Gene Pritsker: Beautiful Heterodoxy

R    eligion...is a person’s total reaction upon life.”
  —  William James, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, 1902.

A   genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over.”
  —  William James, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, 1902.

Y ou will enjoy and be inspired by the new recording by guitarist/composer Gene Pritsker and his ensemble, SoundLiberation.

• Gene Pritsker, electric guitar
  
• Greg Baker, electric guitar
  
• David Gotay, cello
  
• Mat Fieldes, double-bass and electric bass
  
• Joe Abba, percussion

T he original chamber opera from which this VRE Suite derives was orchestrated for narrator, tenor, soprano, mezzo soprano, baritone, 2 guitars, cello, and double-bass.


    [50-sec clip, SoundLiberation Ensemble, Gene Pritsker, Varieties of Religious Experience, ‘Everything Else Might Be a Dream’ (track 3), 2010, 1.6MB MP3]

T he Suite progresses in 8 tracks (64 min) from ‘Introduction’, a musical exposition of William James’ early views on psychology of religion, through James’ subsequent reconsiderations of his thought (‘Closer to Me than My Own Breath’, track 5), to an account of Tolstoy’s spirituality, to William James’ “conclusion” (track 8). There are myriad textures here that invite meditation. Accessible, stimulating chamber music throughout—although I do hope someday to experience the VRE opera. The theatrical gestures in here make me curious about the VRE libretto and staging. What texts did Pritsker choose, I wonder?

T   he last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

M any of the published reviews of Pritsker’s work note that he challenges musical boundaries. Uh, yes he does. Exceptionally curious and inclusive rather than aggressive or confrontational, Pritsker and his collaborators explore passionate new expressions based on jazz, world rhythms, machine rhythms, lyricism, and the spirit.

W    hat interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way?”
  —  William James, ‘Dilemma of Determinism’, 1884.

T he VRE Suite is full of tasteful improvisation, sturdy melodies and voice-leading, strong ‘grooves’. Mystical it may be, but VRE Suite is far from ‘enigmatic’. It positively asserts that your cosmic, mystical experience is as genuine as my mystical experience; or as genuine as that of any organized religion.

R    eligion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men and women in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
  —  William James, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, 1902.

A ccording to theists’ Argument from Religious Experience, people have “religious experiences” — mystical or supernatural experiences, like angels or ghosts. Theists say that, because we believe other experiential claims people make — that they ate spaghetti last night, or they have a pet cat — then we should believe these claims as well. Theists say that, when skeptics insist on different, more stringent standards for assessing the veracity of claims based on religious experiences than they do for claims based on other experiences, they are prejudiced against religious claims. This prevents them from understanding and believing. William James entertained this argument in his Varieties of Religious Experience. He proposed that all normal persons do have religious experience and, since empirical experience is the final arbiter of truth, then God—as one object of religious experiences—must be accepted as factually true. A problem, though, arises in the variety of religious experiences: if there were just one true God, why is there such wide variety in religious experiences? They are mutually inconsistent, so at least some experiences must be false. There are no independent criteria we can use to separate true experiences from false experiences — not only others’, but our own. There are no independent criteria; there can be no independent criteria; all criteria rely upon the validity of some religious system, a Bible or the Koran, or some other sacred text—some of them, or all of them, must be false.

R    eligions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.”
  —  William James, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, 1902.

F or any who are unfamiliar with William James (1842-1910), I should point out that James was not a Christian. He was religious in his own way, but he was hardly a monotheist. William James published his ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ in 1902 and, subsequently, many theists have taken bits of his writings out of context to support their arguments. But at bottom James was a Rationalist, and he did not believe in a personal God who enters history or personally responds to people’s prayers. Gene Pritsker’s VRE Suite likewise evokes a diverse range of spirituality while broadly extending respect and tolerance to all forms.

A   n act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

P ritsker offers a unique look at trans-textual relationships between the poetic text and musical text; between the chamber music creative tradition and new ways of crossing boundaries of genres and orchestration; between the Western canon of chamber music thought and non-traditional, jazz-derived ways of intimacy; and between the ideology of chamber for chamber’s sake and the opposite: the ideology of chamber musicians’ active ethical engagement in, and attention to, social issues.

T   he total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but may mutually ignore each other.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

C hamber operas are a good example of new “ideological,” stylistic and technological approaches to composition. They are emblematic of a transition from musical thinking that was orthodox and conservative to more heterodox, multi-layered forms.

T   he Hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

P ritsker uses isorhythmic patterns in the first several tracks, retrogrades in ‘The Less Real of the Two’, and allusions to the rondo form in ‘William James’ Conclusion’.

G    enius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

T he predominant texture in the VRE Suite is ‘pointillistic’ and tense, but not in the acoustic sense of guitars or pizzicato passages in the cello or double-bass. VRE Suite is organized through a contrapuntal juxtaposition and alternation of single notes, short gestures, and gestural ‘units’ that are based on certain ‘privileged’ pitches and intervals and chosen beat-divisions. Complex linear constructs are mostly melismas—especially exposed in the guitars, but also in the cello part.

T    he transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium.”
  —  William James, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, 1902.

I t is interesting that in the first parts of the Suite the individual notes and gestures are distributed across the whole available range in each instrument, with emphasis given to irregular, “nervous” rotations of leaps and step-wise motion. A kind of self-less, anonymous, transcendent texture emerges as a result. Such an approach has a lot to do with post-serialist compositional methods, even if Pritsker would be happier to disavow this.

I ntegrity—a unified/unifying collective voice that is robust against the ensemble members individuality and rhythmic complexity—is assured by a technique based on manipulations of similar timbral and gestural units (motives, minimalistic ones or otherwise). The groups of repeated units establish a sonic architectural continuum and create a durable terrain governed by intervals and timbres of desire between consenting adults.

R    omeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as the filings. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed; the path may be modified indefinitely.”
  —  William James, quoted by Mortimer Adler.

B eyond the ‘Introduction’, VRE Suite becomes more and more dialectical, but in a good way. Gestures of disparate provenance react against each other, animating each other not killing each other off, bringing passages to life (?reincarnating them). The gestures (revealed by guitars, cello, and drums) alternate against a double-bass ostinato. There is much joy and comfort to be had in this...

P ritsker’s use of unusual cello-electric guitar timbres should be considered from a psychological rather than a technological point of view. “Technical” in nature, these timbres intensify the poetic metaphor or enhance the emotional power the music exerts on us, inscribing us, carving us as it goes...

W    e are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

I n James’ writing, Pritsker has found a congenial source of conceptual and artistic inspiration. William James himself embodies the contradiction of a spiritual man and rationalist. There is something of the prophet as well as a “martyr” in him, despite his wealth and Harvard credentials and social standing... He was aware of the necessity to combine intellectual effort with social intervention and his own convictions. His writings are humorous, perhaps inadvertently so. His entirely serious meanings are embedded in an “innocent”, “childish, “naïve”, “life-is-short-so-what-the-hell” surface. His psychological writings amount to an exotic kind of poetry influenced by folk literature, supernatural beauty, pain of life, and religion.

T    ake the happiest man or woman, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his/her inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his/her ideals in the line of his/her achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he/she has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he/she inwardly knows himself/herself to be found wanting.”
  —  William James, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, 1902.

T he complexity of James’ poetic texture and his multi-spectral style must appeal deeply to Pritsker. It is amazing how masterfully Pritsker explored the opportunities offered by James’ poetic vocabulary.

P ritsker’s compositions (including chamber music, chamber operas, electroacoustic and orchestral works, rock, and hip-hop) have been performed widely (Berlin Philharmonic; Adelaide Symphony; Brooklyn Philharmonic; Athens Camerata; and others). He has also collaborated with Joe Zawinul on film scoring projects.

C   reatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of ‘Hello! Thing-um-a-bob again!’ ever flitted through its mind.”
  —  William James, ‘Principles of Psychology’, 1890.

I    believe that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the Universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries... They are tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. Just so, we are tangent to the wider life of things.”
  —  William James, ‘Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking’, 1907.

• Gene Pritsker website
  
• SoundLiberation ensemble website
  
• Mat Fieldes website
  
• Greg Baker website
  
• Joe Abba website
  
• David Gotay on MySpace
  
• Innova Records (American Composers’ Forum)
  
• Behrens R. William James: Looking for a Way Out. Ballast Quart Rev 2003;18(3).
  
• Positive Atheism’s Big List of Quotations
  
• Atheist Spirituality blog
  
• Pew Research Center, results of survey of U.S. citizens’ religious knowledge, 28-SEP-2010.
  
• Eliade M. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987.
  
• Hitchens C. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve, 2009.
  
• James W. Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature (1902). FQ, 2010.
  
• Otto R. The Idea of the Holy. 2e. Oxford Univ, 1958.
  
• Tracy D. Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope. Univ Chicago, 1994.
  
• Wikipedia entry on Henry James, Sr., with description of his 'Swedenborgian' mystical experiences in 1844 and low regard for Emerson, Thoreau, and transcendentalists in general.

• Some things I am reminded of...
  
• Michael Smetanin’s ‘Obsession’ for tenor saxophone, electric guitar, cello, double bass, piano, and drumkit (1995)
  
• Irinel Anghel’s ‘El Enigmes II’ for electric guitar, cello (with processing), bass guitar, and tape (2001)
  
• James Tenney’s ‘Septet’ for 6 electric guitars and bass guitar (1981)
  
• Salvatore Macchia’s ‘Onde’ for double bass and guitar (2000)
  
• Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Trittico per G.S.’ for double bass (1989); Seven ‘Tableaux Vivants’ depicting the Angel of History as Melancholia; Stelæ for Failed Time)