Classical Music, the Internet, Openness

In this article Alex Ross talks about the internet helping classical music, which is disappearing from radio and the pop culture. Classical music was “deemed too elitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop.”

Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music. Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away. Younger musicians, in particular, are using every available means to reach a potential public that is far larger than the one that already exists…

Ross thinks that the net offers “radical acts of demystification” of classical music — the obscure finding its advocates and interpreters.

In this article Adam Kirsch says about Ross,

Mr. Ross, in keeping with his usual practice, almost never says a skeptical word about even the most extreme musical absurdities. But it is clear that he is much happier writing about recent composers who use tradition creatively, not destructively, and whose accomplishments are more than theoretical. Mr. Ross devotes more space to Benjamin Britten's opera “Peter Grimes” than to any other single work, relishing both its sound and its psychosexual subtlety…These artists are the rare, inspiriting exceptions in a period whose “overall trajectory,” as Mr. Ross admits, looks like “one of steep decline.”

I'm not sure if “never says a skeptical word about even the most extreme musical absurdities” fits with the rest of Kirsch's positive assessment of Ross's writing. If that quote is true of Ross' approach, it is not a mark of openness, nor of wise restraint, but of a lack of character.

Kirsch's defense of Ross, “He knows that …raise-the-drawbridge, circle-the-wagons mentality, while it may afford a mournful, self-righteous pleasure to those inside the classical music world, is designed to drive everyone else away. Instead, Mr. Ross takes the opposite approach: he writes about even recondite works and obscure composers with intelligent absorption. He offers a skeptical world living proof that a smart, curious listener can find pleasures and challenges in new music — whether that music is opera or free jazz or avant-garde pop.”

Who knows what to make of this? Ross may be just trying to be heard, as Kirsch indicates. But clearly there is a lot of fake affection for hollow self-indulgent art, borne most likely of fear of not belonging to a target group, of being ostracized — it is as simple as the playground in its logic. An insightful critic can reinforce people's skepticism without driving them away and in the process the critic might gain trust in a more fruitful way, by establishing standards. In so much art that is celebrated there is no “there” there. Is Ross to be congratulated for his openness, allowing his erudition its due in the process, or condemned for cynical retreat before the mob?

Something More Than Reality

As an art student, for a few summers in New York, I would go up to Woodstock, which had been an artist's colony long before Woodstock. My stays there were only shortly before Woodstock achieved its greater fame. I would study at the Art Student's League; we would go out as a class to paint landscapes — I was the assistant, which saved tuition. It was pretty amazing when I think back on it — there was even more of a need to save money than that…

In exchange for rent, I worked on the property of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's widow. I lived with a fellow artist in Kuniyoshi's studio; a city kid, I was ignorant of the skills of the groundskeeper, but my friend Bill From Iowa, a fine person, showed me what to do and I did my best. Kuniyoshi's second wife, as I remember, was a photographer for MoMA.

Kuniyoshi is pretty well forgotten now — even when I moved in I didn't know much about his work, nor, for whatever reason, did I pursue further knowledge later. But as a thank you for the use of his studio in the magical woods, where at night raccoons loudly scattered the garbage outside as we sat painting inside, here are some words of Yasuo Kuniyoshi:

Throughout these many years of painting I have practiced starting my work from reality stating the facts before me. Then I paint without the object for a certain length of time, combing reality and imagination.

I have often obtained in painting directly from the object that which appears to be real results at the very first shot, but when that does happen, I purposely destroy what I have accomplished and re-do it over and over again. In other words that which comes easily I distrust. When I have condensed and simplified sufficiently I know then that I have something more than reality.

A Cause of Sorrow

In this moving piece by Christopher Hitchens he allows his public self to recede, as Hitchens discusses his feelings and his encounter with the parents of a hero, Mark Daily, who was deeply influenced by Hitchens' writing.

Hitchens says of Daily,

…the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again, not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings, who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he couldn't stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to rethink things… Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit of humor and tough-mindedness…

Hitchens says of the family,

I had already guessed that this was no gung-ho Orange County Republican clan. It was pretty clear that they could have done without the war, and would have been happier if their son had not gone anywhere near Iraq…they had been amazed by the warmth of their neighbors' response, and by the solidarity of his former brothers-in-arms—1,600 people had turned out for Mark's memorial service in Irvine. A sergeant's wife had written a letter to Linda and posted it on Janet's MySpace site on Mother's Day, to tell her that her husband had been in the vehicle with which Mark had insisted on changing places. She had seven children who would have lost their father if it had gone the other way, and she felt both awfully guilty and humbly grateful that her husband had been spared by Mark's heroism. Imagine yourself in that position, if you can, and you will perhaps get a hint of the world in which the Dailys now live: a world that alternates very sharply and steeply between grief and pride.

And finally Hitchens quotes Shakespeare…

Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.

