jwilzewske: sovereignty

Showing posts with label sovereignty. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Slings and Arrows of Fortune: Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf & Epic Chamber Music

H    wæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Literal tr.:
What! We of the Spear-Danes in old days
of the people-kings the power heard
how the princes their brave deeds did.

R. Liuzza tr.:
Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days
of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes—
how those noble lords did lofty deeds.

S. Heaney tr.:
So: The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had
    courage and greatness.
We have heard of these princes’ heroic
    campaigns.”

M edievalist Benjamin Bagby performs the epic Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘Beowulf’, in his one-man drama on Saturday evening in Kansas City. Bagby performs on an historically-reconstructed six-stringed harp, part of which comes from remnants recovered from a medieval gravesite. The poem is the oldest extant complete poem in Old English, a narrative that tells the story of the chieftain, Beowulf, who defeats the monster, Grendel, in battle. The epic/mythical qualities of it are not unlike other Northern European epics, such as the Norse Eddas (sagas) or Kalevala.

B agby hails from a Germanic clan that emigrated from Jutland to northern England in about 630, and subsequently to colonial Virginia a millennium later. In addition to his activities as founder and director of the early music ensemble Sequentia, Benjamin writes about historical performance practice and teaches at the Sorbonne and North America. In 2003, Bagby developed the program ‘Chant Wars’ with Katarina Livljanic at Harvard. Bagby was educated at Oberlin College and at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. Bagby and Glagolitic chant scholar Katarina Livljanic were recently married.

T he ‘auspiciousness’ of the narrative of Beowulf is wonderfully portrayed by Bagby—whether you see him perform ‘live’ or on the excellent 2006 DVD. Having the work performed an old, old stone cathedral with hewn timbers for beams, and minimal central heating on a cold winter’s night helps to reinforce the momentousness of the epic. Beowulf aims to convey something of import to each contemporary listener, clan-member or not. Having the scary, decrepit manuscript projected in front of us adds still more.

T he Grendle ‘fight scene’, I suppose, is what gets the most attention, in almost any casual reading of the text. The mechanics of story-telling and drama: these are what English teachers tend to focus on when teaching Beowulf. The sheer exoticness of a text so old as this tends to limit the serious consideration of why it is the way it is. The ambiguities in the manuscript itself offer prodigious challenges to translators, never mind interpreters or theorists or ordinary readers/hearers.

B ut as we hear Bagby render this in performance today—in this time of widespread terrorism, regime-change and unplanned succession; amid conflicted amity, globalization and disputed sovereignty—what strikes me most is the theme of unrelenting confrontation—the necessity and inevitability of it. The human condition is perilous, no end in sight, and victories are always mixed, pyrrhic ones. Glory is the harbinger of doom. This mortal coil is in fact and above all else a coil—a chute that leads precipitously to our unbidden shuffling off it. No one gets out of here alive.

C oil — (n.) a spiral; tumults, troubles; a noisy disturbance, fuss, ado; the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life; (v.t.) to cull or sacrifice; to thrash; to lay in rings or spirals; to turn; to mound up; to stir.”

T he meaning might be: ‘when we have unwound and worked off this spool of mortality’.”
— Schopenhauer, ‘Parerga & Paralipomena’, Volume 2, §232a.

I n Bagby’s wonderful delivery we hear vocal/musical and stylistic elements of these confrontations. Nothing sung/said is merely a formality. Not all of it is ‘consequential’. But all of it is confrontational. Hwæt! No ‘arrival’ lacks a ‘departure’. What comes in must go out; what goes up must come down. Beowulf ‘confronts’ any and all who would cling to wishful thinking or self-delusion. The end is not ‘tragic’; it just ‘is’.

W hy are there four funerals in Beowulf? Some people make a big thing about thematic repetition and the rhetoric of ‘aftermaths’. Yes, well... As a person descended from Scandinavian ancestors and as one who has read the Eddas since I was about 15, these epics and skaldic ‘lays’ and so on are just profoundly weird. At 3,182 lines length, its epic-oid length does lend to it something of the status of holy scripture—something more canonical and purposefully-structured than a clan fable.

B ut the monster slaying and fight scenes are playful—not unlike modern fantasy lit, if you ignore the extreme agèdness of the manuscript.

T he repetitions in Beowulf might be thought to be driven by the poetics or vocality of the thing. But the repeats have meta-linguistic effects, too. There is a normative fugue-like texture—which makes us notice the variations or ‘counterpoint’. These come alive in Bagby’s performance, whereas they are likely otherwise to remain mute on the printed page. You have to experience the thing ‘live’ to really ‘get it’.

T he epicness of Beowulf is conveyed by many aspects of its style—for example, the namelessness of many of the speakers. We don't know the messenger’s name; we don’t know the name of the mourning woman at the end of the poem; we don’t know the names of the retainers who ride around Beowulf’s funeral pyre. We’re not meant to know them; their names aren’t important to the story-as-epic. In fact, selective anonymity is part of what makes us know it’s an ‘epic’.

T he poet’s point of view is one recalling some much earlier time—and Bagby’s performance, a reenactment of that recall. He brings that recalled world “forward”, into the Present, just as the poet did into his own Present.

I ask myself, ‘Why?’ Why would anybody want to do this, as a performative sort of social or collective memory? For what purposes? What good would it do?

F or the poet, this wasn’t a clannish or courtly entertainment—nor, for us, is it some minor amusement to be consumed quickly and forgotten. It has real substance—weight. It’s a timely political statement—according to John Hill. He notes that the medieval world was “institutionally more complex... church and clergy, king and court. It was socially stratified for different levels of nobility and landholdings, including slavery, and was economically organized for both mundane and prestige trade... Wessex and Mercia and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are in a world of sometimes-hostile arrivals and departures, of aetheling tensions and assassinations... Perhaps the narrative pulse of Beowulf ... might be taken by Anglo-Saxons as a model, for their times, of good customs, heroic/fame-enhancing behaviour, and great kingship in at least two forms: the two-generational Danish model and the Beowulfian model of sovereignty, enlarged to include broader kinship amity.”

A rrivals, especially unanticipated ones, are electric with possibilities—with unexpected surprises ranging from the pleasant and desired, to the tense and potentially dangerous, to the terrible and unwished-for... Departures are often auspicious, full of promise and hope, although they also signify terror's monstrous flight... Each human departure involves an enlargement of possibility, with Beowulf's departure from the Danes being the most expansively promising one in the poem... In those moments, either positive or negative outcomes are possible, indeed sometimes intertwining or sometimes just lurking as potential. They inform the social action of the poem even as the many arrivals and departures create its overall and variable narrative pulse.”
— John Hill, p. 5.

I n comparable fashion, the globalized world of 2009, torn by conflict and economic recession as it is, is institutionally still more complex. More complex, even, than just one year ago. Traditional governance and sovereignty are seriously disrupted in several parts of the world—including, so it seems, here in the U.S. Regulatory institutions seemingly have been co-opted by the very people and organizations who they were intended to regulate, with catastrophic results.

I n other words, Beowulf is way more than a ‘creative anachronism’ or medieval ‘curio’ or museum-piece. It’s a parable for—oh, say, now.

K ennings’ are a significant feature in Beowulf. They’re evocative phrases that stand for everyday things. They’re not cute euphemisms/amphilogisms, nor are they comedic sarcasms. They’re not coy ways to avoid saying an ‘unlucky’ word—like ‘death’—thereby to avoid inadvertently inviting the thing-that-shall-not-be-named into your midst (as the Tlingit and other traditional peoples believe).

Y es, the kennings are alliteration- and meter-appropriate “fits” for the contexts where they occur in the text. But they’re far more than that—and it’s ‘cool’ to hear Bagby perform these gems and pour into them their real, full-blown meaning.

F or example, the skald calls the clan ‘Spear-Danes’—evoking a bellicosity that maybe Danes aren’t so famous for anymore. He calls the sea a ‘whale-road’—this evokes a liveliness and interspecies danger that we scarcely think of anymore, in the era of modern ships, and commoditized human-centric seaway-as-inanimate-resource, and GPS nav. A king is called a ‘ring-giver’ or, at other times, a ‘breaker-of-rings’—evoking not only autocratic privilege but merit-based social generosity and, alternately, unjust/capricious renunciations by those who wield power. The king as ‘guardian-of-hoards’ suggests not only personal wealth and power but a devotion to the public interest and the commonweal—far more public-centered than current or recent notions of a ‘Strong Unitary Executive’.

Sleep-of-the-sword—Death
Mighty-wanderer-of-wastelands—horror, Death (Grendel)
Raven-harvest—battle-field corpses
Battle-sweat—blood
War-friend—sword
Mind’s-worth—honor, valor
Horse-of-the-whale-road—ship
Foamy-necked-floater—ship
Gold-friend—retainer, loyal knight
Gannett’s-bath—sea
World-candle—sun

T here are these many fantastic kennings in Beowulf. To me, the devices seem less ‘formulaic’ or prosodical or circumlocutory than they are ‘out-of-the-box-thinking-compelling’. Benjamin Bagby confronts us and helps us to constructively absorb this deeply disturbing tale and derive new contemporary meanings from it. Beautiful performing art, yes, it is that. But, in the same spirit as J.R.R. Tolkien once argued that Beowulf is the poet’s elegy for (and warning from—) a culture long-gone, Bagby exhorts us to hope and strive in order that our own cultures survive the epic challenges that we presently face.

T    he dyers of the wolf’s fangs
squandered the Reddened Swan’s meat;
The hawk of the sword’s dew
fed on the heroes of the field—
The serpents of the Geats’ moons
fulfilled the Will of the Irons.
   ... by Egil Skallagrimsson, warrior/embedded-journalist at Brunanburh.”
  — Jorge Luis Borges, The kenning. New Yorker, 26-JAN-1976.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Dallapiccola on Children’s Rights and Duties: Quaderno di Annalibera

Luigi Dallapiccola was was 48 years old when Quaderno was composed, nominally as a gift for the eponymous Annalibera, his daughter, on the occasion of her eighth birthday. [Annalibera Dallapiccola was born on the day of the liberation of Italy, whence the ‘libera’. Prof. Annalibera Dallapiccola is now a scholar in Asian and Indian art and is an Honorary Professor of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Edinburgh. Formerly she was Professor of Art History, South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University.] The Quaderno is composed of eleven variations on a twelve-tone sequence based on the name B-A-C-H (the pitches B-flat, A, C, and B).

Surely we can wonder whether Luigi meant Quaderno as a veiled criticism of government: projecting children as analogous to the general public (under Mussolini, or under subsequent regimes). After all, other of Luigi’s compositions were famously political.

But there is plenty of evidence that we should take Quaderno at face value—as a collection of etudes addressed by father to daughter. For one thing, the title ‘Quaderno’ recalls Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Notebook’ for his daughter, Anna Magdalena. Other correspondences include Dallapiccola’s recapitulation of Bach’s contrapunctus subtitles for movements in strict canon, as in Art of the Fugue.

Quaderno’s movement titles are (in English) as follows:

Symbol;
Accents;
First Counterpoint;
Lines;
Second Counterpoint (Canon in contrary motion);
Friezes;
Andantino amoroso and Third Counterpoint (Canon cancrizans);
Rhythms;
Colors;
Shadows; and
Quatrain.

These movements are lovingly didactic in a fatherly way—their names and their playful, thematically-expansive musical content are difficult to construe as covert political polemic.

Some 15 years ago David Lewin published a detailed transformational analysis of the Simbolo movement. Simbolo is marked ‘Quasi lento, misterioso’ and fully lives up to the misterioso. Regarding Simbolo, Lewin said: “The group [of transformations] is not a list of immediate aural intuitions or intentions ... Rather than trying to make our transformations denote phenomenological presences in a blow-by-blow narrative, we can more comfortably regard them as ways of structuring an abstract space ... through which the piece moves” (Lewin, p. 34).

If Dallapiccola wrote that the tone row in Simbolo isn’t meant to be perceptible to the listener, then we should take him at his word. He was, at the ripe age of 48, in a period of rapid change and learning—we hear plenty of discovery and exploratory gestures in these ‘etudes’. We can also readily conceive of what the intense, inquisitive Annalibera may have been like at that age—and imagine the motives that may have been at work in the father, trying to create something beautiful and highly symbolic ‘for her’, to be hers. It is one hell of a birthday gift. And, as things go in the Age of Reason—late in childhood and before the onset of adolescence—it was the perfect time for Luigi to make such a gesture. Misterioso—one of the duties of a composer (of a musician; of any artist) is to trade on the novel and non-obvious. Il Luigi ci istruisce così!

There is no reason why music theorists should give undue emphasis to tone-row or other serial compositional methods—giving priority to the ‘system’ seriously mis-represents the compositional process. It does violence to the music and dishonor to the composer! Dallapiccola especially was no slave to the [twelve-tone, serialist] ‘system’.

Even in Quaderno where a tone-row is perceptible, it does not dominate. As the canon or other variations progress, the role of the tone-row becomes less and less clear. Or, more accurately, the force of the ‘system’—the thematic mechanics—begins to cope with the accretion of other equally-legitimate guiding principles, other thematic genera. How like a Bach fugue this is! Once a theme is developed, it is absorbed into layers upon layers, variation upon variation. Futile to analyze a fugue by exhaustively identifying subject, counter-subject, and so on! Dried insects preserved in an entomologist’s collection have more fidelity to nature than this!

Based on the evidence we see in Quaderno, I don’t believe Dallapiccola relied on twelve-tone rows compulsively. There are so many other factors, that present themselves to the ear, that should inform a faithful analysis true to Dallapiccola’s motives and intentions. Above all, analysis should enlighten the performer and the listener.

So my speculation is this: Luigi Dallapiccola created Quaderno not only as a special gift, but also as a way of memorializing his sentiment(ality) about childhood. He was concerned about children as well as other members of society, both before the war and in the post-War period. A highly private man, he maintained a traditional idea that what went on in the family was nobody’s business, least of all government’s. But he was not a traditionalist as concerns the rights and duties of children, from what we can tell in his writings. Poverty and social exclusion may be resistant to solution by public means, but that simply implies that individual families must redouble their efforts. Children, too, have moral standing and therefore have duties commensurate with their rights. The childhood privilege of engaging in fanciful, creative and artistic pursuits carries with it, for example, an obligation to exert effort in good faith, to pay attention—for the children to avail themselves of the opportunities that the parents set before them.

If there is a better way to talk about this than through the notions of ethics and children’s rights, perhaps Luigi Dallapiccola knew such a way. The embarrassingly prevalent and pernicious (U.S.?) ideology—which insists that parents should be like gods to their children and that children are basically property, in a status of utter subjection to the will of the parents; and which defers to some distant time in adolescence any accountability by children for their acts—surely had no place in Luigi’s world-view.

Of course under U.N. and E.U. resolutions, children are emphatically not property, but they are nonetheless ‘extensions’ of the parents’ identities. Emotionally and biologically, this is natural. And, legally, this is true as well. Children progressively acquire autonomy or sovereignty—increasing rights, commensurate with increasing responsibilities and abilities. They discover and progressively grow beyond the parents’ identities. Quaderno is a gentle exhortation, by Luigi to Annalibera, to have serious fun in this process—of finding her own identity, of finding her own voice, of finding the good in the world and in other individuals and other cultures.

In summary, children are by nature ‘becoming’, not yet arrived into the fullness of identity. Of course, all of us are all always still ‘becoming’ no matter how old we may be, but children are more so. To Luigi Dallapiccola, children were persons to be taken seriously, as subjects with moral standing who have complex and evolving interests that merit public concern and complex and evolving duties that require the attention of the children as well as the attention of their parents and of society. Etudes are at this boundary: they are emblems of the social duty to give (parents’ and society’s duty of care), and they are emblems of a complementary duty to receive (the child’s duty of care). In a way, Quaderno is a meditation on ‘children as children’ and ‘parents as parents’ instead of as proto-adults and gods, respectively.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Robert Taub: Aesthetics, Quantum Tunneling, and the Musical Path of Most Resistance

Mountain Paths of Greater and Lesser Resistance

R obert Taub, a Babbitt champion, played ‘Reflections’ (1974), a stunning work for piano and synthesized tape, and ‘Canonical Form’ (1983), a seminal piano work in which contrapuntal lines get put through innumerable combinations and permutations. Yet on the surface, the piano piece captivates with its bold shifts of mood and texture: incisive and clipped one moment, delicate and pensive the next.”
— Anthony Tommasini, NYT, 12-MAY-2006.

