“… perfect pitch is a tool which, depending on one’s perspective, may or may not be a benefit or liability to musicians and music in general, but is most likely irrelevant either way in the grand scheme of musical innovation and progress.”

The phrase “musical innovation and progress” jumped out at me right away due to its lack of qualification, so I shall now take a few moments to attempt to parse out and explore what I meant by it. This phrase, for me, does not necessarily mean “getting better.” The words “innovation” and “progress” refer to changes within - or otherwise related to - musical forms. These changes often appear (at least figuratively) as simultaneously forward and backward movement, and occur in conjunction with changing cultural and social attitudes and sensibilities, which themselves can be influenced by changes within music and other similar phenomena.

Perhaps “evolution” would have been a more fitting word to use than “progress.” To say that something is evolving is not to say that it is necessarily getting inherently better, but is instead adapting so as to survive and thrive more effectively within certain conditions. To analogize, a certain species of small and delicious animal might do great within conditions that have led it to evolve a bright red skin. Move the animal to a beige environment and, if it’s able to survive at all, the evolutionary process of color selection (and selection of other condition-appropriate features) begins anew for the species.¹

The same is true with music and ideas of a certain kind (more on what I mean by “certain kind” in a moment). An evolved idea is not necessarily a better idea than an earlier version of itself. Rather, it has become more adapted to the conditions that define the idea’s context, making it fresh and new and pleasing and otherwise beneficial to those who appreciate those changes (while the contrary is true for those who don’t appreciate them; indeed, it is common – perhaps even expected - for people to claim that music is getting worse as they get older). This adaptation process is one reason that ideas that aim for contextual autonomy (i.e. to define their own context and exist outside of any cultural heritage or influence etc.) have a difficult time surviving.

The newer an idea is, or, more precisely, the farther it lives from the center of the slow process in which ideas tend to evolve, the greater difficulty the idea faces in gaining cultural currency because of the challenge it poses to the context-defining conditions in which it exists. That is, the contextually autonomous idea demands that conditions adapt to it, not vice versa. This would be like if the small and delicious red animal tried to change the beige-friendly environment to a red-friendly environment (surely it would try to do such a thing by selecting those things which seem to work in its favor, though it will likely lose the red skin in the process; in this way, the evolutionary selection process can be reciprocal, symbiotic, competitive (viciously so), accidental, etc.).

As I consider all of this more closely, it becomes apparent that there are two types of idea properties at play in the musical evolutionary process I’m attempting to describe. These idea properties are (1) technical and (2) aesthetic. Ideas constituted in technical properties include things like notational systems, tuning systems, means of distribution (e.g., the gramophone or mp3 file), instrument design and construction, and perhaps even the human faculty of audition (though this last item would seem to have some significant distinguishing features; I’ll leave that alone for now). Aesthetic properties relate to our first-person experience of music. There is, in many cases, a form-content relationship between these two kinds of properties, but I’m mostly concerned here with aesthetic properties (though form-content relationships are interesting to consider; for example, in what ways are aesthetic possibilities limited or expanded by technical developments such as the Western notational system or, more recently, MIDI).

To put the idea that music does not get better (or worse) another way: The musical aesthetic experience of today is not better or worse than that of the past, nor better or worse from culture to culture or subculture to subculture . (I absolutely reject such an idea to be the case, but if it turns out that there are comparatively better or worse, valid or invalid, authentic or inauthentic, etc. levels of aesthetic experience – based, for example, on qualities such as complexity or sophistication – those comparative levels existed in the past just as they do today.)²

I mentioned earlier that I would look at the possibility of certain kinds of ideas evolving for the better (i.e., judged to be better independent – or irrespective – of conditions). I shall now do that, and in the process I’ll keep a lookout for any causal links (or any other kind of meaningful relationships) that can be observed between those kinds of ideas and music. Science seems like a good place to start.

One could argue that within the world of science, if an idea can be shown to have evolved in a way that reveals the physical nature of the world more accurately than previous versions of itself, that idea is qualitatively better. An example of this would be if a heart surgeon were to develop a new, safer method for repairing a damaged heart, such that increases patient survival rates. I will limit my response to this thought-provoking idea to two items:

(1) Yes, it certainly seems that this sort of idea would provide a comparatively better solution to that which existed before it, and would therefore be a better idea. Aesthetic ideas are different than those of science, however, in that their ultimate success is subjectively measured, and the nature of the tools (e.g., tastes, social attitudes) with which parameters of success are prescribed - and with which successes are measured - change, while the need for a blood-pumping organ does not.

(2) Ultimately, the researcher has figured out how to improve survival rates within certain conditions: within the conditions of this world, with humans at a particular bio-evolutionary point and with a particular relationship to that world, such that can lead to infection and that requires life-sustaining materials (water, oxygen, food, etc.) to be of a certain nature. The researcher’s solution is comparatively better in the context of these conditions. In other words, the more we pull back and look at the overall picture, the new idea begins to appear not inherently better, but better within specific conditions, and therefore relatively better in the sense that those conditions can change, and the idea might no longer provide the best solution for repairing a damaged heart.³

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that ideas can’t be qualitatively better than each other, though I can’t entirely prove that notion considering the difficulty of factoring out conditional contingencies. To use an example: slavery is a bad idea. There were people who thought slavery was a bad idea long before it was abolished in the United States, otherwise it never would have been abolished (Adam Smith, to cite one of  many examples, argued against slavery both on moral and economic grounds). The abolishment of slavery wasn’t due to the evolution of an idea, however, but the spread of an existing idea.⁴ This is quite different than the evolution of the idea itself, though it’s possible that this idea is a sub-category of a larger evolving idea involving how humans should be treated in general, which can also have a relationship to evolving ethical tools, such as empathy, as well as those means which allow for greater instances of empathy (photography comes to mind, as well as the quickly advancing early technology that allowed for the economic reproduction and distribution of photographs, all of which played an important role in U.S. child labor reform).

It may seem odd that I’m jumping into ethics, but I think it’s useful to do this because I do believe certain ethical ideas are better than others. Also, I believe that we make certain connections between ethical ideas and musical ideas, though I’ve yet to get a clear picture on the nature of that connection. I’ll explore this a bit now.

If we accept that the generally accepted notion that the experience of pain and suffering is of ethical significance, then we also must accept that social progress requires the ever-bettering evolution of certain ethics-related ideas (technical and, let’s say, empathetic). This evolution has a relationship with values in general, in that social structures are not built upon a single idea type, and in that all idea types are connected (aesthetic, ethical, economic, etc.). “Values in general” is a category that includes aesthetic experience, which includes musical experience, which means musical forms and content.

Here it starts to get sticky. Does musical progress play an integral role in socio-ethical progress, and does this mean that one musical form is qualitatively better than another insomuch as it facilitates and contributes to that socio-ethical progress? After all, music is one way in which ethical ideas are spread and developed (at individual and, in turn, societal levels). Is it possible that the music merely reflects existing ethical ideas rather than creating them? I don’t believe that to be the case, though even if it were true, music certainly enhances and encourages the ideas it reflects. Though isn’t that just done through lyrics? To examine this, we’d have to look at notions of music semiotics and representation (a simple example of this would be the use of instrumental music to represent sadness, anger, confusion, etc.), cultural attitudes about musical taste, whether aesthetic taste in itself has moral features, implications of music production means, and implications surrounding the means through which music is disseminated. But let’s not get into all that today.

