Art Philosophy – Eric Lemmon

Presenting at BFE/RMA Conference & Music and Democracy Study Days in Jan. 2022

I’ll be presenting research on participation, political theory, and music technology that I have been working on for the past several years at both the Music and Democracy Study Days: Rethinking Participatory Processes Through Music, and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and Royal Musical Association Research Students’ Conference in January. The title of the paper is “Dissensus, Refusal and Participatory Music: Negation and Rupture in Crowd in C,” which I have been developing for an invited chapter in a volume on post-politics and the aesthetic imagination. I am really excited for some fruitful talks that develop my thinking on topics that my music is explicitly engaging with.

You can find out more about the conference and the workshop, as well as their schedule of events here:

British Forum for Ethnomusicology and Royal Musical Association Research Students’ Conference

6 to 8 January, 2022
https://bfe-rma-conference-2022.github.io/

Music and Democracy Study Days: Rethinking Participatory Processes Through Music

14-15 January 2022
https://musicdemocracystudydays.wordpress.com/

Soviet Union Polemicist On Jazz Music:

“The dry knock of an idiotic hammer penetrates the utter stillness. One, two, three, ten, twenty strikes, and afterwards a wild whistling and squeaking as if a ball of mud was falling into clear water; then follows a rattling, howling and screaming like the clamor of a metal pig, the cry of a donkey or the amorous croaking of a monstrous frog. The offensive chaos of this insanity combines into a pulsing rhythm. Listen to this screaming for only a few minutes, and one involuntarily pictures an orchestra of sexually wound-up madmen, conducted by a Stallion-like creature who is swinging his giant genitals.”

From ‘Vilified, Venerated, Forbidden: Jazz in the Stalinist Era’ by Martin Lücke.

~~~

LOL

This is Your Brain on Music

Now that I’m done with Mr. Sacks, I’ve moved on to Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music. While Musicophelia was much more focused on anecdotal discussions of evidence, Levitin gets much deeper into details of music theory and research. In a way, this was the book I was hoping to read when I picked up Musicophilia .

Here are some quotes of note that I’ve already found:

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change. (5)

Hey! More Heideggerian ontology, this guy is everywhere when it comes to art philosophy.

Rhythm, Meter, and tempo are related concepts that are often confused with one another. Briefly, rhythm refers to the lengths of notes… (57)

Hmmm. I think this is duration. Rhythm is more of a super structure that includes duration, meter and tempo. Levitin gets a little closer to the correct definition in the next paragraph:

The relationship between the length of one note and another is what we call rhythm…(58)

A little better, but still nebulous.

Musicophilia

I am finally working my way through Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, about four years after I received the book as a gift. While the reading is mostly anecdotal, there are also some general ideas that I find are spot on and others that are wildly inaccurate. I’ll start with the end of the opening chapter of Part II in the book as an example of something beautifully stated.

The examples of George and Cordelia introduce a theme that will be echoed and explored in many of the clinical case histories that follow: that what one calls musicality comprises a great range of skills and receptivities, from the most elementary perceptions of pitch and tempo to the highest aspects of musical intelligence and sensibility, and that, in principle, all of these are dissociable one from another. All of us, indeed, are stronger in some aspects of musicality, weaker in others, and have some kinship to both Cordelia and George.

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia. Vintage Books. New York. 2008. Page 104.

As a performer, this quote is displayed day after day, sitting in colloquiums or performance classes in school, or even in a section of an orchestra. All of these highly trained and hard working people have strengths and weaknesses to their musicality. For example, one may be stunningly coordinated with their playing, but flat and uncaring with their sound, while another might have a rich, deep tone, but be unable to sight read at all.

On the other hand, in the very first page of the Preface, Sacks makes a statement that many theorists would certainly disagree with, and even fellow scientists in his field have conducted research on and found the opposite of his claim.

[Music] has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no relation to the world.

Ibid. Page ix.

In Aniruddh Patel’s Music, Language and the Brain, Patel devotes a significant section of the book to discussing how leitmotifs in Wagner’s Tristain und Isolde act as referential objects to characters and The Potion, essentially become specific musical symbols. The crazy thing is that Sacks has read this book and at the very least did not take the time to correct his preface in later editions.

This idea goes beyond Wagner’s attachment of leitmotifs to characters or abstract psychological concepts in his operas though, in that music can, and has referenced specific objects that are not ‘generated’ through a composer’s imagination. In Copland’s music, woodblocks are frequently used to recall and imitate a horse’s gallop, in such a way that is unmistakeable for individuals who’ve heard horses gallop and have been steeped in the ontology of ‘Americana’. For these listeners, the music does recall a specific image! Exactly the opposite of what Sacks posits in his book.

Of course there is a little philosophical issue called the intentional fallacy that impedes absolute certainty of reference in our non-discursive language of music. But music being referential as opposed to absolute is an important part of our experience. Tone poems by Strauss and Liszt wouldn’t have quite the same meaning if Don Juans weren’t romping about in our ears.

A Famous Composer Agrees With My Interpretation of Ego In Aleatoric and Totally Serial Music

Aleatoric, in the ‘rationalists’ usage, means dependent on chance or, in the usage of the advocates of New Music, set free from the ‘subject’.

Here the subject is clearly meant to be the composer’s ‘ego’.

But even if the ‘integral rationalisation’ succeeds and everything is ‘calculated’ in advance down to the last detail, there must be a ‘subject’ to do the calculations. Even the most formidable electronic computer can only calculate what a man gives it to calculate.

Krenek, E. (1966). Exploring music; essays. New York: October House.

Fantastic observation! Even in totally serial music, indeterminate music and chance music, the ego of the composer cannot removed because the subject is still making choices about the process! What question we ask as composers immediately limits the answers we will receive.

A Famous Composer Agrees With My Interpretation of Ego In Aleatoric and Totally Serial Music

Aleatoric, in the ‘rationalists’ usage, means dependent on chance or, in the usage of the advocates of New Music, set free from the ‘subject’.

Here the subject is clearly meant to be the composer’s ‘ego’.

But even if the ‘integral rationalisation’ succeeds and everything is ‘calculated’ in advance down to the last detail, there must be a ‘subject’ to do the calculations. Even the most formidable electronic computer can only calculate what a man gives it to calculate.

Krenek, E. (1966). Exploring music; essays. New York: October House.

Fantastic observation! Even in totally serial music, indeterminate music and chance music, the ego of the composer cannot be removed because the subject is still making choices about the process! What question we ask as composers immediately limits the answers we will receive.

Some Notes On Open Hearts

Whatever music might do, it does only when one approaches it with an open heart and shares actively in its being.

~Ernst Krenek

Today I was reading a blog post about Minimal music and boredom by Andrew Lee on icareifyoulisten.com and some good points were made.

Last May, I had the wonderful opportunity to present at a conference on time and the arts in Caen, France. A number of papers addressed time in contemporary music, but it became quickly apparent that most authors had a greater affinity for the music of Stockhausen or Boulez than Reich or Glass. Moreover, there seemed to be a general distaste for all things minimalist among many attendees, something that I forgot even exists outside my own circle of friends and colleagues.

I presented a paper on temporality as a means of analyzing Tom Johnson’s An Hour for Piano, the details of which I will spare you. It was generally well received, but at the same time there seemed to be a slight edge to some of the questions. I don’t necessarily think that it was incredulity at my findings so much as my interest in this music. (Easy for me to think, no doubt.) At one point, a questioner even went so far as to ask, “So you admit that this music is boring.”

My response: “Yes.”

I don’t think anyone expected me to come out and say that. My point, of course, was that minimalist music is in some ways intentionally “boring” on the surface so that one’s attention is drawn to other details, that a different sort of listening experience becomes possible. If one does not allow for other possibilities, does not move beyond the immediacy of the notes and teleological listening, then naturally the music is frustrating and boring.

It was interesting to me as I’ve been thinking a bit about how people inside our musical world approach different musical Movements. Movements not being sections of a larger piece of art, but rather a group of people making some sort of impact on the world. In Europe, Andrew encountered an underlying hostility to Minimal music which he implies is due to a musical heritage stemming from the arch-modernists, a general cultural preference.

What kills me the most about this kind of turf war is that the philosophical underpinnings of what these different sub-genres of music are meant to do to is change the way we listen to music. Andrew states clearly that, “minimalist music is in some ways intentionally “boring” on the surface so that one’s attention is drawn to other details”. I remember the program notes to Glass’ Einstein on the Beach as another example, where it asked the audience to listen to super structures that occur over time. The music of Boulez, Stockhausen and Babbitt all asked us to open our ears to greater harmonic and coloristic content. The totally serialist works and indeterminate music that made such an impact in the second half of the 20th century asked our ears to open up the possibility of what music could be.

This idea along with the intentional fallacy are foundations of artistic thought in the 20th century and now. What these composers did was use this philosophy to carve out justifications for their work, but then they turned around and trashed people that weren’t writing like themselves, just trying to make their own music.

This brings me back to the quote I started with. Since I’ve been plowing through so much Krenek, it sometimes startles me how inconsistent he can sometimes be. After arriving at such a great quote that clearly defines a way of listening that is open to what could be, not two pages before that he had trashed popular forms in the context of radio play.

Now the most popular form of enjoyment is, without a doubt, love. The musical experience of the ‘ordinary man’ is frequently connected with affairs of the heart: he takes his girl friend to a dance for instance, thus paving the way for a less formal approach. So it is felt that the music which serves such ends must possess an absolute enjoyment value. And for that reason, radio with devastating logicality pumps out dance music at all times of day. In consequence the state of bliss engendered by music becomes associated irrevocable with the idea of the noisy consumption of expensive drinks.

Krenek, E. (1966). Exploring music; essays. New York: October House.

Krenek! Stop imposing subjective considerations of value on popular forms!!!

It’s Easy to Pick on Dead People (v. Krenek No. 234362)

I’m combing my way through Krenek’s set of essays Exploring Music, and it’s providing some great insight into the man and his beliefs. His vignette on Milhaud that I wrote about before was really cool. I’m currently digesting ‘New Humanity and Old Objectivity’ and some of his views on vernacular forms of art (pop music in this case) are astonishingly backwards. The genre or medium of a work should not be taken as a way to blanket judgement of quality. I turn it over to Krenek to show you what I mean:

Now in music the age has found the art that satisfies all its needs–popular music. As far as its production and consumption are concerned it corresponds perfectly to the other present-day principles of creation and running. Production takes on a conveyor-belt system–wach of the numerous operatives taking part in the process carries out only one ‘repeated, thoroughly leaned action’ as they say in the collective contracts for a given category of industrial workers. We hear that there are refrain-specialists, verse-specialists, specialists in harmonizing the half-finished product, others specially skilled in producing witty or imposing titles; there are others who do the rhymes and specialists in radio, salon, jazz and other orchestration who then put the finished project into its normal commercial package. It is rather like a cloth factory where at one end the wool is taken off the sheep and at the other the finished material emerges. But in this case the part of the fleeced lamb is played by the unconscious consumer.

This art is, of course, adjusted to the conditions of a large turnover; the goods are mass-produced, so that production costs are lowered the articles are almost interchangeable types so that you can get away with an unsubtle, dull feeling for the type and are not disturbed or surprised by individual traits; the material is easy to understand and the words satisfy the hunger for scraps of information in a particularly accessible field half-way between sex and sentiment.

But of course it must not be thought that this art is deliberately produced because there is a need for it, and that its creators could write differently if they chose. On the contrary, here as elsewhere the demand is created by the producers, for at bottom the public is indiscriminate, ready for anything. The writers cannot do anything else because they themselves cannot rise above this sphere and one cannot but be convinced that they are doing the best they can, for no artist can deliberately write below his real level. If anybody says he could just as well write symphonies as pop songs and only writes the songs because they pay better, he is lying, perhaps unconsciously, and ruining his character without improving his talent.

Seething through this passage is condescension for writers of pop songs, and popular forms themselves. Krenek states that, “if anybody says he could just as well write symphonies as pop songs and only writes the songs because they pay better, he is lying,” but is the inverse true at all? Could Krenek have written a single song out of Exile on Mainstreet? Additionally, the idea that multiple parties coming together to produce a musical track “fleeces the unconscious consumer” is utterly false. Does the help Al Green, The Supremes, Beyoncé, and so many more artists receive over the course of producing their albums inherently reduce the value of their music? There is remarkable depth to some popular songs, this is not a new idea.

Couldn’t write a symphony.