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| Church in historic Puebla |
I just got back from spending Easter weekend in Puebla, a city of 3.3 million people midway between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City. Very important historically and a center of pre-Columbian religion. Here is a very popular image of the church of Los Remedios with the volcano Popocatépetl in the background. Of course, when you are actually there it doesn't look like this due to a prevailing haze:
But it's there. And that church was built on top of a very ancient pyramid so large it covers a couple of hectares. The name of that pyramid? Tlachihualtepetl! Indeed, in contrast to where I live, all the names in the region, apart from Puebla itself, are Nahuatl.
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Here is an interesting post where economist Tyler Cowan recounts his history with philosophy:
I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there. I figured I should read all of them. So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come. Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.
I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato. In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better. The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.
My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium.
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I've been engaged in a philosophical quest myself over the last year or so. I am re-tracing the history of philosophy to see exactly how we got to wherever we are now. Here is an interesting contribution: Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?
When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
Yes, indeed. I find the traditional gods to be implausible and I'm afraid that includes the Jewish and Christian one as well. But I also find the idea that all reality is, is the whirl of atoms in the void to be equally implausible. Reading Bishop Berkeley, he makes a plausible argument that not only cannot everything be reduced to the merely physical, in actuality, all there is, is spirit, consciousness! The problem of consciousness is not only not about to be "solved" as scientists claim, it is more monumental than ever. JMHO.
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Here's a thumbsucker from the Atlantic: Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?
I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès.
The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment.
It would be more interesting if it didn't start out the way a thousand other essays on the "problem" of classical music have.
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This is one of the most positive news items I have seen recently: Wigmore Hall says it no longer requires public funding
The classical music venue in London has raised £10m to become financially self-sufficient and will voluntarily withdraw from Arts Council England’s portfolio.
Celebrated classical music venue the Wigmore Hall has succeeded in its aim to raise £10m and will no longer require Arts Council funding, its director John Gilhooly said.
In April 2026, the London venue, which will be celebrating its 125th anniversary, will voluntarily take itself out of the Arts Council England (ACE) portfolio. It currently receives £344,206 a year.
Last year, Gilhooly launched a fund which aimed to make the Wigmore Hall financially self-sustaining in “an uncertain public environment for classical music in the UK”.
Given the unreliability of all government these days, this might be a good policy for private citizens as well.
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Now for some music. All from Wigmore Hall. Here's one definition of classical music: what they play at Wigmore Hall.
7 comments:
The Aucoin article left me a bit underwhelmed, too.
I think one of the recurring problems is that people writing about classical music bracket out a bunch of things that supposedly happen only in jazz or pop or rock or blues and then proceed to act as if: 1) classical music DOESN'T have these elements and 2) classical music either HASN'T had these elements or 3) they got removed somewhere in the long 19th century. Of the three #3 is the one that has the most history and documentation to back it up.
It's not like William Byrd didn't get flak from clergy for improvisation too much, for instance. I saw over on Slipped Disc John Borstlap did his predictable thing when Lebrecht linked to the Aucoin about how improvisation is a lower art from than putting together a full composition. If by lower he meant to say that improvisation is the dirt from which the flowers of finished musical works eventually grow, sure, I'd agree with "that" but I'm doubtful that "that" is what he meant.
I suspect improvisation has a long, if unrecorded, history in music. The three greatest improvisers that we know of were J. S. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. But yes, the 19th century, when music performance was moved from small, intimate spaces to large concert halls, did see the trend away from improvisation. One suspects that a lot of other performance qualities might have been suppressed as well.
I was reading some work by Robert Gjerdingen and some others on the Neapolitan partimento traditions that were active into even the 19th century where students were required to improvise over stock bass lines. He pointed out in a book on "child prodigies" that orphans were sometimes placed in hard-core music schools and became professional musicians who could be brilliant, yes, but 21st century people would balk at what would come off to us as grinding educational regimes that included a ton of child labor. Kids got that good because they were worked like pack animals to develop just their musical resources. Bruce Haynes mentioned that back in the day of amazing musicians in the Baroque era a lot of the desk players in string sections might have only learned to read scores and might not be literate in the more conventional sense but they could play.
There are performance qualities that might have been lost but I think the other element of music history is there were trade-offs.
I think in the long 19th century hausmusik and chamber music were, in some ways, sidelined. Dana Gooley had a book a few years back on the process through which 19th century classical music (i.e. serious concert life) began to reject improvisation. The thing that was funny for me reading that book was when Gooley pointed out that while in serious concert life improvisation was more and more discouraged church musicians kept improvising every week. What church music lacked in "innovation" it may have compensated for in permitting improvisation.
What if the new music revolutions of the last 2 centuries were as simple as, if nobody gets to jam anymore what's the next new thing we do? ;)
"Bruce Haynes mentioned that back in the day of amazing musicians in the Baroque era a lot of the desk players in string sections might have only learned to read scores and might not be literate in the more conventional sense but they could play." This is still often true today! Some of the best orchestral musicians I know won their first orchestral audition and hence job, in their late teens and never attended university. So they can play, but don't have much theoretical education.
Even though the skill of improvisation is not useful in the concert world, it still exists. When I was in a master-class at Banff in the 80s I hung out with a very fine English violist and we spent some afternoons "jamming".
In my opinion the main problems of music today are that music education has been so diminished that audiences have very few listening skills. And the rest is really economic. There are few economic rewards for being a really good musician. Mediocrity with 'rizz' and a good business plan is where the money is.
Little-known fact: Rimsky-Korsakov taught Stravinsky using the partimento method!
I did not know that about I.S.
Since you referenced an article at Hedgehog Review, a few years ago the editor ran a piece about the pervasiveness of mythic meaning alongside technocratic positivism.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/political-mythologies/articles/from-the-editor
And it doesn't just so happen I've been reading Leszek Kolakowski's The Presence of Myth lately.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3795257.html
LK's observation that fighting for human dignity without having any idea where it comes from can handicap you, especially if you commit to a reductionist materialist stance. Human dignity is a mythic need despite reductionist materialist attempts to say it's mythic. Kolakowski said that to take "that" approach in education is to say "There are no things that are really good or bad but I'm going to operantly condition you to act as if certain things are good or bad despite what I'm explicitly telling you because if I don't take this approach we can't have culture". Kolakowski contended that to take this approach is to always take it in bad faith. To say "authority is bad unless it's ME telling you that authority is bad" is one of the most overt double binds a teacher can probably put on a student.
The information about R-K and IS comes from Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions.
You tease out a number of very pressing problems! I am doubtful that religion is true, but I am sure it is important. Right now I am tracing the course of the problem through the 18th century. Either everything is mere matter in the void as the reductionist materialists would have it, in which case it is impossible to account for consciousness which is of the world, but not in the world; or, as Berkeley has it, the only thing that is, is consciousness because while we have perceptions, we have no proof that they are perceptions OF anything. Matter, substance does not exist independently of the mind. And no-one, it seems (though Kant came close) has managed to account for a world that has both matter and consciousness.
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