In this episode, we pick up the conversation on theories of modernity with a focus on the "color line" as music from the global African Diaspora makes its way into the European art concert hall. We will confront early European perceptions of jazz and consider the theories of Dubois and Stoddard, and listen to the first "jazz-like" compositions of established European art-composers like Debussy, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. We also meditate on the original aims of Ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin and the legacies of George Gershwin revisiting the debate about cultural appropriation and kitsch.

Join us and we listen to prog and punk as a window onto theories of the postmodern, during the decade of decay and decline, the 1970s. This episode features theorists such as Baudrilliard and Lyotard, and concepts of the hyperreal and simulacrum and music from Yes, Caravan, the Clash and the Sex Pistols. These wildly different music responses, one escapist and virtuosic and the other confrontational and self-consciously primitive, share the same home environment: an era of spectacle and decline, deindustrialization and urban decay, the 1970s.

Embodying the Enlightenment ideal of emancipation of the self, Beethoven reworked the modern orchestra at the same time that Napoleon restructured the modern army and both became dominant in their fields. Beethoven famously dedicated his 3rd Eroica Symphony to the Corsican General, then striking it away when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. The two would clash again when French troops occupied Beethoven's Vienna, with much of the audience at the premiere of his only opera, Fidelio, made up of French army officers. A prison break opera, with a transgender twist, Fidelio would become a political hot potato, from the Nazis to apartheid to Latin American juntas, join us as we take a deep dive in.