the-blue-wizard:

ferithtolkienesque:

My BIGGEST pet peeve when it comes to Tolkien is how people will sometimes characterize Melkor’s rebellion as being about him wanting to do his own thing and rebelling against Illuvatar’s oppressive sheet music.

THERE WAS NO SHEET MUSIC!  Illuvatar wasn’t forcing anything.  The Ainulindale was improv.  Illuvatar just gave them the theme, the idea, the feeling, the starting point.  The Ainur were drawing inspiration from the thought of Illuvatar, sure, and so long as they were in harmony the music played precisely as Illuvatar intended because Illuvatar had created them and knew how they worked together.  But the music of the Ainur before Melkor’s dissonance was quintessentially creative, as well as corroborative.  It was spontaneous, perfect harmony of free individuals perfectly in tune with each other, whose improvisations were constantly building upon each other.

Melkor’s rebellion was not about asserting his freedom of expression, because his expression was already free.  Instead it was explicitly about making his own voice louder and more important than anyone else’s, and subjugating the creativity of others to instead convince or force them to follow him exactly in repetitive unison.  And so, when Melkor’s goal became drown everyone else out, instead of make beautiful music together, his music became less creative, less innovative, and less his.

So it kind of annoys me when people talk about Melkor like he’s all for freedom of expression when he’s pretty much the opposite of that.

How.many of y’all been in jazz bands and gotten lead sheets for a song? Just the chord structure, some rhythms jotted out and maybe a few bars of a unifying theme? I played in student jazz bands for 6 years and let me tell you, the truly good musicians listen and feel out the structure of the song and when it comes to their solo, they’re ready and their expression shines. But then you get that one jackass who pulls something weird out of his ass during a performance and doesn’t follow the chord structure and you have to either let it sound bad or drown him out. It’s not freedom or creativity. It’s just being an asshole because you won’t play well with others.