In Search of An Eternal City
I have been accused of copying Beethoven in my string quartets. So let me admit first that the study of the corpus of Western thought, and its extension, will find no more staunch defender tham myself. However, in our search for an Eternal City, there most vocal defenders of "The Western Canon" are all too often trying to bar the gates.
There is, in the modern, a search foran eternal time, though it should be noted that Messiaen was seeking a religiously ecstatic time. The religious conservatism of Messiaen, the rightward of many other leading modernists or proto-modernists – Pound, Schoenberg, Webern, Nolde, Manet among them – conflicts strongly with a theory of Western thought which can be referred to as the "Western Canon" theory. In this theory, Western thought is reducible to a list of "the best" and all education consists, not of understanding the works on this list, but repeated genuflection to a few scattered phrases in them which support a rigid hierarchy of thought and political power in the hands of the very wealthy. This is perhaps why the right wing likes the Western Canon, so long as it is in service of producing officers who won't question illegal orders.
But extremists need other extremists – arrayed against the "saluting the canon" – a phrase that its author surely did not intend to be taken the way I am using it here – are extremists who act as if there is nothing written by a "Dead White European Male" which is of any interests to "people of color". Which is another way of saying that people are owned by their skins. The conflict between these two viewpoints accurately reflects the tenure battles in various university departments, but not in the world at large.
The first point that must be made is that the supposed defenders of the "Western Canon," aren't. Canonization is for saints, not books – the entire history of Western thought is one of relentless incorporation and reinterpretation. The first two works identified as being fundamental to what would later become "Western thought" are the Hebrew scriptures and the Homeric epics. Both are the products of other works whose existence and content has been obliterated. We can tell that these earlier works existed, but not, in many cases, what they were, or even what parts had been original to them, and what parts were crafted in the same mold by authorial hands. The history of thought in the West begins, then, with the process of de-canonization. It is fundamentally different from many other traditions of thought – which grow by an accreting commentary on previous layers of works. The very idea of a reducible canon is not "Western" but religious – even the name should give us the clue needed – the top down decision about which works and which interpretations are appropriately reflective of "Dogma".
However more crushing is the failure of the right to support the basic results of that which they say they promote. Any Western Canon must include Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man. And yet the very conservative and reactionary forces that praise "The Western Canon" are deep in Darwin Denial. More over, if learning a Canon is to mean anything, it is the ability to apply it, and the ability to accept logically forced conclusions which reason demands. This from the side that is deeply entrenched in denial of Global Warming, and which for decades claimed that "cigarettes are not harmful". The list of unscientific, or even anti-scientific positions of the right would take a book to enumerate, fortunately Chris Mooney has produced one.
But firing science from the canon is not the end, nor even really the beginning of the Republican war on the West.
Regardless of political persuasion, one of the chief lessons of Western thought is the importance of the dialectic of debate and knowledge. However, the Western Canon is all too often prescribed not as a means to critical thinking, but as a cure for it.
Consider the following report from the above linked article:
What follows is 45 minutes of classic dialectic. A line from the novel is chosen: "To care for anything deeply is to invite disaster." Is that true in the novel? Colonel Knotts asks. Is it true in life? Cadets respond, and are pressed to clarify points and find evidence. Those who hesitate are pushed harder, and mumblings of disagreement are heeded and challenged. One maintains, "Excessive entanglement between emotion and belief is dangerous"--unusual words for a 19-year-old.
Does anyone care to apply the above line of thinking to Iraq? The answer is, of course not. Or at least, not in those places where dialectic is praised. Except on the issues of Iraq, tax cuts, equal marriage, the use of torture and the present World War III that we are engaged in. One may be endlessly dialectical about the trials of characters in novels, but not about the real issues of the day.
It does not need to be this way, consider Harold Bloom's list which is very much in the spirit Mortimer j. Adler's conception of "The Great Books" program. Adler did not want to worship the past but over come its shortfalls and errors. For him there was more than a canon, there was an organic tradition of Western thought, which could often grow wild or into bent and twisted shapes, and yet still find means to right itself by re-examination of even the most hallowed works and thinkers.
Instead of this kind of active tradition, in the sense of a living growing thread of human activity bound together not by its repetition of the past, but its desire to live in the present with the same vivid genius as the great figures of the past – stands such narrow minded screeds as The Closing of the American Mind. Allan Bloom launches into philosophy, as the quip goes, with all the grace and nuance of a kamikazee pilot. In doing so, he performs a valuable service, because by having the ham handed fanaticism of a true believer, and the energy which hate allows, he does not bother to disguise that it is not the Western Canon that he is really defending, but an attack on "relativism". The real demon in the WeCo pantheon is just that, relativism.
Now unfortunately for the anti-relativists, relativity is also part of, and the product of, the Western Canon. Long before the scientific form of the idea became established, Ovid praised it in the context of desire. Cultural relativism has its roots in German Romanticism and in the growth of social science.
So to summarize, the right wing of the canonite movement wants to roll back science since the introduction of the idea of evolution – in the late 18th century – social philosophy since Kant, that's the mid 18th century, and political philosophy since John Locke. That puts us somewhere in the late 17th century. They are somewhat more generous with art and music, but perhaps because they misunderstand the content of many of the works of art. I remember clearly the essay where George Will argued against Monet and the Impressionists as breaking the age old compact of depiction of the object. Clearly the medieval and gothic escaped his notice, and certainly much of the painting of the long modern period – that is post-medieval – which distorts what it depicts for artistic effect.
- - -
But this topic is old, and has been going on for some time. The absurdity of a Western Canon without Darwin, Kant, Keynes, Monet, Adler – is as absurd of the idea of the dialectic that does not question the most important decisions. What is really going on is Rejectionism. Rejectionists do not want to accept that most of the last 300 years have, in fact happened. Instead they cling to a slender read of faux aristocracy.
I suppose it is de rigeur for me to attack obscurantism in too much of what is called Critical Theory, and point out that the other extreme is often prone to utter extreme statements on race and politics. However, time seems to be doing that work very effectively. The pseudo-philosophical justifications for Alice Walker's The Color Purple are not going to last, where as the work certain seems to be doing just that. In the end the most powerful argument against the polemical manifestations of post-structuralism, is that if there is a Western Canon, some products of the movement are on it, but it has utterly failed to provide a comprehensive replacement for what came before it.
Over time what is of value in the movement will be translated out of its jargon and terminology, and into the language of every day use, and, absent the need for a priesthood, it will find its way into the profane world of every day living.
This view of the past of the West is informed by the reality of both the glory and the terror of its past. One of the great attacking points of that past is the search for what Rousseau called a noble savage to identify with. People in the present, descended from generations of bloodshed and dislocation, wish to wash their hands of it. The West, by documenting and both denying and reveling in its bloody past, by contemplating it – is an easy target for those who recoil. Many such people are people of personally terrible pasts, and they wish to magnify their own story into the story of the whole world. It is common among all stripes of people, and it is all to often raised into an ideology.
This very behavior gives cover to extremists of the opposite partisan affiliation. Any criticism of the canon is accused of being driven by hatred of the West, From either extreme, everything seems to be at the political vanishing point. Consider the following by one Mark Steyn:
Underneath the surface controversy, the United Nations Conference Against Racism, Racial Intolerance, Xenophobia and/ or Related Intolerance in Durban had an impressive unanimity on the key points. Everyone agreed that the West was guilty as charged, disagreement being confined only to the appropriate remedy. Dismissing apologies for colonialism and slavery as a pathetic attempt to cop a plea, Robert Mugabe’s government—taking time out of its hectic schedule of terrorizing white farmers—called on Britain and America to “apologize unreservedly for their crimes against humanity.” There was a big split on the slavery-reparations front between the African-American bloviators, who wanted whitey’s payments to go to individuals, and the African presidents, who thought it would be more convenient if the West just dropped off one big check at the presidential palace.Instead of slapping their knees and weeping with laughter and wondering how the after-conference cabaret was ever going to top this, the Europeans and North Americans were at pains to agree with their chastisers. The British, French, Dutch, Italians, Spanish, Germans, and Portuguese were happy to concede European colonialism was wrong, but unhappy at having their case formally presented by the Belgians as current holders of the EU’s rotating presidency. Having been remarkably inept and corrupt imperialists, the Belgians understandably find consolation in the leftist theory that the murkier bits of their history owe more to the general, inherent iniquities of colonialism rather than to their specific failure to be any good at it. Prostrate as they were, their European colleagues had enough residual rump professional imperialist pride to resent Brussels’s willingness to overegg the self-abasement pudding.
First let us admit, that this prose is clock-stoppingly ugly. After quoting Lord Tennyson, the pure gracelessness of the prose is a shock. But so is the illogic. After hectoring the reader with purple prose over how "every one agreed the West was guilty", he then admits that, Belgium at least, had historical guilt, and, and this is crucial – that historical guilt is still operative. The only way that reparations for long past events is absurd, is if the present people of a particular nation are divorced from the actions of their predecessors. If the Belgains understandably find consolation in theories of colonialism, then the contention that the West does not bear any guilt is impossible to maintain as axiomic. The author himself doesn't believe it. A magazine that proclaims itself the new criterion – the new standard of reason, should, at least, be able to maintain basic coherence for more than one paragraph. But it is hate that is at work here – hate the left, hate anything which casts into question those who own the present for how they, or those who they replaced, came by that power.
But the crowning irony is the Tennyson itself:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” (1842)
Stop and reflect, for that is the nature of art, what Tennyson is saying – he sees a future where there is a Parliament of man, and a Federation of the world. A world government, and the United Nations. At the same time that Steyn is trashing leftism and internationalism, he is quoting one of its poetic roots. I won't go into the mire of the rest of his screed, merely link to this Canadian government page which directly contradicts his version of events.
The article, over and over again, is a firm impeachment of the lack of engagement of the right in its own canonic dogma. They want the history of the West to be neither present, nor engaged with. At which point, whatever its essence is, must also be absent.
And there are millions of similar pieces, paid for by who knows who, floating around the world of print and the internet. It is relatively easy to see the economic interest involved – those who inherit what is taken do not want to have to pay weregilt, and more importantly, they would like the chance to do it again if they can.
The whole tiresome screed fails to understand one of the most important functions of intellectualism and of a tradition of art, philosophy and literature – namely, that it functions as anti-bodies against the diseases and cancers of the body of society. Without an immune system, a body dies. An immune system function by attacking that which is foreign or dead within the body, even if it once was part of it. Of course there is the opposite problem – of an immune system run wild. But of the problems we have, a few old Marxists in universities aren't on very high on the sources of infection.
More important however is a different assertion – namely that one of the ideas embodied by the Western tradition is that the stream of present partisan conflicts and present burning issues often overwhelms us. Whether we act in the present out of altruism or malice, with genius or ignorance, the consumption of the mind by the sense of impending threat to self and sanity is not sufficient to determine all of life's breadth and depth. We must step back from the immanence of the moment, in order that we may fully apply all of the means by which we apprehend the world.
Anyone who writes 11 string quartets and 6 symphonies has a dedicated interest in the belief that the only way to keep cathedrals alive, is by building them. The idea of a "Canon" of the West is less important than there being a growing and living tradition of creation. The purpose of the old is to inform the creation of the new. It is also to inform the rolling wave which is our present understanding.
The components of understanding are rooted in presence, until we sense the presence of an idea, externality or attractor, even if we sense it in the absence, we will not be able to form a coherent sensation of it at all. The new must be believed, to be seen. Sensation itself is often enough to produce this – we have all felt the dawning realization that what we see is not what we thought it was, but something far more powerful. Often because we are hurtling towards it at a higher rate of speed than is safe.
The first reason for plumbing into the tradition of Western creation – of which Western thought is one of the strands which is part of the thread – is because doing so recognizes its presence in the world. Anyone who uses a technological device, such as a cellphone, has present in the hand a crest of the stormy waves of Western creation, from which ever rivers and oceans it, itself, drew, the wave is a product of its climate.
Consider, if you will, the opening of this work of music. Even if you do not know the references to Beethoven's 9th and 3rd symphonies, it is clear that there is a presence that came before this work, and before these notes, that presence exists. Music is not about itself, but about the presences it evokes – the sounds, the smells, the places, the times. One cannot hear a work from the 1750's, without the powdered whigs and stockings being there with it.
However, after presence, and concurrent with it, is engagement. There is a great deal that we sense the presence of, but do not engage. Often for lack of interest, but often too from repulsion, or resistance. Engagement is not always voluntary. Part of the process of engaging the vastness of the past, is precisely because it is alien. The world of Homeric Greece, though it has many points of contact, is not our own. The world of the Italian Renaissance, or even the 1920's modernism which we hear and feel echoing from, is not our time. It is often said that "the past is a different country", and Shakespeare reminds us that death is "the undiscovered country". The relentless push of time and change means that to engage the past is to enter a country which is always different, because it is the combination of that past, and our present. The canonites, who we are leaving behind rapidly, are characterized by a relentless failure to engage, both their own past, and the very presence that they conjure to lay that past to rest. The Long Wall in China did not keep out barbarian hoards, and one will not build a wall of Great Books high enough to keep out the past as it is present.
The reality is that the glory of the past, and its ignominy are one and the same. If we are not heir to the sins of the past, then we are, equally, not particularly heir to its accomplishments. The basic tools of technology are promiscuous enough to make it possible to kill the goose and keep the golden eggs coming. By engaging the presence of all of the roots of the Western tradition – which would be of scant interest to us if it were created by serene peaceful beings that made their living on a small patch of rain forest without bothering anyone – we face that it has an essence.
That essence is what enables it to survive and flourish by incorporation. It is the hallmark of the western tradition that it absorbs and transforms its past, and turns pasts into past. The Romans were Latins who became, by turns, Etruscan, Greek and then Aramaic. The French are teutons who became, by turns, Roman, German, English, Burgundian, Italian, and then, finally, more French than they had ever been.
I choose music to express ideas such as this, attempting to be a philosopher in sound, because in music it is possible to demonstrate. In that section of music from above, there is a great deal of fragment and presentation, but when the theme, the real theme, enters in the viola, it is without a doubt the essence of the movement of music. That which is essential is, even if incomprehensible, unmistakable when finally beheld in the minds eye. We discipline ourselves to travel into the past, and to face an ongoing tradition of creation and recreation, precisely because we too, have an essential unity, one which is only apprehended against the background of what it is not, and what came before it. The past crowds in upon us, and must be under our control, so that we may assert the present clearly.
