Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Cosmopolitanism and Endangered Species: Geek to Learn, Learn to Geek

Allen Forte, Geek Extraordinaire
DSM: A music theory geek friend of mine noticed our conversation last time and sent me this list. You might be a theory geek if . . .
  1. you whistle in style bris.
  2. your favorite pickup line is, “What’s your favorite augmented sixth chord?”
  3. your second favorite pickup line is, “Would you like to raise my leading tone?”
  4. you have ever played the ‘how-many-episodes-is-too-many-episodes’ fugue game.
  5. you have a poster of Allen Forte in your bedroom.
  6. you know who Allen Forte is.
  7. you dream in four parts.
  8. your biological clock follows a non-retrogradable isorhythm.
  9. you can improvise 16th-century counterpoint with no trouble, but you frequently forget how to tie your shoes.
  10. you look at a piece by Bach and say, “You know, I think he could have gotten a better effect this way . . . ”
  11. you expected something quite different out of The Matrix.
  12. you can answer your phone with a tonal or a real answer.
  13. you like to tease your friends and loved ones with deceptive cadences.
  14. you know how many cents a major 23rd is without having to count.
  15. you say you only drink fifths, and then you laugh at your lame pun anyway.
  16. you feel the need to end Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony with a picardy third.
  17. your favorite characteristic of Brahms’ music is the subcutaneous motivic play.
  18. instead of counting sheep to get to sleep, you count sequences.
  19. you find free counterpoint too liberal.
  20. Moussorgsky’s “Hopak” gives you nightmares.
  21. you wonder what a Danish sixth would sound like.
  22. you long for the good old days of movable G-clefs.
  23. the Corelli Clash gives you goosebumps, every single time.
  24. you can hear an enharmonic modulation coming a mile away.
  25. you can hear Berg’s lover’s dog coming a mile away.
  26. you have had to be forced to stop labeling motives.
  27. you confuse fishsticks with ground bass.
  28. you have ever quoted Walter Piston.
  29. you like to march to the rhythm of L’histoire du soldat.
  30. your license plate says: PNTONL.
  31. you have ever defended yourself with “But Gesualdo did it!”
  32. you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on “Three Blind Mice.”
  33. you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on Cage’s 4'33''.
  34. you have ever thrown a Gebrauchsmusik party.
  35. you have ever tried to hop onto the omnibus.
  36. you like to wake up to a Petrushkated version of “Reveille.”
  37. you lament the decline of serialism.
  38. you know what the ninth overtone of the harmonic series is off the top of your head.
  39. you keep the writings of Boethius on the coffee table.
  40. you have ever dressed up as a counterpoint for Halloween.
  41. you have ever written a musical palindrome and given it a witty title.
  42. you can name ten of Palestrina’s contemporaries.
  43. you have ever found a typographical error in a score by Ives, Nancarrow, or Babbitt.
  44. you have ever heard a wrong note in a performance of a composition by Ives, Nancarrow, or Babbitt.
  45. you already sensed that if this list had been written by Bartok, this would be the funniest item.
  46. you enjoy the tang of a tritone whenever you can.
  47. you’ve let the rule of the octave determine how you go from one event of the day to the next.
  48. you have ever played through your music as if the fingering markings were figured bass symbols.
  49. you suspiciously check all the music you play for dangling sevenths.
  50. you have devised your own tuning method.
  51. you keep a notebook of useful diminutions.
  52. you have composed variations on a theme by Anton Webern.
  53. you know the difference between a Courante and a Corrente.
  54. you have trained your dog to jump through a flaming circle of fifths.
  55. you have ever used the word fortspinnung in polite conversation.
  56. you feel cheated by ‘evaded cadences’.
  57. you organize your phone numbers based on their prime form.
  58. you find it amusing to refer to your ear-training course sections as your “pitch classes.”
  59. every now and again you like to kick back and play a tune in hypophrygian mode.
  60. you wonder why there aren’t more types of seventh chords.
  61. you deeply wish you had twelve fingers.
  62. you like polytonal music because, hey, the more keys the merrier.
  63. you abbreviate your shopping list using figured bass symbols.
  64. you always make sure to invert your counterpoint, just in case.
  65. you have ever concluded a joke with the punchline “Because it was polyphonic!”
  66. you have ever named a pet, boat, car or child ‘Zarlino’.
  67. you have an <0 1 4> tattoo.
  68. your lips may say “perfect fourth,” but in your heart it will always be “diatessaron.”
  69. you have ever said, “Yes, didn’t Scriabin use that sonority in... ”
  70. you know lewd mnemonics for the order of sharps in key signatures.
  71. you can name relatives of the “Grandmother Chord.”
  72. you’re still wondering where is the “must-resolve-the-dominant-seventh-before-going-to-bed” indicator.
  73. you not only can identify any of Bach’s 371 Harmonized Chorales by ear, but you also know what page each one is on in the Riemenschneider edition and how many suspensions it has in its first four bars.
Hah! It takes a geek to know a geek!

CMT: Well, some of our tastes here are pretty esoteric. But no more so than other arcane things people pursue—sport, for example. Having the inner confidence and security to poke fun at ourselves is good—the list is honestly amusing. But the list-joke begs the question, does modern mass-culture inherently ostracize or disenfranchise us—does it reject anything that is ‘other’, anything different from itself? If we are true to our geekiness, are we inevitably disempowered? In other words, is there a need for a new cosmopolitanism and a greater toleration in society these days? Seyla Benhabib has written about this…

DSM: You’re right. There’s no reason to think of xenophobia as scoped only to geographic or ethnic boundaries. ‘Cosmopolitan’ should encompass distributive justice and toleration not just of citizens of various disparate nations, but also of members of classes whose membership is founded on interests or beliefs, which may be trans-national and trans-ethnic. And of course it’s not just conflict between musicologists/theorists and a hegemonic mass-culture. There’s conflict too among music theorists of different stripes. The mistake armchair anthropologists frequently fall into—taking a complicated concept, like music, and reifying it as if it were a single, simple thing. A static, time-invariant thing. But naturally theory evolves over time. And composers’ technique and materials evolve over time. And critics’ and analyst-geeks’ propensities evolve over time, in unpredictable jumps—Richard Selfish-Gene Dawkins-style.

CMT: We could instead put forward theories of compositional intention as if the evolution of composers’ technique were logically analogous to Darwin or Mendel’s wrinkled garden peas. There’s a self-evident truth here that any serious musician recognizes—anyone who has experienced that moment when the execution shifts from working memory to procedural muscle memory. My favorite aspect of playing the piano is reaching the jump where my hindbrain is carrying the piece along. Then I can enjoy the music in a different way, without thinking as much about the technical mechanics of making my body perform the piece, making my fingers navigate the keyboard, and so on. Anybody who has performed music at this level knows also that that is the moment when inspiration can enter—when you can deeply surprise yourself, when new layers of meaning become apparent. On some occasions, I’ve had actually an ‘out-of-body’ experience, as though I were looking down from the ceiling, looking down on myself at the piano. That’s pretty rare. More commonly, though, the loss of a consciousness of ‘self’ is more subtle. The interpretive gestures that’ve been internalized and which unfold almost automatically become during a performance quite foreign, as if they were being executed by someone who is not me—and the separation [of that part of me that’s observing this and applying additional adjustments as the playing proceeds] is complete. I wonder whether, in the theater, actors who are in-character experience their art in this way…

DSM: The exoticness of that experience is part of what creates social distance: your having experiences that you clearly value but which the mass monoculture doesn’t understand or regards as deviant—defines and reinforces your otherness. This seems to me to be a feature of globalization—or at least the harms to individual communicative freedom and [full] citizenship and justice are made worse by globalization trends. According to Benhabib, the homogenization, standardization, mass-ification, and so on—are not inadvertent consequences of globalization. They are fundamental preconditions for the possibility of the kind of interaction and interconnectivity that make globalization a reality. The obverse is also true. Heterogenization, hybridization, carnivalization, and mestizaje are also not unintended consequences of globalization—they breed novelty and long-tail niches, and support increasing amounts of novelty, exotics, differénce, and authenticity. Benhabib says that cultures are inherently and continually contested and unstable. They are always in the process of transforming and being transformed. Cultures and specific subcultures (like classical music, or chamber music, or music theory, or sub-subcultures of these) survive or perish in a sort of Darwinian natural selection. Culture is the horizon within which each of us social agents is socialized and individualized.

“... it is only the presumption of each individual’s equal claim to develop the conditions of his or her self-hood within certain webs of interlocution that gives the politics of recognition its normative bite. Claims to authenticity presuppose claims to justice—or the pursuit of differences presupposes a framework sustained by premises of individual equality.”
  —  Seyla Benhabib, Claims of Culture, p. 57.

CMT: And Wellmer is (along with Klaus Günther) one of the philosophers in the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition who has sought to translate discourse ethics’ reformulation of human freedom into communicative freedom.

“Solidarity in a post-conventional sense demands that we want a space for everybody else’s negative freedom, a space which is the precondition for determining and taking responsibility for one’s own life, and which, by the same token, is a space for the freedom to say ‘no’ and to act accordingly. Only on the basis of such freedom are symmetrical forms of mutual recognition, voluntary agreements, and rational concensus among equals conceivable.”
  —  Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames, p.33.


“VI.[14] Mihi vero licet et semper licebit dignitatem tueri, mortem contemnere. Potestas modo veniendi in hunc locum sit: dicendi periculum non recuso.

[15] Quae, malum, est ista voluntaria servitus? Fuerit quaedam necessaria; neque ego hoc ab omnibus eis desidero qui sententiam consulari loco dicunt. Alia causa est eorum quorum silentio ignosco; alia eorum, quorum vocem requiro. quos quidem doleo in suspicionem populo Romano venire non metu, quod ipsum esset turpe, sed alium alia de causa deesse dignitati suae.”

(VI.[14] It is in my power, and it always will be in my power, to uphold my own dignity and to despise death. Let me have only the power to come into this house, and I will never shrink from the danger or declaring my opinion!

[15] What, in the name of all that is horrible, is the meaning of this voluntary slavery? Some submission may have been unavoidable: nor do I require this from every one of the men who deliver their opinions from the consular bench; the case of those men whose silence I pardon is different from that of those whose expression of their sentiments I require; and I do grieve that those men have fallen under the suspicion of the Roman people, not only as being afraid--which of itself would be shameful enough--but as having different private causes for being wanting to their proper dignity.)
  —  Cicero. Fourteen Orations against Marcus Antonius (Philippics 1), 44 BCE.

Milton Babbitt, Celebrated Geek


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