Posts Tagged ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’
The monotonous periodicity of genius
Yesterday, I read a passage from the book Music and Life by the critic and poet W.J. Turner that has been on my mind ever since. He begins with a sentence from the historian Charles Sanford Terry, who says of Bach’s cantatas: “There are few phenomena in the record of art more extraordinary than this unflagging cataract of inspiration in which masterpiece followed masterpiece with the monotonous periodicity of a Sunday sermon.” Turner objects to this:
In my enthusiasm for Bach I swallowed this statement when I first met it, but if Dr. Terry will excuse the expression, it is arrant nonsense. Creative genius does not work in this way. Masterpieces are not produced with the monotonous periodicity of a Sunday sermon. In fact, if we stop to think we shall understand that this “monotonous periodicity ” was exactly what was wrong with a great deal of Bach’s music. Bach, through a combination of natural ability and quite unparalleled concentration on his art, had arrived at the point of being able to sit down at any minute of any day and compose what had all the superficial appearance of being a masterpiece. It is possible that even Bach himself did not know which was a masterpiece and which was not, and it is abundantly clear to me that in all his large-sized works there are huge chunks of stuff to which inspiration is the last word that one could apply.
All too often, Turner implies, Bach leaned on his technical facility when inspiration failed or he simply felt indifferent to the material: “The music shows no sign of Bach’s imagination having been fired at all; the old Leipzig Cantor simply took up his pen and reeled off this chorus as any master craftsman might polish off a ticklish job in the course of a day’s work.”
I first encountered the Turner quotation in The New Listener’s Companion and Record Guide by B.H. Haggin, who cites his fellow critic approvingly and adds: “This seems to me an excellent description of the essential fact about Bach—that one hears always the operation of prodigious powers of invention and construction, but frequently an operation that is not as expressive as it is accomplished.” Haggin continues:
Listening to the six sonatas or partitas for unaccompanied violin, the six sonatas or suites for unaccompanied piano, one is aware of Bach’s success with the difficult problem he set himself, of contriving for the instrument a melody that would imply its underlying harmonic progressions between the occasional chords. But one is aware also that solving this problem was not equivalent to writing great or even enjoyable music…I hear only Bach’s craftsmanship going through the motions of creation and producing the external appearances of expressiveness. And I suspect that it is the name of Bach that awes listeners into accepting the appearance as reality, into hearing an expressive content which isn’t there, and into believing that if the content is difficult to hear, this is only because it is especially profound—because it is “the passionate, yet untroubled meditation of a great mind” that lies beyond “the composition’s formidable technical frontiers.”
Haggins confesses that he regards many pieces in The Goldberg Variations or The Well-Tempered Clavier as “examples of competent construction that are, for me, not interesting pieces of music.” And he sums up: “Bach’s way of exercising the spirit was to exercise his craftsmanship; and some of the results offer more to delight an interest in the skillful use of technique than to delight the spirit.”
As I read this, I was inevitably reminded of Christopher Orr’s recent article in The Atlantic, “The Remarkable Laziness of Woody Allen,” which I discussed here last week. Part of Orr’s case against Allen involves “his frenetic pace of one feature film a year,” which can only be described as monotonous periodicity. This isn’t laziness, of course—it’s the opposite—but Orr implies that the director’s obsession with productivity has led him to cut corners in the films themselves: “Ambition simply isn’t on the agenda.” Yet the funny thing is that this approach to making art, while extreme, is perfectly rational. Allen writes, directs, and releases three movies in the time it would take most directors to finish one, and when you look at his box office and awards history, you see that about one in three breaks through to become a financial success, an Oscar winner, or both. And Orr’s criticism of this process, like Turner’s, could only have been made by a professional critic. If you’re obliged to see every Woody Allen movie or have an opinion on every Bach cantata, it’s easy to feel annoyed by the lesser efforts, and you might even wish that that the artist had only released the works in which his inspiration was at its height. For the rest of us, though, this really isn’t an issue. We get to skip Whatever Works or Irrational Man in favor of the occasional Match Point or Midnight in Paris, and most of us are happy if we can even recognize the cantata that has “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” If you’re a fan, but not a completist, a skilled craftsman who produces a lot of technically proficient work in hopes that some of it will stick is following a reasonable strategy. As Malcolm Gladwell writes of Bach:
The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, [Dean] Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great.
As Simonton puts it: “Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.” But if there’s a risk involved, it’s that an artist will become so used to producing technically proficient material on a regular basis that he or she will fall short when the circumstances demand it. Which brings us back to Bach. Turner’s remarks appear in a chapter on the Mass in B minor, which was hardly a throwaway—it’s generally considered to be one of Bach’s major works. For Turner, however, the virtuosity expressed in the cantatas allowed Bach to take refuge in cleverness even when there was more at stake: “I say that the pretty trumpet work in the four-part chorus of the Gloria, for example, is a proof that Bach was being consciously clever and brightening up his stuff, and that he was not at that moment writing with the spontaneity of those really creative moments which are popularly called inspired.” And he writes of the Kyrie, which he calls “monotonous”:
It is still impressive, and no doubt to an academic musician, with the score in his hands and his soul long ago defunct, this charge of monotony would appear incredible, but then his interest is almost entirely if not absolutely technical. It is a source of everlasting amazement to him to contemplate Bach’s prodigious skill and fertility of invention. But what do I care for Bach’s prodigious skill? Even such virtuosity as Bach’s is valueless unless it expresses some ulterior beauty or, to put it more succinctly, unless it is as expressive as it is accomplished.
And I’m not sure that he’s even wrong. It might seem remarkable to make this accusation of Bach, who is our culture’s embodiment of technical skill as an embodiment of spiritual expression, but if the charge is going to have any weight at all, it has to hold at the highest level. William Blake once wrote: “Mechanical excellence is the only vehicle of genius.” He was right. But it can also be a vehicle, by definition, for literally everything else. And sometimes the real genius lies in being able to tell the difference.
Quote of the Day
There surely must be more cogent reasons than being merely amusing for this or that system to deserve investigation and study. For one, there are aesthetic reasons, and here I am reminded of something Balthasar van der Pol, a great Dutch scientist and engineer who was also a fine musician, remarked to me about the music of Bach. “It is great,” he said, “because it is inevitable and yet surprising.” I have often thought about this lovely epigram in connection with mathematics and am convinced that, with some caution, it is applicable. The inevitability is, in many cases, provided by logic alone, but the element of surprise must come from an insight outside the rigid confines of logic.
Quote of the Day
We may regard the workings of [Bach’s] music as secondary to its spiritual impact on us. But Bach didn’t; he clearly loved and needed the disciplines of the past to make his designs…“Art is what is inevitable,” the writer William Saroyan once said to me, and I have yet to find a better definition of it.
Quote of the Day
There is nothing to playing the organ. You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
—Attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach
The dancer from the dance
Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s topic: “What one piece of pop culture would you use to teach an artificial intelligence what it means to be human?”
When I was growing up, one of the books I browsed through endlessly was Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan, which told the story behind the Voyager golden records. Attached to the two Voyager spacecraft and engraved with instructions for playback, each record was packed with greetings in multiple languages, sounds, encoded images of life on earth, and, most famously, music. The musical selection opens with the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which is about as solid a choice as it gets, and the remaining tracks are eclectic and inspired, ranging from a Pygmy girls’ initiation song to Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” (The inclusion of “Johnny B. Goode” led to a legendary joke on Saturday Night Live, purporting to predict the first message from an alien civilization: “Send more Chuck Berry.”) Not included, alas, was “Here Comes the Sun,” which the Beatles were happy to contribute, only to be vetoed by their record company. Evidently, EMI was concerned about the distribution of royalties from any commercial release of the disc—which says more about our society than we’d like any alien culture to know.
Of course, the odds of either record ever being found and played are infinitesimal, but it was still a valuable exercise. What, exactly, does it mean to be us, and how can we convey this to a nonhuman intelligence? Other solutions have been proposed, some simpler and more elegant than others. In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas writes:
Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.
If such thought experiments so often center on music, it’s because we intuitively see it as our most timeless, universal production, even if that’s as much a cultural construct as anything else. All art, Walter Pater says, aspires to the condition of music, in which form and content can’t be separated, so it’s natural to regard it as the best we have to offer.
Yet music, for all its merits, only hints at a crucial aspect of human existence: its transience. It’s true that every work of music has a beginning and an end, but once written, it potentially exists forever—if not as a single performance, then as an act of crystalized thought—and it can be experienced in pretty much the form that Bach or Beethoven intended. In that sense, it’s an idealized, aspirational, and not particularly accurate representation of human life, in which so much of what matters is ephemeral and irreproducible. We may never have a chance to explain this to an alien civilization, but it’s likely that we’ll have to convey it sooner or later to another form of nonhuman consciousness that arises closer to home. Assuming we’re not convinced, like John Searle, of the philosophical impossibility of artificial intelligence, it’s only a matter of time before we have to take this problem seriously. And when we do, it’s our sense of mortality and impermanence that might pose the greatest obstacle to mutual comprehension. Unless its existence is directly threatened, as with HAL in 2001, an A.I., which is theoretically immortal, might have trouble understanding how we continue to find meaning in a life that is defined largely by the fact that it ends.
When I ask myself what form of art expresses this fact the most vividly, it has to be dance. And although I’d be tempted to start with The Red Shoes, my favorite movie of all time, there’s an even better candidate: the extraordinary documentary Ballets Russes, available now for streaming on Hulu, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. (I didn’t even realize this until I looked up its release date shortly before typing this sentence, which is just another reminder of how quickly time slips away.) Just as the Voyager record was a kind of exercise to determine what art we find most worthy of preservation, the question of what to show a nonhuman intelligence is really more about what works can teach us something about what it means to be human. Ballets Russes qualifies as few other movies do: I welled up with tears within the first minute, which juxtaposes archival footage of dancers in their prime with the same men and women sixty years later. In the space of a cut, we see the full mystery of human existence, and it’s all the more powerful when we reflect that these artists have devoted their lives to creating a string of moments that can’t be recaptured—as we all do, in our different ways. An artificial intelligence might wonder if there was any point. I don’t have an answer to that. But if one exists at all, it’s here.
Performing and informing
Personally, I see no meaningful difference between performing and informing. When you study the historical models for pianists, you find they spent their lives informing—often about music that had just been written, often music of their own or in their own transcription—and that was how they defined themselves.
One of the things I discussed in my lecture, and it’s on the blackboard, is the extent to which Bach was keenly aware of what was going on around him, of contemporary styles other than his own. You see it time and again in the Goldberg, and I find most composers today share that curiosity. But not performers. Young pianists get trapped into thinking all the time about technique and leave themselves a depressingly narrow view of repertoire, with no concern for their wider role as musicians.
One short post about Glenn Gould
As I write this, I’m listening to my copy of The Goldberg Variations, as recorded by Glenn Gould in 1955. It was one of the first albums I made a point of buying for my new record player, which shouldn’t come as a surprise: it occupies something of the same position in classical music that Kind of Blue does in jazz, as the one album that you’ll find in the collections of people who aren’t otherwise aficionados of that kind of music. Gould’s original recording remains one of the bestselling classical releases of all time, and it has served a source of inspiration for everyone from Richard Powers to Hannibal Lecter. Oddly enough, though, this is my first time really listening to it. I’ve always loved Gould’s second version, which he did in 1981, and it’s been a part of my life ever since college: I chose a few of the variations for the pianist to play at my wedding, and my wife and I walked down the aisle to the wonderful closing Quodlibet. For various reasons, however, mostly because it wasn’t available on compact disc for a long time, I never got around to sampling the earlier recording. And listening to it now, I can’t help but reflect a little on what it really means to grow and change as an artist.
It helps that Gould himself is such a fascinating figure. He sometimes claimed that if he hadn’t been a pianist, he might have been an author, and although the critical response to his own writings has been mixed, he had something of a novelist’s attitude toward his materials. “The piano,” Gould once said, “is not an instrument for which I have any great love as such…[but] I have played it all my life, and it is the best vehicle I have to express my ideas.” That’s how I suspect a lot of authors feel toward writing itself: I’m acutely conscious of its limitations, at least in my own hands, but at this point, I’m more or less stuck with it. For a certain kind of artist, what counts is the expression of the idea, and Gould always seemed to regard the act of performing as an obstacle between the music and our understanding of it. Hence the endless hours he spent in the studio, splicing takes into something that reflected his conception of the piece rather than any one performance, and his tendency to think of music in terms of shapes and patterns: “[Bach] was first and last an architect, a constructor of sound, and what makes him so inestimably valuable to us is that he was beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived.”
As an unbelievably gifted prodigy and virtuoso, of course, Gould was particularly qualified to talk about the limitations of technique. It’s staggering to realize how young he was at his peak: he was only twenty-two when he recorded The Goldberg Variations for the first time, and he retired from public performance in his early thirties, after giving fewer than two hundred concerts. Much of his later career seems like a rebuke or renunciation of the early acclaim he received, and his decision to ultimately revisit his most famous recording was a statement in itself, an acknowledgment that cleverness and craft can take an artist only so far. It’s often said that there are just two kinds of prodigies, musical and mathematical, since these are the two fields of human excellence in which raw ability can triumph over inexperience. But there’s more to greatness than simple technical skill, and to listen to the two versions of the Variations is to sense an additional quarter century of experience coming through between the notes, along with the “groans and croons” of which the reviewer for The New Penguin Guide complained, as Gould quietly hummed to himself along with the music.
When I play Gould’s second recording just after the first one, the effect is something like the feeling I get from a documentary like Ballets Russes, which juxtaposes the image of a dancer at age twenty with the same man sixty years later—a combination that never fails to bring me to tears. Gould’s later Variations are slower, more contemplative, less concerned with impressing the listener than with teasing out every last drop of nuance. For someone who only dreams of such virtuosity, it’s a reminder of how much room there is for interpretation by a great performer, and how much can be added by three decades of experience. Gould died from a stroke at age fifty in 1982, shortly after recording his second version. If he’d lived, he’d be in his early eighties by now, and perhaps ready for one last run at his most famous work. It’s tempting to imagine what that final progression would have been like, using the first two recordings as a clue for the unknowable third, and although we’ll never hear it for ourselves, we can dream about it, and I’d like to think that we’ll get the answer in another life.
Of mouses and men
Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.
—Dean Simonton
Malcolm Gladwell’s nifty article on the evolution of the computer mouse in this week’s New Yorker is a terrific read—nobody, but nobody, is better at this sort of thing than Gladwell, which has made him deservedly rich and famous. It’s also, somewhat surprisingly, the most valuable take on the creative process I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve always been interested in the affinities between the artistic process and the work of scientists and engineers, and Gladwell makes the useful point that what most creative geniuses in both fields have in common is their extraordinary productivity. His primary example is Gary Starkweather, the legendary Xerox PARC engineer and inventor of the laser printer, whose creativity was directly linked to the sheer number of his ideas. And in a paragraph that I want to clip out and put in my wallet, Gladwell writes:
The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, [Dean] Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great.
Gladwell concludes with the Simonton quotation cited at the start of this post, which qualifies, to my mind, as one of the great aphorisms—that is, as a startling reminder of something that should be blindingly obvious. Simonton, incidentally, is a professor of psychology at UC Davis and the author of Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity, the subtitle of which refers not to the struggles of genius against genius, as one might think, but to the natural selection of ideas. In nature, natural selection is the result of a Malthusian competition within a large population for limited resources, and it stands to reason that the fittest ideas might arise in a similar fashion. As Simonton says:
Even the greatest creators possess no direct and secure path to truth or beauty. They cannot guarantee that every published idea will survive further evaluation and testing at the hands of audiences or colleagues. The best the creative genius can do is to be as prolific as possible in generating products in the hope that at least some subset will survive the test of time. [Italics mine.]
Which seems obvious enough: most of our greatest artists, from Shakespeare to Picasso, were monsters of productivity, as were nearly all of our great scientists, like Newton. But even more interesting is the point to which Gladwell alludes above, and what Simonton elsewhere calls the “equal odds” rule—that the ratio of total hits to total attempts “tends to stay more or less constant across creators.” Which is to say that if a creative individual of any kind wants to generate more good ideas, the solution isn’t to improve one’s hit rate, but to produce more ideas overall. Productivity is the mother of creativity, by providing the necessary conditions for lasting ideas to emerge. Which is something, I think, that most artists already intuitively grasp. Thanks to Simonton and Gladwell, we’re a little closer to understanding why.
Alec Nevala-Lee 