Craft and Aesthetic Value

Disclaimer: I have almost no prior background in aesthetics, so this is just an uninformed ramble cooked up when I was too tired to read but not sleepy enough to sleep.

Came across this old music theory blog on which Rudolf Serkin was paraphrased as saying: “When two people hear a piece of music, and one likes it and the other doesn’t, the person who likes it is always right.”

That has to be right to some extent — it is often the case that some people hear things in a piece of music which the others are incapable of hearing, things that may be legitimate contributors to the piece’s artistic worth. But it can’t be taken too far either — at some point we have to put down our foot and say that no, “Mary had a little lamb” is not an artistically worthwhile song even if some listeners like it very much (perhaps more than they do the Eroica Symphony).

Furthermore, there are pieces of music which one does not gain satisfaction from listening to (because, say, one is unable to empathise with the emotions conveyed by it, or one has an innate distaste for a certain characteristic of it even as one realises it’s not an aesthetically justified distaste), but which one can still recognise as ‘great’ pieces. That is, one does not need to like a piece of music in order to recognise it as good music. This is roughly my attitude towards the works of Debussy, Faure and Chopin: while I can see how their compositions are great, I get no emotional satisfaction from listening to them. Or, as I like to think of it, I recognise the craft involved in them and hence judge them to be great works even if in a sense I cannot partake of the experential satisfaction they apparently offer to other listeners.

So now it seems like this idea of craft, of a thing being well-made according to (sometimes) vaguely defined standards, could be the essence of aesthetic value. It is more than emotional satisfaction, but it correlates with emotional satisfaction because the really well-crafted ones can take you to heights of emotional intensity that you rarely experience elsewhere.

But anyone who has analysed even a few of the ‘seminal’ musical works in so-called ‘classical’ music (Western art music from 1600 onwards) knows that many of them are great because they violate standards, not because they are the epitome of a certain style. They are great because they managed to turn the original purpose of traditions back on themselves and subvert them for the production of something with such emotional power/beauty/[insert aesthetic characteristic]. But the gold standard isn’t the wanton violation of existing standards. One has to choose which to violate, and for what purpose. And there seems to be no general formula for that. Should this stop us from thinking of music as a craft?

More Herzog on Herzog

On “the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization”:

I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and the advertisements that surrounds us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

[...] Look at the depiction of Jesus in our iconography, unchanged since the vanilla ice-cream kitcsh of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. These imgaes alone are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund.

I suspect he exaggerates the impact of images because he himself is highly sensitive to images, much more so than normal people (as one might expect). Later on in Herzog on Herzog he explains that he can never attend live concerts because he will be so mesmerised by the movement of the bassist’s hands that he will not listen to the music. I’ll have to think more about the notion of “worn-out images”, but prima facie I don’t see how it means anything over and above having been watched by too many people. But how many is too many? Why can an image be watched by too many people? Why is it somehow bad for images to be watched by a large number of people? Why would having too few new images be bad for our imagination? Didn’t Herzog himself, as a child growing up in the ruins of WWII, claim to have had great fun playing games of imaginary scenarios in all the empty houses and such? Are the images in modern, diverse cities simply superifically different, and do not offer as much rein to the imagination as those empty houses?

From Herzog on Herzog

Notable quotes.

In response to “What are your views on film schools?”:

It has always seemed to me that almost everything you are forced to learn at school you forget in a couple of years. But the things you set out to learn yourself in order to quench a thirst, these are things you never forget.

[...]

Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had travelled alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom… academia is the very death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.

On the mysterious ‘something else’ (that is not happiness) he seems to be after:

One aspect of who I am that might be important is the communication defect I have had since a young child. I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony… Let me explain by telling a story. A few weeks ago I received a phone call at my apartment from a painter who lives just down the street from me. He tells me he wants to sell me his paintings, and because I live in the same neighbourhood, he says he wants to give me a good real on his work. He starts to argue with me, saying I can have this painting for only ten dollars or even less. I try to get him off the phone, saying, ‘Sir, I am sorry but I do not have paintings in my apartment. I have only maps on my walls. Sometimes photos, but I would never have a painted picture on my wall, no matter who made it.’ And he kept on and on until all of a sudden he starts to laugh. I think: I know this laughter. And he did not change his voice one bit when the painter announced that it was my friend, Harmony Korine.

[Then comes another anecdote about another prank played on him by a friend.] When [the second prankster] called as the personal assistant he did not change his voice, but I took them as two different people. That is how bad my communication defect is. I am just a complete fool. There are things in language that are common to almost everyone, but that are utterly lost on me.

And compared to other filmmakers — particularly the French, who are able to sit around their cafes waxing eloquent about their work — I am like a Bavarian bullfrog just squatting there, brooding. I have never been capable of discussing art with people. I just cannot cope with irony. The French love to play with their words and to master French is to be a master of irony.

I find the above passage intriguing, because much of the appeal of his movies to me lies in their heavy metaphors. It would seem that he constructs heavily metaphorical films without being entirely aware of what metaphors he has included. This fits in with his explanations of why he did this or that in his films — they often have a lot to do with how he ‘feels’ about the film rather than clear, explicit reasons.

In response to “How do you feel about ‘customizing’ your films to fit television schedules?”:

Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

On why his films are more popular overseas than in Germany:

Germany is just not a country of cinema-goers. It has always been a nation of television viewers. The Germans have never liked their poets, not while they are alive anyway.

The following story about picture perception is intriguing, if true:*

One of the doctors in [The Flying Doctors of East Africa] talks of showing a poster of a fly to the villagers. They would say, ‘We don’t have that problem, our flies aren’t that large’, a response that really fascinated me. We decided to take some of the posters… to a coffee plantation to experiment. One was of a man, one of a huge human eye, another a hut, another a bowl, and the fifth — which was put upside down — of some people and animals. We asked the people which poster was upside down and which was of an eye. Nearly half could not tell which was upside down, and two-thirds did not recognize the eye.

On the final midget-laughing-at-camel scene in Even Dwarfs Started Small, about which a rumour spread that Herzog had cut the the camel’s sinews to get it to kneel for so long:

…I learned something that was to come in useful years later when I made Fitzcarraldo: that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground. That silenced them. Of course, in reality the creature was a very docile and well-trained animal whose owner was standing about two feet outisde of the frame giving it orders. He was trying to confuse the dromedary by constantly giving it conflicting orders by hand: sit down, get up, sit down, get up. And in despair the animal defecated, something which looks absolutely wonderful on screen.

More excerpts to come as I work my way through this fascinating, if sometimes implausible, biography.

*Herzog has so many fantastic stories that I can’t help but be a little sceptical.

Kivy on Music Education

We often think that no student should emerge from college not knowing the great works of Western literature. But does the same apply to the pinnacles of Western music? Should students should be required to know Beethoven’s Eroica symphony the way they are required to know Hamlet? The problem is that while we can argue that knowing the great works of Western literature is essential to understanding humanity, society, and so on, it does not seem possible to make the same argument for musical works that have no programmatic content.

Peter Kivy attempts to connect music to an understanding of humanity by considering music’s social function. Music, he argues, has been a social ritual and a force of social cohesion in every culture we know of. To perform chamber music, or to attend a concert, is to take part in a social ritual. This social ritual increases social cohesion amongst its participants. Kivy takes this as a justification for music education: “Thus, there would seem to be, in this enormous and unique socialising power of music, ample justification for our requiring the educated person not only to be acquainted with the literary totems of his or her tribe, but with the musical ones as well.”¹

It’s not obvious to me why being a tool of social cohesion justifies music as something people should be acquainted with. Sporting competitions, too, are a tool of social cohesion: sports fans of all political stripes unite to support their national teams in international competitions. Yet we would hardly think that a knowledge of the most popular national sports is a necessary part of a great education. Furthermore, the social cohesion argument seems to justify being acquainted with any music that serves the function of social cohesion, and hence does not seem to justify being acquainted with what we consider to be the greatest musical works. Is the Eroica Symphony any greater a force for social cohesion than a simple, inane, but admittedly rousing tune like God Save the Queen? I doubt it.

Kivy had himself earlier recognised the need to distinguish music from other pursuits like sports, and he rightly related it to music’s place in the category of pursuits we call “arts and letters”.² That music falls in that category, and baseball doesn’t, must at least be part of the reason (if there is one) why music should be part of any good general education, while baseball needn’t be. And I think that is because we think of the pinnacles of the arts as different kinds of accomplishments from the victories of a sports team or sportsperson. The amazing feats of physical and mental endurance in sports differ from the creations of artists in that the latter seem to represent, somehow, the potentialities of the human mind. And if this is closer to the essential ingredient (if there’s one) that would make any field of human endeavour an obligatory part of a general education, then it would be more explicable why we should think that students should be acquainted with the musically “great” works rather than the works that can stimulate the most social cohesion, for the great works do seem to present the extremes of the mind’s potential. Kivy, I suspect, might be a little too hasty with his conclusion that “there must be something else about a work of art besides its merely being a great work of art that I think justifies its inclusion in a proper liberal arts education”.³ At least one of his justifications for the above statement is unconvincing. He points out that we tend to feel that “serious” rather than “comic” literary works should be included in the canon of general education, and argues that it’s because “serious” literary works teach us more about “questions of deep and abiding concern” like God, evil, freedom, justice, and so on.⁴ But imagine this: if the only literary works we had were comic works, would we not still feel that some of them should be included in a general education? Isn’t it just that whether a literary works deals with serious issues is a bonus factor that would make it a better candidate for a canonical work in a general education, but what is essential is something else? Here’s another question to pump our intuitions. Do we feel that the masterpieces of so-called abstract art has less of a right to be included in a general education than the masterpieces of representational art? I think not, which is why I think that if there is to be a reason for including art, it is not something reliant on its association with “serious” questions.

I’m also not comfortable with the idea that music that is suited for private consumption would not be justifable inclusions in music education. Now, I’m not entirely sure there is any solo music that really should be played only in private. (Were there any composers who intended some of their solo works not to be performed in public?) But I have an intuition there are pieces that are more suited to public sharing, and others that are more suited to private rumination on the part of the solo performer. We might think here of a distinction between more “intimate” music, like Bach’s cello suites, and something like the Eroica. Are we then going to say that in music education, more “private” music should be passed over in favour of more “public” music? My intuitions rebel strongly against this notion; they want all great music to be included, public or private. Thus we return to the problem of justifying being acquainted with not just any music, but with great music. There is no such problem about the standard justification of including Hamlet in general education, for one could make a plausible argument that the greatness of art works correlates with the lessons they provide about humanity.

Suppose my idea that an important factor is the display of intellectual achievement in great works of art, rather than their social functions or representational content, has a grain of truth in it. Why should we think that people should know about intellectual achievements? Perhaps because these achievements are as much a part of humanity as the supposed “knowledge” that creators of representational art and literature convey to us. And perhaps we focus on intellectual achievements rather than achievements of mental and physical endurance, because it is the mind that is peculiarly human — many animals can doubtless surpass the feats of mental and physical endurance displayed by our greatest mountaineers, but none of them have a chance at surpassing the intellectual feats of our greatest artists.

Another possibility, of course, is that us music-lovers are simply wrong in our intuitions about the value of music education.

——

1. Peter Kivy, “Music and the Liberal Education”, in The Fine Art of Repetition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 28.
2. Ibid. 13.
3. Ibid. 15.
4. Ibid. 18.

Paradigms Defined by Paradigms

One of the paradoxes of an artistic style is that it is defined by its paradigm examples, not by the inferior works which outnumber them. Thus we define the Classical style of music by paradigm works by its three greatest exponents, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Lesser figures like Hummel and Dittersdorf, and the crowd of still lesser figures and still lesser works, do not concern us, even though their “classical” works far outnumber those of the Big Three. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, articulates this paradox far better than I can:

What makes the history of music, or of any art, particularly troublesome is that what is most exceptional, not what is most usual, has often the greatest claim on our interest. Even within the work of one artist, it is not his usual procedure that characterizes his personal ‘style’, but his greatest and most individual success. This, however, seems to deny even the possibility of the history of art: there are only individual works, each self-sufficient, each setting its own standards.

Walking back in today’s unseasonable chill, it struck me that prior to Kuhn, science seemed to be defined this way as well — in terms of its greatest figures and greatest discoveries. There was no concept of what Kuhn calls “normal science“. Instead, science was seen as consisting mainly of the linear progress of important discoveries. No mopping up, no barking up the wrong trees. In short, science was thought to consist of purely the “revolutionary” part of science. Most people will probably intuitively think of this “great events” concept of science whenever science is mentioned. Even though I have been exposed to more of the process of normal science than the average person, and I have read Kuhn, mention the world “science” to me, and my first thoughts still concern seminal discoveries made by seminal people. Science as a grand, coherent structure with its revolutionary nodes outshining everything else.

I don’t quite know where I’m going with this parallel between the naive conception of scientific progress and stylistic paradigms* in art. Perhaps Kuhn’s recharacterization of science could be applied to an artistic style. Perhaps it is a mistake to view art/music history with an eye only on the paradigm works. Kuhn takes great pains to emphasise that despite the apparently disparaging label he had endowed it with, normal science is the meat of science. It is not in any way less imporant or “anomalous” compared to revolutionary science — quite the opposite, in fact. Could this be true for art/music history as well? Are there analogues of paradigm shifts in art? Clearly we can make analogies between scientific revolutionaries and artistic revolutionaries. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would count as artistic revolutionaries. But what of an analogue to “normal science”? For Kuhn, normal science is necessary for revolutions to occur, because revolutions occur only when the previously established paradigm conflicts with observations and theories produced in the process of normal science. The robust paradigm that normal science creates constitutes the firm fulcrum and long lever that revolutionary science uses to shift the earth, like Archimedes did. Can we argue in the same way that Dittersdorf-type figures provided a similar established basis against which the revolutionaries could rebel? Does an artistic style demand a horde of imitators, or could Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart on their own have defined the Classical style?

This is where my non-existent knowledge of music history fails me. By non-existent, I mean that although I know a great deal about the seminal figures, I know nothing about the others. This, however, is no different from science students who learn all their science from textbooks and standard lectures without dabbling in research themselves, or without being contaminated by their corrupt colleagues in the history/philosophy of science department. Only the seminal discoveries appear in the textbooks. They never learn anything of what normal science was like, until they get involved in normal science themselves. Similarly, even though musicologists may concentrate their analyses almost entirely on the great works, the lesser works might still have a philosophical and historical significance that has been overlooked.

*This is confusing. When I say stylistic paradigms in art, I of course do not mean paradigm in Kuhn’s “worldview” sense, but paradigm in the sense of an ideal model.