Favorite Musical Book Quotes?

Hello people!  I just wanted to share a quote from a musical book that was recommended to me by @Thatguy v2.0 "The magic strings of Frankie Presto" by Mitch Albom about a fictional character (Franke Presto) who was purported to be the greatest guitar player to ever walk the Earth, told from the perspective of music itself, narrating.  Feel free to share your own favorite quotes from books you've read about music!

Quote

1953
_____
"The stage is right behind this door," Hampton whispered.
        Frankie nodded.
        "You get in there, you just make your music.  They can't say no to you, fast as you play that guitar."
        It was a hot day, in a brisk 2/4 key signature [sic], and the tempo was vivace-lively, but sostenuto, prolonged.  Hampton and Frankie were standing outside the Grand Ole Opry, waiting to audition.  Frankie, now seventeen years old, had learned a great deal of country music since arriving in Nashville.  He had also grown two inches and looked less a boy than a young man now.  Hampton told him, "I reckon you ready for the biggest stage of all."
        He'd dressed Frankie for the audition in a gray cowboy hat and a white sports coat with lace trimming.  It cost Hampton a week's pay.  I should note that the mechanic had asked to be Frankie's manager, and, while Frankie didn't really understand the position, he'd quickly said yes.  He liked Hampton.  And seeing that he was feeding Frankie and letting him listen to his radio, Frankie couldn't really refuse.
        "Just play the way you played up in Detroit.  No way they say no."
        "Okay."
        "You the fastest thing anyone ever seen."
        "Okay."
        Hampton seemed nervous.  Another hour passed.  Frankie wanted to knock  on the door, but Hampton refused.  "We don't want to seem pushy.  They'll come get us."
        Eventually, with the sun beginning to set, a man in a suit came out the front door.  Frankie ran up and said, "Excuse me," and asked if someone would be greeting them soon.
        "Auditions wait at the south door," the man said.  "Around the corner.  But they're gone now.  Y'all need to come back next week."
        Frankie glanced at Hampton, whose mouth fell open.  Frankie turned back to the man in the suit.
        "Sir . . . can I get something that says we were here?  For next time?  So we can be first in line maybe?"
        The man looked him up and down and grinned.  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card.
        "That's all I got, young fella."
        The man walked away.  Hampton cursed and shook his head.  The wrong door?
        "It's okay, Hampton," Frankie said.  'We can try next week."
        But the old man kept grumbling, upset by his mistake.  He was sweating heavily.  On the ride home, he banged the steering wheel many times.  Then, after turning at a traffic light, he gripped his arm and fell against the door as the car veered to the curb.
       "Hampton!" Frankie screamed, grabbing the wheel and steering wildly.  "What's the matter?  Hampton!  Hey!"  He threw his leg over the man's legs to brake the car with a screech.
        "Oh no, no, no, no," Frankie implored.  He pulled open Hampton's collar.  His eyes were rolled back.  He was moaning.  Frankie screamed out the window, "Help!  Where's a hospital?"
        Minutes later, he was pulling Hampton through double doors, his arms wrapped around the old man's chest.  He kept saying, "You're all right, you're all right," but once inside he again screamed, "Help!" A nurse ran out to assist him, but a doctor with a close-cropped hair and a barrel chest raised his hands.
        "Hold up," he said.  "Y'all need to take him to the colored hospital."
        "Please!" Frankie yelled.
        The doctor shook his head.  "The colored hospital will take care of him."
        "But he's in trouble!"
        "Then you better get moving."
        Frankie's breathing quickened.  He squeezed his eyes closed.  And something inside him snapped.  Perhaps because of Baffa, or El Maestro, or never finding his mother, or any of the many precious things that had been taken from him in his life, he felt a force surging, a noise between his ears, like an angry glissando from one end of the keyboard to the other.
        He would not lose Hampton, too.
        "Now you listen," he said, raising to within inches of the doctor.  "I just came from the Grand Ole Opry.  So did he.  This is an important man."
        The doctor snickered.  "Y'all came from the Opry?"
        Frankie pulled the business card from his pocket and slammed it in the doctor's palm.
        "That's right.  I'm playing there Saturday night.  I will leave you four free tickets in the front row if you take care of this man right now."
        Even as he said it Frankie felt as if he were listening to someone else.  Where did he find these words?
        The doctor sniffed as he read the business card.  It belonged to a high-ranking events manager.
        "You really playin' the Opry?"
        "Look at my clothes," Frankie said.
        The doctor pursed his lips.  He nodded at the nurse.
        "In the back," he said.

And if you got this far, thanks for reading!

Peter

I can't quote any one sentence since the whole paragraph from Hindemith's book is genius:

~ Quotations from a self-proclaimed genius LoL

Any other musical books Y'all would recommend?

On 2/23/2024 at 7:57 PM, Aw Ke Shen said:

Any other musical books Y'all would recommend?

Do you want to read books about music that are entertaining?  Or do you want good educational musical texts about music theory, orchestration, form, counterpoint etc.?

46 minutes ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

Do you want to read books about music that are entertaining?  Or do you want good educational musical texts about music theory, orchestration, form, counterpoint etc.?

The latter : )

LoL - I looked on my secret bookshelf in my closet and I realized that I have some great musical books in there that not even *I* have read!

"Musical Form and Analysis" by Spring, Hutcheson
"The Development of Western Music" - A History by K. Marie Stolba
"Orchestration" by Cecil Forsyth (only read fragments - quite funny!)
"The Technique of Orchestration" - Sixth Edition by Kent Kennan, Donald Grantham
"The Lives of the Great Composers" - Third Edition by Harold C. Schonberg
"The Virtuoso Conductors" by Raymond Holden
"Twentieth-Century Music" - A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America by Robert P. Morgan
"Counterpoint" - Fourth Edition by Kent Kennan (haven't read yet)
"Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life" - Selected Letters Edited and Newly Translated by Robert Spaethling (haven't read yet)
"Music in the Galant Style" by Robert Gjerdingen (which I'm still in the middle of reading)

And a bonus book that isn't a theory/history text:
"The Music Lesson - A Spritual Search for Growth through Music" by Victor L. Wooten

Enjoy!
Peter

1 hour ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

Musical Form and Analysis" by Spring, Hutcheson
"The Development of Western Music" - A History by K. Marie Stolba
"Orchestration" by Cecil Forsyth (only read fragments - quite funny!)
"The Technique of Orchestration" - Sixth Edition by Kent Kennan, Donald Grantham
"The Lives of the Great Composers" - Third Edition by Harold C. Schonberg
"The Virtuoso Conductors" by Raymond Holden
"Twentieth-Century Music" - A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America by Robert P. Morgan
"Counterpoint" - Fourth Edition by Kent Kennan (haven't read yet)
"Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life" - Selected Letters Edited and Newly Translated by Robert Spaethling (haven't read yet)
"Music in the Galant Style" by Robert Gjerdingen (which I'm still in the middle of reading)

And a bonus book that isn't a theory/history text:
"The Music Lesson - A Spritual Search for Growth through Music" by Victor L. Wooten

I have read only 4 here out of your list!

On 2/28/2024 at 12:06 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

LoL - I looked on my secret bookshelf in my closet and I realized that I have some great musical books in there that not even *I* have read!

"Musical Form and Analysis" by Spring, Hutcheson
"The Development of Western Music" - A History by K. Marie Stolba
"Orchestration" by Cecil Forsyth (only read fragments - quite funny!)
"The Technique of Orchestration" - Sixth Edition by Kent Kennan, Donald Grantham
"The Lives of the Great Composers" - Third Edition by Harold C. Schonberg
"The Virtuoso Conductors" by Raymond Holden
"Twentieth-Century Music" - A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America by Robert P. Morgan
"Counterpoint" - Fourth Edition by Kent Kennan (haven't read yet)
"Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life" - Selected Letters Edited and Newly Translated by Robert Spaethling (haven't read yet)
"Music in the Galant Style" by Robert Gjerdingen (which I'm still in the middle of reading)

And a bonus book that isn't a theory/history text:
"The Music Lesson - A Spritual Search for Growth through Music" by Victor L. Wooten

Enjoy!
Peter

Noted Thanks!

On 2/28/2024 at 10:52 AM, Aw Ke Shen said:

The latter : )

I will just list 2 for each categories haha.

On music theory I love “Harmony and Voice Leading” by Aldwell very much! “Introduction to Post tonal theory” by Straus is great too.

On Form I love “The Classical form” by Caplin, “Sonata Theory” by Hepokoski, 

On counterpoint Kennan’s is an essential read and I also like Jepessen’s book on 16th century counterpoint!

For music history Taruskin’s history is so great, but I have only read the first two volumes and have the other 3 still in my cupboard……

Henry
 

2 hours ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

On 2/28/2024 at 10:52 AM, Aw Ke Shen said:

The latter : )

I will just list 2 for each categories haha.

On music theory I love “Harmony and Voice Leading” by Aldwell very much! “Introduction to Post tonal theory” by Straus is great too.

On Form I love “The Classical form” by Caplin, “Sonata Theory” by Hepokoski, 

On counterpoint Kennan’s is an essential read and I also like Jepessen’s book on 16th century counterpoint!

For music history Taruskin’s history is so great, but I have only read the first two volumes and have the other 3 still in my cupboard……

Henry

Noted. Thanks!

My favourite quotes are drawn from my one true textbook "Bluff your way in Music". A few examples:

Polyrhythmic: Someone who can dance a quickstep to a waltz.

Tchaikovsky: He'd have been rich if films had been around in his time.

Accidental: A wrong note played on purpose. 

A few more. Here's what the book says about Mahler:

Mahler had an incurable ambition to write the longest, noisiest and most expensive symphonies in the world. This he actually achieved several times and not surprisingly, it was a long time before people could be persuaded to listen to them or that impresarios felt like trying to make them do so.

It was suddenly realised that Mahler had not written long, boring symphonies of the Brahms type which you have to listen to carefully from beginning to end in order not to miss the themes, but had, in fact, simply strung together hundreds of attractive little tunes, and it was possible to go into a coma for a lot of the symphony and still get involved when you came to again.

It is possible to switch on the car radio in the depths of Surrey to what appears to be a Mahler symphony well in its stride and to arrive in London and find a parking place with it still going on in a forgetfully energetic way that suggests it might still be in progress at 5.30. It is quite obvious that all conductors get lost during a work like the 7^th which Mr Cooke has now called the ‘Mad’. No doubt someone will prove one day that Mahler was crazy. If not, why did he go to such trouble to write so much when he achieved better results in his short symphonies like the 1^st and 4^th.

ABOUT Bruckner:

"It is generally said that Bruckner was a simple man - practically a Nature Boy, you would gather from some writers. If, after listening to one of his symphonies, you still feel that he was simple, then we must all be gibbering idiots - well, perhaps there is something in that. In fact Bruckner was as deep as the Ocean. He was also an organist and organists are far from simple men. / Another misrepresentation of Bruckner is to bracket him with Mahler. The only thing they had in common was a liking for long symphonies.....(etc)

= = = =

And another couple of definitions:

Pentatonic: Music that can be played on bagpipes.

Perfect Interval: A period of time long enough to queue up for and consume a cup of coffee.

.

@Henry Ng Tsz Kiu recommended me a fictional novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera and I happened to find a great musical example/discussion about Beethoven in it!

Quote

15

        This curious melancholic fascination lasted until Sunday evening.  On Monday, everything changed.  Tereza forced her way into his thoughts:  he imagined her sitting there writing her farewell letter; he felt her hands trembling; he saw her lugging her heavy suitcase in one hand and leading Karenin on his leash with the other; he pictured her unlocking their Prague flat, and suffered the utter abandonment breathing her in the face as she opened the door.
        During those two beautiful days of melancholy, his compassion (that curse of emotional telepathy) had taken a holiday.  It had slept the sound Sunday sleep of a miner who, after a hard week's work, needs to gather strength for his Monday shift.
        Instead of the patients he was treating, Tomas saw Tereza.  He tried to remind himself, Don't think about her!  Don't think about her!  He said to himself, I'm sick with compassion.  It's good that she's gone and that I'll never see her again, though it's not Tereza I need to be free of-it's that sickness, compassion, which I thought I was immune to until she infected me with it.
        On Saturday and Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths of the future.  On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of which he had never known.  The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with it.  For there is nothing heavier than compassion.  Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
        He kept warning himself not to give in to compassion, and compassion listened with bowed head and a seemingly guilty conscience.  Compassion knew it was being presumptuous, yet it quietly stood its ground, and on the fifth day after her departure Tomas informed the director of his hospital (the man who had phoned him daily in Prague after the Russian invasion) that he had to return at once.  He was ashamed.  He knew that the move would appear irresponsible, inexcusable to the man.  He thought to unbosom himself and tell him the story of Tereza and the letter she had left on the table for him.  But in the end he did not.  From the Swiss doctor's point of view Tereza's move could only appear hysterical and abhorrent.  And Tomas refused to allow anyone an opportunity to think ill of her.
        The director of the hospital was in fact offended.
        Tomas shrugged his shoulders and said, "Es muss sein.  Es muss sein."
        It was an allusion.  The last movement of Beethoven's last quartet is based on the following two motifs:

        To make the meaning of the words absolutely clear, Beethoven introduced the movement with a phrase, "Der schwer gefasste Entschluss," which is commonly translated as "the difficult resolution."
        This allusion to Beethoven was actually Tomas's first step back to Tereza, because she was the one who had induced him to buy records of the Beethoven quartets and sonatas.
        The allusion was even more pertinent than he had thought because the Swiss doctor was a great music lover.  Smiling serenely, he asked, in the melody of Beethoven's motif, "Muss es sein?"
        "Ja, es muss sein!" Tomas said again.

16

        Unlike Parmenides, Beethoven apparently viewed weight as something positive.  Since the German word schwer means both "difficult" and "heavy," Beethoven's "difficult resolution" may also be construed as a "heavy" or "weighty resolution."  The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate ("Es muss sein!"); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound:  only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
        This is a conviction born of Beethoven's music, and although we cannot ignore the possibility (or even probability) that it owes its origins more to Beethoven's commentators than to Beethoven himself, we all more or less share it:  we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact the he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders.  Beethoven's hero is a lifter of metaphysical weights.
        Tomas approached the Swiss border.  I imagine a gloomy, shock-headed Beethoven, in person, conducting the local firemen's brass band in a farewell to emigration, an "Es Muss Sein" march.
        Then Tomas crossed the Czech border and was welcomed by columns of Russian tanks.  He had to stop his car and wait a half hour before they passed.  A terrifying soldier in the black uniform of the armored forces stood at the crossroads directing traffic as if every road in the country belonged to him and him alone.
        "Es muss sein!" Tomas repeated to himself, but then he began to doubt.  Did it really have to be?
        Yes, it was unbearable for him to stay in Zurich imagining Tereza living on her own in Prague.
        But how long would he have been tortured by compassion?  All his life?  A year?  Or a month?  Or only a week?
        How could he have known?  how could he have gauged it?
        Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses.  But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
        It was with these thoughts in mind that he opened the door to his flat.  Karenin made the homecoming easier by jumping up on him and licking his face.  The desire to fall into Tereza's arms (he could still feel it while getting into his car in Zurich) had completely disintegrated.  He fancied himself standing opposite her in the midst of a snowy plain, the two of them shivering from the cold.

17

        From the very beginning of the occupation, Russian military airplanes had flown over Prague all night long.  Tomas, no longer accustomed to the noise, was unable to fall asleep.
        Twisting and turning beside the slumbering Tereza, he recalled something she had told him a long time before in the course of an insignificant conversation.  They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him."
        Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z.  Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
        We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.
        Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather "Es könnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise).
        Seven years earlier, a complex neurological case happened to have been discovered at the hospital in Tereza's town.  They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital happened to be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the provincial hospital in his place.  The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed.  He happened to have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant.  Tereza happened to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas's table.  it had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if he had little inclination to go to her on his own.
        He had gone back to Prague because of her.  So fateful a decision resting on so fortuitous a love, a love that would not even have existed had it not been for the chief surgeon's sciatica seven years earlier.  And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.
        It was late at night.  His stomach started acting up as it tended to do in times of psychic stress.
        Once or twice her breathing turned into mild snores.  Tomas felt no compassion.  All he felt was the pressure in his stomach and the despair of having returned.

I thought I'd whet your appetite some more for this great book by Milan Kundera "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" with another quote:  (some wonderful and lyrical descriptions of music abound)

Quote

9

        After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.
        But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
        Chance and chance alone has a message for us.  Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.  Only chance can speak to us.  We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
        Tomas appeared to Tereza in the hotel restaurant as chance in the absolute.  There he sat, poring over an open book, when suddenly he raised his eyes to her, smiled, and said, "A cognac, please."
        At that moment, the radio happened to be playing music.  On her way behind the counter to pour the cognac, Tereza turned the volume up.  She recognized Beethoven.  She had known his music from the time a string quartet from Prague had visited their town.  Tereza (who, as we know, yearned for "something higher") went to the concert.  The hall was nearly empty.  The only other people in the audience were the local pharmacist and his wife.  And although the quartet of musicians on stage faced only a trio of spectators down below, they were kind enough not to cancel the concert, and gave a private performance of the last three Beethoven quartets.
        Then the pharmacist invited the musicians to dinner and asked the girl in the audience to come along with them.  From then on, Beethoven became her image of the world on the other side, the world she yearned for.  Rounding the counter with Tomas's cognac, she tried to read chance's message:  How was it possible that at the very moment she was taking an order of cognac to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment she heard Beethoven?
        Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance.  If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

10

        He called her back to pay for the cognac.  He closed his book (the emblem of the secret brotherhood), and she thought of asking him what he was reading.
        "Can you have it charged to my room?" he asked.
        "Yes," she said.  "What number are you in?"
        He showed her his key, which was attached to a piece of wood with a red six drawn on it.
        "That's odd," she said.  "Six."
        "What's so odd about that?" he asked.
        She had suddenly recalled that the house where they had lived in Prague before her parents were divorced was number six.  But she answered something else (which we may credit to her wiles):  "You're in room six and my shift ends at six."
        "Well, my train leaves at seven," said the stranger.
        She did not know how to respond, so she gave him the bill for his signature and took it over to the reception desk.  When she finished work, the stranger was no longer at his table.  Had he understood her discreet message?  She left the restaurant in a state of excitement.
        Opposite the hotel was a barren little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be, but for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty:  it had grass, four poplars, benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes.
        He was sitting on a yellow bench that afforded a clear view of the restaurant entrance.  The very same bench she had sat on the day before with a book in her lap!  She knew then (the birds of fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her fate.  He called out to her, invited her to sit next to him.  (The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.)  Then she walked him to the station, and he gave her his card as a farewell gesture.  "If ever you should happen to come to Prague . . ."

11

        Much more than the card he slipped her at the last minute, it was the call of all those fortuities (the book, Beethoven, the number six, the yellow park bench) which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.  It may well be those few fortuities (quite modest, by the way, even drab, just what one would expect from so lackluster a town) which set her love in motion and provided her with a source of energy she had not yet exhausted at the end of her days.
        Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.  "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet:  Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven.  We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences.  If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence).  But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music.  Whenever she heard it, she would be touched.  Everything going on around her at the moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.
        Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances:  they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train.  At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train.  This symmetrical composition-the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end-may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" in the word "novelistic."  Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.
        They are composed like music.  Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life.  Anna could have chosen another way to take her life.  But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty.  Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
        It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Another pertinent musical quote from "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera:

Quote

3

A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words

. . .

MUSIC

        For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication.  No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles' White Album?  Franz made no distinction between "classical" music and "pop."  He found the distinction old-fashioned and hypocritical.  He loved rock as much as Mozart.
        He considered music a liberating force:  it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends.  He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.
        They were sitting together at a restaurant, and loud music with a heavy beat poured out of a nearby speaker as they ate.
        "It's a vicious circle," Sabina said.  "People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder.  But because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still."
        "Don't you like music?" Franz asked.
        "No," said Sabina, and then added, "though in a different era . . ."  She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.
        Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood.  During her years at the Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at a youth camp.  They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks construction site.  Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning to nine at night.  She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes:  everything was in range of the speakers.  The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her.
        At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical barbarism reign supreme.  Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness.  The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness:  cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens.  The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.
        After dinner, they went upstairs to their room and made love, and as Franz fell asleep his thoughts began to lose coherence.  He recalled the noisy music at dinner and said to himself, "Noise has one advantage.  It drowns out words."  And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.  And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, overpowering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words.  Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!  He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned never to say another sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse with the orgiastic thunder of music.  And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell asleep.

On 3/5/2024 at 11:13 AM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

@Henry Ng Tsz Kiu recommended me a fictional novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera

You owe me a HUGE favour for this 😈😈. Probably people find the heaviness of BEEing unbearable too.

Here's another quote from Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being":

Quote

8

        Even though he came to love Beethoven through Tereza, Tomas was not particularly knowledgeable about music, and I doubt that he knew the true story behind Beethoven's famous "Muss es sein?  Es muss sein!" motif.
        This is how it goes:  A certain Dembscher owed Beethoven fifty florins, and when the composer, who was chronically short of funds, reminded him of the debt, Dembscher heaved a mournful sigh and said, "Muss es sein!"   To which Beethoven replied, with a hearty laugh, "Es muss sein!" and immediately jotted down these words and their melody.  On this realistic motif he then composed a canon for four voices:  three voices sing "Es muss sein, es muss sein, ja, ja, ja, ja!" (It must be, it must be, yes, yes, yes, yes!), and the fourth voice chimes in with "Heraus mit dem Beutel!" (Out with the purse!).
        A year later, the same motif showed up as the basis for the fourth movement of the last quartet, Opus 135.  By that time, Beethoven had forgotten about Dembscher's purse.  The words "Es muss sein!" had acquired a much more solemn ring; they seemed to issue directly from the lips of Fate.  In Kant's language, even "Good morning," suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis.  German is a language of heavy words.  "Es muss sein!" was no longer a joke; it had become "der schwer gefasste Entschluss" (the difficult or weighty resolution).
        So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into a metaphysical truth.  It is an interesting tale of light going to heavy or, as Parmenides would have it, positive going to negative.  Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to surprise us.  We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had transformed the seriousness of his quartet into the trifling joke of a four-voice canon about Dembscher's purse.  Had he done so, however, he would have been in the spirit of Parmenides and made heavy go to light, that is, negative to positive!  First (as an unfinished sketch) would have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece)-the most frivolous of jokes!  But we no longer know how to think as Parmenides thought.

. . .

I do wonder if this story of how Beethoven's "Es muss sein!" motif was conceived is true.  If his supposed exchange with Dembscher occurred a year before he wrote his Op. 135 quartet, then he couldn't have heard Debscher's complaint, since by then he had already been deaf!

I've been reading Kent Kennan's Counterpoint book.  But besides that I decided to re-read "The Music Lesson - A Spritual Search for Growth through Music" by Victor L. Wooten.  Victor Wooten is hailed as "the Carlos Castaneda of music."  Here are a few fragments from the beginning of the book:

Quote

        Having an opinion without being opinionated was a gift of his.  How to do that remains a mystery to me.  I know now that he just wanted me to think, to use my brain.
        Answering my questions with a question was an important part of his teaching method.  That frustrated me many times, but it made me think for myself.  I'm sure that's all he wanted.  I'm not sure if he ever outright lied to me, but I know that he frequently stretched the truth.  Whenever I questioned him about it, he would answer with, "Truth?  What is truth?  And tell me, what importance does truth have anyway?  Did you learn from the experience?  Now, that is important.  And by the way, if I always tell you the truth, you might start to believe me."
        That confused me, as I always thought I was supposed to believe my teachers.  I guess I was wrong.  I can still see the sly smile on his face every time he knew he was totally confusing me.
        Confusion seemed to be my natural state when I was with him, especially in the beginning.  I recall him saying "Music, like Life, and like you, is one entity expressing itself through its differences."  My puzzled look let him know that I didn't understand.  "Music is one thing," he continued, "but it wouldn't exist without its parts.  You couldn't play a chord without different notes.  Change a note, change the chord.  Life is not different, and neither are you.  You are expressing yourself in Life by choosing different notes all the time.  Learn to be conscious of your note choices and Life will respond with the proper chord or, in other words, Life will respond accordingly."  I didn't know what to say.  He just smiled.
         He loved to laugh.  I remember telling him about an invention I once saw called The Lick Blocker.  It was a flat piece of board that attached to your wrist while you played guitar.  It was supposed to block the audience from being able to view your hand, thus keeping them from being able to steal your licks.  He laughed for a full ten minutes when I told him about that one.  "I'm glad I ain't normal," he would often say.
        "Sharing is one of the most important tools needed for personal growth," he once told me, also stating that many people never come to understand that point.  He said that many of us try to hoard our knowledge in order to stay ahead of everyone else.  I understand that completely because I used to use the same method.  Somehow, I think he knew that.
        It didn't take long for me to realize that I was learning more than just music.  We rarely talked about it, but in the few days that we were together, he taught me more about life than anyone else ever has.  "Music, Life, Life, Music:  What's the difference?"  I could hear him saying.
        I remember criticizing him for leaving my car door unlocked.  He asked me if I believed my mother whenever she would tell me that "all things happen for a reason."  I told him that I did.  "Listen to her, then," he responded.  "Change your vibes.  Stop creating reasons for your car to get broken into."  I had to think about that one for a while.
        Vibrations were an important concept to him.  I guess 'concept' is not the best word to use.  I could tell that vibrations were important to him because he talked about them as if they were alive.  His approach to music was the same, and he came alive whenever he talked about it.  He seemed to think that all things were made up of vibrations, especially music.
         "All things are in motion," he once told me, "and although a thing may appear to be stationary, it is always moving.  This motion may change, but it will never cease.  All Music ever played is still playing."  I'd never thought of it like that.  Whenever he mentioned the word "Music," he said it with a specific clarity I didn't have.  It was as if I could feel the truth of the word vibrate whenever he spoke it.
        He even told me that thoughts were vibrations.  I had to think about that one for a long time too.  I had no way of disproving him, and believe me, I would've if I could've, but when I thought about the way a lie detector works, measuring subtle changes in vibrations from the mind and body, I figured that he might have a point.  He always had a point.