James Webb

When James Webb represented the Democrats in one of those required media “reply to” balancing segments after a Bush speech I was impressed by the sophisticated presentation — Webb's words were better than expected in these things; it later came out that Webb had discarded the speech given to him, writing the speech himself.

But what stayed with me, without knowing much about him, was Webb's reptilian stare as he delivered the speech. The press euphemizes this mean-spirited quality as being “direct”. Later, in news clips, Webb appeared a a ponderous, populist demagogue, with little regard for the subtleties of the world. Now there is talk about Webb as a potential running mate. This would be a major mistake for the Democrats.

WaPo says of Webb, the self-righteous public brawler,

This spring, when a senior Webb staffer was arrested carrying the senator's loaded handgun into a Capitol office building, Webb asserted his right “to defend myself and my family.”

If the above-the-law Webb doesn't fully reveal himself for you in that self-presentation, this should tell you all you need to know about the man:

[Webb] also offered a sharp critique last month of a resolution urging that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps be designated as a terrorist organization, arguing that it would give President Bush an opening to seek war with Iran…

Webb is more obsessed with his disdain for and distrust of Bush than with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for 70% of American deaths in Iraq — not to mention the havoc this gang wreaks in their own country.

Class Notes

This discussion is the clearest summary of super symmetry and string theory I've heard. String theory was described as “a framework for a theory”.

The class notes…

Fermions constitute matter and includes:

• neutrinos
• electrons
• quarks

Bosons are transmitters of energy and comprises:

• the W boson which communicates the weak nuclear force
• gluons hold subatomic particles together
• gravitons communicate gravity
• photons express light

As the discussion goes on you have to ask yourself: Does this sound like science or imagination clothing itself in scientism?

The Mobility of Thought

Remember Picasso? At one time considered the greatest artist in the world. His survival through World War II was celebrated by many a sign of a heartening survival of civilization itself. He was promoted by Life and became a rich reclusive celebrity. He was attacked by that Huffington dame in a book excoriated in the New York Review of Books. At his best he was inventive and amazing if not seminal like Matisse.

Picasso's energy and imaginative force carries his work still. He was given to aphorisms, some of which were recorded by Christian Zervos:

The picture is not thought out and determined beforehand, rather while it is being made it follows the mobility of thought. Finished, it changes further, according to the condition of him who looks at it. A picture lives its life like a living creature, undergoing changes that daily life imposes upon us. That is natural, since a picture lives on through him who looks at it.

We ourselves travel through time with the delusion that we are cohesive — our egos intact. But we know we are different with each tick of the clock — even if the day to day changes are invisible to gross scrutiny, we are aware over time how deeply we change. If we are wise and/or lucky, we grow, if not, we deteriorate, like any living thing; but our interior growth is to a great extent determined by our decisions — by what we make of our life and — with what degree of care we process our experience and thereby value our existence.

So it is the picture and ourselves that travels through time, intersecting and changing each the other in a quiet collision in space-time.

The Supremes Discussed

First, here is a discussion not to be missed. Two men who help make decisions that affect 300 million people, speaking about their thought processes. You seldom see the justices in extended serious discussion; both Scalia and Breyer were impressive. I haven't been a big fan of Scalia, but his often-remarked great charm was in evidence — if not fully persuasive in his approach, at least it helps you to understand his logic.

The above discussion was about a year ago at the American Constitution Society. What led me to it was this discussion between Dahlia Lithwick and Jan Crawford Greenburg about covering the Court. This was a model conversation about an important topic by two people who have some fundamental disagreements. Just great. Greenburg's empathy for Clarence Thomas changed my perspective about the man, even if some of his ideas still feel off-putting as well.

The one objection: at the conclusion Greenburg and Lithwick invoked the mind-numbing journalistic formula: “well, if we get angry letters from both sides then we must be doing it right.” Put aside the smugness and dismissive arrogance of the premise; you really do have to consider the content of the criticism and not concern yourself with the “side” it is coming from. A disappointingly dumb meme from the journalistic community, what else is new?

Here is Greenburg's blog
Here is the Ann Coulter of the Left, Maureen Dowd, comparing Thomas to OJ Simpson

Jarrell: Art and Fashion

In a wonderful if gloomy essay called A Sad Heart at the Supermarket Randall Jarrell says of the “media”, meaning pop culture,

If you're so smart why aren't you rich? is the ground-bass of our society, a grumbling and quite unanswerable criticism… Celebrity turns into testimonials, lectures, directorships, presidencies, the capital gains of an autobiography…Our culture is essentially periodical: we believe that all that is deserves to perish and to have something else put in its place…We feel that the present is better and more interesting, more real, than the past, and that the future will be better and more interesting, more real, than the present; but…we do not hold against the present its prospective obsolescence. Our standards have become to an astonishing degree the standards of what is called the world of fashion, where mere timeliness…is the value to which all other values are reducible…

Jarrell goes on to say,

All this is…the opposite of the world of the arts… of Homer and Mozart and Donatello…An artist's work and life presuppose continuing standards, values extended over centuries or millennia, a future that is the continuation and modification of the past, not its contradiction or irrelevant replacement.

Jarrell reminds us of the dismal truth, “New products and fashions replace the old, and the fact that they replace them is proof enough of their superiority.”

So concludes this brief look at the criticism of Randall Jarrell.

Snowball, The Dancing Cockatoo

When I first saw this YouTube video of a dancing cockatoo I thought it was digitally manipulated or some animatronic magic. It is pretty clear it is neither. It is rather a bird inhabited by a human spirit.

Snowball has the moves.

Henry Miller

Henry Miller, with words that jump off the page,

I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.

Brilliantly said. It is surprising how many artists are joiners. How easily influenced by fashion. How much many artists desire support from theory and consensus rather than developing and sticking by personal conviction.

Miller's clarity and simplicity recommend him and lends his work an oddly classical feel stylistically. His honesty, by which I mean a true-ness to his imaginative flow, is the hallmark of art, and provides a tremendously grounded quality to his writing.

Miller also said,

We are dealing with crystalline elements of the dispersed and shattered soul. The modern painters express this state or condition perhaps even more forcibly than the writer: Picasso is the perfect example of what I mean.

Since writing that Picasso has waned in public esteem and Matisse has emerged as a far reaching influence — both conceptually and graphically — but principally through his sensibility. The two artists represent the inescapable antipodes of body/mind and spirit/heart — like Michelangelo and Raphael; a preference for one over the other is a preference derived from local circumstance; both artists work to an equally high level, the only true judgment that can be applied to the ineffable image.

Modernism

Randall Jarrell on modernism:

Modernist poetry…appears to be and is generally considered to be a violent break with romanticism; it is actually I believe, an extension of romanticism, an end product in which most of the tendencies of romanticism have been carried to their limits. Romanticism…is necessarily a process of extension…it presupposes a constant experimentalism, the indefinite attainment of “originality,” primarily by the novel extrapolation of previously exploited processes. (Neoclassicism…is a static system.)

Discussions of modernism, of neoclassicism, seem almost quaint in our time of adolescent irony and “anything goes, nothing lasts”. But movements in art are cyclical and what Jarrell notes will swing back our way soon.

Jimmy We Hardly Knew Ye

Jimmy Kimmel hasn't been funny in weeks. I used to be a big fan of that show; his ratings have certainly grown, as guests keep noting in their appearances, but the show is in a temporary, or possibly more permanent trajectory of a long slow decline. Kimmel's monologues are not funny, the clips are seldom funny, his extended family is becoming a bad joke; Kimmel has mined the same formulas to exhaustion. Inexplicably, the shows are often repeats, even mid-week — you never know when a new show is airing. Kimmel is on autopilot.

Kimmel had his girlfriend Sarah Silverman on the other day. Trying to mine the Andy Kaufman / Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) realm of reality outrageousness Silverman's humor mostly resolves to distracted discomfort; more annoying than funny. True to the odd pop culture phenomenon of peaking popularity and unnoticed decline — Silverman's star is on the rise.

An Article Worth Reading

Here is a brilliant article about Ahmadinejad's visit. Caroline Glick says,

During his visit to New York this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacked every basic assumption upon which Western civilization is predicated…Refusing to note his existential challenge to the Free World, the Western media concentrated their coverage of his trip on his statements regarding specific Western policy goals…In spite of what the West would like to believe, Ahmadinejad and his allies from Ramallah to Waziristan, from Gaza to Kandahar to Baghdad, are not negotiating. They are fighting. Rather than ignore them or seek to find nonexistent common ground, we must defeat them - first and foremost on the battleground of ideas.

I found this article via Ron Rosenbaum. Ron said that what would stay with him about Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia was the applause he heard at the conclusion of the event.

Al Gore and Ron Paul

EJ Dionne said on Lehrer that Gore's success, emphasizing the issue of global warming long before it was popular with the masses, seeing it reach critical mass, resulting in a share of a Nobel Prize, is a success one seldom sees in a lifetime. That is true, and Dionne didn't even include the spectacle of the presidency being ripped from Gore's hands by a dysfunctional Supreme Court, and now Gore finds himself discussed as a potential candidate. Dionne said “Gore is too happy to run” and that again sounds right. With a Nobel Prize, an Academy Award, scads of Google money, it seems unlikely Gore will be running for anything. With all the success Gore appears to practically be purring. More likely he will just be hoping to be able to live 120 years — maybe life extension technologies will be the next Big Idea from Gore Inc.

