Despite Franz Schubert's remark to a fan, perhaps not. After all we have sardonic music, joyful music, comedic music, triumphal music and so on. But so often when I pick a piece of music for myself or for someone else to listen to it is what you might call 'sad' even though it is probably not the garden-variety emotion we think of as sad. Really great music is instead transcendent, out-lifting, making us stand outside ourselves--the original meaing of "ecstasy". Let's have some examples:
I think there is a place in one of my compositions where I inserted the simple instruction: poetically. I knew what I wanted, for the player to take more time, to give a bit more expression, to play, well, beautifully. I think most performers would respond in this way. But it makes me realize that these days, asking someone to do something poetically is almost absurd. We don't live in very beautiful times. Here is a clip that talks about how this manifests:
If I were to peel back the layers of the onion, I could mention that the repoeticization of my own life started a few years ago. Realizing that I had spent the last thirty years composing and writing on the computer I decided to make a radical change. Instead of composing with music software I went back to a pencil and eraser. I started writing a journal including poetry. And I did that with fountain pens in a paper journal. I started sketching. Apart from the sketching, I have kept all this up with great enjoyment. Historically, we can go deeper and look at some of the things that are emblematic of a "war on beauty".
Just a note on pronunciation: "Guernica" is not pronounced "gooernica" but "gernica." The "u" is just there to make the "g" hard instead of soft. Julia attributes the profound changes in aesthetics to the world wars, but it is very interesting to note that the change in aesthetics actually began before World War I. Artists have a sort of vague procognition as to where the culture is going. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was the first to write about the mechanization and flattening of aesthetics in works written between the two wars, but we can hear the disquiet, the feeling of an approaching cultural thunderstorm well before World War I in pieces like Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg as well as symphonies by Mahler and Petrushka by Stravinsky. All of these works show the signs of dislocation and dissonance that are characteristic of modernism. And, as I said, all were written before WWI.
But, as Julia points out, we are starting to become fed up with the sterile, grey world that has come to be. No reason we have to put up with it. We can just change things. And that, indeed, seems to be what is happening. And, in fifty or a hundred years or so, we will see how it turned out.
For some reason this makes me think of the last movement of the Symphony No. 4 by Shostakovich, which takes us on a very strange journey.
There are things about living in Canada I miss, like hiking in the Victoria, BC area. There are a wealth of beautiful places to see, from the ocean-side to the mountains and all the forests in between. There are video clips on YouTube where you can get a bit of a sense of it. Here is a good one:
Yes, beautiful natural surroundings, but after a while I had to turn it off. Can you guess why? Yep, the soundtrack. My recollection of the pleasures of these kinds of experiences always include the silence of the forest, broken by birdcalls and the soughing of the wind in the trees. The freshness of the air, the colors, smells and textures of the woods. But here, we have this damnable, repetitive, pounding soundtrack that seems to be ubiquitous in every video like this. Why? For me, it ruins the experience entirely. Nowadays you can't venture in any public space without suffering this kind of soundtrack. It varies to classic rock sometimes, or smooth jazz, or easy listening melodies. More and more, though, it seems to default to this kind of moronic, motoric thumping.
There are certainly other music choices one could make that would be less aesthetically dissonant, but they are rarely made. Here is one without the intrusive soundtrack, but instead with have an intrusive narration--useful if you are about to embark on one of these hikes. But what's wrong with silence, or the ambient sounds?
Anyway, that's my rant for the day! You're welcome.
Victor Burgin (b. 1941) is a conceptual artist and theorist. Due perhaps to his academic background and extensive teaching experience, he is able to conceptualize the approach of artists more clearly than most. Some quotations, all taken from his essay "Situational Aesthetics" re-printed in Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000, p. 894, originally published in 1969. His approach owes a lot to phenomenology.
Accepting the shifting and ephemeral nature of perceptual experience, and if we accept that both real and conceptual objects are appreciated in an analogous manner, then it becomes reasonable to posit aesthetic objects which are located partly in real space and partly in psychological space. Such a placing of aesthetic objects however involves both a revised attitude towards materials and a reversal of function between these materials and their context.
Cage is hopeful in claiming, 'We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use'; attitudes towards materials in art are still informed largely by the laws of conspicuous consumption, and aesthetic commodity hardware continues to pile while utilitarian objects, whose beauty might once have been taken as conclusive proof of the existence of God, spill in inconceivable profusion from the cybernated cornucopias of industry.
Perceptual fields are not experienced as objects in themselves. Perception is a continuum, a precipitation of event fragments decaying in time, above all a process.
Visual information concerning duration is gained, as it is gained when we observe motion, from observations of shift in perceptual field. In travelling past an object we are presented with an apparent configurational evolution from which we may abstract a number of discrete states. Comparison of expired configurations with the configuration of the moment tells us we are in motion relative to the object.
Time, in the perception of exterior events, is the observation of succession linked with muscular-navigational memories -- a visceral identification with change ... All behaviour has these space-time parameters in common. To distinguish, therefore, between 'arts of space' and 'arts of time' is literally unrealistic. The misconception is based in materialism, it springs, again, from a focus upon the object rather than upon the behaviour of the perceiver.
Vertical structuring, based in hermetic, historically given concepts of art and its cultural role, has given way to a literally proliferating complex of activities which are united only in their common definition as products of artistic behaviour.
Art intended as propaganda is almost invariably both aesthetically tedious and politically impotent. The process-oriented attitudes described here are not intentionally iconoclastic and one should be suspicious of easy comparisons with Dada.
One might note that while one's experience of a painting is time-oriented in the sense that it unfolds over a span of time, contrary-wise in making theoretical plans of the structure of a piece of music, one is converting or reducing a time-oriented experience into a synoptic, spatial view.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a bandit preying on travelers between Athens and Eleusis. He had an iron bed and compelled people to lie on it. No-one ever quite fit so for those who were too tall he amputated the extra and those who were too short he stretched to fit. Theseus, on his way to Athens, solved the problem by serving Procrustes with his own medicine. As commentators like Fil from Wings of Pegasus and Nick Beato have been pointing out, commercial pop music has become something of a Procrustean bed. Let's listen to Fil:
I think this is enough to get the idea. From different angles Fil is pointing out that much of what we see and hear in these kinds of videos is processed or, to be a little more blunt, fake. Rick Beato was making a similar point in the video I just put up yesterday. Here it is:
Now let me connect this to R. G. Collingwood, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford. His essay "Good Art and Bad Art" is found on page 536 in Art in Theory. Here are some quotes:
Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.
...a work of art is an activity of a certain kind; the agent is trying to do something definite, and in that attempt he may succeed or he may fail. It is moreover, a conscious activity; the agent is not only trying to do something definite, he also knows what it is that he is trying to do; though knowing here does not necessarily imply being able to describe, since to describe is to generalize, and generalizing is the function of the intellect and consciousness does not, as such, involve intellect.
A work of art, therefore, may be either a good one or a bad one. And because the agent is necessarily a conscious agent, he necessarily knows which it is. Or rather, he necessarily knows this so far as his consciousness in respect of this work of art is uncorrupted; for we have seen that there is such a thing as untruthful or corrupt consciousness.
A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. This is the difference between bad art and art falsely so called. In art falsely so called there is no failure to express, because there is no attempt at expression; there is only an attempt (whether successful or not) to do something else.
To give some examples: if Paul McCartney were to sing "Hey Jude" very badly, out of tune and poorly phrased, that would be an example of bad art. If his performance of "Hey Jude" were to be pitch-corrected and rhythmically quantized, that would be "art falsely so called" because it would not be the truthful expression of emotion.
A bad work of art is the unsuccessful attempt to become conscious of a given emotion: it is what Spinoza calls an inadequate idea of an affection. Now, a consciousness which thus fails to grasp its own emotions is a corrupt or untruthful consciousness.
In my view, music that is pitch-corrected, autotuned or quantized is the product of a corrupt consciousness. A lot of what J Dilla did with his beats was an attempt to insert human expression into otherwise mechanized rhythms.
A person who is capable of producing bad art cannot, so far as he is capable of producing it, recognize it for what it is ... To mistake bad art for good art would imply having in one's mind an idea of what good art is, and one has such an idea only so far as one knows what it is to have an uncorrupt consciousness; but no one can know this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind, so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity.
Art is not a luxury, and bad art not a thing we can afford to tolerate.
I recommend reading the whole thing. I'm something of an Aristotelian myself and from the first sentence of the Collingwood I got the sense that he was one as well. So when you read him, do so slowly and carefully.
I suppose that we can thank the purveyors of rhythmic quantization and pitch-correction for showing us exactly what a corrupt consciousness in music consists in these days.
Just a footnote: every good singer I have worked with has intentionally bent the pitch of certain notes in one direction or the other for the sake of emotional expression. And phrasing, of course, is nothing but the pushing of rhythm in one direction or the other for the same reason. I learned these things from my first voice teacher.
Thinking about the aesthetic critiques of Dada and Surrealism, yes, they were justified as a reaction to the horrible calamity of the First World War (and the Second for that matter), but the solution, to turn over creativity to the unconscious and the irrational while refreshing and certainly A solution, was not a very good one. I will mention just one reason why: without the diligent use of reason and planning, only fairly small aesthetic objects are feasible. So certainly painting, drawing, small sculpture and poetry are ideal media. But architecture, large sculpture and extended musical works are not. If you want to jump in and cite minimalist music then, ok, that might be an exception or it might simply be the case that they are long works based on short structures. You might also mention some early Shostakovich absurd pieces such as The Nose opera or some ballets, but these are actually short works strung together to form suites.
What cannot be produced under the strictures of Dada and Surrealism are large works like the symphonies of Bruckner or Mahler (or Shostakovich), pieces that take years to write and orchestrate and a large, highly-trained orchestra to perform. Large works of poetry like the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot and large novels like In Search of Lost Time by Proust or Ulysses by James Joyce, while certainly containing whimsy and disjointed episodes, considered as a whole have an intricate structure.
I think we are still hunting for ways of organizing societies that don't rely on either fascistic or communistic authoritarianism! And yes, of course, the aesthetic challenges of organizing large forms are still with us--and they are the same ones that always existed. Pop music avoids the problem by not having large forms. Or not needing them!
I await your comments while listening to Bruckner.
The other day I recommended three philosophy channels on YouTube and I want to start this post by re-recommending one of them. I just started watching Prof. Victor Gijsbers series of videos on epistemology and they are really great. Here is the third one:
You should get a couple of things from this clear, balanced and well-argued clip: epistemology, along with logic and ethics (and probably aesthetics as well) is a normative discipline, i.e. it is not about digging up knowledge so much as it is about discovering why you should be seeking knowledge. The other main point is that the search for knowledge is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental good (of course it could be both). Like friendship and love and kindness and things like that, the search for knowledge, not the simple possession of it, is intrinsically good.
So, let's do some searching for aesthetic knowledge cleverly disguised as a review of some classical guitar videos. I used to do what I called micro-reviews of music videos, almost exclusively of pop music, but it got tiresome and I had the feeling that it was a bit, well, cruel. This is what often restrains criticism: some poor musician is striving to deliver a fine performance and some nasty ankle-biter (avoiding the use of the obvious term) has the nerve to criticize their sincere efforts, even if obviously flawed. But, assuming the logic of the bell curve, most performances will be mediocre, a few will be excellent and a few will be horrifically bad. This is true despite the best efforts of all the marketing and promotional people.
I have the most appropriate expertise to review classical guitar recordings rather than pop music or orchestras or pianists or violinists, but there is a caveat. A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that I had done a lot of work with called me up one day to ask my opinion of some pianists. I asked him why me, I'm a guitarist? His answer was that he certainly would not ask me my opinion about guitarists even though that is my instrument. The reasons for that are well-founded. The music world is very competitive and one's view of rivals is distorted by this. One does not ask one soprano their opinion of another soprano! The other main reason is that well-established performers have arrived at certain decisions regarding style and interpretation and therefore they have little interest in how other artists work nor do they have much empathy for differing approaches.
But these issues aside, I think I might have some useful views on classical guitar performers these days as I retired as a performer a long time ago so I don't see anyone as a 'rival' any more and second, I take a more objective interest in performance and interpretation as I am no longer giving performances. So, let's have a look at some classical guitar clips on YouTube. I will try to focus on recent ones, but an older one might creep in.
David Russell has recently done music videos of all the Bach lute suites on location in some beautiful places in Spain and Portugal (he has lived in Spain for many years). He is the most well-known member of the second generation of British guitarists the first of which consisted of Julian Bream and John Williams. Bream has passed away and Williams has retired so Russell is really the most prominent British guitarist of his generation even though he has lived most of his life in Spain. He attended the Royal Academy and won the Julian Bream prize twice. He has had a very successful career and performs at guitar festivals all over the world. Here is his performance of the Lute Suite no. 3 (which you will have to click over to YouTube to view):
Nothing wrong with that, right? Technically perfect, musically assured, all together a fine performance. Now go back and just listen to the gavottes, starting at the 18:16 mark. I want to focus on those because I learned and performed them a year and half ago so they are fresh in my mind. Ok, so what do you think? First of all, to my ear, they are just a bit too quick. This is a frequent problem with performances of Bach. His music is often technically difficult so performers sometimes mistake this for being music that calls for a virtuoso approach. This is a misunderstanding, of course. Bach's music is not difficult because he intended a virtuoso display, unlike a lot of Vivaldi or Paganini. No, it is difficult because the musical ideas are original and texturally complex. So, this brisk tempo rather misses aspects of the music. Sometimes I think of it as like being frog-marched through the piece in handcuffs! As we reach the end of the first section we find another problem: there is absolutely no acknowledgement that we have come to the end of a section with a cadence and a repeat from the beginning. I'm sure David is aware of the structure, but he just does not let that cause any deviation in his rigid tempo. These observations apply to the whole performance. The main aesthetic ideal here seems to be perfectly clean technical perfection at the expense of musical expression. You might speculate as to the psychological reasons for this, but I won't. So while we can certainly admire the result of many years of disciplined practice, I find it very hard to listen to Bach played as if musical expression were of no importance.
Here is really recent video, just posted a couple of weeks ago. Jan Depreter at the Antwerp Guitar Festival. Again, I want to focus on just part of the performance so I can make detailed observations instead of vague generalizations. Let's listen to the Weiss Passacaglia and the first part of the Bach Chaconne.
We cannot accuse Jan Depreter of a rigid performance. There is lots of expression in the dynamics, the articulation, the tone-color and in the tempo. However, we might consider if all this is appropriate? Quite a lot of it, yes. Performances of Baroque music certainly do not need to avoid expression! However, the kind of ubiquitous vibrato we hear in this performance does not strike me as a very Baroque type of expression. There were also some missed opportunities to shape rhythms and phrases in ways reflecting what little we know about performance practice. For example, a piece like this with its obvious French antecedents could well benefit from some inégale. Now let's have a listen to the Chaconne, which begins at the 4:31 mark. In the first minute I notice six places where he failed to insert a very obvious ornament such as filling in a third, a couple of trills, a couple of mordents, and so on. Instead, we had the ubiquitous vibrato and chords rolled in a romantically guitaristic manner. Again, ok, but not terribly Baroque and frankly, after a while, tiresome.
Another new clip: this was posted just eight days ago. This is Cristina Galietto playing the Romanza by Paganini.
Here we have a performance entirely appropriate to the music--honestly how could a guitarist from Napoli get it wrong? Her tone is warm and her dynamics are finely shaded. She thoroughly understands the music and is delicate when needed and aggressive when needed. It is a treat to hear a performance so expressive of the musical content, not feeling as if it is applied a posteriori with a butter knife.
Let's hear Scott Tennant play the Sonata K. 322 by Domenico Scarlatti.
I met Scott at one of the Toronto guitar festivals. He is a superb guitarist and placed very well in the competition. This is an excellent performance with loads of clarity, but also the right observation of musical expression. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But just for fun, let's compare this to an older recording of Scarlatti by an absolute genius. Less precise, but wow. This is Leo Brouwer with K. 544.
I didn't review any of the vast mass of mediocre performances and didn't happen to stumble across any of the really awful ones--if I had, that would have felt cruel!
Any thoughts from my commentators?
UPDATE: I just ran across this clip from a few years ago by Xuefei Yang playing some music from Latin America. Just to show that you don't have to be from Napoli to play Paganini or 18th century Leipzig to play Bach--you can be Chinese and be a master of Latin American style. This is really excellent:
I'm still doing research for my next Music, War, and Philosophy post and I keep running across interesting quotes:
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” ― Francis Bacon, The Essays
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." --attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Dorothy Parker
“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.” ― William Lloyd Garrison
“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” ― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Let's apply that first one to some music: Some pieces are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Here is one from each category:
I just listened to La Mer by Debussy for, oh, I don't know, about the 100th time. I first heard it around 1970 on a horribly scratched vinyl LP on an equally horrible mono cabinet record-player. I wanted to write "stereo" but it was pre-stereo. But it still sounded great. Just now I listened to a recording by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez in 1993 on a really good harmon/kardon system. With this recording I can pretty much hear everything, but it would be better if I followed in the score. It was still great. And I'm pretty sure that the other hundred times I listened to it, it was also great. This is the odd thing: you can listen to a great piece of music an indefinite number of times without getting bored. In fact, the tendency is to enjoy the piece more each time you listen to it. Of course, with a bad piece of music, the effect is the opposite.
But I don't want to talk about that; instead I want to talk about how the same is not true of, for example, television series. With very few exceptions (cough**Firefly**), I don't find that you can watch a tv show very many times before it becomes tedious, annoying and predictable. Sure, you can watch a favorite show or series two, three, maybe five times and still enjoy it, but then the tediousness kicks in and you go watch something else. With music, the depth just seems to increase with each hearing. Mind you, it has to be a really great piece of music.
Is this just me, because I am a very music-oriented person? Or do others feel the same? I bet that Swifties can listen to Taylor many, many times without boredom. Could they watch a tv show as much? I suspect not. With some music, if I have listened to it five times I feel I am just scratching the surface and need to listen to it several more times before I feel I am really hearing what is going on. In the private concerts that Schoenberg arranged in Vienna, they would often repeat a composition which seems an excellent policy.
Indeed, there is something about music and repetition that is inherent to the form. Some music is very repetitive, while other is not at all. I think that means that we need to listen to the latter a lot more times before we really "get" it.
Poetry is a bit similar as you can read a poem many many times without boredom. Is the same true of novels? Plays?
I got a new pen the other day, a Visconti, designed and made in Florence. It is quite beautiful and the body is fluted, meaning it has shallow channels along the length:
Now the idea of fluting goes way, way back. As the Wikipedia article shows, it was common for Greek columns to be fluted:
But the idea didn't originate with them. They borrowed ideas about column design from the Egyptians who had quite a variety of designs:
They borrowed ideas from nature, specifically bundles of papyrus stalks, lotus buds and palms. Originally there were probably columns made from actual papyrus bound together in bundles and a fluted column just echoes that. The Greeks didn't have these plants, so they just copied the Egyptian columns, making them more simple and, to our eyes, classic. This idea has never really gone away even four or more thousand years later. Here is the facade of the US Supreme Court:
So, architecture has some very, very deep roots! What about music? Unfortunately, we don't have records in stone going back millennia as there are in architecture. The few examples of Greek notation, carved in stone, give us mere hints as to the melodic content and less of the rhythmic and harmonic content. That doesn't stop people from re-creating versions of ancient Greek music, but we can't be sure how authentic they are. Still, the idea of an open fifth drone must be ancient. Whether or not you believe Pythagoras actually existed, the school associated with him was very aware of the basic musical intervals and the idea that they would have been combined for an accompaniment to melody is likely.
I'm not sure if there is much research on this, but I have a feeling that there are a lot of musical ideas that are really ancient. Here is some of the oldest European polyphony, from the St. Martial manuscript:
UPDATE: I thought of another deep root of aesthetics with some musical connection: the poetic "foot" that comes down to us from ancient times. A related concept is that of arsis and thesis or upbeat and downbeat. Just how old these patterns are is suggested by the names: dactyl, anapest, bacchius and cretic. And being basic rhythmic patterns they are still in use today. In fact, in my analyses of Shostakovich string quartets I found a number of occasions where he uses a pattern like the dactyl to unify a whole movement.
An important early source is Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a pupil of Aristotle, who wrote many volumes on harmony, rhythm and music.
One fine book in the field of economics is Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. It is stimulating in its refreshing down to earth common sense. I wonder if we could do something similar in aesthetics?
Aesthetics is that part of philosophy that looks at art and examines questions of taste and quality and what makes an artwork art, that sort of thing. In both music and visual art we have examples of artists who have gone out of their way to create something to challenge even the possibility of asking these sorts of questions. In visual art the locus classicus is "Fountain" (actually a urinal) by Marcel Duchamp using the pseudonym "R. Mutt."
The go-to example in music came much later, in 1952, with John Cage's 4'33 which is for any instruments but usually performed with piano. The work consists solely of rests. In both cases the point is to defy any rational attempt to define "art" or "beauty." Artists like to have complete freedom, or, rather, they like to choose their own challenges. At least the modernist kind of artist, though there are exceptions. Bartók for example believed in crafting a kind of modernism that united with folk or peasant music.
Beauty is, of course, in the eye or ear of the beholder, but what this means is that beauty is something perceived that is consequent or instigated by an art object (at least artistic beauty, leaving aside sunsets and beautiful humans). As something perceived by individuals it is perceived in various ways which is why we can disagree on whether something is beautiful. The art object itself is something real and fixed in itself (leaving aside musical interpretations for the moment), but the way it is perceived is variable, though there can also be considerable agreement.
Theoretical analyses of music offer some interesting examples of how this works. Musical works can be very complex, of course, but that does not mean that they are beyond understanding--at least in most cases. What a theorist discusses or points out in a piece of music is something that we can all see (in the score) and hear, though we might not hear it until it is pointed out. The more we notice in the score, the more we might like the piece--or dislike it, I suppose. The music is what it is, how we feel about it is a different thing, but most certainly related to the music itself.
But I am leaving out all sorts of aspects and some of them exactly what we would want to call "aesthetic." For example, in a masterclass when the maestro stops you and says "play that phrase more poetically," what could that possibly mean? It almost certainly relates to the use of rubato, tone-color, phrasing, that sort of thing. Very crucial to a good performance, but unquantifiable, though we can all hear the application of these things. Tempo and the variation and adjustment of it is another important aspect. Some of this is notated, but most of it is not, but again, we can certainly hear when a passage is played "poetically" and when it is just delivered like cold porridge.
So those are a couple of ideas relating to basic aesthetics.
I'm always on the lookout for bad music because it is often very revealing of aesthetic principles. But it is surprisingly hard to locate bad music. When you search for it you rarely turn up good examples. So I stumbled across this with some anticipation: Turn It Down Please: Here Are The Most Annoying Pop Songs Ever Made:
There’s a fine line between a great song and an unbearably annoying one. Both get stuck in our heads, but the songs that get on our nerves dig in first. It doesn’t make sense. If a song is bad, why does it play on repeat upstairs? It’s counterintuitive.
One sample from the list Cher, "Believe" the big hit from 1999 and the beginnings of Autotune:
There is lots of bad Baroque music as well, but a lot harder to run down. Baroque music was never bad in the sense of badly crafted, but more in the sense of boring and unimaginative. Routine, pedestrian. I'm sure there are lots worse than this, but here is a piece by the fairly dull composer Johann Friedrich Fasch:
But I'm sure he has admirers that will vociferously disagree. Here is another example, from the Classical Era, The Battle of Prague by František Kocžwar:
The title is a quote from a poem by Ernest Dowson--the next phrase is "and stronger wine" but that doesn't fit my theme as well.
What I'm concerned about is the dull seriousness music seems to be slumping into. I look to music for delight, transcendence, euphoria, even perhaps a mad delirium sometimes. But lately music has become dutiful and dull. Whimsy and humor, which open the door to delight and joy, seem suspect. I am reminded of an old French joke about living in difficult times. One says, "situation desperate, but not serious" meaning it is always appropriate to make a joke.
When Stravinsky was composing the Rite of Spring he played parts of it for various listeners. One of these was conductor Pierre Monteux who conducted the premiere. Describing the experience of hearing a performance for himself and Diaghilev in April 1912 he later wrote:
The room was small and the music was large, the sound of it completely dwarfing the poor piano on which the composer was pounding, completely dwarfing Diaghilev and his poor conductor, listening in utter amazement... The old upright piano quivered and shook as Stravinsky tried to give us an idea of his new work... I remember vividly his dynamism and his sort of ruthless impetuosity as he attacked the score. By the time he had reached the second tableau, his face was so completely covered with sweat that I thought, "He will surely burst, or have a syncope." My own head ached badly, and I must admit I did not understand one note of Le Sacre du Printemps. My one desire was to flee that room... [from It's All in the Music: The Life and Works of Pierre Monteux by Doris Monteux, p. 91]
Here is the first recording of the Rite, in 1929, conducted by Pierre Monteux:
This is a topic that has never hugely interested me, but Ted Gioia and others have written a lot about it. He just dropped an interesting essay for subscribers only, but it has this provocative excerpt in the teaser. Talking about a number of new ventures he says:
A meaningful number of these startups aim to make musicians irrelevant or obsolete, usually with some kind of artificial intelligence. Record labels seem more interested in these initiatives, while ignoring many of the rest—I’ll let you decide why that might be the case.
The bottom line: Music tech is evolving faster than the music itself, perhaps for the first time in history. So the next revolution might not be televised, but it sure as hell will be funded by venture capital.
Sure, could be, but the whole idea seems a bit grim to me. It also reminds me of a short story by Lloyd Biggle, jr. who was unique in the science fiction world for his focus on artistic themes:
Biggle was celebrated in science fiction circles as the author who introduced aesthetics into a literature known for its scientific and technological complications. His stories frequently used musical and artistic themes. Such notables as songwriter Jimmy Webb and novelist Orson Scott Card have written of the tremendous effect that his early story, "The Tunesmith", had on them in their youth.
Tunesmith, written in 1957, has this passage about how music has been commercialized, indeed, the only surviving musical form is the "Com" or commercial. This is a conversation between Erlin Baque, the last true composer in the world, and his agent, Hulsey:
Hulsey reached for his briefcase, dropped it again, leaned forward scowling. “Erlin, I’m worried about you. I have twenty-seven tunesmiths in my agency. You’re the best by far. Hell, you’re the best in the world, and you make the least money of any of them. Your net last year was twenty-two hundred. None of the others netted less than eleven thousand.” “That isn’t news to me,” Baque said. “This may be. You have as many accounts as any of them. Did you know that?” Baque shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.” “You have as many accounts, but you don’t make any money. Want to know why? Two reasons. You spend too much time on a Com, and you write it too well. Sponsors can use one of your Coms for months—or sometimes even years, like that Tamper Cheese thing. People like to hear them. Now if you just didn’t write so damned well, you could work faster, and the sponsors would have to use more of your Coms, and you could turn out more.” “I’ve thought about that. Even if I didn’t, Val would keep reminding me. But it’s no use. That’s the way I have to work. If there was some way to get the sponsors to pay more for a good Com—” “There isn’t. The guild wouldn’t stand for it, because good Coms mean less work, and most tunesmiths couldn’t write a really good Com.
This is, of course, the age-old battle between aesthetics and economics or between quality and quantity. In the short story Erlin Baque quits the composer's union and returns to his career as a performer where, reinventing the genre of instrumental music, he achieves such great success that the world returns to honoring the great cultural creators, instead of those who make the most money.
The prolific Ted Gioia has just done us a very big favor in digging into the issue of fake artists on streaming media. I'll refer you to his post to get the whole story: The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize. Here is a key segment:
The streaming model allows for abuses beyond anything a pirate ever envisioned. Algorithms now determine how a huge portion of song royalties are allocated, and if you can manipulate the algorithms you can send enormous sums of money into your bank account.
The root of the problem is the increasingly passive nature of music consumption. People will often ask Alexa, or some other digital assistant, to find background music for a specific task—studying, workout, housework, relaxation, etc. Or they will rely on a pre-curated playlist for that purpose. They don’t pay close attention to the artists or song titles, and this is what creates an opportunity for abuse.
Long before your first article about fake artists in 2016 there was already a huge growth trend in people listening to mostly instrumental “mood music”. Even Sony and Universal Music created playlists for these types of use cases under their Digster and Filtr brands long before Spotify ever did. In fact many majors started releasing music by “fake artists” in the early 2010s and have continued to do so...
Interestingly, all of these ‘artists’ are all discovered on Sony-controlled playlists with very generic search-optimized titles, and millions of followers if you add all the small niche playlists together.
There is a lot more material there, but the bottom line seems to be that there are huge revenues to be earned by creating generic music that will turn up in typical searches. Back to Ted:
Hara Noda seems to be a real person, working as a producer and drummer in Sweden—which, by pure coincidence, is the same place where Spotify has its headquarters. In fact, the number of fake artists whose music comes out of Sweden is extraordinary. But even the numbers may be misleading. According to one survey, “about 20 people are behind over 500 artist names.”
And keep doing it over and over. At the end of the day, these "artists" can get more plays and hence more royalties than Grammy winners. As Ted says, the world has changed.
This kind of scam wasn’t possible before streaming. People obviously listened to music while studying or working, but they either picked out the record themselves, or relied on a radio station to make the choice. Radio stations were sometimes guilty of taking payola, but even in those instances a human being could be held accountable. But with AI now making the decisions, everything can be hidden away in the code.
Music is especially susceptible to passive consumption and in that regard it is like wallpaper or commercial design, something that is designed to be just a comforting background. This is a useful function in many, or perhaps most, people's lives. Music is something to relax to.
What is different today is that this kind of generic, fairly easily cranked out music, is now getting more and more revenues even as it preserves an essential anonymity. Historically, that's new. The pick-up band at the medieval banquet got paid a lot less than the famous composer writing masses for the cathedral. In the medieval world (here I am using "medieval" as a generic term for that period before the middle class became an important economic factor) the high, middle and low musical forms were compensated similarly. But in the world of algorithms, the most generic and least original, the least creative, in other words, can win the biggest earnings.
I think that this is, in an odd way, an argument for aesthetics. People who develop their aesthetic sensitivities become more active listeners and would tend to skip over the generic and seek out the original and stimulating. They look for music that challenges more and rewards more. They are actively engaged in listening. With engagement comes judgement, aesthetic judgement in particular.
This sounds rather elitist, doesn't it? Yes, I'm afraid it does and elitism has a bad name these days. But passivity can also be bad, apparently.
Here is Hara Noda with "The Beauty of Everyday Things". Four million plays on Spotify.
Time was when composers, John Cage for example, luxuriated in their unpopularity, thinking that if they were liked they must be doing something wrong. That seems to have entirely gone away. Everyone wants to be popular now. How do you do that? It seems by largely feeding people what they expect and are used to with just enough novelty to seem fresh (while not exactly being fresh).
So what I want to talk about is how to be unpopular. Now there is a right way and a wrong way, obviously. The wrong way is to simply be bad: clumsy, incoherent, meaningless drivel. This is wrong because, judging from recent films, you can still see some mainstream success even if you are quite bad. No, in order to be unpopular in the right way, you have to be truly original. You have to be doing something that is either new, or something old refreshed. New wine in old bottles or old wine in new bottles. Or, heck, maybe new wine in new bottles. I don't think old wine in old bottles would work because we have lots of that lying around already.
The best way to be unpopular, I think, is to follow your own instincts and intuitions and if it results in some fame or even notoriety, then keep trying until that goes away. Yes, there will always be a few aficionados that will figure out what you are up to, but as long as they remain few in number, you are safe.
So is your main goal simply to be unpopular? No, not really, you strive for unpopularity in order to avoid the perils of commercial success which is the surest way to destroy any actual quality in your work,
Does this seem cynical? Well, I am certainly trying for that, but I worry that I am not nearly cynical enough!
I offer as an envoi, a piece by a composer who really did a achieve a considerable unpopularity in his career. This is the String Quartet No. 4 by Arnold Schoenberg, composed in 1936.
UPDATE: I ran into an interesting coda to this on another blog. A tech writer points out that:
The world largely runs on open source software, but not only is 99.9% of the revenue swallowed up by huge corporations, those corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the people that made that revenue possible will never see a penny of it.
This echoes what I see in the music world. I have a vague feeling that a lot of the real creativity that goes on is completely unrewarded while, again, huge corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the revenue goes almost exclusively to them. There seems something very wrong with this!
I want to preface this discussion by saying it is kind of an addendum to a post from five years ago when I took up the issue of objective aesthetic value at some length. That post is called Philosophy and Aesthetics and I recommend you read it first.
It has always seemed to be harder to talk about music than simply to play or listen to it. That shouldn't be surprising because once you get past, "wow" and "yetch," what in ethics is called the "boo-hoorah" theory, what can you say? Well, a lot, it turns out. I mention ethics because I have noticed, in investigating aesthetics, that it shares some interesting resonances with ethics or moral philosophy. They have both, at different times, resorted to a theory of subjectivism or relativism. Some have said that ethical values are nothing more than your personal opinion about right and wrong, They have no objective existence. Bertrand Russell criticized this by observing that "I cannot necessarily construct an argument to the contrary, but I refuse to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it!" And I refuse to believe that the only difference between good music and bad music is that I prefer one to the other. Speaking of categorizing music in this way, Duke Ellington is reported to have said that "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."
But let me back up quite a ways and take a different approach to this. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was likely the most important philosopher of the 20th century. One of the things he is most known for is the "private language argument." This was discussed in his Philosophical Investigations. This work is divided into numbered paragraphs and the second part of #243 reads:
But is it also conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences--his feelings, moods, and so on--for his own use?--Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language?--But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know--to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.
There has been a remarkable amount of discussion over this and the following passages and the reason is that there are wide ranging implications for epistemology. Some of them are linguistic: a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. Because: language, by its very nature, is both public and communal. The existence of the rules governing the use of language and making communication possible depends on agreement in human behaviour, such as uniformity in normal human reaction.
To take a simple example, itching is a typical human experience that we would say is a private sensation, not shared with others. But we have a word for it because we do actually share the experience of having an itch. Both you and I seem to have similar itching experiences that we describe in similar ways. We are both acquainted with the sensation. Similarly, though we experience a C major chord and dotted rhythms subjectively, they are not just private phenomena because we can point to them, notate them, and play them in the objective physical world. With some specific exceptions, music is not a private language that refers to what only the composer or performer can know, but it is a public manifestation that, even though it may be experienced in a variety of ways, is still an objective event.
Going back to the language issue, one reason this is so important is that we want to talk about music. We say something like "It was quite a shock for me to get to college and hear a jazz professor say that Duke Ellington was the best composer of the twentieth century. Not the best jazz composer, the best composer, period." This is from a comment by Ethan Hein. When I asked what this opinion was based on he responded: "It was based on his belief that jazz was the condition to which all other music aspires. That belief is a highly subjective one, but no more or less subjective than any other hierarchy of value one might choose to have." Ok, so all hierarchies of value are wholly subjective, just like all opinions about good and bad in morality. As Ethan says in another comment: "Musical quality is always dependent on a subjective value system."
What is the problem with that? Well, first off, Ethan or his professor can say "Duke Ellington is the greatest composer of the 20th century" and I could respond, "no, Dmitri Shostakovich is the greatest composer of the 20th century." But if all we are exchanging is hoorahs, if, in other words, these are nothing but subjective utterances, then the conversation is over as from here on it will just be sterile exchanges of the "so's yo momma" variety. In other words, unless we can talk about things that we actually can refer to objectively, things that are not a private language, we can't even have a conversation.
But I very much think we can have a conversation. First however, we have to know what we are talking about. Foggy generalities won't get us very far, we need specifics. Music is a wonderful way to explore our own feelings and moods, but an overwhelming quality of good music is that it appeals to a wide range of people--or maybe just very deeply to a small group of people! But good music is NOT a private language. Though it may explore very intimate feelings.
Yes, we can have a conversation, but only if you give up the idea that your completely subjective perceptions are absolute truth.
This is one of a long string of posts on aesthetic questions that I periodically return to--possibly because I like to live dangerously! Let's look at a couple of statements about taste. First, from Pablo Picasso:
“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
Very sensible thing to say for a modernist painter pursuing new avenues and techniques. The last thing he wants is some old fuddy-duddy telling him what he can or cannot do. But let's set aside this a essay that takes up the question from a more neutral position: On Taste from the Claremont Review.
...the very notion of taste contains within itself two ideas in constant tension. First, taste is always personal: a judgment, but one’s own judgment. The idea derives from our physical sense of taste. It takes no great powers of observation to notice that different people prefer different foods. I like cilantro, you do not. As the Latin tag has it, de gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing about tastes.
And yet, however much we have a right to our own likes and dislikes, such judgments are often measured against a standard. For instance, the man who refuses to eat spinach or asparagus is unlikely to be considered a discerning judge of fine food. These two principles—the autonomy of the individual taste and the existence of some broader principle of excellence—are perpetually at odds. Each of us navigates between them, sometimes vindicating our own preferences, other times yielding to (and perhaps learning from) the taste of others.
When you look at it more closely you see that artists themselves are constantly making their own judgments--how else could they possibly function? I have sometimes used Jordan Peterson's metaphor of the campfire in the wilderness. The job of artists is to venture out from the comforting light and warmth of the campfire into the surrounding dark, perhaps taking a brand from the fire to light the way. You can certainly overwork the metaphor, but it captures an important part of the creative process: you have to venture into the unknown to find new things with which to create new art. But the newness is only part of the puzzle. You also have to take the new thing and work it into an art object. Perhaps this process is raw with really new ideas, but the artist has to use judgment all the time in selecting, modifying and developing whatever he may encounter away from the campfire.
The act of judgment is not only necessary to the creative artist, it is also part of what performers, critics and audiences do. A performer chooses one new concerto to learn for the coming season--out of a hundred possibilities. How? Through aesthetic judgment. The music director of the orchestra chooses certain repertoire over other repertoire through aesthetic judgment as well. Ok, sure, these days the marketing department may be demanding more pop, but that is just one more thing that needs to be judged. Then come the audience--they purchase tickets according to their best judgment as to what programs they will most enjoy. And so on.
What is the role of taste in all this? You might say that taste is just one way of looking at judgment. Good taste is either the enemy of creativity, as Picasso said, or perhaps taste that is based on good judgment. Sure, there is a good deal of personal or subjective reaction in judgments of taste and people often find it pleasurable to assert their independence from consensus judgments of taste. But it seems to be the case that taste is something that can be developed through increased exposure, study of history, study of the materials and practices of art and so on. Every music appreciation class, and indeed music education in general, is based on the idea that one's perceptions can be made more acute and sensitive.
Someone who has no taste or poor taste is perhaps someone who has no interest in art or who is inherently insensitive to it. More from the Claremont Review essay written by Thomas Kaminski:
Those who see what is going on in an Old Master painting “without being told” can do so only because they already know something about the form. Art is never transparent. There are no wholly intuitive responses to it, not even to the Old Masters. We assume, perhaps rightly, that anyone can enjoy the beauty of a sunset or the scent of peonies: the pleasures of nature must certainly be available to all. But the response to art is different. Art is not a part of the natural world; it is a human contrivance, and to appreciate it we must undergo some form of acculturation. Before Western music conquered the world, the shamisen (a three-stringed traditional instrument) would have sounded as natural to Japanese ears as the guitar does to our own. But nature had nothing to do with it: we hear a culture’s vibrations in the strings of each instrument. No one, in fact, is born a connoisseur of Old Master paintings, just as no one is born a reader of Alexander Pope or a devotee of Mozart. Our responses to art involve both nature and nurture, an inherent sensitivity shaped by experience. Taste must always be trained.
This is fairly obviously true; but at the same time it is like a truth that no-one wants to admit in public as it not only smacks of elitism, it is based on several things that are anathema to our current thinking. Everyone's taste is equal to everyone else's, there can be no hierarchy of value in the arts because that somehow goes against equity, and this is all probably somehow racist. Best not to even mention taste!
But it is something that we use every day. And it is something that is constantly changing as our experiences change.
Here are the Haydn Variations by Brahms played by Anastasia Gromoglasova and Lyubov Gromoglasova:
In a very few days I will be off to Salzburg and while there you will get posts every day with comments on the city, the festival, the concerts, the food--the whole enchilada. Photos will be included! If you want to have a look at my last Salzburg excursion, just look in the sidebar archive for the posts in August 2019.
But I ran across an interesting post over at the new neo blog that you might find interesting: Emotion in Music. Neo has been running one of the more interesting blogs for years and years. She usually has an unusual take on the events of the day. Inexplicably she is also a huge Bee Gees fan, though not to the exclusion of other music. (Sorry, Neo!)
Among my drafts I have an enormous number of fragmented ones about the connection between music and emotion. It’s not something I really understand, but I keep trying to write about it nonetheless. I think some people are immune to that connection or at least less likely to be affected emotionally by music. But I certainly always have found music emotional, and some music far more emotional than other music.
By “emotional” I don’t mean a unitary thing, either. Happy, sad, excited, nostalgic, regretful, calm – those are just a few of the emotions music can stir. And I also have noticed that some music is what might be called Apollonian and some Dionysian, and that this distinction is present across and within many genres.
She embeds an interesting video of some scientific research into these questions with Oliver Sacks:
I find much scientific research into music to be just weird. Take this experiment for example: they take a somewhat random clip of Bach choral music and follow it with a somewhat random clip of Beethoven choral music as if randomly selected music by Bach and Beethoven were commensurable in some way. I think it is perfectly obvious that you could get wildly different results, perhaps specifically desirable results, if you simply chose different examples from the two composers. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Bach followed by the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven would surely get you utterly different results. Do scientists have no awareness of the specificity of different pieces of music? How about the Cello Suite No. 3 by Bach and then the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven?
I'm not going to do any confirming research, but I think that the Bach sample in the Nova clip was a chorale from the St. Matthew Passion and the Beethoven was from the Missa Solemnis. Correct me if I am wrong! Bach wrote probably the greatest religious music ever and he was a spectacularly wonderful writer for choir. Beethoven, not so much on either count! I have never liked his choral writing (or vocal writing generally) and he was an indifferent composer of religious music. But when it came to piano sonatas, string quartets and symphonies, he was incomparable. So yes, I suppose the brain scans were indicative of the samples chosen, but the samples chosen were a choice that proves nothing.
When it comes to music, science rarely tells us anything we don't already know.
