The Literary-Musical Analogy

[Roger Bissell]

Yesterday's cryptoquote in the Orange County Register proved to be a remarkable statement by the author Colin Wilson. It succinctly states my own view (as presented in my JARS essay "Art as Microcosm") and that of Alan and Joan Blumenthal (as presented in their lectures on music):

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

This is particularly true of symphonies and sonatas and the like that were written during the Classical and Romantic eras.

REB

[anonrobt]

Agree - with the music being the 'words' of the play, using auditory stimuli to configure the emotional responses originally entailed by singing...

[kiaer.ts]

Yesterday's cryptoquote in the Orange County Register proved to be a remarkable statement by the author Colin Wilson. It succinctly states my own view (as presented in my JARS essay "Art as Microcosm") and that of Alan and Joan Blumenthal (as presented in their lectures on music):

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

This is particularly true of symphonies and sonatas and the like that were written during the Classical and Romantic eras.

Interesting, I was looking for some titles by Colin Wilson at the Strand just the other day. Wilson is a sometimes brilliant but very poorly integrated mind. He does come up with the occasional aphorism. But he is a devoté of the paranormal, and a case study in the primacy of consciousness. His Outsiders made a splash when it was published. I found it quite overrated. His History of Crime holds about as good a place as such a work could hold. He views crime from a Nietzscean/lone wolf perspective. His sci-fi book The Mind Parasites, through which I first became aware of him, has an interesting premise, but eventually devolves into (dissolves into) a wishing-makes-it-so deus ex machina cliché. Reading him is fun in the way that it can be fun to pick up the Enquirer as you check out your groceries.

[BaalChatzaf]

Yesterday's cryptoquote in the Orange County Register proved to be a remarkable statement by the author Colin Wilson. It succinctly states my own view (as presented in my JARS essay "Art as Microcosm") and that of Alan and Joan Blumenthal (as presented in their lectures on music):

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

This is particularly true of symphonies and sonatas and the like that were written during the Classical and Romantic eras.

REB

But, but.... In a stage play the actors utter things that have both denotation and connotation. What is the denotation of a sequence of musical notes?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anonrobt]

Yesterday's cryptoquote in the Orange County Register proved to be a remarkable statement by the author Colin Wilson. It succinctly states my own view (as presented in my JARS essay "Art as Microcosm") and that of Alan and Joan Blumenthal (as presented in their lectures on music):

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

This is particularly true of symphonies and sonatas and the like that were written during the Classical and Romantic eras.

REB

But, but.... In a stage play the actors utter things that have both denotation and connotation. What is the denotation of a sequence of musical notes?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[from my manuscript - ]

there are two criticisms of her view of music I also find a need to address. The first is that she premised the \essence of music as being mathematical. The easiest way to respond to such a criticism is to remember that she defined mathematics as the science of measurement – and also to remember that a sheet of music, any music, is a sheet full of measurement. Yes, there are other aspects of music that give texture to the music, put the measurements into contexts – but the bottom line is that music is an expression of auditory stimulus according to mathematical means. It is on that basis, the fundamental level, that she expressed the way music is involved in one's sense of life and was concerned with.

The other criticism leveled at her music theory is the one she really didn't give a satisfactory answer to – what is the re-presentational aspect of music that co-responds to reality? I suspect part of the problem in giving a good answer to this was her sensation/perception mis-understanding aspect of how the mind hears music. But, if one were to re-translate her sensation mistaken observations and put them into perceptual concretes, it seems a much more integrated and noncontradictory view emerges.

While I am primarily an artist, tho I also sculpt, I also am an avid listener od serious music. One thing I've observed is that for the most part of human history, music was in accompaniment with song and dance. It wasn't until about 300 years or so ago that secular music really made its mark, and music started being played for its own sake. But, for the time music was connected with voice especially, and dance, there was never a question about its expressive meanings. This is to say there was no problem as to what aspect of reality music's meaning referred to, music's emotional respondings. The question would only arise when music per se was involved. Yet, as far as I am concerned, it seems a false problem, as the same set of pitch, beat, tone, etc. That music makes use of when accompanying vocals should elicit the same response emotionally when not accompanying vocals, when the music stands on its own. This is clearly noted in such instances as laments, or songs of joy, or the emotions of solemnity, or the gaiety of dance. Music, as such, is a very abstract Art, and in expressing what it is and does in a form similar to the definition of Art, I would have to say that music selects and styles certain important or meaningful aural experiences, making use of certain configurations which best express those qualities, drawing out the relative emotional responses – abstracting, as it were, to better the perception.

Even when one deals with music beyond a single instrument or small group of instruments, as, say, the expressiveness of an orchestra, where far greater variety of tones and emotional derivations can be achieved, note that there is still a co-respondent to singing – the violins, which are analogous to the vocal, whether singly as in a violin concerto, or grouping as if a choral, as they are arranged in the orchestra itself. In any case, it is clear there is intelligibility, a definite "re-presentation of..." in music, and a definite reference to "some aspect of reality."

[Reidy]

Branden mentions Wilson in one of his memoirs. He wrote Rand seeking to make common cause, and Branden, in his capacity as gatekeeper, wrote back to the effect of buzz off, hatred-eaten intrincisit whim-worshipper. He later regretted this. I don't remember if Branden and Wilson ever connected after that.

Concerning #5: Rand didn't have a theory of music. She said candidly that she didn't know what this representational aspect was beyond a few vague analogies and that a theory would have to wait until we knew more. She didn't give us much to criticize.

[kiaer.ts]

Branden mentions Wilson in one of his memoirs. He wrote Rand seeking to make common cause, and Branden, in his capacity as gatekeeper, wrote back to the effect of buzz off, hatred-eaten intrincisit whim-worshipper. He later regretted this. I don't remember if Branden and Wilson ever connected after that.

That's a shame. Can you give a reference? I have only skimmed NB's memoirs while at friend's houses. From what I know of Wilson he certainly would have been hard for Rand to take - and as for common cause, he would have had to be a bit self-deluded. But again, he is interesting, and his sense of life is individualist. I can definitely see him having liked her. There are much better ways of saying thanks, no thanks.

[Jonathan]

Concerning #5: Rand didn't have a theory of music. She said candidly that she didn't know what this representational aspect was beyond a few vague analogies and that a theory would have to wait until we knew more. She didn't give us much to criticize.

Rand didn't have a completed theory of music, but she did have at least an outline which included the conclusion that music is a valid art form which, in some yet-to-be-identified way, somehow allegedly complies with her requirements that all art must "communicate" "artists's meanings" and be "intelligible" in its representations.

As for not giving us much to criticize, I disagree. The fact that she left the door open for music -- that it can be classified as art today with the promise that at some unspecified point in the future someone, somewhere will identify the necessary objective "conceptual vocabulary" that will allow music to quality as art according to Rand's requirements -- while quite angrily slamming the same door on abstract paintings and not allowing them the same leeway of future discoveries, is an act of employing blatant double standards and allowing contradictions to exist.

J

Edited November 24, 2008 by Jonathan

[Reidy]

I think we know quite enough about music to call it an art by Rand's definition, which is "a selective recreation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value judgements." (That word "metaphysical" is questionable, but this has nothing to do specifically with music. Following a suggestion of Branden's I'll substitute "most deeply felt.") No one would deny that musical composition and performance are selective. The aspect of reality that music recreates is feelings, directly and not through images, words or events. To extrapolate from what she said (and I don't think I'm the first to say this), the difference between music and non-representational painting and the reason Rand isn't guilty of an inconsistency or a double standard is that we perceive objects with vision but qualities or attributes with hearing; non-representational painting ignores this fundamental and unavoidable fact about consciousness.

(Judgement Day, somewhere in the discussion of the NBI years. Maybe the index will say.)

[Dragonfly]

Let's face it, Rand's definition of art as a "selective recreation of reality" is hopelessly inadequate. It might be used for some art, in particular literary art, which was of course Rand's specialization, but as a general definition it fails. Trying to fit art forms like music into Rand's Procrustes' bed results in terribly contrived arguments, stretching the meaning of words like "recreation" and "reality" beyond breaking point. Bloody wars are being fought over the question whether in Rand's definition architecture is art or not. I think it's time to move on, letting those angels dancing on the head of a pin stew in their own juice.

[BaalChatzaf]

Let's face it, Rand's definition of art as a "selective recreation of reality" is hopelessly inadequate. It might be used for some art, in particular literary art, which was of course Rand's specialization, but as a general definition it fails. Trying to fit art forms like music into Rand's Procrustes' bed results in terribly contrived arguments, stretching the meaning of words like "recreation" and "reality" beyond breaking point. Bloody wars are being fought over the question whether in Rand's definition architecture is art or not. I think it's time to move on, letting those angels dancing on the head of a pin stew in their own juice.

I have always wondered what is meant by "recreating reality". Taken literally that means replacing the reality we all live in, with another reality. But how can we do that? Reality is All. Reality is One Big Thing. It is not within our physical or intellectual power to recreate reality. We are not Gods.

O.K. Maybe Rand mean recreating parts of or aspects of reality. But this is not literally recreation. It is representation, description, imitation. Making a statue of a human does not recreate the human. It is a representation of the exterior of a human, perhaps colored or conditioned by how the sculptor feels about humans. If he has a high opinion of humans his statues will emphasize the beauty, harmony and symmetry of human (external) appearance. If the sculptor has a sour view of humans, he might create statues that emphasize the ugly, grotesque features of humans. Basically he will represent the defects of humans. Not a very uplifting attitude I must say.

In any case the sculptor is merely imitating (in some fashion and from some point of view) what he sees or imagine he sees.

Now generalize the above to other visual arts and literature. The visual arts (or some of them) have a clear denotation. Ditto for literature. Notice I exclude music. Music consists of sequences of tones and chords. That is what is there. What a sound structure represents to the composer or performer is strictly in his head. There is no sure fire translation of music to identifiable objects or situations denoted with the possible exception of music that imitates sounds that things make, like explosion, screeches, moans, groans, and perhaps laughter. Such music is a form of Onomatopoeia . Most symphonic music is not imitative, so what does it mean? Only the artist knows for sure because the meaning (or association) is in his head, not in the heads of the listener.

If there is not definitive way of decoding an abstract musical piece, then it is beyond ideas of truth or falsity. O.K., how about beauty? We can judge music by its conformity to certain rules of composition. But what of these rules? I say the arbitrary and conventional. We develop a notion of what beautiful music is, largely by repetitious exposure and convention. I will grant there are certain sounds that are unpleasant and even painful/harmful. For example any sound over 140 Db is doing a number on you hearing apparatus. High pitch screeching ahd squeaking is hard to take. Chalk on the blackboard anyone? Except for obvious instances such as these, what does it mean to say that music is bad or not well constructed except as it conforms to a convention. So why is Convention A better or more valid than Convention B?

Now we get to a subtle point. If a musical piece produces the emotions of sadness, despair, hopelessness etc. we react less then favorably. But why blame the composer. It is we, the listeners, who have made the emotional associations. So we should blame ourselves, for the displeasure we are experiencing. That is why I get antsy when Ayn Rand says things like Bethoven had a bad "sense of life" etc. Ludvig was an abused child, he had a no good nephew he had to take care of and he was going deaf which is bad news for any musical person. I can hardly hold it against him if he general emotional tone was less than happy and carefree. And if his music reflects his gloom (I assume he was gloomy) then so be it. He was being honest to himself if that is how he crafted his music to correspond with his less than elevated moods. I assume (naively) that happy people make "happy music" and gloomy said people sometime make gloomy "sad music". It gets down to this: I am unwilling to say that a person "should have" such and such an attitude. His attitude is his own. I will only judge his externally manifested deeds.

My thought for the day: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. No one is entitled to his own Facts. Facts are what is.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Dragonfly]

That is why I get antsy when Ayn Rand says things like Bethoven had a bad "sense of life" etc. Ludvig was an abused child, he had a no good nephew he had to take care of and he was going deaf which is bad news for any musical person. I can hardly hold it against him if he general emotional tone was less than happy and carefree. And if his music reflects his gloom (I assume he was gloomy) then so be it.

But it isn't even true. If you measure Rachmaninov's (Rand's musical hero) and Van Beethoven's music both with a gloomometer, Rachmaninov's music will in general show far more gloom. The same for Tschaikovsky, another Randian hero and another gloomy Russian composer. You'll find far less gloom in the music by Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Van Beethoven than in that of those Russian composers. So the whole "sense of life" argument in condemning those composers she doesn't like is misdirected.

[tjohnson]

... we perceive objects with vision but qualities or attributes with hearing

Hmmm.... Are you saying vision is the only sense that we can use to objectify? Although vision is perhaps the most developed or perhaps most important of our senses, going by the amount of brain tissue devoted to it, I think objects can be determined without vision. If I went out to the woods and closed my eyes I can hear many different birds singing, for example.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

All recreating reality means is a human being making new entities that do not exist on their own. Sometimes the idea is extended to include a microcosm with its own internal rules of form and causality, as Roger Bissell has written.

It's top-down thinking about bottom-up. Strictly from the top-down perspective, you create a new entity that never existed before. From this same perspective, you take the natural form in which the raw material is found in nature and "recreate" the emergence.

For example, you can create a sculpture. You cannot create the subparticles that make up the stone. The form of the sculpture is the part of reality that is "recreated" from the material (which had "created" other forms on its own, often called emergence).

The same with music. If you interrupt the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony halfway through, you will have one-half the entity which Beethoven created, or "recreated" when considering only how sound waves exist on their own (i.e., in a form vastly different than a symphony). But you will not have one-half of any sound wave.

The notion is more simple that the objections portray. For people who do not accept top-down thinking, Rand's idea of art being a "selective recreation of reality" will never have any meaning.

But in reality, and in practice, it is a valid concept. A simple one at that. It even mirrors concept formation.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

It's top-down thinking about bottom-up. Strictly from the top-down perspective, you create a new entity that never existed before. From this same perspective, you take the natural form in which the raw material is found in nature and "recreate" the emergence.

The new entities created by authors of literature are shadows and fantasies. They are not real. Only Reality is Real.

Fictional literature is entertainment, not reality.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

It's top-down thinking about bottom-up. Strictly from the top-down perspective, you create a new entity that never existed before. From this same perspective, you take the natural form in which the raw material is found in nature and "recreate" the emergence.

The new entities created by authors of literature are shadows and fantasies. They are not real. Only Reality is Real.

Fictional literature is entertainment, not reality.

The idea of God is real--that is God is epistemologically real, not metaphysically. Fiction exists, it's just not true. Lies exist even though only as lies. Etc. You are actually positing two kinds of reality through your exclusions. But you can't exclude that which exists, no matter the form. It's just that one type of reality depends on a more basic type. You cannot think without a brain, yet the thoughts are real even if ephemeral.

--Brant

[Jonathan]

I think we know quite enough about music to call it an art by Rand's definition, which is "a selective recreation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value judgements."

Rand's definition isn't all that she had to say about art. She also said that art must be "intelligible," that it must "communicate," and that if it fails to do so, it ceases to be art.

For example, in The Art of Fiction, she wrote:

Since all art is communication, there can be nothing more viciously contradictory than the idea of nonobjective art. Anyone who wants to communicate with others has to rely on an objective reality and an objective language. The 'nonobjective' is that which is dependent only on the individual subject, not on any standard of outside reality, and which is therefore incommunicable to others.

Yet she also admitted that there are no objective criteria by which to judge music -- that there is (currently) no objective language of music.

It apparently did not occur to her that an objective language might never be discovered, or that perhaps no such language is possible (after all, if music "recreates emotions," and emotions are "dependent only on the individual subject," then it would seem to be "viciously contradictory" to expect to find a language that is both "objective" and "dependent only on the individual subject.")

(That word "metaphysical" is questionable, but this has nothing to do specifically with music. Following a suggestion of Branden's I'll substitute "most deeply felt.") No one would deny that musical composition and performance are selective. The aspect of reality that music recreates is feelings, directly and not through images, words or events.

Often times people experience quite different emotions than others when listening to the same pieces of music, and even to entire genres of music. Or they don't feel anything at all. When there's disagreement about which emotions a piece of music "recreates," or fails to, by what standard would you suggest that we determine whose emotions were correctly "recreated" by the music? By what standard do certain people get to declare that the emotions that they feel are valid and "recreated" in the music, but the emotions that others feel are invalid and not "recreated" in it. Likewise, by what standards can one person reject the emotions of others that are "recreated" in abstract paintings?

From what I've seen of Objectivists, it seems that the person who is capable of feeling the least gets to be in charge of determining that everyone else is a "charlatan" trying to pass off meaningless, emotionless non-art as art. That appears to be the Objectivist aesthetic standard: he or she who is most aesthetically numb, dense or insensitive shall be given the veto power to declare everyone else's emotional responses to art invalid (usually while smugly congratulating him- or herself for having the courage to declare that the Emperor's new clothes don't exist).

To extrapolate from what she said (and I don't think I'm the first to say this), the difference between music and non-representational painting and the reason Rand isn't guilty of an inconsistency or a double standard is that we perceive objects with vision but qualities or attributes with hearing; non-representational painting ignores this fundamental and unavoidable fact about consciousness.

You believe that light waves emitted or reflected by an object allow us to perceive the actual object, but sound waves emitted or reflected by it allow us to perceive only attributes? If I see lightning, I'm perceiving the entity itself, but if I hear thunder I'm perceiving something less than the entity?

What about the other senses? When I feel the sun's heat on my shoulders, or smell a pumpkin pie baking in the oven, am I perceiving the entities or just their attributes?

Anyway, even if I were to accept your division of perception into that of objects versus attributes, it doesn't follow that just because visual art can simulate entities rather than mere attributes that it must do so, just as it doesn't follow that because we can use musical instruments and other devices to "recreate" the sounds of objects -- flutes imitating birds, drums imitating horses or engines running, plunger-muted trumpets and trombones imitating human laughter and crying -- that we must do so.

It doesn't follow that the simulations of objects are the essence of all visual art forms, as opposed to the beauty of the arrangements of the objects' colors and shapes (the essence or meaning of the art of still life paintings is generally not "flowers" or "fruit," or any secondary associations that we might make regarding the specific types of flowers or fruits, but usually the visual appeal of the abstract compositions which contain them -- the relationships, contrasts, abstract visual dramas and harmonies, etc.)

J

Edited November 25, 2008 by Jonathan

[Jonathan]

The new entities created by authors of literature are shadows and fantasies. They are not real. Only Reality is Real.

I think that what Rand meant by "re-creation of reality" was something like "stylized simulation" of reality.

J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

Of course they are real. A painting is made out of canvas, paint, etc. None of that is an abstraction. These are real things.

The "recreation" is the form man gives it, which does not happen without man.

When you describe a real person, you have to be selective. The same goes for fictional people. If literature is too hard to grasp in this sense, watch TV. The actors are quite real. The personalities they present (the form) are "recreated" from what real people are.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob,

Of course they are real. A painting is made out of canvas, paint, etc. None of that is an abstraction. These are real things.

The "recreation" is the form man gives it, which does not happen without man.

When you describe a real person, you have to be selective. The same goes for fictional people. If literature is too hard to grasp in this sense, watch TV. The actors are quite real. The personalities they present (the form) are "recreated" from what real people are.

Michael

If I recreated a car I would be able to drive it away. Artistic images are shadows and imitations of the real things they presumably represent. Plato made this point in -The Republic-.

Michaelangelo's -David- is a graven image, not a person. It is a hunk of marble artfully trimmed. The real David probably stood 5'6'' and had a big nose. He was probably hairy too.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Artistic images are... ... imitations of the real things...

Bob,

What do you think a "recreation" is if not based on imitation? But it is still a new thing.

The point is that an artistic creation exists as an artistic creation. It is an entity with beginning, middle, end and features. I have no idea how that can be denied.

I think you are doing what I see many doing with Rand. You are using a meaning for "recreate" different than she is, then judging her statement by your meaning.

This would be akin to me saying that your statement "Artistic images are shadows..." is all wrong, say, with a painting, because the images on the painting reflect light instead of blocking it.

Michael

[anonrobt]

I have always considered that her meaning of 'recreate ' was actually re-present - that is, to utilize the fundamental essences of that particular aspect of reality, and present it [in paintings, for instance] within those sides of the universe seen within... of course, those fundamental essence have to be proscribed by the fact that humans grasp reality in terms of perceptual concretes, not pure sensatuals [something not known then by those who initiated the 'abstract arts', but validated by science since]...

[Brant Gaede]

Bob,

Of course they are real. A painting is made out of canvas, paint, etc. None of that is an abstraction. These are real things.

The "recreation" is the form man gives it, which does not happen without man.

When you describe a real person, you have to be selective. The same goes for fictional people. If literature is too hard to grasp in this sense, watch TV. The actors are quite real. The personalities they present (the form) are "recreated" from what real people are.

Michael

If I recreated a car I would be able to drive it away. Artistic images are shadows and imitations of the real things they presumably represent. Plato made this point in -The Republic-.

Michaelangelo's -David- is a graven image, not a person. It is a hunk of marble artfully trimmed. The real David probably stood 5'6'' and had a big nose. He was probably hairy too.

Considering Michaelangelo's tastes, the model was probably a beautiful young man. I believe the technique was for the model to pose for a small clay sculpture which the artist refered to while working in the marble. That would have been a lot safer and cheaper. He could have used several models, I suppose. There's a lot of extant physical beauty, man and woman, no need for a big nose or hairy.

--Brant