the puppets

one time i had a dream that my favorite puppet performer, marotte nevrospastos, had come out with a new album of traditional balkan music.

she used her puppets in the creation of her work. all of the puppets had their own unique voice and personality. not many people can appreciate why these puppets are so magnificent. people sometimes complain "hey, these puppets are so fake. it's not realistic. fabric doesn't really have a voice."

that's what i like about marotte's music, however. it gives a voice to characters who don't have one of their own. so they might be isolated in the dirty laundry bucket with the rest of the socks, but they can sing aloud to the whole house when marotte uses her puppets.

other people complain that "these puppets don't have agency." they are annoyed that the puppets appear to be free, but they just mouth whatever the puppeteer tells them. ok. technically that may be true, but that is simply a surface analysis. it doesn't penetrate deeply enough into the puppet phenomenon. it's slapdash. today, puppets are free. they don't have to face the unimaginative barriers of the past.

some people oppose puppets because they think this is going to bring about a fundamental fracture. allowing puppets to have their own voice and perspective will cause everything to disassemble into a profound disorder. puppets, from this perspective, are dangerous to music. if many instruments provide sound, this is acceptable, because they have no personality and there is a long history of human interaction with harps and flutes. puppet voices, on the other hand, are relatively new and they will mislead the young people.

bubbles said that since young people will be so used to small, ineffectual, puppet voices they won't be able to form large pieces of coherent music like symphonies and grand oratoriological choruses. i asked him if he minded. bubbles said that he didn't. he preferred puppet voices. the puppet voices had been around for a very long time in the balkans and they had incorporated them nicely into their lyre-ballads and epic singing traditions.

i agree with marotte that puppet music is going to be very popular in the coming years.