The Musical Box

“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It depicts an angel who seems about to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is agape, and his wings are spread. The angel of history must look like this. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe, incessantly piling rubble upon rubble and hurling it at his feet. He would like to hold back, to awaken the dead and reconnect the fragments. But a storm is blowing from heaven, entangled in his wings, and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm pushes him inexorably into the future, to which he has turned his back, while the pile of rubble before him grows skyward. What we call progress is this storm...
[W. Benjamin, “Thesis on the Concept of History” (1940), Einaudi, Turin 1997, pp. 35-7]

I was almost shocked to learn of the existence of The Musical Box, a Canadian band that reproduces Genesis...

...faithfully, from the clothes to the instruments (one borrowed directly from Rutherford), from the sets to the lights, not even forgetting Peter Gabriel's moves and conversations between songs.
When they came to Italy in '73, the Genesis singer SAID the things that the Musical Box singer repeated faithfully last night, including accents, tones, and grammatical errors in Italian.

Why shocked?
Because this trend seems to me to be exactly the one that occurred in the second half of the 19th century and marked the transition from music tout court to classical music:

Thus, the idea of classical music also began to emerge; the idea, that is, that the music of certain composers of the past had a transcendent value, that it was not mere entertainment and therefore should be listened to with great attention and performed exactly as it was written.
And naturally, 19th-century composers also began to aspire to write music of this kind. Music that expressed superior feelings, not mere entertainment. Music that would make them immortal, too. And for Romanticism, so full of nostalgia, grand ideals, and a drive toward the absolute, such a concept was perfect.
Quoted in this post of mine

Coming from someone who teaches at a school called the Conservatory, it might be laughable (even though I teach electronic music). But the fact that something like this is evident even in "pop" music is a sign of absolute decadence. Be careful: it's not just an inability to innovate while living up to the past, but also an awareness of one's own inability to innovate. In other words, surrender.
Exactly the same surrender that was evident in other arts, for example, with neo-Renaissance painters, or, in architecture, here in Italy, with things like the faithful reconstruction of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice.
Because, my friends, when a church that had perhaps been there for centuries collapsed in the 18th century, few would have thought of rebuilding it exactly the same. Instead, one might have said, we'll rebuild it new and more beautiful than before, expressing confidence in our own creative abilities.
This isn't to say we need to roll over Beethoven with a thick layer of concrete. The past must be preserved, but remaking it the same way is indicative of the birth of a cult (in a cultural sense), also because there are records, films, and recordings of Genesis from that time. Nothing has been lost. It's not like classical music, for which we have no original performances and each new performance is an interpretation and a unique piece.
Here it's worse, because there is no interpretation. Because, mind you, without these technical testimonies (records, films), The Musical Box could not reproduce exactly, not only the music, but also the event (the costumes, the moves, the speeches, the mistakes).
It is the surrender of creativity. It is the closing of the circle of Benjamin: the work of art, technically reproduced, loses its unique status, to use Benjamin's words, its "aura." And so it is that this very technical reproduction is used by someone to reproduce, down to the most secondary details, that work of art. But the aura cannot be regained.
Notice once again the difference with classical music. When I listen to Michelangeli performing Beethoven, in my heart I'm not listening to Beethoven, I'm listening to Michelangeli. In reality, for me, Michelangeli is not Beethoven. Beethoven is the score, not the interpretation. In classical music, the message is conveyed through the score, not through the performance, because every performance is an interpretation, and mine may be different from yours. So, even when I hear a contemporary piece I like for the first time, the first thing I think of is looking at the score, because only then can I understand it and make it my own.
But that's not the case here. Here we fall back into the case of the reconstructed Phoenix. The Musical Box concert is not a Genesis concert; it's just an attempt to recapture their aura. And so it's just a pale illusion, a Dickian simulacrum.

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