James Tenney: the Remaining Appendices

The collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney published by the University of Illinois Press under the title From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory includes three appendices. The third of these has already been discussed in an account of the five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a more “contemporary” theory of harmony. This article will examine the other two appendices and thus conclude the ongoing effort to account for the entire collection.

The first appendix was written in 1959; and, when this book was being planned, it was given the title “Pre—Meta + Hodos.” It amounts to a collection of initial thoughts that would eventually be refined into Tenney’s Master’s thesis, “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form.” That means that the “big picture” of “Meta + Hodos” includes these initial preceding thoughts and well as the succeeding thoughts that were eventually published as “META Meta + Hodos.”

(I have to say that I am no stranger to this “evolutionary” approach to writing. Shortly after I began work in Santa Barbara in 1978, I was invited to a party where I got to meet several former graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that arrived after I had received my doctoral degree in 1971. One of them came up to me; and, as soon as I introduced myself, he said, “I have been trying to rewrite your thesis for the last several years!” I replied calmly, “I wish you had gotten in touch. I’ve done that many times already.” In retrospect I realize that I now regret that I did not keep the notebook in which I first set down those thoughts that would eventually become my thesis. Tenney was clearly more conscious about such things that I was!)

“Pre—Meta + Hodos” never mentions phenomenology. Indeed, I hope that Tenney’s spirit would not be disturbed if I described this document as a study in terminology. This effort at “coming to terms” (a phrase I have unabashedly appropriated from the title of a book by the late narrative theorist Seymour Chatman) was motivated by Tenney’s recognition that the vocabulary of music theory was, at the time he was writing this essay, still very much locked into semantics based on “common practice” traditions. Tenney appreciated that those semantics needed to evolve to keep up with how practices of making and listening to music had changed since 1900.

While I admire the project he set for himself, I have found myself wrestling with an alternative point of view that clearly had not yet entered Tenney mindset in 1959. This has to do with the extent to which the common practice lexicon is almost entirely rooted in nouns and noun phrases, thus holding off at considerable distance the extent to which both making and listening to music are actions (probably a combination of physical and mental activities). In other words, if we are to do justice to the “practice” side of “common practice,” we need to explore verb-based approaches to description, perhaps to the extent that we accept the breadth of verb grammar with constructs such as tense and mood.

Then, as a corollary, we must recognize that any verb-based strategy must be based on time-consciousness. I see this as the strategic shift that both Tenney and myself pursued to mine the resources of phenomenology in general and Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness in particular. However, awareness of phenomenology is only part of the foundation. We also need to recognize that when we actually set about to write about either making or listening music, we draw upon the “text type” (a term I acquired through reading Chatman) of description.

The problem is that writing descriptions tends to be much more difficult than writing other text types, such as the logic of argumentation, narrative, or even general exposition. Writing a description in which time-consciousness is involved is even more difficult. During one of my past efforts to grasp the nature of verb-based thinking, I wrote the following:

The challenge of providing a textual account of “what is” is already, as has been previously discussed, formidable enough.  Where the performance of music is concerned, however, “what is” is secondary to “what is happening;”  but “what is happening” is already “in the moment.”  We cannot begin to describe it (and mind cannot try to deal with it in terms of categories and instances) until it has elapsed;  and then we have to worry about a “new moment!”  The act of description is not only formidable, it may also be theoretically impossible.  The best we can do is engage in an ongoing process of coming up with approximations;  and the beauty of the performance of music is that there will always be room for yet another approximation, which may or may not be a refinement of a previous one!

I think it would be fair to say that Tenney never really rose to this challenge. The two appendices that precede the one written as part of his theoretical approaches to harmony are solidly noun-based. “Pre—Meta + Hodos” is basically an effort to lay a terminological foundation; and, in that foundation, even time itself is treated as a noun. The second essay then explores “musical parameters,” which amounts to laying out the adjectives that can be summoned to modify the nouns. Both of these essays cover significant distances and can be valued for that; but they do not help us to approach the verb-based side of music. A systematic approach to coming up with useful descriptions of “what is happening” when we make or experience music still eludes us; and, when one considers From Scratch in its entirety, one can see how that approach also eluded Tenney.

Kyle Gann Tries to Reinvent Tonality

courtesy of Other Minds

A little over a week ago, Other Minds released its latest recording, a two-CD album of Kyle Gann’s seventeen-movement suite Hyperchromatica. On the strength of numbers alone, this marks a significant addition to the ranks of compositions whose creators have chosen to reject equal-tempered tuning in favor of working with natural harmonics. The tuning systems for such efforts are known collectively as just intonation. In such systems all intervals are based on integer ratios, usually with a limit on the number of integers involved.

The movements in Hyperchromatica are based on 13-limit just intonation. Thus, the integers used in forming the ratios range from 1 to 13 along with different combinations arising from multiplication. Put in another way, all of the ratios have numerators and denominators that arise from multiplicative products of the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13.

Those who read my extended essay about listening to integer ratios, written when I was trying to get my head around Lou Harrison’s compositions based on just intonation, may recall that the thirteenth harmonic has rich history. Benjamin Britten singled it out in the horn solo that begins and concludes his Opus 31 serenade, requiring that the horn be played without the use of valves. As might be guessed, that solo involves an abundance of tonic-to-dominant perfect fifths. However, towards the end of the solo, the dominant pitch is approached by stepwise motion from above; but the “step” is neither a semitone or a whole tone. It is somewhere between the two; and the result can be spooky, provocative, or downright disturbing, depending on the personal disposition of the listener. That result is the movement from the thirteenth harmonic to the twelfth (two octaves above the third harmonic, the basis for the so-called “perfect fifth”).

Britten wrote that daring passage in 1943 for Dennis Brain, the leading horn player of his day. Some 75 years have elapsed since then, during which Harrison emerged as only one of several composers bent on turning to just intonation to explore new ways to think about the fundamental foundations of musical composition. Remember, this was a time when many composers were wrestling with how to approach composition after Arnold Schoenberg had “emancipated” the concept of dissonance. Schoenberg himself saw that emancipation as a liberation from harmonic progression, meaning that the primary foundation of his own work was polyphony; but his was a polyphony that was similarly “emancipated” from the strictures of species counterpoint, which had is own rules based on a distinction between consonance and dissonance.

45 years on we now have Gann, who has written in his notes for the booklet accompanying Hyperchromatica, that his goal “is no less than to reinvent tonality.” I have to confess that this quote sticks rather uncomfortably in my craw. I prefer to think that tonality was discovered, rather than “invented.” Making music is a behavior that probably goes back to the earliest practices of prehistoric social groups. During those prehistoric times, there was probably the emergence of a fundamental precept that, if you liked something you did, do it again. Eventually, when our ancestors were not hunting or gathering, they would assemble in a group to tell stories, or sing them, or perhaps even sing them while others provided “instrumental accompaniment.” Not too long thereafter, those “instrumentalists” realized that they could “perform” just as well without “accompanying” the singers!

It probably took many centuries before mind developed to a point where one could consider these practices and recognize them as instances of some systematic infrastructure. Such systematic thinking dates back (at least) to Socrates (or Plato’s documentation of Socrates’ wisdom). However, it was only in the Middle Ages that more extensive efforts at such documentation advanced. Those efforts would eventually work their way into educational curricula. However, for a long time educational practices seemed to lack the ability to recognize the difference between a document that was descriptive and one that was prescriptive. So it was that the confusion between rules to be followed and descriptions of past practices first emerged; and, on the basis of some of Schoenberg’s more caustic writings, it would appear that all too many practitioners are still laboring under that confusion.

I am not sure where Gann stands in the midst of that confusion, but I think that one way to establish a point of view is by going back to the basics behind practices of making music. Put another way, what was Gann actually making in the process of creating each of the seventeen movements of his suite? At the most fundamental level, he was writing MIDI programs for Disklaviers. MIDI, of course, was based on the equal-tempered tuning of twelve semitones, all the same size, to the octave, the usual way in which most pianos are tuned. In order to deal with just intonation Gann had to alter the hardware of his Disklaviers to synthesize pitches they had not been designed to synthesize. Furthermore, to account for a gamut of 33 pitches per octave, he needed three of those Disklaviers to account for all of the pitches. In other words what Gann made was an extensive library of software to run on an array of hardware, which he had made specifically for that software.

All that probably sounds so dry that many readers may wonder, “What does that have to do with making music?” It is therefore to Gann’s credit that I have to say that, if one puts all thoughts of theory aside and just listens to these two CDs, it is not difficult to imagine that Gann was playing at some non-standard keyboard, perhaps even improvising, rather than building a software library. In other words, while his methods were not actually products of the tight coupling between listening and making, he has successfully created the illusion of that coupling.

Having accepted that illusion, what is the listening experience that emerges from these recordings? The overall impression is one of exploration, often involved with establishing some “seed” of content and then playing around with different approaches to expressing that seed. Those who have listened to (and enjoyed) many of the prolonged improvisations that have been recorded of Keith Jarrett’s solo piano work can appreciate this approach to listening; and, for the most part, Gann works on durational scales that are not quite as extended as Jarrett’s.

On the other hand everything we listen to in the present is informed by what we have listened to in the past. One of my first counterpoint teachers (from the days of that “great confusion” between description and prescription) would consistently come down on all of his students for writing what he called “slimy chromaticism.” Gann has a frequent tendency to run through long strings of consecutive “micro-semitones” in his gamut that would escalate my former teacher’s sense of “slimy” to a level he could not have imagined.

However, Gann’s “hyperchromatic” runs may be the tip of a more imposing iceberg. Over the course of these seventeen pieces, there is little sense of hierarchy in what Gann is playing. The durational value of individual notes often serve as a clue to which of his notes are basically embellishments, but it is not always clear just what they are embellishing. As one who continues to have considerable respect for the theoretical writings of Heinrich Schenker, I feel that the absence of a clear distinction between the embellishing and the embellished reduces much of what Gann is doing on these recordings to another term that my counterpoint teacher used to throw at us: noodling.

To be fair, I am sure that Jarrett has any number of critics that would throw that same term at many (all?) of his prolonged improvisations. For that matter, there are any number of reasons to believe that Miles Davis felt the same way when John Coltrane launched into one of his longer improvised takes on whatever tune they happened to be playing. In other words the experience of listening to Hyperchromatica may, for better or worse, simply be similar to that of my recent account of listening to the world premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Labyrinth, in which I cited Henry Miller’s definition of “confusion” as “a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.” Fortunately, a recording provides ample opportunity to eventually home in on an order that is not yet understood!

The Centenary of Harrison’s Birth has been Honored with a Comprehensive Biography

Those who read this site regularly cannot help but know by now that composer Lou Harrison was born on May 14, 1917. It has been a great personal pleasure to write about performances that were organized in celebration of that composer’s 100th birthday, which included the three-concert festival Lou Harrison: A Centenary Celebration, presented by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the two concerts for this season’s Other Minds 22 festival entitled Just 100: Homage to Lou Harrison. Beyond the music, however, this year saw the publication by Indiana University Press of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, released (according to Amazon.com) in paperback on April 3 and subsequently in hardcover on April 10.

At 602 pages this is the most comprehensive account of Harrison that takes in both life and works. Beyond familiarizing themselves with previously published biographical accounts, the authors availed themselves of the wealth of archival material collected and managed by the University of California at Santa Cruz, which includes not only his music manuscripts but also his correspondence and his personal notebooks. The footnotes for the book also account for a generous number of interviews with both Harrison himself and many that figured in both his musical activities and his personal life.

Equally prodigious is the amount of analytic material that went into the discussion of a broad swathe of Harrison’s compositions. This was no mean feat, because, over the course of the 85 years of his life, Harrison never settled into any one way of making music. Furthermore, that last phrase is the operative one of the preceding sentence. If there was any “spinal cord” that ran through the full course of Harrison’s life and works, it was that music was, first and foremost, a social experience. Making music, particularly with others, always took priority over building up a library of scores to be bequeathed to present and future performers.

Because Harrison ran off in so many different directions so prodigiously, it is likely that different parts of this book will appeal to different readers. My own preferences came to the surface when I celebrated the Fourth of July with an extended riff on the nature of just intonation, which emerges in this book as one of Harrison’s strongest influences. He can be justifiably credited as one of the pioneers in the study of “world music;” and one of the results of his pioneering was a preference for intervals based on natural overtones over the surds (irrational numbers) required for equal-tempered tuning. Perhaps the most interesting by-product of this preference was his commitment to building and tuning (frequently with his life-partner William Colvig) new instruments that would establish his own take on instruments from other countries, such as those that comprise an Indonesian gamelan.

In other words Harrison was not only a maker of music (in a sense of that phrase that is equally applicable to Johann Sebastian Bach and John Coltrane, as has been previously argued) but also a maker of artifacts, which are then applied to the making of music. This distinction may best be appreciated when we consider it in historical context. During the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War, many music-makers were drawn to the lure of new technologies that had previously been, at best, secondary. On the one hand there were those interested in how devices, which had previously been used only for “capture” (i.e. audio recording), might be “repurposed” in the service of creation. This resulted in the emergence of “studios” and “laboratories” in the service of “electronic music.” At roughly the same time there were the first stirrings of those exploring the use of the digital computer for similar pursuits.

It is when we consider this “fork in the road” that we may best appreciate the title Alves and Campbell chose for their book. The Dictionary Web site maintained by Oxford University Press defines a “maverick” as an “independent-minded person.” Yogi Berra used to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” When a maverick comes to that fork, (s)he rejects both options. While all those around him were repurposing new technologies in the service of composition and performance, Harrison went back to earlier basics and found new paths along which he could advance. As a result, those who listen to Harrison’s music are likely to find much that is familiar and much that is novel, often in equal measure.

One of the most compelling take-aways from this book is an appreciation for how long Harrison had to wait before his work enjoyed a “critical mass” of support from both performers and listeners. In that respect the story of Harrison’s life is an impressive lesson in having both the patience and the fortitude to persist in your own convictions. (Ironically, for all of John Cage’s Zen philosophy, Harrison turned out to be the better exemplar. I realized this as early as 1973, when I heard Cage read one of his lectures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rather than using one of his chance-based techniques to construct his text, he simply read a transcript from a ceremony at which he had been given some prestigious, and remunerative, award. Beneath the calm monotone delivery of that text, one had to focus a bit to realize that what Cage was actually saying was, “Where were you when I needed you?!?”)

Mind you, there were dark sides to Harrison’s personality. Alves and Campbell do not try to hide any of them under the rug. To the contrary, their interviews uncover accounts of those who experienced some of Harrison’s fiercer outbursts. So much the better. The Other Minds 22 concerts took place at the Mission Dolores Basilica; and someone involved with the production of the event decided to display an “icon” of sorts coupling photographs of Harrison and Colvig, identified at “Saint Lou” and “Saint Bill.” Harrison was no saint. He was as human as the rest of us, which should make our appreciation of his achievements all the more endearing.

Hearing, Listening, and Ducks: Tracking Down the Source

Yesterday I wrote about my frustration with Google in trying to track down the source of an often cited quote by Igor Stravinsky:

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

This morning it occurred to be that a source of that frustration may have been my decision to use Google, rather than Google Scholar; but it turned out that this purported “scholarly tool” was even less useful than “mainstream” Google. As a result, my only recourse was to follow through on the promise I made to go over to the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) in search of Stephen Walsh’s book, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971. As is frequently the case with scholarship (at least as I was trained to practice it, realizing that it may well be pretty much a lost art by now), this turned out to be a good-news-bad-news affair. Fortunately, the good news significantly outweighed the bad.

Before getting into the specifics, however, I need to observe that being directed to Walsh’s book turned out to be a matter of dumb luck. For those who did not follow yesterday’s narrative, I only learned about it when I added “Craft” to the search keys for the online SFPL catalog, assuming that the text came from one of the many conversations that Stravinsky had with Robert Craft that were subsequently transcribed and published. In fact Craft had nothing to do in this particular case; but, because Walsh’s book is so thorough, Craft’s name appears in it with great frequency!

The text actually came about thanks to Deborah Ishlon, publicity director for Columbia Records. Columbia saw Stravinsky as a “property” and was determined to have him direct, or at least supervise, the recording of all of his compositions. This resulted in a fancy box of vinyls entitled Igor Stravinsky 1882–1971: The Edition (a rather arrogant subtitle, when you think of it, particularly since it was far from complete), which eventually found its way to a 22-CD collection. This was followed in October of 2015 by a 57-CD box set entitled Igor Stravinsky: The Complete Columbia Album Collection. Both of these were notorious for prioritizing the visual over the auditory; and there have been sources that have suggested that Columbia’s treatment of Stravinsky was pretty much on the same level as how the label handled Thelonious Monk … a road paved with good intentions that led you-know-where!

The good news was that Ishlon was also interested in capturing Stravinsky’s thoughts about making music. Thus, according to Walsh, she ended up tape recording a conversation of her own with Stravinsky (without any appearance of Robert Craft). Walsh observed that Stravinsky probably informed Ishlon in advance of the questions he wanted to answer. Nevertheless, Walsh was struck that the text consisted entirely of Stravinsky speaking English, in contrast to the Poetics of Music lectures he had given at Harvard, which had to be translated.

