Stefano Maderno (1576-1636). St. Cecilia. Marble, 1600.
Church of St. Cecilia in Trastavere, Rome.
In 1599, the tomb of St. Cecilia, martyr and patron saint of musicians (feast day: November 22), was opened during a renovation of the church. Before it was closed again, so the story goes, Pope Clement VIII commissioned Maderno to sculpt a reproduction of the miraculously preserved body inside. Image via the Web Gallery of Art.
My current reading is the fancy new reprint of Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. Terrific book, although I kind of wish they had kept the original three-volume division—trying to keep this thing propped open on my lap is like a Pilates workout. Anyway, Kołakowski sets the stage for Marx’s appearance with a quick history of the philosophical traditions that fed into his thinking. This includes Neo-Platonism, so he discusses Plotinus, generally considered the first Neo-Platonist (and no, not because it’s kind of a pun on his name). Here’s how Kołakowski paraphrases Plotinus:
The attenuation of existence is measured by the descent from unity to multiplicity, from immobility to motion and from eternity to time. Movement is a degradation of quiescence, activity is enfeebled contemplation, time is a corruption of eternity.
To which, as a musician, I can only respond oh, great—no wonder we’re always the red-headed stepchild of the visual arts. Let me explain.
Most analyses of Plotinus talk about the three hypostases, or underlying realities, that form the basis of his concept of reality. There’s the One, or the Absolute, something vaguely like either God or a Prime Mover (part of the quality of the One is that you can’t really say anything specific about it)—but since Plotinus says that the One is self-sufficient, that doesn’t explain the presence of non-One reality, so he needs more. He postulates the Intellect as just below the One in his hierarchy; the framework of reality, as we can express it, is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intellect (making the Intellect a creative force in and of itself in this regard was one of Plotinus’s innovations). But the Intellect is merely the foundation of existence, as created by the One. The specific location of that existence is what Plotinus calls the Soul. Although there’s a “higher” part of the Soul that remains in contact with the Intellect, the Soul is the medium by which the Intellect interacts with the physical and the temporal, and it’s corrupted as a result. Here’s how Plotinus lays it out in his main work, the Enneads:
Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How can a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such as Sense-Perception?
No: the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the body. And fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is the body’s doom to fail of its joys and to perish.
Picking up on this note of transience, Kołakowski does something really interesting: he frames his whole survey of this head-scratchingly esoteric business around the idea of man’s contigency, an Aristotelian term that refers to the fact that even though we exist, it isn’t strictly necessary that we exist. This is bound up with our experience of time; as Kołakowski puts it, “Every created thing has a beginning in time; there was a time when it did not exist, and consequently it does not exist of necessity.” What’s more, the fact of time is what separates us from the One; because time continually passes, we can remember what we were, or imagine what we will be, but we can never know what we are—we’re permanently alienated from a unified sense of our own existence. Hence the relative philosophical shoddiness of movement, activity, and time itself.
You may be saying to yourself: bending one’s mind around these ideas is perhaps a not unpleasant way of avoiding actual work, but ultimately, why should I care? Here’s why you should care: because St. Augustine read Plotinus. In fact, Book XI of the Confessions is pretty much Plotinus run through a Christian filter. The big difference? Plotinus says that our alienation will end when the contemplations of the Intellect raise the Soul back into unity with the One. But Augustine says that the only cure for the temporal blues is the salvation of a loving God.
Thus through [the Lord] I may lay hold upon him in whom I am also laid hold upon; and I may be gathered up from my old way of life to follow that One and to forget that which is behind, no longer stretched out but now pulled together again—stretching forth not to what shall be and shall pass away but to those things that are before me. Not distractedly now, but intently, I follow on for the prize of my heavenly calling, where I may hear the sound of thy praise and contemplate thy delights, which neither come to be nor pass away.
But now my years are spent in mourning. And thou, O Lord, art my comfort, my eternal Father. But I have been torn between the times, the order of which I do not know, and my thoughts, even the inmost and deepest places of my soul, are mangled by various commotions until I shall flow together into thee, purged and molten in the fire of thy love.
Contemplation of the passage of time has become something that mangles the soul until it can be purified in the Refiner’s fire. Now, Augustine’s writings became the foundation for the entire edifice of Christian theology. And Christian theology was, for the better part of the millenium, one of the driving engines of Western civilization. Even in this nominally secular age, those threads have been woven pretty deep into the fabric of society.
What does all this have to do with music? Think about it: the fundamental subject of music is the passage of time. I mean, yes, the visual arts are experienced in time, but music actually rubs your nose in it. Paintings, sculpture, architecture—they all create an illusion of timelessness, of being outside our poor alienated sense of the world. It’s all there at once; it provides the comfort of knowing that, at least in theory, there’s a unified reality, even if we can’t quite grasp it. But music is not only not all there, it’s not even there at all. It’s constantly on the move, shifting, disappearing into the past and running off into the future. It not only reminds us of our fractured experience of time, it is our fractured experience of time, made manifest and explicit. It’s a soul-mangling extravaganza.
My sense is that, throughout Western history, music has been the recipient of an unfair share of pious horror. Whenever you chance across a commentary, old or new, warning you about music because it’s too sensual, or too overwhelmingly emotional, or too likely to corrupt the morals of young people, etc., ask youself: aren’t other art forms guilty of all these sins? What is this really about? I think they’re all distant echoes of an Augustinian big bang. The real scare is this: music is the slippery temporal nature of our worldly existence acknowledged, brought to the fore, and most dangerous of all, rendered damned beautiful.
If you remember, a few weeks back the military took over the government of Thailand, with the support of jazz saxophonist, composer, songwriter, and, oh, yeah, King Bhumibol Adulyadej. So, um, how’s that coup going, anyways?
Thailand’s new military-appointed government has threatened to shut down an operatic version of the Hindu epic Ramayana, ostensibly over fears one of its scenes may bring bad luck.
That’s from an AP report about Somtow Sucharitkol’s new opera “Ayodhya,” which premiered in Bangkok last week. The Thai Culture Ministry (hmmm, army generals controlling the ministry of culture, no comedy there) objected to a scene containing the on-stage death of the demon king Thotsakan (that’s him at the right), the principal antagonist in the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Ramayana. Supposedly the depiction of Thotsakan’s death is taboo, although really the restriction only applies to Khon, a highly stylized form of theater-dance in which all the characters wear masks and don’t say anything—raising the possibility that the leaders of the junta are simply unusually catty critics.
The best part of the story? The composer “said the officials told him that ‘if anything happened to anyone in power in Thailand, it would be blamed on this production.'” Applying theatrical superstition to future national misfortunes like some sort of post-dated karmic check—those Thai generals are really on the cutting edge of political spin, aren’t they? Look for Dick Cheney to pre-emptively pin the blame for the next two years of the Bush administration on the Washington National Opera’s production of “Macbeth.”
Somtow is quite a guy: he conducts the Siam Philharmonic and the Bangkok Opera in addition to composing. In the 1980’s a “severe case of musical burnout” resulted in his writing over 40 mostly science-fiction and horror novels. (His bio, which includes a pleasantly surreal testimonial calling him “the J.D. Salinger of Thailand,” also manages to name-drop Wolfgang Wagner and Takashi Miike.) Somtow himself warned that the new opera, inspired by American action movies, might “appall” some of his fellow Thais. You can listen to a bit of “Ayodhya” on Somtow’s website, and it is grand and fun in a late-Romantic Hollywood sort of way. Somtow keeps a house in Los Angeles as well—enterprising movie producers might want to look him up.
Update: ANABlog has a nicely pithy take on this. And the AP report has been updated to include reported comments from Thai Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, who regards the whole situation as silly as we do.
“…ragtime is great when you jazz it.” (Click the cover for the rest.) 
(Via the University of Colorado Digital Sheet Music Ragtime Collection.)
A short one today: I’m actually trying to get some composing done. (What’s that you say? Most people would stop posting for a day? You have not mastered the way of procrastination, grasshopper.) Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to an article by economist Ed Glaeser picking apart a proposal to alter Harvard’s Core Curriculum. The money quote:
Harvard’s system of general education should emphasize methodology over topic because methods are harder to teach and learn than facts. Facts become easier to absorb by one’s self once one has a handle on methods. Harvard students can learn facts about the United Nations Security Council or the Federal Reserve Board from the New York Times or Wikipedia, but they cannot learn the tools to make sense of these institutions so readily. As students learn to think rigorously about society and how to use data to test their thoughts, they acquire a set of tools that can then be used to acquire knowledge in any setting.
Can I get an Amen? It’s one of the biggest deficiencies in higher music education as well: the emphasis on “applied” over “theoretical” knowledge. Most students regard ear training and theory as drudgery to be survived rather than the fundamental basis of everything they’re going to do. I can kind of understand why: the focus of their education is, for the most part, public performances and preparing jury repertoire. But in retrospect, my three most important teachers were: my high school choir director, Jack Olander, who also taught theory and drilled the bejeezus out of my ear; my undergrad piano professor, Dmitry Paperno, who opened my eyes to the futility of attempting to play any piece without understanding it theoretically; and my graduate composition professor, Lukas Foss, who never let me forget that the greatest idea in the world would sink like a stone without solid technical execution (and for all his legendary absentmindedness, he could pick a harmonic or contrapuntal flaw out of the most dense and dissonant texture with a frighteningly uncanny focus).
I learned stuff from all my teachers (I’m lucky in that regard), but it’s those guys that I think of the most often, just because it’s the things they taught me that I use every single day of my working life; a working life, I might add, that’s not exactly what I thought I’d be doing when I graduated. They didn’t just teach me facts or literature or repertoire (Professor Paperno would be horrified to know that my colander of a brain has kept exactly one piece in my memory out of the four years in his studio), they taught me how to deal with a piece of music—how to read it, how to hear it, how to interpret it, how to communicate it.
Most college-level theater programs do a sophomore cut: at the end of sophomore year, the faculty decides whether you’re good enough to stick around for the next two years of the program. I’ve always thought music programs should do this too; and the more I think about it, the more I think the criteria for promotion should be based around the drudgery of theory and ear training. The people I know who have made a success in this business have varying degrees of skill, technique, and repertoire mastery—what they all have in common is steel-trap musicianship. That’s how you make a living as a musician.
(Thus endeth the sermon.)
There was a special way that freshmen were obligated to deal with the mistakes and errors they inevitably committed. The slogan was “The error of one is the error of all.” It was wrong and destructive to permit a new teammate to believe that an obvious error—in conduct or in performance—was his alone. Instead, when such infractions occurred, we freshmen formed two lines face to face and were required to hit each other. By doing this, each one of us could feel that it was necessary to be both sorry and responsible. There was no slacking off either. The upperclassmen who watched would make you hit again if they felt the blow you delivered was too light. I always hit hard because I did not want to be made to strike a second time. I hit hard and in turn was hit hard myself. This happened more times than I can remember.
Sadaharu Oh and David Falkner,
Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball
(New York Times Books, 1984)
Some quick videos while I wait for dinner to come out of the oven.
And what of those crazy kids across the pond? Here’s Michael Tippett (who provided the name for this blog, so we always like him) conducting the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra, circa 1969, in a bit of Charles Ives’ “Putnam’s Camp.” The students nail it—not just technically, but that goofy mash-up Ives spirit as well. Why more children’s concerts aren’t all-Ives affairs I’ll never know.
Those of you in the Boston area looking for something to do this Saturday night (November 18): as part of Boston Conservatory’s New Music Festival, I will be a proud temporary member of the student-run Ludovico Ensemble, performing Morton Feldman’s “Three Pieces for Piano” (1954). Festivities start at 8 pm in Seully Hall.
It’s a cool piece that makes for an interesting problem: how much do I interpretively acknowledge Feldman’s mature style in playing this early music? The “Three Pieces” are sparse and quiet, but also much more pointillistic, dissonant, and non-repetitive than Feldman’s later, better-known music. Do I stretch the time out to make the piece sound more like you expect a Feldman piece to sound? Do I emphasize the Webern-esque nature of the writing to highlight where Feldman diverges from the prevailing mid-1950’s path? If I try to strike a balance, will that just make the piece bland? I still have the rest of the week to tinker with it—right now I’m trying for the temporal disorientation I love in so much of Feldman’s output, but the expressionistic side of me may yet win out. Suspense! Drama! All your burning questions will be answered Saturday night.
(It also strikes me that Feldman could be considered yet another exception to the increasingly suspect rule regarding composer careers I promulgated in yesterday’s post. I’m telling you, it takes me forever to wake up on Monday mornings. I still stand by the unwitting persistence of the idea of musical progress, though.)
The Festival runs Thursday through Sunday and includes perfomances by the Argento Ensemble and Harvard’s White Rabbit. (Scroll down this page for a schedule.) The emphasis is on Webern’s influence in America—serialism, pointillism, miniaturism. All the posters have this logo:
Do you think a bumper sticker of that on your car would result in more traffic tickets, or fewer? (Just don’t drive near the mess hall.)
Update: Tears of a Clownsilly has analyzed the automotive ramifications of said bumper sticker with admirably typical brilliance.
Quick: name a composer whose “late period” music is less complex and adventurous than their “early period” music. Not many. It’s easy to imagine why—the more music you write, the more fluent you get with music’s constituent elements, and the more comfortable you are experimenting with them. Often there’s a trade-off: the surface level becomes less active and dense, but the relationships between elements and the formal structures become more intricate and subtle (Brahms, Carter). In other instances, the style remains relatively constant, but the vocabulary becomes more challenging (Ravel, Copland). Sometimes the musical ideas are concentrated into utterances of great brevity and density (Webern, Stravinsky). And sometimes everything just gets really complicated (Beethoven).
This is such a common career arc for composers that I think it’s affected the way we look at the entire history of music. I’m talking about the idea of historical progress, the notion that an historical style of music supersedes another by virtue of its later chronology. There’s been no shortage of conscious debunking of this notion (Kyle Gann summed it up nicely a couple months back), but it still hangs around the subconscious, influencing musical value judgments all the time.
There’s an old trope (it made some guest appearances in a lot of the articles surrounding the recent Steve Reich birthday celebrations) that atonality was a “wrong turn” in the history of music and that, say, Reich et al. had returned music to its proper path. (Here’s a few examples.) What this implies is that there was a “right turn” that somehow everybody missed. That’s nonsense. In the first place, we only have one datum point for the evolution of Western music—for all we know, it happens this way, in this order, every time. (Compare a creationist’s anti-evolution argument based on the “improbability” of human existence.) But more importantly, the history we do have bears a lot more resemblance to a random walk than an goal-oriented path. Baroque to Classical, Romanticism to Impressionism, Serialism to Minimalism, music history is filled with sharp tacks and weird digressions. If there’s an ultimate goal to all this, we’ve certainly taken the roundabout way there.
Why is the chimera of musical progress so hard to let go of? I know why someone like Schoenberg would espouse it—the Fichte-Hegel idea of the Mind-as-Being inevitably progressing towards the Absolute must have been hard to escape in 19th-century Germany. But I also think it has to do with the similar artistic evolution of individual composers. We subconsciously assume that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the development of the individual somehow mirrors the development of the entire species. If a particular composer’s music gradually becomes more advanced (and you can even see this happening today among the old-school minimalists) then, somehow, it must imply that music as a whole must somehow advance and progress. Haeckel’s recapitulation theory is largely discredited in biology, but its elegance and simplicity have made it a hard intellectual habit to break. Especially in this goal-oriented society: we can’t just be driving around aimlessly; we must be headed somewhere. At least as far as music is concerned, though, it’s better to sit back and enjoy the ride.
Not so tall, not so tan, but still lovely—it’s “The Girl From Ipanema,” as processed through a simulated neural map and projected onto an unfolded torus representing the gamut of Western tonal centers. I think. You should proabably ask Petr Janata, whose lab did this research. (Here’s a partial explanation.) I know it has to do with trying to localize the sensation of tonal harmony in the prefrontal cortex, but Science will only let me look at the abstract without paying. Nevertheless, Dr. Janata has posted a movie (very big file, but worth it) of the whole song that, well, moves so cool and sways so gently. Perfect for a Friday.
And now that the song is stuck in your head, here’s 54 covers of it to tide you over.
The title comes from Mary Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim’s lethal parody “The Boy From…” (which has been hilariously translated into American Sign Language—fingerspelling the name of the town every time must bring down the house).