Aesthetics: Plotinus and immoral art

Plotinus (c. 200-270 BCE) was a neo-Platonist that developed the first real metaphysic of beauty. As you might expect, his ideas about beauty are wrapped up in Platonic ideals. The true beauty is found in the Ideal, and the concrete object gives us a reflection of the true source of the beauty. Of course, this theory has run into some problems along the way, but it is a profound influence in the history of aesthetic philosophy.

One of the more interesting passages from his Ennead has been wrestling with me for a few days. He says “that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly, in soul or mind.” He continues suggesting that we can perceive the beauty of “wisdom” in a man who is outwardly unattractive. Presumably, this is a Socrates reference. What interests me here the way he equates personal virtue with aesthetic beauty. At one time, this was a common idea, but it sounds strange to our jaded modern ears. To wit: If something is beautiful it is morally good.

The thought has even persisted into the 20th century. I am particularly fond of a Russian philosopher named Berdyaev. Here is his reiteration of the concept. “Beauty is the Christianized cosmos in which chaos is overcome; that is why the Church may be defined as the true beauty of existence. Every achievement of beauty in the world is in the deepest sense a process of Christianization. Beauty is the goal of all life; it is the deification of the world. Beauty, as Dostoievsky has said, will save the world. An integral conception of the Church is one in which it is envisaged as the Christianized cosmos, as beauty. Only a differential conception can transform it into an institution.”

“Beauty will save the Universe.” Bold words from Dostoyevsky. This certainly takes us down some dangerous theological paths. I am pretty sure, however, that ugliness won’t save the Universe. I am very sure that creating beauty in the world is a morally good thing to do. The tricky part is the implication. When someone makes an ugly art work (and I don’t mean that in a narrow sense), am I willing to take a stand and say that it is immoral? That’s a difficult thing. Certainly, I can see some items of propaganda fitting into this category, but actual art objects are harder. I have a profound philosophical disagreement with works like Cage’s 4’33’’, but I value the work. I probably do think it is immoral in the sense that its aim is the destruction of personality. There is so much to learn from it – sometimes precisely by disagreeing – that I find it too valuable not to teach.

Aesthetics: Aristotle, Ke$ha, flutes, and conductors

In Politics, there is a passage where Aristotle spends some time on what sort of music we should include in the education of children. He takes some wonderful pot-shots at the flute and flutists in general. Some of my favorite gems include: “…the flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character; it is too exciting” and “the acquirement of flute-playing contributes nothing to the mind.”

Aristotle takes a slightly different approach to music than Plato. Aristotle is OK with music for “intellectual enjoyment, for relaxation and for recreation.” Let’s not go too far though. You shouldn’t understand this to mean that one should become a “vulgar” professional musician. That would be disgusting and unbecoming for a gentleman and a philosopher. You need to play well enough to become a critic. Judging from today’s standards of criticism in the newspapers, I’d say the bar has been set at around six weeks of piano lessons in 4th grade.

What is actually interesting in the passage is the part where he is criticizing professional music contests. In contests, “the performer practices the art, not for the sake of his own improvement, but in order to give pleasure, and that of a vulgar sort, to his hearers.” You can see where this is going. When the performer gets in front of the rabble that are already vulgar, he/she wants to please them and “the result is that the performers are vulgarized, for the end at which they aim is bad. The vulgarity of the spectator tends to lower the character of the music and therefore of the performers; they look to him – he makes them what they are, and fashions even their bodies by the movements which he expects them to exhibit.”

So there you have it. More than 2000 years ago, Grandpa Aristotle was walking around saying, “These kids and their damn popular music. At least in my day, music had a nice Dorian melody that you could hum. Now it’s just all vulgar. Is the flute even a real instrument? Give it 2000 years or so, and they’ll have Ke$ha. They'll deserve it.”