Ron Paul was also on Lehrer. Paul's isolationist, populist exhortations — with an aura of libertarianism — is reminiscent of Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and Howard Dean; a frenzy of simple ideas expressed with enthusiasm can be deeply appealing to the young; aggregated propositions are by their nature demagogic — showing little concern for the labyrinth of the real world. Finally, Paul's energized supporters are more the story than Paul himself. Simple formulas don't really work, because they are simple, and if those simple formulas are successful, as Isaiah Berlin noted, you don't necessarily get what you bargained for. You would think younger people would learn. I guess they do, but by then they are older. Of course, most presidential terms end with a desperate yearning for major change and young energy can help in that. Dionne and Brooks also mentioned the widening income disparity in the country and how dangerous that is for social stability. Now there is an issue.

One thing of note: When Brooks and Dionne are the guests on Lehrer you feel ideas are actually being considered, rather than the default for media discussion — an exchange of slogans.

The Garden Wall

Randall Jarrell's enthusiasm for Robert Frost is infectious. Jarrell quotes a short poem called Atmosphere, subtitled Inscription for a Garden Wall:

Winds blow the open grassy places bleak;
But where this old wall burns a sunny cheek,
They eddy over it too toppling weak
To blow the earth or anything self-clear;
Moisture and color and odor thicken here,
The hours of daylight gather atmosphere.

Those last two resonant lines — they evoke the interior space where we accumulate scattered daily experience into “thickened” memory.

Skepticism and Health

This discussion about Gary Taubes' new book is ostensibly about diet advice but it has such resonance that it recommends itself as an affirmation of skepticism in general. Taubes questions the received notions about diet and exercise — at first I thought Taubes was a crank, but these two science writers make it clear that Taubes is a serious player, with a well documented book.

Very wise advice from these two which underlines the ancient admonition, “moderation in all things”; a healthy skepticism about all things, including scientific studies which are often cohort studies, not necessarily determinant of cause / effect.

We would all do well in life if we took the advice about moderation, healthy skepticism and add to it the golden rule. Words to live by.

Marla Paints Nightline

Nightline just did one of those stories. “Tyke Paints Like Picasso But She Isn't Potty Trained!” — practically ripped from the tabloids. In this case there was a wrinkle: did the child actually paint the abstract expressionist paintings? Or were her parents a little too involved?

A filmmaker was in the process of recording the story when accusations were first made. Contrary to expectations, the filmmaker was not the exploitative type; his doubts arose after basically living with the family over an extended period.

There were a number of unanswered questions — characteristic of media cluelessness when covering art related subjects:

• Did the father lay out the paint and canvases in a selective manner? In one clip the child was painting on a canvas covered with black paint— was that surface prepared for her without any decision on her part and was she then presented with a narrowed palette of colors by her parents?

• Many of the paintings looked as though they were done from formula — squeeze paint on canvas, let child spread and scribble with brush. Did the father show his child this approach?

• A crucial question: did the parents sit with the child and show her paintings by Pollock, Monet, Kokoschka, Matisse, Guston's early expressionist works — just before she began painting? Many of the paintings look imitative. Children have a mimetic genius — although not the same as talent, it isn't a bad starter if the child develops dedication. Did this little girl “get ideas” from tutored, selective exposure and encouragement to “do something like that”?

• These are abstract expressionist works? Although kids will do abstract works, by nature children are literalist by inclination and tend towards storytelling in their work. The little girl never appeared involved in an internal narrative, no matter how simply derived, that would suggest involvement in any nascent aesthetic sense.

I had the feeling the parents had truly convinced themselves that their daughter was borne from Zeus' ear — a spontaneous genius. Then again, Marion Jones probably had convinced herself she wasn't taking enhancement drugs, once, long ago.

Pushing Daisies, Again

So the best show of the new TV season was hyped to be Moonlighting, er, I mean Pushing Daisies. Luckily, the director Barry Sonnenfeld added at lot to The Truman Show, er, I mean Pushing Daisies. It stars John Cusack, er, I mean someone who looks like John. And it co-stars Lesley Ann Warren, er, I mean someone who looks like Lesley. The best TV show of the season — nothing like something new.

Randall Jarrell's Affirmation

Jarrell, in his essay about The Obscurity of the Poet says,

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. … art is indispensable because so much of … truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone…

Jarrell goes on to name many of the greats, from Shakespeare to Blake and revels in the truths they made us see. I admire his unvarnished affirmation. I've felt for a long time that art is what first made us human, and that it is our finest hour as beings. No other expression of our humanity takes in the ambivalence of consciousness and the ambiguity of experience, combining our interior lives and our investment in our physical vessel as it moves through time. At its best, art combines the spirit, the body and the heart. These are difficult assertions to make in a time of distanced irony and sated senses, but it is still important.

Jarrell quotes Proust about the plangent dedication and integrity involved in the creative act,

All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life…[making] the talented artist consider himself to be obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work that admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms…