This is, apparently, the kind of question you might have to answer if you are a philosophy student at the Sorbonne:
Is Beauty limited to perception?
This is exactly the kind of question that philosophers in the Austro-Anglo-American analytical tradition really hate. Oh, by the way, the name of that philosophical stream would be simply "Anglo-American" if it were not for one single figure: Wittgenstein. He started out influenced by Frege, but then went to Cambridge and studied with Bertrand Russell so now he is a huge part of the analytical stream. But back to the question: This is looking at the old saw "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" from a different angle. Yes, of course, Beauty is in perception, but is it limited to perception? I think not because when I am composing or playing I am certainly seeking to express Beauty in some way. And we have to define Beauty pretty widely as it has to include all the contrasts that occur in order to create moments of Beauty. Beauty is not simply sappy prettiness. So when I am attempting to create Beauty is it simply perception? Well, no, it is imagination and recollection and experimentation and serendipity and all sorts of things that we would not normally categorize as perception.
Your thoughts? And to listen to while you are mulling it over, here is a sarabande by Jacques de Saint-Luc:
"... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book.... I really have adopted the Marcus Aurelius philosophy, which is that everything I’ve done means nothing. I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead...."
I'll think that we really are turning around as a culture if I hear that Taylor Swift is reading Aristotle...
The headline: “Music scientists find the connection between music and emotion: ‘Our neurons dance to the same rhythm.’” The subheading: “Three independent scientific studies analyze how the human brain transforms notes into feelings, a mystery that has intrigued psychologists and musicologists for decades.”
More and more, science is allowing us to understand our attraction to music and what it does for us — and consequently, what makes us human.
Aw, hell, I just remembered I have never learned anything interesting from any of these scientific studies of music. So, you know, I pretty much don't care what they have to say. But that term "music scientists" is actually really funny. Next up, "poetry scientists" who aim to discover what makes us, well, poetic.
In 1996, after the war, the Sarajevo orchestra was in residence at the Farfa Giubileo Festival near Rome. Injeian went to Italy to restore its war-torn instruments. The work was done over a couple of weeks at a monastery nearby where he performed the ’surgeries.’ In Injeian’s words, ’Instruments should be treated as living beings. For the Sarajevo Philharmonic some instruments needed to be treated rather like field dressings for soldiers. Some needed more and received further restoration. Repairs were often grafts, just like skin grafts and prostheses made as are such optimal solutions for humans, according to their need.’ Injeian sees his work centered around the humanness of the instruments.
In the famous aria “Un bel dì,” or “One fine day,” every line seemed considered without being mannered, as if Grigorian’s Cio-Cio-San (the actual name of Butterfly) were thinking through her feelings in real time: joy, hope, defiance. She grabbed Suzuki by the shoulders, trying to shake sense into her, before shaking herself out of blissful reverie. You believed her screams, and feared the hand she raised in anger.
This revival of “Butterfly,” which will be simulcast in cinemas on May 11, has another notable debut in the conductor, Xian Zhang, the music director of New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. She led with brisk tempos, sensitive to Puccini’s shifts between Orientalist whole tones and love-drunk chromaticism, and reserving eruptive forces — including a pounding, death-driven drumbeat — for maximal effect.
John Cage, the influential composer and artist, is dead. So it’s technically impossible to know with absolute certainty how he would feel about the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.
But the question emerges after New York Times columnist John McWhorter, a music humanities and linguistics professor at Columbia, wrote that he was forced to stop students from playing Cage’s 4’33”—a seminal work that’s effectively four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (though Cage-heads might disagree with that description)—because of the demonstrations. According to McWhorter, that silence, which would have made room for the chants outside, would have inflicted cruelty on his students, some of whom he identified as Israeli and Jewish American.
But I think it is safe to say that no-one has the ability to read John Cage's mind, especially since he is dead.
* * *
What is Slavoj Zizek's favorite music? Schoenberg.
"Art is the only unregulated business that I know of in the world outside of the illicit drug business since the public had to be protected from criminal abuses in the stock and real estate markets over a hundred years ago," said Volpe.
Now comes Gerstein’s latest project, “Music in Time of War,” a recording that is expansive in its program and packaging: a 141-minute double album of works by Claude Debussy and the Armenian composer and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet, accompanied by a 174-page book of conversations, essays and photographs that situate the music deep in its historical context.
During the early days of the pandemic, as Gerstein thought more about Debussy’s final years, he also revisited a pile of scanned piano music by Komitas (1869-1935) that he had received from an enthusiastic member of the French-Armenian diaspora 20 years earlier. A pairing of late Debussy and late Komitas made for an intriguing fit: They were two composers who, for a brief time before World War I, existed in the same Parisian orbit and channel the darkened spirit of the age in their art.
* * *
From the new Madame Butterfly at the Met:
Here is an etude by Debussy from the new Gerstein album:
What's remarkable about that is that Williams delivers a terrific, flawless performance with one of the world's great orchestras and greatest conductors in front of what must have been an audience of 10,000. Rather the concert of a lifetime...
Dark Academia is not a cult, no, really. Here, listen to this guy:
It's a collection of aesthetic ideas that include fountain pens, journaling, traditional academic disciplines and values, fine literature, architecture and, of course, classical music. One of the things that got the trend started was this novel by Donna Tartt:
The Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society is also an influence:
I'm not sure that representative musical examples have been chosen, so let me make some suggestions. One that comes to mind is the ballet Giselle which featured in an episode of Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff, which might be another contributing influence:
Another suggestion would be Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake:
Personally, I think something like the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz would fit with the aesthetic as well:
That should get you started, at least. Now go get yourself a tweed jacket and a fountain pen. I recommend this one:
YouTube used to be much, much better than it is now, even though now it has many times as many clips. The problem now is that the advertisements are more and more ubiquitous and annoying. But even worse than that is that the majority of the clips seem to be very scam-like. The image luring you to view the clip often has little or nothing to do with the actual content; the claim of the title is often wildly exaggerated and so on. But, there are still some pretty good items. One I ran across this morning is a very brief and very clear discussion of why Ludwig Wittgenstein is an important thinker and actually, a very useful one. Here it is:
In the clip the narrator calls the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a "beautiful" book and indeed it is, it has a kind of mystic clarity to it that is so rare that I can hardly think of another example. Here is a quote:
6.13 Logic is not a set of teachings but a mirror image of the world.
5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world.
Every sentence--proposition--in the book is numbered in a logical hierarchy. But really, quotes like these remind me of Chinese philosophy.
* * *
John Cage is absolutely unique among composers in that the piece for which he is most famous is nothing but silence. Think about that! The piece is 4'33 in length and that is the title by which it is known: 4'33. Here is a famous performance by Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic.
This was made as a statement about the cancelling of performances due to the COVID closure in Germany. You might notice that as this clip is only 3'42 long, he rushes the piece! Use a stopwatch, Kirill!
* * *
Here is an example of a somewhat misleading YouTube clip:
Sure, interesting, but the reason you click on it has very little to do with Picasso, right?
* * *
Reading Dilla Time, this was one of the examples. I warn you, if you don't want to have a fragment of Joni Mitchell stuck in your head for all eternity, don't listen to this!
* * *
Just wandering slightly off the reservation, one of the things I have liked about the French author Michel Houellebecq is just that name. There are too many somethings in there: vowels, consonants? Reminds me of a neighborhood in Montréal: Longueuil. That definitely has too many vowels. Anyway, here is a very funny, very deadpan, review of a recent book:
The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter; he profits by a number of institutions very favourable to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the métier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit
--Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 - 1935) This quote is from 1904.
IN THE EARLY ’70s, Leonard Cohen was in crisis. His life felt meaningless, although, in theory, it shouldn’t have. He’d spent the past decade doing all the things people were supposed to do in the ’60s. He’d joined shadowy religious orders and dabbled in Eastern mysticism. He’d written a sexy experimental novel that thrilled the young and enraged the establishment. He’d reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter and played to crowds of ecstatic flower children. He’d taken all the drugs, smoked all the cigarettes, slept in all the iconic hotels—the King Edward, the Chelsea, the Chateau Marmont. If the ’60s counterculture were a mountain, he was the rare mountaineer who’d made it to the summit.
Read the whole thing for a thoughtful look at an artist that has a lot of relevance for us today.
The tenor Ian Bostridge shocked Symphony Hall Birmingham last night by stopping after the third song in Britten’s Les Illuminations to denounce the CBSO’s new audience rules, which read:
“We are very happy for you to take photographs and short video clips at our concerts, but please refrain from recording the whole performance.”
Bostridge, a thoughtful, courteous man, stepped forward and – clearly fuming – requested that audience members turn off their phone cameras. He said taking photographs was ‘extremely distracting’ for a performer.
One of the most powerful traits instilled by a music education is a deep sense of professionalism. 85% of survey participants identified the trait as the skill that most influenced expectations of themselves and others, and the quality of their work.
A common industry saying about rehearsal reflects this attitude of consistency and punctuality – “early is on time, on time is late, and late is left behind.”
Other notable skills included autonomy and self-direction, resilience and perseverance, and creativity.
Learning an instrument fosters disciplined, focused attention, a highly valuable skill in other contexts. ArtBitz/Shutterstock
Participants attributed the development of these strengths to the disciplined and focused attention required to learn music, and the intrinsic motivation needed to practise and perfect an instrument over a long period of time.
You are not likely to learn these sorts of skills in too many other places.
If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.
Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.
* * *
Our first envoi really has to be Leonard Cohen:
Here is Ian Bostridge with Britten's Les Illuminations, op. 18
Here is a piece you rarely hear, the Septet in E flat major by Beethoven:
And now, if you will excuse me I have to go decolonize my bookshelf.
