Brian Dillon reviews a British touring exhibition of the art of John Cage, currently at the Baltic Mill Gateshead.
Two quibbles: First, someone who compare’s Cage’s 4′ 33” to a blank gallery wall hasn’t actually listened to the piece. If Dillon had compared it to a glass window in the gallery wall allowing a view of the outside of the gallery, then he would have made some sense. But Cage’s composition is not about silence, or even pure sound, for either of which a blank gallery wall might be an appropriate visual representation. The composition is about ambient sound, and about what sounds count as music in our culture.
Second, Dillon rightly mentions that the procedures used by Cage for musical composition from 1950 onwards (and later for poetry and visual art) were based on the Taoist I Ching. But he wrongly describes these procedures as being based on “the philosophy of chance.” Although widespread, this view is nonsense, accurate neither as to what Cage was doing, nor even as to what he may have thought he was doing. Anyone subscribing to the Taoist philosophy underlying them understands the I Ching procedures as examplifying and manifesting hidden causal mechanisms, not chance. The point of the underlying philosophy is that the random-looking events that result from the procedures express something unique, time-dependent, and personal to the specific person invoking the I Ching at the particular time they invoke it. So, to a Taoist, the resulting music or art is not “chance” or “random” or “aleatoric” at all, but profoundly deterministic, being the necessary consequential expression of deep, synchronistic, spiritual forces. I don’t know if Cage was himself a Taoist (I’m not sure that anyone does), but to an adherent of Taoist philosophy Cage’s own beliefs or attitudes are irrelevant to the workings of these forces. I sense that Cage had sufficient understanding of Taoist and Zen ideas (Zen being the Japanese version of Taoism) to recognize this particular feature: that to an adherent of the philosophy the beliefs of the invoker of the procedures are irrelevant.
In my experience, the idea that the I Ching is a deterministic process is a hard one for many modern westerners to understand, let alone to accept, so entrenched is the prevailing western view that the material realm is all there is. This entrenched view is only historically recent in the west: Isaac Newton, for example, was a believer in the existence of cosmic spiritual forces, and thought he had found the laws which governed their operation. Obversely, many easterners in my experience have difficulty with notions of uncertainty and chance; if all events are subject to hidden causal forces, the concepts of randomness and of alternative possible futures make no sense. My experience here includes making presentations and leading discussions on scenario analyses with senior managers of Asian multinationals.
We are two birds swimming, each circling the pond, warily, neither understanding the other, neither flying away.
References:
Kyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence. John Cage’s 4′ 33”. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.
James Pritchett [1993]: The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category
Page 4 of 4
Dream on
Over at Normblog, Norm is thinking about anxiety dreams, and seeks to answer the question: Who is the author of these dreams of ours? Some think it seems not to be us, since the events in the dream come as a surprise to us and trouble us. He concludes that it is the dreamer who is the author. If we think of dreams as being like films that we view in our sleep, then I assume Norm means that the author is the film-director, or perhaps the projectionist.
But there is another explanation of all our dreams, not only those which cause us angst. That explanation is that our dreams are just random images flashed before us by some mechanical process in our brain. Here there is no continuous film, no coherent plot, no themes, no actors, no film-director, and the projectionist is outside having a cigarette while images are being loaded automatically by a random reel selector that management installed to save on staff. We, however, are not outside. We are sitting down in the front-row of the stalls of the cinema, being the audience for the film. So its no wonder we are surprised by what we see. We try our best, both then and after waking, to make sense of the images that flash past us, looking for some narrative coherence. If we have anxieties, this is when they appear, in our attempts at reconstruction of a plot or a theme or some identifiable characters. We are indeed the authors of our dreams, but only in the way that texts are written by their readers, and not their writers.
Mr Sculthorpe, please call your office
I was thinking recently about concert performances I have attended where the composer was present, or rather, where I knew the composer to be present. Here is my list, as best I remember it:
Don Banks (1923-1980)
Sally Beamish (Hover, London, 21 February 2024)
Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012)
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
Ann Carr-Boyd (Britannia Fanfare, 2012)
Barry Conyngham
Palle Dahlstedt
Jasper Eaglesfield (London, 13 June 2024)
David Fanshawe (1942-2010, African Sanctus, Liverpool)
Rolf Hind
Archie John (East China Sea, London, 7 June 2024)
Robin Holloway
Keith Humble (1927-1995)
Gerard McBurney
James MacMillan (premiere of “Precious in the sight of the Lord”, Mass for the Fourth Centenary Celebration of the British Society of Jesus, 21 January 2023)
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
Stephen Montague (Piano Concerto, BBC Proms, London)
Nico Muhly (premiere of Electric Violin Concerto, performed by Thomas Gould, and premiere of opera, Two Boys, at ENO, London)
Olli Mustonen (playing his own Sonata for Violin and Piano with Pekka Kuusisto, London 2013)
Tristan Murail (Reflections/Reflets, performed by the BBSO under Sakari Oramo, London 2013)
Nicola Murphy (Wavelength, Brisbane, 29 August 2024)
Loretta Notareschi
Jim Penberthy (1917-1999)
Behzad Ranjbaran (premiere of Violin Concerto, performed by Joshua Bell)
Johannes X. Schachtner
Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014)
Larry Sitsky
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
David Urquhart-Jones
James Wishart
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Of course, my presence at a performance does not constitute an endorsement of the music performed: some of the music of these composers I like or appreciate very much, and some I think is unpleasant, boring or otherwise of low quality. Although I generally prefer downtown and minimalist music, the music of the composers listed here also includes neo-romanticism (eg, Holloway, late Sculthorpe), abstract expressionism (eg, Penberthy, early Sculthorpe, Takemitsu), and uptown complexity (eg, Boulez, Muhly, Xenakis). And, I have not included in this list jazz performers, who almost always play some of their own compositions.
For Peter Sculthorpe, one occasion (of several where we have both been present) was a performance in January 1975 near Patonga, Broken Bay, Sydney, of his profound and achingly-beautiful Sun Music III, in which I had the great good fortune, as second percussionist, to play the guiro. One has to wonder how the same person could compose the innovative Sun Music series of the 1960s and also the derivative, warmed-over, late-romantic tosh that Sculthorpe has written in recent years. Bill Burroughs would have seen it as a clear case of spirit possession.
POSTSCRIPT (2014-01-11): New Zealander Alannah Currie, of The Thompson Twins, plays a guiro in their hit Hold Me Now (1983). See video here.
Macho mathematicians
Pianist and writer Susan Tomes has just published a new book, Out of Silence, which the Guardian has excerpted here. This story drew my attention:
Afterwards, my husband and I reminisced about our attempts to learn tennis when we were young. I told him that my sisters and I used to go down to the public tennis courts in Portobello. We had probably never seen a professional tennis match; we just knew that tennis was about hitting the ball to and fro across the net. We had a few lessons and became quite good at leisurely rallies, hitting the ball back and forth without any attempt at speed. Sometimes we could keep our rallies going for quite a long time, and I found this enjoyable.
Then our tennis teacher explained that we should now learn to play “properly”. It was only then that I realised we were meant to hit the ball in such a way that the other person could not hit it back. This came as an unpleasant surprise. As soon as we started “playing properly”, our points became extremely short. One person served, the other could not hit it back, and that was the end of the point. It seemed to me that there was skill in hitting the ball so that the other person could hit it back. If they could, the ball would flow, one got to move about and there was not much interruption to the rhythm of play. It struck me that hitting the ball deliberately out of the other person’s reach was unsportsmanlike. When I tell my husband all this, he laughs and says: “There speaks a true chamber musician.”
This story resonated strongly with me. Earlier this year, I had a brief correspondence with mathematician Alexandre Borovik, who has been collecting accounts of childhood experiences of learning mathematics, both from mathematicians and from non-mathematicians. After seeing a discussion on his blog about the roles of puzzles and games in teaching mathematics to children, I had written to him:
Part of my anger & frustration at school was that so much of this subject that I loved, mathematics, was wasted on what I thought was frivolous or immoral applications: frivolous because of all those unrealistic puzzles, and immoral because of the emphasis on competition (Olympiads, chess, card games, gambling, etc). I had (and retain) a profound dislike of competition, and I don’t see why one always had to demonstrate one’s abilities by beating other people, rather than by collaborating with them. I believed that “playing music together”, rather than “playing sport against one another”, was a better metaphor for what I wanted to do in life, and as a mathematician.
Indeed, the macho competitiveness of much of pure mathematics struck me very strongly when I was an undergraduate student: I switched then to mathematical statistics because the teachers and students in that discipline were much less competitive towards one another. For a long time, I thought I was alone in this view, but I have since heard the same story from other people, including some prominent mathematicians. I know one famous category theorist who switched from analysis as a graduate student because the people there were too competitive, while the category theory people were more co-operative.
Perhaps the emphasis on puzzles & tricks is fine for some mathematicians – eg, Paul Erdos seems to have been motivated by puzzles and eager to solve particular problems. However, it is not fine for others — Alexander Grothendieck comes to mind as someone interested in abstract frameworks rather than puzzle-solving. Perhaps the research discipline of pure mathematics needs people of both types. If so, this is even more reason not to eliminate all the top-down thinkers by teaching only using puzzles at school.”
More on the two cultures of mathematics here.
Brautigan on writing
I am a great fan of the writing of Richard Brautigan, so I was delighted once to encounter a short reminiscence of Brautigan by that Zelig of the Beats, Pierre Delattre, in his fascinating memoir, Episodes (page 54):
The last time I saw him [RB], we were walking past the middle room of his house. There was a table in there with a typewriter on it. “Quiet,” he whispered, pushing me ahead of him into the kitchen. “My new novel’s in there. I kind of stroll in occasionally, write a quick few paragraphs, and get out before the novel knows what I’m doing. If novels ever find out you’re writing them, you’re done for.”
Reference:
Pierre Delattre[1993]: Episodes. St. Paul, MN, USA: Graywolf Press.
Bridget Riley on drawing as thinking
Ealier, I quoted Marion Milner on the zen of sunday-painting. The British artist, Bridget Riley, writing for a catalog that accompanied a retrospective of her work presented recently at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, UK, talks about the non-propositional thinking involved in drawing and painting, particularly during the exploration that she undertakes as she begins each new work.
For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.
The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one’s naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort ‘to clarify’ that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground. (p. 15). . .
You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter: ‘doing’ is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes. The ‘new curves’ that I started in 1998 grew directly out of paintings such as Shimmered Shade. The latent visual arcs and sweeping movements came to the fore in Painting with Verticals 1 (2006) and Red with Red 1 (2007). Retaining the diagonals and verticals of the earlier group of paintings, I introduced a curve that connected to the existing structure. This is the underpinning of my new curvilinear work. The vertical is still there, acting like a break in the movement across the canvas. The cut collage pieces define the various contours that arise from combining and recombining the slender curve with its diagonal accents. This has developed into a layering technique that allows me to weave forms and colours together in a supple plastic space. I have reduced the number of colours and increased the scale of the imagery. Would it be possible to once again build up a repertoire of these invented forms, a repertoire that might gradually acquire sufficient momentum to put itself at risk, to precipitate its own kind of hazard? It is only through the experience of working that answers may be discovered within the inner logic of an invented reality such as the art of painting.” (p. 18)
References:
The image is Red with Red by Bridget Riley, 2007.
Bridget Riley [2009]: Work. pp. 15-18 of: Michael Bracewell and Bridget Riley [2009]: Bridget Riley Flashback. London, UK: Hayward Publishing.
This essay was republished in The London Review of Books (31 (19): 20-21, 8 October 2009) and is online here.
The Zen of Sunday-painting
In his famous account of learning the piano as an adult, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger refers to a book by psychiatrist, Marion Milner, a pseudonym of Joanna Field. Milner was the sister of Nobel-physicist Patrick Blackett, and great-neice of Edmund Blackett, the architect of colonial Sydney. Her book is an account of her attempts to paint and draw, and to learn to paint and draw, as an amateur artist.
I am not enchanted by her artwork, and I find her Freudian accounts of artistic creativity and its barriers both implausible and untrue to life. I believe Alfred Gell’s anthropological account of art to be far more compelling – that artworks are tokens or indexes of intentionality, perceived by their viewers or auditors as objects created with specific intentions by goal-directed entities (the artist, or a community, or some spiritual being). These perceived intentions include much else beside the expression of feelings.
But Milner’s book is replete with some wonderful insights, many of which express a Zen sensibility. Herewith a sample:
Continue reading ‘The Zen of Sunday-painting’
Straitjackets of Standards
This week I was invited to participate as an expert in a Delphi study of The Future Internet, being undertaken by an EC-funded research project. One of the aims of the project is to identify multiple plausible future scenarios for the socio-economic role(s) of the Internet and related technologies, after which the project aim to reach a consensus on a small number of these scenarios. Although the documents I saw were unclear as to exactly which population this consensus was to be reached among, I presume it was intended to be a consensus of the participants in the Delphi Study.
I have a profound philosophical disagreement with this objective, and indeed with most of the EC’s many efforts in standardization. Tim Berners-Lee invented Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), for example, in order to enable physicists to publish their research documents to one another in a manner which enabled author-control of document appearance. Like most new technologies. HTTP was not invented for the many other uses to which it has since been put; indeed, many of these other applications have required hacks or fudges to HTTP in order to work. For example, because HTTP does not keep track of the state of a request, fudges such as cookies are needed. If we had all been in consensual agreement with The Greatest Living Briton about the purposes of HTTP, we would have no e-commerce, no blogging, no social networking, no easy remote access to databases, no large-scale distributed collaborations, no easy action-at-a-distance, in short no transformation of our society and life these last two decades, just the broadcast publishing of text documents.
Let us put aside this childish, warm-and-fuzzy, touchy-feely seeking after consensus. Our society benefits most from a diversity of opinions and strong disagreements, a hundred flowers blooming, a cacophony of voices in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes. This is particularly true of opinions regarding the uses and applications of innovations. Yet the EC persists, in some recalcitrant chasing after illusive certainty, in trying to force us all into straitjackets of standards and equal practice. These efforts are misguided and wrong-headed, and deserve to fail.
Creative writing
The English poet T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) talking about creative writing compared it to geometrical drawing. Hulme had studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, although without graduating.
The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognize how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves – flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately”. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.”
Reference:
T. E. Hulme, in the essay, “Romanticism and Classicism”, quoted in: A. Alvarez [2003]: Making it new. The New York Review of Books, 15 May 2003, Volume L, No. 8, pp. 28-30.