E. Michael Jones: Dionysos Rising

The Birth of Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music

Ignatius Press, 1994     Amazon.com Liberty Press

Back Cover:

Following up his best-seller, Degenerate Moderns, Jones reveals how major figures connected with modern music projected their own immorality into the field of music which has been the main vehicle of cultural revolution in the West. For the first time ever, a unified theory of music and cultural revolution links the work of figures like Wagner, Nietzsche, Schönberg, Jagger and others to show the connection between the demise of classical music and the rise of rock ‘n’ roll.

Beginning with Nietzsche’s appropriation of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, music became the instrument for cultural upheaval. What began at the barricades of Dresden in 1849 found its culmination at Woodstock and Altamont and the other Dionysian festivals of 1969. Jones shows the connection between the death of classical music and the rise of the African sensibility which Nietzsche saw as the antidote to Wagner prostrating himself before the cross in Parsifal. Nietzsche prophesied the end of the age of Christ/Socrates and the return of the spirit of music to philosophy. That return took place at the end of 1969 at an abandoned racetrack outside of San Francisco, and the world has never been the same.

“And a man who has not ‘music’ in him is apt to disintegrate states since music is equally suggestive of personal love or political concord.”  G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest

Chapters:

1  Richard Wagner: Chromaticism, Adultery, and the Beginning of Our Cultural Revolution

2  Friedrich Nietzsche: Transvaluation of All Values as the Prosecution of the Cultural War

3  Arnold Schönberg: Craving the Law and the Totalitarian Reaction

4  Sympathy for the Devil: Theodor Adorno, Aleister Crowley, Mick Jagger

Reviews:

“It hits many a nail on the head and names many a problem that needs a name.”  VROON, American Record Guide

“E. Michael Jones posits the highly povocative thesis that the roots of cultural upheavel that culminated in the sixties can be traced back to Richard Wagner’s revolt against classical rational ideals in musical composition coupled with his ‘revolutionary’ sexual ethics. The book is gripping in its story line – Nietzsche, Schonberg, and Mick Jagger form the rest of Jones’s main cast…Jones puts his finger on a notion that is at least as old as Plato’s Republic. Music, he contends, acts directly on the soul. Disordered music leads to disordered lives, which lead to disorder in the state…The idea deserves thoughtful consideration.”  E.W.C., The Religion and Society Report

“E. Michael Jones takes a meat axe to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in his provocative Dionysos Rising. Great book…”  Douglas Wilson, Agenda Magazine

“…well-written and lucid. Catholics engaged in the Culture of Life will find the book indispensible.”  Michael Chapman, HLI Reports

“For a first hand account of how the Western musical tradition was deconstructed, there is no better place to begin than with E. Michael Jones’ eminently readable book.”  Social Justice Review

“Music can help a person develop an ordered and virtuous soul, or it can tend to disrupt a person’s soul. This fact was extensively illustrated by E. Michael Jones in Dionysos Rising.”  Eric J. Scheske, New Covenant

“…highly acclaimed trilogy on modernity: Degenerate Modems, Dionysos Rising, and Living Machines.”  Reformation & Revival Journal

About the Author:

E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars and author of many books.

JOB’s Comment:

Jones makes some extreme interpretations on specific points, and ignores complexifying exceptions, but on the whole presents a convincing general picture of modern music and its effects.