A Listener’s Point of View of a Performer’s Point of View

Earlier this morning I cited the book Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971 by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. This is a chronicle of a concert series that I came to know only about a quarter century following the end of the chronology cited in the title, when I had the opportunity to enjoy a stimulating evening of “new music” in the auditorium of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Through Crawford’s book I learned that, late in his life, Igor Stravinsky had become a “regular” audience member for the concerts in this series, even when his own music was not being performed! That same concert series also led to Pierre Boulez forming a high opinion of Los Angeles as a venue for experiencing adventurous new works by a wide diversity of composers.

Through this book my attention was directed to an early article in the Perspective of New Music journal, which had been contributed by Leonard Stein. (During my own time in Los Angeles, I knew Stein primarily as the Director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, which, at that time, was based on the campus of the University of Southern California.) The title of Stein’s paper was “The Performer’s Point of View;” and it involved how he, as a pianist, tried to deal with the complexities of many of the compositions that he had tried to prepare for performance.

Stein’s paper appeared in the Spring, 1963 issue of Perspectives, only the second issue to have been published. By 1963 there was a significant body of composers who felt that basic music notation was inadequate for what they wanted to create. There emerged a wild diversity of scores, some of which extended the expressiveness of traditional notation, others invented elaborate symbol systems (which required even more elaborate supplementary notes on how those symbols were to be interpreted), and still others were coming up with little more than graphic designs, often with few, if any, hints as to how those images should be interpreted as acts of performance.

As an aside, it is worth noting that five years later, in May of 1968, John Cage completed a book entitled simply Notations. The book consisted of single-page score samples provided to Cage (one by Cage himself) by 269 composers. Those samples were presented in alphabetic order of the composer’s last names. In addition, each composer was asked to provide a brief statement (no more than 64 words).  Each of those statements was then assigned to a specific page of the book on the basis of chance operations, meaning that (as far as I could tell) what the composer chose to say never ended up on the same page as the notation example (s)he had submitted.

Cornelius Cardew’s contribution was a page from his Treatise, described on his Wikipedia page as “a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation.” Another composer who tried working with highly abstract graphics without any notes about the process of interpretation was Earle Brown. His “December 1952” from his Folio collection was such a piece. Given that interpretation was in the eye of the reader, the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music selected eight students to compose their respective interpretations of Brown’s abstract image; and, in July of 2016, the members of sfSoundGroup performed their interpretations of the scores created by the students (not all of which involved conventional notation). In such a context of diverse approaches to composition, Stein clearly had his work cut out for him in trying to establish and then document his “point of view” when confronted with such scores for performance.

For the most part, the article surveyed a sample of challenging score pages. In each case Stein began by considering what he had to read and proceeded from there to make a case for how decided to interpret what he had read as a keyboard performance. Ironically, however, Stein’s manuscript does not include a single instance of a word whose stem is “listen!” This recalled Milton Babbitt’s article about the growing distance between composers and listeners, which he published under the provocative title “Who Cares if You Listen?” (That title was misinterpreted by many, including at least one New York Times critic, to mean that Babbitt and his colleagues were contemptuous of audiences, failing to recognize that Babbitt was calling out a problem, rather than declaring a manifesto!)

This brings us back to Crawford’s book and a passage quoting the words of percussionist William Kraft. Boulez had come to Los Angeles to conduct a performance of his “Le Marteau sans maître.” Kraft described the first rehearsal as follows:

We assumed that Marteau had been mathematically conceived and mechanically notated. Certainly, it was not the product of the human mind and ear. When [Boulez] began the first movement with the count-off, “Un-deux-trois,” so rapidly as to sound like one word (perhaps the name of a new French perfume or liqueur), we simply froze—and said, “What did you say?” … He has since reduced the tempo marking of that movement from a quarter-note equals 208 to a quarter note equals 168. But it was when he sang our parts that the true shock hit us. The man knew what he had written. Furthermore, if it could be sung, albeit with the registral adjustment for the voice, it could be played. … My ears became so finely tuned that I could (and had to) hear what everyone else was doing.

In other words Boulez clearly knew how to listen to his own music, and a primary goal of rehearsal was to make sure that the players knew how to do the same.

However, this anecdote reveals a problem that is at least as significant as its account of a solution. What if the performers do not have access to someone with the experience of knowing how the music should sound? What if the composer is so committed to indeterminacy that (s)he has no “fixed point” for “how it should sound?” Given a score page in which the very act of interpretation may, itself, be indeterminate, what, if anything, can a performer to do bridge the act of performance with the act of listening on the other side of the proscenium?

There are no simple answers to any of these questions; and, most likely, there are not any complex ones either. Perhaps the shoe needs to be placed on the other foot. If an ensemble assembles to prepare a performance of “Marteau,” perhaps, before anyone picks up his/her instrument, the group, as a whole, should address the question of why they are playing the piece. The old mountain-climber’s answer (“Because it’s there.”) really doesn’t cut it. Performers are about to invest many hours of preparation time for what will be a half-hour experience on audience side. Assuming that they want something more than a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot reaction from their listeners, they cannot take the matter of audience response lightly.

This should not necessary be treated as a major cerebral undertaking. I have long felt that Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 7 (first) string quartet in D minor is, as I put it last December, “a major challenge for even the most dedicated serious listeners.” However, on that December occasion, the Telegraph Quartet prepared the audience with a “road map” of key themes and an overall sense of how the uninterrupted performance could be structured into the four traditional movements of a classical string quartet. Given only a few items of such expectation, the challenge ceased to be as daunting as I feared it could have been.

Without trying to raise any religious implications, I would like to suggest that the act of performance involves a Janus-faced pair of acts of communion. On the one hand there is the communion between the performers and the composer, which sometimes can enjoy being face-to-face but, more often than not, is mediated by marks on paper that need to be interpreted. However, that interpretation must than provide a basis for communion with the listeners. It is rarely the case that both of these acts of communion are simple or even straightforward. (If they were, they could be subjected to texting, rather than musical performance!) Thus, rather than worrying about how to care about listening, performers should simply own up to the fact that caring is rarely an easy matter and commit themselves to preparing, rather than surprising, their listeners.