According to the footnote that Walsh provided, the transcript of Stravinsky’s encounter with Ishlon now resides at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (foundation) in Basle. It is unclear just how long this document is, but Walsh’s book reproduces six paragraphs. These are worth reading in their entirety, at least for my own benefit, if not for the curiosity of others:

To be a good listener you must acquire a musical culture, as in literature. You must be familiar with the history and development of music, you must listen. The person with the subscription ticket for concerts, he is not necessarily a musically cultured person. He is musical only because the music is performed in front of him. To receive music you have to open the ears and wait, not for Godot, but for the music; you must feel that it is something you need. Some let the ear be present and they make no effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

The larger the audience, the worse. I have never attached much importance to the collective mind and collective opinion. You can imagine what collective opinion looks like. Especially in America, they like to speak and work with masses. But music is not a moral activity, to render the masses more happy. Music cannot deal with such things. Music never was for the masses. I am not against masses. But please do not confuse the value of the music which is addressed from ear to ear with the value of music addressed from one ear to a million ears. That doesn’t mean for millions, but for each of the millions. Don’t make the mistake of merely multiplying.

No audiences are good anywhere, but the major level, the best musical level, is that of the Germans. They have a higher level of listeners because of their musical history and musical culture. You can think how it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The people who listened to music were much more learned; music was for them a language which they knew well. They knew not only by passive listening but by active playing. Everybody played—harpsichords, organs, flutes, violins. They had the habit of music played with their own hands, not only by ears. Now we hear music by the gramophone. This gives maybe more people a connection with music, but the result is not the same because the passive is not the active.

Accustomcy to music is a fact with which we have to count. We think that very difficult works like all the last works of Beethoven are better understood now. No, people are simply more accustomed to them. It isn’t that they understand better. People are not shocked by dissonances. Otherwise, why should we write them? And shocking really means striking. To be merely shocking is vulgar. It could not be the legal goal merely to be shocking. Music should be striking.

A composer thinks about the audience, but not primarily. If you think about audience, you don’t think about your work. You think about a reaction which will come from certain things. If the audience is yourself, that is quite different. To be yourself the audience is difficult; it is difficult to multiply yourself. To become an audience by imaginary multiplication does not give you new value.

Where is music going? How can we see the direction? Even going very high we can see very little. The higher we go, the less we see, because we are far away. If we are very close we see only a part of the mountain. We can judge about some facts. But to draw a conclusion is another thing. We can never be absolutely right.

That pretty much covers the good news side of the day’s efforts.

However, Walsh’s footnote also specified that a “substantial excerpt” of this text was included in Memories and Commentaries, a book published by Faber and Faber in 2002 that lists both Stravinsky and Craft as authors (in that order). This is basically a “greatest hits” volume of material that had first appeared in the five books that Craft compiled based on his conversations with Stravinsky: Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1958), Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), Dialogues (1982), and Themes and Conclusion (1972). Note that the title Memories and Commentaries appears twice, each identified by a different abbreviation in Walsh’s bibliography. The abbreviation in Walsh’s footnote refers to the 2002 edition, but the page number he provides makes no sense. Unfortunately, that was the volume I found on the shelf at the San Francisco Public Library. I now have the card catalog number for the 1960 volume and will have to make another trip to find it (hopefully without having to walk through the rain)! Meanwhile, having the larger body of text that was excerpted for inclusion in Memories and Commentaries is definitely a step in the right direction!

Paul Hersh Brings an Expressive and Cerebral All-Beethoven Recital to SFCM

Last night in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), pianist and violist Paul Hersh presented what amounted to a “final report” of a project he undertook during the fall term with three graduate students, violinists Kevin Matson and Shelby Yamin and cellist Evan Khan. The “surface structure” of this undertaking involved preparing performances of three chamber music compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven with consecutive opus numbers. As was observed when this concert was announced on this site, opus numbers are a highly unreliable guide to Beethoven’s chronology.

However, the project was not so much an evolutionary perspective on Beethoven’s efforts as a composer as it was an exercise in teasing out the expressive elements that distinguished these pieces in the Beethoven canon. Nevertheless, Hersh always introduces works on his program with remarks; and it was clear that the pursuit of this project entailed considerable cerebral effort. On the basis of those remarks, one can assume that much of that effort went into the nature of time itself.

Indeed, Hersh had much to say about the significant distinction between subjective time and “clock time.” However, he seems to have overlooked a temporal element that may have been the most significant attribute that all three works had in common. The one time Hersh identified this element specifically was at the beginning of the program, the Opus 95 string quartet (“Serioso”) in F minor in which he played viola with the three graduate students. The coda of the final movement shifts from F minor to F major for a rapid flood of eighth notes at a breakneck Allegro pace, keeping the dynamics as soft as possible until a few forte punctuations arise towards the conclusion, culminating in a surging crescendo in the last three measures. This idea of an almost disruptive “dash to the finish line” also concluded the other two works on the program, the Opus 96 violin sonata in G major and the Opus 97 (“Archduke”) piano trio in B-flat major. (This same device would later show up in one of Beethoven’s most popular works, the Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor, with its wild Prestissimo coda to the final movement.)

While Hersh did not dwell on this particular aspect of Beethoven’s subjective approach to time, he had much to say about subjectivity in general, particularly pertaining to the sense of prolongation or of time standing still. What made this discussion interesting was that, by virtue of framing his points in many of his own experiences, Hersh offered up valuable insights into the performer’s sense of time. This tweaked several of my own personal nerves, since it was the first time it occurred to me that the listener’s sense of time need not align with that of the performer’s. Thus, Hersh’s anecdotes about time standing still had more to do with moments or episodes that seemed to take forever, while the listener’s experience often arises from a combination of what has gone into the score pages and how the performer(s) choose(s) to interpret those pages.

From the listener’s point of view, the best example last night of time slowing down, if not coming to a full stop, could be found in Opus 97 in the Andante cantabile ma però con moto. This is an early example of Beethoven composing variations on a theme whose duration decidedly exceeds the “length specifications” encountered in the eighteenth century. One might almost say that the variations do not emerge from a “theme” as much as from an episode that is traversed multiple times, each of them involving a different context. When that episode unfolds at a slow pace, as is the case in Opus 97, the listener often has to go do great deliberative effort to orient himself/herself around a defining pulse. One might almost say that, while the variations composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were poetic, in this movement of Opus 97 Beethoven was experimenting with prose. This means that the listener’s very sense of the passing of time has been, to some extent, undermined, thus encouraging the illusion that the very flow of time has been suspended.

In his discussion of Opus 96, Hersh also dwelled on the need to find significance in every note on the page. He observed how when, in the first movement, Beethoven returned to his opening thematic gesture, he added a passing tone to what had originally been a wider interval. This gave Hersh the opportunity for a brief riff on the distinction between sign and symbol based on his reading of Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. Langer’s thoughts on this matter basically came out of her exposure to Charles Morris’ Signs, Language and Behavior, which, in turn, had been inspired by the pioneering writings on semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce. All of those thinkers put considerable effort into the problem of how we make sense of what I casually like to refer to as “marks on paper;” and, since those score pages are based on their own systematic lexicon of marks on paper, it is understandable that all of us, from time to time, find ourselves barking up the semiotic tree. Indeed, some of the most committed barks have come from Jean-Jacques Nattiez, author of a book whose English translation by Carolyn Abbate is entitled Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music.

Nevertheless, here, too, problematic issues of time rear their heads. The problem is that those marks on paper are static, while making music must, of necessity, be dynamic. (Just to be clear about this, basic physics tells us that making any sound is dynamic. Sound does not exist in any immediate instance of time, a point that continued to haunt Edmund Husserl in his own efforts to grasp the nature of time-consciousness. Martin Heidegger did not manage much better in this regard.) In other words making sense of marks on paper may be prerequisite to making music; but, unlike those marks, making music involves actions that progress through the flow of time itself. Mind may carry the burden of the sensemaking; but the music arises through what James V. Wertsch called “mind as action” (a phrase he used as the title of a book he published in 1998).

Thus, almost all of Hersh’s commentary comes back to the tight coupling of the actions of making music to the very consciousness of time itself. It is through that consciousness that we are aware of succession and simultaneity, of evenly-spaced pulses and the grouping of those pulses to expose rhythmic patterns, and of the extent to which any act of performance entails a metaphorical journey. The marks on paper may denote the beginning and ending of that journey; but in the mind of the attentive listener, that journey only “exists” through its process of unfolding in the immediate present. This is what makes the act of listening so satisfying, the fact that, because it is an act, it always reveals its own unique identify every time it occurs.

Erik Satie’s Encounter with Aristotle

I recently decided that I needed a better acquaintance with the “Nicomachean Ethics” of Aristotle, when, through a footnote, I discovered that it was the source of one of my favorite quotes (first encountered, along with attribution to Aristotle, by reading Pogo):

For one swallow does not make a summer

This morning I found another fascinating connection, although it would not surprise me if the connection were an accidental one. It has to do with an observation that usually seems to be attributed to Erik Satie, which is the music is what happens at concerts. Unless I am mistaken, I first learned about this from John Cage int he summer of 1968; and it has stuck with me ever since then. (It even showed up on this site back in April of 2012.)

The “Aristotle connection” has to do with his thoughts about how doing is necessary for learning. One of his examples is that one becomes a lyre-player by playing the lyre. In a more general sense this means that one becomes a music-maker by making music; and, to move into Satie’s domain, another version would be that one becomes a concert performer by giving performances in concert settings. This is a favorite topic of mine, because it offers yet another perspective on the need to establish a verb-based foundation (as opposed to a noun-based one that is grounded only in objects and attributes, just like entries in a database) whenever we try to talk about music in a productive way. It is not just that both making and listening to music are inextricably anchored to the fundamental flow of time; it is also that our very knowledge of music (a word I try to use with great delicacy) cannot be abstracted away from that same temporal flow through noun-based “representations” of “concepts,” “notations,” or “documents.”

This is a stance that I encountered many years ago in a book that I still value highly by Donald A. Schön, whose full title is The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. In his coy way, Satie was basically saying that, if you want to know what music is, pay attention to how a music-maker (be (s)he performer, composers, or even improviser) is “thinking in action.” If you can think that way, then you, too, can give concerts and be recognized as a music-maker!

Is There an Analogy between Listening to Music and Reading a Text?

Having already turned to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics in trying to address the problem of listening to music as a real-time process, I find it may be necessary to address the question of why a hermeneutic stance may be useful at all. After all, hermeneutics is basically about the act of understanding difficult texts. Originally, those texts were sacred; but, with the rise of the Enlightenment, the study extended to secular domains, such as literary, historical, and legal texts. The hermeneutic discipline, in turn, chose to tease out subtle differences in terms that we tend to take for granted when we use them informally, terms such as “expression,” “interpretation,” and “eloquence.”

When we shift our attention to music, we should have no trouble thinking of any artifact of music notation as a text. We may then ask whether or not any of the techniques or results of hermeneutic study will tell us anything about the connection between notation and performance on one side and the relationship between performance and listening on the other. One way to begin would be to try to unpack the different terms that Gadamer used in his approach to the understanding of texts.

He seems to treat “interpretation” as the most fundamental of those terms. This may be taken as a “semantic decoding” of the text, approaching the text as a representation of underlying ideas. Similarly, there is an underlying decoding of music notation, which amounts to translating a basic set of symbols into a schedule of auditory events, so to speak. Of course not all symbols admit of simple decoding. Even the position of a note on a staff has some degree of variation with regard to intonation unless one is playing an instrument, such as a piano or organ, that does not allow for that variation.

One thus advances from the decoding of symbols to what Gadamer called “everything that we have to get behind.” In other words there is the flow of events that can be traced to notation itself; but then there are other flows of events that are, in one way or another, the results of “personalization.” “Expression” is Gadamer’s way of trying to get at the mindset behind the text, treating the text as a bridge between the mindset of the author and the mindset of the reader. In music the author is the composer, and the reader is the performer. However, the performer can also bring “eloquence,” which amounts to an alternative to expression. Ultimately, it is through eloquence that the performer then builds a bridge of his/her own to the listener.

This may be one way to approach what may be one of Gadamer’s key observations:

Rather, all reading involves application, so that a person reading a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends. He belongs to the text that he is reading.

Through the act of expression, the performer arrives at a point at which (s)he “belongs” to the notation at the foundation of the music being performed. However, that is not the end of the story, because it is through the act of eloquence that the listener may then belong to those phenomena perceived through the act of listening.

Granted, this strays pretty far from the familiar path that we usually encounter when addressing the “sensemaking” of symbol systems. Rather, it may be a path that explicitly recognizes the need for the performer to find a subjective layer behind the notated music and the need for the listener to find a social layer behind the actions of the performer. From that point of view, Gadamer has proposed an approach to hermeneutics that both teases out just what those layers are and then tries to find the right way to characterize how they interact.

Communion

This past Monday I tried to cast the problem of “understanding processes while they are processing” in the framework of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach to the discipline of hermeneutics. I appealed to Gadamer’s evocation of the concept of communion to describe the relationship between an individual sitting in the audience and the performance being played before him/her. Gadamer had developed this “secular” approach to communion with respect to a dramatic performance; but there is no reason to avoid translating it to a musical setting.

From that point of view, I would like to consider a particular sentence I encountered in Truth and Method:

Our line of thought prevents us from dividing the hermeneutic problem in terms of the subjectivity of the interpreter and the objectivity of the meaning to be understood.

In other words the act of listening is one of interpretation; but we should not fall into the trap of assuming that listening to the performance of music is a matter of “deriving” some objective “meaning” out of our perceptual processes. After all, as was previously suggested, those doing the performing are most likely engaged simultaneously with the objective world of the symbol systems on the score pages, the subjectivity of bringing expressiveness to the “decoding” of those symbols, and the social world of “real-time engagement” with the other performing musicians. Listening is never a matter of just recognizing and sharing that process of decoding. Rather, it is one of assimilating the expressiveness being conveyed and “inhabiting” (to use the word from Monday’s article) the social world of the performers as something more than a detached observer. It is through the attempt to enter that social world, complete with its connections to the objective and subjective worlds, that communion is established. One might say that, through that communion, the listener escalates from being a mere observer to becoming an “involved” participant, even if that involvement takes place at a distance from the performers themselves. (There may be some connection between this approach to “involvement” and the concept of “care” that we find in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time; but that will require further exploration.)

Most of us are probably more familiar with this sense of physical involvement in settings of rock concerts and, for more limited audiences, the more spontaneous jazz improvisations. However, we can be just as involved when listening to music of any genre from any period of history. Indeed, that is one reason why I fall back so many times on the use of the concept of jamming when writing about performances of pre-Classical music. Sitting in the audience is not just a matter of listening to how musicians are interpreting a score. Rather, it is a matter of “bearing witness” to acts of making music; and communion arises which the scope of such witnessing takes in the objective, subjective, and social dimensions of those acts.

Understanding Processes While They are Processing

When it comes to understanding the nature of listening to music, acknowledging the differences between noun-based and verb-based thinking, as I did last week, is less than half the battle. It does little more than refine the statement of the problem, but it still provides a useful point of departure. The fact is that the very concept of understanding has a long and venerable history. Understanding the nature of understanding has its roots in how the practice of hermeneutics has changed over the centuries.

The original intention behind hermeneutics involved systematic approach to understanding the content of sacred texts. However, with the rise of Enlightenment thinking, the scope of the study broadened to all texts. Nevertheless, texts are artifacts. They can, literally or figuratively, be “held in place” and “examined” from many different “points of view.” Like my favorite metaphor of the elephant, they can even be “grasped” from many different locations, sometimes providing broadly varying data points that challenge the observer to assimilate them all. However, if we are to think about the performance of music as a phenomenon that extends beyond the symbols encoded on score pages, then we need to think about listening as a matter of trying to understand a process in the real-time flow of its very processing.

Hans-Georg Gadamer distinguished himself in writing about hermeneutics in Truth and Method by taking aesthetics as his point of departure. This allows him to pursue the fundamental nature of concept of play, thinking of the elephant-nature of that concept, a game from one point of view, the act of playing from another, and, more specifically, the process of enacting a drama from a third. He introduces the term “self-presentation” in referring to the relationship between the performers of and those in the audience. With almost religious rhetoric he suggests that there is a communion behind the individual sitting in the audience and the drama being enacted before him/her.

That sense of communion may be a fruitful metaphor to explore when one tries to take on how the attentive listener tries, as perhaps succeeds in the task of understanding the music being performed before him/her. There may be some means by which such a listener is capable of “inhabiting” (again in a metaphorical way) the music being performed, thus recognizing that the real-time cognitive processes are significantly different from those that emerge when one is manipulating the symbols on score pages. This may sound overly poetic, but sometimes ideas congeal out of serious efforts to make sense out of poetic vagueness!

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!

"… our pathetic native self"

I just finished reading Janet Malcom's harsh review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of Ted Hughes, now available online prior to my receiving it in the next issue of The New York Review of Books. I was particularly pleased with her concluding paragraph, in which she dismissed the idea that a biography should be about what the subject was "really" like. Her punch line about that topic was:

If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.

This left me wondering if this was her way of venting about the current mass addiction to social media, suggesting that whose who indulge most heavily are actually the most pathetic. In an earlier age (about which these addicts are totally oblivious), the prevailing motto would have been "Get a life!" In the absence of an authoritative voice to utter that maxim, such addicts can think of nothing to do other what broadcast every detail of "native self" to the entire Internet, neither knowing nor caring about how pathetic that act of broadcasting is.

Who Serves Whom?

In the latest issue of The New York Review, David Cole, in his article "The New America: Little Privacy, Big Terror," makes the following statement:

When we carry our cell phone, use (or have downloaded) apps on those phones, browse websites, send e-mails or texts, drive in our cars, or make purchases with a credit card, we send digital information about our whereabouts, our association, our interests, and our needs and desires to the corporations that serve us.

It is that last phrase that gets to me. We may be customers or clients; but, thanks to all those opportunities that Cole outlines, it is no longer fair to say that any corporation "serves" is customer or client base. Simply by providing all those data, we now serve them. It is almost as if, by virtue of the data they acquire, corporations now, for all intents and purposes, own us and deliberately manipulate us to generate numbers that look good on balance sheets and stockholders' reports.

I should have seen this coming. Back when I was trying to pursue "knowledge management" as a legitimate domain for research, I was first exposed to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While the ideals of CRM looked good enough on paper, allowing me to address questions of how knowledge management might leverage CRM by providing more personalized interactions with customers, once I saw the technology in use, I realized that it was pointing in the opposite direction. As I put it in a post back in 2010, it was basically a technology for "desubjectivizing" customers, transforming them from agents acting according to their personal motivations into data points to feed banks of analytical software. While others were looking for technologies that would commoditize knowledge, the game was going to those who had figured out how to commoditize their own customers!

Service Providers that Don't

As a followup to yesterday's post about reality-checking innovation, I feel it worth noting that the problem goes beyond the invention of artifacts. Yes, we are drowning in innovative artifacts, all of which are developed to realizes scenarios about how much better things will be when they work, as if the failure of any mere artifact was not an option. However, things are no better in the service sector, possibly because prevailing thinking (such as IBM's effort to declare and then study "service science") seems to have gotten hooked on trying to reduce service to a product. However, Google does not help you find which shelf has the eye drops at your local pharmacy; and, even automatic checkout systems (like the one at Safeway) need a human to see to what happens when human behavior does not meet the expectation of the machine. Similarly, one of the channels on your cable system does not black out all by itself: A machine may implement breaking the connection, but it is responding to some policy decision (or, perhaps, the refusal of the service provider to accept the terms proposed by a particular channel).

These are not consequences of what happens when the technology breaks. They are "corollary events" that arise because, no matter how many machines there are, we are still part of a sector of people inhabiting the world. As people we are consumers of both products and services. The providers may wish that they would not have to deal with our all-too-human frailties, but they seem to have decided that denial is a better strategy than coping.

Still, there is a lesson to be learned here. Don't waste your time raging against the machine. Find out (perhaps with the help of one or more machines) who are the people behind the machine. They are the ones who should feel your rage!

New Results in the Study of Memory

It is unclear what to make of this morning's report on memory research filed by BBC News Science Reporter Jonathan Webb. It was definitely helpful that Maria Wimber, the University of Birmingham research whose results were being discussed, went to some length to emphasize that human memory did not follow the store-and-retrieve paradigm of computer memory. When she talked about memory "traces," she seemed to suggested that these were "trails" left by a dynamic process, possibly the way that indentations in the snow indicate not just a path that had been trod but even further details, such as the pace at which that path was traversed. Nevertheless, we must also recognize that the experiment that was discussed in Webb's article, involving recall of photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, was more than a little artificial. Understanding the making of music is probably a more useful domain in which we may come to understand the dynamics of memory, but it is likely to take some time before we can collect data for such a complex setting.

Conferring on Extremism

As a refugee from the world of high technology research, I must confess that I have a rather jaundiced view of conferences. It has struck me that such events have always been, first and foremost, an excuse for travel. When the excuse was to parade recent activities, I came to accept it as tolerable and even set the standard that if, over the course of half a week away from my desk, I had encountered one result worthy of attention, then the trip was a good one.

More insidious, however, are those conferences that are concerned more with policy than with results. These are an excuse for little more than jawboning. They may conclude with an agenda of action items, but action rarely emerges from such an agenda. As a result I was far more than a little skeptical when I read about the White House hosting a special conference on terrorism.

Having read Marwan Bishara's editorial this morning on the Al Jazeera English Web site, I was glad to see that I was not alone in my thoughts. Bishara was perceptive enough to look beyond all the usual gratuitous observations that were uttered and turn, instead, to what was not said. Furthermore, I chose to concentrate his enumeration of "sins of omission" on the conference's host, President Barack Obama. Here is the basic summary of that enumeration:

Obama said nothing about how proxy and other western wars have created the fertile grounds for the type of extremism that has been evolving and spreading in the Arab and Muslim world.

How the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan coupled with US/Saudi intervention on the side of the mujahideen led to the creation of al-Qaeda.

Or, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, coupled with Iran's interference, prepared the ground for the creation and expansion of ISIL.

Nevertheless, I think there is a broader view, which first came on my radar during the early heady days of the Arab Spring. It is not enough to observe that the world, as a whole, has lapsed into a "forever war" mentality. We need to home in on how that mentality is being sustained.

What we learned from the protests that arose during the Arab Spring (protests that, it is important to observe, extended to include the educated young citizens of Israel) was that the current generation of youth, particularly those who have enjoyed a rich education, is desperately concerned that they have no future in the world as it is being run by its current leaders. While Corita Kent believed that war was not healthy for children and other living beings, that slender minority that controls the lion's share of the world's wealth sees great value in war, particularly as a solution to providing for those of the "other class," condemning them to be little more than "cannon fodder" for the many new generations of cannons that provide a major chuck of revenue to the moneyed class.

In also is amusing to see how, through control of the consciousness industry, that class has tried to cloak its elite status with a smoke screen. The recent report about the top 1% controlling more wealth than the remaining 99% overlooked just how much of that top 1% has almost no control at all. That upper tier needs to be narrowed down to 0.1%, if not 0.01% before we can really appreciate just how unevenly wealth has been distributed.

In my "other life" of writing about music, I have recently been listening to a new recording of the songs composed by Claude Debussy. This last of these songs, for a single unaccompanied voice, is a Christmas carol for homeless children. Debussy wrote this in 1915 when Europe was being torn apart by war. Who speaks for the homeless today?

Henri Bergson on Nouns and Verbs

It seems to have been about a year since my last riff on the need to distinguish between noun-based and verb-based thinking when distinguishing between music as an artifact, usually in the form of some system of marks on paper, and music as the result of some act of performance. I remember that at one point, during that interval, I found myself in casual conversation with two members of a string quartet, telling them that people who worked in professions such as science, engineering, finance, and business management all tended to constrain their thinking to nouns and adjectives, partly because so much of their work had become driven by databases that could only allow for structures based on noun phrases, while those who performed music distinguished themselves by living in a world of verbs. Because such thoughts never leave me, I often seek out other writers who have based their work on a similar perspective.

That is probably one reason why I finally decided to spend some time reading Henri Bergson. I have now progressed to the final chapter of Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell's English translation, the book that led to Bergson receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. As the title suggests, Bergson approaches evolution more as an ongoing creative act, rather in terms of those artifacts that emerge that process. The book does not make for easy reading. His paragraphs often stretch out across several pages, and it is not always easy to parse them down into individual elements of the argument he is trying to make. However, every now and then, the verbiage distills down to a more manageable brevity, as with the following passage:

But things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions. More particularly, if I consider the world in which we live, I find that the automatic and strictly determined evolution of this well-knit whole is action which is unmaking itself, and that the unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent the action that is making itself.

This is still a bit unwieldy; but there is something rather exciting about the possibility that Ludwig Wittgenstein's "world as I found it" can be reduced to the "unmaking" of an ongoing evolutionary process. Bergson may not have registered very strongly in Wittgenstein's Vienna; but his influence seems to have reached into the work of Martin Heidegger and then moved on to Jean-Paul Sartre. Unless I am mistaken, Albert Einstein also found him fascinating reading.

A Telling Choice of Words

It was hard to avoid reacting to this lead sentence from an article on the BBC News Web site about the free trade agreement that Australia has signed with China:

Australia's international education industry will benefit hugely from a major trade deal sealed on Monday with China, experts say.

Regular readers probably know that I continue to voice upset over how our country has come to call health care an industry in which market share is more important than the physical well-being of our citizens. I suspect that the shift to the computer-based delivery of course material has already established a similar industrialziation of education. However, it seems as if we deal with the sorry state of education in this country by ignoring it, while health care has become the favored battlefield for conflicts between extreme ideologies.

To be fair, the story about Australia seems to involved the fact that it will be easier for Chinese students to go to Australia to study at the universities there. In other words it does not appear as if the fundamental work practices of education are going to suffer as a result of this agreement. Nevertheless, the article is about market share, addressing the numbers of Chinese students coming into Australia in comparison with the number of Australian students choosing to get their education in another country. Like it or not, the bean-counters are in charge of the future of Australian universities, just as they are here; but here nobody seems particularly interested in paying attention to the state of affairs.

Does Money Buy Happiness?

Hannah Gregg, of ABC7 News, decided to revisit the 2009 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Denton, which established that income of $75,000 was the threshold of emotional well-being. Granting the fact that the study was controversial, she decided to see what would happen if she tried to adjust this so-called "Happiness Benchmark" to account for economic factors, such as inflation. Her conclusion was that the benchmark had, indeed, risen and was now at $83,000. She also prepared a state-by-state breakdown, applying her calculations to individual states to determine what it would take to be happy there. As might be guessed, California clocked in above the average at $95,325.

Idle curiosity drove me to look back on my tax forms for last year. Since my wife and I are both in retirement, I figured that, at the very least, it might tell me something about how effective our "wealth management" practices were. I discovered that our household was above the national figure and below that for California.

Needless to say, I do not take any of this particularly seriously. Obviously, when revenue shifts to a stock portfolio, you start thinking more about income than growth. In 2006, I decided to set up a spreadsheet through which I could track the difference between income and expenses on a month-by-month basis. It turns out that, while, at this fine monthly level, that difference fluctuates between positive and negative, over the long term we have been pretty successful at keeping it positive. We refer to the cumulative difference as a "cushion."

One result is that we tend to think of large expenses in terms of their impact on that cushion, bearing in mind that it has become sort of a rainy-day resource. This means that we tend to spend less than we did when household income was significantly higher than the benchmark. However, I do not think that either my wife or I would say that we are less happy because we are spending less. To the contrary, I think that one of the results of moving over to retirement income is that we are more likely to be happy with what we have, rather than what we want.

I wanted to report on this exercise because I believe that emotional well-being is an important factor. However, I have to worry about the reasoning behind the effort of Kahneman and Denton to reduce it to a single number. Indeed, I have argued in the past that such "bottom-line thinking" is responsible for a lot of really bad social decisions, the most serious being those concerned with health care. Even worse is when that bottom line is a dollar figure, rather than some other quantitative measurement.

Then I realized that I was flying in the face of nature. A consumerist society is all about having what you want and having a bottom-line dollar figure that will allow you to get it. It is a bit like a casino in which the tables are rigged against you. You can never have enough money to be happy; but, as John Oliver noted on his HBO program last Sunday, you are manipulated (by what is sometimes called "consciousness industry") into such an unrealistic state of optimism that you prefer the remote chance of breaking the casino's bank to the dangers of the more likely outcome that the casino will break you. The possibility that happiness can be found by walking away from the casino, rather than walking into it, never really arises, simply because those who have the wealth can spent it on propaganda to convince us that no alternative is even remotely thinkable.

Perception and Listening

Having now finished John Sloboda's The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music for the second time, I still find myself at odds with those who try to take too "scientific" an approach to any musical act, whether it involves composition, performance, or listening (in Stravinsky's sense of the word that distinguishes it from mere hearing). Earlier I tried to express my discontent through the rather reductive proposition that "psychologists do what psychologists do." However, I think it would be fairer to say that psychologists do what can be done in a laboratory setting. More specifically, that setting is one that, for most purposes of the concept, is divorced from any sense of time-consciousness. At the very least the scientific community requires that results be reproducible, which means that are products of a situation that can be duplicated. Such duplication, in turn, demands isolation from any dependence on past history.

Such isolation, however, in unrealistic where any of those aforementioned musical acts are concerned. As I previously put it, making music is always, of necessity, "entangled" in history. As soon as we try to abstract out that entanglement, the actions we examine are no longer musical in any fundamental sense of the concept. Thus, while psychology may tell us a lot about perception, it is unclear how much enlightenment in can offer with regard to what Stravinsky meant by listening.