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Musical Bans

Chechnya Bans Music That Isn’t Between 80 and 116 Beats Per Minute

Moonlight Sonata? Banned! Rage Over a Lost Penny? Banned! Musical bans are not a new thing,

We know that the Church was not happy with the appearance of polyphonic singing in the churches in the first place. There is a well-known written record in the Iceland "Episcopal Sagas" that Episcope Laurentius from Holar tried to ban polyphonic singing in the church in the 1320s (Grinde, 1982:15). As we can see, there was something totally unacceptable in Icelandic polyphonic singing for the Medieval European musical system.

— Who Asked the First Question. Joseph Jordania. 2006.

and some of this might be trying to push water uphill, though bans and prosecution have or have almost stamped out various traditions in Europe, America, and elsewhere. Meme warfare, perhaps. Bans could also be signals for "doing something" to the supporters of the one-who-bans, and may translate to a political advantage. The "doing something" does not have to make sense (to an outsider); parallels from biology might be the excessively long feathers of a peacock or some meiotic drive that a third party may view as crazy, but the actions do make sense within the context of those feathers or the "dancing for Mao".

There can be softer objections; "The Rite of Spring" (Igor Stravinsky, 1913) is reported to have caused a sensation, but that may have been more about the dancing than the music. The subtitle of the work was "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts". Biology need not be involved; Imogen Holst objected to the electronic version of "The Planets" produced by Isao Tomita (1976), so for a while those sounds were banned.

Some may suspect that the gods must be crazy.