Geräuschmusik again ...

Lichtenberg

'It is easy to construct a landscape out of a mass of disorderly lines, but disorderly sounds cannot be made into music.'

'Everything grows more refined and polished: music was once noise, satire was once lampoon, and where we nowadays say Please excuse me, in the old days we cuffed his head.'

— G.C. Lichtenberg (Sudelbücher, A.40, D.83.)

Geräuschmusik ...

Schönberg (self portrait)

Roundabout the middle of his music-life, Schönberg experimented with Klangfarbenmelodien. These were to be strictly timbrous 'melodies'—successions of timbre that qua successions of timbre were not unlike melodies structurally. (And why not Klangfarbenharmonien, simultaneities of timbre that as such were not unlike harmonies?) Consider the following extracts from Schönberg's Harmonielehre (1911):

'If it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call "melodies" [...], then it must be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours [...], progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches. That has the appearance of a futuristic fantasy and is probably just that. But it is one that, I firmly believe, will be realised ... Tone colour melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things!'

Schönberg was a (minor) philosopher of music as well as a (major) composer and theorist. But his ontology is here-and-there wanting. Speaking in the manner of the Aristotelians, melody is a formality (as is harmony), whereas timbre is a materiality. And the timbre of a melody (or of a harmony) is logically accidental. (That is not to say that it is unimportant.) A Klangfarbenmelodie is thus a mix-up of ontological levels, a sort of category mistake. Twentieth-century music is full of such errors. After Klangfarbenmusik came Geräuschmusik. And today we have Christian Wolff (et al) telling us that 'no sound is preferable to any other sound or noise.' Ah, if only Chapelmaster Bach knew then what we do now, about this egalitarian levelling of sounds and noises—how much toilsome labour it would have saved him! The modern composer need only load his scattergun with note-shot, stand twenty paces from the page, aim (optional), and fire.

Theory in theory is to follow after practice, both logically and temporally. But in the twentieth century theory ran on ahead, and even to places that practice could not possibly go. Geräuschmusik is an example. Better theorising would have concluded that noise-music is a contradiction, and that contradictions are not more likely to obtain in music than elsewhere. (Is it noise? Then it is not music. Is it music? Then it is not noise. 'But music is made from "noise." ' And violins are made from trees, yet trees are not violins. The composer has as much formative work to do with his material as does the luthier.) Maybe in this way we can give some credence to the 'Heartless brainiac!' objection.

Heart versus brain ...

Schönberg (by Schiele)

In 1946 Schönberg published an article called 'Heart and Brain in Music,' on the adhockery of the heart-brain dichotomy. (He wrote polemics more so than irenics.) See, Schönberg was constantly accused of a brainiac heartlessness. Readers may now open their copies of Style and Idea, turning to page 53. (Readers without the book are asked to feel especially ashamed of themselves.) Twelve-tone composing, Schönberg is sorry to say, has given him 'the title of constructionist, engineer, mathematician, etc., meaning that these compositions are produced exclusively by the brain without the slightest participation of something like a human heart.' However:

'It is not the heart alone which creates all that is beautiful, emotional, pathetic, affectionate, and charming; nor is it the brain alone which is able to produce the well-constructed, the soundly organized, the logical, and the complicated.'

Some compositions are brainier than others, but all music is brainwork as well as heartwork. And if we call Schönberg a heartless brainiac, mustn't we call Chapelmaster Bach—that sovereign of the ars combinatoria—the same? Don't let's forget, in the earlier eighteenth century Bach was most famous for an arcanum.

Bach's celebrated 'Hudemann' canon (BWV 1074)

So far so good for Herr Schönberg. (NB: His musicianship cannot be questioned. He was an exemplar. Musicasters beware.) There is nonetheless a disanalogy. For where there was a realism there is but a nominalism.

To prove the legitimacy of his heirdom, Schönberg was always at-the-ready. He exhibited documentary evidence, juxtaposing tonal and atonal scoreworks, noting hereditary likenesses. Already tone-rows have their transpositions, cancrizans, inversions, and so on, as in olden-days canonic imitation. And look whether there are not even fugues in twelve-tone scores ... Or are there? We must acknowledge that the terms are not univocal, not monosemous. In Webern's Fünf Canons (op. 16), for example, there are 'canons' but not canons. Take Schönberg himself:

'There is no merit in writing canons of two or more voices, because the second, third, fourth, and further voice has only to begin two or more notes later and there will never occur parallel octaves. And who cares about fifths? ... Even the writing of fugues is a little too easy under these circumstances.'

[Note: A prohibition against parallel octaves is common to tonality and atonality, but the prohibitory wherefores are unalike. Tonally, parallels are prohibited for bringing about untoward monophony, monophony where there ought to be polyphony; atonally, for abetting tonicization, for coming nigh unto tonality.]

There could be less heart and more brain in the 'Heartless brainiac!' objections. But just what is it that's objectionable to the objectors?

More to come.

A prayer ...

From the BCP:

A Prayer for persons troubled in Mind or in Conscience 

O blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts, We beseech thee, looke down in pittie and compassion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bitter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniquities; Thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trouble: But O mercifull God, who hast written thy holy word for our learning, that we through patience, and comfort of thy holy Scriptures might have hope; give him a right understanding of himself, and of thy threats, and promises, That he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in thee. Give him strength against all his Temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised Reed, nor quench the smoaking Flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure, but make him to hear of joy, and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoyce. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift up the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

' Exceedingly stupid as the idea is ...'

Wittgenstein

'People still have the idea that psychology is one day going to explain all our aesthetic judgements, and they mean experimental psychology. This is very funny, very funny indeed.'

—Wittgenstein (Lectures and Conversations, § 19)

Mood ...

Look around. On any day there is reason enough for any person to be in any mood—happy or unhappy, hopeful or hopeless, heartwell or heartsick—so that 'Why are you in such-and-such mood?' may reasonably be answered: 'X and Y and Z.' But, at least in my experience, moodish reasons are generally not moodish causes. For me, there's almost always a causal inexplicability to moods, an arbitrariness. They seem to come in from and go out to: nowhere. First I am sad, sighing over everything. Next I'm happy, smiling on the world beatifically. Then I am depressed, wanting to pull completely away from everybody and withdraw sullenly into myself. Meantime the external conditions of my life are unchanged. So what gives?

'Mood is like the Niger River in Africa; no one knows its source, no one knows its outlet—only its reach is known!'

—Johannes Climacus, K. XII.1.237.

(Note: To the detriment of the analogy, the source of the river was discovered in 1879. How rude!)

Comicality ...

What is it for something to be comic? What is comicality? The literature here is small by comparison, but many of the great philosophers had something to say, if only in hurried passing. Moreover, there is even appreciable unanimity. Most everybody who wrote on the formal questions (ut supra) put forward some version of what the textbooks call the 'incongruity theory.' Here the form of the comic is the contradictory, the mismatched, the disparate, the out-of-place. (Stanford's mediocre encyclopaedia entry speaks of multiple theories of humour competing, but they don't really compete at all. For one is a theory about what it is for something to be comically laughable, another is a theory about why we laugh derisively, another is a theory about laughter's long-gone evolutionary wherefrom, and so on. They're all in different categories.)

But the above needs straightly to be qualified, for not all such contradictions are comic (and some are even tragic). Going back at least to Aristotle (Poetics V), the specifying mark of the comic has been painlessness: painless contradictions are comic, whereas painful are tragic. (It is a perverse sense of the comic that laughs at physical injury or at mental suffering.)

So. Mismatch seems to be of the essence of the comic. And that means that it is essentially juxtapositive, essentially relational. In an excellent footnote to the Postscript, a footnote that takes up most of the page for several pages, Johannes Climacus writes on the fundamental relationality of the comic: 'The comic is a relation, the misrelation of contradiction, but painless' (XII.1.514). And that's not a bad definition of comicality. Genus: misrelation. Species: painless. (All cases of comicality are cases of painless misrelationality. But may we also convert that proposition? Put differently, a painless misrelation is necessary for the comic, but is it sufficient? It's hard to say. Some cases of the same don't seem particularly comic. But the comic comes in degrees, like the tragic. And maybe such cases are of but low comic degree.)

Let's have some examples:

'Hamlet swears by the fire tongs; the comic is in the contradiction between the solemnity of the oath and the reference that annuls the oath, no matter what the object is ...

'Holophernes is said to be fourteen and one-fourth feet tall. The contradiction is essentially in the latter part. The fourteen feet is fantastic, but the fantastic does not as a rule speak of fourths ... The person who laughs at the fourteen feet does not laugh appropriately, but the person who laughs at fourteen and one-fourth feet knows what he is laughing at ...

'When a man applies for a permit to go into business as an innkeeper and the application is turned down, this is not comic. But if it is turned down because there are so few innkeepers, it is comic, because the reason for the application is used as the reason against it. For example, there is a story about a baker who said to a poor woman, "No, mother, she does not get anything; there was another recently who didn't get anything, either. We can't give to everybody." The comic is in his seemingly arriving at the sum total "everybody" by subtracting.

'When a girl applies for a permit to go into business as a public prostitute and the application is turned down, this is comic. One correctly considers that it is difficult to become something respectable ... but the turning down of an application to become something contemptible is a contradiction. Of course, if she receives a permit, that also is comic, but the contradiction is a different one, that the legal authority shows its powerlessness simply in showing its power, its power by granting the permit, its powerlessness by being unable to make it permissible ...

'When a soldier stands in the street staring at the glorious window display in a fancy gift shop and comes closer in order to see better, when with his face really aglow and his eyes fixed on the finery in the window he does not notice that the basement entrance extends inordinately far so that he vanishes into the basement just when he is about to have a proper look—then the contradiction is in the movement, the upward direction of the head and gaze and the underground direction down into the basement ...'

At the end of the multi-page footnote, after forwarding several more specimens of the comic, J. Climacus writes: 'Let these examples suffice, and everyone whom this footnote disturbs may leave it unread.' Here the comic is in the displacement of the disclaimer, coming only when it is too late to act upon.

As a rule, comedians are poor philosophers of comedy. That is, they know when something is comedic—if they're any good—but they don't really know why. (They know the comic by praxis, not theory.) And, no, comedians needn't be philosophers of comedy, (just as such philosophers needn't be comedians). Nonetheless, many comedians nowadays could do with some philosophical lessons. For example, stand-up comedians could learn that explicitness is not in itself comic, that ribaldry and scurrility are not in themselves shortcuts thereto. Explicitness may serve comicality as matter to form, but that goes for anything and everything. It is comic when a dear-old punctilious grandma speaks with sailorly coarseness. And, contrarily, it's comic when a roughneck vulgarian speaks with fastidious politesse. (Think of how masterfully G. Bernard Shaw plays with these themes in his Pygmalion.) But non-comic anecdotes are not made comic by being translated into the explicit, not eo ipso. An anecdote is comic if painless misrelations are present, inasmuch as they're present.

More later.