| "quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio." ("What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know well enough what it is; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.") --Augustine, Confessions XI.14 * * *  |
| Dr. Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective immaterialism by violently kicking a stone: “I refute it thus!” |
You don't get many statues celebrating philosophical arguments, in fact this might the only one. Bishop Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who put forth a theory that denied the existence of material substances, postulating instead that we don't have perceptions of anything, we just have perceptions. This is a surprisingly tricky position to refute and Dr. Johnson did so by simply kicking a stone.
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I think of McGill University in Montreal as being a sober and respectable academic institution and not just because it is my alma mater. Pieces like this are one reason why: Mozart’s Music Doesn’t Make Baby Geniuses
There is an alchemy to science. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, the results of tiny, preliminary studies are transformed into truisms that spread the world over. For example, everyone knows that you’re either left-brained or right-brained… except that that is false. What is true is that some brain functions tend to involve one half of the brain more than the other, but the idea that scientists are left-brained while artists are right-brained is nonsense. Yet, the belief endures. When science goes public, it can become magic.
The Mozart effect is a scientific legend. It’s the idea that playing Mozart’s music to a baby will make them smart. We know it isn’t true. But it started with a nugget of science back in 1993. What happened next is a cautionary tale for how these legends spread. The media half-remembers the study and twists its findings, and the story starts morphing in the telling until it finds a shape the public views as desirable.
This is a story of scientists hounded by the media, trying to evade death threats. It is also about how scientific studies are portrayed as sacred rituals when they fail to replicate.
And then the article gets really interesting! Yes, you have to read the whole thing if only to find out how minimalist composer Philip Glass’ music was unfairly demonized in an attempt to prove a theory. (The term "minimalist" is from the article and no, I don't really agree.) This is a brilliant piece of intellectual history.
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Here is how one UK student amuses himself: transcribing performances that do not already have a notation, like this cadenza to a Mozart piano concerto:
Hat tip to the New York Times.
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While over at The Critic, Norman Lebrecht does a drive-by of the Chopin Competition: How to win at Chopin
Over three weeks, 40 contenders from around the world play Chopin all day and into the night for the benefit of a half-filled hall and large local television ratings. In the final, half a dozen survivors slug it out for the top slot, egged on by teachers, parents, bus drivers and their own damaged egos, trapped in a remorseless kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes them love their tormentors — the judges, and the contest itself.
One finalist, locked in a toilet with her teacher, is heard weeping hysterically and being ordered to stop if she wants to win. Another is watched over in sleep by his professor, herself a past contestant. A splendid Polish young man thinks he stands the best chance of winning if he has his hair done like Chopin’s; he winds up walking off stage in the middle of the second round, saying something like “I don’t want to do this any more.”
Three Italians maintain a modicum of sanity. One of them recommends, “I would say, whoever wins this competition should spend the €40,000 on a course of psychotherapy.”
My personal take on competitions: they are psychologically brutal and tend to produce generations of robotic virtuosos. Oh, and the best musician never wins.
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A CANADIAN UNIVERSITY SCRAPS MUSIC DEGREE
McMaster University, a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, has abolished its music degrees.
The degree course began in 1965. The university administration underfunded Music programmes for 40 years, closing its MA program in 2006, according to Paul Rapoport, who taught there from 1977 to 2005 and was Chairman of the Music Department in 1994–95. Now the bachelor degree has also been abolished.
Just between us, I barely knew that McMaster even had a music department...
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New York City’s famed Metropolitan Opera added a website trigger warning for prospective ticket buyers to Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot,” informing audiences that the 1926 masterpiece set in ancient China could be offensive.
“It is rife with contradictions, distortions, and racial stereotypes,” reads a program note promising “a discussion of the opera’s cultural insensitivities.”
“It shouldn’t be surprising . . . that many audience members of Chinese descent find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishized, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward,” the note continues.
Trigger warnings are themselves rife with contradictions, historical distortions and intellectual fetishes.
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AT LAST, LA WAKES UP TO SCHOENBERG
Arnold Schoenberg’s inventive approach to harmony left a lasting influence on the 20th century. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the LA Phil explores the work of the Austrian-turned-Angeleno composer throughout the season highlighted by two performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by LA Phil Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta featuring soprano Christin Goerke (Tove), mezzo Violeta Urmana (Waldtaube), tenors Brandon Jovanovich (Waldemar) and Gerhard Siegel (Klaus-Narr), and speaker Dietrich Henschel (December 13 and 15).
I think it is safe to say that, despite the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, Los Angeles has not woken up very far. Gurrelieder is a lovely early work that resembles Wagner as much as anyone. Actually waking up to Schoenberg would probably involve programming some later works like the Piano and Violin Concertos, some string quartets, piano music and maybe his opera...
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Alex Ross swoops in with a big piece on Schoenberg: How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood
Of the thousands of German-speaking Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe to the comparative paradise of Los Angeles, Arnold Schoenberg seemed especially unlikely to make himself at home. He was, after all, the most implacable modernist composer of the day—the progenitor of atonality, the codifier of twelve-tone music, a Viennese firebrand who relished polemics as a sport. He once wrote, “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.” The prevailing attitude in the Hollywood film industry, the dominant cultural concern in Schoenberg’s adopted city, was the opposite: if it’s not for all, it’s worthless.
Yet there he was, the composer of “Transfigured Night” and “Pierrot Lunaire,” living in Brentwood, across the street from Shirley Temple. He took a liking to Jackie Robinson, the Marx Brothers, and the radio quiz show “Information Please.” He played tennis with George Gershwin, who idolized him. He delighted in the American habits of his children, who, to the alarm of other émigrés, ran all over the house. (Thomas Mann, after a visit, wrote in his diary, “Impertinent kids. Excellent Viennese coffee.”) He taught at U.S.C., at U.C.L.A., and at home, counting John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Oscar Levant among his students. Although he faced a degree of indifference and hostility from audiences, he had experienced worse in Austria and Germany. He made modest concessions to popular taste, writing a harmonically lush adaptation of the Kol Nidre for Rabbi Jacob Sonderling, of the Fairfax Temple. He died in Los Angeles in 1951, an eccentric but proud American.
Read the rest for more of Ross' charming and informative guide to Schoenberg and how his music is being celebrated this year.
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In honor of the refractory Austrian, let's have a whole set of envois dedicated to Schoenberg. First, the Piano Pieces op. 11 from that fertile transitional stage when he was experimenting with atonality but had not yet organized it in 12-tone serialism:
The String Quartet No. 2 is also from this time:
Two later works are the Piano Concerto op 42:
And the Violin Concerto op. 36:
16 comments:
I'm curious what you would recommend to opera companies staging works whose racial politics have aged badly. Just go ahead and let the audience figure it out? Or is there some way to communicate these things than the "woke" way they are doing it? Or should people who find racism unpleasant just stay home?
Those are some good questions, Ethan. I think first I would want to examine the assumptions. You imply that the racial politics of Turandot have aged badly. Is that true? Are there even any "racial politics" in the modern sense present? The opera takes place, not in an historic China, but rather in an entirely fictional world. Wikipedia:
"The title of the opera is derived from the Persian term Turandokht (توراندخت, 'daughter of Turan'), a name frequently given to Central Asian princesses in Persian poetry. Turan is a region of Central Asia that was once part of the Persian Empire."
And:
"The beginnings of Turandot can likely be found in Haft Peykar, a twelfth-century epic by the Persian poet Nizami. One of the stories in Haft Peykar features a Russian princess.[8] In 1722, François Pétis de la Croix published his Les Mille et un jours (The Thousand and One Days), a collection of stories which were purportedly taken from Middle Eastern folklore and mythologies."
It is essentially a Persian fairy tale, so I think I stand by my description of trigger warnings as "rife with contradictions, historical distortions and intellectual fetishes."
"Here is how one UK student amuses himself: transcribing performances that do not already have a notation, like this cadenza to a Mozart piano concerto"
Reminds me of one guy’s effort, brought to my attention in a Brian Ferneyhough interview, to notate a Beethoven symphony as it actually sounds from the performances tradition represented across recordings. All the little nuances of conductor choice that the piece had accreted over the years. As Ferneyhough puts it, the end result of the notation looked rather like the score of Boulez’s Second Sonata. Having a hard time finding that score again now, I only remember it was created by an Italian guy in the mid 20th century.
I have a vague recollection of that myself. Of course what you get when a performer tries to follow this notation with all its little nuances of tempo and dynamics and articulations is nothing like the original performance because all the naturally flowing expression is turned into explicit actions--kind of like being digitized.
What is Time? Clearly St Augustine was nodding when the Deity was speaking to him about the Higgs Boson and Higgs Field. I don't blame St Augustine as quantum mechanics is no easy matter and my own knowledge of it is cursory. Anyway to rid yourself of Time rid yourself of matter which is done by not interacting with the Higgs Field.
Schoenberg. No Mr Ross Arnold did Not change Hollywood. I do appreciate him mentioning that Schoenberg wrote tonal music throughout his life to the very end. He was not doing it to please audiences according to him but simply because the urge to write them returned occasionally.
As Schoenberg said, "Still lots of good music to be written in C major."
I have not waded into Berkeley's work itself but I have it stowed away on my kindle. I read a book on the relationship between eye and brain that's a standard work and, curiously, the author said that Berkeley's theory about the relationship of the mind and eye in interpreting what exists outside us is hard to refute altogether because he was, accidentally or not, more correct about the sheer ton of work the brain does in interpreting what the eyes can actually physically perceive into what we take for granted as what we see.
The Schoenberg conversation reminds me of his glowing eulogy for Gershwin. He had a riff about how the composers who refused to take Gershwin seriously took themselves too seriously, something that sprung to mind since we hit the 100th of Rhapsody in Bllue.
