Category — Art, Music & Film

Alex Chilton, RIP:

Thinking of the Kuhn discussion, I’d like to look at how a mythical culture understands an innovation of techné/craft; here treated as both a divinely revealed gift and the ground of human tragedy.

We start with the Titan Prometheus. In the Theogony, Hesiod depicts Prometheus as a sly trickster who angered Zeus by giving him the bones of an ox wrapped in glistening fat to eat. For unclear reasons, Zeus responded by vowing to keep the secret of fire from mankind, but Prometheus secreted away a ray of fire for man in a fennel stalk, a story that could reflect earlier man’s experience with fire sparked by lightning and carried by similar means. When he found out, Zeus punished Prometheus by having him bound to a pillar, where his liver was munched on by an eagle each day and regenerated each night, until he was finally freed by Heracles. Man, meanwhile, was punished with the creation of woman, according to the misogynist Hesiod, the source of all his troubles. Ever the Zeus propagandist, Hesiod uses the Prometheus story to show, “It is impossible to hoodwink Zeus, or to surpass him”. But, of course, Prometheus did hoodwink Zeus.

Living in a time of Athenian optimism (mid-400s BCE), Aeschylus, instead, depicts Zeus as a tyrant, recently enthroned by coup, paranoid about losing power, and planning to exterminate man. Some readers doubt the generally pious Aeschylus could have created this Zeus, but he isn’t much different from the bullying character elsewhere in mythology. Also, Aeschylus doesn’t really describe Prometheus’s gifts as pure windfalls. For example, his first gift, the ability to imagine a happy future, hides from men their wretched actuality. The other gifts: medicine, astrology, writing, metallurgy, and fire are also mixed blessings. Man’s imaginative creations somehow alienate him from his own condition, allowing him to deceive himself as to his mortal physical state. Prometheus is still a trickster. This is pilfered divine knowledge, hidden from men because, with it, they would be as gods, but not gods. The human condition is tragic precisely because we can imagine a future brighter than we are allowed by nature. [Read more →]

Much ado has been blogged about Emily Howell, the computer program that writes Bach chorales , Mozart sonatas, and other kinds of pieces in the style of various composers. You can listen to two samples of the program’s work here.

The samples are impressive, but there are three considerations that temper the achievement:

First: the program itself is not simple. The programmer added innumerable tweaks in order to get the output to sound right. Presumably he did this with a clear idea of what the output should sound like. Why he should add tweaks to produce certain kinds of output (beautiful output) and not other outputs preserves the basic mystery of why we find the particularities of classical composition beautiful. The algorithm does nothing to explain this mystery.

Second: the pieces are based on statistical analyses of past composers. These analyses extracted methods, then, which were created not by the program but by human beings. Presumably the program cannot create new musical idioms as composers have done.

Third: the samples, while surprising and occasionally beguiling, are not as good as the originals. Not even close. The first sounds like it’s supposed to imitate Faure, though the article doesn’t say, and it’s quite successful at capturing his characteristic harmonic moves, but try listening to it five times in a row, as I have just done. Then listen to a piece by the real Faure (an amateur musician playing on a wretched piano, which I hope evens the score somewhat, since the computer’s music was generated by a player piano).

The second sample’s inferiority is harder to understand, for several reasons. It is a perfectly correct fugue, and the mere form of a fugue is beautiful (I, for one, would love to listen to, say, a 64-voice fugue in Bach’s style written by Miss Howell). Also, many of Bach’s ardent admirers miss what is exciting about him. As grouchy Adorno wrote:

“his influence…no longer results from the musical substance of his music but rather from its style and play, from its form and play, from formula and symmetry, from the mere gesture of recognition.”

Bach is himself partly to blame. His greatness is particularly difficult to grasp, among the really greats. DB Hart wrote a piece in First Things this morning that describes the poetry of T’ao Ch’ien in terms that can be applied to Bach:

“The greatest writers of China’s poetic golden age regarded him as the absolute virtuoso of ‘the natural voice,’ almost magically able to combine the subtle and the simple in verse that was most lyrical precisely where it appeared least adorned. ‘On the outside,’ remarked the great Sung poet Su Shi (Su Tung-p’o), ‘it is withered, but on the inside abundant. It seems plain, and yet is truly beautiful.’”

With that in mind, listen to the most hellish performance I could find of a Bach fugue.

All this is not to say that the program doesn’t mean anything. As with many technologies, it neither upends the way we’ve been doing things for millennia nor leaves everything the same. Specifically, I no longer see any use for the industry that composes music to accompany movies. If I were a studio executive, I’d already be inquiring about how much it might cost to licensed a copy of Emily Howell.

Below I talk with Ordinary Gentleman David Schaengold about the remarkable work of the recently deceased director Eric Rohmer.

MS: As I wrote in my recent First Things piece on Eric Rohmer, a lot of people think his films are boring. You won’t be surprised to hear that I strongly disagree:

A character played by Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn’s film Night Moves memorably says, “I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” A subtler form of this criticism is present in the habit—especially noticeable in the obituaries—of comparing Rohmer to great novelists and painters. Whether the reference is to Sherwin-Williams or Cezanne, the insinuation is that while Rohmer may have crafted delicate tales and created striking visual compositions, he was not really a filmmaker; he never made movies. Rohmer did place speech over spectacle, but only out of a belief that in life the real action takes place in conversations. In his essay “For a Talking Cinema,” Rohmer noted that twenty years after the introduction of sound to film, words still were seen as secondary to the image. Rohmer called for the kind of cinema he would go on to create, one in which speech was integral to the structure.

Possibly related, David, is the observation you once made to me that Rohmer offers a successful example of Brechtian cinema. What did you mean by that?

DS: Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t say right off. I’d like to invoke Rilke first, specifically the Archaic Torso of Apollo. Rilke’s poem is meant to convey the experience of being slowly transfixed by a work of art, I think he ends with perhaps the most famous non sequitur in lyric poetry after describing the torso, he says, abruptly: “you must change your life.” It is an odd thing to say so unadornedly, but Rilke was, I think, evoking a particular feature of the phenomenology of aesthetics. The torso, like all works of art, is frustratingly silent on what, precisely, you must do to change your life, but the imperative is categorical and unforgettable.

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{Note: I wasn’t planning to post this because it’s a bit rambling and digressive. But, I realized that it sort of fits with the discussion about war and morality.}

Let me start by showing my cards: for me, The Persians doesn’t really work as theatrical drama. It is the oldest extant play (472 BCE) and the only surviving classical play based in events real as opposed to mythological. It has been successfully updated several times and is still exceptional as a war play that generates great sympathy for the “enemy”.

So, why doesn’t The Persians work as theatre? [Read more →]

I just had to let you know how I feel:

The album version is also excellent:

I’m a little late to my Lost blogging again – mainly because I didn’t end up watching ‘Sundown’ until this past Friday.  I thought it was a good episode.  Very dark.  The show is getting decidedly creepier this season.  In any case, more after the leap… [obviously, spoiler alert]

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Here at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, we’re doing our part to help kill off serious film criticism. I sat down with distinguished League alumnus Freddie deBoer and Sonny Bunch of America’s Future Foundation (and a few other places) to talk about the Oscars. Full podcast after the jump.

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“Does it matter where you see a piece of art?” Jed Perl asks at the New Republic, in an article about the imminent and ill-conceived move of the Barnes Collection from its original home in Merion, PA to the museum district of Philadelphia. Like all lovers of truth and beauty, Perl comes down on the side of keeping the museum where it is.

I don’t have much to say about race issues in the USA, since I think I’m still at a stage where I should be doing much more listening than speaking, but this month-old blog post by Pitchfork critic Nitsuh Abebe seems sharp enough that I should post an excerpt and point you to the rest of it. [Read more →]

It’s this, with some violins thrown in.

The Oresteia is a monument to the advent of law and order over primitive cycles of vengeance. The three-play cycle (the only complete Greek trilogy we have) was first performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BCE and won first prize. It was understandably a crowd pleaser, as it celebrates the recently established democratic institutions of Athens and the development of civilized order out of ferocious chthonic nature, represented here as the younger generation killing the older, but also as the formation of a patriarchal society and the divine sanctioning of an act of matricide. It remains a work of uncanny power and terrifying intensity.

Agamemnon

After the Trojan War, the victorious king Agamemnon returns home to Argos. He and his men have been through hell, but among the victory celebrations he is apprehensive about giving in to the thrill of victory, fearing hubris, that paramount Greek flaw. Aeschylus reminds us repeatedly that this war turned the world upside down and destroyed many lives simply to reclaim unfaithful Helen; there would be something inappropriate about crowing over an abattoir. In contrast to the Iliad, where Agamemnon’s pissing contest with Achilles nearly destroys the Greek army, here he is subdued and even timid, reluctant to enter his own palace with his loving wife Clytemnestra.

His humility is, no doubt, caused in part by the public knowledge that Agamemnon took the life of his own daughter Iphigenia. Caught in a storm that threatened to wreck the fleet, he took the advice of religious prophets and sacrificed his daughter to appease the gods. Facing an impossible choice, he picked poorly and now bears the guilt; Voltaire, memorably, saw Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia as a model example of the damage caused by religious superstition. [Read more →]