Karajan in Berlin: Advances in Production Quality

The title of the ninth box in the thirteen box sets that comprise Warner Classics’ Karajan Official Remastered Edition is simply Herbert von Karajan 1970–1981. These are, for the most part, recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic from the same period as the “Berlin edition” of his Herbert von Karajan and his Soloists recordings. Like the last of the boxes of the Philharmonia Orchestra, there is no overall theme to the contents. At best one may describe it as a “West Meets East” selection, with three CDs devoted to France and a (very) little bit of Italy followed by four CDs traversing Eastern Europe into Russia.

Many (but not all) of the selections in this box had previously been recorded with the Philharmonia. In this case, however, the Devil is not in the details but in the dates. The Philharmonia recordings were made during the Fifties. Audio technology had changed significantly by the beginning of the Seventies. Thus, the recordings in this later box were made with vastly improved equipment being operated by engineers with more advanced technical skills.

The primary evidence of improvement can be found in the wider dynamic range. In other words the soft moments could be, when necessary, softer; and the same held for the loud ones. Unfortunately, just about all of the selections in this box tend to favor the loud side, making the package a rather disconcerting account of Karajan at his least impressive.

Readers may recall that the Russian Music box with the Philharmonia was one of the best in the set because Karajan presented the symphonies of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky without ever descending into vulgarity. Apparently, new technology made that descent harder to resist. Decibels rule, not only in the Tchaikovsky symphonies but throughout the entire box. My own tastes in jazz led me to recall two of the tracks from Charles Mingus’ Oh Yeah album, “Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me” and (with apologies for Mingus’ vulgarity) “Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am” (although there are few, if any, signs of Karajan saying “thank you” over the course of his recordings)!

On the positive side, remastering means that listeners can appreciate that breadth of dynamic range far better than they could when these recordings were first released. This will doubtless impress those more occupied with audiophilia than with the music itself. Since I have made it clear in the past that I am not one to be so occupied, audiophiles should be free to disregard all I have said about these recordings and revel in the dynamic extremes!

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.

Cat Explores Old Optical Illusion

Now that everyone is bored with arguing over the color of a dress, along comes a photograph of a cat with the question of whether it is walking upstairs or downstairs. However, this is basically an appropriation of an optical illusion listed in Wikipedia as the Schroeder stairs. Here is the original version:

The basic idea is that you can view either A or B as the outer face of a stair structure. The the first case you see stairs descending to the floor; in the second case they are rising to the ceiling. As the Wikipedia author observed, this illusion inspired Escher's "Convex and Concave."

In this case a photographer figured out how to photograph a staircase to allow for the same kind of ambiguity in interpretation. The cat was then added just to make the image interesting. The point has less to do with the reality of the setting in which the photograph was taken and more with how it reproduces a classical optical illusion, older than the cat and everyone looking at the photograph.

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.

Why Anthropology?

Regular readers should know by now that I often appeal to anthropological practices in my writing, particularly involving the study of work practices and not only on this site but also in my writings for Examiner.com. Much of this may be attributed to the amount of time I spent rubbing shoulders with workplace anthropologists when I was an IT research in Silicon Valley. However, I realized that there is another perspective that might be useful.

Several weeks ago, while I was waiting for a concert to begin, one of the managers of the ensemble I was covering came by and observed that I was reading Local Knowledge, a collection of essays by Clifford Geertz. Since she had studied anthropology, she wanted to know why I was reading his work. I replied that I had spent the better part of my time as a student with my head in an innumerable number of scores. As a result, whether I was attending a concert or listening to a recording, I could never get my head away from questions of fidelity to the score, without realizing that there was more to performance than decoding pages full of symbols that had nothing to do with the English language. That "more," of course, had to do with the ability to consider the performance of music as a work practice grounded in a culture no different, fundamentally, from the culture of sculptors in a particular African tribe or (the example to which I was closest) the culture of technicians who repair copy machines.

What appealed to me in Geertz' work was that he appreciated the extent to which one could appeal to the abstractions of symbols (such as those in music notation) as part of the study, as long as one did not overload the attention one paid to those symbols. Here is a passage from this "Art as a Cultural System" essay that particularly appealed to me:

To be of effective use in the study of art, semiotics must move beyond the consideration of signs as means of communication, code to be deciphered, to a consideration of them as modes of thought, idiom to be interpreted. It is not a new cryptography that we need, especially when it consists of replacing one cipher by another less intelligible, but a new diagnostics, a science that can determine the meaning of things for the life that surrounds them. It will have, of course, to be trained on signification, not pathology, and treat with ideas, not with symptoms.

This idea that interpretation involves more than decoding and may even involve a frame of mind oriented towards diagnosis appealed to me when I read it, and it continues to appeal to me. It seems to be that anyone who sits in the audience during a performance of music is trying to make the experience an intelligible one. If, as I writer, I realize that this is what I am doing and if I can then translate my efforts to do so into a readable text, then I may be of assistance to others faced with that same problem of finding intelligibility. If that is the case, then I feel obliged to follow Geertz' lead, putting more attention into the "culture of making music" than into either the objective artifacts of that culture (scores and recordings) or to any intellectual effort that tries to abstract the music away from how it is made, whether it involves a mathematical analysis of a symbolic representation or the far more pedestrian ideology focused on worshiping the "greatness of a hero."

Is the Recording the new RES FACTA?

Once again I find myself taking issue with the "Audiophiliac" opinions of Steve Guttenberg over on CNET News. This time it involved his launching a poll on the question:

Live vs. recorded music -- what's better?

Indeed, I am tempted to assume the contentious position that the very phrase "recorded music" is an oxymoron. In this respect I suppose I am reviving the way in which Tinctoris adopted Aristotle's distinction between making and doing, to which I devoted a post last month. In that post I quoted heavily from a paper by Rob Wegman entitled "From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450–1500." In this case I would like to home in on one sentence:

While written counterpoint, by its very nature, can only be represented by a noun (res facta or cantus compositus), oral counterpoint necessarily requires one to use a verb (cantare super librum).

A recording, particularly one made with extensive studio work, can never be anything other than a res facta (literally, a "made thing," with some bizarre connotations of the Mafia expression "made man"). Doing is clearly part of the process; but, when the work is done, it is inevitably secondary. True Aristotelian doing only takes place in the immediacy of performing in front of an audience (and lip-syncers need not apply). Calling anything else "music" amounts to taking a counterfeit to be the real item.

A Musicological Appreciation of the Distinction between Nouns and Verbs

At the beginning of this year, I wrote about an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society by Rob C. Wegman which suggested that the governing powers of "the city of fifteenth-century Leiden thought more about the issues of both education and poverty than government at any level in our own country in the present day." However, I was not drawn to this article by my interests in educational policy. Rather, I was drawn to the paper by its title "From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450–1500." I had encountered that title while reading Kate van Orden’s book Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print, about which I had written (in rather glowing terms) on my Examiner.com national site at the end of last month. The thesis behind this book is that the sixteenth century, which happened to begin with the publication of the first volume of the masses of Josquin des Prez in 1502, was a period during which how people thought about music went through a radical "paradigm" shift (to invoke the terminology of of Thomas S. Kuhn's monograph, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." In prior centuries thinking about music was solely a matter of thinking about making it through performance. However, Ottaviano Petrucci's printed volume of Josquin's music introduced the possibility that one could make music by making a document, rather than making a performance.

This struck a familiar nerve for me. Last August I had found myself thinking, once again, about the difference between a verb-based approach to thinking about music (where the focus is on those actions that lead to performance) and a noun-based approach in which thinking about artifacts, such as pieces of paper with music notation on them, is more important than the dynamics of interpreting the notation. It was that familiarity that led me to check out what Wegman had to say about the distinction between making and composing. Through this paper, I was pleased to discover that I was far from the first to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs in thinking about music. Instead, that recognition could be traced all the way back to Aristotle.

There are some real gems of observation in that section of Wegman's paper that deals with the distinction between making and doing. His primary source is the medieval theorist Tinctoris, but he is also interested in how one can read Tinctoris' texts properly. Here is the first quote that resonated with me:

At the root of Tinctoris's perception lies the Aristotelian distinction between making (poiesis) and doing (praxis). Music, by definition, belongs to the latter category. To ‘make’ is to produce a piece of work, an object, and sound is not an object but motion. It is fleeting, transitory, immaterial: sound cannot be made (factus) but only uttered (prolatus).To think of music as a ‘thing’ is a paradox: things have permanence and spatial extension, and for sound this is unthinkable unless it is represented by ink on paper, thus assuming matter and form.

The distinction between nouns and verbs then arises in addressing the nature of "Tinctoris's perception" as follows:

And the principal characteristic of the perception is, in fact, its commonsensical nature, its rootedness in everyday language: a thing is a substance (noun) modified by accidents (adjectives),while motion is caused by action (verb), involving an agent (nominative) and patient (accusative). Tinctoris's written/mental classification, cited above, parallels exactly this noun/verb distinction. While written counterpoint, by its very nature, can only be represented by a noun (res facta or cantus compositus), oral counterpoint necessarily requires one to use a verb (cantare super librum). The noun contrapunctus, covering both, can be an overarching term by virtue of being, not an object, but an ars, a knowledge of the rules for making and doing.

From that position Wegman can then return to the "Aristotelian distinction," now reflected by the writings of Thomas Aquinas:

Although writing, creating, and making are nowadays used interchangeably as synonyms for composing, medievals were acutely conscious of the distinctions between them, and they carefully maintained these in written statements. ‘To create,’ as Aquinas put it (ibid., 264), is to ‘produce something out of nothing,’ which only the Creator can. To make or to compose is to work on or put together material provided by nature, which is what the artist does. To write, finally, is to copy (scribere).

I suppose that, had I been younger, I would have felt disappointed to discover that what I had thought was my own bright idea had actually been hijacked from Aristotle. However, I have been nurturing this idea for quite some time, going back to my own days as a Silicon Valley researcher. No matter how hard I worked at it, I always felt as if I was the only one who saw any value in it. As a result of reading Wegman's paper, I no longer feel quite so solitary!

"Intelligence does not Work That Way"

This morning's "state of play" report on the BBC News Web site, written just before our do-nothing Congress decides to do something when nothing would be preferable, included an interesting statement from White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough:

We've seen the video proof of the outcome of those attacks.

Now do we have a picture or do we have irrefutable beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence? This is not a court of law and intelligence does not work that way.

There is every reason to believe that ongoing "expert analysis" will confirm that the videos cited by McDonough show victims of some form of chemical warfare. The experts may even be more specific as to the chemicals themselves. They will not, however, say anything about how those attacks came to pass: Who deployed the weapons, and how did they get them to deploy.

It is because of that final point that I have to wonder if, in making that final sentence, McDonough knows anything about how intelligence does work. For example, neither judicial decisions nor the interpretation of intelligence evidence can be based strictly on abstract principles of logic. The concept of reasonable doubt was introduced in recognition of the inadequacy of pure logic. Any case made in court can never be anything more than a well-formulated hypothesis. It is up to subjectivity to then decide whether or not that hypothesis should be rejected on the basis of reasonable doubt..

Having had the opportunity to examine some training material for intelligence analysts, I can state that the way in which intelligence "works" is not that different. The most important difference is that, while in most courts, there are only two hypotheses at stake, those of the prosecution and the defense, respectively, intelligence analysis needs to take a broader point of view. Thus, in the face of a particularly hostile act, disciplined analysis is required to formulate as many viable hypotheses as the imagination will entertain and then consider all of them in the face of available evidence. There are even systematic techniques through which hypotheses can be "scored" with respect to the evidence. These techniques can just as easily lead to a search for more hypotheses (if no hypothesis is conclusively better than others) as to the selection of the most viable hypothesis.

This is a process that can be just as time-consuming as the analysis required to determine whether a particular location was the site of a chemical attack. It probably also involves more creative imagination (which, itself, can be time-consuming) in the interest of building a sufficiently large "space" of different hypotheses. My guess is that neither McDonough nor the members of the press he was briefing realize the extent to which this is how intelligence "works." However, if we end up barreling into Syria on the basis of ignorance, it would be better for the press to devote some attention to where that ignorance resides.

Rushdie the Unreliable Narrator

In the latest issue of The New York Review, Zoë Heller seems to have no end of ways to pounce of Salman Rushdie for his latest book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir. From what I have seen in several other reviews, she is not alone. For those unfamiliar with the book, the name is the title that Rushdie used as an alias when he was under threat of fatwa assassination for the heresy of having written (and had published) The Satanic Verses. Heller begins by observing that the book is written in the third person, a style she called "de Gaulle-like," although the best known practitioner was probably Julius Caesar.

