Friday Miscellanea

It's no surprise that most, if not all, of the marketed aids to "creativity" are really rather useless. But the reasons why are somewhat mysterious. I think it is something akin to what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category-mistake." Any pedagogical attempt to teach creativity is going to run into the problem that creativity is mostly about details and how they might form wholes whereas pedagogy is nearly always about general principles--bottom up versus top down. I say "nearly" always because in the area of teaching with while I am most familiar, private instrumental instruction, for much of the time you are dealing with details which is why it takes so long. But in the familiar models of learning, what goes on the blackboard and ultimately in the test is the principle--even if it is manifested in particular examples.

Which brings us to an article in The New Yorker: How Should We Create Things? The whole thing is worth reading, but here is a sample:

I’ve listened to music recorded or produced by Eno nearly every day for decades. He’s well known for coining the term “ambient music” (his “Discreet Music,” from 1975, is a landmark in the genre) and for working on career-defining records by Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, and others; for the past few decades, he’s also made “generative” music, in which computer programs work within parameters he’s set to create compositions that unfold infinitely. More broadly, though, he’s developed a recognizable approach to creativity that’s cerebral, chance-driven, hands-off, impersonal, collaborative, meditative, ecological, extended in time, and open to accident. In the high-pressure environment of a recording studio, where every hour costs money, he introduces layers of abstraction, randomness, and play.

How Eno's approach helps is that it tends to short-circuit the idea of general principles in favor of accidental discovery.

As a writer, I’m more of a maker; I enjoy the exacting selection of words, the endless polishing of sentences. But, as a listener, I enjoy Eno’s world, and every now and then I try to enter it in my writing life. Many years ago, my wife gave me “Oblique Strategies” as a gift, and I use it from time to time while I’m writing. As I’m mired in endless revisions, it’s nice to be told to “define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor,” or to “go slowly all the way round the outside.” In some cases, the questions in the deck can directly inspire approaches in a piece of writing: “What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate”; “What is the reality of the situation?”; “Into the impossible.”

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And here's something on inspiration: Max Richter on the Music That Made Him. As this is mostly an illustrated list of influential music at different ages, it is impossible to summarize so you will just have to go read for yourself. But here is an introduction:

Max Richter spent his early years living in a cramped apartment near Hamelin, Germany, where his parents would play Bach and Beatles LPs on a cheap record player that popped out of a suitcase. When he was three, they moved to the English market town of Bedford and he quickly shed any evidence of his remote past life. “It wasn’t that easy being a German kid at an English school,” the composer, 58, recalls. “I was bullied a lot. It was ‘Sieg Heil’ and all of that. So I basically ditched the whole German identity, on the outside.” In himself, however, Richter naturally reconciled that dual identity, just as he has the allegiances to classical, ambient, pop, and folk music that make him the musical polyglot he is today.

I notice that we share a few albums!

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An interesting take on Strawberry Fields Forever.

Lennon himself once said of the track, “‘Strawberry Fields’ was psychoanalysis set to music.” So, let’s psychoanalyse for a second.

The song is coloured by a sense of uncertainty. “Always, no sometimes, think it’s me,” he sings, or, “I think I know, I mean a yes / But it’s all wrong / That is, I think I disagree.” Throughout the song, Lennon can’t figure out what’s real, what’s right, what’s up and what’s down.

Perhaps this is Lennon’s attempt at grappling with his own difficult, complex and traumatic childhood. As a young boy, he never knew if he was coming or going, which parent he’d be staying with, who loved him most, where he would be living, and so on. There was so much uncertainty and confusion in his young life that maybe this trippy, unsure track is a reflection of that as Lennon crawled back into his youthful hiding spot and still found that same rocky sense of the world. Who knows, I’m not a therapist.

For a close look at the music, consult Walter Everett, The Beatles As Musicians.

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Ancient classical texts are still hugely influential despite the fact that 99% of ancient texts are lost: Doom scrolling

Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

Because of new computer technology we might soon be able to read some of the vast library of ancient scrolls carbonized at Herculaneum:

On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap.

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Every era re-creates Mozart in their own image: Mozart's God.

It’s too early to say, of course, but it seems equally unlikely that it’s the Mozart we’ll see in the forthcoming Sky reboot of Amadeus—the 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 stage play based on a playlet written in 1832 by Alexander Pushkin. We’re promised a Mozart who has been “playfully re-imagined”; Paul Bettany has been cast as Salieri and Will Sharpe (from The White Lotus) has been announced in the title role. It will, we’re assured, be “fresh, intimate and irreverent.”

That’s no great surprise in the year 2024, though the Mozart revealed in his music and letters is—in his own way—deeply reverent. In fairness to the creators of this new drama, it’s true that every era since 1791 has recreated Mozart in its own image. You might say that each generation gets the Mozart it deserves. In the spring of 2013, the Mozarteum in Salzburg mounted an exhibition at the city’s Mozart-Wohnhaus containing every documented portrait that is known to exist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and quite a few with rather shakier credentials.

It was eye-opening in all sorts of ways. Who knew that the famous painting of a bewigged Mozart in a red coat dates from nearly thirty years after his death? One portrait whose provenance is unquestioned—the one painted by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, and said by Mozart’s widow Constanze to be the best likeness—seemed almost drab by comparison: a small, half-finished image of a quizzical-looking man with bulging eyes, dun-colored hair, and a hint of an incipient double-chin.

It's a substantial article, probably worth reading.

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Excellent review of a Proms concert: BBCSO/Peltokoski/Kopatchinskaja review – conducting sensation reveals what the fuss is about

A lurching gear change saw Patricia Kopatchinskaja go head-to-head with Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, a work she introduced as “unplayable”, unless of course the violinist is endowed with an extra finger (for the record, she isn’t). Nevertheless, she took the plunge, playing with elfin grace and demonic fury in equal measure, her body shimmying with sheer delight in a work she clearly adores.

Kopatchinskaja managed to convey both the music’s inner logic and elusive spirit, guiding the listener along even the thorniest of paths. Playing with exceptional sweetness, especially in the upper register, and relishing each of Schoenberg’s motivic sidesteps, she unearthed several waltzes, a tango and a militaristic march along the way as she skittered and swerved through one of the toughest nuts in the repertoire. Peltokoski was a thoughtful partner, clarifying some knotty textures, before joining Kopatchinskaja in a pair of hilarious encores, the second requiring him to quack like a duck (you needed to have been there).

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Lots of great stuff this week, making choosing suitable envois easy.  First, here is that Brian Eno/David Bowie collaboration:

Next Max Richter On The Nature of Daylight:

And that incredibly scandalous canon by Mozart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9MN2WeqFY8

Finally Kopatchinskaja and Schoenberg: