Taking Issue with Alex Ross (or Jed Pearl)

Yesterday I finished reading “The Cults of Wagner,” the review that Jed Perl wrote about Alex Ross’ book Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music for The New York Review of Books. Given that the book runs to 769 pages, Perl covered a lot of ground in his article. I would even say that his coverage was thorough enough that I can probably pass of reading the book itself. That said, there is one point where I would like to take issue; and, to be fair, I am not sure whether the issue is with Ross or Perl.

It concerns a single sentence:

What Ross believes, simply put, is that since life is disorderly, then art must be disorderly, too.

Given the argument that Perl develops across the paragraph that concludes with this sentence, I am inclined to believe that he has provided an accurate account of one of Ross’ beliefs. Regardless of the source, however, I am not sure there is much meaning in the premise that “art must be disorderly.” Indeed, I am not sure that there is much sense that can be derived from attempts to hang adjectives and adverbs on the noun “art.” In other words I have my doubts that art is anything and that it would be more appropriate to say that art provides grounds for experience. For those wondering, the answer is that this is not an original idea; rather it is one I picked up from John Dewey, specifically from the book Art as Experience.

What, then, is the “experiencing of art?” I would suggest that it is not that different from any other form of experience. The function of “mind” is basically to provide order to all the disorder that bombards us through stimuli. William James called this the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals, which “mind” then tries to register as configurations of objects (often succeeding in unexpected ways that lead to phenomena such as optical illusions). No two minds need necessarily conceive of the same objects; but, at a much higher cognitive level, we have language to negotiate any disagreements. So it is that Ross turns to language to bring order to the disorderly stimuli created during a performance of Richard Wagner’s music and Perl does the same with the disorderly stimuli created while reading Ross’ book.

For some time I have been interested in those processes that enable bringing order to disorder. As I have written in the past, one of my primary sources has been a book by Friedrich Hayek entitled The Sensory Order, which seems to have had a serious impact on two researchers that have influenced me significantly: Marvin Minsky for his work on artificial intelligence and Gerald Edelman for his efforts to model what he called perceptual categorization. My guess is that neither Ross nor Perl have gone down either of these paths. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the “experiencing of art” has more to do with the biological substrate of experience itself than it does with any properties of “art itself,” philosophical, biological, or otherwise.

This is not an injunction to advocate writing about making music or listening to it in terms of a biological substrate. Nevertheless, to go back to William James, both making music and listening are instances of experience. Unless we can anchor our thoughts to viable (if not necessarily valid) hypotheses about “how we experience,” we might as well just be juggling symbolic structures (such as the sentences we write) the same way we do when we try to solve a crossword puzzle!

James Tenney’s Final Thoughts on Harmony

In the last three of the chapters in the James Tenney anthology From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the author continues to wrestle with the nature of harmony and the perception of pitch. What is interesting is how each of Tenney’s essays on these matters tries to approach the subject from a different point of view, meaning that, by the end of the collection, one is reminded of the problems that three blind men have in trying to describe an elephant. “The Several Dimensions of Pitch,” written in 1993 and revised in 2003, tried to grab this particular elephant by its physiology, beginning with several informative pages that take a deep dive into what is happening in the inner ear. Of greatest interest is the explanation of the difference between hearing a simultaneity of individual tones and hearing them as a single unified stimulus, suggesting that, from an ontological point of view, a “chord” resides in a different category than a single tone.

In itself this is a rather profound insight. The problem is that Tenney does not quite seem to know where to take it. Part of the problem has to do with the fact that he never really reconciles the difference between the mathematical precision of integer ratio with the “fudge factors” of tolerance that arise when listening to real instruments playing their tones. As a result, I come away from Tenney’s speculations reminded of the old joke that the mathematical constant π, a transcendental irrational number, is equal to the integer 3 for very large values of 3.

The following chapter, “On ‘Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic Space,” also written in 1993 and revised in 2003, is the most problematic in the collection. It serves up an abundance of diagrams that get progressively larger and perhaps may be interpreted as a metaphor for crystal growth. For the life of me, I could not make heads or tails out of how to read those diagrams or what Tenney intended them to signify. It is as if he was in search of yet another metaphor to elaborate his thoughts, but it is almost immediately clear that his knowledge of auditory physiology was on much sounder ground than anything involving crystal growth.

The final chapter discusses Tenney’s composition “Diapason” and can be taken, without too much of a stretch, as a summing-up of the entire volume. The composition was clearly intended to make concrete many of Tenney’s abstract speculations on how the concept of harmony could “evolve” to accommodate new concepts of consonance and dissonance in the atonal repertoire. The “punch line” of those speculations is as follows:

Before harmony can evolve, the role of music itself must evolve. Otherwise we will simply be replaying an earlier scenario with minor, “cosmetic” changes in the details.

My own feeling is that there is too much to music to be crammed into a single context, let alone a “role” associated with that context. For my part, I would prefer to fall back on the “definition” that I think was attributed to Erik Satie by John Cage, which declares simply that music is what happens at concerts. I have now lived long enough to see the nature of the concert evolve in any number of imaginative ways, each with its own sense of context. Has music “evolved” along with the concert experience? From the Satie-Cage point of view, I suppose it has!

In the final paragraph of this chapter, Tenney turns his attention to the concept of form, which he declares should be treated “simply as another object of perception.” This takes me back to my own frequently-explored turf of the nature of mind as hypothesized by Gerald Edelman based on speculations by Friedrich Hayek. This involves the principle of “perceptual categorization,” which I discussed when writing about the “META Meta + Hodos” chapter in From Scratch. As I see it, what Tenney calls an “object of perception” is basically what Edelman calls a “perceptual category;” and, on the basis of what Edelman has written about the relationship between brain and perceptual categories, I am not yet convinced that the concept of form is one of those perceptual categories.

Tenney’s Effort to Move from Theory to Practice

The ninth chapter of From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, seems to be the second-longest in the book: “Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music: A Metric Space Model (with Larry Polansky).” This was written in 1978 and was subsequently published by the Journal of Music Theory in 1980. It basically involves first distilling a hypothesis out of the theoretical speculations that first emerged in Tenney’s “Meta + Hodos” Master’s thesis and then testing the hypothesis by implementing its content in a computer analysis program, which was written by Polansky and executed on input from three scores of twentieth-century music compositions.

Before discussing the model, the hypothesis behind the model, and the testing of the hypothesis, however, I want to call attention to a published review of “Meta + Hodos.” This took place after “Meta + Hodos” itself was published as a monograph by the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research in 1964. The Spring 1966 issue of the Journal of Music Theory published a review of the monograph by A. Wayne Slawson, which was pretty devastating.

Slawson provided the reader with a paragraph explaining the the “birth” of Gestalt psychology as a result of observations made by Max Wertheimer in 1912. However, Slawson then accused Wertheimer and his colleagues of oversimplifying the theory they developed, concluding that “the Gestalt movement failed to go beyond a particularly apt and persuasive presentation of new questions.” This was the stick he used to subject “Meta + Hodos” to a rather merciless beating.

Thus Tenney’s effort to develop a model that could then be realized through software-based testing amounts to a response to Slawson’s review. The fact is that this was a time when painfully little was known about the “wetware” of a brain embedded in the larger complex system of the human body. Thus, even a precept as straightforward as Donald O. Hebb’s famous postulate that “neurons that fire together wire together” could not be tested in the absence of technology for observing the “wiring.” One of the reason’s that I have been citing the work of Gerald Edelman is that he recognized that his own theory of perceptual categorization could not be tested through direct observation; so, as an alternative, his team developed a computer-based simulation model of Hebb’s “wiring” process. Tenney’s model, on the other hand, was based on an attempt to turn the theoretical speculations of “Meta + Hodos” (a product of the theoretical speculations of Gestalt psychology) into practice.