Well Schoenberg often took himself too seriously but it was a nice thought about Gershwin. I will say Schoenberg was more perceptive about different composers than many other composers have been.
But going back to Bryan's quote I was trying to think of the great works in C Major after the arbitrary starting point of serialism's formation about a century ago. Off the top of my head there was Sibelius' Symphony 7 which most agree is great music and then Franz Schmidt's Symphony 4 from the mid 30s which a smaller group of people think is great. After that I'm drawing a blank. Any others that that were after WW2?
I'm just about to read Bishop Berkeley's Three Dialogues.
The twelve-tone system was developed in the 1920s. I'm sure there are a number of works written after that in C major. The Symphony in C by Stravinsky is one and hey, there is Terry Riley's In C. And there are quite a few pieces by Shostakovich. Wasn't there something by Prokofiev? A piano sonata maybe?
I may have misremembered the quote although I guess we won't know what Schoenberg said exactly. I thought he said there was still Great music to be written in C Major. Looking around there seems to be inconsistency in what people think Schoenberg said; although it appears to be something he said to a UCLA composition class or to Glenn Gould or to ??.
Anyway I thought it was specifically Great music he meant so I was trying to find works subsequent to serialim's development that were generally considered Dreat. That's' a interesting discussion whether people regard Stravinsky's Symphony in C as Great. Also is Riley's In C really in C Major? C Major is part of the tonal system and not simply the diatonic scale based on C. It would be rather dull to simply say " much music in C Major" as tonal music was hardly obsolete all through Schoenberg's life and his foreseeable future.
sorry for my typos ... serialism's development that were generally considered Great.
I have the vague recollection that the quote might have been somewhere in Style and Idea.
I once read an account of Johnson's refutation of Berkeley, which memory tells me was during a lecture where he responded to a question about Berkeley's philosophy by tapping his foot against the podium and saying "I refute him thus."
I actually read Berkeley's "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge" back when I was about 18 years old, so I guess that was 40 years ago. I liked it, it was in a year or so when I read philosophy, such as Plato's Dialogues (of Socrates), Spinoza, Schoepenhauer, Nietzche (if that counts as philosophy?), and dabbled less in a few others. I'm sure I was too young and unschooled to fully appreciate these books, and I didn't much look at philosophy again until maybe the last 5 years. Berkeley was my favorite of them all, probably because I couldn't refute him, and yet I also continued my common sense "belief" in a material objective reality outside of my mind. Probably also that's part of why I soon dismissed philosophy as idle and useless, judging it to be a diverse set of elaborate interpretations of the world that were deeply clever but untestable and and therefore irrefutable yet contradicting each other and therefore likely just mental models that as such will all and forever be separate from and only metaphorical interpretations of an objective world that will never be in the mind.
I have better things to say about the more contemporary philosophers (and even theologians!) I've read lately, but, knowing well what time is, I won't expound now because I better get back on the roof before I'm noticed missing!
Will, just make sure you don't fall off one of those roofs! We would miss you.
Are you sure you hadn't read David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature instead? He is a very likeable philosopher. Philosophy is certainly something that requires a great deal of leisure time and sees little material return--but I suspect that might be part of its virtue. One of the things that I have certainly derived from philosophy is the ability to see through much of the malarky that is thrown at us every day. It does actually teach critical thinking. Without it we would be unaware even of what things we are taking for granted, let alone their veracity.
No, it was definitely Berkeley I'm remembering, however vaguely. Here's how I remember it...I can only know my own sensations, only know my own feelings and thoughts, therefore I could not have knowledge of supposed material things or any thing not my own sensation. The trick Berkeley launched, as I remember it, was that the permanence of objects even when they pass out of my own attention is that an omniscient God holds all concepts without faltering, and so even when I can't see behind me...that wall is still there in the mind of God.
Although I have always been a materialist, before and after reading Berkeley, I nonetheless always liked him because he presented the problem of objectivity, of ever being able to know things that are not my own sensations, my guess is this is what Kant meant by the "thing in itself." There is a certain kind of faith in believing there is an objective world outside of myself. It is a very common sense and ubiquitous and useful conceit at the very least, and although I'm not much of a man of faith, here I'd bet a lot that a material objective external reality is actually true...whatever "material" might mean in the quantum disturbances of fields.
Regarding Hume, I didn't mention reading him because I hardly did, I only remember losing interest after a few pages, not because of anything lacking in those pages but because my 18 or 19 year old mind had had enough philosophy at the time...and so I must have went on to some other now-forgotten book near at hand.
Yep, yep, yep, that's Berkeley all right! I'm obviously ignorant of that treatise. I read a different one. But it's the same argument.
Speaking of materialism, have a look at my second post on Reading Philosophy. At the end I put a video by Jeffrey Kaplan talking about an argument that disproves physicalism. I think you might enjoy it!
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