Music, closed societies and football – Hans Keller

I would like to wholeheartedly recommend one of my favourite books about music of all time - "Music, closed societies and football" Hans Keller.
Hans Heinrich Keller (11 March 1919 - 6 November 1985) was an Austrian-born British writer and musician who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as writing articles of great insight in fields such as psychoanalysis and football. In his later years he invented the method of "wordless functional analysis", in which a piece of music is analysed by musical sound alone, without words being read or heard.

A prominent figure of the "contemporary music" scene (He also worked for several years as assistant chief in the Department of Contemporary Music of the BBC), he had close personal and professional relationships with many composers, and several dedicated works to him, such as Benjamin Britten, Benjamin Frankel, Philip Grange, David Matthews, Jan Northcott, Buxton Orr, Robert Simpson, Robert Matthew Walker, Judith Bingham and Israeli composer Josef Tal.

This book, written in 1975 speaks of what he held most dear – a man’s ability to be himself and the dangers created by society that threatens to rob a person's ability to be such. Keller was a man who saw the music not only in itself but as a part of social process.

This book is a most interesting mix of aesthetic and social analysis.

In the first chapter he talks about his experiences as a young Jew in occupied Austria, The second deals with psychoanalysis (this is to say traditional psychoanalysis) in which Keller saw a great danger to the individual's ability to develop, the third is all about music and music criticism, and the last but not least is about football. He was a big fan of the game and had interesting ideas of how the game changed its character over time.

I would like to leave you here with my favourite part of the introduction to the book written by the man himself –


“Thinkers of the world, disunite!

Art is not a game, though many would make it one. All game-playing (or watching) is regression - and welcome regression at that, so long as one doesn't confuse it with art or life. Sleep and dreams are regressions too, and welcome on precisely the same terms. what commands our attention in the context of this book is that even on the game playing level, which can be relaxing as it is regressive, and where individualism used to flower in, and lend strength and efficiency to team sports, frightened, safe-playing collectively and forcible de-individualisation have gained the upper hand. Our age has given up the will to win, and our dreams settle on not losing – which, we feel, can best be done collectively (in numbers) first.
But unless we regain the power to think and feel for ourselves, in all intellectual and emotional situations, and unless we show total respect of that power in other people, and total contempt for all attempts at conversion, we are going to lose anyhow- transitively: we shall lose the dignity of being human, a loss which is never notices when it happens.


Hans Keller, from the introduction to “Music, closed societies and football!”