YouTube used to be much, much better than it is now, even though now it has many times as many clips. The problem now is that the advertisements are more and more ubiquitous and annoying. But even worse than that is that the majority of the clips seem to be very scam-like. The image luring you to view the clip often has little or nothing to do with the actual content; the claim of the title is often wildly exaggerated and so on. But, there are still some pretty good items. One I ran across this morning is a very brief and very clear discussion of why Ludwig Wittgenstein is an important thinker and actually, a very useful one. Here it is:
In the clip the narrator calls the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a "beautiful" book and indeed it is, it has a kind of mystic clarity to it that is so rare that I can hardly think of another example. Here is a quote:
6.13 Logic is not a set of teachings but a mirror image of the world.
5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world.
Every sentence--proposition--in the book is numbered in a logical hierarchy. But really, quotes like these remind me of Chinese philosophy.
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John Cage is absolutely unique among composers in that the piece for which he is most famous is nothing but silence. Think about that! The piece is 4'33 in length and that is the title by which it is known: 4'33. Here is a famous performance by Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic.
This was made as a statement about the cancelling of performances due to the COVID closure in Germany. You might notice that as this clip is only 3'42 long, he rushes the piece! Use a stopwatch, Kirill!
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Here is an example of a somewhat misleading YouTube clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpvzGEMQmY&t=358s
Sure, interesting, but the reason you click on it has very little to do with Picasso, right?
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Reading Dilla Time, this was one of the examples. I warn you, if you don't want to have a fragment of Joni Mitchell stuck in your head for all eternity, don't listen to this!
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Just wandering slightly off the reservation, one of the things I have liked about the French author Michel Houellebecq is just that name. There are too many somethings in there: vowels, consonants? Reminds me of a neighborhood in Montréal: Longueuil. That definitely has too many vowels. Anyway, here is a very funny, very deadpan, review of a recent book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyZzhtM41x4
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We really must end with some excellent music, so here you go. A lot of the younger singers I have enjoyed recently have been French.
I can't resist throwing in Ligeti's Symphonic Poem for 100 metronomes
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAYGJmYKrI4
I knew I missed something!
ReplyDeleteIt’s fun to hear (?) how Cage’s 4’33” has become part of the canon. Even the most radical artistic statement is eventually absorbed into music history.
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember a comment by Cage to the effect that, given enough time, noise becomes melody. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by it. Did he think that the pattern-seeking minds of listeners would eventually start hearing hidden Schubert-like melodic lines, even in his most aleatoric pieces, or even his silences?
BTW there’s a piece by the grindcore metal band Napalm Death called “You Suffer”. It lasts just one second. I’d love someone to arrange the piece for full symphony orchestra, choir, organ - the full forces required to perform Mahler 8. Then, put on a concert where it would be the only item on the program. Okay, I know that sounds like another Dada or Fluxus provocation. But I love the idea of people coming together in large numbers to perform and listen to a single musical micro-event. The build up before, the resonance afterwards. I think it would be amazing.
I'm not sure what Cage might have meant by that, but I am about to re-read Silence, his collection of prose pieces, so if I find out, I will post something.
ReplyDeleteRe your one second long grindcore piece, I think that would be the perfect encore to a performance of Mahler 8. I notice that there is a cover of the original You Suffer by another band. But the performance lacks tautness...
I'm not at home to dust off the book on my shelf, but didn't Spinoza enumerate each of his statements? I don't even quite remember the title anymore, I think there were 2 volumes but I only read the first...40 years ago. I might not quite remember reading the exact philosophy, but I certainly remember how I felt reading it, and I somehow feel a little bit shaped by it still. Maybe just another version of the idea that God is in everything, whatever that might end up doing to the concept of God. Which brings us to Chinese philosophy after all, the way is like water, it is not embarrassed in the lowest of places...
ReplyDeleteGeorge, your idea is deep, or at least it would provoke a deep hole in musical and overall modern culture to actually come together for a very large scale tiny moment. Resonance indeed! And as interesting as it is to imagine it, I think you're right the real world is not our mental model of it, and the full range of qualia in the buildup and resonance of that moment might be a version of the empty zen mirror I can't quite achieve in normal time scales. It would be funny if not unlikely for someone in the event to have a cathartic moment in that flash of sound. Maybe it's exactly what somebody needs? And there ought to be a wide range of interpretations of the score, such that different performances could greatly contrast.
ReplyDeleteYes, indeed, Spinoza's Ethics are a series of numbered definitions, axioms and propositions. I started it, but set it aside temporarily. It's on my to-read shelf. Just one volume in five sections.
ReplyDelete"YouTube used to be much, much better than it is now, even though now it has many times as many clips. The problem now is that the advertisements are more and more ubiquitous and annoying."
ReplyDeleteYou can always install an adblocking extension (ideally uBlock Origin on Firefox). I’m only reminded that YouTube has ads once in a great while from a post like yours. Of course, a general adblocking extension doesn’t help with the fact that so many YouTubers are monetizing their videos with sponsor relationships, to the point where their video itself is a big ad.
I used to use a browser that blocked nearly all the YouTube ads, but for some reason I had to stop using it. I will check out your recommendation. Yes, the sponsor integral ads are hard to avoid, but somehow I don't find them as annoying.
ReplyDelete