Well, I have once again begun with a seemingly simple idea (the innovation and progress of music) and turned it into something that raises more questions than it answers, many of which might be ultimately unanswerable. My favorite! I’m not kidding. This is what philosophy – or the general act of contemplation – is to me: the constant revelation that there is a holistic bond between all things that precludes the possibility for genuine contextual autonomy, even for the simplest of ideas.

That said, to summarize and clarify my initial point, when I use the phrase “musical innovation and progress,” I’m not claiming that music necessarily gets better, but rather that it moves along with the broader social and cultural changes that create, along with music itself, the conditions which give music and other ideas their context and, therefore, meaning. It’s surely more complicated than this, but at least what I’ve written here is more substantive – does more justice to the complexity of the subject – than the unqualified closing statement I made in my original post about perfect pitch.

Back in October, Marnie Stern’s dense guitar, frenetic energy, and songcraft grabbed my attention. While sounding of her time, she also sounded unique and fresh. I made a mental note of her, but didn’t investigate further until coming across a recent article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker (Jan 3, 2011). The article introduces Stern as a virtuosic guitarist, and groups her with indie rock contemporaries Annie Clark (nom de plectre, St. Vincent) and Marissa Paternoster (of the band Screaming Females), who are also invariably lauded for their guitar prowess whenever mentioned by the press.

This movement of female guitar badasses is really interesting to me. Though it might seem prima facie to be largely the construction of the media, it really does appear that, at least in the world of mainstream indie rock music, most of the guitarists pushing at the customary boundaries of the instrument are girls (the article points out that boys are more concerned with their samplers). My favorite guitarist working today is probably Shannon Wright, come to think of it.

Marnie Stern herself, though, is always quick to point out that she doesn’t see herself as a great guitar player. She opts for her technique of choice – finger tapping – because it’s “easy” thanks to using two hands instead of one on the fret board. Here’s a video of Stern talking about it. If you don’t watch it, note that she also points out that, despite not considering herself a great guitar player (though she does, in another video, refer to one of her tapping riffs as a “shred,” an idiosyncratic use of the word, perhaps naively so), people on the internet are very mean in their attacks on her playing.

So, what’s with the discrepancy between the media who revere Stern and the online public who tears her apart?

Finger tapping, the most focused upon feature of her playing, is broadly associated with 1980s rock guitar icon Eddie Van Halen, though Stern, who’s self-taught, has said that she got it from Ian Williams of the band Don Caballero (and I once read an interview with Eddie, who is also self-taught, in which he said that he got it from trying to duplicate what jazz fusion uber-virtuoso Alan Holdsworth was doing with his left hand alone). Lots of guitarists used the technique in the ‘80s, however, and some of them developed it well beyond Eddie’s approach. Check out Jennifer Batten’s 8-finger performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”; it’s quite the feat (she was Michael Jackson’s guitarist for a spell, by the way, which meant Jackson got a fantastic live rendition of Eddie’s solo for the song “Beat It”):

Stanley Jordon, another guitarist who came up in the ’80s, took tapping even further, playing bass lines and chords with the left hand while simultaneously playing melodies or improvising solos with the right. But he’s a jazz player. This is an important distinction. Most people expect jazz players to be capable of playing virtuosically, at least since music critics warmed to bebop. The same is not only expected, but demanded of classical musicians, at the very least of the soloists. And flamenco guitarists… a flamenco guitarist who can’t shred isn’t a flamenco guitarist.

Marnie Stern is an indie rock guitarist, which comes with its own technical expectations. As is Annie Clark (a.k.a St. Vincent). But Clark, though often referred to as a guitar genius, shredder, virtuoso and the like, doesn’t play with techniques or effects that would be typically be associated with virtuosity. She therefore doesn’t seem like she’s trying to be a shredder, and as a result will be largely ignored by the shredder community (I spent some time searching and couldn’t find the sort of guitar-centric vitriol you find for Stern). Stern, on the other hand, does play fast, and she does it with tapping, a technique associated with virtuosity. But, in pure shred guitar terms, what she’s doing isn’t nearly as difficult, ambitious, fast, or cleanly executed as what the best rock guitarists were doing in the ‘80s, nor what many of their (generally perfunctory) successors are doing today.

So, despite the fact that she’s an “indie rock guitarist,” Stern’s utilizing a virtuoso technique, getting media attention for it, and using that attention to her commercial advantage, which firmly puts her into the guitar player scrutiny ‘gator tank. One of the first criterion young guitarists look at when determining if someone is any good is whether they can reasonably say, “I could play that.” Most guitarists who aspire to shredder status would consider themselves to be able to play what Stern is playing, even though most of them would have a hard time imitating what she does. Getting through the entirety of such songs as “This American Life” and “Precious Metal” (from 2007′s In Advance of the Broken Arm) would take quite a bit of practice due to the stamina and accuracy that her idiosyncratic (especially phrasing-wise) self-taught style requires (especially considering that to really be true to the challenges she has set for herself, the parts should be played while singing). Still, ambitious guitarists figure that, with practice, they could play the guitar parts without too much trouble.

(As for her opponents who, even with practice, know they couldn’t play those parts… well, these types of guitarists consider even most of the people better than them to suck. They might say, in long impassioned message board debates, that Jimi Hendrix or Steve Vai suck due to not meeting some arbitrary technical or aesthetic criterion such as, “To be a good guitarist, you have to be able to uniformly pick every note with your balls.” Such haters don’t deserve more mention than this parenthetical blurb.)

Therefore, I can say with confidence that Marnie Stern is a badass musician in her own right, at the very least for the way her intricately weaved tapping riffs are part of a greater musical structure that includes the juxtaposition of vocal melody, harmonic environment, and fret board movement (it’s generally unfair to reduce a musician to a single instrumental technique, even if that musician focuses on that technique as a marketing hook; we shouldn’t conflate “musician” and “marketer”). Her music is fantastic, I love her playing, and I’m happy she’s made the scene.

That said, I’d like to dig a little deeper into our cultural conceptions of the guitar without venturing too far from the context of girl badasses. These regions may be more dimly lit than the above, so bear with me as I attempt to separate and identify the obfuscated shapes and forms dwelling there.

By employing her techniques primarily on distorted electric guitar (as opposed to acoustic guitar, as guitar wiz Kaki King does),Stern has landed on the radar screens of shredders from all walks of life: heavy metal, metal prog, jazz, fusion, neoclassical fusion, etc., despite the fact that what Stern claims to really want more than anything is to play guitar in the way that best facilities the realization of her musical vision. These other genres and subgenres continue to encourage virtuosic technique, but mainstream pop and rock music abandoned the virtuosic guitar solo when Nirvana came onto the scene. Kurt Cobain soloed, but his solos served other purposes than that of the shredders. Virtuosic rock guitar solos became quickly stigmatized in the early 1990s (Billy Corgan, however, played shredder guitar solos on the early Smashing Pumpkins stuff, but less so as time went on, and certainly not on any of their hits).

In the last several years, however, I have noticed an increasing appetite for virtuosic rock guitar playing. You can find loads of young shredders of varying skill levels on YouTube, most of whom are playing along with the same stuff I did in the ‘80s because, having gone out of style, there’s not much interesting music to choose from that’s new to the field. Even the former metal shredders who are still around have taken to holding back (compare solo Marty Friedman in the ‘80s to his solo output in the ‘00s). Media and audience praise for Stern’s playing exemplifies this renewed appetite, though, to be clear, it’s coming from people who also expect to hear their idea of a good song.

