Hi Ray,
Once again, I'm overwelmed with the length and richness of your reply, but
I can't do it justice (if at all) right now because, like you, I have a
business to run and I need to spend some time doing other things. (Needless
to say, discussion of this sort is far more interesting than work! At
least, to me anyway.)
But I'll keep my interim reply short.
Previously I called in aid Stephen Spengler when he wrote "[Culture] . . .
suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down .
. ." ("Decline of the West").
I'm now going to call in aid one of the most radical historians of our
time, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, of Oxford University, in his recent book,
"Civilizations". In this he says that civilizations are not linear
developments of mankind, in which the torch of culture is handed on, as it
were, from one civilization to another with refinements added in a sort of
consecutive way, but that civilizations have most frequently arisen
spontaneously -- and can die as quickly, too. Civilizations, he says, are
largely independent from one another and are best defined in terms of their
economic relationships with the environment rather than with anything that
has gone before. True, artefacts may well be handed on from one culture to
another, but their meaning and use is likely to become quite different.
I don't know whether Fernández-Armesto mentions in his book the printing
press and the cannon as good example of artefacts (as were supposedly
passed between China and Europe in the late Middle Ages) that mutated
significantly because I'm only halfway into his book, but those two seminal
inventions spring to mind straightaway. They were used so differently in
the two civilzations as to constitute almost entirely different products.
As you've mentioned Gutenberg's printing press yourself, let me confine
myself to this. The notion that "the Chinese are able to print" may well
have been around in Gutenberg's day and perhaps exercised a few minds in a
vague way, but the Chinese technology in which the former descends onto the
recipient material (ceramics or banknote paper, for example) could never
have worked in the case of moveable type because it would have fallen to
pieces after one or two impressions. Gutenberg's brilliance lay in
inverting the process so that the recipient descended onto the otherwise
fragile former. (And it is said that the spark for this came from the wine
press.)
Also, because Gutenberg's printing press was used for publishing
information rather than decorating dinner plates, then it must be
considered to be an entirely different grade of innovation from the humdrum
Chinese sort. At bottom, the European culture and civilisation was very
different from the Chinese.
Artefacts don't necessarily move easily from one culture to another even if
the superficial appearance is similar. Another example which
Fernández-Armesto doesn't mention (it's not in the index anyway) is the PC.
Despite its popularity in the West over the last decade, it has simply not
taken off in the same way in Japan! Furthermore, the particular way that
the mobile phone has been used in Japan is totally different from the way
it is usually used in Europe and America (so far, anyway).
In a similar way, I would still suggest that the Middle Age culture which
finally "congealed" (to use Spengler's phrase) at around the turn of the
19th century century, and the dawn of the Industrial Age might be
considered to be a dramatic phase change between altogether different types
of civilizations, even though they both involved the same countries and
peoples.
I'm not so sure that Fernández-Armesto proves his case completely to my
satisfaction, but at least he is the first historian to show that large
(and I emphasise "large") numbers of civilisations have existed in the past
50-70,000 years which have hitherto been completely ignored by historians
because they didn't conform to our present-day prejudiced and narrow views
of what "civilization" is. (Such as being city-based, and so on and so on.)
Almost every year, evidence of civilizations that lived for centuries and
involved large numbers of people over large tracts of land is now being
discovered.
Despite my misgivings, his insights may well illuminate what might have
happened to the world of the arts as between the Middle (agrarian) Ages and
the Industrial world of today. Perhaps we can't compare them at all in a
meaningful way. In trying to do so (as you and I have been doing) we might
be straining at a gnat.
But I must read your latest essay further. Don't give up on those who
haven't replied to it. We both may be boring old farts to some FWers, but
I'm sure that one or two read our offerings.
Best wishes,
Keith H
At 03:26 16/04/01 -0400, you wrote:
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "Magic Circ Op Rep Ens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 2:41 PM
>Subject: Re: Another way
>
>
>> Hi Ray,
>>
>> Gosh! How can I possibly reply in any sort of adequate way to your
>message
>> -- surely one of the most eloquent offerings that FW has ever seen?
>
>Actually FW didn't see it. The machine censored it. I get double and
>sometimes triple copies of posts but most of my posts and answers don't get
>posted on FW.
>
>> I could attempt to answer your points one by one but I won't do so. Or
>> should I say am unable to do so? This, despite the fact that both of us
>are
>> probably misunderstanding the views of the other on some matters (one
>being
>> that you think I "venerate" the rich!).
>
>Yep, the process of "culture" and "profession" is tough. It's different
>over here and I speak from having created work in every area of the
>performing arts for forty years. We are in a 70 year arts economic
>depression. I certainly don't assume that it is the same in the UK.
>
>> I suspect that our psychologies are very different. If we were composers
>> then you would be Richard Strauss who packed as many instruments as
>> possible into his compositions to enhance the final product, while I would
>> be Delius who deleted as many instruments as possible to the same end.
>
>You're saying I'm your German cousin? You should try living in a dense
>environment for a while. I live with 6,000 books in two rooms with art,
>studio, office, etc. If I am linear the environment yells at me.
>
>> Your psychology causes you to weave a lot of strands together in your
>> thinking -- of aesthetics, spirituality, tradition, economics, the
>Cherokee
>> and many more -- into a vast and rich tapestry . I like to try to keep
>> things simple and, as far as possible, separate, despite the danger of
>> apparent aridity.
>
>Multi-cultural life in a many-cultured society. I love it. Art is first
>about life and then the truth of that life. There is nothing true about
>linearity anymore than a scientific "ideal steady state" exists in nature.
>That is why I love all of the arts and artistic expression. Each sincere
>and serious work shows me more and gives me insight into the meaning and
>intent of the human condition and my own inner life.
>
>> Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that I like to discover the
>> simple "formulae" from which spring the chaos and complexity of human
>> behaviour and, indeed, those of the universe as a whole. I don't claim
>that
>> my approach is more valid than yours but as my brain becomes more senile
>as
>> I grow older and unable to perform some of the limited gymnastics of my
>> youth, I now prefer to look deeper rather than wider.
>
>There is no simple formula. That's why chaos theory was invented. But
>complexity exists in the mind of the individual, the world is just the
>world. In my work, focus must always be balanced with the whole. I
>don't believe that the kind of simplified "ideal state" scientific thinking
>is relevant to the arts at all. Arts expand, science limits. But
>science in its theoretical phase is the same as the arts. It is done "for
>its own sake" just as theoretical art exploration is. Both once in the
>commercial world, are simplified for the purpose of productivity. In
>science and economics that is good while in the arts it is considered
>handicrafts. We Cherokees have a rather withering view of such things.
>We call it "Boy Scout" thinking. Such thinking does not even admit the
>existence of alternate sexuality in nature even though it exists as the Boy
>Scouts here proved in their court case against a homosexual Eagle Scout
>leader.
>
>As for final years, aren't you being a bit over-simplistic? I chose to
>put my savings, funds, inheritance etc. into my work rather than build a
>retirement so if I don't stay current, the money stops, my wife and I don't
>eat and the daughter doesn't go to college. Current economics has raised
>the price on that commodity so high that it is a distinct possibility
>anyway. And college as you point out has become less and less relevant,
>but it is a connection gateway and the gatekeepers for vocations still live
>there. There are those who guarantee their future with securities and
>mutual funds and there are those like myself who put all of our money back
>into the Art. I had one small fund which recently lost 1/4 of its 1999
>value. I wonder about those security folks. How they are doing? But I
>have no choice but to continue until I stop. Money is much too important
>to waste gambling for me. But one man's work is another man's gamble.
>
>> So, how to reduce our disputation (if that is what it is -- we have much
>in
>> common) to manageable proportions? The key is, I think, that we locked
>into
>> bodies and brains of certain sizes, and our abilities are therefore
>> restricted. There are boundaries to our personal skills. I would humbly
>> suggest that what you are concerned with is the perfection of what the
>> individual human is capable of intuiting and/or creating and/or
>performing.
>
>That is accurate except you didn't include "for the current generation and
>people." Art conserves and reveals the past, it expresses and gives
>spiritual meaning to the present and its most complicated expressions give
>insight into our souls for our descendants. It is about inner motivation
>and inner life as opposed to outer motivation and shallow feelings. It
>disputes the humdrum economic assertion that says you must "work, work, work
>and then you die, and that's all!" And it does it, unlike philosophy or
>psychology, through actual controlled life experience of a process that has
>both complexity and pleasure intertwined within it.
>
>> I've mentioned this point previously but perhaps you have overlooked it. I
>> would suggest that the arts have essentially been involved with
>individuals
>> and what they can produce (whether at the behest of patrons or
>> otherwise,whether paid or doing it "for love"). If this is so, then there
>> has to be a limit to what can be achieved.
>
>Is that not like saying that a human can never go into space because their
>brain isn't capable of imagining how to get there?
>
>And I say that the arts reached
>> their zenith by about 1880-1920 when, by then, technological processes
>> (e.g. the camera, the recording, the electric drill, standardised
>> manufacturing, etc) could produce products of comparable quality to those
>> of the individual in previous times.
>
>No that is not accurate. In sculpture, machines have always produced art
>anyway, but that is not the point. Please don't take this personally but I
>believe you are working from the myth of a golden age. I agree that
>there was a great surge in Germany in the Art song and an exploration in the
>symphonic literature of consonance and dissonance, related to the acoustical
>overtone structure of harmony, while in Italy there was a surge in music for
>the theater and that there became such a glut of things and parties that the
>only way out was war for the silliest of reasons.
>
>But this was not due to the common man searching for upward mobility and
>validity but instead to the availability of printed music for the first time
>and the rape of the Americas for gold and silver for 300 years. In the
>1900s, in America, printed music was given away at opera performances like
>today's trinkets and trash. The music was transcribed for private virtuoso
>concerts by the likes of Liszt and Paganini and in America the greatest use
>of pig iron before 1900 was for piano frames.
>
>This was capitalism at work in concerts for the general public which in
>America included sections divided off for the various economic classes
>including slaves in the South. Later it would continue in the form of
>America's Apartheid segregation by race at the movies. This is research
>that is by one of my Board members who has written the first history of
>American musical performance from contact to present for the National
>Endowment of the Humanities published this year. That is how bad the old
>myths based upon self protecting class, gender and company advertising
>stories has been.
>
>The story that I was taught in college forty years ago about the development
>of a greater and greater complexity from monody is just plain wrong. It
>was data that was based upon class and company prejudices and worse. Here
>in America it justified a continuation of the White Man's Burden Manifest
>Destiny myth that still permeates the language of modern Chicago Economists.
>This is not a new story. The human process of music and art never ceases.
>It is a primal activity wired into the Cro-Magnon brain from the beginning
>of the type. What does stop are eras, and style patterns in history as
>peoples change and evolve.
>
>It happened earlier with "Musica Ficta" Intellectual Capital, when Europe
>simply gave up its performing techniques and lost the virtuosity necessary
>to maintain the technical performance of their traditional music. It
>almost happened after the 2nd world war when the soldiers and politicians in
>the cultural cold war imported a bunch of naive American singers who did not
>possess bel canto skills to replace the Nazi singers who were not allowed to
>work because of their party membership. American voice teaching
>improved as those German teachers came here and went to Japan and started
>the blossoming of today's great Oriental singers of European art. The
>Russians from the Soviet Schools are doing it again.
>
>As a voice teacher we are the last bastion of what is left of those
>techniques that go back to Guido in the tenth century. But that is because
>Guido was a pedagogical genius who based his teachings on acoustics and the
>acoustic of the voice is the same in every human although the styles and
>sounds are used in different ways. In the 15th century, European
>performing art gave in to fashion and lost their past. As a result archaic
>music today isn't thousands but hundreds of years old. As for how much
>music happened in the 19th century compared to the centuries of the
>Troubadours is a guess. One thing that is said has to do with the triumph
>of literacy. Where printing made more music available, literacy seems to
>have limited the memories of the performing artists. It is said that it
>was not unusual for a performer to have thousands of poems and songs in his
>repertory memory before literacy. It was reduced to hundreds once the
>brain was wired from non-literate memory to literary memory.
>
>Progress? Literary art in both word and music is different from a purely
>aural one. Poetry has certainly changed with the advent of the written
>poem. But progress is not so much the point as simple change and it isn't
>the death of poetry but the change from one type to another. The same thing
>has happened in the record arts of movies, TV and CD recordings. This
>same myth of progress and stagnation has butchered European heritage on a
>cyclic basis. You are projecting that language onto technology and
>talking about the ends of things in the same fashion that made people
>declare the fugue dead after Beethoven wrote the Hammerklavier Sonata.
>One hundred and fifty years later Samuel Barber wrote a wonderful fugue for
>one of his piano sonatas. Seems it wasn't dead after all.
>
>Today the wonderful studies of intonation and the rhythmic analysis of
>harmony, melody, orchestration etc. by Heinrich Shencker is as far from the
>normal conservatory graduate as Musica Ficta was from the practitioners of
>the Neue Musik. That is not evolution, simply fashion and change and has
>nothing to do with the death of a process but simply the birth, growth,
>maturation and finish of a style.
>
>On the computer level, there has been no machine invented thus far that is
>capable of even translating language much less the complicated structures of
>late chromatic romanticism. A machine can thus far only go where humans
>have gone before and in the case of translation whether language or music it
>can't go that far. But it does play a mean game of chess, a game with very
>limited options compared to a Sonata-Allegro and it seems to do Math more
>quickly than a human can accomplish, but that is far from a great work of
>imagination and human spirit. In spite of the formulaic writing of TV
>sitcoms, the best the machines can do is the cartoon "Skooby Doo". That
>current scientists don't understand this, is scandalous. But science is
>often scandalous in what it claims versus what it actually can do. (note:
>I am however a great fan and lover of baby shamanism, i.e. science)
>
>I would also point out that machines can't translate English into German, a
>rather easy stretch in literature. It is hopeless if it is to translate
>the subtle complexities of speech. Working with a computer means to dumb
>down your thinking to a keyhole description of a room filled with books and
>art. English to Japanese or Cherokee is like getting to another galaxy
>with a Saturn rocket. Just because you can imagine and talk about it
>doesn't make it so.
>
>The arts in the era you describe as the end of music was basically about
>overtones and harmony and rhythmically naive. In the same era the rhythm
>work of African and American Indian Artists was so complicated that
>Europeans couldn't even hear it much less notate it.
>
>A few years ago scientists invented a metronome that did two different pulse
>speeds. That was an interesting trinket with Western composers claiming
>that audiences couldn't hear such things and musicians couldn't play them
>either. Charles Ives did however, (Harvest Home Chorales and Symphony 4)
>and anyone who goes to a powwow with a Southern drum will hear patterns that
>only synchronize every 32 bars as the singers sing at one speed and the drum
>plays at another. Like double entendres, it is the job of the dancer to
>inhabit both worlds dancing to the drum while being aware of the music.
>Losing that awareness means you don't know when the music is finished in
>which case you lose the prize money for the dance competition. That is
>one of the reasons that the anthropologists have not written intelligently
>about Native American music. They not only can't notate it but most of
>them don't know what they are hearing. Gregg Smith of the Gregg Smith
>Singers did a wonderful demonstration for us many years ago in conservatory
>when he conducted three different tempos for the Ives Harvest Home Chorales.
>He did one with the right hand another with the left and the third sticking
>out his tongue.
>
>Jazz is also impossible to notate given the European system of writing.
>"It don't mean a thing if you don't got that swing." I would add that you
>shouldn't be insulted or annoyed at any of this. I know a master violin
>teacher who cannot hear the harmonies in Tibetan Harmonic Singing, and
>Quapaw composer Louis Ballard who hears micro-tones (like Ives did) took
>Igor Stravinsky to the Pueblo Deer Dance and he only heard monody. Ballard
>was astounded that this great composer of the time you described, percieved
>limited to the ability of Western musical notation to express. The same
>problem as with a midi interface from keyboard to computer written score.
>
>> But at the same time as individual patrons and artists were coming to an
>> end, there arose mass patronage (the bourgeosie) who wanted the same mix
>of
>> things that princes and potentates were after previously -- mainly status.
>
>Are you making the argument that a poor Cherokee child from Qualla
>reservation who hears poly tempos is more sophisticated than the wealthiest
>Europeans? That is certainly not true here except in the dumbed down
>commercial music sector where complexity is diminished by economically
>downsizing the performers and giving them derivative things to do. The
>Beatles as Boy Scouts.
>
>> So there has been desperate activity ever since on the part of artists
>> trying to find techniques and products which couldn't be replicated by
>> other methods, but also on the part of the new breed of patrons who were
>> trying to avoid the mass product in order to impress their friends and the
>> public.
>
>Do you really believe that?
>
>> And that is my simplified view of the world of art, music, poetry and
>> similar. What remains now is that there are "frozen" examples of these
>> beautiful arts of the past and of their pockets of living cognoscenti. (My
>> pocket is that of renaissance music which happens to be mainly of church
>> music or madrigals by the love-lorn, some of them very risqué.)
>
>I've been looking for the Robert Burns Men's club poems but they seem to
>have been censored out on the internet. I knew them forty years ago in
>college and I have lost my copy. I believe they were called the Merry Maid
>of Chalcedon but my memory is not that great. Do you know them? Also
>my old student John Ostendorf has been the archeologist for reviving and
>recording Baroque works on original instruments over here. He was a
>great singer but he was seduced into the more powerful role of recording
>producer and has released more Baroque recordings than any producer here and
>probably in the world. Such works are our Heritage and should be
>explored since they can tell more about the history of a time then any
>bones, although I love physical archeology too. They convince of the
>maturity of our ancestors and what we have to live up to.
>
>These
>> frozen examples of human achievement are rightfully treasured and it is
>fun
>> to keep them alive as a pastime, but I don't believe we can make any
>> further claims for the arts than that.
>
>You don't learn anything from singing and dancing Elizabethan music? How
>about Elizabeth's physicality and the intricacy of her court compared to the
>dry books that would make you think that she always walked around in
>uncomfortable clothes and was a bore. Literary history is great,
>especially when it isn't apologetic but nothing can compare to seeing it on
>the stage, to a good film or best of all doing it yourself. But there is a
>limit. Films make it alright for a child to set under their mother's dress
>in a Polish Potato field while their mother has no underwear (The Tin Drum).
>Books tell the same story but the visuals are more powerful. Doing that
>on stage night after night has other implications for real actors of all
>ages. All art has its purposes and limitations based in the minds of
>humans.
>
>> None of this is to say that there isn't a deep spiritual yearning in the
>> mind of man, formerly coralled by priesthoods for their own benefit and,
>> more latterly, by the nation-state (though less successfully, and already
>> weakening). I believe that this yearning is actually implanted or, rather,
>> was already there even before human life, or even animal life, began.
>
>The earliest art found is Cro-Magnon and it has been used and abused from
>the start by those who don't know anymore about it than Madam Curie did when
>she got her first lump of radium. She knew that she had something but
>she didn't know that it would kill her.
>
>> The arts of the past, being that of individual human skills, could only be
>> passed on from a master to a pupil. The arts of the present and future are
>> not so easily transferred and are passed on only by an increasingly
>> many-to-one process.
>
>"One to many" or lecturing is very poor pedagogy. You can't teach any
>complicated activity from a book or in a lecture class. Such educational
>practices are the reason that companies have to teach their own specifics
>and pay them at the same time. That is also why the only purpose for
>colleges is old knowledge and as gatekeepers to the jobs. They still
>can't and never could teach anything but the most general of arts.
>Unfortunately only the most obviously talented escape their inadequacy. On
>the other hand that is not to be confused with artistic collaboration of the
>skills of virtuosos. It was done by Rembrandt in his studio, it has been
>done by composers in non-Western cultures into the present and is done in
>architecture and products of technology like movies, CDs, and television and
>in the opera since the 17th century.
>
>As for the audience: if they are what you mean by "many to one" then you
>are completely missing the traditional ceremonial function of art. Many
>to one in the audience is a death knell for one of the primary purposes of
>art from the beginning. The common experience of raw truth and exceptional
>virtuosity intertwined in a graceful and challenging product conveyed to the
>observations of a live audience for their growth, pleasure and edification.
>
>Innovative accomplishments these days can only be
>> achieved by cooperative creativity. In your piece you are scathing about
>> VCRs. OK, let's raise the tone a bit -- surely you cannot deny that the
>> Hubble Telescope is an artistic product equivalent, say, to the Sistine
>> Chapel?
>
>I wasn't scathing about VCRs, I was scathing about calling them progressive
>while an art work is considered stagnant in current economic language. My
>point was that language can be used in a toxic fashion. Something that
>GWBush is proving in the market. The cultural war over here has heated up
>to the point where just to reply tit for tat means that I must be absolutely
>ruthless in my description of such things just to stay even at 98%
>unemployment for all graduated artists.
>
>As for Hubble, if it were an artistic product then it would have been fixed
>for free. But I can enjoy it from an artistic point of view, that however
>speaks nothing to its intent. The Hubbell is a useful thing that is used
>to explore the external world, art is the opposite and explores the inner
>life of humanity and is a history of that life in its relationship to the
>external. All human activities intersect but here in the West we have
>chosen to think in terms of professionalism for the purpose of greater
>development of the area of expertise. As a Cherokee I don't think that
>way but as an artist I can inhabit any era, ethnicity or style that I have
>obtained a virtuosity in. So I'm comfortable with and enjoy Western Art
>and professionalism. Western Professionalism does not define the Hubbell
>as a work of art but as a scientific instrument that will eventually become
>an artifact of the time and place that invented it. That is a blurring of
>the lines in history but should not concern us in the present any more than
>paper is really gold. The West has even invented a new academic area to
>deal with the issue: Semiotics.
>
>
>> I'll leave it there on what you may think is a provocative note -- though
>> I'm certainly not meaning to be provocative. And it is with no disrespect
>> that I have not answered you as thoroughly as your message deserves.
>
>It is always a pleasure to think with you Keith. I never mistake passion
>or brevity for a brush off.
>
>Best to you and yours.
>
>REH
>
>P.S. if this is not posted to the list would you do so for me. I'm fed up
>with it and am reconsidering my subscription after doing all that work a
>couple of days ago and it going nowhere. Not blaming anyone, I'm sure
>that it has to do with Road Runner/ Time Warner and the list's program.
>A very good reason for a socialist bureau of standards answer to all of this
>lost time in poor coordination, inept technical support and competitive
>waste. Something that Einstein mentioned would happen if we went with
>this system and once again he was right.
>
>
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________________________