At this point I feel it is important to note that the term “metric space” that appears in the title is never explicitly invoked in the article’s text. Nevertheless, there is an implicit sense of “distance” that Tenney seeks to apply to his “temporal gestalt-units” (TGs), focusing primarily on those constructs captured by the terms “element,” “clang,” and “sequence.” The model requires a quantitative representation of the amount of difference that distinguishes two TGs. A metric space is a topological construct that defines the concept of distance in terms of four criteria:

1. The distance from a point to itself is zero.
2. The distance between two distinct points is a positive number.
3. The distance from point A to point B is the same as the distance from point B to point A.
4. For any point C, the distance from A to B is less than or equal to the sum of the distance from A to C plus the distance from C to B.

(That last criterion is sometimes called the “triangle rule” because the length of the hypotenuse is always shorter than the sum of the lengths of the other two sides of a triangle.)

As we liked to say as freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these properties were “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” However, those of us who went on to major in mathematics discovered that the most interesting insights were those involving counterexamples to the constraints of those criteria. Every math major knew about the book Counterexamples in Analysis by Bernard R. Gelbaum and John M. H. Olmsted and the critical role it played when trying to solve homework problems. So, in the interest of seeking out counterexamples, it is important to determine whether or not the concept of distance can actually be applied to comparing two TGs.

Let’s start with something simple. Imagine music as it is printed on score pages. Imagine, then, that you take a pencil and draw circles around groups of notes that you wish to identify as TGs. You can then take a ruler and measure distances between TGs on the score page. Even if those distances are somewhat rough (since a TG is not a simple point on the page), it is easy to see how the four distance criteria are satisfied.

However, as we all know, the marks on the score pages do not constitute the music. The music only exists through the experience of listening to a performance, even if that performance involves playing a recording. I would now suggest that the time-consciousness required for such listening involves awareness of differences that do not necessarily satisfy the distance criteria.

To make my point, I need to appeal to the reader’s imagination. Think of a flowing stream. Now, imagine that every point along that stream can be established as a fixed position (through a very precise measurement of latitude and longitude, for example). Suppose, now, that “distance” is not measured by difference in latitude and longitude but in the amount of time it takes a reference object, such as a fish, to swim from one point to another. By virtue of the flow of the river, the third property of a distance metric is violated because swimming “downstream” takes less time than swimming “upstream,” even though the beginning and ending points are fixed! I would argue that the passing of time is like the flowing of that stream and that Tenney’s model, while it looks good on paper (such as score pages), does not adequately capture the phenomenology of difference in a situation requiring the dynamic nature of time-consciousness.

After I first performed this exercise, I realized that I had been about as merciless in approaching Tenney’s work as Slawson had been. The reason is that the model that provided Tenney’s point of departure was required a quantitative foundation based on the topological properties of distance. Even the hypothesis being tested in his article, involving relationships among elements, clangs, and sequences, had been undermined in the absence of how those relationships could be represented quantitatively; and, if the hypothesis was no longer sound, then testing it was out of the question.

Once again I find myself thinking about the problems with Tenney being ahead of his time in terms of the tools available for his efforts. This particular paper predates the earliest efforts that would eventually lead to MIDI. For all of its shortcomings, MIDI provided a symbol representation that could capture not only marks on score pages but also the time-dependent factors inherent in any performance involving the interpretation of those marks. As a result of MIDI representations, it has been possible to investigate structural questions that go beyond music notation and enter the realm of time-dependent interpretations of the notation. It is in those interpretations that we need to seek out patterns and make sense of both what they are and why they are, and it is a pity that Tenney did not have such tools at his disposal when he first set off down his phenomenological path of inquiry.

“Meta + Hodos” After a Decade

In working my way through the writings of music theorist and composer James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, some of my more extended efforts went into situating Tenney’s Master’s thesis, “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form” in the context of how issues of phenomenology in general and time-consciousness in particular have evolved since that thesis was completed in 1961. Tenney himself took his own retrospective view of his thesis but only after over ten years of experiences and cogitations had ensued. The result was his follow-up essay “META Meta + Hodos,” written in 1975 but not published until 1992, when Frog Peak Music coupled it for publication with the original “Meta + Hodos” document.

The preface to the retrospective document begins as follows:

“META Meta + Hodos” represented an attempt to organize certain ideas first presented in Meta + Hodos in 1961, incorporating insights and revision that have emerged since then. The writing was initially motivated by the desire to provide an outline of my ideas and terminology for use by students in a class in formal perception and analysis at the California Institute of the Arts.

The result is not quite the sort of systematic outline that many of us learned to create in secondary school. However, it amounts to a reasonably well-organized collection of propositions, whose contents are elaborated through systematic definitions. Both propositions and definitions are then further elaborated by comments. For most readers this is hardly a page-turner; but Tenney’s attempt to be systematic facilitates homing in on the ways in which more recent insights reflect on the ideas brewing both in 1961 and subsequently in 1975.

One of my key conclusions about “Meta + Hodos” was that Tenney would probably have altered the path he was following had he been aware of Friedrich Hayek’s book The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. This book was first published in 1952; and, while it did not cross my path until around 2005, I quickly discovered that it had influenced two of the most perceptive thinkers concerned with the nature of mind that I had been fortunate enough to encounter. One of them was my doctoral thesis advisor Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial intelligence back in the days when understanding the nature of mind was more important than hacking together software that could fool enough people about its inherent “wisdom.” The other was Gerald Edelman, who was inspired to seek out biological processes that might validate what for Hayek was never anything more than mere speculation.

The very first Proposition in “META Meta + Hodos” involves the hierarchical organization of temporal gestalt-units. However, this is quickly qualified with a comment that suggests that the organization does not necessarily follow the strict “tree formation” of a hierarchy. (In abstract mathematics we would call the structure Tenney had in mind as a “partially-ordered set.”) The absence of such strict hierarchies is a significant issue in the biological model that Edelman developed based on a principle he called “perceptual categorization.” Put simply, perceptual categories are not neatly nested, nor, for that matter, are they stable. Indeed, those who have been following these “commentary” articles should know by now that the Necker cube is one of the easiest observed instances of unstable category definition.

Where things start to get a bit dicey, however, is when, in spite of the fluidity of the underlying nature of perceived categories, Tenney succumbs to the influences of his background in working with computers and ventures into a domain he calls “Musical Parameters.” Unfortunately, there is a slippery slope here. The very idea of there being parameters presumes that sound (and, therefore, music) is produced by what in computer-speak we would call a functional module, which has one or more control inputs. “Parameters” are neither more nor less than the quantities passed through those inputs.

Of course, those parameters can be applied to do a variety of things, meaning that they do not all “look alike,” so to speak. Thus, computer science recognizes that parameter values need to be classified, so that they can be distinguished as involving different categories. Those categories are usually called data types. (For the record, in 1975 I was teaching this sort of stuff to both undergraduates and graduate students!)

With such terminology at our disposal, it is easy to appreciate one of Tenney’s Comments:

There is not, in general, a one-to-one correspondence between musical and acoustical parameters.

This can only be appreciated if it is generalized to the above terminology. Given any two data types, does a relationship exist that defines one in terms of the other? From a computational point of view, that relationship needs to be expressed as a function. However, in the language of mathematics, that function may be injective (different inputs mean different outputs), surjective (different outputs mean different inputs), or bijective (both injective and surjective). (A bijective function is also known as an isomorphism.) Until we tease out the mathematics behind it all, any “correspondence between musical and acoustical parameters” can be little more than vague speculation.