I myself get mostly positive response to my guitar solos, though there has been some anger as well. On the other hand, no one has ever objected to my playing fast, complicated music on a classical guitar. This difference in reaction is in line with our cultural conceptions of musicianship in general: it’s perfectly fine to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on violin or classical guitar, it’s revered as high art and craft in fact. Play it on a distorted electric guitar, however, and suddenly we have an affront to taste, a soulless exercise. We praise the classical and jazz (the “purer” the better) virtuosi, and denigrate the same in rock music because of what it supposedly stands for (to be clear, in non-cultural, simple musical/sonic terms, playing a piece on one instrument rather than another is in large part merely a change in timbre; interestingly, the change from violin to electric guitar is smaller than going from violin to classical guitar, because the former two are closer in timbre). As a result, many electric guitarists who aspire to virtuosity have developed the sort of defense mechanism we see in action when people are tearing Stern apart.

These haters are, on some level, reacting to the fact that they themselves have been demonized for that which they do better than Stern, but for which Stern is being praised (Rhapsody music service describes her as the “candy-coated Yngwie Malmsteen of freak rock,” which is way off the mark any way you look at it, and doesn’t help anybody). There is certainly going to be some resentment for the likes of Stern on the part of accomplished guitarists who have not managed to have a career. It’s unfortunate, but there is an incredible amount of bitterness among many guitarists who spent years of their lives practicing eight hours a day only to be dismissed by the public as being cheesy showoffs. Their therapy is to congregate at message boards and talk shit about people who are famous. And you don’t have to be an accomplished player to join in, you just have to be a fan of the sentiment (see above parenthetical blurb). It’s not healthy. People with thriving careers don’t do this.

What the haters aren’t getting, though, is that Stern’s musical sensibility is essentially a marriage of the dirty philosophy of melodic post-punk with the technical approach of prog and metal, and that’s something the sensibility of the current (recently mainstreamed) indie rock media is going to respond to (a great example of this marriage is the song “Nothing Left” from her 2010 album, Marnie Stern). Her instrumental technique gives those journalists something new to think and write about in their field, but they wouldn’t care about it at all if they didn’t relate to the music that came out of it. Personally, I like that she’s touted by the media as a virtuoso because it might help open some doors for my own music and playing.

Before closing, I want to comment on the other guitarist mentioned in the New Yorker article, Marissa Paternoster. She shreds in an essentially blues-based rock style, and does it quite well. There has for some time been a debate amongst factions of (mostly narrow-minded) rock guitarists about the merits of such a style (famous examples of such players are Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Slash, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughn, John Frusciante, Angus Young, Eric Johnson, and Orianthi Panagaris) vs. a more modal or technically honed rock style that also draws from blues, but more predominantly takes from jazz and/or classical music. Examples of this second type, to name a small few, are Randy Rhoads, Frank Zappa, Jennifer Batten, Jason Becker, Vinnie Vincent, Marty Friedman, Paul Gilbert, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and, of course, Yngwie Malmsteen. (NB: I’m loosely categorizing some of these for the sake of making a point, not as an attempt to make some hard bifurcation of rock guitardom.)

“Tasteful” and “feel(ing)” are the words that gets bandied about the most in arguments over which of the above approaches is best, though I think it’s a pointless argument, the real purpose of which is to support tastes that are too elusive to concretize. I prefer defending my taste (if forced to) with the famous old Duke Ellington tautology because of how it underscores the aforementioned elusiveness: if it sounds good to me, it’s good. At any rate, Paternoster might be put down by the latter faction but supported by the former, though overall she will be considered a good soloist by most fans of rock guitar. I know I dig her.

I’ll leave you with another excellent musician (and songwriter), whom I referred to earlier as my favorite guitarist working today, Shannon Wright. I’ll let the music speak for itself:

To clarify, insightful critical analysis delivered in a *nonthreatening environment, generally as a feature of an ongoing dialogue with one’s mentors, peers, qualified journalists and audience (though in these last two cases the dialogue is often more figurative than literal), can be a vital, essential part of the development of an artist’s craft and creative vision. Conversely, yelling “you suck” at a show or writing “eat shit and die” at a message board is just being an asshole, and in many cases has the opposite effect of insightful criticism.

But, such assholery does exist, and it does seem that many artists have no choice but to get out of the business or learn to deal. However, the only reason performers need to be able to handle asshole behavior is because of the existence of assholes. If this seems obvious, it should. It is, by extension, equally obvious that when you write “eat shit and die” or “she looks like a retarded baby” at a message board, and then find out that it hurt the actor, writer, director, comedian, or musician’s feelings and you feel bad about it and try to justify it by saying, “if she can’t take it she shouldn’t be in the business,” what you really should be saying is, “yes, I’m an inexcusable asshole and it’s people like me who make the world a harder place to live in; I should apologize and never do it again.”

If that doesn’t convince you, keep the following in mind. Even if you feel that the person you are heckling is terrible at his craft and deserves to be berated publicly, the prevalence of this sort of behavior keeps a lot of especially sensitive performers, some of whom you might actually like, from even trying to get into the business. By contributing to an environment of meanness, you are creating a Darwinian situation in which the only performers who are able to thrive are those who are able to dish it back (especially in comedy) and those who are able to withdraw from general public contact, sticking as closely as possible to their adoring fan base and professional colleagues. These attitudes become part of the cultural fabric and substantially contribute our collective zeitgeist, unfortunately.

So, don’t be mean to your performers, generally even if they themselves are deluded jerks (you’ll have to use your judgment in this regard, but keep in mind that the consequences of that judgment are your responsibility, not the performer’s; for example, if you feel someone’s work is in the service of an ideology you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself for ignoring, attack the ideology, not the person, and not at a staged performance if at all possible). People working in the arts and entertainment industries are struggling through their lives and careers just like everyone else, and by launching insults at them you’re only adding more misery to the world.

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*Yes, sometimes insightful criticism itself is brutal, and there are differing opinions about just how nonthreatening venues for evaluative criticism should be, but that’s a different – and very long – conversation.

I. Overview: Philip Pettit on Group Agency

The other day, I heard a fascinating interview with philosopher Philip Pettit on the Philosophy Bites podcast. The topic was group agency (the subject and title of Pettit’s as-yet unreleased new book), described thus on the podcast’s website:

How do groups act? We hold them morally and legally responsible, but are their decisions simply a majoritarian sum of individuals’ decisions? Princeton philosopher Philip Pettit, who has written a book on this topic with the LSE’s Christian List, explores these questions in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Here’s the Amazon.com book description (full title: Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents):

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper approach to the social sciences, law, morality, and politics must take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy.

And, “agency,” as defined in its philosophical and sociological connotations, taken from Wikipedia:

Agency is the capacity of an agent to act in a world. In philosophy, the agency is considered as belonging to that agent even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act, therefore moral agency is a distinct concept. In sociology, an agent is an individual engaging with the social structure; the structure and agency debate concerning the level of reflexivity that agent may possess.

