d&g on art

From What Is Philosophy:

"Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself, although actually it lasts no longer than its support and materials--stone, canvas, chemical color, and so on. [...] If art preserves it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became independent of its "model" from the start, but also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artist-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting." (164)

thinking about design

I've been occupied for the last few days with my website. I recently decided that perhaps, just maybe, if I embrace social media, I will grow to love it. To that end, I purchased clarelouiseharmon.com, my very own domain name. In preparing to post my design portfolio, I began to cobble together some thoughts on design. It often troubles me, to participate in a media that, essentially, produces waste. Posters are disposable. The streets are filled with cheap fliers, disintegrating in the gutter. Soon enough the following (or some form of it) will be posted on my website. For now, here it is. I began with three questions: What is it to design? What does design do? Why is design important to me?

What is it to design, to make objects? As a musician, I worked primarily with temporal forms that lack specific objects. Intangible and transient, the quintessence of the ineffable constituted my study and continues to inform my thought. Indeed, the musical media draw us near Deleuzian immanence: they offer an image of time, a sense of the conceivable yet inarticulable, the truth that is grasped only as it slips through our fingers. 

What does design do? Design produces a negative dialectic between the material and the imaginary; the actual and virtual. In this way, design produces endless Becomings. The tension between material and virtual--incapable of converging in perfect Hegelian unity--spurs the creation of perceptions, contexts, interpretations. Design creates an open system through its process of Rhizomatic proliferation.

 Why is design important to me? Existing as we do in this an-aesthetic epoch--plagued by hierarchicalization of every stripe--that which is beautiful is either dehumanized, commodified, or restricted. Presently, poignancy is inextricable from art objects past and present. Art was once connected to individual bodies, the hands that made it and the eyes that saw it. Art was once an experience, singular and special. Art was once a human behavior, available to all and fully embodied. Now, we must do the best we can. The mass-produced object is a reality. A century of mechanical reproduction has obliterated Benjamin’s aura. Class stratification has undergone an ostensibly irreversible process of calcification. As a designer, I am compelled to create objects that reference and honor the hands that made them. I am compelled to explore an expressive form that resists commodification by embracing its own reproducibility. I am compelled to provide an aesthetic experience to the passer-by, not just to the museum-goer.

more reading

I've been doing a lot of reading lately and no so much writing, so for the moment please enjoy the words of persons-far-more-eloquent-than-I.

Manning Marable/The Great Wells of Democracy; Cornel West/Race Matters; Susanne Langer/Feeling and Form; Ellen Dissanayake/Art & Intimacy; Ta-Nehisi Coates/The Beautiful Struggle; Elizabeth Grosz (ed)/Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures

Cornel West on nihilism:
"...For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle."¹

Elizabeth Grosz on Time:
"Time, or more precisely duration, is an extraordinarily complex term which functions simultaneously as singular, unified, and whole, as well as in specific fragments and multiplicitous proliferation. There is one and only one time, there there are also numerous times: a duration for each thing or movement, which melds with a global or collective time."²

"This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new"³

Bergson as quoted by Grosz
"Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation"⁴

Langer on music as the "Image of Time"
"The semblance of this vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its sonorous forms move in relation to each other--always and only to each other, for nothing else exists there. Virtual time is as separate from the sequence of actual happenings as virtual space from actual space...Inward tensions and outward changes, heartbeats and clocks, daylight and routines and weariness furnish various incoherent temporal data, which we coordinate for practical purposes by letting the clock predominate. But music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it--organize, fill, and shape it, all along. It creates an image of time measured by the motion of forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consist entirely of sound, so it is transitoriness itself. Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible.⁵

1. West, Cornel. 1993. Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. 15
2. Grosz, E. A. 1999. Becomings: explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 18
3. Ibid 28
4. Ibid 25
5. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth. 1953. Feeling and form; a theory of art. New York: Scribner. 109-110

octavio paz on music

"The paradox of music, a temporal art like poetry, lies in the fact that music's characteristic manner of taking place is recurrence. The kinship between music and poetry is based on their both being temporal arts, arts of succession: time. In each of the two recurrence, the phrase that returns and is repeated, constitutes an essential element; the motifs intertwine and disentwine so as to interwtine once again; they are a path that ceaselessly returns to its point of departure only to depart once more and return again. The difference between the two lies in the code: the musical scale and the word. Poetry is made up of rhythmic phrases (verses) that are not only units of sound but words, clusters of meanings. The code of music--the scale--is abstract: units of sound empty of meaning. Finally, music is architecture made of time. But invisible and impalpable architecture: crystallisation of the instant in forms that we do not see or touch and that, being pure time, elapse."

Paz, Octavio. Essays on Mexican Art. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. (6-7)

agnes martin = hero

Agnes Martin, Milk River, 1963. Oil on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund 64.10

When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is an awareness of perfection.

blogging adorno: popular music and the "contrived postures of femininity"

Okay, okay. Time to confess: I have never read Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Once upon a time I tried to read Aesthetic Theory, and I am sorry to admit that my head almost exploded. Recently, a friend of mine began his own serious engagement with Adorno; after a few conversations about these studies, I decided it was foolish for me to sit around twiddling my thumbs with Dostoevsky my only literary/philosophical diversion. Eccolo, "baby's first" Adorno. And since every signature looks, more or less, like this:

I hope that you will indulge me as I post some thoughts daily as I make my way. First off, this is an ongoing project. As I read, I find myself overjoyed by the words on the page. Why it has taken me so long to engage with this text, I will never know; frankly, I'm a little irritated with myself that I didn't crack the damn thing open the day I received it in the mail. In any event, here we are, months later.

Prior to my engagement with Teddy, I took a few moments to read Susan Brownmiller's "The Contrived Postures of Femininity." You know I can't get enough of the disciplined, docile feminine body--Brownmiller's essay seemed to be an appropriate summer epilogue to Foucault, Butler, McClary and the rest. Upon reading "The Contrived Posture...", I had a largely predictable reaction: a lovely combination of anger, sadness, and an undeniable aporia (what can be done? how did we get here?). We should all read this in its entirety, however, in conjunction with my recent reading of IttSoM, I couldn't help but be reminded of the following passage and the notion of an ideal femininity (one that fosters and subsequently manipulates desire) based upon a tenuous balance between that which is crass and that which is cultured. Brownmiller writes:

Slowly, it dawned on me that much of feminine movement, the inhibited gestures, the locked knees, the nervous adjustments of the skirt, was a defensive maneuver against an immodest, vulgar display that feminine clothing flirted with in deliberate provocation. My feminine responsibility was to keep both aspects, the provocative and the chaste, in careful balance, even if it meant avoiding the beautifully designed open stairway in a Fifth Avenue bookshop. [1]

Likewise, about popular music, Teddy pens the following:

On the one hand [popular music] must catch the listener's attention, must differ from other popular songs if it is to sell, to reach the listener at all. On the other hand it must not go beyond what audiences are used to, lest it repel them. It must remain unobtrusive, must not transcend that musical language which seems natural to the average listener envisaged by the producers...

Going on, he writes:

The difficulty facing the producer of pop music is that he mus void the contradiction. He must write something impressive enough to be remembered and at the same time well-known enough to be banal. [2]

So why discuss these passages together? Their commonalities exist in their oblique references to a rhetoric of desire and more importantly (and indeed, more distressingly) cultural technologies of coercion. I have quite a bit to say about Adorno, structure/ornament and femininity, certainly. For now, why don't we just use these two passages as preliminary evidence for such a connection. Let's look at what we have here:

Adorno equates the hit song with its ability to traverse that tenuous passage between submission and dominance, the passive and dynamic, that which is familiar and that which is alien. Likewise, Brownmiller discusses that same delicate balance struck by feminine postures and manners. At once submissive and suggestive, the ideally desirable woman must expertly navigate the murky waters of culturally constructed conceptions of the feminine.

This banal observation aside, broader implications surround Adorno's rhetoric. Again and again Teddy returns to the coercive force of music, that it manipulates its "victims" through a manipulation of desire. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like Brownmiller and countless accounts of the femme fatale. So I leave you with the following question: do Adorno's aesthetics valorize structure, thus devaluing ornament? And, if indeed we accept this premise (and I think we must), is there something intrinsically masculine about Adorno's philosophy of music?

Okay, well, that was a little more sex and gender-y than I originally intended. Stay tuned for tomorrow: sonic landscapes and the distancing, stratification and reification of social classes.YEAH! Adorno is the coolest.

[1] Ashton-Jones, Evelyn, and Gary A. Olson. 1991. The Gender reader. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 543
[2] Adorno, Theodor W. 1989. Introduction to the sociology of music. New York: Continuum. 31

when nothing is beautiful anymore (except edith wharton)

There exists an apocryphal tale: the day Charles Ives stopped composing was the day he announced, "nothing sounds good anymore."

Although dubious in its origins and accuracy, this anecdote has remained with me since first I heard it. The disparity and hopelessness that, ostensibly, motivates such a statement is staggering. Ives's supposed utterance is indeed spurious, however the idea that one can become so saturated with sameness that the dichotomy of good and bad no longer exists articulates so perfectly one facet of the post-modern aesthetic. Or could it be that Ives, so inundated by post-war angst and early twentieth century sonic detritus, could no longer conceive a cogent expression? Who is to say, really. What is more thought provoking is 1) the lack of contrast that results from the saturation of imagery (this part of Greenberg's kitsch, by the way) and 2) the effect that an increase--and yes, an inundation--of stimuli has on the artistic psyche. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but in the wake of re-reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and you know, all that time I spent ruminating on Baudrillard) I couldn't help but think of Ives as a victim of twentieth century saturation/stimulation/commodity fetishization/etc.

This time around, Benjamin really got to me. Like most of us, I've had the "we're going to hell" conversation many times: nothing is beautiful, presented with every possibility, we are left in a turbid ether disengaged, disembodied, and cognitively disemboweled. You know, that conversation. Revisiting Benjamin, what seemed a knee-jerk fear-inspired attitude now appeared prophetic; an apparition marked by ineffable veracity.  We are disembodied by technology, daily--what was once reserved for the film star has proliferated into the banal and mundane. Divorced from carnal experience, we exist in virtual multiplicity. Benjamin identified and predicted this crisis in the 30s, and here we are: nothing sounds good anymore.

On a more positive note, I picked up a copy of The Age of Innocence yesterday (a purchase inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates) and, I would be lying if the word-smithing above was not inspired by Wharton's command of her craft. Behold:


Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or)...


And my favorite part:


seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.


Okay, one more:


The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror and almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the lat Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.


That, my friends, is virtuosity. "...traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation." Gen-ius. Last one, I promise:


She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.


I'm going to go read now. Sigh.

program notes in fifteen minutes or less

Notes for Hummel Viola Sonata op.5 no. 3
Hummel’s viola sonata can be understood in the context of a fin-de-siecle predilection for that which is elegant, operatic, and/or grotesque. Ostensibly paradoxical, these categories provide a conceptual framework within which we can understand proto-romantic/post-enlightenment art. A quintessential example of the epoch, Hummel’s viola sonata—in its three movements—exemplifies the aforesaid aesthetic triumvirate. Where the opening Allegro tips its musico-proverbial hat to the gallant style of years past, the Adagio Cantabile is understood as a diva’s lament; the Rondo a “low” dance on the edge of good taste.

jottings, chiefly on visual + musical egalitarianism*

So I'm working on a short little flurry of a paper about what I'm calling "visual egalitarianism" in Jackson Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues. Thinking critically about the lack of a focal point or any sort of representation** in their work brings me back to this idea of equality and absolutism expressed in artistic forms. Considering the former, a few examples come to mind: Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, Kandinsky, the AbEx'ists, Boulez, and Cage. With regards to the latter, I'm thinking of the First Viennese School, and the general "academic" style of Western Europe (anyone from Michelangelo to Titian to David, even Gerome).

Indeed, before we get to Kandinsky and the Second Viennese School [of Rock] and their descendants (Boulez/Pollock et al), we have to first look at their predecessors: the First Viennese School [of Rock]. The musical forms and aesthetic of the eighteenth century really offer a fantastic aural analogue to the socio-political milieu of the era. I'm specifically thinking about the disparity between the aristocracy/ruling class and everyone else. Essentially, musical hierarchies in the form of tonality (ie the tonic, dominant, and leading tone are the "important" scale degrees. An oversimplification, but you get the idea) mirror social structures (class). I'd really like to know a whole lot more about the French Revolution, but for now I'll just say that it is completely compelling the way that strict musical forms and harmonic structure begin to erode around the beginning of the nineteenth century, following various political upheavals (the French Revolution being just one example). Beethoven's Eroica is actually a great example of this in that the sonata form of the first movement is, well, jumbled. By reorganizing a then-familiar form, the composer challenges our expectations, thus subtly implying social change. Maybe. This is all pretty speculative.

So with this in mind, Schoenberg's Pan-Tonality (that is what he said) takes on a new social meaning. When he literally refers to it as an emancipation--how can we not read a kind of "liberation narrative" into the work? Considering also what we know about fin-de-siecle Vienna, Schoenberg's musical freedom-fight gains more complexity. At once, the composer is a member of the political minority (Christian socialist Lueger is in power) while also participating in a (sometimes violent) patriarchy. That is not to say that he was a misogynist (as far as I know, he wasn't), only to note the often complex relationship of minority to majority(ies). In a very real sense, the emancipation represents not only a break from the musical past, but also implies a kind of Utopian ideal--not surprising given Schoenberg's own biography and what I can imagine would be a hell of a time living in Vienna around 1900.

With regards to the visual arts, I'd like to discuss Kandinsky and the AbEx'ists. Taking the example of Kandinsky, we can notice a break down of visual hierarchy, something like Composition IV (1911) is tottering on the brink of non-representational art.

Figure non-representational: Kandinsky's Composition IV

Although that is a sort of "well, duh" analysis, the aforesaid connection between abstraction and equality is what makes this sort of thing compelling. Recently, I was speaking with one of my mum's friends (a visual artist) about Schoenberg and this idea of pantonality as a representation of equality; being an awfully sharp tac, she brought up Kandinsky's work--for her, the musical analogue in that when art is non-representational, all shapes, colors and lines are equal. This conversation still fresh in my mind, I began to mull over the notion of representation as being inherently unequal with regards to the AbEx'ists.

These guys were, in my mind, both ideological and stylistic descendants of Kandinsky. Similarities abound, the most obvious being the non-representational style and a sort of spiritual relationship between artist, canvas, and material (the material being much more important for the AbEx'ists). However, more intriguing is the American public's reaction to Pollock and his pals. Upheld as arbiters of a quintessential American art, their works and personae were used as a cultural weapon in the cold war: they were celebrated as visual symbols of democracy. Certainly, you can discuss the movement of the avant-garde from Paris to New York; the American adoration of the "new," but from my perspective the notion of visual egalitarianism is the most "American" aspect of their work.

Figure visual egalitarianism: Pollock's Autumn Rhythm

*that is a little Aristotle jokey-joke(!) Yay Poetics!
**I'm thinking here about formal hierarchy: there is an inherent value judgment in notions of foreground versus background. Indeed, one might argue that a line that implicates contour is more important (valuable) than one that participates in say, a cross hatch. The main idea being that in representational art, one line can have more meaning than another.

a successful conclusion + an exciting future

I've said before that this season was "the best ever" and in its already fading wake, I can say that indeed it was. The performances were polished and captivating, and our audience base has grown considerably. Seeing children and young families at our last concert, I realized that slowly but surely, we are beginning to achieve the goals set out in our mission statement. And, we received a standing ovation on Saturday! How cool is that?!

So. On to season four: Poetics(!). The subtitle has several layers of meaning, one of which is a reference to Aristotle's Poetics. I've been looking quite a bit at the text recently and the way diverse artistic movements interact with it over time. Of course it is referenced in the Enlightenment, but I was reading Greenberg's mid 20th century essay, Art and Kitsch, today and there was a reference to imitation "in the Aristotelian sense." Aristotle, in response to Plato, is primarily concerned with the problem of mimesis in art. Is imitation good? Is it bad? How does it operate within an artwork, and what does that mean for the artist? In addition to these basic questions, there are innumerable issues that arise from the discussion. I find myself drawn to the problematic relationship of Poetics with a contemporary society that no longer reads the classics: on the whole, the citizens of the world are unaware of the text, yet its prevalence in Western culture until this moment subtly shapes our own concept of what is "good" and "bad" in the arts. Mimesis is easy; abstraction is not. My current contention is that this attitude has been a part of our historical conditioning and thus results in a phenomenon I like to think of as "pre-conditioned taste." I have a lot more books to read and ideas to explore over the next year (obviously), but I'd like this discussion to be a part of CMM4. From the start, CMM has championed music that is perhaps more challenging to the ear than Mozart, Bach, et al. and I think the above discussion is REALLY helpful for looking at this stuff: if we are cognizant of our historical conditioning (ie preconditioned taste), we can understand it and eventually move beyond it. That is to say, things like Mark Rothko won't seem so "meaningless" (the old, "my kid could do that!" argument); Schoenberg's imitation will gain clarity.

The above is just one facet of next season, the more obvious one is music and text. We're talkin' song cycles people. I'm completely nuts for the art song, and if we're going to discuss mimesis, there is not a better place to start than so-called "word painting." We're looking at Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens (!!!!!), any number of cycles/songs by Schubert, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel...the list goes on. It would fulfill a dream of mine to program and perform Pierrot Lunaire, but we'll see.

Lastly, I'll mention that we're hoping to program some Helmut Lachenmann. From what I've listened to, his music is not at all mimetic, in that it is like nothing I have ever heard before. The Kinderspiel, for example, explore sonic possibilities of the piano in the same way that Pollock explores the possibilities of raw materials (house paint, for example). I could certainly see where Lachenmann's music would be threatening to the American musical avant-garde (such as it is); I'm recalling something James Dillon (an advocate of Lachenmann, and another excellent composer) once said to me about Lachenmann's reception in the US. If I am remembering correctly, Dillon implied that Lachenmann was perceived by the US as a "de-composer" in that by redefining the means by which classical instruments were to be used, he was writing "anti-music." The pejorative connotation of these statements ought not to be ignored; it is a real shame, actually, as I think the music is quite good. Below is a video of Kinderspiel as played by pianist Seda Roeder. When you listen, try to notice all the sounds--in these pieces the residual is just as important (if not more so) as the initial sound. Though I must say, as wonderful as YouTube is for this sort of thing, to fully appreciate these pieces, you really have to hear them live (enter CMM4....).

a laugh at the expense of e.t.a hoffmann

I've got some good stuff in the works: ideas about the artist and artwork, the rise of the virtuoso, listening practices...the list goes on. And of course, a recap of the largely successful Concerto Soloists (we received a standing ovation from our 60+ audience members!).

Until then (and to get us all primed for the art-as-autonomous-object discussion), I give you a little humor, a review I wrote of Haydn's Creation as a parody of E.T.A. Hoffmann:

Upon hearing Mr. Haydn’s Creation, it is my contention that the “Representation of Chaos” emblemizes our epoch. No longer do the shackles of Classical thought bind us—indeed we have engaged in an emerging era of empiricism and experimentation. Aristotle’s grip has weakened; Scholasticism’s shadow has waned. Where our aesthetic was once based upon the logic of the ancients, their suppositions steeped in Ancient dogma, the slow transition to modernity has arrived.

While some of my less progressive colleagues (ensconced in their own propensity for cultural torpidity) might construct diatribes rife with misunderstanding and incredulity—citing the work as a grotesque parody of the sublime wherein superfluous decadence serves to create a blasphemous farce—I wish to advocate the opposite. If I may apply a yet unknown metaphor: in the war of modern and ancient, progressive and stagnant, Mr. Haydn is at the front of the army (my philosophe colleagues would, in their native tongue, say the “avant garde”), gallantly fighting for the advancement of art. Indeed, the work differs aesthetically from the prevailing style. Like Aristotle’s logic, the music of our time is balanced: syllogistic premises support their inevitable conclusions, inexorable from substance, universal classifications provide clarity. Where this popular style relies on idealized form, Haydn’s work surpasses the ideal, ascending to portray the actual. In his “Chaos,” Mr. Haydn represents nature in all its terrible sublimity: too well counterfeited with sacred text and music in gross contrast, it has created a scandal. Rather than experiencing the ideal of nature (perfect and inevitable), Mr. Haydn has recreated its extremes: the subtle, the bizarre, the transcendent thus instigating in the listener sensations ecstatic, horrific, terrific.

Haydn’s “Chaos” begins in grandeur, its initial opulence subsiding to reveal a hazy pool of harmonies both transcendent and monstrous. From this bizarre jumble, sensibility emerges: couth and pleasing harmonies, set ablaze by timpani interjections. It is an aural landscape, akin not to Fragonard or Poussin, but rather an unnamed, unknown visionary: offering impressions paradoxically fleeting and sustained, their aural audacity imprinted on the minds of many. The music meanders woefully through uncertain waters, the mind envisages the ether: seemingly bleak, empty. However within this unfettered vacancy lie innumerable possibilities ripe for development and our subsequent pleasure. In this atmospheric environment rising arpeggios titillate, anticipating the approaching sonic splendor, the expectation heightened by an unyielding pulse. Receding into ethereal gray the music subsides; the senses are saturated by cosmic nothingness. From the vacuum, a voice interrupts to shatter this once serene oblivion: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The pulsating motive introduced in the opening sinfonia becomes an instrument not of drama (as in the previous movement) but rather, representative of time itself. With the omnipresence of this metronomic impulse, the choir begins: “and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” With this text, Mr. Haydn incites expectation, marrying this text with hushed music in minor key. Extreme text painting follows—the oblivion is vivified by a transition awesome and indeed luminous: “And God said, let there be light; And there was light.”

The too oft cloying effervescence so characteristic of the present style has been tamed by contemporary ennui. Haydn’s “Chaos” is our own: where once aesthetic conventions valued idealized nature, Haydn duplicates it with virtuosic veracity: it is an expert counterfeit conceived with exacting similitude. The orchestra quivers and roars, its quavers symbolic of our own cultural melancholy: the current quest to reconcile artistic, aesthetic, philosophical and political uncertainty. At moment of illumination, the music mimics our era: with the announcement of “light” a strict style reemerges, recalling our own age: enlightened by reason while clinging still to logic.

With the completion of the eighteenth century, we have entered a new age: the age of experience, of practice, of knowing, of empiricism. Our fathers and their disciples are consumed with pursuits of the mind alone. Basing their knowledge of the world on mere theory, they are imprisoned by both logic and doctrine; like Ripa’s representation[1], they too are fools, rendered inept by their scholarly isolation. And thus our present aesthetic predicament: periodicity, balance, idealization, formal rigidity. Lacking authenticity, it is bereft of substance thus a mere verisimilitude: it possesses the compass, but performs an incongruous task.[2] And here, I must agree with Mr. Locke, in all his empirical eminence: without experiential understanding, theoretical pursuits are hollow. Brandishing merely the baton and violin, a musical bastion—that of the oratorio ensemble—emboldens Mr. Haydn’s Creation: though tempered by its intrinsic transience, the composition becomes a literal force of nature through which the terrible sublime is known experientially. In creating this aforementioned “counterfeit” Mr. Haydn has replicated and thus known nature herself, replete with resplendence both subtle and crass.

---

[1] Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia link to 1709 English printing: http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/Ripa/Images/ripatoc.htm. Originally produced at the close of the 16^th century, Ripa’s Iconologia was an anthology of emblems. The allegorical figures—organized with meticulous exactitude—have been noted as “the key of seventeenth and eighteenth century allegory.” (Emile Male, as quoted by Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts p. 163) were widely used in visual art and were well known to the cultural elite. The collection is a clear product of its age—the urge for both taxonomy and collection central to its being. Theory, depicted as a beautiful woman misusing a compass (figure 295), exemplifies the Renaissance attitude toward scholastic methodology: without practice, theory remains hopelessly flawed.

[2] Ripa, in his description of Theory “A young woman looking upward: her hands clasp’d together; a pair of Compasses over her Head; nobly clad in Purple; seeming to descend the Stairs. The colour of her Garment shews that the Sky terminates our Sight; her Face, that the Intellect is taken up with celestial Things; the Stairs, that Things intelligible have Order, proceeding by Degrees from Things near to Things a-far off. The Compasses are the most proper instrument of Measuring, which perpetuate the Name of an Author.” It is important to note not only Theory’s misuse of the compass, but also her status as “nobly clad in Purple” indicating her position as a member of the wealthy elite and thus aligning the upper-class education (that is to say, the Classical education) with foolishness.

a fool for foucault

I just started Discipline & Punish. Heaven help me.

When I say "just" I truly mean it--I've only read the first few pages (what I could get through during last week's La Valse; the orchestra sounded so good, it was hard to concentrate on my reading...)--but the accounts of punishment in terms of eighteenth century spectacle and nineteenth century compartmentalization made me think about certain aesthetic concerns of the former.

I'm thinking specifically about the body--by including an eighteenth century account of torture (written in, by the way, classically matter-of-fact style), Foucault illustrates the era's interest in man as a physical being (as opposed to a spiritual one as in the Medieval era, or mental as in the nineteenth century). Because much of my recent reading and thoughts have revolved around the epistemological shifts occurring between the conversion of Constantine and the Scientific Revolution, I cannot help but view torture through this particular lens. What is truly fascinating is the way the practice of torture interacts and reflects upon then-contemporary art, philosophy and science.

Lately I have been thinking about the eighteenth century as a sort of confluence of empiricism, scholasticism, classical thought (specifically Aristotle's Poetics, among others...), and the last gasps of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution's luminous afterglow. You end up with social change and Enlightenment philosophy, but we already knew that. To me, the changes in how individuals viewed themselves is what is truly captivating. Because of the aforementioned cultural milieu, philosophes and the so-called "great unwashed" alike experience a re-nascence (if you'll pardon the pun): a new egalitarianism is born out of the coalescence and subsequent synthesis of medieval and early modern ideals. Subtle thought it may be, these things work together to empower physical man, always returning to the sensational experience of living.

So what then, do you get in art and culture? Low dance forms in "high" art (the gigue, for example), the prevalence of the pastoral (as we will see in Tyler Wottrich's performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 17), things like (the other) Fragonard, Madame Tussaud, La Specola, David's rendering, and of course, revolution.

I bring all of this up because I think it is so important to understand the cultural turmoil from which the first Viennese school (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven) emerged. Although on the surface their music may seem "pleasing" (a description favored by the eighteenth century critic), it is rife with the tension of duality: empirical thought versus scholasticism, feeling versus rationality, the grotesque versus the ideal. The next time you listen to Figaro, just remember that a few blocks from the opera house, there was a good chance of being able to witness torture in all its unfettered, disquieting brutality.

some thoughts on mahler

Again and again, I return to Mahler. Ostensibly enigmatic, his music often seems to me to be a proto-postmodern pastiche; an attempt to express fin-de-siecle anxieties and nineteenth century nostalgia. A certain fascination with the past permeates and I can't help but think of the rampant historicism in Vienna at that time (Gottfried Semper, ahem ahem). What is really intriguing (as if rampant historicism isn't stimulating enough) is the way this historicism interacts with a yearning for progress--a hallmark of the early twentieth century. One need only to look at the work of say, Gerome and Nolde or the aforementioned Semper and his art historical counterpoint, Alois Riegl. In addition to these broad dichotomies, there is a certain duality that plays out in each individual's work. But I digress (and could go on...and on, but I'll spare you). What is great about Mahler, is that in his music this dualism is expressed so damn eloquently (and effectively, I might add). He uses all these archaic dance forms, but sets them in a modern idiom, fragments them, orchestrates them. In this way, his music (like the visual analogues Kirchner or Ensor) can be downright creepy.

We're playing his piano quartet this season. It is just a movement, a fragment from 1876 (that means Ringstrasse-era Vienna, by the way); apparently it was recently used in a Scorsese film and to my ears it sounds like Brahms. But, not just Brahms--more like post-German Requiem Brahms, anxiety-laden tragic Brahms. Take a listen for yourself:

For me, the pulsating quarter-triplets in the piano are most reminiscent of Brahms--the comparison being something like the cello part in the third movement of the C minor string quartet (but I feel like he uses this gesture quite a bit). You must agree that the music is imbued with ennui: the musical sighs, the low register octaves in the piano, and the aforementioned pulsations (that are to me, symbolic of the passage of time and the fear that often accompanies it). Even at seventeen, young Mahler was acutely aware of burgeoning change. And, like the rest of nineteenth century Europe, he was scared.

With all this in mind, I'll tell you that I am really looking forward to learning and performing this piece. In case you couldn't tell, I have a pretty strong affinity for fin-de-siecle Vienna.