Tom Wolfe's infamous article is just as infuriating now as it ever was. Yes one could agree that for certain artists their work is so informed by theoretical writings that it might as well be an illustration of the written word but Pollock for example was barely able to understand what Greenberg write about him and artists like Rothko and de Kooning detested the critics who supported them. Wolfe clearly has no alternative conception of what a different modern art could have been nor could he. My heart sinks when I hear artists talking about most of the theoretical baggage they pick up in art school. I get a headache when I hear someone using the term "deconstruction" as if it were a synonym for "interpretation" but this is not necessarily a problem either. There are countless incidences of great art being supported by bad theory (Cubism) as well as great theories leading inexorably to dreadful results (the 1980s). Wolfe is an able satirist but to take him seriously is a ridiculous idea.
Funnily enough for someone who delights in parading erudition ("cenacle" anyone?) his is a profoundly anti-intellectual view of modernism as well as a profoundly short sighted view of the kinds of responses that people can have to the works themselves without ever having read a word about them. You would never know from reading Wolfe that I have seen many people cry in front of Rothko's works, that I have been so excited by seeing "Lavender Mist" for the first and only time that I had to run on the spot for a bit to disperse the kind of energies it filled me with. His own view of the art is dry and academic. He obviously just doesn't respond to it (god knows what art he actually likes) and then projects this first of all onto the writers who first attempted to make sense of these new forms and then onto the painters themselves. I first saw "Blue Poles" as a child on a visit to Canberra sometime in the 1970s then again as a teenager on a school visit and last saw it a couple of years ago. Obviously in the intervening years I had read Greenberg on Pollock but I hardly ever think about the theory when I see what is one of the greatest paintings in the country. Next to Pollock's visual acheivements, the music he makes, any theory is feeble and Wolfe's is the most feeble of all.
As usual the other essay is so close to my way of thinking it's almost funny. I do think that Tenney's music is not quite so interesting as his ideas but i fully agree with most of what he says.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
THE "TRANSCENDENTAL" QUESTION - Peterson
Again I would question exactly what "music" is in the lecture. No definitions are given, he clearly likes Bach for example but "music" includes gagaku and the Wiggles as well. I still persist in saying that there is no such thing as "music" only things that people have variously described as music.
The common complaint that "X isn't music" is actually more than a simple canard: it touches on something that Peterson somewhat avoids stating explicitly. This is intriguing as the nomination of a sequence of sonic events as "music" is precisely a question of framing. One of the implications of the idea that perception is not simply the reception of data but a process involving framing or some other quasi-unconscious categorisation is that potentially every single person has different and incomparable ways of framing.
I sometimes get the impression that some varieties of psychology have a tendency towards universalism whilst others have the opposing tendency. My own tendency is towards a kind of radical particularity of perception, almost to the point of experiential "solipsism". What I mean by this is the idea that, as we cannot hear with another person's ears or brain, we cannot access what music sounds like to them: we can imagine it and they can imagine what we imagine but there is no third position from which to compare those two imaginaries. For some people this may be a cause for despair or surprise: to me it is the most obvious explanation for the variety of different kinds of music and in addition a reason why nearly all universalist theories of music are bound for failure from the outset. Good psychological research into music perception would pay more attention to the differences between (and within) individuals rather than coming up with yet another proof of the "universality" of the major triad when most of the music of the world does without it quite fine.
Obviously the conception of music Peterson operates from is that it is pattern-making in sound that is experienced as being meaningful in some way. This is the frame problem he discusses in the lecture: if perception implies that the same set of coloured patches on the retina or sounds can be categorised in a large number of ways then the problem is how to frame the perceptions. He speaks of the difficulties of building machines that can perceive as well as we can because our perceptual systems have been informed by a whole history of perception. We might think of "tradition" in music as the material sedimentation of that history of listening: this means that the genuinely new in music is almost unable to be perceived. A more strictly musical version of the problem is what I call the "succession problem". In listening and exploring the world of music available to us the order in which we hear works affects each one: someone who doesn't hear a single note of Schubert until after they have absorbed say the music of the post WWII period is not hearing the same work as someone who listens to Schubert only without knowing anything else (yes one of my customers at our store listened almost only to Schubert lieder, having bought the massive Hyperion set of all the lieder). Someone who has never been to a lieder recital will see the weirdness of the format and its rituals in all purity.