This is why creation of "Western Canons" is a reasonable activity – it is not about the past, but about the presence that that past has with us. We make the list to prove that we know the works on it, and we know the works that we exclude, perhaps regretting that we must do so. This is presence and engagement and search for essence, but the list, any list, is not the essence itself, nor the presence. It is, to point back to Plato, a shadow on the cave wall.
It is such shadows, and the implication both of the object that casts the shadow, and more importantly the light that has shadows, that causes us to desire to turn our heads, and behold for a moment, the eternal city. A generation hence the canon will not even be "Western" particularly, as the tradition which was woven together from many strands weaves together even more – from China and from India, whose accomplishments in the past have been woven in directly and indirectly as strands, but which now must become part of the fibre – and will have lost many works that were once important, gaining others, both new and old.
I close this defense of the eternal city with a warning that the greatest dangers to it, are those who declare that they would protect it by killing everything that has made it endure. The ray of hope is that it is always too late, and never too late. The tradition of creation, like the theatre, is always on the verge of collapse. It is this which gives urgency to the project of restoring and enlarging it.
Comments (56)
Re: And yet the very conservative and reactionary forces that praise "The Western Canon" are deep in Darwin Denial.
I'm not sure that the Creationists and the Canonites are the same folks. Allan Bloom, recall, was a gay, Jewish atheist. And I suspect that the Religious Right (if they actually bothered to read anything except the Bible) would have a big problem with much of the Western Canon, from all that Pagan Greek and Roman stuff, down to Candide, Faust and the more modern works. Even Shakespeare is not exactly a Christian writer, at least not in the Bible-thumping sense.
October 28, 2006 6:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
" Allan Bloom, recall, was a gay, Jewish atheist. "
Lie down the the dogs, get up with the fleas. The canonites and the religious right are deeply entangled on such issue as school vouchers, "academic diversity" and anti-20th century doctrines. The canonites talking point on Darwin Denial is that "it deserves to be considered".
What unifies these two groups is their love of absolutism, not the specific words, just so long as they add up to a defense of absolutist ideas and discourse. Think of it as different brands for the same product.
"Shakespeare..."
And Churchill isn't a neo-con, but a very selective reading of his career has been used as a front line talking point on the "World War III" hysteria.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 28, 2006 6:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Usually I can make my way through your missspellings and grammatical solecisms, Stirling. But I have no idea what "woned" means.
October 28, 2006 8:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Despite the occasional unintelligibility, Stirling, this is a very deep thing you wrote here.
October 28, 2006 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I note you did not reply to my point that the so-called canon is not very Christian-friendly, apart from Augustine, Dante and the Bible itself. And maybe Dostoevsky, if we include the Russians, though he's so deep and mystical I doubt American evangelicals could make a head or a tail out of him.
October 28, 2006 9:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you would discipline yourself and edit, edit, edit...
October 28, 2006 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't want to be disagreeable, BevD, but I would hate to see Stirling spending so much time editing that his output is reduced. I'm just astounded that Stirling can post so many interesting essays so quickly; look at what we've been given in the just the last 3 days! And the guy has time to write music too. Keep 'em coming Stirling.
== Jimmy ==
October 28, 2006 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
It took me a couple of readings, but I believe it's simply owned: he's characterizing the attack as implying that "people are owned by their skins." I apologize that I haven't listened to Stirling's music, but this post really was thought provoking. It fits into something familiar, as he acknowledges, and I was glad for that, even at the expense of reinforcing my prejudices too comfortably. But just his getting away with a slam at PC without in the least falling into the neocon artist camp is a sign of how much is going on.
It's also interesting to be asked to consider Adler again. I'd dismissed him long ago as simple minded, well before the idea had been coopted by wingnuts; fear of a "great books" curriculum helped determine my college choice, as I was determined to get, if you will, beyond high school formats by encountering profs going in depth into what they cared most about. But I'll take it as a sign I should rethink.
It's interesting to see the parallel to "original intent" in constitutional interpretation. There again one has the paradox there that the original intent appears clearly to be to apply certain generalities, such as "cruel and unusual punishment" in ways that the framers might not have anticipated or they'd have spelled it out. There again, too, is a document being used as an appeal to authority and a bludgeon to enforce the prejudices of the present and nostalgia for a fictitious past that protects one's eroding sense of identity against the intellectual inquiry characteristic of the framers themselves.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 28, 2006 1:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Stirling,
Where gathered are more developed thoughts and musings of yours on Western classical music (and other genres, as may be)? I'm intrigued by your writing, but am mostly familiar with classical music by experience and profession (violinist). I'm especially interested in matters of the sort you are writing about here. Thanks.
TomEG
October 28, 2006 2:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I recently experienced scholarship on the classic Greek canaon (vicariously) by reading I. F. Stone's "The Trial of Socrates." Stone studied the classics in college and came back to them in later life, reading Aeschylus in the Greek, etc.
A cogent, if inadvertant, lesson resides in Plato's Conversations. The arguments we are now having over democracy and elites are considered by Socrates, and Stone shows how insidious certain of those ideas are as espoused by Socrates and Plato. They were not friends of common-man voting and rule.
Ironic to consider that this treasure of deep discourse, the Greek Classics, especially including the plays, was largely destroyed by Christians burning the Library at Alexandria, and rescued for the ages by the indigenous culture of Egypt and carried forward in translation by the Islamic nations.
We owe at least part of our Renaissance and Enlightenment to Arabs.
October 28, 2006 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
A large part, since it is in the Islamic world that Algebra and learning flourished during the medieval epoch.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 28, 2006 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't want to be disagreeable either, but his work could be so much better if he would take the time to edit it. It's like reading Proust - a painful duty, instead of a pleasure.
October 28, 2006 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
If we are not heir to the sins of the past, then we are, equally, not particularly heir to its accomplishments. The basic tools of technology are promiscuous enough to make it possible to kill the goose and keep the golden eggs coming.
Maybe slightly apropos .
When Nye Bevan was writing his autobiography cum political creed "In Place of Fear" he was deeply involved as midwife at the birth of the NHS . In retrospect , awe inspiring .
With that perspective , he speculated about the effort and resources consumed in building Europe's cathedrals . Made sense , he felt . Because , given then available technology , that effort would have had minimal effect if, instead , directed at improving the desperate living conditions of the poor .
But the cathederals could be enjoyed by all classes . For centuries .
October 28, 2006 5:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Ironic to consider that this treasure of deep discourse, the Greek Classics, especially including the plays, was largely destroyed by Christians burning the Library at Alexandria
This is simply not true. Neither the Christians nor the Muslims ever burned the library of Alexandria, though both accused each other of having done so. The famous library of the Ptolemies actually decayed gradually in the later Empire, neglected by corrupt Roman rulers. It had also been badly damaged by fire in the days of Julius Caesar and again in the urban rioting of the 3rd century AD. In the demographic collapse of the 6th century much of it simply disappeared, along with many other public works; probably wealthy men, Byzantines and later Arabs, simply carted off its volumes to their own private collections.
October 28, 2006 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I haven't written much of value on classical music, except a short series of essays called "Note of the Day" where I examined small details of a few works.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 28, 2006 6:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
People don't pay for creation, but for the tweezing.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 28, 2006 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's because either you are uninformed about, or don't understand the connection between Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, and the implications of that connection.
Either way, you need to catch up on your reading before you are entitled to being obnoxiously disputatious.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 28, 2006 6:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Stirling, why can't you reply courteously to people who disagree with you?
Now I am well aware that Allan Bloom was a conservative of a sort. That said, there are many types of conseravtives and Bloom certainly did not qualify as any kidn of theocon, of either the James Dobson or Fr. Neuhaus strain.
Moreover have you read the canon works? I am not arguing in favor of a canon-based ciriculum, unless someone can come up with a truly international-based canon (Confucius, Omar Khayyam, the Bhagavad Gita, Tales of Jenji, Popul Vuh, etc. all should belong). However most of these works are not supportive of the Religious Right: quite the opposite in fact. Some (Euripides, Voltaire, Marx) are profoundly subversive of religion and traditional elites; and all, or nearly all of them, inculate a habit of critical skepticism in looking at the world around us. Even Dante didn't mind consigning popes and other clergy to Hell. Should the religious Right really succeed in getting students to read the classics I confidently predict they would be quite appalled at the result.
October 28, 2006 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
In reverse order...
Cathedrals can indeed be enjoyed by people of all classes who have the wealth to travel to them, or live nearby. Historically though, most people lived their entire lives within a few miles of their place of birth. Until recently then, less affluent classes had minimal access to such grand structures. As an (electrical) engineer, I marvel at their soaring art and impeccable craftsmanship; count me in as one who enjoys them, despite my pedestrian American upbringing! :-) :-)
I've often seen people comment that "assistance to the poor has minimal effect", and that would be true if direct assistance were the only choice available.
One alternative is infrastructure construction and improvement. We have examples throughout history, from the Roman road system to the U.S. depression recovery projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Such infrastructure improvement projects brought productive economic opportunity to many people.
So I submit that we should consider policies that lead to productive enablement of broad segments of the population. For example (though I am no expert on public works), it seems to me that reducing U.S. dependence on middle eastern oil is one example of a process that would simultaneously inoculate us from charges of failing to be an honest broker, and give us far far greater influence over our own affairs.
(I realize that many of those depression-era projects are today held up as examples of bad ecological management, but they were developed given the knowledge of the day; I hope future works are based on best available knowledge...)
October 28, 2006 8:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
On the dispute between Stirling and JPF over canon/Bloom vs religious right, there's something to be said on both sides. Just bear in mind that the GOP makes strange bedfellows and leave it at that. I'd like to return, though, to how it works, since I think there's an interdependency between the libertarians and authoritarians that's easy to miss because they'd seem logically to exclude one another. (It's interesting to read how well they comport together in the mouths of college students, in a Harper's report this month from a few days of retreat, indoctrination, and rallying.)
It'd take me more time to develop, especially since, as I say, it really does contain contradictions, but it's designed in fact to mask contradictions. (Maybe Hegel and Marx already have it all sewn up.) The basic idea is that one has to evoke values and authority to explain and mitigate the failure of the market to achieve what's promised, a bit like Hobbes proceding from a greater individualism than successors like Locke, Hume, and Smith would posit in order to advocate a king. If the poor stay poor, they lack values, and they need to rely on the (voluntary but value-motivated) charity of others. If markets produce greater centralization of resources in practice, thanks to monopoly and militarism, all the better.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 29, 2006 5:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Lenski's got a point in talking about cathedrals as requiring wealth to appreciate. The point's been made not only about access (travel dollars) but about other factors as well in critiques of the separation between popular culture and the fine arts: costs of leisure and education; institutional costs of museums in shaping the canon; etc.
However, I'd hesitate to overstate the point, as long as great works do encourage critical discourse. Besides, there's a kind of apples and oranges game when we shift from a claim about the founding of cathedrals to travel to them now. They weren't built, after all, for American tourists but for their communities.
The actual cultural background on conditions behind architecture is complex. (I recommend that perspective in Kostof's history of architecture.) It varies with period and helps determine style, and of course all those past periods were hierarchical and hardly egalitarian, but the details matter.
In the Renaissance, while civic spaces were the product of wealth concentrated in certain families (and also by death, from the plague), they did aim at a ideal civic space and public spending to achieve it that someone could have identified with in New Deal times, I imagine. You can almost make a parallel between the engineering achievements in Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral in Florence and dams later. But, as I say, it's complex, and the dynamics of wealth, authority, and learning with cathedrals in other times would differ.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 29, 2006 5:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Historically though, most people lived their entire lives within a few miles of their place of birth
Back in the Middle Ages pilgrimmages to famous religious shrines were very common. Hence Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
October 29, 2006 6:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think I was conflating the Library with the story of Hypatia, whose death at the hands of a mob surely served the purposes of Cyril's bishopric.
In any case, there seems to have been little reverence among early Christians for works of learning. Augustine seems to have spent little time on nature's functioning, instead philosphizing on free will and time.
One important point illustrated in the Classics is the unflinching scrutiny of Greek life by the playwrights. They were no more cautious than is Michael Moore in skewering authority, and the Dixie Chicks are foreshadowed by the women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata.
BTW, my avocation of astronomy owes much to early star-mappers that gave us Aldebaran, Deneb, Betelgeuse, Altair, and most of the bright stars.
October 29, 2006 6:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Because your nonsense insults the intelligence of everyone who reads it.
The price of civility is good faith, one that you are consistently unwilling to pay. You have a right to make an ass out of yourself in public, and you obviously enjoy doing that. But you don't have a right, when behaving like an ass in public, to be treated as anything other than an ass.
Moreover, you are consistent in defending a social and political viewpoint which is viciously nasty, bombastically vile and pathalogically dishonest. After this, the demand to be treated differently then you (plural) have treated others is hypocritical, dishonest, immoral, unethical and perverse.
I am treating you, the way your side has treated others for a very long time, and does so by the acre every single day on hundreds of web sites, dozens of talk radio shows and countless publications and think tanks.
Obviously you like dishing it out, but equally obviously, you don't have the ability to take it. That earns you contempt.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 29, 2006 8:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
They key about Cathedral building is that it created a concentration of power that was separate from the military power of kings. The synchronization of a Cathedral led to charity, jobs, technology and trade that was not tied to royal patronage. People paid for the stones and bones - but what they got was a social service organization.
Of course, it wasn't a very efficient social service organization, and it was a very corrupt one, but it was better than nothing. Could the medievals have done better for their effort? Probably not. We, after all, behave the same way - donating heavily to candidates headed for easy reëlection, contributing heavily to staff heavy charities, and funding social services through military Keynesianism. It's easy to pick on the medievals for their ineffectual social organization and misplaced priorities, but if we pick hard enough, we find that we are medievals under the skin as well.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 29, 2006 9:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are missing a key point - both groups are two components of the same social system - the fundamentalist/evangelical system is for the poor, and for those trying to rise by good fortune, where as the worship of a bowdlerized version of the canon is systematic for the metropolitan and leadership class. This much is in Leo Strauss, and anyone who wants to study the structure of the reactionary movement needs to understand that there is nothing strange about the bedfellows involved.
The core emotional tie is to a top down absolutist system, and to a fragmented social organization where different groups of people are indoctrinated in different ways based on their function. You don't see moves to put the canon in Business schools, even though the same people who funded Allan Bloom also fund Business schools. Canonite ideology isn't really important to the reactionary movement, except in its utility in occupying a particular ideological space.
The meme that is used to tie this together can be called "we hate the '60s" - even though the social movement goes back before the 1960's and has "we hate the New Deal" and "we hate Lincoln" components which are crucial to its partisan cohesion.
The fundamental assertion is that people are bundles of negative impulses, and only by various forms of coercive absolutism can they be made to act in such a manner as to form a functioning society. As a system of social theory, it is far from new. Hence there are religious coercive tools, social ones, intellectual coercion, economic coercion and military coercion.
Conversely the reactionary movement wants to disarm forms of coercion or social synchronization which would deny or disable their ability to use coercive tactics. This includes the welfare state, international law, cosmopolitan society, anti-bigotry and scientific thinking - plus whatever sections of social science and economic theory which get in the way of a plutocracy.
In sum, it isn't really contradictory in its goals, its merely incoherent in the series of mutally exclusive sets of axioms used.
One of the reasons that so much of the right wing is viciously opposed to post-structuralism, is that post-structuralism offers tools to deconstruct conflicting foundational ideologies. Let me unpack that - many ideologies, in order to win arguments without actually having to argue, create axioms which assume the point to be proved. The challenge for the intelligentsia of such a movement is to find means of reconcilinging, or at least preventing the cognitive dissonance between - the different assumptions.
Often this is done by conspiracy theory - assert, loudly and repeatedly, that everything that followers of the movement hate is joined together by a conspiracy which has different tentacles. You'll note I don't do that here - the cohesion is created by synchronization, not cooperation, even if there are individuals who are consciously involved in juggling the problems of synchronization. A simple example is the assertion that everyone opposed to say, the New Criterion, is in league with Mugabe or al-Qaeda.
By creating an enemy, incoherencies in ideology can be papered over.
More sophisticated is assume some form of unity based on meta-principles. Allan Bloom attacks "cultural relativism", and thus unifies fundamentalists and canonites - since both agree that there is a set of scriptural texts which cannot be reasonably questioned, and a priesthood - more important than the texts, really - whose interpretations of scripture cannot reasonably be questioned.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 29, 2006 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am intrigued by your thoughts and arguments for presence being indispensable to an individual's experience of a work of art, but am not wholly convinced by them - at least with respect to music, which is your prime example. I certainly can understand your point of view, being a composer. However, I am not touched as you are, emotionally or intellectually, in the experience. In fact, though I am very well acquainted with much of the musical tradition as both performer and listener, I find that thinking about, more still reading, the particulars of historical context in which a work was created (or a composer composed), a distraction at best and often an annoyance. Learning context is unavoidable if one is to have a meaningul conversation about the appeal (or not) of a work or genre, but it is not essential to hearing or even assimilating the expression embodied in it.
To some extent I find the same with written and spoken literature. Context augments and possibly also adds to a reading or hearing, but, for example, when I read Moby Dick or attend a performance of As You Like It, by way of imagination I come with open eyes and ears, and, if am to really get my money's worth, an open mind, to the furthest extent I can. That takes a certain disciplining as an adult, but I enjoy the same works now as when I was a first-time comer as a kid.
Interestingly, on this point, the conductor George Szell was reported to have said "We [in the twentieth century] can listen to eighteenth century music, but not with eighteenth century ears." But we can to a considerable extent listen with ahistorical ears, and it may be that from such audition active and vital attention to aspects of composition and performance may be had that otherwise might have been missed.
October 29, 2006 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
"In sum, it isn't really contradictory in its goals, its merely incoherent in the series of mutally exclusive sets of axioms used." The entire comment was well argued, and that's good summing up. The point about a need for enemies (liberal media, immigrants, gay marriages, and especially external enemies) in papering things over is useful in this context as well. One can't forget that Bush was actually not popular until 9/11. And as great as Americans may have felt after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the USSR, I suppose that loss of enemy as much as economics kept Bush I a one-term president.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 29, 2006 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Historical presence is only one kind of presence. It is also inescapable, like the lack of repeated tones in a Mozart piano sonata, because pianos of his day did not have the action required to play them as would be possible later. One can ignore the historical presence, but only by substituting some other kind of presence - the most common being the conceit of the composer as a member of the contemporary generation This has created marvelous performances and musical ideas, and so is valid.
But presence itself is the awareness of another pattern outside of ones own stream of consciousness - a thing a part, whether from somewhere else in the mind, or from outside. Before we can engage a work, we first must admit that it has a presence.
" by way of imagination I come with open eyes and ears, "
A good description of attempting engagement as anyone could write.
"But we can to a considerable extent listen with ahistorical ears, "
That is the one thing we can't do, our ears and hands are conditioned by our circumstances. We can attempt to divorce ourselves from some of our biases and traditions - as "Historically Informed Performance" attempts to do. We can also submit ourselves more rigorously to the demands of tradition - I think any day now someone is going to assemble an Orchestra to play works in the early 20th century style of Fuertwangler and others, complete with all of the mannerisms. But in any event the one thing we can't get rid of is our own history.
Which is not, or shouldn't be, a problem. After all, our own experience with our own past, and the presence of our own present and engagement with the future is what is essential to us, and the one thing we can be sure that the past did not have. It is what makes our enacting a work unique and worthwhile.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 29, 2006 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
You bring up a good point, one which deserves further study. I certainly had not really considered religious pilgrimage. So let's stipulate for now that a fair number of common folk had the opportunity to travel to these edifices raised to the Glory of God. Following up on that, it is certainly reasonable to accept that these pilgrimages had value to the people that participated.
The point I was addressing, however, was to bring up an additional way to invest resources beyond the choices offered in Flavius' original comment. I got the impression that the choice was between "build grand cathedrals that would inspire many people for centuries" versus "improving the desperate living conditions of the poor", and I believe there are other creative ways to think about these things, such as infrastructure projects.
So the new question remains: whether the resource investment in cathedrals and other man-made religious monuments still has better R.O.I. than infrastructure improvements, even when taking religious pilgrimage into consideration. This is not an either/or question, merely a question of tilting somewhat more toward infrastructure versus resource-intensive religious monuments.
October 29, 2006 6:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I got the impression that the choice was between 'build grand cathedrals that would inspire many people for centuries' versus 'improving the desperate living conditions of the poor,' and I believe there are other creative ways to think about these things . . . ." That's right. Benefits were spread unequally, and projects existed in part to project certain visions of society we can't respect. But historically based criticism can do more than debunk, since it can provide necessary interpretive contexts for seeing the importance of past things now.
This accords with Stirling's observation that one thing we can't do is "to a considerable extent listen with ahistorical ears." I've learned to appreciate things differently or for the first time thanks to both original instrument and modern performances, from Malcom Bilsoln to Glen Gould and Furtwangler, as well as from both historically informed criticism and Richard Taruskin's diatribes against the authority of the musical text. But someone like Horowitz now does sound to me like listening with ahistorical ears, and he suffers from it.
Adding ". . . such as infrastructure projects" is also valuable here. One doesn't want to feed a distrust of government, the arts, and science by seeing them as stealing from us ordinary people. The point that projects weren't strictly for a community but included pilgrims doesn't do much to defend the comparison to modern tourism either. Not all Chaucer's characters have jobs on Wall Street.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 30, 2006 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Stirling,
Can you recommend a list of "Great Books/Great Scores" for the study of composition?
Here is a question that I think has not been sufficiently addressed by music theory: what is the purpose (as distinct from the technique) of developing a musical idea? I am sure that you have an interesting idea about this subject.
Perhaps the purpose is to lead the listener politely and supportively from a more or less ordinary state of mind into something that could be described as a dreamtime and then back - as a polite conversation begins and ends with conventional formalisms.
Leonard Meyer once asked the question, "Why does one musical idea follow another in a particular order?" I don't think the question has ever been answered. In fact, I suspect that there is no unique, deterministic, syntactical answer to the question - that the question of what makes a satisfactory musical form has more to do with balance and configuration - things that are difficult to describe in concrete terms.
Someday I would like for you to write an essay devoted to the art / craft / philosophy / whatever of music composition, and another one on the training / thinking / inspiration of a composer.
October 30, 2006 7:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
While it's impossible to listen with ahistorical ears it is equally impossible to listen with contemporaneous ears. We can't experience a new Beethoven symphony the way his audience could. Even if we have never heard it, others have, other musicians have, and most important, composers since Beethoven have.
A special case of never having heard any music would not help either, since Beethoven's audience understood when he used a familiar musical figure, just like we notice the "Jaws" figure now.
A deep problem (or condition) is this difficulty in being fresh, without an impossible weight of history informing the music. The inevitable historical resonance of a melody was one thing driving Schoenberg to invent a language free of that. (A failed enterprise.)
I don't feel it is impossible to be fresh, but the effect is familiar when hearing neo-classical compositions--they just sound weird, not sure if they are being direct or ironic. This shows up in popular music, too, with rock bands trying to achieve the revolutionary effect of Jimi Hendrix and ending up with ironic emulation instead of naive joy.
What has to happen is for the composer, or novelist, or painter, or photographer, to forget (or never study) the entire corpus. Some knowledge is helpful---too much is stunting for creativity that can communicate with an audience. Works for the cognoscenti are not a problem, but Beethoven was not depending on them, and contemporary composers that do don't sell tickets.
There is no way to avoid the evolution of taste, and the steady shedding of history. Life requires death (so far), and just as our familiarity with past music thins down to a few Great Works, so with our intimacy with the Western Canon. The good news is that with an increasing population and increasing data storage there is room for more specialists and early-art devotees. They become a niche, though. The big time is always going to move on.
On the question of how music develops, ask how a novel develops--just as life has no rules beyond reproduction, art has no rules beyond making the audience want the experience repeated. And just as in life, there are a variety of strategies, from multiple copies of a simple program (bacteria, and jokes or folk songs) to extended life or immortal root systems (tortoises or linden trees, and War and Peace or Beethoven 9).
October 30, 2006 8:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
What to study. An excellent question, I'll write a longer reply when professional duties ease slightly.
"Why does one musical idea follow another in a particular order?"
It was Habeneck and Wagner who answered this question in the other direction - it is we who look for the ideas, and order them - when we perform, bringing out those details that seem to create an inexorable flow.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 30, 2006 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
On books to read, can I offer a suggestion? I fell in love with a lot of music because of Charles Rosen's The Classical Style. It's only about one period, as the title declares, and surely ideas follow one another differently and for different reasons at other times. But maybe because that's a period with such a tight sense of what you can do with structure and indeed with the very basic opposition of tonic and dominant, I can't hear even the bridge of a pop song the same way ever again.
Speaking of Rosen, he's got a way with words in addressing an issue of this thread, elitism, in a review of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. The review appeared in NYRB.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 30, 2006 11:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Here is a question that I think has not been sufficiently addressed by music theory: what is the purpose (as distinct from the technique) of developing a musical idea?"
This too, is an excellent question.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 30, 2006 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tom,
I agree with your opening comments about historical ears.
You are probably right that, as a general proposition, "art has no rules beyond making the audience want the experience repeated." It is possible that what I am looking for is an answer that is more individual to my own personal taste.
I once read that in many cultures there are myths concerning the image of a ring, and that these myths tend to involve transformations that can be interpreted as having to do with questions of identity. It struck me that the image of a ring is analogous to a triad or a motive, and that possibly, at least in some instances, the transformation of musical ideas might have a mythic significance having to do with identity. I haven't been able to carry that idea much further than that, partly because I don't know enough about mythology, and partly because it may be inherently impossible to go much further with the idea. I am struck, however, that, at least for me, things like triads have a primoridal significance - suggesting some sort of fundamental life energy - that must be somewhat analogous to the Polynesian concept of mana, the Roman numena, the Egyptian ka, the Chinese qi. You can see that I do not really believe that music is a "pure" art form, which is not to say that it cannot be, but to me a Bach two-part invention is full of life which does not have any specific meaning but is certainly not "pure" in the sense of being devoid of any similarity to the rest of life.
So I suppose I am really asking, from a mythic perspective, what is the point of it all? And of course many people would say that is the wrong question to be asking in the first place. Easley Blackwood was quoted as saying that the only purpose of music is to amuse and entertain. Did you play his Fifth Symphony? I haven't heard it. What did you think of it?
From a completely different perspective, the attempt of composers to be original partly has to do with the purely market-driven need to establish a brand and distinguish themselves from other producers in the marketplace. Market pressure eventually leads to a parody of the original Enlightenment aesthetic that valued a hard-to-describe blend of expression, genius and taste. The Enlightenment concept of the sublime, which is orthogonal to the system of expression, genius and taste, may have some relationship to what I perceive as mana. Stravinsky's depiction of the voice of God in The Flood depicts a terrifying, intense mana, which is utterly different from the hymn-like Ode to Joy theme of Beethoven's 9th, but not so different in principle from the depiction of God in the starry heavens in the same work.
The other day I was playing around with the composition of a minimalist piece, and as I played the piece back several times in Finale, I decided that it contained one too many repetitions. So I deleted one measure, and I was better satisfied with the result. That explains why most of the systems are four measures long, but there is one system that only has three measures. In my own mind, the experience suggests to me that I do have - to some degree - a sense of form. But I do not know any theory of music that could either justify or refute my judgment to delete the measure. I do not even know of any theory of music that addresses the question.
Concerning your comment about neo-classic compositions - this is probably an idiosyncracy of my own taste, but I was never in any doubt that neo-classic compositions were ironic. That is what I have always admired about them. I heard Disney's Fantasia when I was in junior high. I immediately fell in love with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring - and frankly, the dinosaurs did not hurt, although I later learned that Stravinksy himself, or at least Robert Craft, was quite incensed about the association with dinosaurs. I grew up in Louisville, KY, so I heard a lot of commissioned work - which I later found out was quite conservative for its time (there were chamber music series that played more "advanced" music, including electronic music, but I was unprepared for the ascendancy of twelve-tone music that I found when I got to college). Over the years, I bought every record of Stravinsky that I could get my hands on. I also admired the Prokofieff piano sonatas. Gradually I worked my way backward through music history, so I never heard Mozart, for example, through any ears but 20th century ears. I was an autodidact, so when I got to the University of Chicago, in my senior year, I placed out of all the undergraduate music theory. My first formal training in music theory was a graduate seminar in analysis with Leonard Meyer, and composition with John Perkins. As an autodidact, I have always found it difficult to talk to traditionally trained musicians about music. Iain Hamilton once told me, "You have a unique mind." I took that as a compliment, but I suppose there are others who would disagree.
I was very proud to get Aaron Copland's autograph at one concert. I saw Shostakovitch at a concert of Russian composers, but he was not talking to anybody. Like Kosygin and other Russians, he bore the countenance of someone sucking on lemons. The rumors were that he was under orders to not be too friendly.
October 30, 2006 11:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
The meaning of musical "words" is trickier to discuss than real words, becuase there is a less obvious overt meaning. Words began as icons, probably, being similar in sound or feeling to their meaning. But I love the phrase one writer used--"Writing [novels] is a way of saying with words what you can't say with words." It is the evocation of emotion, through the context of a word's use, and through the larger structure, that is the message.
Music works through inducing sympathetic physical states in the listener, most obviously in rhythm and the "line" of melody. We use units divisible by two for the obvious reason of our bilateral symmetry. A phrase that stops short of a divide-by-two makes a special point, because it's different. And so on.
Harmony is tricky, but all cultures agree on a tonic (fundamental) pitch, and use the first few harmonics in the series, the octave, fifth, and fourth. Even if we have not studied Pythagoras, we have heard natural whistles and stretched cables singing, so the overtone series is natural and ingrained. After a tonic is defined, the octave is a higher-tension tonic, the lower octave is a bigger-sized tonic, etc. The fifth "wants" to return, the fourth is less certain, etc. Two pitches a fifth apart define a tonic, but one doesn't know what kind of scale it is without a third note (thus a triad). The major triad shows up right after the second octave of harmonic series, but a minor triad doesn't exist until one is pretty far up, so it is less "fundamental" than the major triad.
Since the major triad is lower in the series it carries less emotional tension than the minor, so we get a feeling of coming home.
Different scales seem more contingent on local culture, and the Arabic scale may result from a preference for flutes in early instruments. Presumably the finger holes were evenly spaced, producing the "wrong" third and fourth scale step.
Cultures that used strings or other physically constrained pitch producers tend to hear more "natural" harmonics, and have a more familiar scale to our ears. Chinese scales may have been a way to avoid the weird fourth step of the flute scale, and dodge the seventh, too.
BTW, after I began playing professionally in an orchestra it was sevral years before I could play Rite of Spring without seeing mud volcanoes and thirsty dinosaurs.
I wish I could have been in Beethoven's audience for the premiere of the Seventh. Must have floored them, with its rollicking rhythms.
October 30, 2006 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I once heard the Rite of Spring in a live performance by the Atlanta Symphony. There is no way to understand how truly violent that work is until you hear it live. No recording that I have ever heard conveys the true effect. I finally understood why there was a riot at the first performance. There should have been a riot. There should always be a riot. People who don't riot don't understand what they are hearing! (Is this hyperbole?)
October 30, 2006 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Admittedly, one has to be careful about questions like this. It is like trying to become an expert on the Kennedy assassination. It can be a bottomless pit.
October 30, 2006 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is very interesting. As an experiment, I have written one movement of a work called "Transitions," in which the plan is that each movement is supposed to gradually move farther and farther away from its original idea, without ever coming back. At one level, this is a technical exercise in what Wagner called "the art of transition," or it could be interpreted as a neo-classical parody of CPE Bach in one of his wilder moments. The result is, needless to say, rather disconcerting. But that raises the philosophical / aesthetic question, which may be formally stated as "What's the big deal?"
The idea of inexorable flow reminds me of Kant's idea that beauty in art comes from the appearance of purposefulness without a (utilitarian) purpose. I do not see how this idea can be a rock-bottom postulate, without any cultural or mythic significance. Purposefulness, it seems to me, we understand as a depiction of the psychological quality of potency, which can be interpreted as related to the Polynesian concept of mana, but probably has a specific Western European interpretation, as well.
October 30, 2006 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Stravinsky from the mosh pit, sounds like a thrill.
October 30, 2006 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a purpose to art that is separate, but dependent on its utilitarian service as making a living. That is to communicate emotion. We say we are moved because there is actual motion, of muscles and hormones and blood. The word emotion includes the root of motion.
Art that is sentimental and shallow is so because of the same reasons anything is sentimental--it is pushing emotional buttons not really justfied in the story line, or musical story. When the artist searches for the feeling he has, and the way to convey that feeling, the more honestly he views the emotion the more coherent the emotional triggers employed to make us feel that way. When successful, we feel that someone else feels as we do at a level deeper than words, and often deeper than we achieve with our partners. Upon reading, hearing, or seeing some works we feel we are not as alone as we thought. This is why tragedy can be uplifting and make us want to experience it again.
It is the coherence of emotional story that drives a musical "plot" or development. The purpose of the more elaborate musical structures is the same is verse/chorus, or call/response. It aids memory, which is necessary so that we retain a figure long enough to notice the comment on it that occurs later in the work. The semi-logical structure is such that while replication or deletion of an entire section may be OK, changing one note may stick out a mile. It is a self-correcting code.
Story was and remains our best method of remembering. While some elements will allow substitution, the purpose of those elements won't change. Story forces a coherent totality. This is why we will continue to use it as the basis of all sequential art for the foreseeable future.
The purpose of all arts is not elaborate structure, but meaning. Elaborate structure is only engineering. Architecture requires it to feel a certain way, and the feeling is the meaning. All meaning derives from value, and is encoded in emotion, in that some things are good (survival, sex, comfort, thrill, etc.) and some things are bad, and they only matter because they make us feel good or bad.
A computer might write music but it wouldn't speak to us without reference to our bodies and their rhythms. Elephants would find a human funeral march rather sprightly and cheerful, probably. And squirrels would fall asleep waiting for the climax of a scherzo, we're so sluggish by their standards.
Art is not arbitrary--it is the language of our bodies. When we consider that all humans share Chomsky's grammar engine, we realize it is an old adaptation, and probably represents the likely engineering solution to a self-correcting code. Music shares attributes with basic grammar, and is probably equally old. Note that even the "tone-deaf" can recognize a song from only a few notes.
Got me going, I see. I'll stop here.
October 30, 2006 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I have written one movement of a work called 'Transitions,' in which the plan is that each movement is supposed to gradually move farther and farther away from its original idea, without ever coming back." Sounds neat. Let's not forget that even supposedly universal structures, whether the claim is true or not, are there to be assaulted. We should be used to the eye on harmonic structures, much as the appeal to me of going away from home and coming back remains, between serialism, minimalism, and fashionable interest in world music. But I still miss the cycle of fifths in the bridge to Buddy Holly's "Everyday"!
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 30, 2006 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with you, and I think that is why I always blocked when I had to deal with twelve-tone music. I have never been able to hear Pierrot Lunaire or Erwartung as anything but expressions of psychoticism. This is not necessarily a wrong interpretation. From the perspective of the time in which they were written, these works can be understood as reflections of the then current fashion of Freudianism. Some people would say that I should try to put on my fin-de-siecle ears when listening to those works, but as Arthur Rubinstein said, when asked why he did not play 20th century music, "Why should I suffer?" (It is interesting that I heard that story from Iain Hamilton. Although Hamilton was a composer of contemporary music himself, he had a sense of humor. I wish I could have studied with him longer.)
I think your idea is connected with the issue of motivic development having something to do with transformations of identity, at both technical and mythic levels. If we hear a piece of music as developing an identity, we can be seriously jolted by transformations that go beyond a certain degree of psychological reasonableness. Surprise is necessary in music, but it is a matter of personal judgment how much surprise is tolerable.
I think that tonality has much to do with putting psychological revelations in a safe context. In Beethoven's 9th, the depiction of the sublimity of God is placed in a safe context, whereas Stravinsky's depiction of God in The Flood is made deliberately intrusive. As a composer, not necessarily as an individual, Beethoven was discrete, Stravinsky was rude.
Stravinsky's rudeness can be understood as being within the bounds of comprehensible commentary on the world in which he lived. (Although he admitted to being an admirer of Mussolini, I suspect he must have had a deep-seated love-hate relationship with the old order of Mother Russia.) The problem is that rudeness can be nothing more than a marketing ploy. We see that in TV commercials, such as the commercials that feature automobile crashes. Marketers have to try harder and harder to compete for our attention and stand out from the crowd.
This is just my theory, which I cannot back up with scholarly documentation, but it seems to me that the old patronage system put a damper on such developments. Of the Enlightenment values of expression, genius, taste and sublimity, taste was the inhibiting factor. Competing as free agents to produce a marketable identity in a post-Enlightenment world, composers were forced to weaken the inhibitions of taste and amp up the other three factors. There were always people, such as Schoenberg, who were able to do this in all sincerity. I do not question that Schoenberg was genuinely devoted to what he was doing, even to the point of paranoia. I credit Schoenberg with being one of the greatest musical thinkers of all time, and in his own way, he was a composer of incredible grace. My impression is that Schoenberg deeply identified with the artistic currents of his time, and he was convinced of their historical inevitability. At some point, however - a couple of generations after Schoenberg - in my opinion Schoenberg's revolutionary idea eventually turned into an academic pose. I am still digging my way out from under it. Younger composers are fortunate that they can dispense with that task.
October 31, 2006 7:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting.
I am trying to think of infrastructure that was built to be functional and somehow an enduring monument. Great Wall? Bridges such as Golden Gate, Brooklyn?
October 31, 2006 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
People write the music they need to write, for better and for worse. Berg's music moves me, Schoenberg's far less so - not because of the desire to express extreme emotional states, but because I think that what Berg was trying to say is more interesting than what Schoenberg had to say.
Rather than refighting "the style wars" - I think it is better to look at concert music as a conversation, one where we ask what artists bring to the table. The Second Vienna School was talking about a kind of post-apocolyptic moment, a twilight of the gods of Wagner and Brahms - as well as their own immersion in the 20th century - cinema, machines, sleep deprivation, industrial darkness, as well as occultism and mysticism all figure in the music of that moment. It is a report from that time and place, and I think, has shown that it has an audience and a meaning. This doesn't require anyone to like it - we are, after all, free in the vast salon which is art to find the parts of the conversation that are most interesting to us.
But the Vienna question is old - consider that this year, should anyone want to do it, we could celebrate the a century of pantonal/atonal music. It's as far removed from us as Art Deco is.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 31, 2006 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
That is an interesting suggestion. In the wake of 9/11, the Iraq War, the coming of Peak Oil, etc., a centennial of fin-de-siecle Vienna might be more comprehensible today than we might anticipate.
A revival of the composers who died in concentration camps - some of whom were influenced by the Second Viennese style - might almost be more relevant than we could bear.
October 31, 2006 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
EMI released music by banned composers about 5 years ago, many of them did, indeed, die in concentration camps.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
October 31, 2006 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Our orchestra has been playing some music from the Nazi camps, and other music from before the Nazis by composers that died at their hands. Conclusion---camps are a lousy place in which to write.
Schoenberg was most successful when his ears chose the notes, instead of his system. Berg obviously wrote first from his ears (and heart) and satisfied theory as a personal conceit. The descending arpeggio in Wozzek is a simple blues scale in f minor--only Berg cared that it fit with serialism.
Whether a composer had a patron or not, it was expected that he would please the audience. An unhappy audience reflected poorly on the patron. There is too much emphasis on the patronage of arts. Did Verdi need fundraisers? Not to my knowledge--he was so successful he retired three times, only to be dragged back by his adoring public and despondent impresarios.
My orchestra brings in enough in ticket sales to break even. Fundraising is only continued to increase budgets (and adminstrator salaries). The fiction is that arts need basic life support. The fact is that they are very alive, and doing fine. Now if we can get some more rocking tunes (Stirling, submit a manusctript of a playable symphony to CSO).
October 31, 2006 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes to those structures, as well as other examples: The Hoover Dam (which *really* impressed my wife and me); When I was young, the latest bridge example was the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.
Downthread, Stirling commented that in an important way, the cathedrals themselves were in part "infrastructural", so I have the privilege of altering my view of resource-intensive religious shrines, because they can, when managed properly, bring people together, even the common-folk, for the mutual benefit of all.
While I still prefer not-necessarily-enduringly-monumental infrastructure, I believe the great European cathedrals have much better R.O.I than I had originally considered.
October 31, 2006 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Stirling, you DO owe courtesy and civility to people who particpate on this site (that is part and parcel of the site ghuidelines after all) and I don't see why it costs you anything to behave civilly toward people who disagree with you, but who do not make the issue a personal one. I have offered sound albiet brief (because of the nature of the medium) reasons for my disagreements, and I have endeavored to let you know that I find your pieces quite interesting overall; most of my disagreements are on side issues, or perhaps have involved requests for corroborating information to back up your assertions. You do yourself no favors by acting like a funadmentalist yourself, unable to accepot disagreemnent or the possibility that you do not have a corner of the revealed truth, and your threads will be more satisfying to everyone if they are nor marked by petty name-calling and vindictiveness.
October 31, 2006 3:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm glad someone else hears Schoenberg's music the same way I do. Before Schoenberg used the row, he allowed his music to have light and shade, which gave his music clarity. Then he invented the row, and his music turned a uniform, opaque gray. I think Ligeti made some such observation about the effect of the tone row. Schoenberg had a vast knowledge of tonal music, however, particularly his understanding of the nature of musical ideas.
Not to short-change Verdi, but he did have the good fortune that his name was a political acronym that people painted on walls.
Complaints about the effects of marketing on music go way back. Schumann complained that empty virtuosity distracted audiences from serious values. In the days of the castrati, a superstar could insist that he be allowed to make his entrance riding a horse, just to make a grand effect, regardless of the situation in the plot.
Even Mozart understood that making a career as a composer is a business. Leopold trained him to incorporate local fashions in his compositions. Mozart's German dances all have little gimmicks in them to make them distinctive. One of the standards that Mozart used to judge a work was that it ought to