jwilzewske

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Performance Values: Deranged Self-Help Aims at ‘Having It All’, Or Not

S himoff offers a breakthrough approach to being happy, one that doesn’t depend on achievements, goals, money, relationships, or anything else ‘out there.’ Most books on happiness tell you to find the things that make you happy and do more of them. Although there’s nothing wrong with that, it won’t bring you the kind of deep and lasting happiness most people long for—the kind you’ll never lose, no matter what happens in your life. Based on cutting-edge research and knowledge from the world’s leading experts in the fields of positive psychology and neurophysiology, plus interviews with 100 truly happy people, this life-changing book provides a powerful, proven 7-step program that will enable you to be happier right now—no matter where you start. Studies show that each of us has a ‘happiness set-point’—a fixed range of happiness we tend to return to throughout our life—that’s approximately 50 percent genetic and 50 percent learned. In the same way you’d crank up the thermostat to get comfortable on a chilly day, you can actually raise your happiness set-point! The holistic 7-step program at the heart of Happy for No Reason encompasses ‘Happiness Habits’ for all areas of life: personal power, mind, heart, body, soul, purpose, and relationships.”
— Publisher’s jacket-blurb.

T he performances rarely rise above an undergraduate, state-school level, and often sink below. The recordings sound one-dimensional, and the Kohon Quartet sounds as if they play on plywood instruments. However, if you’re researching repertoire, this is an important recording, and hopefully these beautiful pieces will be visited by greater artists in the near future! … True, one would not mistake the Kohon Quartet for The Emerson, but on these late-Sixties recordings they perform with enthusiasm and commitment.”
— Customer Reviewers commenting on Kohon Quartet CD, Early String Quartet in the U.S.A., on Amazon.com website.

M y playing is so much better, I think, since I read Shimoff’s book and began to understand the 7 points. And my happiness set-point is better, and I’m more satisfied with my playing. Do you agree that, in the past month or so, I’m playing more freely, transparently?”
— Anonymous, overheard in a conservatory lunchroom.

Well, no. You’re not playing so much better. And, while ‘Chicken Soup for the Acquisitive Cyborg Soul’ hasn’t yet been written, I can see by the overheard remark above that there’s clearly a market for it, even among classically-trained musicians. Do you admire Lang Lang then—his playing and all that he stands for? And is it wrong for me to admire the oh-so-human mid-Sixties recordings by the Kohon Quartet?

Unlike other animals, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves as well as others. And our mendacity is probably embedded in our evolutionary past and our genes and thereby in our unconscious. In other words, we may not be able to resist our tendencies, to deceive ourselves in this way, to try to comfort ourselves. I don’t blame people for buying the Shimoff book, and I won’t argue with people who seem to find it helpful.

T he insistence on persvering, on living life in this ‘new normal’, is highly reminiscent of that post-9/11 trope that begged Americans to go out, shop, fly, do anything so that the terrorists would not win... The Plan’s ‘You are the architect of your life’ [est-like] motto is never completely dismantled. These characters who so often dream of different lives actually do attain them quite frequently.”
— Ashley Sayeau, Americanitis: Self-Help and the American Dream in Six Feet Under, Akass & McCabe, p.104.

S ix Feet Under attempts to analyze the ironies in self-help, and, consequently, in American views of success, individualism, and power... Is my life living up to the American Dream? Is that a valid question, or a narcissistic one? And, if my main objective is to help myself, what am I doing with others? In asking these questions, the series performs the logic of self-help—both its silly and its seductive sides... So, what do we make of our times when all this [Shimoff-type] nonsense actually works [or helps me be happier or more successful]?”
— Ashley Sayeau, Americanitis: Self-Help and the American Dream in Six Feet Under, Akass & McCabe, p.97.

R ationalizing, selectively focusing, evading, overcompensating, and so on make repression possible. Neither the repressing nor the acquiring of the wishful belief essentially involves intentional action. Both are tropisms. While the self-deceiver’s activities are motivated in that they have a purpose—to relieve his anxiety (and hence the belief, since it reduces anxiety, is always welcome)—they are not done ‘from’ or ‘for’ a reason.”
— Annette Barnes, Seeing through Self-Deception, p. 32.

T he objection that steroids provide an unnatural assist to performance is inchoate. Many of the means and ends which athletes use and seek are unnatural. From Nautilus machines to Gatorade, their lives are filled with drugs and devices whose aim is to maximize performance.”
— Norman Fost (bioethicist), New York Times, 1983.

T he performer exhibits a range of behaviour coincident with the sounds made which influence what we hear and how we judge what we hear. The ‘personalist’ anticipates the individualistic in performance—the person-centred particularities of performance and manner. Much value is pegged to this quality, which is richer than uniqueness, individuality, or idiosyncrasy. An individualistic performance is not just unique, individual, or idiosyncratic; it displays the signature of a person... Those who have seen Glenn Gould play Bach are invariably drawn to his mannerism of conducting the active voice with his ‘spare’ hand. Watching this allows listeners to separate the voices much more effectively. The uncanny clarity in Gould’s voice treatment is further heightened by this quirk. Further, one becomes more intricately involved in Gould’s way of making this music. Whoever remained impervious [to this]? Every performance manifests the dimensions of musicality and musicianship in the form of (1) expression and (2) technical skill. The former displays affect, mood, personality, and, for the personalist, draws its power from some inner source on which it is modeled... Virtuosity [only] matters because of an obvious banality of life; namely, most things that most humans do competently most of the time are simple to do. Most people can do them. We are, for most things, functionally intersubstitutable. Virtuosity diplays the near miracle of a mere human being doing something savagely difficult perfectly—on call... True virtuosity is a temporary suspension of predictable human fallibility. Recognizing this, one draws once more upon the inner source without which the [temporary] victory over human limitation loses all substance.”
— Stan Godlovitch, p. 140.

Popular marketing success though Shimoff may be, that doesn’t mean I have to like the book or its philosophy. It doesn’t mean I have to become a member of this cult or believe in its tenets. The est-like, Shimoff-type quest is, despite its assertions to the contrary, a quest that seeks to acquire more and more authority, more and more power, more invincibility—more and more individual happiness for the adherent. The quest denies our imperfections and mortality, and betrays our humanity. The quest is sovereignty-obsessed. It’s deranged.

I n the broadest sense, integrity in musical performance entails acting in accordance with that core set of principles or commitments that makes performance interpreters who they are. But while integrity thus entails the notion of authenticity, there is more to it than that. As well as consistency, integrity involves wholeness. It locates itself not just in isolated, discrete instances of adherence to principle but in consistent exemplification of the latter over time. The subject of integrity is an entire life conceived has having a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the person of integrity is someone whose life is ‘of a piece’, whose self is ‘whole and integrated’ [or whose aging or disabled self is coping in an ethical, admirable way with the ravages of age and disability and with the imperilment of the former self who is thus ravaged].”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 98.

You, in the conservatory lunchroom—your music will be commodified and treated as the coinage of a power fetish, if you continue on your current path. Your stories of mastery and superiority may accumulate, your virtuosic performances may build and multiply, but you and your imagined ‘competitors’ are still mortal, still beatable. The game you are playing at is one where everyone loses. Everything that was directly lived and experienced ‘recedes into mere representation’, as Guy Debord once said. A person engaging in this quest foolishly ‘buys into a system of spectacles and domination.’ This is not Chamber Music Tomorrow. I surely hope it’s not. If you’re going to buy a happiness book, buy Lyubomirsky's book.

Here are a couple of spreadsheet questionnaires I created, from instruments that appear in Lyubomirsky. You can click on the screenshots to download them and try them out.

Spreadsheet version of Subjective Happiness Scale of Lyubomirsky

Spreadsheet version of Lyubomirsky Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic

I n front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am; the one I want others to think I am; the one the photographer thinks I am; the one the photographer makes use of, to exhibit the art.”
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 13.

T he aesthetic and artistic values realized in an incorrect performance of a work can nonetheless bear upon the appreciation of it, if the values themselves would be realizable in a correct performance—one that met whatever conditions of correctness the performance in question fails to meet... Even though a performance of Elgar’s cello concerto may depart from the score in certain minor respects, we can still refer qualities found in the performance to the performed work as long as we take these departures to be inessential to the qualities in question. What matters, then, is not whether a performance of it in which a given quality is realized is itself a ‘correct’ performance, but whether that quality could have been realized in a correct performance of it. Where we judge that it could have been, we refer the quality to the performed work, if one of two further conditions is satisfied:
(1) it is a positive quality that increases the value of the work [to someone, not necessarily everyone], or
(2) if it is a negative quality, we take it that any correct performance of the work would have that quality or would be likely to have that quality—that is, that the weakness lies in the set of constraints, not in a particular way of interpreting that set of constraints.”
— Dave Davies, Art as Performance, p.218.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Neo-Neo Look: Avant-Garde in the Eye (Ear) of Once-and-Future Beholders

D uring the 17th century there was great interest amongst scholars and performers in the question of temperament and use of more ‘extreme’ keys. Old quarter-comma meantone tunings were gradually giving way to circulating temperaments (called ‘unequal’ temperaments today) where there was freedom of modulation. In meantone, pure major thirds are on C, D, E-flat, E, F, G, A, B-flat, whilst unusable thirds are on C#, F#, G# (A-flat does not exist!) and B; the ‘wolf’ fifth is from G# to E-flat. As the century progressed, there were increasing signs of dissatisfaction with the old tunings, and in the F-sharp minor Praeludia we see Buxtehude making a clear avant-garde statement to the world, for here is a piece which is totally unplayable in the old tunings.”
— Douglas Hollick.

The term ‘avant-garde’ usually means contemporary new music. But consider the premise that ‘contemporary’ is context-dependent—‘new’ is always new in the eye of the then-current beholder. Each age has its avant-garde, its innovators, anarchists. ‘Avant-garde’ can be accurately applied to innovative works of any era. Douglas Hollick notes that the avant-garde tends in each era to be linked to and critically dependent upon technology: the great organs of North Germany in the first half of the 17th Century were pushing the technology ‘envelope’ with the architectural requirements arising from their size and geometry; with the mechanics and mechanical engineering requirements associated with their pneumatics; and with metallurgical and 17th-Century machine-shop requirements in the production and machining of metal for the pipes. Electroacoustic music of the 1950s was comparably dependent upon then-current developments in electronics.

Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707) lived his whole life near the Baltic. Buxtehude grew up in Helsingør, Skåne, where his father was organist, tinkerer, and amateur metallurgist. The young Buxtehude served as organist at Helsingborg St. Mariae (1658 - 60) and Helsingør St. Mariae (1660 - 68). In 1668 he was appointed to St. Marien in Lübeck. Sadly, not much of Lübeck survived the WWII bombing of 1942. Although St. Marien was rebuilt, none of the original interior or Buxtehude-era pipe organs survives. We can therefore only make educated guesses about the sounds that Buxtehude composed and created there. But some of the most inspired and convincing conjectures imaginable come from Hollick.

M ost of Buxtehude’s Praeludia are for organ with pedals. But BuxWV 162 is for manuals only, and it can be played either on the organ or the harpsichord. Perhaps one of the least obviously ‘avant-garde’ works in the programme, it does show the desire in the later 17th Century for the freedom to modulate beyond the confines of the old meantone tuning, here moving to E minor, and desperately needing the dominant of that key, B major with its D-sharp. With the luxury of recording, it has been possible to use a variant of the normal meantone for this work and the Weckmann, with E-flat replaced by D-sharp. The final harpsichord work by Johann Christoph Bach probably dates from near the end of the century, and is in the (then) ‘very modern’ key of E-flat major. This is a key that is completely impossible in meantone, and clearly demonstrates the move towards greater tonal freedom in keyboard tunings by the end of the 17th Century.”
— Douglas Hollick, liner notes, Baroque Avant-garde.

Hollick’s performances reveal how Buxtehude’s improvisational works—toccatas, praeludia, chaconnes, passacaglia, canzonas, and so on—had to depart from then-conventional quarter-comma meantone tuning. There would’ve been horrific wolf-tones in meantone temperament. Do you hear the interval of C#-F as a diminished fourth, or as a major third? It depends on how the scale is tempered. Have a look at Bill Sethares’s excellent book for lots of examples and clear illustrations on the CD that comes with the book.

S ince, through the grace of God, music has so progressed and changed, it would be absurd if we had not tried to improve the keyboard, so that well-composed modern pieces should not be ruined, and a howl come out of them … Some would like to say that one should not compose in every key, such as C-sharp, F-sharp and G-sharp. But I say that if one does not do it, another will …”
— Andreas Werckmeister, Orgel-Probe, 1698.

The intense chromaticism in much of Buxtehude’s writing is the locus of much of his envelope-pushing. But there’s ample rhythmic iconoclasm in Buxtehude as well. For example, the insistent, repeated bass line is varied but lends an avant-garde Baltic / North German ‘straight-ahead’ quality to many of the pieces. Eighteenth-century Baltic Lutheran avant-garde, that is.

T hat’s a lotta ‘look’! [so extreme or excessive, in fact, that I really recommend that you reconsider what you’ve composed, and reflect on whether it will suit the client for whom the piece is intended]”
— Tim Gunn, Parsons New School for Design, ProjectRunway (BravoTV television series), 2007.

Toward the audience, this music maintains a ‘missionary’, ‘therapeutic’ intentional stance. As such, Buxtehude should be considered ‘avant-garde-proper’ instead of ‘neo-avant-garde’. In other words, Buxtehude didn’t compose in this way as a matter of personal cliché or throw-down creative novelty or cultural conquest or as a gesture of ironical fashion-conscious ‘lookism’. This music is ‘precarious’ but not narcissistically so. And that is part of Buxtehude’s enduring, sempervirens ever-green charm—part of the excitement and authenticity and power to captivate our ears and minds as Buxtehude’s music can do, even today. That is part of the ‘newness’ that Hollick so ably recreates for us. Baroque avant-garde!

Dieterich Buxtehude: Fantasizing? Inebriated? Mad?

H ollick’s wide repertoire includes major works like the Goldberg Variations and Clavierübung III of Bach, and also works by lesser known composers such as Kuhnau, Benda, Moyreau and Séjan. His programmes often have a particular theme (such as ‘Fantasy, Inebriation and Madness’ [!!] ), and his mixed harpsichord-and-organ programmes can be particularly interesting.”