Funny stuff, but I don’t find that the world of serious music is that immune to the problem. My friend Lane Harder podcasts about these problems here. I’ve experienced the vulgarization process because of "aiming at a bad end" most often with conductors. There are some conductors that communicate that the reason we are working so hard is in service to the music. There are some conductors that communicate that the reason we are working so hard is in service to their career. I’m not always sure how they do it, but I can spot it right away. When I’m playing for the selfish ones, I’m never as vulnerable because I won’t entrust my emotional life to someone that won’t care for it and protect it. I just shut down, do my job, and play the notes.

That crowd thing is a problem. It's why we see so many composers find a "style" and continue to crank out the same thing for their entire career. Nothing against Steve Reich. I like a few of his tunes, but can anyone say that "9-11 WTC" is the work of someone exploring and pushing boundaries. That's OK. Maybe he didn't want to for this piece. I'm just saying that the Beethoven 9 is different than the Beethoven 1. That's what I want to be.

Aesthetics: Teaching honesty in music composition?

In the Poetics, Aristotle gives us one of the first (if not the first) introduction to the idea that there is an economy in works of art. He says, “For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.” I don’t believe that I am uncommon in the way that I am progressing toward maturity. That is, I am much more adept at spotting the extraneous and extracting it than I was when I was young. I can more readily assess an idea and its potential development. I can balance the unity and diversity necessary to establish an economy of means that allows me to create a musical work that is poignant without running to far from the central point. This is a skill that I haven’t worked so hard to develop in my prose. I enjoy the diversions of wandering thoughts.

The issue that still tries to pin me on the mat is the pedagogy problem. To wit: how do you handle a student that brings you a work that is immature and lacks any sort of economy. To be sure, there is a different economy in a poem than in a novel. There is a different economy in a fugue than there is in a symphony. The difficult part is in the way we foster students to maturity of economy.

I certainly remember the anxiety I experienced as a teenager the first time my works were exposed to mature composers. I remember how I hung on their every word for encouragement. Most of my teachers were very kind and did not press to hard on the issue of the ideas – however immature they may have been – but focused on how well those ideas were communicated.

All this is to say, I have an idea that my job is to foster honesty in creative work. I don’t know how to assess “honesty” aesthetically, so I retreat to technique. Is this really what you mean to say? Do you realize that the climax you are trying to establish has been betrayed by foreshadowing that all but revealed the conclusion? Did you really want to take away the significance of the end by presenting it so clearly in the beginning?

In some ways, I find those questions easier to ask than others. Do you realize that the substance of your ideas are well trodden paths that have already been explored? Do you really hunger to know the Western canon well enough to understand the tradition in which you are participating? Are you willing to discover that what you thought was a profound emotional experience was really something trite? That’s the hard stuff, and I don’t have good answers for these problems.

There is one thing that I have experienced that gives me comfort. I have had a few students that I knew very well. I could tell when they were making the easy choice instead of the honest choice. I could tell when they were placing expediency over truth. I could tell when they were trying to impress my sensibilities instead of their own artistic calling. I confronted them on it every time.

Sneak peek at my 9-11 memorial music

This is a preview of the first movement of a piece that David Matthews commissioned for the University of South Florida Chamber Singers. The official premiere of the whole piece is going to be at Florida ACDA in November. Dan Monek is also performing it at Marietta College. I was trying to write neo-Franco-Flemish music in this movement. The kind of thing Josquin might write if he was alive today.

We are using the first movement as part of our 9-11 10th anniversary service tomorrow night at 8pm at St. Mark's on the Campus. The lovely singers in the video are the vocal ensemble Dulces Voces.

The text is taken from the 9th century Fleury play Ordo Rachelis which I believe was written by Notker the Stutterer. Here is a translation of the Latin.

Alas! We see the lacerated limbs of tender youths! Alas! sweet children murdered soley by madness! Alas! whom neither your devotion or age restrained! Alas! miserable mothers who are compelled to see this! Why do we not submit under these deeds? Alas! because of our memories, our sorrows cannot be lifted. Joy has no power for the sweet, promising youths are no more

The beginning, middle, and end

Just in case you were confused, Aristotle explains it all.

"A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it."

Aristotle and didacticism in art

As usual, Aristotle follows Plato and suggests that the arts are about imitation. He suggests that humans are imitative by nature and delight in imitation. We even like to see the nasty bits imitated. In Poetics, he says that “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies.” I’m reminded of Basil Fawlty saying to Sybil, “That type would wear a dog turd around his neck if it was made of gold.”

Here is the spot where Aristotle goes a little further than his teacher and says that there is a another factor involved. That is, “to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning – gathering the meaning of things.” Even dumb people like to learn.

The problem that Aristotle sets up is one that we haven’t quite resolved yet. Does art have content that is being communicated? Should it? If it does, what is the content made from? The artists emotions? In fact, Aristotle says that if we don’t grasp the content because we are unfamiliar with the object that is being imitated, our pleasure “will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution of colouring or some similar cause.” So, failing to grasp content, we are thrust back to execution. At this point in history, I don’t think Aristotle would argue that the execution is the content.

We tend to get a little skittish around obvious didacticism in art works, sort of. When artists are purposefully heavy handed in making a point that is “non-art” related, things get weird. So, some people like To Kill a Mockingbird because it teaches tolerance, and that’s OK, but if the art work teaches something different, let’s say something like a minstrel show that exploits racial stereotypes, then it’s “propaganda”. There is a dangerous line here. We’ve seen it in recent years with things like Michael Moore’s films. Some say they are documentaries. Some say they are propaganda films. That is, if I like the content, it’s art. If I don’t like the content, it’s propaganda.

The danger, as I see it, is that the easy solution is to separate the technical matter from the content. Then we can say, “I can appreciate it from a technical artistic point of view, but I disagree with the content.” I’m still not convinced of this approach. I suppose that is mostly because in my own work, I find that form and content have such a symbiotic relationship that I find it hard to separate the two and still conceive of the work in the same way. This makes me very confused on the didacticism question too. I hate a sit-com that tries to teach me a moral lesson, but I love a folk story that does the same thing. I hate the Czerny Etudes, but I love the Chopin Etudes. I can’t tolerate a televangelist telling me not to be envious, but I love Othello. I have a suspicion that what I don’t like about the things I hate is not just the execution, but the execution as it is conceived in relation to the content. I guess that’s because I have a difficult time grasping what execution without content might really mean.

again on the evolutionary theory

I think I’ve finally figured out what I don’t like about the American press and evolutionary theory. When they interview biologists, I’m usually okay. When they interview psychologists, I get a little weird.

Consider this report on NPR today:

"Embed a tiny little person or a tiny little animal anywhere in the scene and they'll notice it changing right away," he says. On the other hand, people were really bad at noticing changes in things like buildings.

"We actually had other images where entire grain silos were appearing and disappearing and they would report that there was no change in the scene," he says.

More recent research suggests that people actually pay as much attention to animals as they do to other people, New says.

And he says once a person has detected a living creature, their brain keeps monitoring it — probably because, unlike, say, a bridge or a building, a person or animal can suddenly turn from friendly to hostile."

I assume that the implication here is that once bridges and buildings turn hostile – and a billion years pass – we will have evolved to the state that we will keep track of the grain silos disappearing and report the change in the scene.

This always seems like an ex nihilo argument to me. The tacit assumption is that because a thing is, it is a successful evolutionary strategy. Leaving behind Gould’s Panda Bear Thumbs, we don’t really know do we. If we try to pin the thing down to a certain point in time, it gets confusing. Will the rattlesnakes and spiders get us in the long run, or will it be the buildings and the bridges and the carbon fuels? We don’t really know what is successful. We only know what works right now when we have to buy bean burritos and make it to our jobs and classes on time.

As for me, I’m jumping over buildings and bridges just to be on the safe side.