GG: calling all boffins

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>]

At 02:46 AM 10/2/02 -0400, Elmer Elevator wrote:
>All scientists and mathematicians on this List -- come out, come out
>wherever you are! (...)
>And it was my experience in high school and college that there was an
>intimate connection between the hands, hearts and brains on keyboards and
>in the orchestra, and those in the sciences and mathematics. We don't
>talk much about this phenomenon, and why the two realms seem so naturally
>to be so intimately related, but I think it's a fascinating topic.
>
>Call this OT if you like -- but I'd love to read the testimony of our shy
>scientists and mathematicians who've been haunting f_minor, how they
>integrate Nature and number with music and their love of Glenn Gould.


I guess that makes me a...what?  I had an undergraduate major in
mathematics, and for most of my career (and currently) I'm employed as a
software developer.  Intricate logic and problem-solving are my daily
bread: building (or untangling!) deeply nested structures of shape and
detail, data relationships and meaning.

BUT...I have a doctorate in harpsichord performance with some sub-degrees
in music history and the other "early" keyboard instruments.  I was a
pianist until the first year of college, then switched to all the others
(harpsichord, fortepiano, organ, clavichord) and went on with them.  As
much as I enjoy mathematical structures (and earning good money in them),
music is my passion.  And it's really very similar: deeply nested
structures of shape and detail, data relationships (notes/phrases) and
meaning.

The artistic part of both these fields is in seeing and embracing
irregularity, flow, beauty that can never be described fully by rational
explanation.  My computer programs are designed to withstand all sorts of
random events, unpredictable influences, user error, anything else
adverse, and roll with the punches and go along robustly.  It means I have
to imagine anything that might happen and make sure we're covered, as far
as possible, thinking "outside the box" of a design.  When the real
product is built, the platonic elegance of the idea has to withstand the
dynamics of real life: flexibility is a key to success.  Interpretation of
a design spec is quite a bit like interpretation of a musical score: there
are always many, many layers of information that are not made explicit,
and the programmer/player has to peer into all those spaces to come up
with something that really, REALLY works.  A completely literal approach
to the facts doesn't cut it; something will come up to challenge an
unstated assumption or a change in the configuration, and a literal
approach collapses.  The more completely rational something is, as a goal,
the more the slightest irrationality will come along and ruin it.

I'm also a bridge player, and this game exercises and rewards those same
skills of creative thinking.  It's like playing chamber music.  I've
written an essay about how bridge principles apply to life (and vice
versa); I use these same ideas in my business relationships and in my
music-making.  It's all interconnected.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/bridge-principles.htm

I've met several younger people who are also math/music crossover
achievers; we've had interesting discussions about all this stuff.

This overlap is nothing new, of course.  Bach knew it.  It was the
standard academic curriculum in his time, and earlier.  Music and various
branches of mathematics form the "quadrivium."  Viz:

-----
(from http://www.cosmopolis.com/villa/liberal-arts.html )

Based on the types of studies that were pursued in the Classical world,
the Seven Liberal Arts became codified in late antiquity by such writers
as Varro and Martianus Capella. In medieval times, the Seven Liberal Arts
offered a canonical way of depicting the realms of higher learning.

The Liberal Arts were divided into the Trivium ("the three roads") and the
Quadrivium ("the four roads").

The Trivium consisted of:

Grammar
Rhetoric
Logic

The Quadrivium consisted of:

Arithmetic -- Number in itself
Geometry -- Number in space
Music, Harmonics, or Tuning Theory -- Number in time
Astronomy or Cosmology -- Number in space and time

The medieval Quadrivium thus followed the division of mathematics made by
the Pythagoreans. Recently, mathematics has been defined as "the study of
patterns in space and time," which very much resembles the ancient
Pythagorean understanding of mathematics.
(...)

-----

Patterns.  Yes.

So, what do I appreciate about Glenn Gould's music-making?  I think the
early Gould was a genius.  A perfect blend of instinct and analytical
preparation went into his performances; he listened to his intuition and
let his innate musicality express things beautifully.  And he knew how to
communicate with a real live audience: the "party tricks" and projection
to the balcony that he later deplored.

And then he took his art out of the realm of real-time projection, to
focus instead on the more experimental and permanent medium of sound
recordings.  He explored the performer's and listener's perception of
music outside the conventional notion of a musical performance as an event
(and the numinous qualities of such an event).  He created some
extraordinary things there in a different space, a space that doesn't have
any real-time listeners in it.  "Time is to the musician what space is to
the painter."  (Who said that?)  Gould showed us a different way of
listening to time.  The later Gould was a different genius: one who took
rationality (and rationalization) to extremes.  He showed us a different
aspect of the numinous: a glimpse into timeless space, where order
(supposedly) trumps the normal disorder of daily life.

And I find him sometimes infuriating.  In plenty of his interpretations it
seems he's putting something unbelievably eccentric out there just to get
our attention, like a bad little boy pulling a prank, or a polemicist out
to shock us out of our daily stupor.  (I found Gould's approaches almost
completely winning while I was in high school and early college; but then
as I continued my music study beyond that, I have become more and more
disenchanted with Gould's stunts.  He was a brilliant dilettante, more
concerned with constructing or rationalizing his own private truth than
lining up with everybody else's.  That might sound harsh, but I mean it as
a compliment: he recast the lapses in his musical knowledge as a virtue,
as they didn't distract him from his own vision.)

Gould's delivery is vital and forces one to listen to it, to confront it.
He's always stimulating and challenging.  That's why we keep listening to
*his* versions of things: he brings up ideas that have to be grappled
with.  I think it would be going too far to say he was a "musical
terrorist," but his methods and results are the same...shake the _status
quo_ at all costs, to force us to think about things we may not have
considered.  He's more like a heckler on the fringes of the musical
establishment: a guy with fascinating things to say, and unafraid to say
them, because he knows that we must pay attention to him; the points he
raises are almost always valid ones.  He's the wild card in your game, the
joker, the knuckleball, the Till Eulenspiegel that makes you reconsider
the things you thought you knew.

The danger, I think, comes in if one listens exclusively to Gould's way.
He didn't seem to give much of a rip about a composer's intentions, or
historical precedents, or even the "facts" written in a score or in
performance-practice documentation...he was eclectic, choosing only the
bits and pieces that could be made to serve his own ends, and he felt free
to change anything he didn't like (tempos, dynamics, articulations....).
Gould was a creator, not a re-creator.  His recordings are _sui generis_.
They make best sense when compared against more "normal" approaches, to
see what it is he's challenging.

Gould's way sometimes has an extraordinary aura or serenity to it, on its
own, and it can seduce a listener into not caring about any other way.
He's a singing siren: listen to him at your own peril!  I think he was a
great artist *because* his way was so strong, so compelling, so focused,
so challenging, so attention-grabbing.  His performances and writings
bring up ideas one probably hadn't considered before.  And the more one
knows about music, the more challenging Gould is.  It's like the
deliberately screwball work of another bad boy: Mozart, in "Ein
musikalischer Spass" K522.  On the surface it sounds like a legitimate,
nice piece of music, a pleasant little serenade, nothing too screwy about
it.  But the more one studies music (part-writing, harmony,
instrumentation, ensemble playing, counterpoint, phrasing, improvisation,
composition) the more this work is revealed as a brilliant parody, a
knee-slapping farce, _Mad Magazine_.  Find any available chain and yank
it.  It's hilarious in context, even funnier the more closely one pays
attention to it, while it's only mildly amusing if one misses the inside
jokes.  It might even be taken seriously if one doesn't know better, until
the fart at the end that no one can possibly miss.

I'm not making this point to imply that Gould was out to be merely funny;
but to say that the more one knows about music, the more one sees Gould as
a challenger of conventional truth as normally perceived.  Gould's
brilliant role was to be stimulating, like the piece of foreign substance
that irritates an oyster enough to go ahead and make a pearl.  If we
listen only to Gould's way, focusing on its astounding "otherness" as the
fascinating end in itself, and (God forbid!) hearing it as the norm, we're
stuck short of making that pearl.

That's my perception of Glenn Gould.  It's vital to listen to him.  And
it's vital to listen away from him, and to grow through the challenges he
forces one to confront.