He comes close to arguing that because music is beyond the exercise of reason that it has survived the disenchantment of the world, lived on after the death of God. This is indeed the way that Nietzsche once saw music and the idea of a "musical religion" is attractive in some ways but also dangerous: again the question is whose music? Why does thinking of Wagner as being about "the transcendental" make sense but the idea that the Wiggles are engaged in the same pursuit seems ridiculous? I get the strong impression that Peterson is a believer in "the transcendental": it is hinted in the lecture that this could well be an effect of our perception but it's not really followed through and it would take a book to describe how this might be the case.
Ultimately the framing issue is rather like the problem of whether "private language" is possible in Wittgenstein - Peterson's position seems to be that music is a universal, non-translatable "language". Obviously I tend towards the idea that "private language" is precisely what music can become and indeed, has become once the common practice era finished in the 20th century. I don't see this at all as a problem. It is actually to be celebrated even if audiences cling to ingrained habits and framings of sound which makes the "classical music" audience possibly the most backward and tedious one. If conceiving of music as a private language gives us the variety of styles and sounds we see today I can't see any problem with giving up the pretension of universality. I think composers themselves gave up on that a long time ago, theorists should as well.
The common complaint that "X isn't music" is actually more than a simple canard: it touches on something that Peterson somewhat avoids stating explicitly. This is intriguing as the nomination of a sequence of sonic events as "music" is precisely a question of framing. One of the implications of the idea that perception is not simply the reception of data but a process involving framing or some other quasi-unconscious categorisation is that potentially every single person has different and incomparable ways of framing.
I sometimes get the impression that some varieties of psychology have a tendency towards universalism whilst others have the opposing tendency. My own tendency is towards a kind of radical particularity of perception, almost to the point of experiential "solipsism". What I mean by this is the idea that, as we cannot hear with another person's ears or brain, we cannot access what music sounds like to them: we can imagine it and they can imagine what we imagine but there is no third position from which to compare those two imaginaries. For some people this may be a cause for despair or surprise: to me it is the most obvious explanation for the variety of different kinds of music and in addition a reason why nearly all universalist theories of music are bound for failure from the outset. Good psychological research into music perception would pay more attention to the differences between (and within) individuals rather than coming up with yet another proof of the "universality" of the major triad when most of the music of the world does without it quite fine.
Obviously the conception of music Peterson operates from is that it is pattern-making in sound that is experienced as being meaningful in some way. This is the frame problem he discusses in the lecture: if perception implies that the same set of coloured patches on the retina or sounds can be categorised in a large number of ways then the problem is how to frame the perceptions. He speaks of the difficulties of building machines that can perceive as well as we can because our perceptual systems have been informed by a whole history of perception. We might think of "tradition" in music as the material sedimentation of that history of listening: this means that the genuinely new in music is almost unable to be perceived. A more strictly musical version of the problem is what I call the "succession problem". In listening and exploring the world of music available to us the order in which we hear works affects each one: someone who doesn't hear a single note of Schubert until after they have absorbed say the music of the post WWII period is not hearing the same work as someone who listens to Schubert only without knowing anything else (yes one of my customers at our store listened almost only to Schubert lieder, having bought the massive Hyperion set of all the lieder). Someone who has never been to a lieder recital will see the weirdness of the format and its rituals in all purity.
He comes close to arguing that because music is beyond the exercise of reason that it has survived the disenchantment of the world, lived on after the death of God. This is indeed the way that Nietzsche once saw music and the idea of a "musical religion" is attractive in some ways but also dangerous: again the question is whose music? Why does thinking of Wagner as being about "the transcendental" make sense but the idea that the Wiggles are engaged in the same pursuit seems ridiculous? I get the strong impression that Peterson is a believer in "the transcendental": it is hinted in the lecture that this could well be an effect of our perception but it's not really followed through and it would take a book to describe how this might be the case.
Ultimately the framing issue is rather like the problem of whether "private language" is possible in Wittgenstein - Peterson's position seems to be that music is a universal, non-translatable "language". Obviously I tend towards the idea that "private language" is precisely what music can become and indeed, has become once the common practice era finished in the 20th century. I don't see this at all as a problem. It is actually to be celebrated even if audiences cling to ingrained habits and framings of sound which makes the "classical music" audience possibly the most backward and tedious one. If conceiving of music as a private language gives us the variety of styles and sounds we see today I can't see any problem with giving up the pretension of universality. I think composers themselves gave up on that a long time ago, theorists should as well.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
"PARADIGMS" . . . ugh
Trevor Wishart's chapter "Beyond the Pitch/Duration Paradigm" is an incredibly frustrating piece of writing to read. Nearly every time an interesting point was made it was followed by something that either does not follow from the previous good point or develops one of the many bad points in his writing instead. I found it interesting but thoroughly misguided on an number of counts and even pernicious to some extent as, like nearly every essay with the word "paradigm" in the title, it poses as "problem solving".
His basic conception of music seems incredibly narrow (as are those of most people, especially those who congratulate themselves on their catholicity of taste): like most theories of music this essay is primarily linked to the tastes and practices of the author. Given the necessarily subjective character of musical cognition and the massive variety of musical forms throughout the world and through history it makes no sense to me to talk about "music" or "listening" as if they were the one thing in the world that was identical to itself. Given that no one can hear with the ears of another I find this universalisation of taste highly problematic. There is no such thing as "music" there are only "musics".
He is critical of the "lattice" that structures most Western music because it is clearly implied by the notation and in fact is built into the design of most musical technologies devoted to dance music for example: there are entire nights in clubs around the world devoted to the fetishisation of that "lattice", in its rawest and most brutal form and yet it seems to cause no lasting damage. He is critical of Plato (and gets the meaning of "idea" in the theory of mimesis completely wrong by thinking Socrates was a "Platonist") but is almost as much of an idealist as Lyndon La Rouche.
Beyond calling it "formalist" he can't really say what exactly is "wrong" with highly intricate abstract constructions such as those of the late 14th and 20th centuries, both made possible and demanding in turn highly sophisticated new forms of notation. Perhaps, given his age and the generation he grew up in, "formalism" is enough of a death sentence to warrant no further content.
Later on Wishart's argument becomes an elaborately superb example of what Jacques Derrida calls "logocentrism", the longstanding set of concepts and practices (broadly identifiable with "Western metaphysics") that presupposes the primacy of "living" voice (or "spirit") over the "dead" character of writing or inscription (we might as well call it technology as well). It is a way of thinking that often goes along with some kind of naturalism or universalism: the fact that in the first paragraph he refers to "our listening experience" is instructive here. Either he is correctly using the Royal "we" or simply assuming that "listening experience" is something that would be universal. Such a universal could not at all be "experientially verified" (whatever that might mean).
I find the setting of "An die Freude" in the Beethoven Ninth simultaneously horrifying and tragic and I could write another essay beginning to explain why perhaps I find it so: if even such a canonically "communicative" work can be so terribly "misunderstood" (but my reading of it makes perfect sense to me) then what does this mean to thinking about "communication" in music?
He rightly points out that music is non-verbal but the way it is described in the essay pushes it close to telepathy by insisting repeatedly that notation stands in the way of a presumably "natural" immediacy. On page 15 he writes that only those capable of imagining that talking to a partner involves more than verbal exchange could understand what he means here. What he is attempting to demonstrate is that music is a "communion" of people (Welcome back transcendental signified it's been a while!): but if this were so then musical "misunderstanding" ought to be impossible, we ought to all agree that the finale of the Mahler Fourth Symphony is sunny, light and lyrical but "we" don't agree at all.
And when he says that it "is music's intrinsic irrefutability, its going behind the back of language, which has caused it to be viewed with so much suspicion and disdain by guardians of socially approved order" it is clear that he is only talking about music he likes (and quite possibly his own). In a move as old as music itself all this talk about "music" ignores the fact that "music" includes all the stuff the writer doesn't really like.
People who pontificate about "music" tend to forget that it necessarily includes Katy Perry as well as gagaku, includes all of us who count ourselves "musicians" as well as the writers of jingles for laxatives. For me personally "music" also includes all ambient sound and "silence", birdsong and the song of cicadas. There is no concept of "music" other than "sounds to which we can pay attention" that unifies these and I doubt such a broad and effectively meaningless concept would be of much interest to Wishart. I might add that I can think of hardly any music that has actually been viewed with suspicion and disdain by the ruling classes except for some experimental and avant-garde works.
The characterisation of notation on later pages (after p. 18 especially) is hampered by thinking of notation as transparent representation of orally-transmitted practice that then, in this just-so story, gets taken over by the big bad wolf of music that is written without coming from performance. Music that is god forbid not at all "spontaneously invented" but instead is put together over time: there are things that could be improvised but I doubt anyone could improvise even one of the simpler Ockeghem motets, nor could it be transmitted any other way than in writing.
In a move that Richard Taruskin also repeatedly makes, the invention and especially the inventiveness of "literate" music ends up seeming like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I'm as big a fan of improvisation and various "ethnic" musics from around the world (Japan, Bali, Burma and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular) as anyone but I don't see the point of making a critique of "Western notation" some 1,000 years after that horse has bolted and left the door open for Solage and Ligeti.
I certainly don't see "oral" music as better or worse than "literate" music because for me all that counts is the experience of the work in that particular performance. I don't care if you can't sight read "Unity Capsule" because that failure produces something in performance that could not happen otherwise: it also means that each successive failure transforms the work and allows a great deal of personal "interpretation". The Ardittis almost rewrite the works Ferneyhough writes for them but if he gave them a work identical to the re-written version it would sound and feel different yet again.
The later sections of the essay are better perhaps but still hampered by his reliance on a personal utopian mythology of communication/immediacy that for me merely adds yet more words to the pile of bad words written about music.
As for the Smalley article it's a great piece of writing that has helped me a lot over the past few years: one of those rare articles you read and think "yes this describes what I've been after and the way I've been thinking but much better than I could do".
His basic conception of music seems incredibly narrow (as are those of most people, especially those who congratulate themselves on their catholicity of taste): like most theories of music this essay is primarily linked to the tastes and practices of the author. Given the necessarily subjective character of musical cognition and the massive variety of musical forms throughout the world and through history it makes no sense to me to talk about "music" or "listening" as if they were the one thing in the world that was identical to itself. Given that no one can hear with the ears of another I find this universalisation of taste highly problematic. There is no such thing as "music" there are only "musics".
He is critical of the "lattice" that structures most Western music because it is clearly implied by the notation and in fact is built into the design of most musical technologies devoted to dance music for example: there are entire nights in clubs around the world devoted to the fetishisation of that "lattice", in its rawest and most brutal form and yet it seems to cause no lasting damage. He is critical of Plato (and gets the meaning of "idea" in the theory of mimesis completely wrong by thinking Socrates was a "Platonist") but is almost as much of an idealist as Lyndon La Rouche.
Beyond calling it "formalist" he can't really say what exactly is "wrong" with highly intricate abstract constructions such as those of the late 14th and 20th centuries, both made possible and demanding in turn highly sophisticated new forms of notation. Perhaps, given his age and the generation he grew up in, "formalism" is enough of a death sentence to warrant no further content.
Later on Wishart's argument becomes an elaborately superb example of what Jacques Derrida calls "logocentrism", the longstanding set of concepts and practices (broadly identifiable with "Western metaphysics") that presupposes the primacy of "living" voice (or "spirit") over the "dead" character of writing or inscription (we might as well call it technology as well). It is a way of thinking that often goes along with some kind of naturalism or universalism: the fact that in the first paragraph he refers to "our listening experience" is instructive here. Either he is correctly using the Royal "we" or simply assuming that "listening experience" is something that would be universal. Such a universal could not at all be "experientially verified" (whatever that might mean).
I find the setting of "An die Freude" in the Beethoven Ninth simultaneously horrifying and tragic and I could write another essay beginning to explain why perhaps I find it so: if even such a canonically "communicative" work can be so terribly "misunderstood" (but my reading of it makes perfect sense to me) then what does this mean to thinking about "communication" in music?
He rightly points out that music is non-verbal but the way it is described in the essay pushes it close to telepathy by insisting repeatedly that notation stands in the way of a presumably "natural" immediacy. On page 15 he writes that only those capable of imagining that talking to a partner involves more than verbal exchange could understand what he means here. What he is attempting to demonstrate is that music is a "communion" of people (Welcome back transcendental signified it's been a while!): but if this were so then musical "misunderstanding" ought to be impossible, we ought to all agree that the finale of the Mahler Fourth Symphony is sunny, light and lyrical but "we" don't agree at all.
And when he says that it "is music's intrinsic irrefutability, its going behind the back of language, which has caused it to be viewed with so much suspicion and disdain by guardians of socially approved order" it is clear that he is only talking about music he likes (and quite possibly his own). In a move as old as music itself all this talk about "music" ignores the fact that "music" includes all the stuff the writer doesn't really like.
People who pontificate about "music" tend to forget that it necessarily includes Katy Perry as well as gagaku, includes all of us who count ourselves "musicians" as well as the writers of jingles for laxatives. For me personally "music" also includes all ambient sound and "silence", birdsong and the song of cicadas. There is no concept of "music" other than "sounds to which we can pay attention" that unifies these and I doubt such a broad and effectively meaningless concept would be of much interest to Wishart. I might add that I can think of hardly any music that has actually been viewed with suspicion and disdain by the ruling classes except for some experimental and avant-garde works.
The characterisation of notation on later pages (after p. 18 especially) is hampered by thinking of notation as transparent representation of orally-transmitted practice that then, in this just-so story, gets taken over by the big bad wolf of music that is written without coming from performance. Music that is god forbid not at all "spontaneously invented" but instead is put together over time: there are things that could be improvised but I doubt anyone could improvise even one of the simpler Ockeghem motets, nor could it be transmitted any other way than in writing.
In a move that Richard Taruskin also repeatedly makes, the invention and especially the inventiveness of "literate" music ends up seeming like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I'm as big a fan of improvisation and various "ethnic" musics from around the world (Japan, Bali, Burma and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular) as anyone but I don't see the point of making a critique of "Western notation" some 1,000 years after that horse has bolted and left the door open for Solage and Ligeti.
I certainly don't see "oral" music as better or worse than "literate" music because for me all that counts is the experience of the work in that particular performance. I don't care if you can't sight read "Unity Capsule" because that failure produces something in performance that could not happen otherwise: it also means that each successive failure transforms the work and allows a great deal of personal "interpretation". The Ardittis almost rewrite the works Ferneyhough writes for them but if he gave them a work identical to the re-written version it would sound and feel different yet again.
The later sections of the essay are better perhaps but still hampered by his reliance on a personal utopian mythology of communication/immediacy that for me merely adds yet more words to the pile of bad words written about music.
As for the Smalley article it's a great piece of writing that has helped me a lot over the past few years: one of those rare articles you read and think "yes this describes what I've been after and the way I've been thinking but much better than I could do".
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