It didn't seem so then because of my doubts about getting a job in the field afterwards, but my time as a doctoral candidate in musicology at McGill University in Montreal was a very happy time in my life. It was a time of intellectual and aesthetic exploration unconstrained by economic factors. I had a full scholarship which paid for tuition and I was given employment in the form of teaching courses to non-music majors.
I did leave before writing a dissertation for other things, but I really enjoyed the seminars. For me education is about learning, not about certification. A number of years ago I was asked to give some pre-concert lectures in our local chamber series, one on Chopin and I realized that my many years at university had actually taught me almost nothing about Chopin except for brief discussion in a 19th century music history course. So I undertook to give myself a graduate seminar in Chopin based on ones I had at McGill on DuFay, Shostakovich and comic opera. It was great fun and I think the talk was successful. But the big reward was that I discovered I could give myself a course in anything I wanted.
Right now I am mostly through giving myself a course in Ludwig Wittgenstein. I first tried to read the Philosophical Investigations many years ago (fifty to be exact!) with no discernible success. Subsequently I have taken a couple of runs at the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus with even less success. But my complete lack of comprehension has actually led me to want to try harder and last year I read the whole of the Investigations coming away with an understanding of perhaps, oh, 4 or 5% of the text. Then I decided to give it a more serious try and read the Tractatus again in a couple of different translations and watched some videos on it by a Dutch professor. Ok, faint inklings. So I just finished Anscombe's introduction and I'm reading Hülster's introduction which is actually quite clear. Then I think I will read the Tractatus again. After that I will read the Routledge Guidebook to the Investigations and maybe try to write a summary. Oh, and I have also been reading the Monk biography of Wittgenstein which is pretty mind-boggling in itself.
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| My Wittgenstein shelf |
And here is that biography:
What has this to do with music? Well, there is a potential connection. I've been chewing over my thoughts on the problem of musical structure and I think that Wittgenstein's picture theory about the representation of reality could actually be very helpful. I talked about the problem in this post: Musical "Structure" in which I made the point that music does not have "structure" which is a spatial concept, rather it has "flow," which is a temporal concept. In any case, once I have finished my Wittgenstein seminar I will return to the problem, with, I hope, more intellectual tools to bring to the table.
Some listening: Henri Dutilleux, The Shadows of Time.
My next seminar will be on the Mozart operas for which I will be reading Charles Osborne's book The Complete Operas of Mozart. I also have the marvelous box of DVDs of the complete productions at Salzburg in 2006:
in his book Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics and God in Modern Theology Philip E Stolzfus proposed that Wittgentstein's approach to philosophy can be read as based in performance practice itself and is a divergence from the two dominant trends in Western European philosophizing about music that could be described as the Pythagorean and Orphic traditions that developed in Greek philosophical and religious thought. The Pythagorean and Orphic traditions are relatively easy to identify. Interestingly, Stolzfus claims that Augustine started in the neo-Pythagorean school shortly after his Christian conversion experience but that he functionally became Orphic in his sympathies. Augustine's famously ambiguous and ambivalent stance toward music "may" reflect his shifting loyalties on the idea that music is either a reflection of a cosmic order (the neo-Platonic/Pythagorean idea) or serves as a catalyst for spiritual attunement and elevated states. If so then, well, Ted Gioia's take on Augustine may be incoherent simply because Augustine's views on music have to be parsed by professional philosophers and theologians. ;)
ReplyDeleteStolzfus claims that Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical questions doesn't situate him firmly in either of these schools of thought. Whether or not Schleiermacher represents the neo-Orphic stance and Barth (via Busoni via Hanslick) represents a neo-Pythagorean might be the stuff of scholastic debates.
Taruskin pointed out in his final (posthumous) book that there have been two guiding metaphors in the way people have written about music and that these metaphors are "language" and "space" but these two metaphors are inherently in conflict or tension with each other. I wonder whether that's overselling the point because you can walk into the middle of a circle and stand there just like you can stop mid-sentence.
The metaphor of language and the metaphor of space will seem more vividly opposed only if we eliminate the most foundational and basic element of what Taruskin has called the western European literate musical tradition, the score. Chiara Bertoglio has a literal book on the topic of how score-reading has invited reflection from philosophers, scientists and theologians on how the act of reading a musical score spatializes our experience of time. It is the act of reading a score that highlights our capacity to translate time into space and space into time and this via the language of the score.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is both a shared resource and negotiated in its use. We continuously use words and this way and not that way and usages change over time yet we are able to understand each other. Stolzfus made a point early in his book that the core problem with the Pythagorean tradition is that it cannot account for things like irrational numbers and a more pointed criticism of the neo-Pythagorean/Pythagorean monochord of the cosmos would be, as Kyle Gann pointed out, the cosmic joke that the overtone series does not actually correspond to the pure number ratios posited in the Pythagorean ideal of simple number ratios. We will never get the subdominant chord from the overtone series, for instance.
But the Orphic tradition, Stolzfus points out, has a long history of pedaling stereotypes about men and women and, to put it in the most PC vernacular, the Orphic traditions have a long and unsavory tradition of egregious stereotypes and a penchant for dionysian group mentalities. The Orphic tradition also punts on how and why music can appeal to our intellects. Stolzfus proposes that Wittgenstein interrogated both the concept of "expression" from the neo-Orphic approach to music and the neo-Pythagorean idea that music refers to some cosmic transcendental ideal by exploring music as performance (i.e. the language game stuff).
That's a rather haphazard summary for a weekend but I thought I would mention it since I finished the book late last year and it has given me plenty to think about.
I take Taruskin's point that the metaphor of language and the metaphor of space are different but I am simply not sure they are as irreconcilable as he said they were. I started off in drawing, painting and dabbling with sculpture before I shifted nearly all my attentions to music and writing and I think the human capacity to proprioceptively translate time into space and space back into time through the creative process and engagement with the arts is one of the things that's most intriguing about the human condition. It's scholars and philosophers who seem most determined to treat the two core metaphorical conceptions of music as opposed when practical and practicing musicians, I would think, would want to take full advantage of both the metaphor of language and the metaphor of space to allow for a, yes, I'm going there, a kind of hypostatic union of the two.
It's why I have found theological aesthetics in the Dutch Reformed and post-Vatican II Catholic traditions interesting because no one can say that Christian dogmatics has not dedicated time and thought to conceptions of time and space. Aquinas' discourse on filiation, spiration and procession anticipated Jason Yust's idea that there are overlapping and converging forms of musical timespace in each musical work by quite a few centuries.
Not to confine things to the Western tradition, John of Damascus' discussion of intra-Trinitarian perichoresis got at the same core concept. That John Damascene transformed via Christian traditions the concept of perichoresis into something different from what the Stoic philosophers meant by the term suggests that language certainly changes over time through negotiated use.
Most interesting comment. I am always impressed with the depth of your command of the secondary literature. Wittgenstein was a profound lover of music and when in London or Vienna was a frequent attender of concerts. He was a skilled whistler and had a repertoire of some forty Schubert lieder he could perform from memory. But he wrote very little about music. His tastes stopped with Brahms and he rejected more modern music. What you say about the Pythagorean and Orphic traditions is very compelling and I hadn't heard that before. This is somewhat similar to my sense that the two categories of music are the somatic and the cerebral, but I like Pythagorean and Orphic.
ReplyDeleteIn the Routlege Guide to the Investigations there is a piece on Wittgenstein and Augustine that I will have a look at. Re Taruskin, I will have to look at that last collection for the passage you mention.
Yes, the Pythagoreans got caught in a nasty contradiction with the belief that reality was all number and the problem of the square root of 2, which is an irrational number. This is why subsequent Greek theorists based mathematics on geometry rather than number.
I'm not sure I get how you are understanding perichoresis.
Well, I'm working with perichoresis as developed by John of Damascus and Church Fathers regarding the intra-Trinitarian relationships between the Persons the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. perichoresis has meant inter-penetration but in Stoic philosophy it is said to more in the nature of, say, fire co-existing within the thing that burns. Greek metaphysical notions of four elements stuff, and "some" of the reading I've done in biblical studies and theology touches on how those ideas played out in Greek thought in ways that have not necessarily survived into our era. The Latin corresponding concept is circumincession or interpenetration. Thomas Torrance drew on Church Fathers to point out that what this practically meant is a rejection of a Cartesian/Newtonian concept that time and space are absolute and have extension. Instead time and space are contingent. Jason Yust has proposed that in musical works the timespace of rhythm, the timespace of harmony, and the timespace of form all overlap but do not necessarily converge. Each has its own identity within a musical work and yet is not ultimately separable from the performed work. This is not a big leap beyond Aquinas considering filiation, spiration and procession within the Persons of the Trinity, which Christians believe reveals the unified nature of God while also demonstrating diversity (Colin Gunton's got a whole book on how this relates to the problem of the one and the many I have to get around to). I have not actually read Wittgenstein for myself and don't know if I would get him if I did. :) But, as you put it, I have tried to dig into the secondary literature that deals with him that I can find in my fields of interest. I admit I don't have the language skills to dive into the primary sources (I tried to start into koine Greek and also picked up dabs of Spanish but I'm strictly English-language overall).
ReplyDeleteAt some point in my academic career it was impressed on me that you go to the primary sources first and I guess that stuck. It can be quite a revelation when you realize that you have been dealing with different interpretations instead of the original idea. But the original Wittgenstein is so challenging to read I have gone to various interpretations just to find a way into his whole thought-world. And they have certainly helped me zero in to what he was saying.
ReplyDeleteYes, I tried to teach myself classical Greek once and didn't get very far. Occasionally I glance at that hefty volume on my bookshelf with regret.
that reminds me of friends who have done translation and study of biblical texts who have said that it's important to distinguish between Attic and Koine because if you read the wrong Greek texts the wrong ways it's kind of like trying to read Gawain and the Green Knight like you're reading Hemmingway.
ReplyDeleteYa, good metaphor. Greek civilization has been around so long there are four different written languages: Homeric Greek, Classical Greek, Koine and Modern Greek. All with the same alphabet.
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