I recently heard a portion of Robert Taub’s account of Beethoven’s Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, on NPR’s Morning Edition program while in the car, on my way driving to work. Robert Taub is a Princeton- (class of 1977) and Juilliard-trained American pianist known for his performance of contemporary classical music. He has performed and recorded many of the works of Babbitt, Powell, Persichetti, and Brümmer—as well as Beethoven, Scriabin, and others. Robert Taub was Artist-in-Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study from 1994 through 2000. Robert Taub appeared in November 2005 with Rob Kapilow at the Folly Theater in Kansas City on the Friends of Chamber Music’s ‘What Makes It Great?’ series. And I had heard him play many years ago, when Taub was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. But I have not heard him perform live for a long while. Hearing him on the radio prompted me to revisit Taub’s recordings and try to understand why I admire his playing so much.

M y conclusion is that, while he creates an illusion of relative ease, Robert does not take any ‘easy’ routes—not in the Sessions or Babbitt, and not in the Beethoven. In fact, he seems always to cleave to paths less traveled. He takes the ‘path of most resistance’, not the ‘path of least resistance.’

W hy? I would ask Robert if I get the opportunity. But for now, and in view of the previous post’s reflections on Andrew Armstrong’s playing, I think the reason—for Robert, for Andrew, for many others—has to do with personal temperament and avidity for risk, and with personal motivations and how music comes to be a prominent part of one’s life. After all, this playing is not a ‘job’. Artistic integrity is not about free-will, choosing, and then cohering with one’s choice—as if one could simply decide what one is or could be, pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and become that. Instead, it’s about discovery—of the truth in the music, and of one’s own ‘chops’—and acceptance of what one has been given or what one has found out.

In his ‘Principia Ethica,’ G. E. Moore asserted that the property ‘Good’ is simple, indefinable, and non-natural [timeless]. Good has an immediacy and immanence that are impervious to analysis: the indisputable aesthetic unity of the fine wine in the glass. That’s what I hear in Taub’s playing, just as I hear it in Armstrong’s playing. The playing is beautifully crafted, yes, and with no unnecessary tension—only the amounts and types necessary to accomplish the aesthetic and expressive purposes. But there is their clear musical ‘vision’ and this burning desire to express it. The fact that the need to express it entails arduous treks up very high peaks—or tunneling straight through them—that’s just the way things are.

W hat is a ‘path of most resistance’? Well, the path of least resistance describes the physical or metaphorical pathway that provides the smallest resistance to forward motion by a given object or entity, among a set of alternative paths. In physics, the concept is often used to explain why an object or entity (electrons, for the flow of electricity) follows a given path. So the path of most resistance is the opposite: the one path among the set of alternatives that presents the maximum obstacle or energy requirement, the most improbable path.

But in quantum physics there is the possibility of ‘tunneling’, where particles behave in a probabilistic rather than deterministic manner. My impressions of Taub’s playing of Sessions or Babbitt are that he is engaging in quantum tunneling, phrase to phrase.

A n aphorism is not a mere fragment, a morsel of thought: it is a proposition which only makes sense in relation to the state of forces that it expresses, and which changes sense, which must change sense, according to the new forces which it is capable of attracting.”
— Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. xiii.

T aub plays Babbitt as though the phrases were quantum Nietzschean aphorisms—a totally different way of doing philosophy, and a totally different way of doing aesthetics: this is maybe the difference in how Taub enters into this music so beautifully, how he makes it his own.”
— DSM.

In a manner reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s, Jacques Derrida’s or Hélène Cixous’s sense of ‘performing,’ Taub’s playing is like a text that resists stereotypical acts of reading by acting-out his own idiomatic identity. Some may think his taste ‘out-of-step’ with conventional wisdom, but that waywardness and deviance are the basis for his originality and timeless [non-natural] beauty. He’s a musicians’ musician, but one whose diverse, novel, and sometimes dissident styles of playing are accessible to almost anyone with the inclination to listen.

W hat else? There is an innocence about his tone and his phrasing that belies his scholarship and worldliness. There is no law of physics against what he is about to do, and so he does it. Whatever is not forbidden is permitted! A barrier looms in front of him—a musical passage that presents formidable technical challenges—and quantum tunneling kicks in. Suddenly, he is on the other side.

His pedaling technic, among other things, is noteworthy. Listening to it, I was led to revisit the papers that Bruno Repp at Yale published about ten years ago. In that research, Bruno studied conservatory pianists and the biomechanics of their pedal depressions and pedal releases as a function of tempo and musical style. Excerpts from Beethoven and Brahms sonatas were a particular focus of Repp’s research.

Repp found that there was no stable or consistent aspect of personal pedaling style that generalized among the pianists he studied. There was no constant phase-relationship between the periodic key depressions and either peda depressions or pedal releases, nor was there a consistent delay of pedal actions relative to manual actions.

But pedal-change time (PCT) can’t decrease indefinitely as tempo increases. And the kinematics of hand and foot actions changes with global changes in tempo—the velocity of pedal depressions and releases tends to increase with tempo, and the depth of pedal depressions tends to decrease—so that motor delays (both absolute, in milliseconds, and relative, as a percentage of inter-onset interval (IOI) ) are a function of tempo.

Repp found that there were different individual tolerances for overlap between successive sonorities. Long PRT and long key overlaps result in more appealing legato and tend to be mastered relatively late in a pianist’s development. In terms of the neurophysiology, the longer these intervals are, the harder they are to control, according to Repp. But the skill to achieve long PRT and long key-pedal overlap enables elite pianists to systematically vary these times over wider and wider ranges to achieve their expressive purposes—one of the ‘secrets’ of elite legato technic that we hear in Taub’s playing—the Beethoven Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, that I heard on the radio, for example.

T he sense of disappointment philosophers suffer from becomes the fundament of profoundly reformist religious and political philosophies called ideologies. Because ideologues radically underestimate the amount of value that is contained—that could be contained—by the world, they suffer from a deep-seated, ever-to-be-frustrated feeling that the world stands in need of a special kind of transformation, or that it must somehow be transcended if human life is to be made worth living. The unique feature of the sought-for change is that it depends on a thoroughgoing reconception of the world. Their thought is that, since the value of the things in the world as we presently conceive it to be is insufficient, we must conceive it wholly anew as the first step toward remaking it—if we are ever to discover the things that would give it sufficient value. Moore responds to this by arguing that such a reconception is not merely unnecessary and self-defeating, but the cause of great unhappiness. Whatever value is to be had by new things results from their being things human beings have known to be good from time immemorial. To try to make any of these things into something never before beheld is to try to make something into what it is not... Our attitude toward the [real things in the world in its current configuration] must then be one of inadvertent denigration rather than enjoyment.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 172.

M oore’s argument for the indivisibility of Good leaves no room for regret upon the sacrifice of a smaller good for the sake of a greater good. More importantly, although his doctrine of organic unities leaves it open for him to say that the greatest of goods depends on something bad, this is a possibility he explicitly rejects. Immediately, this is suprising, as he finds tragedy—the artistic representation of suffering and evil—to be a very great good. But he maintains that the actions and emotions that art displays for our wonderment (in its presentation of the eternal struggle between good and evil) can rest on make-believe rather than reflect anything real... Moore’s thought is an exercise in the dialectic of innocence rather than of lost innocence itself.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 175.

T o be completely innocent is to be unaware that there is any perspective or condition in opposition to which a case for innocence needs to be made—it is to be unaware even of the tricks of thought that lead the misguided to deny innocence. It follows then that anyone who attempts to diagnose those tricks of thought in order to make the case for innocence cannot be completely innocent. But if only someone who is no longer innocent can make the case for innocence, then to make the case is to guarantee its defeat. The possibility of innocence as a permanent condition of life cannot be said. But because it could only be done against a backdrop that is impossible, it also cannot be shown. For it even to occur to someone to try to state Moore’s [theory of innocence], he must consider that a simple and easily recoverable misunderstanding lies behind the thought of those who see the world as standing in need of redemption. The impulse to see the world falsely ... must be of the depth of a simple arithmetical mistake.”
— Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory, p. 176.

Robert Taub recording of Scriabin sonatas