However, the general annoyance with the book led me to wonder whether Heller and the other critics may have made the mistake of taking the title at face value. After all, Rushdie's primary defense for The Satanic Verses amounted to the assertion that the book was "only fiction." Indeed, back in the days of the Bush Administration, when I felt as if rationality were currently under siege from faith-based thinking, I liked to observe that faith-based thinking only allows literal interpretation of a text, never recognizing that there may be a more significant figurative reading. Given the ludic approach that Rushdie has taken to so many of his texts, why should we assume that the title of his latest book should be interpreted literally?

The Questionable Value of the Nobel Laureate

BBC Business Presenter Peter Day, to whom I listen semi-regularly through my BBC World Service feed, has an interesting piece on the BBC New Web site.  It involves a convening of Nobel laureates in Lindau, an old Bavarian town, which is an island on Lake Constance.  Day provides the following context for this gathering:

In 1951, a distinguished local Count took up the bright idea of two local doctors for an international conference where Nobel Prize winners in various disciplines could lecture and interact with the best and the brightest under-30s in their fields from all over the world.

This year, as might be expected, economics was on everyone’s mind.  The funny thing is that in 1951 there was no Nobel Prize in economics.  Alfred Nobel had not included this in his areas worthy of his award.  The Nobel Prize in Economics was actually created by the Swedish Central Bank in 1968 in celebration of the Bank’s 300th anniversary.  Ever since then it has been controversial.

One of the most articulate sources of controversy was himself a Nobel Laureate in Economics, Friedrich Hayek.  He initiated the controversy in his acceptance speech, quoted in part by Day as follows:

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.

This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence.

But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.

Hayek might have added (and may have done so) that the most important legacy of any natural scientist is the body of data (s)he collects.  Those data may be subject to different interpretations by later generations of scientists;  but the “hard value” of each datum will still stand.

As Hayek frequently observed, the complexity of economics is so great that even the reliable gathering of data can be called into question.  What does that say about the prospects for interpretation?  Look at Ben Bernanke.  He wrote one of the most authoritative analyses of the Great Depression, a model of scholarship involving both the collection and interpretation of evidence.  What does that get him in current conditions?  At the rate things are going, the sale of a used copy of his book might pay for a trip on the Metro in Washington.

The corollary of Hayek’s complexity claim is that even the best economists can rarely do more than hypothesize.  Before hypotheses are subjected to rigorous testing, they are good for nothing other than opinions.  Hayek’s point is that the authority conferred by the Nobel Prize provides a bully pulpit for opinions, regardless of whether they have been warranted (or, as is so often the case in complex systems, can be warranted).

The current gathering in Lindau reminds me of Colin Quinn’s joke about Davos.  Every year all the leading economists of the world gather to meet in Davos.  Between sessions they wander through the streets of Davos;  and, as they look around, they conclude that the world is in pretty good shape.  Isn’t is about time that all those economic authorities have one of their meetings in Haiti?

The Secret Service Takes On the "What is Art?" Question

There are any number of layers of interpretation that make the BBC News account of the case of Kyle McDonald interesting.  On the surface McDonald is an artist, currently working on a project-in-process called People Staring at Computers.  BBC News provided the following description of the project:

A photographic intervention. Custom app installed around NYC, taking a picture every minute and uploading it if a face is found in the image.

Exhibited on site with a remotely triggered app that displayed the photos full screen on every available computer.

Since mine is a generation that endured Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film of a guy’s night of slumber (entitled, appropriately enough, Sleep), I have to say that I find the prospect of looking at how people behave in front of computer screens far more interesting.

One of McDonald’s sites for collecting images is an Apple store in New York.  Having been in the two Apple stores in San Francisco, I again applaud his decision.  Those are lively places;  and, while the people you find there trying out the devices available to them are probably not representative of the overall population of computer users, they are a really great source for people-watching.  McDonald claims he was given permission from security guard, and that may have been the start of his problems.

What has happened is that McDonald’s home has been raided by the Secret Service;  and Apple has “declined to comment” on whether McDonald had been authorized to collect his data.  I can certainly appreciate that a security guard did not have the right to grant this authority;  but, at the very least, we deserve a better account of McDonald’s inquiry.  He may have framed his request for permission in a way that made it more innocuous than it actually way.  These days it is one thing to collect video and photographs on individuals who do not know that they are on camera and quite another to distribute that content globally through the Internet without addressing any questions of invasion of privacy.  On the other hand the guard may have erred by not considering the implications of the request and failing to refer McDonald to someone better equipped to make the judgment call.

Then there is the question of whether or not the immediate action taken by the Secret Service was a raid.  All they have confirmed is that this was an investigation of “electronic crime” having to do with “Fraud and related activity in connection with computers.”  The obvious question is whether the Secret Service felt there were grounds for this accusation by visiting McDonald’s site or by other means that did not wish to state at the risk of compromising their investigation.

All this is one way of saying that it is hard to draw any conclusions (or even formulate some viable hypotheses) on the basis of information currently available.  In this context, however, the real irritant comes from how BBC News decided to headline this story:

Secret agents raid Apple store webcam 'artist'

The implication is that McDonald’s status as an artist is questionable, either because his activities do not confirm to accepted norms for what artists do or because the People Staring at Computers projects is actually a cover for some more nefarious activity.  The fact that the story itself does not use those scare quotes suggests that its author sees no reason to doubt McDonald’s claim to be an artist;  so why did the BBC decided to muddy further the waters of interpreting the events being reported when those waters were already pretty murky?

Further Reflections on the 1970 Time Frame

Writing yesterday about the 1970 concerts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York reminded me just how exciting that time was.  I suppose I had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time as a corollary to a series of writing and composing activities that began in the summer of 1968, a pivotal time in my life about which I have written in other contexts.  This morning I found myself thinking about the various ways that I came to know about Cornelius Cardew.

I first became aware of Cardew when the MIT Music Library purchased a copy Treatise.  I was not sure what to make it at the time, and I am not sure I know any better today.  Cardew’s Wikipedia page describes it as “a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation;”  and I doubt that I can come up with a better description.  (John Cage included a preliminary sketch of a page in his Notations anthology.)  The thing is that the phrase “considerable freedom of interpretation” may be the height of understatement.  The American edition was published by Gallery Upstairs Press in Buffalo.  So, from my point of view, it is highly reasonable that one reader (such as the Wikipedia author) would “interpret” this document as the score for a piece of music, another might take it as an innovative approach to graphic art, and yet another might take it as a semiotic exercise of a text represented by a non-standard repertoire of signs.  (I was actually surprised that this breadth of “interpreting interpretation” has not yet come up on the Wikipedia Talk:Cornelius Cardew page.  There is a Mode recording of a “performance of the score” by Petr Kotik’s QUaX Ensemble (Petr Kotik, flute; Pavel Kondelik, tenor sax; Jan Hyncica, trombone; Josef Vejvoda, percussion; Vaclav Zahradnik, piano).  It is from a live performance in  Prague on October 15, 1967 lasting about two hours.  Having spent a fair amount of time with this score, I agree with Amazon.com reviewer Michael A. Duvernois that the performance itself is rather a “short take” for the number of pages;  but I am still impressed that someone decided to follow up on this approach so soon after the “score” was published.

As a result of my own fascination with Treatise, I later leapt at the opportunity to hear Cardew speak when Christian Wolff invited him to the Goethe Institute in Manhattan.  His topic was the Scratch Orchestra, an improvisatory ensemble that Cardew formed for the performance of another one of his major projects, The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound.  To the best of my knowledge, The Great Learning has yet to be performed in its entirety;  and, according to its Wikipedia page, the Scratch Orchestra was “effectively inoperative” by 1974.  However, the Deutsche Grammophon recording of their performance of Paragraph 2 and Paragraph 7 is still available from Amazon.com;  and there may still be copies of the organ of Corti CD that includes these two performances, recorded in 1971, as well as one of Paragraph 1 made in 1982 (after the date Wikipedia gives as that of the ensemble’s “demise”).

Those familiar with Cardew will probably notice that I have judiciously avoided saying anything about his politics.  This is because politics never came up during the talk I heard him give and because I never saw anything to be gained from a “political reading” of Treatise.  According to his Wikipedia page, Cardew did not turn to his extreme left-wing politics until after he lost hope of The Great Learning ever receiving a complete performance.  His beliefs were sufficiently extreme and vociferous that, when he died of a hit-and-run accident on December 13, 1981, his friend John Maharg told his biographer, John Tilbury, that MI6 had probably been involved.

I could care less about his politics.  Musically he was an anarchist, but I have never been afraid of anarchy.  After all, the Internet is also anarchic;  and I figure that I can approach Cardew’s anything-goes attitudes about making music with the same cautious awareness I now bring to the Internet.  I would like to believe that, if Cardew were alive today, he would be more interested in the Internet as a new medium for performance, rather than for the promotion of his extremist political positions;  but this is a moot point based on my having him speak only once, and then in better times for all of us.  The bottom line is that I continue to enjoy listening to recordings of his music and would welcome an opportunity to encounter that music in concert performance.

Purveyors of Noise

What happens when you assemble a panel of some of the world’s keenest analysts of economic signals before an audience too stupid to grasp the difference between signal and noise?  This may be the best way to describe a panel assembled for the World Economic Forum in Davos on the topic of “the perils of economic prediction,” just reported on the BBC News Web site by Business Editor Tim Weber.  I am familiar with the work of at least two of the invited panelists, Carmen Reinhart and Joe Stiglitz;  and I know they are capable of explaining both the practices of what they can do and the supporting theory in language clear enough for a lay audience to understand.  However, if the Davos audience wanted them to make predictions that would guide critical business decision making, than they may as well have been asking them to work miracles.

I suppose it all comes down to the fallacy of trying to use an explanatory model for predictive purposes.  However, while there may be some validity to the hypothesis that knowledge of the past can prepare us to confront future situations, the very title of Reinhart’s book (This Time Is Different) stresses that the historical past that is most informative in an explanatory sense tends to be the evidence that is most ignored.  The sad truth is that those Davos conferees are not interested in analysis.  They just want magic bullets that increase wealth and power, and models to not provide those bullets.

At the risk of committing my own sin of over-simplification, I would suggest that, while figures of profit and loss figure in just about every economic model, economics is not about profit and loss, let alone, as the operations researchers would put it, maximizing profit and minimizing loss.  Rather, economics is about how agents behave in the midst of complex systems, systems so complex that they involve a diversity of human actions far beyond the scope of the transactions of trade.  This is why Alfred Schutz’ paper, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” includes a footnote mentioning that “A Treatise on Economics” is the subtitle of the book that Ludwig von Mises entitled Human Action.  The panelists assembled to strut their stuff before the Davos audience probably all appreciate this distinction.  They are probably also smart enough to know that those on audience side who invited them will most likely never get it.

The Most Aggravating Fiction I Ever Read

Recently I seem to be spending a lot of time listening to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 120, his 33 variations on that waltz theme that Anton Diabelli circulated to publicize his publishing business.  For those who do not know the story (easily accessible through Wikipedia), Diabelli figured he could come up with a “best seller” by composing a waltz that would be published with a variation by every important Austrian composer living in 1819, “as well as several significant non-Austrians,” as the Wikipedia author puts it.  Here is how that author describes the response to this project:

Fifty-one composers responded with pieces, including Beethoven, Schubert, Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, and the eight-year-old Franz Liszt (although it seems Liszt was not invited personally, but his teacher Czerny arranged for him to be involved).

However, asking Beethoven to write a single variation was a bit like asking anyone else to eat a single potato chip (the basis for a major advertising campaign by the folks at Frito-Lay);  so Diabelli published Beethoven’s 33 contributions in one volume and everyone else’s in a second.

The problem that arises when Beethoven goes over the top in the number of variations he composes is that both performer and listener have to confront a major challenge of orientation both “in the small” (within each variation) and “in the large” (within the entire composition).  When I have had to deal with getting my mind to embrace an opera by Richard Wagner “in the large,” I have, in the past, resorted to “total immersion listening.”  This amounts to listening to a recording of the piece with as much frequency as a serious performer would spend practicing the music.  Opus 120 clearly deserves that attention (particularly since I doubt that my keyboard skills will ever be up to playing the damned thing);  but I am not going to make any promises as to whether I shall have any results to report (let alone when I may arrive at those results).

Nevertheless, that parenthetic remark about keyboard skills triggered thoughts about authors I have encountered who insist on showing off their knowledge of music, often with the result of advertising the painfully shallow limits of their amateurism.  My favorite bête noire used to be Douglas Hofstadter, whose Gödel, Escher, Bach practically invited me to throw it against the wall (which I probably would have done had I not been assigned the task of reviewing it).  Fortunately, I was eventually able to take some comfort from Vladimir Nabokov, which I reported in an earlier post.  In that case I was responding to a comment by David Simon about the television business:

The average Emmy voter has the attention span of a gnat.

This inspired me to respond as follows:

Vladimir Nabokov had chosen somewhat more elegant language when he lectured about reading Dostoevsky as "a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize" (a pleasure which I had experienced at its greatest when I had to write a review of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach) ….

There is, however, one author for whom I would be hard pressed to call the reading experience “a mischievous but very healthy pleasure.”  That author is Fred Hoyle, at least when he was writing science fiction, rather than any of his more serious work in astronomy.

Hofstadter’s sin was in trying to draw conclusions about Johann Sebastian Bach by looking at his more “idle pastimes,” such as the puzzle canons from the BWV 1079 Musical Offering, while completely ignoring all those uncanny examples of synthesizing technique and expression that may be found in his sacred music.  Hoyle, however, would use his fiction to go straight to the jugular of Beethoven’s masterpieces, usually by creating an alter ego who was a concert pianist.  In The Black Cloud that character decides to test the hypothesis that an enormous cloud blocking out the sun is actually sentient by playing Beethoven’s Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) to it.  (As I recall, the cloud dismisses the performance with a style that Nabokov would have enjoyed.)  However, this “Hammerklavier” experience is chicken feed when compared with October the First is too Late, whose protagonist is obsessed with Opus 120.  Quite honestly, I have forgotten the number of times he plays this work in its entirety in the course of the novel.  I know it was at least three, and I remember finishing the book with the feeling that I had now endured the most blatant example of authorial masturbation I had ever encountered in text!  Beethoven may have had a problem with writing too many variations on this one theme, but that problem was nothing compared to Hoyle’s making us endure playing the result far beyond any limit we would call excessive.

For my part I have to confess that I have yet to hear Opus 120 performed in a recital.  I suppose that is why I am now focused on taking to trouble to get the music into my head.  When the occasion arises I want to make sure that I am better prepared to be a serious listener than Hoyle ever was!

Phenomenological Music Theory

Yesterday afternoon, while gathering background material for an Examiner.com review of a recent Brilliant Classics collection of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet music (along with a few other selections) performed by Ernest Ansermet conducting his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, I found an interesting sentence in the Wikipedia entry for Ansermet:

In Ansermet's book, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (1961), he sought to prove, using Husserlian phenomenology and partly his own mathematical studies [Ansermet began as a mathematics professor at the University of Lausanne], that Schoenberg's idiom was false and irrational.

Arnold Schoenberg died in 1951; but, even ten years after his death, there were still strong factions willing to attack him at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, not only was Schoenberg not around to defend himself in 1961 but also many of his staunchest defenders were probably more deserving of attack on grounds of the nature of human consciousness than Schoenberg was.

Consider, for example, the misconceived enthusiasm of René Leibowitz, who got caught up in the mathematics behind the permutation of twelve tone rows and lost all awareness of the music that employed those rows. In 1945 Schoenberg wrote a letter to him that tried to reprimand him with the words:

I do not compose principles, but music.

This is very much in the same league as another of my favorite Schoenberg quotations:

My music is not modern; it's just badly played.

I suspect that what bothered Ansermet most about Schoenberg's music was not the music itself but the scholarly obsession with only talking about that music in the most objective terms. Since he was no slouch in mathematics, he probably figured he could take on all of those amateurs fooling around with permutation groups on the mathematical ground they so cherished and understood so poorly. Furthermore, when it comes to confronting the inadequacies of the objective world, Husserlian phenomenology is as good a weapon as any.

The problem is that, if we follow Edmund Husserl's guidance into the subjective world, we find ourselves on turf where words like "false" and "irrational" do not amount to very much. In what Friedrich Hayek called the phenomenal world in The Sensory Order, there is no true-or-false about the way in which our consciousness organizes physical sensations, nor does the rationality of a logical calculus pertain to how that organization is achieved. Ultimately, Ansermet did not need to resort to mathematics to bash in the skulls of those who recognized only permutation groups. All he needed was a platform to enjoin those "amateurs" to spend less time looking at the score pages and more time listening to well-played performances. From a theoretical point of view, Husserl offers some interesting lenses through which we may consider the act of listening; but, considering the patience it takes to negotiate many of his texts, Ansermet probably could have selected a better advocate. On the other hand, had he been more willing to embrace the full scope of Husserlian phenomenology, Ansermet would probably have been less inclined to attack Schoenberg himself in the first place!

British Illiteracy?

My interest in the ironies of life was satisfied early this morning. After having committed a sizeable chunk of time to yesterday's rambling attempt at exploring my approaches to reading challenging texts, this morning the London Telegraph slammed me with the worst example of "junk writing" I have encountered on their Web site. Furthermore, since the example appeared in a headline, it is very likely that neither I nor anyone else will know who perpetrated the slovenly abuse of the English language. Of course the article itself was not much to crow about, particularly since it could not, in any sense of the word, count as journalism. Basically, the Telegraph decided to give Natasha Vargas-Cooper the opportunity to promote her new book, Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America, by reproducing excerpts under the newspaper's banner. For the most part I do not approve of such practices, but at least I appreciate the need for them. The real provocation came from the subheadline that declared Mad Men to be "the most literate show on television."

Don't get me wrong. I definitely count myself among the Mad Men enthusiasts (even if I have to watch it on my own because my wife refuses to be in the same room with any of its characters); but literacy is hardly one of its virtues. To the contrary, if the language of Man Men succeeds, it does so through the ability of the writers to capture the verbal ineptitude of all of its characters. This is an entire social sector that speaks almost entirely in clichés. The scripts succeed through establishing a tight coupling between the dramatic tensions of the plot line and across-the-board failures of communicative action in a manner that we previously could only expect from David Mamet; and, in contrast to Mamet, that coupling is achieved with a bare minimum of foul language. Furthermore, that verbal ineptitude is entirely consistent with (if not essential to) the setting that needs to be established. Beyond all the surface features of the advertising profession that Sloan Wilson disclosed in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose recent paperback edition has a male silhouette figure that clearly resonates with the opening credits of Mad Men), there is the deeper structure of the culture analyzed by Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Literacy is too "intellectual" for any of the Mad Men characters. (When Don Draper had his beatnik girlfriend, we saw him watching French Nouvelle Vague cinema; but, unless I am mistaken, we have never seen him or any other character actually reading a book.)

Now I am never sure which products of American television come to the attention of the British; but, if it is literacy they crave, I can come up with far better examples. If one is not put off when foul language is not kept to a minimum, then the most dazzling example may be the two seasons of Deadwood before it was canceled. These were scripts where it was not exaggeration to claim that every single word counted. Indeed, there were episodes that my wife and I watched multiple times, just to make sure that we were aware of how every single word fell into its proper place. More surprisingly, however, is that both my wife and I have been struck by the high level of literacy in, of all things, NCIS: Los Angeles. Whatever jokes you may want to tell about using the word "literacy" in the same sentence as "Los Angeles," these characters have a depth that they are not afraid to disclose, often with throw-away gestures that are probably lost on most viewers waiting for the next chase scene. After one episode, which subtly teased out a bit of that literacy, I remember telling my wife that these were characters who understood (and cared about) the difference between Rainer Maria Rilke and Theodore Roethke (a far cry from those "cultural literacy" polls of students who associate the term "Madonna" only with popular music)!

Needless to say, I know better than to believe that high literacy makes for high ratings. Still, I reserve the right to make at least some of my personal viewing choices on the basis of how much cerebral exercise they provide; and programs that acknowledge my intelligence, even if only with subtle gestures, tend to rate high on my list. I simply wish to argue that Mad Men does not appeal to me on these grounds; and, if it were to try to do so, then it would have to give up all the elements of establishing context that contribute so heavily to its success.

Reading Strategies

Yesterday I found myself reflecting on Ray Monk's valuable little "handbook," How to Read Wittgenstein. This is one of a series of "how to read" texts that was apparently the brain child of Simon Critchley, which struck me as a sort of latter-day rethinking of the Great Books Program, particularly as implemented at the University of Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century through the efforts of scholars such as Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. This matured into a grander vision of the core curriculum of "great books of the Western world" being read not only by undergraduates but also by neighborhood reading groups, for which Adler prepared a plan for covering the authors he had selected over the course of a year. He also wrote a companion volume helpfully entitled How to Read a Book to try to convey the message that reading these texts was not just a matter of jumping in at the beginning and plowing page-by-page through to the end.

When I was involved with a project called "Productive Reading," I put a fair amount of time into exploring the books Adler had selected as the canon for his curriculum, along with an elaborate system of indexing the complete set, which he called the Syntopicon. I also revisited How to Read a Book in the revised and updated edition for which Charles van Doren served as Adler's coauthor. (While browsing Amazon.com, I discovered that Blackstone Audio recently released an "Audible Audio Edition" of this book, read in its entirety by Edward Holland. This seems to carry the ironic connotation that you do not actually have to read a physical book to learn how to read books, thus freeing you from an "endless loop" situation!) After having been immersed in this activity of reading about reading for several months, I saw an announcement of Critchley's series and found it appropriate to investigate the possibility of an alternative school of thought and/or strategy. I selected Monk's volume because I figured it would be good for an "acid test."

At this point I should note that my personal habits probably would have aggravated both Adler and Critchley. I have long lived by the inclination to jump, feet first, into any new text, whatever reputation that text may have for being challenging. This may be because I tend to be as interested in style as I am in content, which has always made be a bit cool towards Adler's quest for getting to the content most efficiently without necessarily dwelling on style. Indeed, I have often wondered impishly whether or not Adler had encountered any of Slavoj Žižek's texts prior to his own death in 2001 and what impact those texts would have had on his preoccupation with efficient reading! For that matter, even before I had discovered Žižek, I had similar thoughts about Marcel Proust, whose Remembrance of Things Past is included in the reading list of How to Read a Book provided in the first appendix.

My own strategy has tended to be one of thrashing around in the midst of total immersion, usually taking notes of passages that catch my attention, even if I do not fully understand their text. While a lot of my colleagues have seen this as an opportunity to provide electronic books with support for underlining and/or highlighting portions of the pages being read, this for me has been only half (if that much) of my strategy. These days I copy anything I mark, usually onto PowerPoint slides, which for me have become the moral equivalent of 3 x 5 cards. This process of copying often contributes to a level of understanding that had not yet been reached when the passage was first encountered. (I remember being told of a counterpoint instructor at the Curtis Institute of Music, whose name I have long forgotten, who made his students write out their own copies of Palestrina, presumably under the assumption that one cannot copy particularly effectively without first having done some rudimentary parsing of what one is copying.) I copy into a digital domain, because I want to be able to search it; and I want to search because I know I will want to come back to it as a result of further reading I plan to do.

None of this fits in very well with Critchley's agenda, but I still found Monk's Wittgenstein handbook to be useful. Most importantly, Monk made me more aware of the need to seek out a structural architecture in the text even when that architecture was not explicitly delineated by the author. Indeed, it took Monk to get me to realize that the elaborate system of numbering each section of the Tractatus reflected a hierarchical structure. One could then reconstruct the hierarchy from the numbers and read the book "top-down," rather than from beginning to end. As a result I now often take notes pertaining to such architecture in other texts (particularly Plato), which then help me to properly sort the other notes I am taking. The other valuable element in reading Monk was the way in which he tried to establish a context for each text he considered (which meant that he could draw upon his own biography of Wittgenstein).

It seems to me that this question of context is important in establishing how you approach an author, particularly one whose texts are challenging for one reason or another. Thus, my recent attempt to compare Friedrich Nietzsche with Slavoj Žižek emerged from challenges encountered in reading both authors; and, while my hypothesis that these two authors were "unified" by the rhetoric of polemic may have been overly reductive, it set an initial contextual frame of reference in place. I have been reading more Nietzsche since then, which has given me an opportunity to tune up his piece of that frame of reference. Needless to say, much of that tuning has to do with what the polemic is attacking, rather than the rhetorical device itself; and it is interesting to see the extent to which his targets are other texts of philosophy, the most notorious of which, as I have already observed, are those of Plato.

