Music and Mystery

Through a series of tentative agreements, passive comments, whimsies, and guilt, I have come to find myself playing second chair oboe for our local community college symphony orchestra.  I am not an oboist.  Or rather, I am no longer an oboist.  I am a music teacher and a composer.  I played oboe when I was in high school.  I’m an oboist the same way your coworker Bill from Accounting is a quarterback.

But I returned to playing oboe for the local band, and since I had been a band nerd, it was a familiar place to fall into, out of practice or otherwise.  Band Oboes have the distinct privilege of being mostly pointless, often doubling Flute 2 or trumpets (for some reason) before suddenly having a surprise solo (cued for in Alto Sax 1).  It’s easy to hide, but it’s also easy to feel worthless, so I was excited to play for an orchestra, where oboe parts having meaning and purpose.

The piece we’re playing is Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony.

In case you don’t know Tchaikovsky’s 5th, it starts off with a canvas of strings playing chords beneath a clarinet soli solemnly expressing the inevitability of death.  For me, as Oboe II, it starts off with fifty-seven andante measures of rest, which, if you don’t know, translates to roughly 3.7 years of counting to 4.

This time of rest, captive in my chair, forces me to do nothing but listen to the music going on around me.  I used to do that in my youth.  I would just sit there and listen to the music I loved.  No homework, no chores.  Just music.  I find it harder to do that as an adult.  There are places to be.  Emails to think about responding to.  Dishes.

I find it futile to describe music in words, but allow me to try.  Tchaikovsky’s introduction starts off with an aching hollowness yearning to call out, but failing to have the energy to do so, before fading away in a hopeless resignation.  It is a moment of isolation, wondering how it became so alone, feebly calling into the void and then giving up.  It is austere, bare, and raw.  It is a deep, muted crimson spilled over a vast desert sand and whisked away into the ether leaving nothing but a sad memory.

In other words: it starts with strings playing a slow minor chord progression with slight dynamic variation, and clarinets play a modal melody above it.

(I imagine someone trying to describe the Grand Canyon in such manner, that empty gorge so deep that it may contain the universe and all of its joys and sorrows within its space, from its junipers sprouting out of the soft red rock, layering down to the cactus frozen mid-leap looming above the crystalline river below – a canyon made up of smaller canyons, any one of which would be remarkable in its own right, and yet, when joined together, are dwarfed and devoured by the beast they create.

In other words: erosion in a desert.)

When I was younger, classical music captivated me through its complex and dynamic emotional energy, its intangible narrative voice, and its allusive imagery.  There was something mystical about it, so when I became a teenager, I decided I wanted to study it.  I wanted to crack the code and solve the riddle.  I wanted to know its secrets.  And then I wanted to create it, to wield it as a tool of expression and emotional manipulation.

So I learned things.  I learned how leading tones resolve (unless they don’t).  I learned that dominant function leads to tonic function (unless it doesn’t).  I learned that a fugue answers the subject at the fifth (unless it doesn’t).
Minor is sad (until it isn’t).
Major is happy (unless it’s sad).
Functional harmonies have motion (unless they’re static).
Modal harmonies are static (unless they have motion).
Dissonance is unpleasant (until it’s pleasant).
Consonances are pleasant (until they’re unpleasant).
One and three are strong beats (but you clap on two and four).

And so on and so forth.

If I were to summarize everything I learned in music school into three principles, they would be this:

1. Music’s emotional value is created by using tension and release.
2. Music’s entertainment value is created by setting up expectations, and either fulfilling them or not fulfilling them.
3. (until they aren’t)

There it is.  Music is solved.

So with its mystery dead, I stopped enjoying it as much.

A melancholy yet hopeful chorale can be explained.  The ii7 is borrowed from the parallel minor, half-diminished.  It subverts expectations while increasing tension (melancholy), before resolving (hopeful).  Case closed.

It was once a meadow of wilting flowers in early autumn.  Now it’s a borrowed seventh chord.

Mystique is just ignorance.  Santa is your mom.  The tooth fairy is your dad.  Hogwarts doesn’t exist.  The seven dwarves were downtrodden serfs.  Prince Charming murdered protestants.  God is dead.  Love is sex.  Nationhood is a social construct.  Cake has only ever tasted okay.

And yet, there stands Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, that muted crimson plain vanishing lonely into the wind.  The icy Colorado, distant and frozen beneath the canyon of canyons, solitary and alone.  Austere, bare, and raw.  A feeble proclamation of existence, fading into resignation.

Why does it so captivate me?

I know what it is.  The simple quarter-note rhythms with slight dynamic variation highlight an unremarkable military march motif, played deliberately on chalumeau clarinets.  Its rests create a space of thoughtful silence allowing the listener to ruminate on the minor chords, and minor is sad.  The sparse orchestration evokes a sense of emptiness.

Again, I know what it is.

But why is it what it is?

Where is its magic born?

And why do I allow myself the frustration of not knowing its secrets?

Meadows wilt in the autumn for a lack of sunlight and dropping temperatures.  Flowers are just reproductive plant parts.  They’re just half diminished seventh chords.  But somehow, they still move me when I allow myself to be moved, no matter how actively my brain wages its war against mystery.

It’s hard for a proud, secular man to accept his limitations.  This is the world of knowledge.  Reality is facts.  And yet, I must admit to myself that I am weak.  That I know little.  That there is too much beyond what I can understand.  But also that I should want it that way.

Tales of a Liminal Age

Forgive me, Readers, for what I am about to write may be classified as comparative literature.  Don’t get too excited now.

I present to you two novels that couldn’t be more different:

Ferdydurke – a surrealist tale of a thirty year-old man erroneously deemed unfit for adulthood and forcefully sent back to secondary school, written in 1937 by Polish author Witold Gombrowicz.

A Confederacy of Dunces – a comic tale of a thirty year-old man living with his mother who is forced to seek employment against his will, written in 1963 by Louisianan author John Kennedy Toole.

In Ferdydurke, the protagonist, Joey (in the English trans.), gets dragged by a former professor back to high school and must integrate himself with painfully immature teenagers.  Eventually, he is forced to live in a homestay where he is treated as a young boy (in spite of still being a thirty year-old adult).  He runs away and accidentally finds himself at his aunt’s and uncle’s estate, who proceed to treat him with a condescension as if he were nothing more than a child.

In an effort to reclaim his adulthood, he runs away with his lady-cousin (of ambiguous relation) and professes his (false) love to her.  They live happily ever after (probably).

In A Confederacy of Dunces, the protagonist, Ignatius, gets forced into a job working at a pants factory (and later goes into selling hot dogs) by his mother who needs him to raise money to pay for damages done in a car accident.  Unfit for the real world of employment, he jeopardizes his work and antagonizes his neighbors and coworkers, pushing his mother to commit him to a mental institution, lest he forever be a petulant, overgrown child.

In an effort to avoid being committed, he runs away with his old college sweetheart (and/or enemy) and together they drive off into the ambiguous future to live happily ever after (probably).

Behold two stories of young men unfit for their world.

Joey is brought back to secondary school because he fails to fulfill the expectations adults have for other adults, namely self-definition.  His relatives tell him, “If you don’t want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be . . . something definite.”  His inability to fulfill a role in his society is what forces him back into the trial of growing up (or growing down, in his case) again.

Ignatius is forced to get a job because he spends all day every day chasing fruitless scholarship in the ivory tower if academic pursuits to no sense and end, and it becomes high time for him to support his family (mother).  His absorption with meaningless academic pursuits convinces the rest of his society that he is doing nothing of any use and can most definitely find a job (as academic pursuits have no real worth).

In a way, the stories are opposite.  Joey, because of his failures as an adult, is forced to be a child, and failing that, flees.  Ignatius, because of his failures as a child, is forced to become an adult, and failing that, flees.

And yet, how do they flee?  Both into the arms of a woman they might not actually desire, deceptively and desperately persuading their respective female saviors that they’re ready to move out and move on (into companionship, i.e. the Adult World).  These two men, facing the consequences of their prolonged immaturity (Joey -> insanity at the hands of his aunt and uncle | Ignatius -> commitment into an insane asylum by his mother), reluctantly pair themselves off with duped partners, and their stories end.

Their ascent into the world of adulthood is a deception, forced upon them by circumstance, using sex as their alibi, as if no one can question a grown man once he is beside a woman.

Certainly there exist those who are fully confident in their ages and relationships, but I do wonder: how often is marriage (or companionship) really just a desperate attempt to clutch adulthood from the jaws of an eternal childhood, lest one never grows up in a world which demands that we do so?

Profanation of the Sublime

(Warning: this entry has strong language, but it’s all for a point.  If you’re sensitive to strong language, regardless of the point, please stop reading.  That’s right, I’m looking at you, Mom.)

We live in two different worlds: the world of profanity and the world of sublimity.  All of life’s joys and sorrows fall into one of these two categories, and they are mutually exclusive.  But they shouldn’t be, because there is no line between them.

There is no better way to explain the difference than to bring up the world of music.  Classical Music, often deemed a high art, is supposed to be an expression of something beautiful, heavenly, ethereal.  Gangsta Rap is supposed to be violent, earthy, the face of the slums, crude, real.  Whatever PR firms represent these two genres understand the Profane v. Sublime division, and they market accordingly – classical music with images of enraptured cellists prancing barefoot through a meadow, gangsta rap with images of unhappy men and guns.

This is bullshit.

If there’s one thing that irritates me about classical radio, it’s their obsession with the sublime innocence of their art.  They use words like, “lovely, relaxing, delightful,” as if all of classical music is about tea time.  There isn’t a single four-letter word in the entire lexicon of high-art cultural expression.  But there should be, because sometimes classical music is more than “delightful,” it’s “fucking awesome.”

Classical music has too much of this:

And not enough this:

Yes, it’s vulgar.  But cussing is a part of our language, and an extremely powerful part of our language at that.  We have chosen to relegate these words to moments of pain, anguish, and frustration, or perhaps to bring emphasis on otherwise unremarkable points in every day colloquial conversation.  Yet, our acute awareness of cuss words gives them a power over us; we are at their mercy, their beck and call.  When they are used, we notice.  Why waste this mighty power on the profane?  Why not harness this power on behalf of the sublime?

That is to say, why are these words somehow acceptable to use when we stub our toes, and not when we listen to Shostakovich symphonies?  Stubbing your toe is a frequent and unpleasant occurrence – one that happens and then fades away into the depths of irrelevance.  A symphony is an experience to behold, delving into the depths of horror and joy unlike any to be had in our daily, banal lives.  Shostakovich symphonies are fucking incredible.  Stubbing your toe is just a minor nuisance.

The other day, I decided to catch the Central Texas wildflower blooms before they all die for the summer.  It was sublime.  The entire time, I wanted to say, “Holy shit, are those Bluebonnets?!  Christ Almighty, they’re fuckin’ beautiful!”  But I didn’t.  I said, “Wow, are those Bluebonnets?  Wow, they’re really beautiful.”  Something about that seems inadequate.  They’re not just beautiful.  They’re fuckin’ beautiful.  There is never a better time to cuss than when talking about wildflowers.

May we look no further in regards to our division of profanation and sublimity than how we treat the naked body: a highly esteemed subject of art for centuries.  But at what point does art become porn?  Is it the language with which we talk about it?  If Da Vinci paints a picture of breasts, is it not beautiful?  What if he paints a picture of tits?  Does it become pornographic?  Is it our language itself that identifies something as representing the beauty of sexuality versus the distastefulness of it?  What if Renoir painted two lovers having sex?  Is it art because he does it with oil on canvas?  What if the same exact painting is described as two lovers banging?  Does our language deny it the right of being art?

Why grant swear words this holy power over the finer things in life?  Why let them decide what is decent and indecent?  It is a privilege our culture has bestowed upon them, and yet we allow it to reduce our experiences of the sublime to something only ever lukewarm?

Cuss words are like a currency.  The more you use them, the less valuable they become.  So instead of keeping them away from our sublime experiences, why not use them exclusively for our sublime experiences?   Because holy shit, wildflowers!  Jesus Christ!

Badass.

Cities and Villages

Every so often I go out on a Friday night to remind myself how much I don’t like going out on Friday nights.  My excursions are seldom ever internally motivated – usually I get persuaded by an exuberant friend starved for the thrills of urban nightlife.  But I always immediately regret it.

To me, nightlife is suffocating in a mass of sweaty bodies, drowning in the inescapably oppressive noise of over-amplified music, reluctantly being held hostage by social decency as I pretend to enjoy myself as the night ticks away into the wee hours of the morning and the bar tab crawls higher and higher.  Often I wonder who else is only pretending to enjoy themselves.

And thus encapsulates my feelings towards cities in general.  What is it about the thrill of urban possibilities that so captivates my fellow man?  My existence in geography is a battle to find the open road and stretch my arms into space – to escape the crowds and the noise and enjoy the peace of desolation, wherever it may be.  I recall my travels abroad, a school trip in Italy; we went from city to city to city, museum to cathedral to museum to cathedral, and it was all stunning, but it wasn’t until we reached the remote countryside that I let out a sigh and thought to myself, “Yes.  We have arrived.”

Too often I see tourists follow urban itineraries seemingly unaware that a world exists outside of the concrete jungle.  Of course there are the usual London -> Paris -> Rome -> Berlin tourists (throw in Amsterdam or Barcelona perhaps), and the country is passed through via train for a brief taste.  Some people even go to the Alps or the Riviera, which are definitely lovely.  But there’s something to be said about stepping into some sleepy town and dedicating a piece of yourself and your time to what it has to offer.

Allow me to quote a passage by Antun Šoljan, from his short story, A Brief Excursion.  In this story, a crew of scholars are reluctantly walking through the Yugoslav countryside after their bus breaks down, and they stumble upon a small village.

“[This is] a place that owes things to you with this noble, old-fashioned courtesy for the attention you pay it.  The place feels noticed, honored, and it returns the honor to you in kind.  It gives what it has to give.  We must value that, because it is giving what it has.  Maybe all that it has.  A house in the distance.  A stone wall.  A little field.

Take Paris, for instance.  I have been all over the world, but it was clearest to me in Paris.  What did Paris actually have to offer me?  It did not deign to notice me at all.  It did not return my attentions, if you see what I’m getting at . . . Now, it isn’t that I was indifferent to Paris.  I was not.  Quite the contrary.  Who could be indifferent – sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine et nos amours, and so forth, or as one of my uncles, a globetrotter and old rapscallion, used to say:

When I was in Paris
I saw the Mona Lisa

and he’d always end it with the vulgar part of the song in a whisper in a close duet with my old man, so I don’t know those last words to this day.  Maybe I did come to Paris ignorant and naive.  But I sure was not indifferent.  Still, Paris was indifferent to me.  That is one whore of a place.  It takes you in a way a whore takes her clients.  Everybody trampled it like a plucked hen.  It takes in everybody the same.  A whore, I tell you.  It flirts, true enough, but it flirts impersonally, commercially, with anyone who comes along.  It picks your pocket completely asexually, to get your wallet.  Whore.

This is a place, you see, which is like a woman in love.  It knows you are there.  It takes you into account.  It waits for you gratefully, because it knows that you are coming to see it and nothing else.  It accepts you.  That, my friends, is not flirtation; that is love.  It awards you with its modest beauties, but it gives them only to you.  A person can get rich that way.  It isn’t the money, or the knowledge, or the slyness, or anything that make you rich – it is the love and the belonging.  Only a place can give you that.  Only a place like this.”

Space and Meaning in “Cosmos” by Gombrowicz

(disclaimer: may contain spoilers)

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the author Witold Gombrowicz, he is considered by some to be the greatest 20th century novelist nobody knows.  I’ve had the (mis)fortune of reading three of his novels recently: Ferdydurke, Cosmos, and Pornografia, and I recommend them, not necessarily because they’re enjoyable (they’re often quite frustrating), but because they force the reader to reconsider reality and interpret their surroundings abstract and disorienting ways.  This could, of course, lead to insanity, but it could also lead to a heightened awareness of space and self.

Surely countless scholars have written extensive and eloquent essays on what I’m about to poop out here in a lazy and rigorously questionable blog entry: the manipulation of space and meaning in Gombrowicz’s Cosmos.  I’m writing this simply to give you a brief taste of what to expect with the faint hope that someday, someone else will read this story, and we will be able to commiserate.  But first, let me summarize for you the basic Gombrowiczian story arch (from the aforementioned works) so you are familiar with the temporal design of his storytelling:

1) Confused Narrator and Unintentional Accomplice enter a household of caricatures.
2) Due to boredom/desire, the Narrator and Accomplice stir up trouble in the household.
3) The ideological foundations of the household collapse into a heap of rubble exposing a senseless and inexplicable void of reason or purpose.
4) Some minor character dies remorselessly in a foolish manner, and nobody learns a lesson.

With that said, onto Cosmos:

Cosmos follows the story of two students who decide to spend the summer in a rural boarding house in order to escape their petty problems back home.  On the way to the house, in the street, they discover a gruesome scene: a dead sparrow deliberately hung from from a tree.  The scene with the sparrow haunts the minds of two students as they meet the house family, and the narrator makes the baseless assumption that someone in the family had something to do with the hung sparrow.

The next 100 pages is about the students trying to solve the mystery of the sparrow by secretly following clues to nowhere and causing trouble through their efforts in trying to connect everything with everything else even though nothing really connects to anything.  Or as the New York Times put it: “The Plotlessness Thickens.”

Why is it called Cosmos?  Because at one point, the author looks at the stars, and contemplates about how each individual star has nothing at all to do with any other star, being millions of light years away from each other, and yet, from Earth, we arbitrarily draw connection between them to form constellations, and out of those constellations, meaning.  And suddenly, the reality of the vast cosmos becomes his immediate environment: the boarding house.  The stars become the items and clues around him, and the individual marks and things which have no relation or context are suddenly ascribed meaning in his desperate attempt to solve the great Mystery of the Sparrow.

This is the lesson I want to convey from this book: deriving meaning out of non-meaning is madness, and yet, meaning has consequences even if it’s out of nothing.  So what comes first: the search to find meaning or meaning itself?  Does the desire for meaning create meaning when no meaning is warranted?  Is meaning self-fulfilling?

Like drawing lines between the stars, the narrator finds marks on the ceiling of the house pointing outside, leading to a twig hanging from a brick – a connection he immediately draws to the hanging of the sparrow.  With this, he follows branches to the maid, and rummaging around in the maid’s dwelling, he finds yet another clue that leads to another clue until nothing adds up.  Then he makes his own clues, because the idea of a meaningless universe frightens him.  Just like the stars, his clues have no reason and no meaning.

Or do they, and does it matter?

Just like the characters themselves, I’m not sure I fully grasp the lesson to be learned here.  But there’s one thing this story tells me: both a world full of meaning and a world void of meaning are equally terrifying.

Don’t be too reckless in your quest for meaning.  Also, read the book.  I would hope it would influence how you look at things in relation to each other.

Five reasons artists should appreciate sports

Growing up as someone who valued academics and performing arts, I had always harbored a wee bit of resentment toward sports and athletes.  Perhaps this resentment arose in high school where I found injustice in that athletic departments are given more money and attention than arts programs ever will.  Perhaps it was jealousy that the jocks were higher up on the social ladder than the oboists.  Maybe the source of my resentment can be traced back to my early days playing youth soccer alongside every other little boy in America – an experience during which I spent most of my time picking dandelions in whichever part of the field the coach determined I would cause the least amount of damage.

After all, dandelions don’t yell at you and make you run laps.  Dandelions don’t judge you for being a lazy fat slob.  Dandelions love you for who you are on the inside.

In any case, I was all too eager to project the negative “jock” stereotype onto my fellow classmates even though, in retrospect, they were all good people.  I saw an interest in sports as placing value on the more brutish, less refined aspects of society.  This wasn’t an opinion held solely by myself – a lot of my artistic colleagues tended to view athletics begrudgingly, especially in light of not having enough departmental money to repair the school contrabassoon.

But then I went to college and realized that valuing sports isn’t actually bad, but rather, something that, as an artist, we should openly do.  Here’s why:

1.  Being an athlete requires practice and dedication.

We, in the world of music, spend hours upon hours per day perfecting our craft.  The amount of time and effort we put into mastering the skills of our trade is perhaps one reason we are so defensive about its cultural value – if you spent half of your waking life playing scales, you would damn well want your scales appreciated.

Athletes also spend hours upon hours per day perfecting their craft.  While we’re in the practice room playing scales, they’re on the court shooting free-throws.  It requires the same finesse, the same focus, and the same drive for an artist to achieve the level of skill necessary to be happily employed as it does for the athlete to become employable.  The least we could do is appreciate hard work, practice, and dedication.

2.  Most sports require a refined sense of subtlety and a keen eye.

It’s not like sports are just contests of brute force.  There is an element of smarts and mental aptitude required to succeed in any team sport and most individual sports.  Even football, the quintessential sport for brainless jocks, involves strategy and quick decision-making.  Plays are drawn up and studied for months before the first game, and opposing sides must read each other and make decisions in real time based on wits and gut.  Executing a successful play takes artistic mastery and teamwork, not unlike executing an orchestral passage.

There is an aesthetically satisfying elegance that comes forth when a quarterback throws a perfect spiral to a wide open receiver who then jukes the safety and scores a touchdown.  It might as well be the soloist bringing the cadenza into the triumphant recapitulation of a concerto.  Both require artistic mastery and refinement, and both make the crowd go wild.

3.  Athletics is a celebration of passion.

Music is the aural representation of passion.  That’s why we love it: it evokes a wide variety of feelings hardly felt elsewhere in daily life.  Through music, we can experience emotions otherwise unknown to us, or known to us all too well – the terrors of war, the joys of love, the anxiety of meaninglessness, the simple pleasures of a nice day, etc…

…which is why athletics should be all the more valuable to our artistic experiences.  The emotions the players experience on the field, as they overcome all odds to win the day or fall to the ground in the agony of defeat, provide a greater breadth of emotional language than we ever get commuting to and from our accounting jobs on weekdays.  Being emotionally involved in sports is how we break out of our monotonous lives and feel feelings once again, even if it is just for a saturday night college football game.

Art requires passion.  Sports require passion.  Both produce emotional responses.

4.  Teams promote regional rivalries which result in cultural diversity and pride.

In art, we tend to value the expression of culture.  We see diversity in craft as a positive result of nationalism or regionalist tendencies.  It’s why we can talk about “Russian Romantics” and “French Impressionists” and why Bartok’s work in ethnomusicology defined early 20th century compositional styles.  The difference in flavor between a Ukrainian gypsy playing an accordion and an Appalachian hillbilly playing a banjo is what makes music an infinite resource for entertainment, and it’s that diversity that allows us to be proud of our own regional artistic language.

Pride in one’s region through art is not unlike pride in one’s region through supporting a local team.  Traditional dresses worn in commemoration of your heritage is not unlike wearing an orange and black SF Giants shirt in commemoration of the town in which you grew up and the culture associated therein.  When I wear Giants clothes, it’s not just me rooting for the Giants, it’s me rooting for the City of San Francisco, Northern California, the redwoods, the Bay, sourdough bread, crab dinners, Tahoe, Yosemite…

…okay, maybe I’m being a little too grandiose.  But really, can you not celebrate the beauty of your native Bohemia both in listening to Dvorak and in cheering on the Czech athletes in the Olympics?

5.  Playing sports reminds us that our bodies are among our most valuable creative tools.

We exist on this earth packed into little bags of meat.  These bags of meat are how we interact with everything.  Athletes know this.  Dancers know this.  Musicians tend to forget until the carpal tunnel arrives.  Composers write notes for instruments, not necessarily for human beings.  In a concert, everyone wears black to take away the physical humanity in order to reorient the focus onto the aural humanity.

But lest we forget, rhythm was created hand-in-hand with dance and movement.  Using our bodies to feel or produce music provides for a greater understanding and internalization of the music, not only on a rhythmic level, but also on the level of emotional involvement.  Exercising, getting hit, and generally interacting with people on a physical level reminds us that we exist and that our bags of meat can do a lot of different and amazing things.

Also, getting up off your fat ass and throwing a ball makes you healthier.  Do it.

Music, Noise, Future, and the foolishness of confidence (a passage from Kundera)

I read a passage of Milan Kundera today that I would like to share.  Please forgive me, copyright hawks.  It is about the unpredictability of the future and the foolishness of confidence, as told via an anecdote about 20th Century music.  I quote:

In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg declares that because of him German music will continue to dominate the world for the next hundred years.  Twelve years later he is forced to leave Germany forever.  After the war, in America, laden with honors, he is still convinced that his work will be celebrated forever.  He faults Igor Stravisnky for paying too much attention to his contemporaries and disregarding the judgement of the future.  He expects posterity to be his most reliable ally.  In a scathing letter to Thomas Mann he looks to the period “after two or three hundred years,” when it will finally become clear which of the two was the greater, Mann or he!  Schoenberg dies in 1951.  For the next two decades his work is hailed as the greatest of the century, venerated by the most brilliant of the young composers, who declare themselves his disciples; but thereafter it recedes from both concert halls and memory.  Who plays it nowadays, at the turn of this century? Who looks to him?  No, I don’t mean to make foolish fun of his presumptuousness and say he overestimated himself.  A thousand times no!  Schoenberg did not overestimate himself.  He overestimated the future.

Did he commit an error of thinking?  No.  His thinking was correct, but he was living in spheres that were too lofty.  He was conversing with the greatest Germans, with Bach and Goethe and Brahms and Mahler, but , however intelligent they might be, conversations carried on in the higher stratospheres of the mind are always myopic about what goes on, with no reason or logic, down below: two great armies are battling to the death over sacred causes; but some minuscule plague bacterium comes along and lays them both low.

Schoenberg was aware that the bacterium existed.  As early as 1930 he wrote: “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless”; it “force-feeds us music … regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it,” with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.

Radio was the tiny stream it all began with.  Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river.  If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, “regardless whether we want to hear it,” it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Schoenberg saw the bacterium, he was aware of the danger, but deep inside he did not grant it much importance.  As I said, he was living in the very lofty spheres of the mind, and pride kept him from taking seriously an enemy so small, so vulgar, so repugnant, so contemptible.  The only great adversary worthy of him, the sublime rival whom he battled with verve and severity, was Igor Stravinsky.  That was the music he charged at, sword flashing, to win the favor of the future.

But the future was a river, a flood of notes where composers’ corpses drifted among the fallen leaves and torn-away branches.  One day Schoenberg’s dead body, bobbing about in the raging waves, collided with Stravinsky’s, and in a shamefaced late-day reconciliation the two of them journeyed on together toward nothingness (toward the nothingness of music that is absolute din).

– Milan Kundera, Ignorance, 2000

Time Must be Stopped

I, among billions of earthly cohorts, once wished there was more time.  Every day I would struggle to do what I needed to do, and every day, I would fail.  I (surely along with you, comrade – let us commiserate) would fail at accomplishing everything I had hoped to achieve in a 24 hour period while somehow sacrificing sleep, friends, (and hygiene).  Yet inexplicably, I would only be able to account for about 2/3 of my day.  What about the other the 8 hours?  What happened?  How were they eaten up?  Commuting?  Eating?  Rereading webcomics?  Do I really spend that long staring at empty space, drooling?

I refer to my time management woes in the past tense, but not a thing has changed.  I still struggle.  But there is one major difference: before, I wished there was more time.  Now, I wish there was no time.

Time is an enemy.  It must be destroyed.

Everything we do is within an imaginary grid (surely without which the world would cease to function – but that’s beside the point!).  Everything.  On an obvious level: calendars, clocks, scheduling.  On a less obvious level: music.

The language of music is written purely in expressions of time.  A quarter [of a whole measure of time] note.  A frequency is a set of wave impulses per time.  Crescendo -> an increase in wave amplitude over time.  Music devoid of time doesn’t exist.  We can only experience music in time.  How would it even be possible otherwise?

Even less obvious: language.  Every sentence we say, every word we utter within a larger syntax, exists in a timed sequence that conveys an expression.  Outside of time, is language impossible?

Clearly, time is our overlord.  It controls everything we do.  We live as slaves in its matrix, and we must break free.  But we desire it, as if victims of Stockholm Syndrome.

Let me briefly summarize for you my relationship with Time.  In an effort for better self-management, I time everything I do.  Literally, I’ll start homework and I’ll hit the stopwatch.  I’ll start reading a book -> stopwatch.  Gym -> stopwatch.  Every time I visit a new place, I count quarter-hours.  Museums? – hour maximum.  Hell, I even time my visits with friends.  I don’t even watch movies anymore because they take too much time (but there will always be time to reread webcomics!).

My compositions are the musical embodiment of impatience.  Everything I write exists in a sectional form where I move from one texture to another texture with no regard for space because I’m afraid that too much time in any one texture is a waste of time.

Time has ruined me.

Has it ruined you?

Now of course, I have never ever smoked weed.  But let us pretend for a moment, for the sake of discourse, that I can speak first hand to the experience of being high (hypothetically, because I totally can’t – all this is based on hearsay from a friend.  A friend of a friend, really.  An acquaintance).  As I understand, the most bizarre psychological effect of the aforementioned herb is its distortion of Time.  At high enough levels of intoxication, short-term memory can completely disappear, leaving the user in a state completely detached from the immediate past.

With no sense of past, there is no mappable trajectory through the present.  No present velocity means no predictable future.  No past, no future.  Only present.  Suddenly, time is revealed as something optional – something apart from us – something that isn’t an inevitability of existence.

Marijuana defeats Time.  (But seriously, kids, don’t do drugs.  Drugs are bad, m’kay?)

Doesn’t living in a timeless present sound idyllic?  A while back I posted a passage by Milan Kundera (yes, I realize if you read my blog, you’re probably sick of him by now).  Reading the passage would do it more justice than reading my summary of it, but in part of this passage, he discusses the differences between Animal and Man in regards to how we react to time.  For Man, time is a linear path.  For Animal, time runs in circles.  Every morning, a dog can wake up, partake in the same routine, and never get bored.  But for humans, becoming bored with our lives is a reality of existence.  We feel this need to move forward in time and being trapped in an endlessly routine existence becomes banal misery.  And yet, if our relationship to our pets proves anything, its that we long for this timeless routine and vicariously seek it through others, even though we can’t seem to find happiness in it through ourselves.

“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

When something repeats an infinite number of times, is the concept of Time no longer applicable?  Does something that occurs continuously exist outside of Time?  If animals can defeat Time, why can’t we?

A thought struck me: Do many of our anxieties and psychoses result from a soured relationship with Time?  Can depression be linked to a disagreement with our role in time and space?  Does Time affect our sense of self worth?  Surely, time implies age -> age implies decay.  Does our existence in the Domain of Time reinforce a dreadful sense of existential meaninglessness?  If 60 seconds is a minute, and 60 minutes is an hour, and an hour is what it takes to bake a potato, how many potatoes can we fit into our lifetime before looking back and realizing that, in the face of Infinity, our life-potatoes were crafted from negligible units?  Considering the formidably vast expanse of historical time, how are we to assign even the slightest importance to the infinitesimally small portion of time we occupy on the Timeline of Humanity?

Time is ruthless.  Time is insanity.  Even through our daily servitude to the prison of Time, it cruelly insists on depriving us of the one thing mankind treasures most: sovereign, independent self-importance.  In the face of Time, there can only exist resigned disappointment.

There is one solution.  – Brothers, Sisters.  Countrymen.  Let us fight the war on Time.  Let us show no mercy.

Minor Desperation on the Internet

I prefer to reserve my blog for expressing thoughts or anecdotes with some vague point.  I don’t like to update with personal stories unless they go somewhere outside of the realm of self, and I shelve many drafts that do not meet my personal standards of quality (whatever that means).  But I haven’t posted in a while, my drafts have been subpar, and I’m desperately afraid that my readers, who have absolutely no obligation to read my words, are going to lose faith that anything I’ve said has ever been worth something.  As it is, sense of self-worth is a fragile thing, and more than I’d like to admit, I actively seek affirmation from strangers such as yourselves.  As much as I’d like to pretend to be an emotionally independent human being, let’s be honest – I have a blog, and I write in it. That pretty much pegs me as needy and insecure.

…which is why I’ve decided to post neither thoughts, nor anecdotes, but music.  In real life (outside of the internet) I study music composition, and on rare occasion, I actually compose.  Perhaps some of you might enjoy listening to what I write beyond the words in my blog (assuming you don’t just scan through all the words in search for the elusive picture I occasionally post).  For those of you who hate it or don’t care for my style of music, please forgive me: I’ll post a real entry soon.  I promise.

I’m not necessarily looking for praise or criticism, but if you have praise or criticism you want to provide, I’ll be most receptive to it (for the record, criticism is more useful than praise [but praise is good too]).  In any case, this is what I do, and if you actually listened to this clip of my most recent recorded work, I am most appreciative of your time and ears.  Thank you.

Loss for Words

“Words cannot describe…”
“I’m struggling to find the right words…”
“Words fail me…”
“It’s hard to explain…”

The experience of being unable to verbalize a thought, sensation, or experience is terrifying to me, and I’ll tell you why: it reminds me that all of existence is only perceivable through a series of clumsy symbols.

Think about all those times you’ve been unable to adequately express yourself.  Think about how your inner desires and convictions were at the mercy of your eloquence.  Think about how dissatisfied you felt when, while holding the brief and elusively precious attention of an audience, you stood there and stumbled through an idea that was only kind of close to what you wanted to say.  And then you went home and thought about all the other things you could’ve said otherwise that were better.

And thus exist two realities: the reality in which you exist without language, and the reality in which others perceive you with language.  The battle to be understood is a constant confrontation between these two realities.  Does the distance between our internal self and our perceived self indicate our level of alienation or social anxiety?

I don’t speak only of spoken word, but all of self-expression.  Our movements and our gestures, as well as our words, are mere symbols, and can a symbol ever truly accurately depict the very reality it’s attempting to symbolize?  Could it be that all of our physical interaction with the perceivable world is somehow cheaply symbolic to some abstract metaphysical intention?

Or what if we can only perceive our own feelings through the filter of language even if we choose not to use language to express them.  Maybe the complexity of our individual internal experiences are an illusion, and the symbols of language are how we process and understand them.  Does language itself allow us to feel?  Is our internal desire forced to submit to our dictionary of expressive tools, or does our dictionary of expressive tools define our personal experiences of desire?

I don’t know.

But I do know this: “sadness“ and “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” are two very different feelings.

Perhaps the difference between average writing and good writing is this – average writing sacrifices the richness of the experience for the directness of expressing it, whereas good writing uses symbols that evoke otherwise inexpressible feelings through associations.  Perhaps great writing is somehow harnessing these associations in a direct manner, which is something very hard to do.  Brevity is an oft undervalued quality in literature.

Maybe the key to an internally enriching and psychologically cohesive life is to stay in touch with the non-symbolized internal reality in which we live, and trying to express that reality only when necessary through unique specific associations rather than cheap quantifiers and qualifiers.  Perhaps the only way to be true to yourself is to refrain from expressing yourself (I say as I clumsily express my thoughts on a blog).  That is to say, maybe the key to living well (whatever that means) is to live poetry.  (I try to refrain from saying “the key to happiness” because I don’t believe that life is about happiness – sorrow and desire are just as important for keeping me passionate as joy is)

This is what I find incredible about literature – the written word was invented to symbolize the spoken word, but literature is the written word divorced from the spoken word.  The written word no longer stands for what it was invented to stand for.  Think about lolcats.  It is impossible to speak a lolcat and have the same effect or even a remote understanding.  Lolcats exist in a world of the written word where the hierarchies of symbolic meaning are completely destroyed.  The lolcat has no reality beyond itself, and yet, it is an ever-cycling parody of its own invented reality.  That is why I see lolcats as the highest form of existentialist humor.

Well, maybe not, but words are failing me right now, and that’s the best example I could come up with.