Nicht Diese...

Some old fashioned writing this Sunday evening (or Monday morning). A reflection.

There was a time when I kept a journal. As a high schooler, I wrote and wrote and wrote for no one but myself, trying out poetic devices, exploring thoughts on religion and love and politics, rarely, but occasionally, chronicling the day's events. In retrospect there was nothing all that peculiar about this habit of mine; after all, I was a teenager, and aspired even then to be an intellectual because of, and often in spite of, the community of peers that my private high school afforded me.

I say in spite of because there's a certain stigma attached to intellect in our competitive culture. There's nothing quite so satisfying as the smart guy who loses all the same, faced with the hard-working idiot. Mastermind has dark connotations, so too genius, in a more twisted and historical way. At the time - and maybe still today - I was caught in the paradox of intellect. Our culture honors the intellectual, but punishes and chides all the same. We value intellect, but we despise the person who recognizes their own intelligence.

Perhaps, more than anything, we despise the egotism of the self-promoter not because he is selfish - after all, there's a certain synonymity between "selfish" and "conscious" - but because he often refuses to acknowledge that, ultimately, there are always greater minds. In some sense, our fetish for specialization is a rebellion against the great minds of the great generalists throughout history, who strove to know as much as they could about as many different subjects as they could. "How dare they encroach upon my specialty!"

That's not the point, but I'm not sure what the point is. Even though I have become a writer of prose - after one time being a writer mainly of (poor) verse - I still hold a certain lesson from poetry dear: you don't have to have a "point." That's not fair to poetry, because most poems have a point in one sense or another, but there's a kind of beautiful chaos in the endeavor of poetry that prose simply cannot replicate. Even the most pointed and purposeful poetry is clothed, nonetheless, in a poetic diction, a formalism of meter and rhyme, that prevents easy unfolding. A poem may be compelling, then, but hardly in the way that a persuasive essay is.

Not all essays persuade, however. Sometimes they border on poetry. Indeed, John Dryden was one of the founders of the essay, and his Religio Laici, like the majority of his work, is in verse. Though perhaps that's poetry bordering on essay?

It is odd that we draw such a distinction, truly. Poetry comes from the Greek word meaning "to create." What difference, then, between Montaigne and Dryden, Plutarch and Sappho?

Ah, specialization is our specialty. Today we divide not just writing from poetry, but different kinds of writing and poetry from each other. The essay is a form distinct from the story, which is in turn distinct from the academic essay, the memoir, the novel, the novella, the biography, the autobiography, the treatise, the manifesto, the confession. Do we allow more experts, or fewer by such divisions? By that I mean, by splitting our brilliant writers into such camps, do we not maybe lose our brilliant writers?

That's not fair, either. A great many writers straddle such narrow definitions. Indeed, the best writers are the very cause of new terms and genres. The novel sprung into existence as a way to categorize the work of Cervantes, the essay for Montaigne. The same in music, where the Opera became a term necessary to characterize Monteverdi. The same in poetry.

Since I was a high schooler, I have learned a great deal about how little I know. I expect that, now, at a still-young 24, I have a great deal more to learn about how little I know. What is insufferable about intellectuals, it turns out, is not how much they know, but how little. Socrates was killed for it.

A turn of phrase, a turn of phrase. I have collected, in my short life of reading, a great many connections and associations - many of which are historical, and most of which are European, with occasional Hawaiian or Buddhist allusions mixed in - which allow me to express myself without expressing myself. That is another of the intellectual's tricks, and perhaps the heart of the poet's art. T.S. Eliot's Wasteland would not have gotten far without tricky, intellectual allusions. Nor would Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the longest inside joke in history, perhaps). "Oystery Gods gaggin' Fishy Gods."

For a long time, between high school and graduate school, I stopped writing. Oh, I wrote for classes at St. John's, and I would occasionally pick up a pen ruefully in the time in between then and Stanford. Poetry, never, but occasional essays, arguments for why surfing matters - a concept that only fellow surfers will understand - or a history of the beautiful Platonic romance that closed my Freshman year of college.

Perhaps that is the object of these wanderings. The last of my poetic fervor expended itself in the poems composed for two women. The first, an illusive goddess who rekindled in me the concept of love - albeit in my hoity-toity (spelling?) way - sending me into thralls unmatched by any but my first (and less Platonic) romance. The second, my one-month-from wife, who is so much more real and wise. No goddess - for how long do such relationships last? - but instead a life. There was one poem each way, with Jericha, and that was enough. Indeed, those first poems probably say more about our relationship - even now - than anything else we could write (just as toddlers already display so many of the personality traits they will have as adults).

I suppose, for me, there is too much poetry in living for me to write poetry. I have become polemical, instead, arguing fiercely for a position on education, music, politics, or culture. Usually arguing a position untaken, or untakeable, and explaining why it should not be so neglected. A natural contrarian, I have become, who can turn "because" into "in spite of" and back again. To what end? It profits me little that I oppose so vehemently a great many things which are simply "the way it is." Why oppose, for example, specialization? It leads to such a beautiful, functional world. Why oppose citation? It leads to such easy access to knowledge. If only it were so simple.

I oppose simplicity. Or rather, I suppose simplification, which likely means I oppose myself as a writer. The vast majority of my writing - and probably all writing - is an attempt to simplify, to make expressible the inexpressible nature of being. If writing is an argument, then the most direct, simple argument wins, and the writing that best takes the complex and makes it appear simple will always be favored. I am opposed to sophistry, you might say, even though I will acknowledge that I am as good a sophist as can be found. That's perhaps a bit too self-congratulatory, for there are a great many sophists in this world better than I.

When I allow myself to write honestly - or, at least, without regard for how complicated a narrative I weave - I find that I use the word "perhaps" with astounding frequency. Perhaps. It's a versatile word, but what it does more than anything is act as a crutch. There is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. Perhaps there is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. See the difference? One is certain, the other... Perhaps.

Judicious use of "perhaps," (and "seems," and "this suggests," and "I think," and "possibly") might be a mark of intellectual rigor, laziness, or both. Judicious use of perhaps might, also, be my least poetic trait as a writer. Good writers avoid pointless, empty words like "perhaps." It means nothing. Or it means everything.

Now I'm stealing from Demetri Martin* (I run the gamut; Socrates to Important Things), which perhaps indicates that our winding road is nearing its end. What is that end? Hard to say. What the journey? Equally hard.

* To wit: 'Sort of' is such a harmless thing to say. Sort of. It's just a filler. Sort of - it doesn't really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like after 'I love you' or 'You're going to live.'

Nicht Diese Tone, I titled this blog, and though I addressed it in my opening post (gulp, five months and about 60 posts ago), perhaps a return to that theme is in order. The title is German, meaning "not these tones." In retrospect, why a negative? Of all the phrases from Beethoven's Ninth, why this one? I suppose it's the contrarian in me, the intellectual who doubts the value of intellectuals; the liberal who despises the term "liberal;" the musician, astrologer, and student who wants to be everything and, sometimes, just wants to be nothing and play computer for six hours. How to describe these qualities ("and this, and so much more"), how to 'fix myself in a formulated phrase'?

There was a time when poetry was written, and though it is still written, what magic is left after the placing of such lines as "All truths wait in all things," and "It is impossible to say just what I mean." Ginsberg was reduced to a string of "Holy, Holy, Holy ..." Perhaps profound in its own right. Perhaps too self-indulgent.

But we live in self-indulgent times, which I also oppose, and also embody. Maybe paradox is the real lesson. Maybe it always has been. Or rather, maybe paradox and order, chaos and structure, sway ever across some abyss of human meaning. Death, there's the real question, the ultimate contrarian, and the hardest thing for a contrarian to oppose. And yet we have a society built around death (or built around a religion built around death, to paraphrase Nietzsche). Those poems that haunt me and inspire me sit on that precipice. Prufrock, a poem afraid of death, Song of Myself, a poem of celebrating life. Of all the paradoxes of being, that may be the most poignant, and, ironically, the most taboo in our modern age.

In truth, I have little to contribute to such looming questions as "what is the meaning of life?" Ultimately, I resist the question as unsophisticated, at least as it is commonly asked. No, ask it like Eliot, for then it is complicated enough to warrant my austere notice. Or something like that... The true story is, I first recognized the terrible power of the fear of death watching, of all things, Stargate SG-1. How's that for a paradox? What can I say, after all, that is profound?

Nicht Diese, indeed.

Towards Defining Great Music, Part Two: On Genre and Deciding Greatness

In trying to decide what is great music – and whether such a thing exists – it is important to consider the genres of music that have dominated and defined their particular times. Genre might as well be, here, a substitute for context, or even for culture more broadly, and is therefore intimately tied in with taste, but it is nevertheless a useful way of categorizing an incredibly complicated phenomenon.

In any given era, there are seemingly uncountable genres and sub-genres of music. It is tempting and simple to simply divide music into two camps, “art” and “popular.” But that is a misleading attempt, because much of what we now consider “art music” was wildly popular at the time, and much music that is written primarily for the sake of a popular audience is nonetheless artistic for it.

Similarly, we might divide music into “spiritual” and “secular” music. While not a meaningful distinction in contemporary music, historically there is a significant difference between the purposes and forms of the two. Indeed, for a long time “spiritual music” and “art music” were essentially the same thing, with popular, secular (and thereby vulgar) music serving an entirely different function and performed by an entirely different set of musicians.

At the other extreme, we might choose to define genres of music narrowly. The minuet and the fugue might be separate, as might the 12-bar blues and the 16-bar blues, or the symphony and the concerto. A narrower understanding of genre might help us to compare pieces under those frameworks – and it strikes me that most reasonable narrow divisions are actually formal constraints – but they don't necessarily help us to find great music.

Perhaps the most common delineation of genres in music is the chronological one. That is, classical music is divided into distinct eras, each of which has a distinctive but related (by the “progress” from one understanding of harmony to the next) style. Beginning with the medieval era, Western music is traditionally said to have gone through the following eras (in order): Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern. Some nit-pickers also slide Nationalist in between Romantic and Modern, or at least alongside, but that's of more political than musical interest.

While I don't think any of these approaches really properly captures what I mean by “genre,” I think they are useful nonetheless, especially when considered together.* A genre is, in short, the combination of the context in which the work was written (that is, its historical, geo-political, and philosophical situation) and the purpose for which it was written (that is, whether it was written for the sake of religion, art as such, popularity or notoriety, or what-have-you). The historical side of that equation is something a composer has essentially no control over, and if there is an argument for or against the existence of great music from a particular time period, it ought to therefore confront the context and the not the composers of that time.**

*I will avoid, for the time being, the thorny issue of modern music, because that is where 'genre' becomes especially uninformative in trying to qualify music. I promise, however, that I will have a whole post in this series specifically devoted to modern music.

** Indeed, we don't really speak of “Great Music” from the Dark Ages primarily for this reason; the social, political, and religious realities of the time made great music all but impossible. Of course, it is also possible that, rather than making great music impossible, context instead made the transmission of that music impossible. Likewise with the Greeks. We cannot evaluate their music – even though discussions of it abound in their writings – because none of it survived. Accessibility is a necessary condition for greatness, and music, after all, must be heard.

So the question becomes, what is greatness? Is it relative, or absolute? Does it even exist?

It seems to me that the simplest claim is that greatness is merely the sorting of music in a particular genre by quality, as is generally agreed upon by those most versed in the language of that genre,* with some help from popular opinion, and as confirmed by the experts who learn that language later and confirm the former judgment. I realize that's a fairly long-winded “simple” definition, but I think the components all make sense, and I'm inclined to use it moving forward. Because of that, I want to go through the definition in a little more detail, to make sure it is clear and to argue for each part.

* Those with the most taste, as we might say, drawing on my last post.

First off, this definition of greatness assumes that greatness is not Platonic, dealing with eternal forms, and rather is a relative measure of art against the other art from close to the same time. That is not to say we don't set up a non-contextual scale, comparing music from the 1800s to music from the 1600s, deciding that Bach is perhaps greater than Wagner, but that Wagner is greater than Vivaldi. Rather, it is to say that, before we compare Vivaldi or Bach to Wagner, we compare them to the other, lesser known composers of their own time, and we recognize that those “lesser knowns” are lesser known for good reason.*

* By way of analogy, there is endless debate amongst baseball fans as to who the greatest player of all time is. Babe Ruth still has a lot going for him because of how much better he was than his contemporaries, but then again Willie Mays faced what was probably a higher level of competition. Barry Bonds may have been a cheat, but he faced an even higher level of competition and managed – by whatever means – to life himself well above it. The point being, there's no way to really decide who's the best baseball player, but it is fairly widely acknowledged that, comparing Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Barry Bonds against their contemporaries, it's hard to say they were not great. Though undoubtedly Willie Bloomquist is an exceptional athlete and phenomenal baseball player by most any measure, he is “lesser known” for good reason when compared against Albert Pujols.

As for how the greatest composers of an era are decided, a great deal of that happens well before we modern folk ever had a say. Beethoven was anointed great and his music preserved because his contemporaries understood his music to be great. The same could be said of Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, and the myriad other household name Classical composers. This, however, is an important part of greatness; the recognition of the experts of the time.

While certainly Beethoven was helped by broader popularity, it was the favor of both his fellow musicians and of the more austere, academic critics of music which carried him. Of course there was also substantial negative reaction to much of what he wrote, and a good deal of misunderstanding, but that too we might label a condition for greatness. On the whole, however, it was widely recognized that Beethoven was incomparable among his contemporaries even at the time, a judgment that came from a combination of expert opinion and general enjoyment of the music he produced.

Retrospect, however, is also important in determining greatness. At the time, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was met with mixed and, frankly, a good many negative reviews. Beethoven was, in summary, an old, deaf man grasping at straws, full of grand ideas but no longer aware of how to really write music. In retrospect, however, it is Beethoven's contemporaries that were grasping at straws, unable to understand a treatment of harmony and form that was heretofore unheard, but that anticipated the evolutions in music theory that would occur over the next century during the Romantic era.

Only hindsight, it could be said, can judge whether the wild and crazy ideas of a great mind will be prophetic or insane. Perhaps it is no mark of greatness, and merely of fortune that in this case Beethoven was the former, but I believe that oversimplifies a complicated situation. An important quality of the prophet is not merely predicting the future, but helping to make that future happen. In Beethoven's case, his greatness was not in anticipating what Romantic music would bring to fruition, but in planting the seed such that his was the only flower that had any chance of growing in the first place.

It is easy to look at transition points between historical genres and find great composers, of course, because influence and greatness are easy to confound. While a great many changes may be inevitable – for example, the progress of music theory in its essence may have been almost exactly the same had Beethoven never been born – the way those changes occur is subject to the influences of a great many men and women, and some manage to have more influence than others.

Even within a fairly static genre, however, we might find greatness. Mozart, brilliant though he was, did not live long enough to see the transition from the Classical to the Romantic eras. While much of his music may have pushed the boundaries of what was common at his time – another potential mark of greatness – he did not possess nearly the influence that Beethoven did historically. And yet we might argue that Mozart was the greater composer. Regardless, that he stood out both now and then above his contemporaries is largely unquestioned.

It is almost inevitable that a discussion of great music will end up being a discussion of great composers, because individual pieces are even harder to categorize and qualify. Nevertheless, we might approach pieces the same way, but with a stronger eye towards the theory in each piece. There are a great many musical devices and techniques that underlie even this discussion of what a musical genre is, and while it is reductionist to discuss composers without that theory, it is at least possible. Discussing the music itself without the theory itself would be impossible, because music theory is the very language that allows for the discussion to have meaning.*

* Without music theory, it's easy to get trapped in the pitfall of unarguable metaphor. “This piece is like a waterfall, that one like a giant rock.” While those connotations and images may percolate in the heads of some listeners, trying to have a discussion and trying to determine quality under such terms is about as productive as teaching First Graders differential calculus. That's not to say the images and emotions that we feel aren't important; indeed, they are the point. But just because a piece of music (or anything else) makes you feel happy or helps you imagine daffodils doesn't mean that it is great. It must also stand up to analysis and contemplation. Some might argue this is a view that encourages cynicism, and I won't disagree. But I will say this: while a great deal of music might be beautiful, happy, melancholy, or any other number of things, only music that remains beautiful, happy, or melancholy when you are cynical about it is truly great. If you are afraid that thinking carefully and critically about a thing will decrease rather than increase your enjoyment of it, perhaps it is not a thing worth enjoying after all.

With that in mind, we'll spend the next post discussing music itself. What is music, after all? Music has undeniable power, and is ubiquitous in our culture. Indeed, the music industry has been at the forefront of copyright law and the effects of digital distribution primarily because we take our music much more seriously than we take our movies, our pictures, or our words. Why is that? What is the power of music? Tune in next time, but don't expect answers.