Tenney then moves on to a domain that he calls “On Formal Perception and Description.” This is where he probably would have benefitted from a previous encounter with Hayek. As might be expected, The Sensory Order has a good deal to say about “forms” and how they “are formed,” so to speak. Hayek even distinguishes “simple” and “complex” “forms of classification,” the latter having the sort of dynamic qualities we associate with the Necker cube. In that context it seems to be fair to ask whether form, as such, as actually perceived or whether it is essentially a framework for expected perceptions. The latter seems more consistent with Edelman’s model of perceptual categorization, which, in turn, has little to do with Tenney trying to identify state, shape, and structure as “aspects of form.”

To those who may be chafing from my invocation of terminology from mathematics and computer science, I apologize. For better or worse, if we are trying to explain something, it always helps to have a vocabulary that facilitates the process of explanation. Readers may recall my earlier citation of the programming language LISP. An early pioneer of computer science Edsger W. Dijkstra, once praised the language for its ability to allow us to think previously unthinkable thoughts. Decades later a natural language researcher observed, in the middle of a talk he was giving, that it is often easier to explain what you are doing with a LISP program, rather than in text. The bottom line is that you cannot undertake explanation without terminology, and I have tried my best to evoke terminology that is appropriate without being dangerously confusing.

I make this point because, towards the end of the “META” article, Tenney begins to abandon it. There is an entire section of the text based on the mathematical property of ergodicity. However, he does not explain that term; nor does he interpret it the same way that any well-educated mathematician would. (To be fair to Tenney, Milton Babbitt had a tendency to play similar games in applying the terminology of abstract mathematics to his arguments about serial music. Several mathematicians I know have looked at his paragraphs and dismissed them as mere bunk.) The good news is that Tenney enlists such terminology to elaborate on those properties of state, shape, and structure; and the really good news is that those who follow in the footsteps of Hayek and Edelman need not worry about the specifics of those properties. The same can be said about the final section of the “META” article devoted to entropy, which seems to have originated from misconceptions that Tenney probably picked up from Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois.

Mahan Esfahani Takes his Harpsichord (and his Audience) on a Stunning Journey

Last night on the Rembe Stage of the Strand Theatre, San Francisco Performances launched the 2016–17 season of its PIVOT series of concerts. When this series was initiated this past spring, its full title was PIVOT: New Adventures in the Performing Arts; and it would be safe to say that last night’s performance was truly adventurous. Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani presented a solo recital entitled Time Present & Time Past, which also happens to be the title of his Archiv Produktion album that was released in May of 2015. Only one selection from that album was included on the program; but it became quickly clear that Esfahani’s thoughts about time could not be crammed into a single album.

Indeed, his title is actually a quotation from T. S. Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

These are the opening lines of “Burnt Norton,” one of four rather lengthy poems collected under the title Four Quartets. Eliot had a reputation for a keen intellect and a stunning breadth of knowledge. It is therefore reasonable to assume that any educated reader of this poem would quickly have seen those lines as the poet’s reaction to the chapter of the Confessions in which Augustine of Hippo wrestles with understanding the nature of time. Indeed, Book XI of the Confessions, entitled “Time and Eternity” has a sentence (translated into English by Henry Chadwick) that could easily have triggered Eliot’s opening:

It [the human heart] will see that all past time is driven backwards by the future, and all future time is the consequent of the past, and all past and future are created and set on their course by that which is always present.

In all fairness it is worth noting that Augustine may well have had just as powerful an influence on the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who was still alive when “Burnt Norton” was first published and had put much of his effort into trying to understand the phenomenology of time-consciousness.

None of this is intended to confuse Esfahani’s recital with an academic presentation. Nevertheless, his remarks prior to playing Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (the one piece from last night’s program that can be found on his album), made was clear that, on the subject of time, he was just as boldly inquisitive as his predecessors, Augustine and Eliot. Indeed, there was even a bit of Gerald Edelman in those remarks. Edelman was the author of The Remembered Present, a book whose title confronts the problem that the brain needs time to process signals from the sensory organs. As a result, once the brain has “figured out” what has been sensed as “the present,” time has advanced; and it is not “the present” any more and has become memory retained by mind!

Esfahani was understandably cautious in preparing his audience for the experience of listening to “Piano Phase.” Apparently, it sparked a riot when he played in in Germany; but then “Four Organs” nearly caused a riot when it was played in Carnegie Hall in 1973 (when one of the organists was Michael Tilson Thomas). Esfahani’s cautiousness took him down several fascinating rabbit holes. Not only did he tease out the curious relations among present, past, and future; but also he was bold enough to take on one of the most crucial dimensions of consciousness, that of understanding. He cited Stravinsky saying that he did not understand a lot of music, but he knew how to feel it. This provided Esfahani with grounds for confessing that he could not claim to understand “Piano Phase;” but he clearly had a strong desire to play it.

Most importantly, particularly in the context of his thoughts about time, Esfahani observed that “Piano Phase” will be 50 years old next year. In a similar vein he might also have mentioned that when he (Esfahani) was born in 1984, “Piano Phase” had been around for seventeen years. Yet, over all of these spans of time, those who have come to know it (and even love it) still feel at least some need to be apologetic about it. Esfahani’s reluctance to claim understanding, however, led me to wonder about the more general breadth of his exposure to Reich’s music.

If I, personally, claim to “understand” any of Reich’s “phase” pieces at all, it is because one of my earliest exposures to Reich was “Come Out,” a tape piece that he had created in 1966, in which two recordings of the same spoken text uttered by a single voice begin simultaneously; and then one, as a result of a very slight difference in tape speed, gradually falls out of sync with the other. This was the basic idea of “phase shifting;” and in “Come Out” the words on the tape recording become less and less intelligible and transform into new textures of sounds that are neither instrumental nor, in the strictest sense of the word, “electronic.” If one has the requisite curiosity to appreciate “Come Out,” then any of Reich’s subsequent instrumental “phase” pieces are basically exploring new possibilities in the underlying technique.

Having said all that, it is also worth noting that the instrumental pieces are, for the most part, rigidly procedural. Each of the pieces is based on little more than a single repeated phrase. That phrase needs to be played as close to mechanically as possible, since any hint of “expressive” phrasing would jeopardize the effect of phase shifting. In other words, in order to perform “Piano Phase” effectively, Esfahani has to “follow the directions faithfully” and do little more. To put this in terms of the vocabulary he evoked, no “understanding” is necessary. The music does all the “heavy lifting.” This was, indeed, how Esfahani performed Reich last night; and, writing as one with a generous amount of Reich listening experience, I can attest personally that his performance was a compelling one, as much in the spirit of the composer’s intentions as one could expect.

This then raises a more interesting issue across the entire program. The selections were divided between those composed prior to 1750 and those composed after 1940. However, in addition to that wide temporal separation, there is even a significant gulf between the six sonatas that Lou Harrison wrote in 1943 and the Reich piece, which is the chronological successor to the Harrison sonatas. Then the program leaps ahead to Toru Takemitsu’s 1986 “Rain Dreaming” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Le Jardin Secret II,” composed in 1987 and a piece Esfahani got to work on with Saariaho’s guidance. “Le Jardin Secret II” was the other work on the program that included tape accompaniment, in this case a quadrophonic projection into the audience area. (“Le Jardin Secret I” was strictly electronic.) This listener is thus confronted with leaping over some rather wide intervals of time with differences in music-making practices being just as broadly separated.

In approaching “Le Jardin Secret II,” Esfahani was again a bit shy in introducing the music. Apparently, it gave offense to some of his European audiences. It is hard to say for certain why it should have provoked such a reaction. My own guess is that the taped sound had a few rather suggestive intimations of orgasm; but, compared with some other tape pieces that are now part of the repertoire, those suggestions were pretty tame. For the performance itself Esfahani used a stopwatch (on his cell phone) to coordinate with Saariaho’s tape; but the composer was impressively practical in giving him the right “space” in which to coordinate. In contrast to “Piano Phase,” this was a piece in which instrument and recording had decidedly different sonorous qualities, making the composition an engaging study of the interplay between those differences.

Esfahani decided to play the Harrison sonatas as the second part of a two-part set that began with three of the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (thus establishing another wide gulf for the listener to cross). His Scarlatti choices were, in order of performance, K. 518 in F major, K. 516 in D minor, and K. 517 in D minor. In his extensive notes for his recording of all of the Scarlatti sonatas, Scott Ross suggested that K. 516 and K. 517 could be played as a two-movement sonata; but he also advises coupling K. 518 as a predecessor to K. 519, which is in F minor. (K. 518 is actually also in F minor, but it concludes in F major.) Esfahani did not say anything about whether or not the Scarlatti sonatas should be grouped. Rather, he performed them as three independent pieces, which is also how he performed the Harrison single-movement sonatas that similarly seemed to have been conceived independently.

More interesting were two selections that provided more fuel for my argument that jamming was part of the practice of making music long before blues and jazz musicians started using it to describe improvisation. This was evident in the selections by both William Byrd and Johann Sebastian Bach. The former consisted of a pavan and galliard both given the title “the Passinge Mesures” in My Ladye Nevells Brooke, while the Bach selection was the BWV 911 keyboard toccata in C minor. Both of the Byrd compositions serve as prime examples of how the simplest of tunes could be so overloaded with embellishment that only those intimately familiar with the melody would be aware of its presence. The breadth of Byrd’s imagination can stand admirably beside “Moody’s Mood for Love,” one of the most elaborate bebop improvisations by saxophonist James Moody (clearly inspired by Charlie Parker) taking “I’m in the Mood for Love” as a point of departure and then obscuring even the slightest hint of it.

BWV 911, on the other hand, is another one of those Bach compositions that establishes him as an honored predecessor of another saxophonist, John Coltrane. Regular readers may recall this connection being discussed this past Wednesday with respect to the fugues in Bach’s solo violin sonatas. The fugue that occupies the better part of BWV 911 has that same Coltrane spirit of improvisation during which each idea triggers a wealth of succeeding ideas until it is clear that the music-maker just does not know when or how to stop. (It is said that Coltrane once tried to explain his inability to stop to Miles Davis, who replied, simply, “You could begin by taking the sax out of your mouth!”) Both the Byrd and Bach offerings thus presented the prospect of being able to fashion a wealth of inventiveness from what seemed like, on the surface, not very much. Esfahani knew just the right spirit in which this music could be approached as “pre-Classical jamming;” and these pieces gave an energetic kick to the overall spirit of the evening.

(At this point I should add parenthetically that, when I returned home, I put on KCSM to listen to Michael Burman’s Just Jazz. One of his selections was another saxophonist, Sonny Stitt, playing “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” in a combo with Hank Jones on piano, Wendell Marshall on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. This was a night in which I could not get away from over-the-top jamming; and the Stitt selection made it clear that thoughts of time-consciousness were still with me!)

Esfahani’s remaining “time past” selection was a three-movement sonata in D major by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. This was Sebastian’s first serious pupil and the inspiration for some of the earliest pieces Sebastian created for pedagogical purposes. Friedemann was a good pupil and became a skilled performer and composer. However, his dissolute life style left him in poverty at the time of his death. His music is seldom performed, and Esfahani clearly felt that this neglect needed to be remedied. Hopefully, he will follow through on this particular interest when he prepares his next album.

If all this sounds like a lot of music, it definitely was. The program claimed that the evening would run for about 75 minutes. By the time things had concluded with “Piano Phase,” about two hours had elapsed. However, there were no signs that anyone was interested in leaving prematurely. Esfahani clearly knows how to engage with an audience; and no one seemed to mind his taking more than the “advertised” duration allotted for his performance. Indeed, I am sure I not the only one wondering when he will make his next visit.

Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

The grouping of beauty, goodness, and truth as three related “transcendental” qualities of being seems to have originated in the fifteenth century with Marco Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s “Philebus” dialogue. It then resurfaces throughout the history of philosophy, probably most notably in the three “critiques” of Immanuel Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason (truth), the Critique of Practical Reason (goodness), and the Critique of Judgment, whose first half focuses on aesthetics (beauty). This Kantian framework, in turn, may have provided the foundation for much of the thinking that can be found in Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. Since much of my thinking about music came out of trying to approach performance as a form of “communicative action,” it may be time to tie this together with yesterday’s thoughts about time.

Habermas’ approach begins by recognizing that communication is a particular instance of personal interaction and that all personal interactions are distributed across three independent “worlds,” the objective, the subjective, and the social. This tripartite division is basically another take on Ficino as handed down through Kant. The objective world is the world of “pure reason,” the subjective world is the world of personal “judgment,” and the social world is the world of “practical reason,” based on goodness for the benefit of all. Each of these worlds, in turn, provides its own approach to the verb-based nature of time. The objective world deals with the mathematics of time-based functions with particular attention to the nature of continuous functions and how they can be manipulated. The subjective world, on the other hand, deals with the passing of time as a psychological phenomenon. This is where we move into the domain of Gerald Edelman, most specifically his book The Remembered Present. The idea behind the title of that book is that “mind” has to “process” the “stimuli of the present.” That processing is not instantaneous; so, by the time the processing has been completed, what mind takes to be the present is actually a memory of what had been perceived in a very recent past.

This is all very well and good until we have to worry about “now” in a communicative setting. It was one thing to be even remotely aware that a subjective “now” is actually an objective “then;” but things become more complicated when we move into the social world. What happens when someone uses “now” as a cue to say, “It is time to press that button?” In many respects that is the ultimate simplification of what it means for a performing musician to follow a conductor’s beat.

However, the complexity of the social world becomes more evident when we think about a string quartet, rather than an orchestra. This is a group of four individuals that, somehow or another, have to establish a shared concept of how time is passing, maintaining that agreement through some form of ongoing monitoring. Indeed, music itself clearly resides in Habermas’ three worlds. The objective world is the world of notation with its associated rules of interpretation. However, an expressive interpretation of that notation requires a move into the subjective world; but that move only goes far enough to cover solo performance. As soon as more than one performer is involved, performance is firmly ensconced in the social world. Performance is thus a matter of how each individual juggles reasoning in the objective and subjective worlds in order to communicate effectively with the rest of the ensemble in the social world.

Sadly, while Habermas appreciated that there was more to linguistics than semantics and pragmatics, he does not seem to have had much background and/or interest in music. Thus, like Kant, all he can provide is a framework for thinking about the performance of music. Putting flesh onto that framework is the task that still needs to be done.

What am I Doing?

This site is where I first decided to embark on writing seriously about the “composition and performance” (as it says on my new business card) of music. Through that activity I was able to compile a strong amount of “audition material” that served me when I applied to write for Examiner.com. After I settled into that site, my writing about music on this site gradually abated; and I used it primarily to comment on some of the many absurdities I would encounter while reading my news sources about both current events and the world of technology. Following the passing of Examiner.com and my frantic efforts to preserve as many of the pieces I wrote there before their URLs became inaccessible, I have returned to this platform for writing about music. This feels a bit like a homecoming; and, in that spirit, readers may have observed that I used yesterday’s article about the guitar music composed by Jorge Liderman as an opportunity for some autobiographical musing.

However, since I spent more than half a decade putting out a large number of articles for Examiner.com, all of which took on the task of turning listening experiences into text, I realized that it might be worth while to take stock of the current state of my thoughts on such matters. From that point of view, I should probably begin by apologizing for using a phrase like “state of my thoughts,” which implies that my mind is some sort of a database that gets fed with new entries every time I write something and becomes the source of my memories. Yes, I have been building a database (which is why I used print-to-PDF on Safari to back up my Examiner.com articles, since that tool preserved both searchable text and hyperlinks). However, the database is not my memory; it is the crutch I use when memory fails me.

Even before I was writing about music, I was using this site to call out and explore the critical differences between what I called “noun-based” and “verb-based” thinking. Simply put, a database is a resource that is confined to noun phrases, nouns and the adjectives that modify them. However, as a result of reading the books of Gerald Edelman, I began to appreciate that memory, like consciousness itself, is an ongoing process. As a result, without some grasp (even a hypothesized one) of how we deal with our awareness of the passing of time, we are unlikely to grasp just how the “wet brain” deals with memory. Actually, that link to consciousness is a critical one, since, in many ways, the most important take-away from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time has to do with his use of “being” as a verb, rather than a noun.

In other words we have become so wedded to the advantages of digital technology that we have begun to lose an appreciation for what that technology does not do; and a primary example is the inability to deal with the time-base nature of verbs, rather than just their grammatical role in parsing sentences. This turned out to have a major effect on how I would think about music, because making music is a particularly accessible instance of time-based behavior. Indeed, sound itself is time-based. Because sound arises from the temporal phenomenon of oscillation, there is no such thing as an “instant” of sound. One cannot “freeze” an auditory stimulus for “closer inspection,” the way a digital stimulus can be captured in a photograph.

The impact of this attitude on my writing has emerged over the last half-dozen years or so. More and more I used phrases like “in-the-moment” when writing about a performance. Indeed, following up on Augustine’s Confessions, I often think of the “immediate” present in terms of its two “horizons,” one of those events that have passed and the other of events that are anticipated. Because any performance of music is tightly coupled to an awareness of an entire score at every instant of the performance (or, in the case of jazz improvisation, an awareness of the sorts of things that every other player is likely to do, as well as whatever (s)he has already done), it would be fair to say that one cannot provide a performance that engages the attention of the listener without building on a solid foundation of time-consciousness.

Perhaps “solid” is not the right word. It may be that asking a musician to talk about time-consciousness is in the same league as asking a fish to talk about water. In a somewhat overly reductive way, one might say that “what time is” is less important than “what you do with it.” It is through the doing that both past and future bump into the present as described in the preceding paragraph. The performing musician may not know what is happening or why it is happening, (s)he just knows “what to do” in the circumstances at hand.

If we include memory as part of the area of speculation, then it would be fair to say that we have been worrying about the nature of time since the Ancient Greeks. There is no questioning that we have made progress since then; and these days those with enough patience can appreciate at least some of that progress through the “wet brain” literature. Nevertheless, the stimuli associated with listening to music are still too complex to be handled adequately with the current tools of scientific research. Thus, the best we can do with a phenomenon like listening to music is speculate and then try to come up with sufficient warrants to lend credibility to our speculations.

I suppose that is what I am doing these days. I am using those settings in which I listen to music, in performance or on recording, as a “laboratory workbench” at which I speculate about the nature of time-based behavior. From that point of view, writing provides me with the discipline to maintain a “laboratory notebook.” Perhaps one of these days I shall be able to draw some useful conclusions from those many speculations!

Self-Documenting without Self

Financial Times writer Gautam Malkani was apparently given permission to write an opinion piece about Benedict Cumberbatch's (probably futile) attempt to get those attending his performances in Hamlet to cease and desist from capturing him (through photographs and/or video) on their personal portable devices. Whether or not Malkani himself wrote the sub-headline, it is a useful enough summary to spare the reader from some of the verbal games he plays that do not contribute very much to advancing his argument, particularly if that argument is flawed in the first place. That sub-headline is:

If we did not digitally document our life, our ‘self’ might cease to exist

That is quite a claim; but, in all likelihood it is as specious as it is compelling.

The logical flaw lies in that verb "document." Digital devices do not document. They capture signals that would otherwise stimulate our visual (and sometimes auditory) sensory organs. In the latter case those signals are, for all intents and purposes, meaningless until mind imposes order on them through a process that I like to call "sensemaking," having picked up that word from former colleagues.

Documentation is a similar process by which we try to make sense out of bodies of objective data that confront us (which may include the images we have captured on our portable devices). In other words documentation is, in a sense, an attempt, usually through writing, to reproduce the results of sensemaking achieved by mind. This brings us to Malkani's scare quotes. Many researchers of the nature of consciousness, such as Gerald Edelman and his acknowledged predecessor Friedrich Hayek, have made compelling arguments that "self" is not only the "engine" of sensemaking but also its product. In other words, to use Malkani's turn of phrase, "self" exists as a result of how we make sense of the signals we capture. It is neither the process of capturing nor the signals themselves.

This allows us to turn Malkani's conclusion on its head. The more obsessed we get with capturing the signals around us, the less obliged we seem to feel to "make sense" of them, which is to say to "document" them. The reductio ad absurdum is that we shall become mindless drones, sucking up all of the signals around us but leaving interpretation to someone else (except that there is no "someone else"). Rather than compensating for dementia, an obsession with capture contributes to further erosion of the capacity for sensemaking. Welcome to the world of the "hollow men!"

Virgil Thomson Discovers the Sensory Order

It is hard to imagine that Virgil Thomson would have spend much, if any, of his time reading anything by Friedrich Hayek. It is hard to imagine that he would have been unaware of the buzz that surrounded the publication of The Road to Serfdom. However, he does not strike me as the sort of person to read a book just because everyone else was talking about it. That would make it even less likely that he would have encountered Hayek's The Sensory Order. I was not surprised when one of my colleagues at Xerox PARC informed me that my own doctoral thesis advisor had been influenced by this book, and it has had enough of an impact on how I listen to music to surface in my writings, not only on this site but also on Examiner.com.

The phrase "sensory order" should be easy enough to grasp. I like to pose it in distinction to William James' idea that the signals detected by our sensory organs constitute a "blooming, buzzing confusion" before they are processed by the brain. (Gertrude Stein studied with William James when she was a student at Radcliffe College. Thomson was a proud Harvard man; but James only shows up in his autobiography for having said, "I am against greatness and bigness in all their forms.") The business of mind, so to speak, is to bring order to all of that confusion; and the primary idea that Hayek contributed to hypothesizing about this problem was that mind has a capacity for what Gerald Edelman would, decades later (but also aware of Hayek's book), call "perceptual categorization." Simply put, order is established when elements of the nervous system (including the brain) detect similarities among sensory signals and express those similarities through the creation of categories. Those categories then provide the first level of processing as new sensory impressions are encountered.

The significance of this insight is that we process new sensory experiences by trying to relate them to past ones. (There is, of course, the question of how the pump gets primed in the first place. Most of Edelman's Neural Darwinism is about answering that question.) This brings up to what Thomson one wrote about how to listen to a new composition for the first time:

Consequently the listener must ask himself what such music most resembles among familiar music of the past and among what he knows of contemporary work, if he is to follow it at all. Such a resemblance may be one of contradiction.

Basically, he is arguing that listening to something new in the immediate present should be guided by last listening experiences. Furthermore, that guidance is not necessary driven by a "same-as" relationship but may just as readily result from a "different-than" one. I would thus suggest that, in his own way, Thomson, too, addressed the question of "sensory order," even if he did so within his own particularly specialized domain of sensory experiences.

A Possible Insight from Genetics

The headline for an article by Helen Briggs, Health Editor for the BBC News Web site reads:

Same genes 'drive maths and reading ability'

In the body of the article, Briggs makes it clear that these results are far from conclusive. Nevertheless, they may provide a way for us to refine the questions we ask, even if the answers have yet to be resolved.

One way of looking at the results is to ask where there is commonality between the ability to read and reason with text and the ability to do the same with mathematics. Several years ago I did some tutoring; and I realized that, for this particular student, an equation was just a string a symbols whose only structure lay in the left-to-right ordering. The idea that it was necessary to "parse" the equation as part of understanding it (and, therefore, solving it) seemed to be absent. In a similar respect reading with understanding requires getting beyond the string of words to the recognition of how that string is structured.

Gerald Edelman recognized that there was a "cognitive leap" that had to be taken between the ability to identify objects and the ability to identify structural relationships among those objects. He called the first stage "perceptual categorization" and the second "presyntax." The idea that there may be genes associated with the capacity for presyntax suggests that we may also wish to ask whether or not there are also brain regions with a similar association. At the very least, scientists should be thinking about how to design experiments to explore this matter in greater depth. After all, the capacity for reading the symbols of text and mathematics should also apply to reading music notation!

Getting Beyond Standard Terminology

I finally seem to have built up some momentum in my efforts to read Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel. I was drawn to it because the author wrote it while on a fellowship at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, and I have been interested in that facility as a result of my following Gerald Edelman's efforts to develop a viable model of consciousness. Patel has been very thorough in writing this book, and his thoroughness makes reading it a difficult slog. However, for all of its academic technique, I fear it may be missing the forest for all the the trees it tries to take into account.

One of the things the appealed to me about Edelman was that he was willing to abandon familiar terminology in trying to grasp the nature of mind. The words we use tend to influence our thinking; and, when we adopt words from the legacy of others, we run the risk of adopting the worldview of that legacy as well. Edelman had the courage to rethink worldview; and, even if his current round of conjectures do not survive validation, there is a lot to be said for his method.

As one might guess, the thesis Patel is trying to pursue is one of identifying one or more relationships between how mind thinks about music and how mind thinks about language. He approaches this task by examining a different aspect of music in each chapter. My reading thus far has taken me through the following topics:

• Sound elements
• Rhythm
• Melody
• Syntax

Several things trouble me about this strategy. Most important is that the book does not seem to acknowledge that listening to music should be considered in terms of its relations to making music, rather than just from the "audience point of view." This may be because science has traditionally shown a bias in favor of matters of perception in preference to matters of action, and this raises another point. Anything having to do with sound, such as music or spoken language, only exists in the time domain. It is a product of action, rather than some static image that we can analyze without knowing a lot about its source. As Edmund Husserl observed, music does not exist in the mind unless the mind has time-consciousness. Edelman recognized that time-consciousness is not axiomatic; and he put a lot of effort into relating it to the other components of his model of "primary consciousness."

With all of those disclaimers, it seems necessary to dispense with "standard terminology" until we can try to fix what it is we really mean when using those terms, impeded by as little technical baggage as possible. This is the sort of thing I mean with respect to the above four topics:

1. When we talk about "sound elements," we are actually talking about those basic signals that form sensory impressions, signals that only exist in the time domain.
2. Thus, we are actually talking about the sensation of events; and, at a further level of time-consciousness, it is through rhythm that we recognize how sequences of events are structured.
3. When we then subject those signals we associated to sound elements to sequencing structured by rhythm, we have melody.
4. However, in the broader scheme of both listening to and making music, structure involves more than linear ordering. Embellishment, for example, involves some level of hierarchy (and, if we believe Heinrich Schenker, many levels). Counterpoint involves the sophisticated interplay of sequencing within voices and the harmonies that emerge when those voices are superposed. We tend to associate the noun "syntax" with such higher-level structuring; but, where music is concerned, this is a far cry from diagramming sentences.

Of course the proposition that these alternatives may facilitate our arriving at a better understanding of what mind does with music is still conjectural. However, I am a firm believer in documenting conjectures. You never known when you may be able to validate one of them!

The Concept of “Art”

I spent part of this past weekend wrestling with an essay entitled “Art and the Arts,” which I found in the Stanford University Press anthology of works by Theodor W. Adorno collected under the title Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader. This was the essay in which I found Adorno making explicit reference to John Cage, and I figured I had better get a sense of the context in which that reference was situated. The title referred to the question of whether or not it made sense of have a concept of “art,” given the diversity of all the instances subsumed by that concept.

I was a bit surprised that this “philosophical reader” contained no reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein in this essay. After all, Wittgenstein had taken on the same question with regard to the concept of “game.” Ultimately, he concluded that, while one could not define the that concept through the necessary and sufficient conditions of a rigorous formal logic, one could not dismiss the concept out of hand. To borrow a later phrase from John L. Austin, this was just one of those examples of how we “do things with words,” regardless of whether or not what we do can be reduced to a formal infrastructure.

The bottom line is that categories are not mere abstract constructs. They are products of how mind imposes order on sensory input, which is why Gerald Edelman chooses to focus not on the categories themselves but on those processes that he calls “perceptual categorization.” This stance is particularly important where “art” is concerned. Like it or not, we exist in a social world of minds that have declared it a perceptual category, reinforced by how our capacity for language has chosen to hang a noun-label on it. We have done this without worrying about whether that label has a variable target. Indeed, we may even embrace the variability of that target, which is what I had in mind when, back in 2010, I wrote that Edgard Varèse had “laid siege to those perceptual categories that we all assumed would serve us when listening to music.” From this we may conclude that Cage showed up in Adorno’s essay because he came along with a bigger siege engine.

In order to advance from sensation to cognition, Edelman uses his foundation as a basis for building hierarchies of categories of categories. This hierarchical stance has appealed to the artificial intelligence set, where it was abstracted into “object-oriented programming.” Unfortunately, that approach tried to abstract away the social dimension, which is one reason why it still cannot come to grips with “game.” (I once had a colleague who wrestled with whether, in the hierarchy he was trying to build, a “toy truck” was a “toy” or a “truck!”)

My own interest, on the other hand, has been to determine whether or not the things we do with our words might fall into some “meta-level” set of categories that serve us when we talk about different art forms. I have been at this for some time. Thus, when I find myself wrestling with a particularly tricky aspect of the making of music, I still tend to turn to the medieval trivium to guide how I use my words within a framework of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. This does not strike me as far-fetched, since one of the key aspects of the social dimension of music concerns the intersection between how we make music and how we talk about making music.

This is not to imply that, in the course of my own doing things with words, everything always fits nicely into that framework. Sometimes I feel as if I have to take a shoehorn to what I am trying to say. Then I have to remind myself that rethinking the framework may be more valuable that cramming into it things that may not belong there!

Time-Consciousness in the Performance of Music

This is definitely “rehearsal” material, having grown out of some casual conversations I have been conducting while in the midst of a rather heavy schedule of covering concerts.

The thoughts first emerged through a conversation with a friend who believes that teaching piano should pay as much attention to improvisation as it does to reading from the score page. This struck a particularly resonant cord in my own consciousness, because, while I spent a lot of time improvising as a kid, I was not particularly good at it then; and I am even worse at it now. As a result, I have developed a real interest in the extent to which Johann Sebastian Bach’s approach to pedagogy seems to be grounded in the assumption of a tight coupling (not that Bach would ever have used such a phrase) between proficiency in execution and proficiency in invention.

Since I still tend to be as interested in “wet brains” as I am in “abstract ideas” and since last year I was put off by what I felt was some really bad experiment design in an effort to identify, through brain scanning, areas of brain activity associated with both memorization of music and improvisation, I tried to relate this inadequate attempt to a firmer foundation of hypothesis generation. It occurred to me that questions concerned with both memorization and improvisation could only be framed in the context of some more general model of time-consciousness. This continues to be one of the most problematic concepts for those trying to get a handle on time-based thinking. Edmund Husserl wrote a whole book about it, but the problem has been nagging great minds going back at least to Augustine, not to mention Aristotle’s efforts to get a handle on memory.

In his book The Remembered Present, Gerald Edelman tries to approach time-consciousness through areas of the brain that he calls “organs of succession.” (For those wanting me to be more specific, these are the cerebellum, the hippocampus, and the basal ganglia.) In his model time-consciousness has much more to do with the ability of the mind to work with the concepts of “before” and “after” than with the more specific matters of duration, whether in the specific domain of clock time or in those of Henri Bergson’s more subjective model of subjectively “felt” time. (This actually suggests that Edelman and Augustine might have easily found a common ground for conversation.)

I would like to suggest that those who are good at improvisation depend very heavily on such organs of succession. In more simplistic language improvisation comes down to continually dealing with two questions:

1. What have I done?
2. What do I do next?

Now, while these questions are good to bear in mind when one is reading from a score page, from a strictly logical point of view, neither is absolutely necessary. Reading music can take place entirely “in the moment,” with no regard to either past or future. The eye is simply providing a stream of answers to only one question:

What do I do now?

This then suggests why Bach felt it was important for the student to acquire both sides of the coin, so to speak. One masters execution because, once you know the answer to the what-do-I-do-now question, you have to have the physical capacity to actually do it. On the other hand Bach’s approach to invention addresses the capacity for improvisation. That requires those before/after questions; and they cannot be satisfied unless your organs of succession have been “primed” to deal with them.

As I said at the beginning, these are admittedly “unkempt thoughts.” However, I figure that a “rehearsal studio” can double as a “laboratory notebook;” and such a notebook is more than a record of hypotheses, data, and analyses. It can also be a diary in which one lays out the “tracks for trains of thought,” so to speak, that direct one to those hypotheses that need to be further investigated.

Solitary Professions

A high point in my (far from standard) television viewing over this past holiday weekend was definitely the Book TV broadcast of a discussion with Rick Atkinson on the occasion of his receipt of the 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.  Atkinson gave his own take on the extent to which writing is a solitary profession, a proposition that was hardly new to anyone who takes writing seriously.  From my own point of view, I would certainly not contest that writing about music is a solitary profession, even if, as I wrote yesterday, both performing and listening are “behaviors that take place in the social world.”

I do not see this as paradoxical.  Rather it constitutes an elaboration on the extent to which listening is a matter of sensemaking (or, as Friedrich Hayek put it, bringing “sensory order” to the stimuli of sense data).  Those data originate in the objective world, which is why they can be captured through scientific instrumentation and subjected to analysis through scientific methodologies.  Nevertheless, those data are produced in the social world;  and, while there are any number of sophisticated analytic tools that may be applied to them, it is not necessarily the case that we can interpret what those tools tell us in ways that take the social world into account.  At the same time the listening itself is a subjective matter of what mind does in order to achieve sensory order, whether we model mind according to Gerald Edelman’s elaborations on Hayek’s speculations or on Ernst Cassirer’s approach to how we arrive at a capacity for symbolic expression.

Nevertheless, any sensory order that is achieved is like that tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it unless that subjective “I” is capable of giving an account (in the sense of Plato’s use of “λόγος” in “Theaetetus”) of what that order is.  This is where writing, particularly descriptive writing, enters the picture.  However, as Jacques Derrida put it, writing is far from a simple matter of putting marks on paper.  Rather, as Derrida’s translator Barbara Johnson put it, writing is “any differential trace structure … that also inhabits speech.”  In other words writing involves creating a system of marks (a “trace structure”) grounded in speech;  and, by being grounded in speech, writing is also grounded in the social world.  In other words we write in order to communicate;  and we communicate according to our speech practices (or, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, our “communicative actions”).

A key insight in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action is that any communicative action must, of necessity, “inhabit” objective, subjective, and social worlds simultaneously.  The writer must deal with the subjectivity of his/her sensemaking;  but (s)he must deal with it within significant objective constraints (most of which fall within the domain of grammar) on the “system of marks” that (s)he creates.  At the same time those marks are subject to the constraints of logic and rhetoric, both of which address the efficacy of speech practices in the objective and social worlds, respectively.  In other words the writer works within a formidable array of constraints;  and dealing with those constraints is basically a “too many cooks” problem.  The act of writing must be strictly between the writer and the marks.  Once the marks have been fixed, they may (and ideally should) be passed to an editor for feedback;  but the writing itself cannot be anything other than solitary.

Learning about Cassirer from Schutz

I cannot remember when I acquired the four volumes of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.  I had been aware of this work for quite some time, probably going back to my first efforts in the middle of the last decade to make sense of semiotic research.  My guess is that I made the commitment one day when I was browsing at City Lights Bookstore because all four volumes were there on the shelf.  I would also guess that I purchased the books after my research had gotten sucked into the “knowledge management” movement and that I was struck by the fact that the third volume was entitled The Phenomenology of Knowledge.

Since that time (whenever it was), those four volumes have languished on several shelves.  Currently they are on my “philosophy shelf,” where as a result of my crude effort to keep things chronologically ordered by the author’s earliest work in my collection, they sit between the two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Martin Heidegger’s early Introduction to Phenomenological Research.  Charles Hendel’s Introduction to Cassirer’s first volume cites Cassirer’s approach to phenomenology as critically opposed to the “naturalistic philosophy of culture” embraced by Spengler.  In the other direction Heidegger played a clearly significant role in the thinking that went into the Phenomenology of Knowledge volume, a role that was probably enhanced by personal interactions between these two men.

For my part Cassirer returned to my own radar screen while I was reading Alfred Schutz’ paper, “Language, Language Disturbances, and the Texture of Consciousness,” which was basically his reflections on the findings of Kurt Goldstein published in the 1948 book, Language and Language Disturbances, Aphasic Symptom Complexes and their Significance for Medicine and Theory of Language.  (I should note, as an aside, that the data from this book would later play a critical role in Roman Jakobson’s 1956 paper, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.”  Jakobson called those disturbances “The Similarity Disorder” and “The Contiguity Disorder” and interpreted them as impairments that prevented the mind from dealing with the rhetorical devices of metaphor and metonymy, respectively.)  Schutz’ paper was basically a study of Goldstein’s impact on philosophers who were trying to grapple with the nature of consciousness, and Cassirer was one of the philosophers examined.

As I read the section on Cassirer in Schutz’ paper, I realized that there was considerable resonance with Friederich Hayek’s book The Sensory Order and the role that book had played in the more recent research into consciousness by Gerald Edelman.  I was therefore not surprised to discover that Goldstein was one of the sources for Hayek’s book, although he does not appear to be cited by Edelman.  What first caught my attention was Schutz’ summarization of Cassirer’s approach as follows:

The world of “perceptions” is not a mere sum total of sense data;  it is organized in a threefold way.  First, there are phenomena of a central character, calling things and qualities;  second, there is the order of these phenomena in spatial coexistence;  and third, in their succession in time.

 

Edelman would later attach his own labels to these three stages:

1. Perceptual categorization
2. Presyntax
3. Time-consciousness (actually a term used by Husserl)

He also gave them in a different order in his own gradus to the Parnassum of consciousness, postulating time-consciousness as a precondition for syntax.

Cassirer then proposed a parallel set of three stages through which linguistic behavior develops, described by Schutz as follows:

1. It is first mimic expression, imitation of the sensuous perception by sound, so characteristic of the language of the child and primitive man.
2. The second level is that of analogical expression.  Here the relationship between sound and designated content is not a of material nature, but that of an analogy of formal structure.
3. Only the third level is that of symbolic expression proper.

What makes this interesting is that, in The Remembered Present, Edelman never really gets beyond viewing language as “mimic expression,” engaged in the service of “primary consciousness.”  Thus, what makes Cassirer particularly interesting (at least to me) is that he explicitly recognized the need to establish a bridge between basic perceptual categorization (what Hayek called our capacity for “sensory order”) and our ability to work with symbolic forms (the theme of all four of his volumes).  Neither Hayek nor Edelman explicitly addressed that capacity, and I now feel more than a little sheepish for not having noticed that omission on their parts.

I suppose this revelation has been particularly important to me because that capacity for working with symbolic forms is equally important in the performance of music.  Indeed, it may well be that the distinction between “authentic reproduction” and imitation, in the Aristotelian sense of that word, can be attributed entirely (or at least almost entirely) to the intervention of symbolic forms during the act of performance.  This intervention probably does not involve a direct appeal to semiotic theories that try to sort everything into signifiers and signifieds.  In all likelihood semantic signification never enters into the equation.  Nevertheless, music notation is basically a set of symbolic forms without which music cannot be made.  I might even advance the radical hypothesis that, even when musicians are playing by ear, their very mindset presumes a context grounded on those symbolic forms (which may be one reason why Keith Richards could never properly get that guitar riff that Chuck Berry insisted he play in that episode in Taylor Hackford’s film, Chuck Berry:  Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll).  Now all I need to do is find the right window of time in which I can turn to a more disciplined reading of Cassirer’s texts!

Getting One's Perceptual Categories in Order

My recent attempt to do justice to this week’s performance of Edgard Varèse’s “Amériques” by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas reminded me of my current round of struggles with reading Jacques Derrida.  Specifically, I have been wrestling with Dissemination, Barbara Johnson’s translation of La Dissémination, and the mind-bending games Derrida plays with the concept of “preface,” trying to make the case that the text that appears where one would expect a preface is not really a preface (nor could it ever be).

For those unfamiliar with this work, the first sentence is:

This (therefore) will not have been a book.

Think of that as the ascent to the top of the roller coaster ride before the free fall begins.  The basic game that Derrida plays is to ask what it means for a writer to write something that tells the reader what (s)he will be reading in the future.  In far blunter language than Derrida would ever use, it comes down to asking:  Why would you say what you are going to say when you have already said it?  (This presumes that the preface is written after the “work” has been completed, which is usually the case.)

If all Derrida wanted to do was get me lost in a labyrinth, I could appreciate his intention with some amusement;  but I still wanted to get a bird’s eye view of the labyrinth he had designed.  After a bit of groping around with his convoluted sentences, I found myself falling back on Friedrich Hayek’s speculations about sensory order and Gerald Edelman’s efforts to pursue those speculations through the investigation of brain behavior.  Edelman’s work revolves around the capability of the brain to perform perceptual categorization;  and, as I wandered through Derrida’s labyrinth, I realized that there are actually two aspects of perceptual categorization.  The better understood aspect is the one motivated by Hayek;  and it involves “ordering sensations” according to “known categories.”  The more challenging aspect, however, involves how mind maintains a repertoire of the categories it “knows.”  From this point of view, writing a preface is a strategy for making sure that the reader has those categories that are prerequisite for making sense of the text to follow.  Thus, it is less a matter of saying what you are going to say and more one and more one of inducing a set of perceptual categories in the reader such that, when you get around to “saying it,” the reader can then figure out what you “mean.”

This brings me to the challenge of listening to Varèse.  For his time Varèse basically laid siege to those perceptual categories that we all assumed would serve us when listening to music.  What he wrote just did not “fit” into those categories;  but, what is worse, he never bothered to provide us with the benefit of any sort of preface.  Thus, there is little a listener can do other than roll his/her own categories as the music unfolds.  The good news is that there is now music that goes beyond the Varèse canon;  and much of that music can help us establish new perceptual categories as much as “total immersion” in Varèse’s own works can.  This would explain why I found myself thinking a lot about the music of Frank Zappa while I was listening to “Amériques” on Thursday night.  I might even suggest that, if one wanted to prepare a “preface” for this particular composition, a good start might be a screening of 200 Motels!

In Search of Foundations for a Theory of Performing Music

It seems as if much of the writing I do these days is directed toward trying to establish what would be a theory of performing music and how such a theory could be developed. Recently I have finally gotten around to starting in on reading The Sensory Order, one of the final works of Friedrich Hayek. I have been meaning to read this book for about a year and a half, and it has suffered the cruel fate of always being bumped down a notch or two on my priority list. If we broaden our perspective of Hayek beyond his usual role as a "founding father" of "Chicago School" economics, particularly as both preached and practiced by Milton Friedman, we discover that, as far as pioneering is concerned, Hayek's interest in economics was pursued within the context of mathematical problems concerned with the analysis of what we now call "complex systems." To invoke my past language, these are systems "based on nonlinear equations whose interactive behavior cannot be reduced to the better-understood principle of linear systems and that, from a statistical point of view, may easily be perceived as chaotic." In this terminology The Sensory Order takes on what is generally recognized as "the mother of all complex systems," human consciousness. Basically, the title refers to how we bring order to what William James called the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that assaults our sensory organs, not just external but also internal.

When I started telling some of my colleagues about Hayek's book, I was not surprised to discover that it had influenced the work of two thinkers who have a major impact on my own approach to the nature of the human mind. One was my doctoral advisor, Marvin Minsky; and the other was Gerald Edelman, whose The Remembered Present is one of the most fascinating attempts to account for consciousness in terms of physiological foundations. All this background was at work yesterday when I settled into the fourth chapter of The Sensory Order, entitled "Sensation and Behavior." As I began this chapter, I recalled preparing to give an expository talk on Edelman's theory to members of the research laboratory where I was working in Singapore at the beginning of the last decade. I used the word "behavior" in my introductory remarks and was immediately called to task by a psychologist for not being specific enough in how I was using the word. From this point of view, I was encouraged that Hayek was using the word at a highly intuitive level, which he could do because he never tried to conceal the thoroughly speculative nature of the thinking behind his text.

At that intuitive level, Hayek was just interested in establishing the relationship between what our sensations tell us about objects in the world and what actions we take through knowing about those objects. By the time we have reached this chapter, he has made it clear that, while the objects of the world may be physical, we know about them through properties that are phenomenal, rather than physical. For example, when I look at the printed page next to me, I see the marks organized into words; and I recognize that different words have been printed in different colors. I do not see the page in terms of a spectral representation of the different frequencies of light that are reflected off of its surface. Hayek's chapter is thus about how and why we act the way we do in the physical world on the basis of how we apprehend the phenomenal world; and that chapter gave me a better appreciation of the extent to which the performance of music is concerned heavily (but not entirely) with actions ultimately grounded in the phenomenal world. (I actually have one colleague with whom I converse heavily over the relationship between the physical world and the phenomenal world behind the performance of music. This includes not only what goes into producing the sounds but also our perception of our sounds and those of others.)

At some level, then, developing a theory of performing music requires developing a prerequisite theory of the relations that exist between objects and actions. In thinking about those relations, I have come up with three categories (knowing full well that there may be more):

1. At the most objective level there are the mathematical relationships between representations of state and representations of process, covering disciplines running all the way from the calculus to cybernetic models of control through feedback.
2. Physiologically, there are the relations between perception and action, which were the primary focus of Hayek's chapter.
3. In the social world, however, relations are established through how we communicate about them; so we also need to account for grammatical distinctions between how we apply nouns and noun phrases to objects and how we apply verbs and verb phrases to processes.

I have no idea whether or not I shall still be thinking about this framework a month (week?) from now; but today is seems to be helping me to sort out my own confusions!