As I said above, "The more completely rational something is, as a goal,
the more the slightest irrationality will come along and ruin it."
Gould's later work (pretty much anything after his retirement from the
stage) shows us the possibilities and limits of extreme rationality,
performances that are deeply ordered (as a goal) for the sake of being
ordered, to see where that takes us.  A recording can be rational forever:
it's an object that can always be revisited exactly as it was, for all its
perfections and imperfections.  Real life is not rational.  Real life is
flexibility, learning, adapting, dealing with influences.  When we hear
the same recording again after a span of many years, it sounds different
because we have changed, and the world has changed.

When I first started being a Gould fan twenty-five years ago, everything I
heard of his sounded terrific to me, convincing, because "I didn't know
any better."  (Boy, there's a dangerous phrase.)  His rationality took me
in directions I needed to grow, and I'm grateful for it.  And somewhere
between then and now, I have become somewhat disenchanted, as explained
here; I see it as a brilliantly stimulating dead end.  I'm sorry if my
saying so "ruins" Gould for anyone here.  Maybe my own role here is to
say: "Strike a balance, broaden your perspectives!"  It's in the nature of
a fan list to worship the very ground the hero walks on.  Twenty-five
years later (i.e., now) I'm the guy encouraging more than an unquestioning
devotion.  I'd like to think that 25 years of grappling with Gould have
made me into a better person than I was.

That's why I respect Gould's art: it changes the perceiver, forces every
critic (every listener, anywhere) to think and probably change.  The
beauty of the whole thing is in putting Gould into an appropriate place in
one's own universe (different for everybody, of course): he's significant.
It's what we *do* with our Gould confrontation that counts.  For me, right
now, he's mostly that irritant that has been (I hope!) inducing me to make
some worthwhile pearls.  I'm hoping to spend the next fifty years refining
my reactions to Gould, maybe changing some of them again, and continuing
to make myself into a "better" person through the process.  That's the
purpose of art, isn't it?

Anybody here who thinks he's not an irritant *for you*, that's fine too.
I respect that, just as I ask for respect of my position that he is an
irritant *for me*.  An important one.  We can disagree, and it's the
discussion that's stimulating, not so much any conclusions.  Everything I
write here is my opinion, speaking from my current stage of Gould
contemplation, and I imagine some (many?) here disagree vehemently with
the things I write.  That's fine.

-----

Getting away from Gould again...

For many years I saved a favorite greeting card that had the following
fairly well-known text on it.  I think it sums things up pretty well:


After silence, that which that comes nearest to expressing the
inexpressible is music...

Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved
to a state of unity which one thinks with the heart and feels with the
brain.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching
them to events or objects in the world.

The entire pleasure of music consists of creating illusions, and common
sense is the greatest enemy of musical appreciation.

What gives music its universal appeal is the very fact that at it is at
the same time the most subtle and intangible and the most primitive of all
arts... The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are
taught to have too much respect for music - they should be taught to love
it instead.

Too many people are trying to justify the precision with which organized
musical sound is produced rather than the energy with which it is
manipulated.

By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique; but concentrating
on technique one does not arrive at precision.

Melody is the golden thread running through the maze of tones by which the
ear is guided and the heart reached.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the piano
happens to be open; because they want to become millionaires; because of
the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful
eyes; or for no reason whatsoever.

///

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting
ideas which one has no time to write down.

The public today must pay its debt to the great composers of the past by
supporting the living creators of the present.

All human activity must pass through the period of rise, ripeness and
decline. And music has been to a certain extent fortunate in that it is
the last of the great arts to suffer this general expense.

Time is to the musician what space is to the painter.

Psychologists have found that music does things whether you like it or
not.  Fast tempos invariably raise your pulse, respiration and blood
pressure; slow music lowers them. Music hath charms to soothe the savage
beast, soften rocks, or bend knotted oak.

Good musicians execute their music, but bad ones murder it.

Some musicians take pains with music; others give them.

We can look away from pictures, but we can't listen away from sounds.

It is not necessary to understand music; it is only necessary to enjoy it.

Of all the arts, music is practiced most. Music is a kind of counting
performed by the mind without knowing that it is counting.

The hardest thing in the world is to start an orchestra, and the next
hardest, to stop it.

There should be music in every house - except the one next door.

THE MORE YOU LOVE MUSIC ~ THE MORE MUSIC YOU LOVE


-----


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot