of life.”

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