However, when we get beyond rhetoric to more substantive argument, I have come away with the impression that the skills that Nietzsche exercises have less to do with philosophy and more to do with two other disciplines that clearly occupied much of his attention. One is philology, and we see that in play when he turns to Horace as a stick for beating Plato, even if most readers would never think of Horace as a philosopher. Nevertheless, this approach is very dear to me, partly because I have used it myself on many occasions. It is the idea that you cannot get at semantics without first "unpacking" the sign structures through which meaning is conveyed, particularly when the act of unpacking reveals as much about the thinker as it does about the thoughts being expressed through the text. There is thus an implicit assumption that words always "know more than they say," so to speak; and I relish an author who sees the value in teasing out such wordplay.

Nietzsche's other discipline is the more intriguing. It is psychology; and it is intriguing because, as an actual discipline, psychology was still very much in its infancy when Nietzsche was trying to get his own head around it. There are passages that reveal an almost uncanny intuition for where the study of psychology would eventually lead, even if Nietzsche himself lacked any clear sense of the path that would be followed. Consider, for example, his hyperbolic outburst about atomism in "Twilight of the Idols" (in Walter Kaufmann's translation):

The thing itself, to say it once more, the concept of thing is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear mechanists and physicists—how much error, how much rudimentary psychology is still residual in your atom! Not to mention the "thing-in-itself," the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! And made the very measure of reality! And called God!

This idea that "faith in the ego as cause" can go so far as to engender "the concept of thing" can be read, from our contemporary point of view, as the first suggestion that reality itself is psychologically constructed, a perspective that would have to wait about a century after Nietzsche's death before being considered as a feasible hypothesis.

Perhaps this strategy on my part reflects one way in which I actually agree with Adler. This is Adler's conviction that we should approach every text we read as if we are entering into a conversation with the author. However, while Adler tended to think in terms of the reader standing on the author's platform to conduct that conversation, it makes just as much sense (since the actual conversation is totally imaginary) for the author to be brought to the reader's contemporary platform. In Nietzsche's case this is a matter of reading his speculations in light of what we now know about human psychology and that still-murky area of consciousness itself. Any such conversation that ensues is likely to be a wild one that may even be well advanced by Nietzsche's preference for hyperbole; but it makes for an invigorating exercise, particularly if one spends much of one's time investigating the academic literature of far more "serious" scientists!

Attacking Plato

When I read Friedrich Nietzsche's bald "Plato is boring" declaration in Twilight of the Idols (at least in Walter Kaufmann's translation), my thoughts almost immediately turned to Louis Andriessen and his setting of passages about music from "Republic" in "De Staat." Here were two men from two adjacent centuries, who decided to have it out with Plato in ways whose similarities may ultimately be more interesting than their differences. This set me wondering just what intentions and motives they had brought to their respective efforts and what it was that each of them was really trying to say. At the very least it is clear that both philosopher and composer were interested in taking a polemic stance, but that observation means relatively little without homing in on the target of the polemic in each case.

In "Twilight of the Idols" it is too easy to read Nietzsche's sentence out of context, exactly the same problem we encounter with his more famous (infamous?) "God is dead" proclamation. I suspect that the best way to appreciate his attack on Plato leads through the opening paragraph of the section in which it appears and in the following sentences from that paragraph:

One does not learn from the Greeks—their manner is too foreign, and too fluid, to have an imperative, a "classical" effect. Who could ever have learned to write from a Greek? Who could ever have learned it without the Romans?

This paragraph, in turn, can only really be appreciated in Nietzsche's praise of Horace in the preceding section:

To this day, no other poet has given me the same artistic delight that a Horatian ode have me from the first. In certain languages that which has been achieved here could not even be attempted. This mosaic of words, in which every word—as sound, as place, as concept—pours out its strength right and left and over the whole, this minimum in the extent and number of the signs, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs—all that is Roman and, if one will believe me, noble par excellence. All the test of poetry becomes, in contrast, something too popular—a mere garrulity of feelings.

In other words the appeal of Horace lies in his "way with words." At the risk of making too great a stretch, I would venture a guess that the virtue of Horace's "mosaic of words" resides in the way it integrates the three strands of the medieval trivium, which has influenced my writing about the performance of music so profoundly. Specifically, "concept" captures the relationship to logic, "place" the relationship to grammatical structure, and "sound" the relationship to rhetoric.

From this point of view, we can appreciate at least one aspect of why Nietzsche should have found Plato so annoying. Plato is strongly suspicious of rhetoric, and that suspicion surfaces in several of his dialogs. Logic is paramount, and grammar is there only to provide structural support for the expression of logical statements. Rhetoric is at best mere embellishment and at worst a distraction from the logic. Nietzsche, on the other hand, makes it clear after his bald declaration that he totally rejects these priorities:

My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Principe are most closely related to myself by the unconditional will not to full oneself and to see reason in reality—not in "reason," still less in "morality."

In the context of "Twilight of the Idols" read in its entirety, this is a rejection of Plato's prioritizing logic in the face of the messiness of reality, not only in regard to man but also accounting for man's place in the overall natural world.

Here is where we may find a link to Andriessen, who in many respects is more interested in the messiness of reality (particularly the realities of making music) than in the pristine order of Plato's appeals to reason. His point of departure for "De Staat," at least according to the notes in the Elektra Nonesuch recording of the performance by the Schoenberg Ensemble, is the semantic absurdity of the excepts from "Republic" that he chose to set, particularly pertaining to the damaging effects of music that departs from the constraints imposed in "Republic." Andriessen flaunts Plato, not through the sort of highly charged words invoked by Nietzsche but through a deliberately iconoclastic approach to both composition and performance. The result strives to be an assault on our capacity as audience to find Friedrich Hayek's "sensory order" in the auditory signals that impose themselves on our ears. Indeed, if, in its minimalist unfolding of motifs, that assault was not strong enough, Andriessen strengthened it even further with "Hoketus," for two identical instrumental ensembles, each of which "fills in the rests" of the other (a device already exercised towards the end of "De Staat"), resulting in a maddening level of raw musical mechanism.

There is thus at least one way of approaching Andriessen has having carried the polemic torch that Nietzsche passed and expressing it through the composition of music. From this point of view, it should not be surprising that, a little more than ten years after the completion of "Hoketus," Andriessen composed "Nietzsche Redet" for speaker and chamber ensemble. I still need to track down the text he chose to set (let alone listen to this later work); but I now feel inclined to research this matter in greater depth!