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Musical Truth

This is a summary of part of Max Paddison’s Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture.

Art is always in a state of becoming, developing into the next thing - so says Adorno. This applies as much to music as to any other medium. This process of becoming involves negation - at each stage former stages are criticized. But this critique takes place within a tradition. Music used to be secondary to cult and magic but has broken free and as such it is part of the enlightenment project of the expansion of rationality.

Music works partly with the tension between immediate expression and the rationality of its form or construction.The mimetic aspect is to be found in the expressive pole. Music may be subject to each of analysis, interpretation and critique. Interpretation has a social dimension but focuses on the interplay between rationality and expression within the work.The expressive aspect relates to Geist - the Hegelian idea of the essential spirit of the time.

The technical analysis of music may reveal contradictions, which in turn can be understood in social terms, characteristic of a particular period.The apparent unity achieved at technical level in a piece of music is always deceptive in relation to a fragmented social reality which surrounds it. But beyond that each piece has its own specific riddle which may be approached finally at the level of interpretation. Adorno thinks that the riddle relates to maintaining a possibility of hope at the subjective level.

In his longer book, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Paddison explains that the subjective element in music stems from gesture rather than emotion.Gestures are spontaneous and communicative but also rooted in culture and it is via gesture that music involves mimesis. This raw material is shaped by some rational process into a piece of music.The rational process confers on the piece it’s apparent linguistic character for listeners - so that music appears to say something but we can’t say what.

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Pretty or Beautiful

Kant claimed  that our appreciation of the beautiful was disinterested and contemplative. This attracted Nietzsche’s scorn as he believed that the beautiful was the result of an act of creation.. N tended to agree  with those such as Stendahl who thought that beauty was linked to the promise of pleasure and consequently linked to the interests of the perceiver.

There is a long history of linking aesthetics to the dynamics of mate selection starting with Darwin. In many parts of the animal kingdom it seems that female select males on aesthetic criteria. There is another school which sees natural selection being only to do with fitness for survival. If that is the single mechanism for selection then aesthetics don’t have much impact. Indeed it may disfavour survival if for example birds with coloured plumage are easier for predators to spot..

If females select mates on aesthetic criteria in the animal kingdom  then the interest in beauty is reproduction. Possibly in human society the interest in reproduction has become more elaborated and includes other linked aspects . But if so this doesn't get us much further forward as post Freud sex has become associated with so much.

Dante’s  love sonnets suggest that for him beauty was linked to all kinds of positive values. Beauty has had a few advocates latterly including Sircello and Scruton. Scruton recognises that 20th century art disengaged from beauty. He puts this down to the rise of kitsch - kitsch is an aesthetic which apes aspects of High Art but fails to meet sufficient criteria. These days it is often seen in commercially produced religious art. Not to appreciate the realcharacter of kitsch is a sign of lack of sophistication.

Sircello maintains that if a person claims that X is beautiful then they can be pressed to name some property of X which is a reason why they make that judgement. For example in a beautiful landscape it might be the shape or the colour of the hills. The property selected in this way has to be something that admits of grades. The claim that X is beautiful means that X exhibits the property in question to an excellent degree. On this foundation he wants to support a Dante - type vision that there is a strong link between beauty and moral qualities.

The first point to note is that Sircello claims that his account of the beautiful only gives a necessary condition. Possessing a suitable property to an excellent degree is a requirement for something to be beautiful but if an entity has such a property it is not a guarantee that it is beautiful.

Sircello also admits that there are problems with the limited vocabulary available to describe sounds. Much oif this vocabulary is metaphor as well. The significance of music seems to go beyond the available vocabulary. This raises the possibility that there may be sounds which we judge to be beautiful but which we lack the ability to find a gradable quality for.

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Nietzsche’s disappointment with Wagner

In January 1889 Nietzsche had a breakdown from which he didn't recover during the last 11 years of his life. In 1888 he published The Case of Wagner and planned a book of other writings about W. My English translation of the Case of Wagner contains an Introduction to the Third Edition by Anthony M Ludovici dated July 1911.

One of N’s apparent gripes about W is his final opera, Parsifal, which happens to be the only W opera I have seen in a full scale production. Wagner has in Nietzsche’s opinion, made the stage the master of the arts, made actors corrupters of the genuine and made music the art of lying, all of which N abhors. N concludes that W’s metaphysical art is an attempt to manipulate the audience’s sentiments with rhetorically overblown devices and trickery. Nonetheless, as Michael Tanner points out, when W first heard Parsifal, he wrote to a friend about the Prelude in glowing terms- from a purely aesthetic point of view, has Wagner ever written anything better? He referred to the supreme psychological perception and precision and the extreme concision and directness of form.

In his very short introduction to Nietzsche, MT speculates on the factors which may have helped N turn away from W. The first is the unrealistic expectations which N entertained prior to his first visit to Bayreuth. N was unaware that in order to raise funds for the project the fashionable and well-healed but superficial fans of opera had to be courted. MT gives less weight to the reason that N stressed for the break - that W had adopted Christianity in the opera Parsifal. MT classes N as an aspirant artist who uses ideas from great art as a spur for his own vision but who sadly lacks the capability to produce great art. MT thinks that the most important factor was that W was the only one of his favoured figures whom he got to know personally. N could not reconcilethe inevitable tension between his image of W as a  symbol and the person he got to know.

In his strange autobiography, Ecce Homo, written in 1888, Nietzsche said that he was still searching for a work of art that could match Tristan and Isolde in terms of a ‘sweet and shuddering infinity’ Yet he goes on to say that one must be sick to experience ‘the voluptuousness of hell’ offered by this opera. The year before The Case of Wagner appeared, N published On the Genealogy of Morals, one of his most influential works. GOM is in four sections, the first of which seeks to disentangle different senses of good, evil and bad. The second examines the motivation and practice of punishment.. The third section is of more interest here, dealing with the practice and basis of asceticism. It soon emerges that N intensely disliked what he saw as the adoption of asceticism in Parsifal.

N starts by examining what the ascetic ideal means for different groups. The first group is artists and N selects Wagner as the typical  of course. He concludes that artists are not philosophers and need to get their philosophical foundations from someone else. In the case of Wagner this was clearly Schopenhauer. In the next section he considers the group of philosophers. They have adopted the ascetic mantle as a means of avoiding suspicion that they seek to usurp the power of the priesthood. The priesthood use asceticism as a means of social control.

N clearly thought W went right off the rails with Parsifal as he appears to adopt asceticism. But he seems to have had doubts before this starting with his disappointing visit to Bayreuth. The core of his disappointment seems to have come from his realisation that W used rhetorical trickery to gain power over his audience.

Initially N was a supporter of both Schopenhauer and Wagner. Kai Hammermeister’s  book, The German Aesthetic Tradition, distinguishes between three phases in N’s aesthetic as does Julian Young’s in his book, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art.

The first aesthetic comes in the Birth of Tragedy which represents his pro-W phase. The second is summarised as an attempt to reformulate aesthetics on the basis of sensual perception. N stated his change of heart on W as follows: My arguments against Wagner are physiological arguments: why hide them under aesthetic formula? Aesthetics is nothing but applied physiology. This is close to the position which many adopt today, thinking of music as the processing of signal patterns in the brain initiated by sound waves striking the ear. KH links this observation to another of N’s ideas which is current these days - perspectivism. This is the idea that each person’s perspective brings its own set of truths and there is no guarantee that any two sets of apparent truths overlap to any great degree.

This phase brings the concept of taste back into the centre of aesthetics, a place it had held for example for Hume and Kant but which it had lost in subsequent analysis, for example in Hegel. The problem, perhaps inevitably, is that taste is given its central role as a counter-weight to scientific rationality. So the outcome is that one just accepts that each individual just has their own individual taste and that’s all there is to it. Any object which increases the individual’s sense of power and pleases any of our interests is beautiful. Yet again one can find plenty of examples of this approach today.

Finally N elevates his aesthetics to the top of the hierarchy and attempts to use it to settle all other major questions. Julian Young suggests that in the final phase N accepts much of Schopenhauer’s analysis of the human predicament but adopts an opposite view of the implications.

For S art is for contemplative consolation. But according to JY  in the third phase of his aesthetics N goes back to his early description of Dionysian art. My reaction to this is that this also turns out to be a dead end . From 1966 onwards this avenue was thoroughly explored by Hendrix and Miles.

In GOM where N picks on S for drawing a sharp contrast between the aesthetic and the sexual (contra Miles and Hendrix). S sees sexuality as the life force manifesting itself in the individual will and so aesthetic experience offers a temporary remission from this subjugation according to S. N contrasts this with Stendhal's view that the beautiful promises happiness, a view which he finds much more acceptable.

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Scruton and Schopenhauer

S and S are two philosophers I have tried to ignore. Sir Roger Scruton is a philosopher of the right. Politics hasn't done Schopenhauer any favours. His emphasis on the primacy of the will links him to Nazi ideology. However, lately I have revised my prejudices. The concept of the will is in fact much more general than human volition as far as Schopenhauer is concerned . I think it comes from Schelling’s suggestion that there is a basic forward vector in the cosmos. Hence the title of his most important book, The World as Will. These days we have four forces which physicists like to think they have come close to unifying but it seems to me there are plenty of differences still between them. Physicists hope one day to have unified the four to a single driver.

Lydia Goehr describes Schopenhauer’s view of the essence of the objective world as will in movement - a blind  active and pure drive which shapes the  urgings and strivings of men and everything else. Schopenhauer elevated music amongst the arts, seeing it as more fundamental than the rest. In music we confront the objective character of the world as will. LG explains that Schopenhauer’ held that music is the pure expression of the will. It tracks the expressive course of the world-will as a temporal process.

Scruton thinks this particular attempt to link the external world and our internal world confronting music is mistaken. But he thinks an alternative related approach could account for engagement with music. Scruton selects our ability or propensity to see others as possessing an internal world like the one we experience as being at work when we engage with music. Tim Hodgkinson’s summary that music is sounds that listen to themselves is not far away this approach, it seems. So in music we are encountering the fundamental glue of our social world perhaps.

Scruton summarises Schopenhauer’s theory thus- music acquaints us with the will –  the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’, the indescribable reality behind the veil of human perception, whose operations we know through our own self-awareness. Concepts, provide us merely with representations, and never with the thing-in-itself. Our inner knowledge of the will is therefore non-conceptual, a direct and unsayable access to the metaphysical essence. This non-conceptual knowledge is offered also by music.

Scruton goes on - this explains music’s power: for it also acts on the will directly, raising and altering the passions without the intermediary of conceptual thought. Through consonance and dissonance music shows, in objective form, the will as satisfied and obstructed; melodies offer the ‘copy of the origination of new desires, and then of their satisfaction’; suspension is ‘an analogue of the satisfaction of the will which is enhanced through delay’. Music is a non-conceptual art, and therefore shows the inner working of the will itself, released from the prison of appearances.

Scruton summarises his own position - Music is then heard to address the listener, I to you, and the listener responds with the over-reaching attitudes that are the norm in inter-personal relations. These attitudes reach for the subjective horizon, the edge behind the musical object. The music invites the listener to adopt its own subjective point of view, through a kind of empathy that shows the world from a perspective that is no-one’s and therefore everyone’s.

Schopenhauer influenced Hegel and after him Hanslick, Wagner and Nietzsche. Hanslick was an opponent of Wagner, favouring Brahms. Nietzsche initially favoured Wagner but just before he descended into madness he published a critique. Perhaps this is the next stone to turn?

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Adorno on Colour in Wagner

Adorno wrote about Wagner at the end of the 1930s after he had been forced to flee Germany. His book is based on a set of chapters each of which tackles a distinct aspect of Wagner’s approach - motif, gesture, myth etc - and one such is colour.

Adorno thinks Wagner is a great innovator in terms of colour, building on and extending the practice of Berlioz and providing the basis for subsequent composers like Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov. Adorno notes that even today there is no widely accepted theory of orchestral colour equivalent to theories of harmony and counterpoint. Adorno concludes that the colouristic dimension is the domain of Wagner’s subjectivity. He links this to Wagner’s sensuality.

The opera where colour becomes a key compositional variable is Lohengrin. The first time I encountered a Wagnerian aesthete was at Cambridge where Michael Tanner preceded his aesthetics lectures by saying that he strongly believed that Wagner’s operas are supreme works of art. MT has written the Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner and he believes that the Prelude to Lohengrin is the  first time in music that an extended piece is structured via timbre. He  also quotes Nietzsche’s view that it is an example of hypnosis in music.

Wagner provided a programme for this piece in terms of the apparition of the Holy Grail. ‘The beholder sinks to his knees in adoring self-annihilation. The Grail pours out its light on him like a benediction and consecrates him to its service.’ Tanner observes that this description seems very much of its time while the music retains its power for us today.

Adorno who was himself a composer, studying with Berg, goes into some detail on the woodwind scoring in Lohengrin, how the combination of instruments and their intervals results in timbres which sound novel and where the ear cannot easily resolve the sound into its constituents. As the musical; statement progresses the timbre shifts via the imperceptible entry and exit of certain instruments.

From there I wonder how Adorno would regard noise. Is noise also a colour? We speak of white noise after all. Colour in Wagner is an aspect of music which is already parameterised in terms of pitch and harmony - and the alteration of timbre doesn't modify those parameters. But with synthesizers you can imperceptibly modify a patch in small steps so that it becomes a noise and the colour aspects supress the pitch. Colour becomes the dominant parameter of the sound. This is particularly true on the Volca kick drum synth for example which can become a reasonable string bass sound by parameter adjustment.

This makes me wonder if the threat of noise is tamed by breaking it up into rhythm. This might explain the popularity of the extreme affiliation that is achieved by collective enjoyment of EDM.

Adorno believes that Wagner has corrupted the notion that art might replace religion., He commends Verlaine for his oppositional stance in this regard. Also Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire which unifies individual imagination with a totality of dissonance. Whereas for Wagner’s music the nuances of his orchestration represent the triumph of reification. Adorno suggests that by making so  much of colour he is hoping that he can free himself from producing operas as commodities within the market. So the colour in Wagner’s orchestration is a kind of superficial varnish or make-up which is there to mislead audiences about how the opera came to be . If in contrast Pierrot Lunaire is authentic then noise entering music say with Varese in New York  between the wars might represent the next step along an honest trajectory.(In Stockhausen’s solo percussion piece in 1959, he claims to have taken percussion in a new direction away from conventional theatrics.)

Adorno’s musical aesthetics are complex - he knew a great deal about both music and philosophy and lived through dramatic social and political changes. The position of the composer within the social and economic ecology of his times is part of the overall account which Adorno provides. From this standpoint Rimsky-Korsakov is a more extreme example of colourism as an objective evasion. His difficulties at the St Petersburg Conservatoire in the student unrest that followed the 1905 military failures against Japan cast him as a classic liberal compromiser, on the one hand defending his student’s right to protest but on the other going on to resume a senior post at the Conservatoire before finally resigning. His oeuvre is operatic where he can incorporate exotic elements with more mainstream material and render a superficial coherence through colouration. But when he hears Debussy’s Pelleas and Mellisande at this point during a visit to Paris he is adamant that he will never compose anything similar.

This is also the point at which Stravinsky becomes a pupil, a period in his life which he subsequently remembered very fondly. Stravinsky is a composer that Adorno vilified in contrast to Schoenberg. Rimsly-Korsakov died of a heart condition in 1908. In his 1909 Five Orchestral Pieces, Schoenberg includes one entitled Farben or Colour Chords.

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Aesthetic Development

Heidegger is just one 20th century thinker who has been influential in aesthetics. Lukacs and Adorno are two more.

Lukacs is probably the easier of the two to get hold of. His focus was the novel, especially the realistic novel. He stressed the way a novel might give a quasi objective view of the whole society including the way individuals might through experience and reflection develop insight, especially political insight. Lukacs has variously been described as a Leninist, a Stalinist and a Hegelian. Lukacs may well be able to give a better answer than Heidegger to the question - why does this person’s experience matter? The individual may be either the author or one of more characters.

In my postgraduate education at Sussex U in the early 70s I did a course with a radical philosopher (now dead) called John Meopham. He made us read some key sections of Lukacs 1923 masterwork, History and Class Consciousness. At this time the Philosophy Prof was Istvan Meszaros who had been a pupil of Lukacs in Hungary after WW2. The two escaped to the West in 1956. I have just bought from India a copy of Meszaros 1972 book on Lukacs.

M has a very clear of the direction of influence from Lukacs to Heidegger and Adorno. He puts Adorno in a very impressive group of 20C philosophers who were influenced by it including Gramsci, Horkheimer, Mannheim and Marcuse besides Adorno.

Meszaros believes that the book also influenced the development of Existentialism via Heidegger and then Sartre and presumably de Beauvoir. Lukacs fled Hungary after the failure of the revolution in Hungary around 1920 and went to Moscow where he stayed until after WW2 just about surviving the purges. He acquired the negative reputation of being Stalin’s philosopher although think he deserves great credit for surviving a lot of the most murderous episodes in the first two thirds of the twentieth century.

Adorno is just as hard as Heidegger to understand if not more so. I have recently discovered that he liked John Cage’s approach which came as a surprise given he studied composition with Berg. He liked the way that Cage let sounds make their own intrinsic contribution. This is in contrast to Schoenberg’s highly formalist approach of serial composition. He preferred the music that Schoenberg created earlier - in the first two decades of the twentieth century, sometimes termed free atonality. Some commentators stress the role of dialectics in his approach and for me this certainly doesn't help me. More study needed. 

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Ereignis

This  is a word which features in Heidegger’s philosophy as the location of positive value. Besides its normal German meaning of event or happening it also bears a special sense around the following - truth, a clearing, presence, the being of beings and presence. All of this is close to the heart of H’s difficult philosophy. I source this clarification from Julian Young in the University of Aukland.

JY suggests that although Ereignis is at the heart of H’s philosophy , mistakenly he lacks the ability to discern Ereignis in music. H does believe that the driving experience of the poet which leads him to create poetry is Ereignis - becoming enchanted with and by the world - an ecstatic feeling of holiness.``

Heidegger was influenced by the German poet Holderlin who was active in the decades either of side 1800. Holderlin influenced the philosophers Schelling and Hegel and also a number of composers including Brahms, Britten and Nono. In the case of Nono, he found inspiration in Holderlin for the string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, which I bought once as a tryout and which made a great impression on me.

JY thinks that Heidegger has a good grasp of the mood of Holderlin’s later poetry but poses the question why we should give this poetry especial philosophical weight. Holderlin’s life was quite strange, more than eccentric, so why should we value Holderlin any more than to say that his poetry is effective in expressing how he felt about the world and his strange place in it?

JY suggests that universalist responses to the character of the world and indeed the brute fact of its existence can be subsumed under the philosophical heading of The Argument from Design. I have been wondering about the AfD from investigating the Standard Model of the Physicists - wondering whether there might be a route to a credible aesthetics of music based on Schelling and A N Whitehead in terms  of musical processes in some way capturing some truths about world processes.

Another commentator, Tony Lack, in his Kindle book Re-enchanting the World, poses the question of how H fits into the general pattern of German aesthetics since the end of the 18th century. Art is in Kant, he suggests, a means of overcoming alienation, healing the wounds of modern life, in Holderlin and Hegel,; for escaping the vicious cycle of desire and satisfaction in Scopenhauer and revitalising the culture in Nietzsche. So there are clear similarities between H and a number of illustrious predecessors.

TL suggests there are also some important points of originality, principally his emphasis on the essence of art works in terms of being and truth. He believed that Kant had the wrong approach in emphasising the disinterestedness in the aesthetic attitude. For H the importance of the work of art is the network of relationships which link the artwork to its context and culture.

H’s objection to Schopenhauer has a very modern ring and anticipates some aspects of neo-liberalism. Art shouldn't be simply a haven from the stresses of today, a soothing balm. Neither should it be (as in Bordieu) the code for participation in a cultural elite. Incidentally TL endorses aspects of JY’s interpretation of Heidegger.