II. The Problem with Voting

Before I touch on the podcast discussion, some comments:

I have for a long while had a problem with voting as a means of deciding what’s best for individuals. Here are some of the issues I find most bothersome:

- when a democracy is established, nobody votes on who gets to vote; that right is designed by those with power and given as they see fit to serve their own interests

- what’s best for the group is not necessarily best for each individual in the group, which is to say, most people are voting for their own best interest, and those who happen to share the most similar self-interests win; often people will band together simply for the sake of winning; all of this falls more or less under the Tyranny of the Majority problem, a recent example of which is same-sex marriage (I’ll get back to that)

- no group ever gained the right to vote by voting, they gained that right through protest (which is true of most progressive social victories); once the right to vote is won in an already established democracy, most protest movements wane and are reduced to those few who understand that that particular victory is one step in a longer journey

- it seems to me that voting in the U.S. (with its Electoral College, judicial system, etc.) is a largely symbolic gesture of expressing one’s voice (as uninformed as it may be, in which case voting is not the practice of voicing one’s opinion on a particular philosophical, social, or political ideology, but, instead, is the practice of asserting the right to vote per se as a symbol of living in a free country; in this symbolic form, voting is treated more like badge/duty than a right); the political process too often serves to placate and exploit those eligible to vote by giving them the impression of voter/civil influence

- in the broader sense of group agency, I am not convinced of individual moral impunity: if you are a part of a group, and are aware of the ethical implications of the group’s actions, you are responsible for your actions despite personal gains or perils that might come with complying or not complying with the group’s belief system/policies/etc. (a fantastic morality play [to use the term loosely] on this subject is Sam Raimi’s 2008 film, “Drag Me to Hell,” which deals with a bank loan officer who, against her guilty conscience, forecloses on a sick elderly woman’s house in the hopes of winning herself a promotion).

There are disconcerting problems with how large groups tend to be organized. In most corporations, for example, members of upper management make policy but don’t have to deal face-to-face regularly with low level staff or customers (especially significant in the case of essential services such as health care, credit lending, heating gas, et al.), while lower level staff deals out the bad news to those customers, citing policy and saying “I’m just the messenger, just doing my job to feed my kids.” Thanks to this arrangement, the individual members of the group have manageably clear consciences, however, this arrangement does not translate into moral impunity for the group or, frankly, for the individual members (though, considering that I only believe in morality as a human conception, I would have to make a fine distinction between conceptions of moral duty and practical social accountability to fully argue this premise). These members might have elaborate and justifiable explanations for their actions, but those explanations don’t automatically remove the moral implications of actions and their consequences. I myself have worked for a major insurance company and health care network, and have seen the consequences of such group organizing on both lower level staff and clients/patients; “disconcerting” is putting it lightly.

With all this in mind, however, I’m not actually convinced that the low level employee, the low ranking soldier, or the least affluent of the voter classes are genuine members of the group they serve (I say this keeping well in mind the possible differences as well as similarities between being born into a group and purposively joining one). One of the reasons companies need to put the effort they do into employee morale is to compensate for the tremendous discrepancy between that which the lower level employees accept to be the case and that which the middle and upper management employees accept to be the case. Lower level employees have little to no say in the group’s belief system (how the company is run) and are therefore prone to morale problems. As you move up the ladder, these problems are less prevalent because of the control and influence held by those positions (it is generally accepted, and borne out by studies, that employee satisfaction is more related to a sense of personal control and autonomy than pay scale, just as customer satisfaction is more influenced by customer service than product cost).

These are general issues I have with voting practices. To be clear, I’m not against the idea of voting per se, but at the same time, I see these flaws in its practice and they bother me. It seems obvious to me that voting’s only one small part of a flourishing democratic life, despite its status as the be-all and end-all symbol of American democratic freedom. In fact, voting often seems more like a justification for laziness, which those who are more socially active either exploit, or towards which they adopt a, “well, it’s the least you can do,” attitude.

III. Same-Sex Marriage and Rights Distribution (States of Being vs. Kinds of Persons)

To look at a specific example of problems with voting practices (whether at the popular or governmental/higher courts/etc. levels), we have the recent controversy of same-sex marriage. The problem in this case is that we have established that any two consenting adults of a certain age who aren’t too closely blood-related and who aren’t already married etc. have the right to marry one another, and those who wish to not get married don’t have to. To establish such a set of criteria toward the goal of determining the scope of a civil liberty is, in effect, to establish a right. Surely there are people who feel they should be able to marry their brothers or have 12 wives, and, for their loss, I see no solution. They are out of luck. But I do feel that once a right is established (including the right to a privilege, for those of you who like to argue that marriage is merely a privilege*), that right should be viewed as a shared, inviolable vision for the group as a facet of free agency within a democracy.

Violation of that vision occurs when people begin to decide exactly which KINDS of consenting adults of a certain age (and so forth) have the right to marry. This is a step too far, and is where problems arise: in some states, a majority of people (again, either at the popular or governmental levels) won’t allow for same-sex marriage because they don’t believe that “self -evident” human rights apply to every kind of person. This is, in fact, a blatant violation of human rights as we conceive of the idea in the Western world (see the below footnote). They are applying specific as opposed to general criteria to which they themselves could never be subject.

To resolve this, it’s necessary here to make a critically important distinction. It could be argued that, especially as these criteria originate at the state level where age, blood-relation and other such criteria may vary, so may the criterion of gender. That is a groundless argument, however, just as it’s groundless to argue that liberty should be determined by a criterion of race. I will make a distinction here between two types of criterion: (1) kinds of persons; (2) a state of being in which any kind of person can exist or find him/herself.

Elaboration:

Age does not designate a kind of person, but instead a state of being in which any kind of person can exist or find him/herself. So, an African American, homosexual and heterosexual can all find themselves at the age of 17 or 18. In marriage laws, state of being criteria are covered by the stipulation of consent between both individuals. We determine states of being in which any kind of person is unable to consent: children, the comatose, severely mentally disabled, dead… these are all states of being in which any KIND of person can find themselves or exist (or, in the case of death, be found by others).

Incest, polygamy, et al. are also states of being that are not restricted to kinds of people, but they are states of relationships as opposed to states in which a single individual can exist. They are often evaluated based upon cultural taboos with varying levels of rational support, but this is irrelevant to the question of to whom we should apply established human rights. Counterarguments invoking cultural taboos in the same-sex scenario often have to take the slippery slope route because, unlike incest, polygamy (especially polyandry), bestiality and, for that matter, cannibalism, homosexuality is not a genuine cultural taboo and is not a relationship state of being: a homosexual can, just as a heterosexual, find him/herself in a relationship state of incest or polygamy. (Citizenship falls into the relationship state classification as well, but that’s a case that comes with its own special prickliness not worth getting into here.)

IV. Back to the Podcast: Group Agency and the Discursive Dilemma

Ok, back now to the abovementioned podcast in which Pettit discusses group agency. Most interestingly, he describes a paradox which he calls the discursive dilemma (a generalized version of the jurisprudential doctrinal paradox) in the voting process within a group (or, more specifically, the means by which a group’s beliefs are established). He doesn’t have time to fully explain his proposed solutions, but does point out that groups should be treated like individuals (as “institutional persons”), and that the group should have a shared vision toward which it works and which is not dependent on majoritarian support that can lead to incoherence in the group’s beliefs. Here’s the paradox, followed by his example (edited for the sake of simplicity/clarity):

Tom, Joan and Ed are to vote on P and Q:

Tom believes P and Q
Joan believes P not Q
Ed believes Q not P

Result: The group believes P and Q as being disjunctively true, but not P and Q as being conjunctively true = paradox

Example:

A tenant has a faulty heater in his apartment. He complains to the landlord that it’s malfunctioning and needs to be fixed. The landlord does nothing. The heater explodes, which the tenant claims has caused him trauma, for which he sues the landlord. The case is taken to the housing board. The questions at hand are: Was the explosion the landlord’s fault? and Did the tenant really suffer trauma? If both things are true, then, presumably, the man has grounds for suing the landlord. They vote:

Tom believes that the landlord is responsible for the explosion (P) and that the man suffered trauma (Q)
Joan believes P but not Q
Ed believes Q but not P

Result: the group believes that the landlord is responsible for the heater exploding (P), and that the tenant was traumatized as a result (Q), but the group does not believe both P and Q together: that the landlord should be held accountable. In other words, viewing the group as possessing a single mind (an “institutional person”), the group believes that, as two separate ideas, the landlord is responsible AND that the man experienced trauma, but the group as a single mind doesn’t believe those things together: that the landlord is responsible and that the man experienced trauma. In which case, the landlord is off the hook, and the group’s beliefs are clearly incoherent.

