The Role of Aesthetics

If you search for the tag "aesthetics" you will come up with many, many posts on this blog--hundreds at least. There are two reasons for this, first, that I tend to slap on the "aesthetics" tag when I can't think what else it could be or if the post is uncategorizable, second because of the crucial role aesthetics has played in my life and the one that I believe it does, or should play, in social life in general. One of the few places one hears this addressed is in a couple of times that Jordan Peterson has mentioned it in talks and clips on YouTube. Here is an example:

One interesting thing is that Jordan Peterson was born very close to where I was born in northern Alberta, Canada--twenty or thirty miles apart, which up there is like being next door neighbors.

The role of aesthetics in my life is so important that I think of it as what I fled to, trying to escape the stifling environment I was born into. I say stifling because, even though it was wide open nature, to someone with an intellectual bent, it was like being in one of those tanks where you float without sensation--no sounds, no light. One place we lived when I was young, was so far north it was taiga with permafrost, meaning that you could dig down in the ground at the end of August and, about ten or twelve feet down, the ground would still be frozen. The summer wasn't long enough for more than just the surface to thaw out. This was when I was five or six years old and, honestly, the only thing I could find to play with was moss.

The landscape was basically small, stunted trees and moss: frozen in the winter and soggy in the brief summer. You might say, gee, go to the store and buy a toy. Ah, no stores, not within a two or three hour drive at least. Well, wait, there was a Hudson's Bay trading post where if you took in some mink or beaver skins they would trade you flour and sugar. Yes, it must have been one of the last. There was a Department of Defence radar base in the neighborhood, and a tribe of Indigenous People, but that, literally, was it. My father ran a small rail terminal that served the DOD base.

You have to recall that this was before the internet. Indeed, in this place, not only was there no internet, there was also no television, no radio, no newspapers, no bookstores (no stores of any kind). The only place I have ever been that was more desolate was northern Vancouver Island when I worked as a tree-planter and while in one place there was not even a building, there was always the beauty of nature.

The first time I was in a place that had a library big enough to have books with aesthetic content I fell in love with Japanese art, specifically ukiyo-e:

Some of these, and some Chinese landscapes, looked a great deal like the landscapes of northern Vancouver Island.

To me, this art and music when I discovered it, offered what seemed to be the only door out of a drear and narrow life. I think this is the role of art: to beckon, to widen, to draw us out of the narrowness of our lives.

But in some ways, I regard my early life as being of immense benefit because it was free of the false appeal of the Internet, social, and mass media of today. It is hard to imagine what it is like for a child now. Instead of just some moss to play with, he has an iPad, with access to literally everything in the world. But 99% of what he sees is cacophonous drivel. Instead of silence and distance, the experience is of a million hucksters and a million diversions that may very well mean almost nothing. That's enough to make you long for a little moss! (By the way, after collecting different varieties of moss, I would take them home and install them into a large glass bowl, creating a little terrarium.)

But back to art: the benefits of real art in anyone's life are enormous. Even if you have little sensitivity to art you can still derive tranquillity and perhaps a bit of perspective from it. With more acquaintance it can give you access to a thousand worlds, a million points of view. But remember, real art always has a price of admission: you have to learn the context, the methods, the history, before you can understand and appreciate most artworks.

Well, enough preaching for today. Let's listen to some music by Toru Takemitsu, Folios, for guitar (that I played at Wigmore Hall in London at my debut concert there). It ends with a quotation from a chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

Structure and Non-Structure

 I'am now 37% of the way through Marcel Proust's massive shaggy dog of a novel, In Search of Lost Time and I took a break for a couple of days to read a much shorter novel, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. At only 162 pages it would barely make a chapter for Proust. He, Proust, has been accused of writing a novel with no structure and that is certainly the feeling one gets. He seems to wander around with no plan except whatever digression comes to him. The Calvino on the other hand is all about structure. Wikipedia describes the novel as having a "rigorous mathematical structure" and provides a table to show how it works. Here is how the Wikipedia article describes the structure of the novel:

The matrix of eleven column themes and fifty-five subchapters (ten rows in chapters 1 and 9, five in all others) shows some interesting properties. Each column has five entries, rows only one, so there are fifty-five cities in all. The matrix of cities has a central element (Baucis). The pattern of cities is symmetric with respect to inversion about that center. Equivalently, it is symmetric against 180 degree rotations about Baucis. Inner chapters (2-8 inclusive) have diagonal cascades of five cities (e.g. Maurila through Euphemia in chapter 2). These five-city cascades are displaced by one theme column to the right as one proceeds to the next chapter. In order that the cascade sequence terminate (the book of cities is not infinite!) Calvino, in chapter 9, truncates the diagonal cascades in steps: Laudomia through Raissa is a cascade of four cities, followed by cascades of three, two, and one, necessitating ten cities in the final chapter. The same pattern is used in reverse in chapter 1 as the diagonal cascade of cities is born. This strict adherence to a mathematical pattern is characteristic of the Oulipo literary group to which Calvino belonged.

That sounds a lot like a discussion of form in Stockhausen! Have a look at this article for an example.

Proust reminds me more of a symphony by Allan Petterssohn: it just goes on and on and on, exploring several themes from every possible angle, but in a kind of formless way.

Here is a clip of the piece Plus-Minus by Stockhausen:

And here is the Symphony No. 7 by Allan Pettersson:

Quartet 3 Opening

With some help from Finale, I improved somewhat the playback of the glissandi in the opening section, so here is a clip that you can listen to. I have changed my mind about the basic structure somewhat. My original intention was to have five sections. The first, third and fifth were to be composed out and the second and fourth were going to be in moment form. For the present at least, I have dropped that idea. Instead we have the three existing sections which will be the Quartet 3. The three sections will be called

1. Opening, Slowly, quartet note = 50
2. Middle, Moderato, quarter note = 80
3. Ending, eighth note = 240

And that's it! Here is the Opening:

And here are the links to the Middle (previously, Section 3) and the Ending (previously, Section 5). 

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/09/excerpt-from-string-quartet-no-3.html

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/09/quartet-3-section-5.html

The main reason I decided to not add the other sections is that the quartet in Vancouver, the Pro Nova Ensemble, want to read the piece, so I thought I should give them something complete. And, I rather like it in this manifestation. It's a short quartet, about ten minutes total.

Digital Seductions

I am old enough to remember the profession of "music copyist." These were people employed by every composer (this was way back when composers had money) to make a fair copy of the score and parts for use in performances. The copyists had to make a clear copy of the score if the composer's own hand was not legible and then extract parts for each instrument. It was a fairly laborious process. If the work was to be published, the score and parts were then handed over to a music engraver who would engrave them on copper plates--at least as I understand it. Wikipedia has an article on music engraving. But that all went away with the advent of music software. Early versions were utilitarian and rather ugly in appearance, but things improved quickly and now music software like Finale and Sibelius automatically generate a perfect score and can extract parts in an instant. Now, mind you, after Finale has extracted the parts I have to go through them bar by bar because rhythmic proportions sometimes get distorted and things like slurs and expression marks can wander around. But the benefits are enormous as anyone can produce a publication-ready score on their desktop or laptop computer. And probably on their iPad or iPhone as well.

So for most of the last thirty years I have used music software for just about everything from theory assignments to my own compositions and have been deeply grateful for the resources. You can't imagine the benefit to a composer of a string quartet or orchestral piece of being able to hear a reasonable facsimile of what you just composed played by samples of the actual instruments. I haven't figured out how to get them to do sul ponticello, but they do pizzicato very well. Joseph Haydn had a full orchestra on call just down the hall to try things out, but the rest of us don't!

But I am writing a new piece for piano and I am going back to the oldest of old ways: scratching with a pencil on paper! An example: 

Click to enlarge

Music software, for all its benefits, is a Procrustean bed (one of my favorite metaphors) in that everything you input has to be a precise pitch, precise rhythm, precise meter and exact tempo. But that's not how musical ideas come. They are often just little fragments with no rhythm or little rhythmic ideas with no pitches. Music software has two basic uses: putting down on paper already formed ideas, playing them using samples, and printing them out as a final publication. It's role in the actual compositional "process" (I'm not sure it is a "process" actually, more like stumbling around) is minimal. So I have, gratefully, gone back to pencil and paper as the first stage. The second stage is trying out various things on the piano (even though I am not an actual pianist) and the third stage will be notating the piece. I will likely do that with the music software, but not necessarily. If I want to do something the software will not accommodate, then I will just notate it by hand.

At this stage I have mostly primitive sketches for the first movement, which I am titling "Remembering What Is to Come" which is a line from a poem I wrote some thirty years ago. The second movement is titled "Transparent Sheets of Memory" and the third is "To Ascend the Stream of Time." All about time and memory. The titles of the second and third movements are semi-quotations from The Guermantes Way by Proust. The piece as a whole will be titled Per Sonare which dates back to compositions by Giovanni Gabrieli.

I really can't put an envoi for this post!

Rewiring Our Brains?

 I'm sure you've seen the claim that this-or-that is "rewiring our brains"? Leaving the faulty metaphor aside, our brains are not "wired" in the first place, I think this is one of those terribly useful claims that usually comes with an ulterior motive. You know, like:

"all we need to do is spend just a little (or a lot) more money on the (homeless, war on drugs, war on poverty, healthcare, national defence, climate change ...) and the problem will be solved"

Uh-huh. What's really weird is that voters keep believing this stuff. Some of them, at least, the rest know that their government jobs depend on it.

But back to that "rewiring the brain" stuff. You know it is complete nonsense, right? But if you are reading about listening habits on Spotify, or the new fad of bullet journaling, or work habits, or work environments, or a host of other things, they always seem, mysteriously, to be connected with someone trying to sell a new book, project, product, program or website. You need this to

• rewire your brain!
• stop your brain from being rewired!
• rewire your brain in a better way!
• to help others rewire their brains!

It reminds me of the Tom Waits song "Step Right Up."

No, you can't rewire your brain and therefore neither you nor anyone else has had their brain rewired because that is just a stupid metaphor. All this boils down to claims about a different way of thinking about things. And just about the most salient truth of recent decades is that since education has been rotted from within by post-modernists, there is damned little thinking going on in the first place. If that is what is meant by "rewiring your brain" I think that we should go back to the older word for this phenomenon: ignorance. Oh, yes, and that explains voting patterns as well.

Now that we have that figured out I think we have the right to listen to some Bach. This is the Netherlands Bach Society take on the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by Bach. And it ain't gonna rewire your brain!

When Beethoven Is Cancelled

 

Individuality

Our individuality is our most precious resource, and it is probably the one most threatened by the world of high technology we now live in. One of the keenest threats to our individuality however is the steamroller of identity politics because what it steamrollers over is the individuality, not only of the ones who are attacked, white people and males in particular, but especially the ones for whom the attack is ostensibly launched. The identity of black people is erased just as thoroughly as that of white people. And behind it all are always those shadowy manipulators who are the ones who are the real beneficiaries because what you get when you erase individual identity in favor of easily manipulated cohorts is power. 

Power.

I could go on at great length about how the relentless promotion of mass transit enables the few to tell the many where and when they can go, about how the minute regulation of every aspect of life again enables the few to tell the many what they can and cannot do, about how the draining off of every possible fee and tax and fine again enables the few to restrict the many from being independent of the state, but that would be to wander outside the margins of this blog, so I will not.

But I will point out that it is the individuality that we treasure in the great composers, who are not some herd of white supremacists who can be replaced by fiat with a different herd of diverse composers of color. In both cases it is the individuality that is simply dismissed because the group identity is the generic identity. We listen to Mozart because he is an individual, different from Salieri. We listen to Beethoven because he is an individual, different from Hummel. We listen to Stravinsky because he is an individual different from Anatol Liadov.

The problem with music theory is that it tends to always look for the Universal, the Ideal, the General and to discount the unique and individual as some sort of quirk. So in defining and describing "sonata form" the theorist looks for what is general and generic to all sonata forms, missing the fact that when he has so perfectly defined this form, he will discover to his dismay that none of the movements in sonata form written by Haydn actually fit his model!

Every great work of music is undefinable in the sense that it has an irreducible individuality. The generic form or genre is merely a kind of container or organization within which the individuality flourishes. If all you see is the generic bones, you miss not only the flesh, but the actual soul. This is the problem with music theory in general (quite useful as long as we recognize the limitations) and that of Schenker in particular--Schenker who reduced entire movements to the movement from 3 to 2 to 1 scale degrees.

For an envoi, here is one of Stravinsky's most individual and quirky pieces, Les Noces, based on Russian peasant folk traditions and melodies but which sounds like nothing but Stravinsky: