Kivy

Kivy would seem to be a leading philosopher of music, but I don't find him convincing in the least.  For example, he argues that emotions always have an intentional object to them. So fear must have a tiger or some other dangerous object, you have to be sad about something, etc.. So these "garden variety" emotions, as he calls them in his jargon, are not the ones aroused by music.

Yet I often feel sad, anxious, or satisfied, content, as a mood, without an intentional object in sight. It is clear, too, that music arouses moods, like whimsy, tension, triumph, relaxation, melancholy. I can refute his theory by accident just by laughing at a musical joke, or feeling my body tense up at a particular moment. If he doesn't want to call these moods "emotions" or "garden variety" emotions, that's his choice. He wants to just say that we recognize those things as properties of the music, without actually feeling them. But how can we recognize a feeling if we haven't felt it?

He goes on to admit that the object can be missing, but he treats that an unusual case, the exception that proves the rule.  But since it is precisely the absence of that object that leads him to his theory, that seems like cheating to me.  

The whole debate seems not very intelligent to me. He's arguing against someone else who seems to be saying that there is only "sad" and "happy" in music, but it's obvious that there are dozens more moods, like awkward, conclusive, anticipatory, incongruous, graceful, sweet, ethereal, plodding, distracted...  

George Steiner

Steiner has died.  The New York Times reports

In 2009, in “My Unwritten Books,” he described the seven works that might have seen the light of day but remained in his head. “It is the unwritten book which might have made the difference,” he wrote. “Which might have allowed one to fail better. Or perhaps not.”

Negativity

I was telling my friend I didn't want to write negative book reviews any more.  This is true. I will never write a mostly or primarily negative review of any book. If I find myself doing it, I will back off and have someone else do the review.

She asked why, and I gave a fumbling, stumbling answer, but thinking about it more, I decided I don't need to be a negative force about anything. I could worry that some bad book was not sufficiently chastised, but what good would that do?

It feels good to be negative, sometimes. When I got together with colleagues recently, to complain about others, it felt genuinely cathartic. If it weren't pleasurable, we wouldn't do it. But I have to think beyond that gratification.

Miniatures

Kyle Gann says that for him the difference between pop and classical is duration. Over a certain length, music  becomes classical, while a short Schubert Lied for him is a pop music.

This is an interesting perspective. I was thinking about the attention span for classical music. It is true that you typically need to pay attention to longer.  But there are Chopin pieces, parts of Bach's cello suites and violin partitas, and Schubert Lieder that are very short. Also, sections of Mompou's Música  callada.  Movements of classical string quartets can be brief as well. I tend to like short pieces, both as player and listener. Of course, there are long pieces too, like Mahler symphonies, but I see no reason to disdain the miniatures either. There are composers like Feldman who have very long and very short pieces.

Of course, my own poems are very short, and I like Basho...

Feb

February will not bring in new habits, or breaking old ones, but consolidating January's changes.  As we remember, in January, I joined the Zen center, stopped mindless surfing of web, turned my email off most of day, and introduced two minor personal habits nobody else wants to hear about.

That is literally all I have to do in February.  Maintain those habits.

Mozart- Piano Sonata in F major, K. 280- 2nd mov. Adagio

Mayhew's Fallacy Revisited

I'm learning an adagio from a Mozart sonata, and I was reminded of Mayhew's fallacy, or the idea that people who like inferior things simply don't know enough of the good stuff to even know that what they like is not so good. I forgot who termed it Mayhew's fallacy. I am glad to view it as a fallacy, because, while I do believe it, I don't expect anyone else to share my belief!

It seemed to me that Mozart (or Bach) when you see what it's really about in any detail, you realize it really is superb in an almost objective way. You can just see that Mozart uses in this adagio these weird harmonies in an unexpected but still seamless way. I had been playing a Beethoven Sonata that is easy, and not quite as subtle in what it does, and I saw after a little while that this Mozart piece had more than that Beethoven did (not one of Beethoven's greatest, though.). It is in a short binary form, with two themes; in the second part he takes the themes in another direction, then comes back and resolves it all in F minor.  

So that someone who thought Clementi or Telemann was the culmination of music, well, maybe they hadn't heard Mozart or Bach. I think Clementi is fine too. In other words, you listen to him and the music makes sense and is memorable. It is excellent in its own fashion, just not superb. There are just several other layers in Mozart so that you don't even have to consider them in the same category.

Kyle Gann in an old blog post said that there are various values in music. Craftmanship, depth, innovation, etc... and that subjectivity comes into play in deciding which of those values you value. But he argues that you can demonstrate more or less objectively which composers have those particular values in what degree. This seems convincing to me, though I can't analyze music well enough to make those judgments about those particular categories.  

When you just go immediately to the position that all value are simply relative and contingent, you lose out on the value of the Mozart epiphany. If you haven't had the Mozart epiphany (not necessarily with Mozart, but with any artist in any medium) then you almost don't get to take part in the conversation. It's easy to believe there is no such thing as greatness if you have never had the experience of greatness.