Pettit and List’s book is not out yet, though I did find an article in which Pettit describes the basic problems of the discursive dilemma and some proposed solutions: Groups with Minds (I am also interested in his paper, Rawl’s Political Ontology in this context, but haven’t read it yet). He also explains (in Groups with Minds) that he believes that groups should be viewed as individuals in their own right.

Whether or not the group is to be treated as having a single mind, it seems clear to me that sharing a common vision would be essential for coherence. In cases such as the above, it seems that such a vision would be: if both P & Q are considered true by a majority of the group, then P & Q together will be considered true by the group, and P & not Q will be considered false. This is very sticky, and is ultimately an ethical problem (I take “vision” to mean “moral stance,” really) because it would seem to be just as easy to say that if each P & Q separately are not considered true, then P & Q together will be considered not true by the group.

The group would need to decide beforehand the ethical thrust of their purpose. To be clear, what I’m interested in are the ethical implications of group agency and determining case outcome in general (itself something of debate in law… natural law vs. legal positivism vs. soft positivism… namely, the role of ethics in jurisprudence). Pettit’s article deals mainly with the metaphysical idea of the group forming a single mind, so I’ll need to read his book to understand his take on ethics and accountability (I get the impression that the book does deal with ethics to some extent, which it should, considering that agency is tied to ideas about moral accountability).

Anyway, in order to determine the thrust of their vision before voting, the group will first decide if it is their belief AS A GROUP that if it’s the landlord’s fault and if the tenant did suffer, then the tenant has grounds for being compensated by the landlord (what’s referred to as a premise-centered procedure, as opposed to conclusion-centered). Which approach to take should be decided based on considerations of ethical thrust and group agency coherence (metaphysically, I’m not convinced of the single-mindedness of the group, but, either way, the incoherence exists). With these considerations in mind, the outcome then becomes a matter of how the culture of that group affects the group’s evaluation of the ethical grounds for holding the landlord accountable for a breach of duty of care, which, in our society, I think the outcome would most likely be that of the premise-centered procedure.

(Of course, this still doesn’t take care of the problem of a majoritarian ethical perspective ["tyrranically"] beating out a less prevalent one, which is why I’m more concerned with the ethical than metaphysical implications, though I do understand the importance of the metaphysical question when determining the accountibility of the group itself as well as the members that constitute it. I’ll be curious to see how Pettit and List approach this problem. I’m skeptical of there being any practical solution to the ethical problems of voting [including the notion I suggest, that some members are really only ostensibly such], despite achieving group coherence.)

To make things more complicated, voting isn’t always laid out as it is in the above example. P and Q are not always voted on separately. For example, the housing board might vote individually simply on whether the landlord should be held accountable (a conclusion-centered procedure). In this case, you’d have one yes and two nos. However, that doesn’t change the fact that, AS A GROUP, there is still incoherence, whether it’s as apparent as it is in the earlier example or not. Even trickier is the incoherence resulting when P and Q are voted on at different times (Pettit calls this scenario the diachronic generalization), perhaps even by different members of a group fulfilling the voting quota at different times (a problem tackled by 18th century philosopher Marquis de Condorcet).

V. Wrapping it Up

I look forward to reading Pettit and List’s book to see how they deal with the concept of group agency in and outside of the jurisprudential context, and I am happy to have learned about the discursive dilemma (which is the relative of quite a few similar voting paradoxes, just google “doctrinal paradox” and you’ll see what I mean; if you’re interested in economic theory, you’ll notice some shared ideas between voting paradox and game theory).

One last bit of clarification: I am very frustrated by political practice, and am therefore not interested in politics. I am, however, very concerned with those things which politics are supposedly in place to address. But, given the way the political machinery actually works, I have little interest in it for reasons which, were I to point them out, would seem too obvious to even bother stating. The best cure for this frustration seems to be writing about it. If you made it this far, thanks for reading and please feel free to share your own ideas.

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FOOTNOTE:

*The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists marriage as a right, and there is nothing in it that explicitly states people can only marry those of the opposite gender, though I could imagine someone arguing that it is implied:

Article 16:
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 2:
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Varèse: The Liberation of Sound
From Perspectives on New Music
New Instruments and New Music

Edgard Varèse, 1936

When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived. When these sound-masses collide the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows.

Today with the technical means that exist and are easily adaptable, the differentiation of the various masses and different planes as these beams of sound, could be made discernible to the listener by means of certain acoustical arrangements. Moreover, such an acoustical arrangement would permit the delimitation of what I call Zones of Intensities. These zones would be differentiated by various timbres or colors and different loudnesses. Through such a physical process these zones would appear of different colors and of different magnitude in different perspectives for our perception. The role of color or timbre would be completely changed from being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque, it would become an agent of delineation like the different colors on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form. These zones would be felt as isolated, and the hitherto unobtainable non-blending (or at least the sensation of non-blending) would become possible.

In the moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations when they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities, or are dilated in certain rarefactions. Moreover, the new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the vertical resultants: chords, their arrangements, their spacings, that is, their oxygenation. Not only will the harmonic possibilities of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor but the use of certain interferences created by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. The never before thought of use of the inferior resultants and of the differential and additional sounds may also be expected. An entirely new magic of sound!

I am sure that the time will come when the composer, after he has graphically realized his score, will see this score automatically put on a machine which will faithfully transmit the musical content to the listener. As frequencies and new rhythms will have to be indicated on the score, our actual notation will be inadequate. The new notation will probably be seismographic. And here it is curious to note that at the beginning of two eras, the Mediaeval primitive and our own primitive era (for we are at a new primitive stage in music today) we are faced with an identical problem: the problem of finding graphic symbols for the transposition of the composer’s thought into sound. At a distance of more than a thousand years we have this analogy: our still primitive electrical instruments find it necessary to abandon staff notation and to use a kind of seismographic writing much like the early ideographic writing originally used for the voice before the development of staff notation. Formerly the curves of the musical line indicated the melodic fluctuations of the voice, today the machine-instrument requires precise design indications.

Music as an Art-science

And here are the advantages I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations; new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound-projection in space by means of the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, “contrapuntally” (since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them) – all these in a given unit of measure or time which is humanly impossible to attain.

Rhythm, Form and Content

My fight for the liberation of sound and for my right to make music with any sound and all sounds has sometimes been construed as a desire to disparage and even to discard the great music of the past. But that is where my roots are. No matter how original, how different a composer may seem, he has only grafted a little bit of himself on the old plant. But this he should be allowed to do without being accused of wanting to kill the plant. He only wants to produce a new flower. It does not matter if at first it seems to some people more like a cactus than a rose. Many of the old masters are my intimate friends – all are respected colleagues. None of them are dead saints – in fact none of them are dead – and the rules they made for themselves are not sacrosanct and are not everlasting laws. Listening to music by Perotin, Machaut, Monteverdi, Bach, or Beethoven we are conscious of living substances; they are “alive in the present.” But music written in the manner of another century is the result of culture and, desirable and comfortable as culture may be, an artist should not lie down in it. The best bit of criticism André Gide ever wrote was this confession, which must have been wrung from him by self-torture: “When I read Rimbaud or the Sixth Song of Maldoror, I am ashamed of my own works and everything that is only the result of culture.”

Because for so many years I crusaded for new instruments with what may have seemed fanatical zeal, I have been accused of desiring nothing less than the destruction of all musical instruments and even of all performers. This is, to say the least, an exaggeration. Our new liberating medium – the electronic – is not meant to replace the old musical instruments which composers, including myself, will continue to use. Electronics is an additive, not a destructive factor in the art and science of music. It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony.

Grateful as we must be for the new medium, we should not expect miracles from machines. The machine can give out only what we put into it. The musical principles remain the same whether a composer writes for orchestra or tape. Rhythm and Form are still his most important problems and the two elements in much most generally misunderstood.

Rhythm is too often confused with metrics. Cadence or the regular succession of beats and accents has little to do with the rhythm of a composition. Rhythm is the element in music that gives life to the work and holds it together. It is the element of stability, the generator of form. In my own works, for instance, rhythm derives from the simultaneous interplay of unrelated elements that intervene at calculated, but not regular time lapses. This corresponds more nearly to the definition of rhythm in physics and philosophy as “a succession of alternate and opposite or correlative states.”

As for form, Busoni once wrote: “is it not singular to demand of a composer originality in all things and to forbid it as regards form? No wonder that if he is original he is accused of formlessness.”

The misunderstanding has come from thinking of form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be filled. Form is a result – the result of a process. Each of my works discovers its own form, I could never have fitted them into any of the historical containers. If you want to fill a rigid box of a definite shape, you must have something to put into it that is the same shape and size or that is elastic or soft enough to be made to fit in. But if you try to force into it something of a different shape and harder substance, even if its volume and size are the same, it will break the box. My music cannot be made to fit into any of the traditional music boxes.

Conceiving musical form as a resultant – the result of a process, I was struck what seems to me an analogy between the formation of my compositions and the phenomenon of crystallization. Let me quote the crystallographic description given me by Nathaniel Arbiter, professor of mineralogy at Columbia University:

“The crystal is characterized by both a definite external forma in a definite internal structure. The internal structure is based on the unit of crystal which is the smallest grouping of the atoms that has the order and composition of the substance. The extension of the unit into space forms the whole crystal. But in spite of the relatively limited variety of internal structures, the external forms of crystals are limitless.”

Then Mr. Arbiter added in his own words: “Crystal form itself is a resultant (the very word I have always used in reference to musical form) rather than a primary attribute. Crystal form is the consequence of the interaction of attractive and repulsive forces and the ordered packing of the atom.”

This, I believe, suggests better than any explanation I could give about the way my works are formed. There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, directions, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is the consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals.

Connected with this contentious subject of form in music is the really futile question of the difference between form and content. There is no difference. Form and content are one. Take away form, and there is no content, and if there is no content there is only a rearrangement of musical patterns, but no form. Some people go so far as to suppose that the content of what is called program music is the subject described. This subject is only the ostensible motive I have spoken of, which in program music the composer chooses to reveal. The content is still only music. The same senseless bickering goes on over style and content in poetry. We could very well transfer to the question of music what Samuel Beckett has said of Proust: “For Proust the quality of language is more important than any system of ethics or esthetics. Indeed he makes no attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is the concretion of the other – the revelation of a world.” To reveal a new world is the function of creation in all the arts, but the act of creation defies analysis. A composer knows about as little as anyone else about where the substance of his work comes from.

As an epigraph to his book, Busoni uses this verse from a poem by the Danish poet, Oelenschläger:

“What seek you? Say! And what do you expect?
I know not what; the Unknown I would have!
What’s known to me is endless; I would go
Beyond the known: The last word still is wanting.”
And so it is for any artist.

The Electronic Medium

First of all I should like you to consider what I believe is the best definition of music, because it is all-inclusive: “the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound,” as proposed by Hoëne Wronsky. If you think about it you will realize that, unlike most dictionary definitions which make use of such subjective terms as beauty, feeling, etc., it covers all music, Eastern or Western, past or present, including the music of our new electronic medium. Although this new music is being gradually accepted, there are still people who, while admitting that it is “interesting,” say, “but is it music?” It is a question I am only too familiar with. Until quite recently I used to hear it so often in regard to my own works, that, as far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.” Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But after all what is music but organized noises? And a composer, like all artists, is an organizer of disparate elements. Subjectively, noise is any sound one doesn’t like.

Our new medium has brought to composers almost endless possibilities of expression, and opened up for them the whole mysterious world of sound. For instance, I have always felt the need of a kind of continuous flowing curve that instruments could not give me. That is why I used sirens in several of my works. Today such effects are easily obtainable by electronic means. In this connection it is curious to note that it is this lack of flow that seems to disturb Eastern musicians in our Western music. To their ears it does not glide, sounds jerky, composed of edges of intervals and holes and, as an Indian pupil of mine expressed it, “jumping like a bird from branch to branch.” To them apparently our Western music seems to sound much as it sounds to us when a record is played backward. But playing a Hindu record of a melodic vocalization backward, I found that it had the same smooth flow as when played normally, scarcely altered at all.

The electronic medium is also adding an unbelievable variety of new timbres to our musical store, but most important of all, it has freed music from the tempered system, which has prevented music from keeping pace with the other arts and with science. Composers are now able, as never before, to satisfy the dictates of that inner ear of the imagination. They are also lucky so far in not being hampered by esthetic codification – at least not yet! But I am afraid it will not be long before some musical mortician begins embalming electronic music in rules.

We should also remember that no machine is a wizard, as we are beginning to think, and we must not expect our electronic devices to compose for us. Good music and bad music will be composed by electronic means, just as good and bad music have been composed for instruments. The computing machine is a marvelous invention and seems almost superhuman. But, in reality, it is as limited as the mind of the individual who feeds it material. Like the computer, the machines we use for making music can only give back what we put into them. But, considering the fact that our electronic devices were never meant for making music, but for the sole purpose of measuring and analyzing sound, it is remarkable that what has already been achieved as musically valid. They are still somewhat unwieldy and time-consuming and not entirely satisfactory as an art-medium. But this new art is still in its infancy, and I hope and firmly believe, now that composers and physicists are at least working together, and music is again linked with science, as it was in the Middle Ages, that new and more musically efficient devices will be invented.

In the Jean-Luc Godard movie Weekend, there’s a scene in which a character is playing piano (Mozart, I believe), and at one point he says something to the effective of, “Modern classical music is the biggest practical joke to be played on the public in the history of Western art.” Something like that. Anyway, I wonder if Godard, a pretentious modernist of sorts in his own right, had read Babbitt’s article; I bet he had. Finally, I’ll end this over-long preface by pointing out that if read from the right angle, this article is funny, like a lampoon of a mid-20th century modernist manifesto:

“Who Cares if You Listen?”

Milton Babbitt, High Fidelity (Feb. 1958)

This article might have been entitled “The Composer as Specialist” or, alternatively, and perhaps less contentiously, “The Composer as Anachronism.” For I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. This composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy- and, usually, considerable money- on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. e is, in essence, a “vanity” composer. The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. he majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow ‘professionals’. t best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.

Towards this condition of musical and societal “isolation,” a variety of attitudes has been expressed, usually with the purpose of assigning blame, often to the music itself, occasionally to critics or performers, and very occasionally to the public. But to assign blame is to imply that this isolation is unnecessary and undesirable. t is my contention that, on the contrary, this condition is not only inevitable, but potentially advantageous for the composer and his music. From my point of view, the composer would do well to consider means of realizing, consolidating, and extending the advantages.

The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners, on the one hand, and traditional music and its following, on the other, is not accidental and- most probably- not transitory. Rather, it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics The immediate and profound effect has been the necessity of the informed musician to reexamine and probe the very foundations of his art. He has been obliged to recognize the possibility, and actuality, of alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes. He lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of “common practice,” but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.

This fall from musical innocence is, understandably, as disquieting to some as it is challenging to others, but in any event the process is irreversible; and the music that reflects the full impact of this revolution is, in many significant respects, a truly “new” music, apart from the often highly sophisticated and complex constructive methods of any one composition or group of compositions, the very minimal properties characterizing this body of music are the sources of its “difficulty,” “unintelligibility,” and- isolation. In indicating the most general of these properties, I shall make reference to no specific works, since I wish to avoid the independent issue of evaluation. The reader is at liberty to supply his own instances; if he cannot (and, granted the condition under discussion, this is a very real possibility) let him be assured that such music does exist.

First. This music employs a tonal vocabulary which is more “efficient” than that of the music of the past, or its derivatives. This is not necessarily a virtue in itself, but it does make possible a greatly increased number or pitch simultaneities, successions, and relationships. This increase in efficiency necessarily reduces the “redundancy” of the language, and as a result the intelligible communication of the work demands increased accuracy from the transmitter (the performer) and activity from the receiver (the listener). Incidentally, it is this circumstance, among many others, that has created the need for purely electronic media of “performance.” More importantly for us, it makes ever heavier demands upon the training of the listener’s perceptual capacities.

Second. Along with this increase of meaningful pitch materials, the number of functions associated with each component of the musical event also has been multiplied. In the simplest possible terms. Each such “atomic” event is located in a five-dimensional musical space determined by pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration, and timbre. These five components not only together define the single event, but, in the course of a work, the successive values of each component create an individually coherent structure, frequently in parallel with the corresponding structures created by each of the other components. Inability to perceive and remember precisely the values of any of these components results in a dislocation of the event in the work’s musical space, an alternation of its relation to a other events in the work, and-thus-a falsification of the composition’s total structure. For example, an incorrectly performed or perceived dynamic value results in destruction of the work’s dynamic pattern, but also in false identification of other components of the event (of which this dynamic value is a part) with corresponding components of other events so creating incorrect pitch, registral, timbral, and durational associations. It is this high degree of “determinancy” that most strikingly differentiates such music from, for example, a popular song. A popular song is only very partially determined, since it would appear to retain its germane characteristics under considerable alteration of register, rhythmic texture, dynamics, harmonic structure, timbre, and other qualities.

The preliminary differentiation of musical categories by means of this reasonable and usable criterion of “degree of determinacy” offends those who take it to be a definition of qualitative categories, which-of course-it need not always be. Curiously, their demurrers usually take the familiar form of some such “democratic” counterdefinition as: “There is no such thing as ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music.” There is only ‘good’ and ‘bad’ music.” As a public service, let me offer those who still patiently await the revelation of the criteria of Absolute Good an alternative criterion which possesses, at least, the virtue of immediate and irrefutable applicability: “There is no such thing as ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music. There is only music whose title begins with the letter ‘X,’ and music whose title does not.”

Third, musical compositions of the kind under discussion possess a high degree of contextuality and autonomy. That is, the structural characteristics of a given work are less representative of a general class of characteristics than they are unique to the individual work itself. Particularly, principles of relatedness, upon which depends immediate coherence of continuity, are more likely to evolve in the course of the work than to be derived from generalized assumptions. Here again greater and new demands are made upon the perceptual and conceptual abilities of the listener.

Fourth, and finally. Although in many fundamental respects this music is “new,” it often also represents a vast extension of the methods of other musics, derived from a considered and extensive knowledge of their dynamic principles. For, concomitant with the “revolution in music,” perhaps even an integral aspect thereof, has been the development of analytical theory, concerned with the systematic formulation of such principles to the end of greater efficiency, economy, and understanding. Compositions so rooted necessarily ask comparable knowledge and experience from the listener. Like all communication, this music presupposes a suitably equipped receptor. am aware that “tradition” has it that the lay listener, by virtue of some undefined, transcendental faculty, always is able to arrive at a musical judgment absolute in its wisdom if not always permanent in its validity. I regret my inability to accord this declaration of faith the respect due its advanced age.

Deviation from this tradition is bound to dismiss the contemporary music of which I have been talking into “isolation.” Nor do I see how or why the situation should be otherwise. Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else? It is only the translation of this boredom and puzzlement into resentment and denunciation that seems to me indefensible. After all, the public does have its own music, its ubiquitous music: music to eat by, to read by, to dance by, and to be impressed by. Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity? The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields. But to this, a double standard is invoked, with the words music is music,” implying also that “music is just music.” Why not, then, equate the activities of the radio repairman with those of the theoretical physicist, on the basis of the dictum that “physics is physics.” It is not difficult to find statements like the following, from the New York Times of September 8, 1 957: “The scientific level of the conference is so high… that there are in the world only 120 mathematicians specializing in the field who could contribute.” Specialized music on the other hand, far from signifying “height” of musical level, has been charged with “decadence,” even as evidence of an insidious “conspiracy.”

It often has been remarked that only in politics and the “arts” does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard. In the realm of politics he knows that this right, in the form of a vote, is guaranteed by fiat. Comparably, in the realm of public music, the concertgoer is secure in the knowledge that the amenities of concert going protect his firmly stated “I didn’t like it” from further scrutiny. Imagine, if you can, a layman chancing upon a lecture on “Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms.” At the conclusion, he announces: “I didn’t like it,” Social conventions being what they are in such circles, someone might dare inquire: “Why not?” Under duress, our layman discloses precise reasons for his failure to enjoy himself; he found the hall chilly, the lecturer’s voice unpleasant, and he was suffering the digestive aftermath of a poor dinner. His interlocutor understandably disqualifies these reasons as irrelevant to the content and value of the lecture, and the development of mathematics is left undisturbed. If the concertgoer is at all versed in the ways of musical lifesmanship, he also will offer reasons for his “I didn’t like it” – in the form of assertions that the work in question is “inexpressive,” “undramatic,” “lacking in poetry,” etc., etc., tapping that store of vacuous equivalents hallowed by time for: “I don’t like it, and I cannot or will not state why.” The concertgoer’s critical authority is established beyond the possibility of further inquiry. Certainly he is not responsible for the circumstance that musical discourse is a never-never land of semantic confusion, the last resting place of all those verbal and formal fallacies, those hoary dualisms that have been banished from rational discourse Perhaps he has read, in a widely consulted and respected book on the history of music, the following: “to call him (Tchaikovsky) the ‘modern Russian Beethoven’ is footless, Beethoven being patently neither modern nor Russian…” Or, the following, by an eminent “nonanalytic” philosopher: “The music of Lourie’ is an ontological music… It is born in the singular roots of being, the nearest possible juncture of the soul and the spirit…” How unexceptionable the verbal peccadilloes of the average concertgoer appear beside these masterful models. Or, perhaps, in search of “real” authority, he has acquired his critical vocabulary from the pronouncements of officially “eminent” composers, whose eminence, in turn, is founded largely upon just such assertions as the concertgoer has learned to regurgitate. This cycle is of slight moment in a world where circularity is one of the norms of criticism. Composers (and performers), wittingly or unwittingly assuming the character of “talented children” and “inspired idiots” generally ascribed to them, are singularly adept at the conversion of personal tastes into general principles. Music they do not like is “not music,” composers whose music they do not like are “not composers

In search of what to think and how to say it, the layman may turn to newspapers and magazines. Here he finds conclusive evidence for the proposition that “music is music.” The science editor of such publications contents himself with straightforward reporting, usually news of the “factual” sciences; books and articles not intended for popular consumption are not reviewed. Whatever the reason, such matters are left to professional journals. The music critic admits no comparable differentiation. We may feel, with some justice, that music which presents itself in the market place of the concert hall automatically offers itself to public approval or disapproval. We may feel, again with some justice, that to omit the expected criticism of the “advanced” work would be to do the composer an injustice in his assumed quest for, if nothing else, public notice and “professional recognition.” The critic, at least to this extent, is himself a victim of the leveling of categories.

Here, then, are some of the factors determining the climate of the public world of music. Perhaps we should not have overlooked those pockets of “power” where prizes, awards, and commissions are dispensed, where music is adjudged guilty, not only without the right to be confronted by its accuser, but without the right to be confronted by the accusations. Or those well-meaning souls who exhort the public “just to listen to more contemporary music,” apparently on the theory that familiarity breeds passive acceptance. Or those, often the same well-meaning souls, who remind the composer of his “obligation to the public,” while the public’s obligation to the composer is fulfilled, manifestly, by mere physical presence in the concert hall or before loudspeaker or- more authoritatively- by committing to memory the numbers of phonograph and amplifier models. Or the intricate social world within this musical world where the salon becomes bazaar, and music itself becomes an ingredient of verbal canapés for cocktail conversation.

I say all this not to present a picture of a virtuous music in a sinful world, but to point up the problems of a special music in an alien and inapposite world. And so, I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism

But how, it may be asked, will this serve to secure the means of survival or the composer and his music? One answer is that after all such a private life is what the university provides the scholar and the scientist. It is only proper that the university, which-significantly-has provided so many contemporary composers with their professional training and general education, should provide a home for the “complex,” “difficult,” and “problematical” in music. Indeed, the process has begun; and if it appears to proceed too slowly, I take consolation in the knowledge that in this respect, too, music seems to be in historically retarded parallel with now sacrosanct fields of endeavor. In E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics, we read: “In the eighteenth century the universities were not the principal centers of research in Europe. hey might have become such sooner than they did but for the classical tradition and its understandable hostility to science. Mathematics was close enough to antiquity to be respectable, but physics, being more recent, was suspect. Further, a mathematician in a university of the time would have been expected to put much of his effort on elementary teaching; his research, if any, would have been an unprofitable luxury…” A simple substitution of “musical composition” for “research,” of “academic” for “classical,” of “music” for “physics,” and of “composer” for “mathematician,” provides a strikingly accurate picture of the current situation. And as long as the confusion I have described continues to exist, how can the university and its community assume other than that the composer welcomes and courts public competition with the historically certified products of the past, and the commercially certified products of the present?

Perhaps for the same reason, the various institutes of advanced research and the large majority of foundations have disregarded this music’s need for means of survival. I do not wish to appear to obscure the obvious differences between musical composition and scholarly research, although it can be contended that these differences are no more fundamental than the differences among the various fields of study. I do question whether these differences, by their nature, justify the denial to music’s development of assistance granted these other fields. Immediate “practical” applicability (which may be said to have its musical analogue in “immediate extensibility of a compositional technique”) is certainly not a necessary condition for the support of scientific research. And if it be contended that such research is so supported because in the past it has yielded eventual applications, one can counter with, for example, the music of Anton Webern, which during the composer’s lifetime was regarded (to the very limited extent that it was regarded at all) as the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition; today, some dozen years after the composer’s death, his complete works have been recorded by a major record company, primarily- I suspect- as a result of the enormous influence this music has had on the postwar, nonpopular, musical world. I doubt that scientific research is any more secure against predictions of ultimate significance than is musical composition. Finally, if it be contended that research, even in its least “practical” phases, contributes to the sum of knowledge in the particular realm, what possibly can contribute more to our knowledge of music than a genuinely original composition?

Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live.

British Lecturer: Suppose a student comes in late to class the fifth day in a row and I say to her, “Early again are we?” What have I really said?

Class of British Adults Attending Beginning Philosophy Lectures: She’s arrived late again.

Lecturer: Right, my meaning is not the literal interpretation of the actual words, but is dependent on [certain factors]. You know perfectly well what I mean if you are an English-speaking person.

Man in the Class, Interjecting (this one’s a quote): Isn’t it cultural? If you said that in America they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

(End of recreation.)

What? The lecturer responds, saying some stuff about cultural conventions that come into play when people communicate ideas, then comments that although it is supposed that Americans don’t use irony, she’s sure that sometimes they do, though she can’t think of an instance (she characterized Jon Stewart as being sarcastic, not ironic; I assume her distinction has to do with degrees of subtlety/dryness and possibly context, but considering the obviousness of the “late student” example she gave, an explanation would have been nice).

I tried to shrug this off because, really, who cares, right? Well, I guess I care, as that was a few days ago and it’s still gnawing at me. It wasn’t just that the (smug, “I’ve got you now teacher” sounding) adult student was ignorant, it was that the (smart and seasoned) lecturer herself didn’t have a proper response to the stereotype. Maybe she hasn’t been to the U.S. or had any American friends, or maybe she was just too tired to address the issue after over an hour of having to field the constant attempts from her students to challenge just about every other thing she said.

I’ve run into this kind of thinking before, by the way. I once met some young British men in Paris when I was in my mid-20s who were hilarious afficionados and practicioners of sarcasm, just as many of my back-home American friends were at the time (in fact, neither of these guys were ever as complex in their practice as my American friend whom I once heard being elaborately sarcastic while sleep-talking). My new British friends were happily surpised to discover, very much contrary to their expectations, that Americans not only understood sarcasm, but could engage in it. (Incidentally, one of them asked me, ”But isn’t it true that Americans don’t understand sarcasm?” The word “irony” never came up.)

The best (well, my favorite anyway) argument I’ve heard for American irony/sarcasm comes from a British man I blogged about recently, Stephen Fry, in one of his Blessay/Podgrams:

“Incidentally, forgive a detour here, but if there is one misapprehension about Americans that annoys me more than any other, it is the lofty claim, usually made by the most dim-witted and wit-free Britons, that America is an – ho-ho – “irony free zone”. Let it be established here, this day, that no one, on pain of being designated fifty types of watery twat, ever dare repeat that feeble, ignorant, self-satisfied canard ever ever again. Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else and the repeated assertion (and it is no more than an assertion not a demonstrable provable fact) is no more than a pathetic symbol of a certain kind of Briton’s flabby need to convince themselves of their sophisticated superiority over the average American. Now, don’t feel bad about the fact that you, dear listener/reader have, at some point in the past been guilty of repeating and transmitting this feeble myth, we all have. It’s lazy, easy and gives us a warm glow. My war on the lie begins now, and is not retrospective, so you need not feel ashamed. Only promise never to repeat it. Actually, even if you think it’s true, have the grace to recognise that such a clunking, tedious, oft-repeated cliché is so dull and well-worn that it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it’s just plain tedious and only bar-stool bores and dull-witted gibbons would ever think it worth trotting out. Besides, it is ugly, graceless and rude.”

Thank you, Stephen, for saying this in terms that the Briton can relate to (does “watery twat” mean what I think it does??).

Finally, I’m reminded now of something I read some years ago (only a few months after the abovementioned Parisian trip, in fact) in a book called Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, in which Whitehead (a British philosopher who died in 1947) is quoted as saying:

 ”Irony, I would say, signifies the state of mind of people or of an age which has lost faith. They conceal their loss, or even flaunt it by laughter. You seldom get irony except from people who have been somehow more or less cleaned out.”