Questions about form

My friend Katie Ganson invited me to be interviewed by one of her classes the other day. One of the more interesting questions asked by a non-musician was whether or not there are pre-made forms for musical compositions like there are for term papers. I gave a brief answer in the class, but here are a few more developed thoughts.

Form, when it is working properly, is always the result of an honest grappling with the ideas involved. Form, when it isn't working properly, functions as a mold into which you can pour notes and words. Form is free and and expansive when it works properly. It is restrictive when it doesn't. We should not ignore the conclusions reached by those that preceded us. Many of the forms taught in text books are representative of those conclusions. It is interesting to discover how very few Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven sonatas actually conform to the textbooks. The classic forms are not prescriptions but discoveries that inform our creative endeavors. A theory teacher of mine was once on the hunt for a Mozart Sonata that fit perfectly into Sonata-Allegro form and asked if I knew one of the top of my head. I pointed out that if you want to find one, it is much easier to start your search amongst the kleinmeisters. I think that is as true for scholarly papers as it is for musical work. So, you can add the 5 paragraph paper with a 3 pronged thesis statement to jeans skirts and Space Odyssey scenes air brushed on the side of vans to the things that I hate in this world.

Ford Crown Victory: Prequel

     When we started dating, I had a white ’76 Chevy Nova with mag wheels.  The car fit my personality like an over-sized jacket, and I had to stretch out my machismo just to get my hands past the cuff links.  When my dad first bought the car for me, my friends and I had some difficulty in determining its gender.  The vehicle’s well-developed biceps fooled us momentarily.  After checking under the skirt, she was christened, “La Nova Cabrona” by a Cuban-American friend.  The passenger door could only be opened from the outside, which might have been used to some advantage. It turned out to be rather ironic because the number of girls who had actually dated me when I had the Nova was rather small. 

The Nova’s defining moment came when we were in college together.  During class one day, my friend Brian snuck out to the University parking lot and attached a late 70’s style license plate with the words “Cute n’ Sexy” on the front of the car.  The words were airbrushed in that sickening manner that all artists of the compressed air genre seem to have ready at their disposal.

The three principle mediums of "airbrush artists" are the license plate, the T-shirt, and the van side.  An entire bastardized ouvre has been created by artists expressing themselves all over the place by means of hose and compressor. Brian had discovered an example sine qua non.  While the artist was clearly influenced by the so-called “unicorn” school, the piece managed to introduce a graffiti edginess while still maintaining a classic “space odyssey” sensibility.  I saw the license plate immediately after class and knew where blame was to be placed. 

I found Brian laughing, but was unprepared for his next assault.  Brian was a cunning foe and had the advantage of knowing me since eighth grade.  I had expected a simple frontal attack, but he, aware of my weaknesses, had prepared a pincer move.  “Take that thing off my car!  I don’t want to drive around and have people looking at me with a ‘Cute n’ Sexy’ air brushed license plate,” I said.
“Why?  Because you don’t have the existential courage to drive around with that plate on the front of your car?” he quipped.

The blow fell true.  Despite the ironic situation of having to prove my existential freedom by doing something that someone else told me to do, I could no longer remove the plate without acting in "bad faith."  Brian was standing there complete with his French beret, goatee, and horned rimmed glasses mocking me.  “He even dressed the part,” I thought.  I pictured Matthieu in The Road to Freedom stabbing that knife into his hand.  I could see Jean Paul Sartre himself saying, “Kurt, Matthieu could put a knife through his hand, and you can’t even put an air-brushed license plate on your car!”
 
Now, it happens to be the case that I am both “Cute” n’ “Sexy,” but I am not the type of person that likes to spend exorbitant amounts of time defending truths which are both obvious and self-evident.  However, for the sake of acting in good faith and announcing to all those motorists driving around the streets of Tampa that had not yet perceived these truths, I maintained my car-front placard for six months.  Each time I would exit the car at a convenient store, passers-by would immediately glance toward the emerging driver to see if the plate was warranted.  “He’s alright,” I could see them say, “but he’s not all that.”  After receiving a concession from Brian that I had fulfilled my existential duties to the point of supererogation, the plate was removed and placed in a prominent place in my bedroom to remind all that entered that my existential freedom had been tested in the fire and proved worthy.

    Jennifer brought a white Volkswagen Rabbit to our relationship.  Its ears were worn out, and its fur had faded in spots; but it could still hop around a bit.  Riding in the Rabbit whilst Jennifer drove was always a time of excitement in my life.  It was the same sort of thrill I used to get as a child when I was trying to perfect a new trick on my bicycle.  Driving the Rabbit was like trying to jump a makeshift ramp with your little sister riding on the handlebars.  If your timing wasn’t exact, there could be consequences for both you and the passenger.   The Rabbit was an adventure-mobile that could turn the simplest ten-minute drive into a thrilling safari.   
                                                  
Despite its general good nature and kind demeanor, it had two quirks.  We all have strange relatives and learn how to work around their idiosyncrasies.  “Don’t start talking to Uncle Joe about Tibetan alternative health techniques.” “Hide the fingernail clippers before cousin Bob gets here because he has a phobia,” etc.  The Rabbit’s first oddity was that it was an ardent socialist.  It hated to turn right for any reason.  Forward and backward were fine.  It loved heading to the left.  If you attempted to force a right turn upon the vehicle, the engine would become as quiet and motionless as a Quaker at an NRA meeting. 

Jennifer would devise complex schemes for arriving at destination points.  By using a series of left turns, the car would become confused enough to allow you to reach a destination that was actually to the right.  This technique is well known to most socialist dictators, but it can work for navigating left-wing vehicles as well.  If a situation arose where a right turn was inevitable, a carefully timed procedure was required.  During the right turn, the driver would depress the clutch as the motor stalled.  With the clutch down, she shifted into neutral and allowed the car as much forward momentum as possible. She completed the procedure by shifting back into first, popping the clutch, and depressing the accelerator.  Restarting the car during right turns gave surrounding automobiles the impression that the Rabbit was as capable of bi-directionality as any Libertarian.  Accomplishing the right-turn-ritual while still maintaining control of the car was so mentally taxing that the driver occasionally forgot to say, “Lift!” 

As with all left-leaning activists, the Rabbit eventually had a romance with environmental issues.  While frolicking in the salty bay air of Tampa, the Rabbit developed a rusty blemish where the windshield and hood greeted each other.  The melanoma turned out to be malignant, and the cancer bore a hole through to the interior of the car leaving its organs exposed.  The mighty rainstorms of a Tampa summer, when finding their paths unobstructed, felt obliged to deposit several inches of water through the small hole.  The waters formed tributaries that gathered into a wetlands area on the floorboards of the back seat. 

One could walk across the parking lot on a hot summer day and see the ecosystem in the car functioning like an oversized terrarium.  Cumulus clouds would form in the back seat and drift to the front where they would rain down and become the tributaries that fed the wetlands.  This aqueous habitat gave the driver even more obligations than the perfunctory steering and right turn restarting.  Any braking motion required the driver to shout, “Lift!” for the passenger.  When you pressed the brakes on the Rabbit, a small tsunami would form on the floorboards of the back seat and rush forward to spend its fury on the back of your shoes and socks.  Regular passengers in the Rabbit became quickly acculturated.  It only required one experience of the “shoe and sock drenching” to develop an immediate reaction to the word “Lift!” from the driver’s mouth.  Eventually, it didn’t matter if the passenger was actually in the vehicle.  I could be sitting in a chair at home, and Jennifer would say “Lift!”  The word worked like the doctor’s rubber mallet on my kneecap, and my legs would suddenly rise up from the ground in reflexive response. 

    Those cars left us.  The Nova went off to help some at risk children confined in a Hillsborough County Sherrif’s Youth Ranch proving that she wasn’t such a “Cavron” after all.  The Rabbit scampered off to die in the woods somewhere, and Grandma Bean was kind enough to give us her old Crown Victoria.  We had no idea when we accepted the car that it would make us famous for a week in Dallas, Texas.

Further adventures of Kaptain Kartoffelkopf

The reprise of my own idiocy has struck again in what is becoming an all to familiar litany of stories.  I could be an idiot-savant if I could just get the savant part down.  This time it occurred as follows:

I was playing for several members of a horn studio for a little competition at Nebraska Wesleyan University.  The winner had to play at a 4pm recital.  As I was going in to the recital, Jenn texted me to ask what time she should pick me up.  I texted back that I would text her as we were going on stage.  If she left then, she would be down to get me by the time I finished playing.  All went according to plan, but Jenn didn’t make it when I finished.  After waiting for about 5 minutes, I sent her another message that said, “Where are you?”  She arrived shortly after, and we left.  About six blocks away from the University, the following dialogue ensued:

Kurt:  We have to go back.  I forgot something.
Jenn:  What?
Kurt:  We have to go back.  I forgot something.
Jenn:  I heard you before.  What did you forget.
(after a long pause)
Kurt:  I don’t want to tell you.
Jenn:  What?!
Kurt:  I don’t want to tell you.  We just have to go back.
Jenn:  What did you forget?  Your cell phone?  Your computer?
Kurt:  No.  I don’t want to tell you.
Jenn:  I’m going to see when you walk out of the building with it.  You need to tell me what it is.
Kurt:  I don’t want to tell you because you’re just going to tell me that I’m a dumb-ass, and then you’ll be on about it all night.
Jenn:  Just tell me.
Kurt:  No.
Jenn:  If you don’t tell me right now, I can promise that the rest of the evening will not be enjoyable.
(after a long pause, sheepishly)
Kurt:  The car.

Yes, it turns out I had driven myself to work like a big boy and then forgotten how I arrived.  I then pestered my wife to pick me up and complained when she was a few moments late.  In my defense, I was playing Mozart, Richard Strauss, and also some Franz Strauss.  That’s the dad, and he had asthma. 

For further adventures you can read here and here and here and here and here and here.  There are many more that aren't posted yet.

Aesthetics: Form, Content, and my dad's cheesecake theory

So the big question that has to be answered is: Is form separable from content in an art object as St. Augustine seems to suggest. I confess that I haven't been able to puzzle out all of the questions in this problem. There is somewhere that Carl Dalhaus (I think in the 19th century book) says that in regard to the Beethoven Symphonies that the form is the content. We have to travel a little carefully here. Musicians sometimes mean something a little different by "form" than what philosophers of art mean.

An interesting way to look at the problem is through the lens of reinterpretation. What are we to do with Stokowski's orchestral version of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D minor or the Byrds singing Mr. Tambourine Man? Isn't Beethoven's orchestration part of the content of what he has to say? Can we really change it (the "form" in a philosophical sense) without fundamentally altering the content? If Guernica was a sculpture instead of a painting, wouldn't its meaning be subtly altered? For an even more difficult question: Would The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock mean something different if it were a painting? Is it possible that as some commentators on Buber have said that the only real response to a work of art is another work of art?

The funny thing is, it is fairly easy to separate form from content in conversation. We do it all the time for pedagogical purposes. The existential reality of our confrontation with real art objects is more complex. As my dad said to me earlier this week, "Don't you think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Like a cheesecake?"

I'm thinking I like my dad's "cheesecake theory of art" better than St. Augustine's "coffee cup".

Aesthetics: Alternative to St. Augustine's coffee cup theory of art

My good friend, Brian McMillan passed along a lovely passage today. It is from Lars Iyer's book The Birth of Philosophy in Poetry: Blanchot, Char, Heraclitus. It's a nice alternative to the art object as a vehicle for carrying content theory.

"As for Heidegger, the experience of nature in question is linked to a certain experience of the origin. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot tells us that the work of art “is always original and at all moments a beginning” – it appears, first of all, to be “ever new, the mirage of the future’s inaccessible truth”: it shimmers before us, seeming to promise a truth that never finally arrives (The Space of Literature 229). Second, its novelty, this “new ‘now,’” he writes, “renews this ‘now’ which it seems to initiate”; welling up now, happening now, it disrupts the reigning order of experience. And third, Blanchot tells us, “it is the very old, frightfully ancient, lost in the night of time”; it precedes us, it is a thing of the past, but it returns, renewing our time and promising us a future (The Space of Literature 229). The original experience happens, as I will explain, as the happening of the work of art and in so doing, it remembers what is “forgotten” in the coming to presence of the real. The poem, by remembering, also renews our time by drawing on the future – not as the future that one might calculate or plan in advance, nor as the outcome of what is caused in the present, but what, from the perspective of plans and programmes, can only appear as a mirage."

Rilke translations: Ich lebe mein Leben

In anticipation of the upcoming premiere, I'm continuing some translating work for the programs. This is the first text in the new Rilke song cycle from his Stundenbuch. The poems are written from the perspective of a medieval monk.

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein großer Gesang.

I live my life in widening rings
that expand over all things.
I may not complete the last one,
but I will attempt it.

I circle around God, around the ancient tower,
and I circle for thousands of years:
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm,
or a great song.

Aesthetics: St. Augustine's Church coffee

In one of the more famous passages of the Confessions, St. Augustine’s brings his “coffee cup theory of art” (which you can read about here) to church with mixed results.

“Yet again, when I remember the tears I shed at the Psalmody of Thy Church, in the beginning of my recovered faith; and how at this time I am moved, not with the singing, but with the things sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and modulation most suitable, I acknowledge the great use of this institution. Thus I fluctuate between peril of pleasure and approved wholesomeness; inclined the rather (though not as pronouncing an irrevocable opinion) to approve of the usage of singing in the church; that so by the delight of the ears the weaker minds may rise to the feeling of devotion. Yet when it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music.”

First of all, we need to acknowledge the irony involved. St. Augustine gets worried that he is taking more delight in the music than in the words that it is conveying. The irony is that he is worrying in what is generally accepted to be some of the most beautifully penned Latin prose in the history of the world. He reluctantly accepts that fancy mugs might be necessary, but they can be distracting if they keep you from really focusing on the coffee. We know this argument from our relationships. “I really like your for your personality, not your looks.” To quote from one of my favorite poems, “But all the time he was talking she had in mind/The notion of what his whiskers would feel like on the back of her neck.” (I’m giving out some facebook love to anyone that can name the poem without using google.)

St. Augustine’s coffee cup theory will take some time to unpack, but it has a long history in the world of aesthetic philosophy. For church musicians, it finds its most extreme form in the thought of John Calvin and the Geneva Psalter. Music’s purpose is to serve the text without distracting us with interesting little sounds. That theology has had a severe impact on the artistic life of the churches in the Calvinist tradition. I do an experiment with my classes on occasion to underline the point. I write headers on the board listing the major Judeo-Christian denominations. I ask the class to name composers from history. As they name them, I write the composer’s names under the religious tradition to which they at least nominally assented. The last experiment looked something like this:

Judaism: Schoenberg, Bruch, Bernstein, Copland

Roman Catholic: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Messiaen

Orthodox: Pärt, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky

Lutheran: Bach, Mendelssohn, Buxtehude, Brahms

Anglican: Vaughn Williams, Britten, Tallis, Byrd

Calvinist: ???

Apparently, the book of “Great Calvinist Composers” is as brief as the book lampooned on Fawlty Towers: “Great English Lovers”

Aesthetics: St. Augustine's coffee cup

St. Augustine’s views of art will take some time to tackle. He was certainly one of the most powerful and influential minds for the shaping of Western thought. In general, he tends to borrow much of his language and starting points from the neo-Platonists and Plotinus in particular. The big change is that his thought is theological and not strictly philosophical. For Plato, thought centered around what was the best art for the State. With Augustine, we move to thinking about how art stands in relation to God. It should also be noted that Augustine’s final arbiter on these questions are the Scriptures as he understands them.

One of the perennial issues in aesthetic philosophy is articulated clearly by Augustine in De Ordine Chapter 11. He says that “delight of the sense is one thing; delight through the sense is something else.” In one of his examples of this distinction, he quotes Vergil. “Why do the suns in the winter rapidly sink in the ocean? What is the hindrance that holds back late-coming nights in the summer?” Then he states, “our praise of the meter is one thing, but our praise of the meaning is something else.” So our delight in the meter is “delight of the sense,” and our praise of the meaning is “delight through the sense.” As my friend Lane Harder likes to say, there is a difference between idea and execution.

I think it is safe to say that we have all had an experience like this when encountering art objects. That is, there have been occasions when I really liked the ideas communicated by a novel or a movie, but I felt that the supporting architectural structure couldn’t bear up under the profundity of the concepts that where trying to be conveyed. Alternatively, I have encountered music, for example, that I found to be sonically stunning but emotionally unconvincing. This is a pregnant idea that will take some time to unpack.

Augustine gives us what I like to call a coffee cup theory of art. That is, we are to conceive of art objects as a coffee mug. There is an idea – the coffee – that is being carried inside of the object. The idea and the object are separable. Thus, we have a whole school of thought that emerges justifying ugliness by saying, “The main thing is the idea. If the coffee is good, it doesn’t matter if it is served in a Styrofoam cup.” I encounter this idea most often in religious institutions that justify presenting the worst that our culture has to offer artistically by saying that the coffee is good. On the other hand, we also see examples of people pointing out how innovative their mugs are hoping to slip us some Folgers instant coffee that we won’t notice in our distraction.

The underlying assumption in all of this is that art is supposed to do something. Whether or not that is the case will take some more blog posts.

UNL Chamber Singers sing Michelangelo's On Beauty

I had the lovely surprise this weekend of discovering that the UNL Chamber Singers under the direction of Dr. Therees Hibbard were performing an older work of mine on a concert. As always, they sang with beautiful expressive intent. Thanks for creating such a beautiful moment for me today. I have never heard the work in a concert before despite the fact that it's been performed quite often.

This piece was written when I was emerging from a period of about 10 years when I wrote almost exclusively atonal music. I was beginning to explore some new things and set out to write a completely diatonic piece that I could still find interesting. My friend Robert Platte had introduced me to an ambient musician named Jeff Johnson in high school. He had a song with a text by Michelangelo, and I thought it would be perfect. I set about trying to find out if the translation was in the public domain. I was unsuccessful, so I got in touch with Jeff Johnson. I said, "Hey, where did you get that text? Is it in the public domain?" He said something like, "Funny you should ask. We never found the source of the translation when we did the album. I'm sure it's public domain. I actually took it from a poster that used to hang in my room." Said text is below the video.




Mine eyes which are enamored of things fair
And this my soul which for salvation cries
May never heavenward rise
Unless the sight of beauty lifts them there.
Down from the loftiest star
A splendor falls to the earth
And draws desire from afar
To that which gave it birth
So love, and heavenly fire, and counsel wise.
The noble heart finds most in star-like eyes.

Aesthetics: More rambling about Plotinus

Whilst traversing the modest byways between two Universities on Lincoln’s adequate public transportation system, I have been re-reading some of Plotinus’ Ennead. I am certainly struck by the profound and detailed supernal vision he describes. It is easy to see why St. Augustine fell under his spell and borrowed so much of his language. I also find that his mystical approach to epistemology is incredibly relevant today. He complains that knowledge is misunderstood as “a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our sciences of the sense-realm.”

The idea that we “know” a thing by being able to explain its component parts is an argument that is still seductive. When we start by trying to explain the absolute uniqueness of a phenomenon by building it up from its pieces, it always seems like something is missing when we get back to the concrete reality of the form. I do like talking about the building blocks, but there is something that doesn’t ever quite contain the whole ontic nature of the thing in itself. The physicist Richard Feynman describes the limited nature of this sort of knowledge by saying suggesting that all scientific statements are a “kind of approximation to the complete truth.”

So, Plotinus says we need a wisdom that is not “built up of the theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail coordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.” This makes a lot of sense from an artistic perspective. I remember reading a Ravel quote one time where someone asked him about a piece he was working on. He said something like, “It’s all written except for the notes.” I find that idea very concomitant with my own creative process. I struggle with the whole. When that struggle is finished, I work out the details. I know of many other artists who report the same experience.

The big question for Plotinus is what does my “struggling with the whole” look like? Though there are some that claim that works have sprung, fully formed, from the head of Zeus, I just don’t think so. I think they are forged in the concrete reality of working with real materials. There is always something in Plotinus that can’t acknowledge real beauty here and now on this earth. For him, beauty is only a pale reflection of the true beauty in heaven. Maybe. This goes back to the old paradigm that William Barrett liked to call “Hellenistic vs. Hebraic” man. I heard an interview with Dr. Cornell West where he said something like this, “Blood and shit. Born of a woman. When you find someone that can love you in your blood and shit, that’s the real deal.”

Plotinus’ beautific vision is always a little too other worldly for me. It never really allows the wonder of a person or a work of art to exist in the concrete reality of this world. They or it are always only beautiful insofar as they reflect something beyond. There is always a qualifier. There is always an “insofar as”. I’m not sure that’s enough. I want to love people and make art in the incarnational reality of this world – in the “blood and shit”. I suppose this means that I don’t mind a mystical approach to knowledge, but Plotinus never allows enough of a mystical approach to concrete phenomena to allow them real participation in divinity.