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Marsalis Jazz Police

In the mid 70s Herbie Hancock agreed that he would do a retrospective at the Neuport Jazz Festival. Besides his current Headhunters band he would do sets with the Miles 60s 5tet, and his previous band Mwandishi. The latter proved very difficult to recreate. Even with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet the 60s 5tet fell into place and got a great response. The result was that the 5tet began doing prestige gigs around the world as VSOP. I saw one at the Albert Hall and loved it. Freddie Hubbard's time keeping and attitude got to be tiresome and so he was replaced by a young and emerging Wynton Marsalis.

In his autobiography HH relates what he sees as some slightly eccentric aspects of WM during his time with VSOP including his tendency to  put musicians down. The implication us that WM has some kind of inner insecurity.

Marsalis went on to build a successful career in the 80s to some degree by building on the stylistic foundations of VSOP which was itself drawing on Miles pre Bitches Brew 5tet. WM grew to be a jazz ambassador with a leading role at the Lincoln Centre. He came to be positioned at the opposite pole from John Zorn and his downtown network which had a much more open approach to improvised music.?

John Zorn's symbolic leadership was criticised by Kyle Gann in the Village Voice on the lack of originality in his approach compared with the innovations made by composers in the 25 years after the end of WW2. KG seemed aware of a sceptical mood in some cognescenti that many of JZ s apparent innovations could be traced to Cage and Stockhausen.

To me this overlooks the context. The post war innovators failed to achieve much reach immediately with the possible exception of Cage in the years around 1960. The minimalists were much much more successful in reaching an audience at the end of the 60s and early 70s and Zorn is really the successor of their cultural penetration. From the mid 70s the most prominent minimalists went back to the old school compositional ecology. Zorn emerged as the centre around which the next generation could network.

It seems from time to time those with a detailed knowledge of an artistic form want to fence it off and start policing the boundaries.

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Ideal Music

I am beginning to see how Schelling's visons connect with an aesthetics music. I have found the parallels some commentators see with A N Whitehead’s  metaphysics. ANW collaborated with B Russell on mathematical logic ln the first decade of 20C but after the FWW their paths diverged as ANW developed his process philosophy. 

Both men thought that the basic fabric of the world are processes and that there was an inside and outside aspect to these processes. In Schelling the inside aspect included a forward dynamic. Music has an inside and outside. There is the formal and scientific ‘outside’ account and the inside which we experience as listeners . The forward dynamic is found in harmonic pressure. Rhythm structures forward movement and provides the groove. Melody is perhaps harder to map in dynamic terms ? Perhaps the way in is through the ‘ riff’  ‘ ?

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Explore musical meaning

Currently there is renewed interest in the implications of the way we find music meaningful. Music is more available than ever before but there are few signs yet that demand for it is reaching saturation. This might be a reaction to the human strains of ever more intrusive neo-liberalism in peoples' lives but it would be hasty to jump to this conclusion.

The nineteenth century saw some philosophers such as Schelling seek in the human experience of music some core of value outside the ever increasing scientific vision of the cosmos and our place in it. I have yet to be persuaded they cracked it. After about 1850 the formalist school developed in a manner which aped mathematical rigour.The other parallel development involved Wagner and Nietzsche who eventually fell out. N changed his approach but scholars haven't yet agreed on where he ended up.

At the end of the nineteenth century there were different national interpretations of musical romanticism - Elgar, Grieg and Sibelius for example. This was possibly an echo of Kant's suggestion that there is a link between aesthetics and solidarity. The Nazi use of broadcast music, especially Bruckner and Wagner posed serious questions about all of this. Incidentally the Allies listening to Nazi broadcast didn't know that tape recorded music was being used. They were puzzled for example by elite orchestras apparently playing live in the middle of the night.

Arguably after WW2 the pendulum swung back  in the other direction with an extreme formal modernistic approach being adopted by composers who wanted to reflect the times and this lasted for about twenty years. Strange to say one of the last outposts of post WW2 High Modernism has been identified in the UK  - the development of a European free improvisation movement. Here a community based approach replaces formalism.

From the point of view of formalistic modernism both jazz and pop were examples of the masses being spoon fed dross to stop them appreciation their exploitation. This simple model fell apart in all sorts of ways. Left-wing musicologists researched the richness of folk and blues. In Britain the exuberance of New Orleans music provided a much needed release in the aftermath of WW2 following the maturation of seeds sown by the Left. The idea that audiences passively let music as product dull their senses was defeated by the discovery that music based subcultures were actively created by participants outside both the middle class enthusiasm for pre 20C c!assical and mass pop.

But music as a business also evolved on a variety of lines. The Rolling Stones in the 70s became a debauched exiled aristocracy and built a vast fortune on the spectacle of themselves via global touring. Madonna forged a template of fashion personality led dance-pop that is proving remarkably enduring. The basis of authenticity in these approaches is questionable. Arguably Miles Davis adapted this model to suit his own circumstance in his last decade while keeping a firmer hold on his musical values. After his death his bass player replaced Bill Wyman in the Stones.

One could see neo-liberalism as all consuming. It sweeps up figures like Nick Drake and Sylvia Plath to console those it damages. It tolerates the avant-garde at the margin to do its research and development for free. It allows locations like the Ballearics to provide consoling respite via a temporary physically based sense of rhythmic solidarity. 

 In his book on Underground Music Stephen Graham reviews the substantial body of theory and practice surrounding the idea of noise particularly as some kind of oppositional category. Black Metal strikes me as just another genre with fairly strict conventions. Fairly frequently it provides scandalous excess for example in benign Nordic societies.

Plenty of recent philosophy sees noise as being much more radical than that,readingly standing in a dialectical relationship to musical structure and there is quite a lot on the dialectics of musical structure. I have been reading Scmalfeldt's book, In the Process of Becoming about the changing processes in 19c music. A lot of the book  is debate with recent academics, for example about the two themes in Beethoven's piano sonata no 17 and their introduction in the exposition of the first movement. Failing to establish a concensus she concludes that the second theme might vary depending how any one interpretor plays the piece in performance. My attention has also been caught by an aspect of Schelling's philosophy who was developing his concepts while these composers were active .He tries to account for the development of the material world from a chaotic start with formal structures gradually developing via eddy type motions.     

Silence Chaos and Noise all come at the margin of music and can provoke intense debate which can become serious  aesthetics. Gann s book on the Cage silent work is a good way to enter the tangle. Here s an online comment from a discussion on chaos:

--If you refer to "deterministic chaos" then this means that you have well defined equations of motion, no random terms per se. Then you can look at the time evolution of "trajectories" with similar (small distance in phase space) initial conditions. The so-called Ljapunov exponent(s) describe this time evolution of nearby solutions. If e.g. they diverge exponentially, then deliberately small differences in initial conditions may lead to qualitatively different behavior (-> e.g. bifurcations). This seemingly erratic evolution still is deterministic, though.Typical examples include periodically driven nonlinear systems (e.g. coupled pendula or nonlinear electric circuits). Here on can look at the (Fourier) spectrum of the resultant motion and there are ways to distinguish the "chaotic noise" from "random noise".--

This could be over technical n terms of getting the main issues . Random is well defined in technology as process throwing out a series of numbers. There are  quite a few ways of taking a series of random numbers and converting it into sound. Chaos also has a theoretical approach. You can build chaotic systems with a quadratic equation and iteration. Iteration usually has one of two outcomes - escalating progress to infinity or convergence on a certain value. The interesting cases are a third category which appears to give a random series. Is chaos another way of getting to randomness? My inclination is to say there is a difference ...... one which would take a lot of explanation.

Using this formal mathematical approach, however , in each case leads to the challenge of converting numbers into sound. An Oxford PhD came up with a great book about this - Infinite Music - by Adam Harper. His idea is that there is no limit to the dimensions of sound which might be quantified in some way or another. Some there a lot of possibilities in terms of taking a random or chaotic number sequence into the world of sound. In the early 1950s the post WW2 formalists briefly thought they could cover every dimension of music but this idea got abandoned pretty quickly.

John Cage also made pieces in ways which sought to source randomness. He started this around the time he came up with the silent piece which happened to be about the time the European formalists were trying to cover all the dimensions.

In his Cage obituary Kyle Gann's states that Cage's music is enduring but his philosophy is dated. He summarizes the philosophy as being pre WW2 materialism. He mistrusted symbolism and thought communication models were mistaken. He thought sounds were part of nature and he wanted audiences to hear them as such. He used very painstaking means to achieve something he called randomness but the point was getting the audience to focus attention on sound.

To summarise it looks as if using randomness involves lots of compositional choice about how to source randomness and once its sourced how to bring it into the sound world. Most of these choices would still be there when chaos is linked to sounds.  We probably couldn't tell the difference between random sourced sound and chaos sourced sound. In either case noise might happen, sometimes, all the time or not at all.

An audience might reasonably ask why it is being exposed to noise and of course any number of answers might be given by a composer or performer.

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Uk Growth: 2008 - 2016

In the eight years 2008-2016 the UK economy only grew by about 10 pc and currently is slowing further. This 10pc is about £173bn in constant price terms. The growth driver has been the service sector and within that sector over the same period four subsectors have in aggregate grown by around £180bn as gross value added (GVA).They are:

Administration and Support Services - GVA growth £50bn

Professional Scientific and Support Services - GVA growth £51bn

Information and Communication Serivces - GVA growth £36bn

Retail and Wholesale - GVA growth £44bn

Other sectors have grown - for example the Manufacturing Sector grew by. £20bn. Indeed the non financial private sector which accounts for about 60pc of the economy grew by around £290bn or CAGR of 3.5pc. This suggests that the problem of slow growth is concentrated in the other 40pc. Has the economic policy of austerity restricted the growth of the public sector to the overall detriment of the economy as a whole for example ? The problems of the financial sector have been widely discussed and the sector faces further challenges with Brexit. Austerity is likely to continue under the present Government and so future UK economic growth is likely to rely on the service sector especially the hot spots.

The four subsectors listed above probably form a cluster with a network of commercial and other linkages  between the relevant firms mutually contributing to the overall strength of the cluster. Within the cluster the CAGR has been an impressive  9pc.

The Government s committed to producing an industrial strategy and these figures suggest that a key plank of the strategy should be accelerating the spread of the tools and techniques that have helped drive the high growth service sectors  to other parts of the economy.

[iaincblog]

Romantic Identity

For about a century from 1780 two developments in Central European culture progressed and may well  have been related. One was the classical stream of  musical composition and the other was more ambitious attempts to theorise the implications of human musical appreciation -  what our capability to understand music reveals about ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

The compositional stream is easy enough to illustrate Haydn and Mozart, followed by Beethoven and Schubert; Mendelssohn  and Schumann followed by Brahms. One could follow Brahms with Schoenberg as it seems he devised his 12 tone method so that he could compose Brahmsian thematic development on a truly chromatic basis. Sadly this original rationale seems to have been forgotten ignored or dismissed by those who took up that approach. Lots of people would say that the compositional development ended with Brahms - not me because I vastly prefer Schoenberg.

The aesthetic stream is less well mapped but seems to include Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Hanslick. Hanslick championed Brahms and was satirised by Wagner in the Meistersingers andhe published The Beautiful in Music in 1854 just as Brahms was starting his musical career.

Back at the start, Fichte greatly admired Kant but sought to go beyond his framework. He is the first philosopher to suggest that individual self-consciousness is a social phenomenon. Subjectivity means inter-subjectivity, a community of subjects and to be self conscious is to be conscious of oneself as some sort of thing or other. All this sounds very modern. Sadly the next step in the analysis is more uncongenial. Fichte thought that it was impossible that the material world could generate this kind of community of subjects and that the material must therefore be in some way dependent on the subject. This is not at all a fashionable point of view these days.

In Fichte’s defence it can be said that he may not have reached this conclusion if like us he was aware of the success of a lot of strange science since 1800. Natural selection, bio-informatics, the Standard Model in physics and so on.

Fichte also toyed with the primary status of the unconscious. He wasn’t sure that as self conscious beings we are aware of our whole selves or whether some parts of our mentality might be out of our grasp either in practical terms or as a matter of logic. I think we are still ambivalent on this. We can easily spot limited self awareness in others but is it even feasible to acknowledge it in ourselves.

I was exchanging ideas on improvisation with a friend in California over the weekend and he sent me a link to a local radio interview with an improvising musician. This person thought that good improvisation came from beyond the conscious mind. I can see that this idea can be based on genuine first person experience. But the implications are the interesting thing. If I improvise well for an audience does it mean that their appreciation involves a link with wherever my music comes from? I am genuinely uncertain but I think Fichte believed it does.

Schelling started out as a follower of Fichte but after 1800 moved off on his own track. These days S is given credit for being one of the first ecological thinkers in Western thought because he was prepared to recognise that the material world or nature was not a simple mechanism but involved all kinds of intricate linkages. He saw that if we believe that nature is there to be mastered or dominated then this risks human enslavement by our own nature. This idea was developed by exiled German left wingers in LA during the Second World War.

For Schelling subjectivity is double sided character - we are active aware subjects to such a degree that we can reflect on ourselves as subjects and in that sense combine our freedom to think with a discovery of how we maybe partially conditioned say by circumstance. He was tempted to think that the natural order might also be double sided - both product and process.

Schelling suspected that art might be the arena where the lawlike conditioned realm came close to and perhaps even joined human freedom. In terms of the improvisation example mentioned earlier there might be both (say) an internalisation of the laws of harmony, scales and progression - conditioned - with in the minute creativity which exemplifies freedom. Sadly Schelling changed his position frequently and never completed a grand synthesis that he thought might be possible.

Hegel is said to be the most original thinker on aesthetics since Plato. He is hard to read and has a vast system that seeks to explain the pattern within history. He went along with the Schelling conclusion that reality has to be in its foundation mental rather than material. Although his career overlapped Beethoven he never mentions the composer once although others including Adorno have tried to link Hegel’s ideas to the formal patterns used by Beethoven. H did say that he liked the music of Rossini - a composer that I believe Beethoven rather disliked.

Hegel maintained that music is a way that the free subject can demonstrate its character. Because it is an artform beyond space it exemplifies inwardness as the organised succession of vanishing sounds. He links music to the ‘ ah and oh of the heart’ but music brings structure and organisation to this so that the soul hears its own inner movements and can be moved again. It is able to bring unity out of diversity and as a such it is a source of mental satisfaction even where the emotions conjured are negative. The risk is that technical manipulation can lead to a disconnection with the human source resulting in pure artistry.

All of this makes him a theorist of early romanticism, possibly the best theorist of early romantic music that there is. He summarises and codifies the insights of Fichte and Schelling.

Hanslick’s book On the Beautiful in Music was published in 1854 and is seen as the beginning of musical formalism. He conceded that music may arouse emotions but denied that music can represent emotions or that emotional content in any way represents the content of music. He thought that music relies on freely moving musical forms which are sound in motion. He summarised composition as follows:

‘The initial force of a composition is the invention of some definite theme, and not the desire to describe a given emotion by musical means. Thanks to that primitive and mysterious power, whose mode of action will forever be hidden from us, a theme, a melody flashes on the composer’s mind. The origin of this first germ cannot be explained, but must simply be accepted as a fact. When once it has taken root in the composer’s imagination, it forthwith begins to grow and develop; the principal theme being the center round which the branches group themselves in all conceivable ways, though always unmistakably related to it. The beauty of an independent and simple theme appeals to our aesthetic feeling with that directness, which tolerates no explanation, except, perhaps, that of its inherent fitness and the harmony of parts, to the exclusion of any alien factor. It pleases for its own sake, like an arabesque, a column, or some spontaneous product of nature – a leaf or a flower.”

Formalism had powerful advocates in the 20th century including Stravinsky and Forte. It also had powerful enemies like Stalin. One of the crimes he accused Shostakovich of was formalism. Formalism relies on some musical symbolism and explains the music in terms of patterns in the symbols which represent musical development. Nicholas Cook has written a good introduction to formal analysis in music.

The obvious objection is that formal analysis misses the content - but to push this through a good account of the content is needed, beyond reference to emotions.  Clearly music can be analysed formally but does any other approach work to illuminate aspects that formal analysis cannot or does not cover. Appreciation of formal aspects s bound to be limited to a minority of listeners. Audiences who lack formal understanding are not  just listening to random sounds.  The opposite pole is also valid - post WW2 composers often used elaborate formal schemes but struggled to gain acceptance from contemporary audiences who could not hear the sense.

Adorno said that the musical form of Hegelian philosophy was to be found with Beethoven but that there was more truth with Beethoven than with Hegel.  After Adorno some more recent analysts have developed this nugget. The thought is that Beethoven foregrounded the musical process so that the formal core of the work wasn't clearly stated at the start but emerged through the work . The formal core of the work was only revealed to the listener as the work progressed. The process of the work  is key for revealing  its formal structure.

There could be a lot in this and indeed Schoenberg made a very similar point.

[iaincblog]

Musicality

Lydia Goehr is the daughter of a Professor of Music at Cambridge and the grand-daughter of a student of Schoenberg. She is a Philosophy Prof in NYC and was friends with Arthur Danto. I was looking at the Manchester group of mid 50s modernists that her father was part of and this led me to buy her book on Elective Affinities which I have struggled with.

EA is the title of Goethe’s 3rd novel which seems to be about a foursome exploring romance as a life brightener. The EA metaphor seems to have been used by all and sundry. I decided the way into LG is via her comments on Schelling.

Schelling was part of a group of philosophers who come  between Kant and Hegel and who were based in Weimar and Jena and surroundings. I am wondering whether a trip to those parts is feasible but I have yet to work out how you fly there. In one of her essays in EA LG looks at the idea of musicality in the philosophy of German Romanticism. Apparently Schelling was the first to make use of this term in a philosophical sense. I have been able to pick up that for S the musicality of music lay in rhythm. We might think of the p ower of the groove.

Schelling seems to have influenced the first phase of Romanticism including Coleridge. One of the problems that this group were concerned with was the primacy of mind or matter following Kant’s treatment of the dichotomy. Schelling seems to have taken a view that there are animistic features to matter or nature. We can see how this would appeal to English Romantics but we can also see in the animating power of the groove how music might be a prime example for him.

Schelling puts rhythm ahead of the other two major dimensions of music that he discusses, modulation and melody. Using Kant’s language of faculties, melody appeals to the imagination and intuition while modulation is for feeling and judgement.

According to the Stanford philosophy encyclopoedia, Schelling paved the way for a hermeneutic view of nature beyond more scientific description. He also criticised Hegel in a way which influenced Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. He argued against the possibility of complete self knowledge by the subject - a view which has been developed by Lacan. Quite a decent score.

S takes from other post Kantians the idea that art offers a route to what is not available to us simply as knowledge. Art objects convey more to us than their objective properties. Art works are able to release aspects from our unconscious and this can be a route to the highest insights. Schelling was active during the productive parts of Beethoven s career during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Bowie, the one who is head of German Studies at Royal Holloway, highlights the fact that Beethoven’s music coincides with upheavals in aesthetic theory. This is enough for me to order his book on the period.

Bowie looks at how Heidegger contributes to this development in aesthetics in the first half of 20C, noting that H takes on board Nietzsche’s criticisms of Wagner and Hegel’s view of music. He (like Kant) downplays the significance of music and suggests that it is indicative of something missing in modern culture - something which pure thought and poetry engage with more effectively. H has the narrow view of music that it is all about ‘feelings’.

This limited view adopted by H contrasts with a widespread sense in Romanticism that music enables engagement with areas of the self that are beyond propositional knowledge. Bowie suggests that much post-structuralism with its foregrounding of the extra personal determinations of language, fails to do justice to these Romantic insights. Heidegger is more sympathetic to other art-forms which he thinks can disclose being in a fashion which is beyond the categories of science and technology.

If we switch from philosophy to composition in 1790 Haydn was in Vienna with Mozart going to the rehearsals of Cosi fan Tutti enjoying the company greatly. Returning to Esterhaza he had to support his employer, the Duke, whose wife had just died. Against his background Haydn produced the six string quartets op 64 which to my ears probe new musical depths - even before Beethoven gets into his stride.