. . .

"How'd you get in here?" I asked, startled, half asleep, and wondering why I wasn't angry at his intrusion.
        "You asked me to come."
        "I did?"
        "Yes."
        "But how'd you get in here?  Who let you in?"
        "You did."
        "Oh really!  Did I give you a key?"
        "I don't need a key."
        "Who are you?"
        "I am your teacher."
        "My teacher?"
        "Yes."
        "My teacher of what?"
        "Nothing."
        "Nothing?  Well, then, what are you supposed to teach me?"
        "What do you want to learn?"
        "Lots of things.  What can you teach me?"
        "Nothing!"
        "What do you mean 'nothing'?"
        "Exactly that, nothing."
        This was typical of conversations to come, but at that time, I didn't know what to make of him and I needed a straightforward answer.
        "You have to do better than that.  You showed up in my house unannounced; I think I deserve some kind of explanation."
        Tilting his head, he looked at me through the face shield of his helmet and replied, "I teach nothing because there is nothing to be taught.  You already know everything you need to know, but you asked me to come, so here I am."
        "But you said that you're my teacher."
        "Yes, I did, but try to understand.  'Teacher' is just a title.  I cannot teach you because no one can teach another person anything."
        "What do you mean by that?"
        "You can only teach yourself.  Until we live in a day when I can physically implant knowledge into your head, I can teach you nothing.  I can only show you things."
        "What can you 'show' me?"
        "Anything."
        "Show me everything then," I replied.
        "That would take a while.  It might be easier if we pick a subject."
        "Okay, how about music?"
        "Perfect!  Music!  Shall we begin?"
        I didn't know if I was ready to begin anything with this character.  I already told you he was wearing a blue jumpsuit and a black motorcycle helmet (yes, he was still wearing the helmet), but did I mention that he was carrying a skateboard under his left arm and burlap bag over his shoulder?  I imagine him riding his skateboard down the street, through the rain, in his getup.
        I didn't know what I was getting myself into.  I also couldn't tell if he was really serious or not.  For all I knew, he could've been there to rob me.  But I didn't think so.  There was a lot I didn't know, but I decided to play along anyway.  There was an intriguing quality about him, and I wanted to know more.
        "Wait a minute.  If you're not a teacher, what are you?  What should I call you?"
        "Micheal.  Call me Micheal," he answered as he removed his helmet and offered me his hand.
        I remember his bright blue eyes as hypnotic.  They had an immediate effect on me.  Somehow, I sensed they could see beneath the surface, and I was fearful of what he might uncover.  I struggled to stay in control.
        Not bothering to move from my reclined position on the couch, I allowed his hand to dangle in the air.  Asserting what I thought was dominance, I responded in a cocky tone, "Okay, Micheal, what can you teach me about music?"
        "Nothing.  I already told you that," he answered, retracting his hand.  "I tried teaching many times before.  Once as an Apache medicine man in New Jersey and twice as a Yogi in India.  I even tried teaching while flying biplanes in Illinois.  This time around, I am living the laws of Music."

. . .

        Neither my mom nor my dad played a musical instrument, but they were very musical, more musical than some musicians I know.  They sang in church and there was always a record playing on their stereo at home.  They also helped spark my interest by taking me to concerts when I was young and supported my musical interest by offering to pay for lessons if I wanted them.  I can't say they taught me how to play music, but they surely supported my decision to play.  Hearing it around the house was such a major part of my childhood that it was like a second language to me.
        "Language, that's good."  Micheal spoke out of the blue, as if reading my thoughts.
        "What?" I replied in disbelief.
        "Language, that's a good one."
        "Wait a minute!  Can you read--"
        "Music?" he interrupted with a sly smile.  "Of course I can.  Can't you?"
        "That's not what I was gonna say," I muttered.
        Knowing where I was heading, he steered the conversation by asking, "Is Music a language?"
        "I would say so."
        "Then why don't you treat it like one?"
        "What do you mean?"
        "What language do you speak the best?" he asked.
        "English," I answered.
        "Are you better at English than you are at Music?"
        "Much!" I answered, not knowing where he was headed.
        "At what age did you get really good at English?
        "I would say by about age four or five I was fluent."
        "And at what age did you get really good at Music?"
        "I'm still working on it," I answered in total seriousness.
        "So it took you only four or five years to get really good at English, but even though you've been speaking Music for almost four times as long, you're still not really good at it yet?"
        "Well, I guess not," I answered, finally realizing his point.  I hadn't looked at it from that perspective.
        "Why not?" Micheal asked.
        "I don't know why.  Maybe I just haven't practiced enough."  I was frustrated by the question.
        "How much did you practice English?"
        "All the time," I answered, but then I thought about it.  "Well, I didn't really practice English; I just spoke it a lot."
        "Bingo!" he replied, "That is why you speak that language naturally."
        "So, are you saying that I should stop practicing music?" I asked sarcastically, trying to regain some ground.
        "I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't do anything.  I'm just comparing the two languages and your processes of learning them.  If Music and English are both languages, then why not apply the process used to get good at one of them to the other?"
        Realizing I'd totally lost my ability to direct the conversation, I finally relaxed and gave in.
        "How do I do that?"  I asked.
        "How do you do that?" was his reply.
        I had to think for a minute, but I soon came up with an answer.
        "Well, when I was young, I was surrounded by people who spoke English.  I was probably hearing it even before I was born.  So, since I've heard people speaking English everyday of my life, it was easy for me to pick up because it was always around.  How's that?"
        "It's a start; keep going."
        "Okay.  Because I heard English every day, speaking it came naturally to me."  I was talking more quickly and with more confidence.  "It wasn't something I ever thought about.  It wasn't something I ever really practiced.  I just did it.  I just listened to it and spoke it.  And the more I spoke it, the better I got."
        "That's brilliant!  See, you do understand.  I like the part about it coming naturally to you.  I must be a good teacher," he said smiling.
        "Comedian?  Yes!  Teacher?  I'm not so sure," I retorted, joining in the fun.
        "How can we apply this approach to Music?"  Micheal inquired.
        "I'm not so sure," I answered.  "I am around music most of the time.  It's hard to go anywhere without hearing some type of music playing in the background.  So that part of it is similar to English, but I know that there's still something missing.  There has to be something else that keeps me from being just as good at music as I am at English."
        I thought for a moment.
        "Oh, I know.  I speak English every day.  I'm always talking, but I'm not always playing.  I don't play music every day.  If I played my bass every day, I'd be just as good.  Is that it?"
        "Did you speak English every day when you were a baby?" he asked.
        "Well, not exactly."  Apparently there was more.
        "Do you need to speak English every day to get better at it?" he asked.
        "No, I don't."
        "Then what's missing?"
        "I don't know."  My frustration grew.  "Just tell me."
        "Jamming!" he stated with a slight nod of his head.
        "What?"
        "Jamming," he repeated.  "That is the missing element.  When you were a baby, you were allowed to jam with the English language.  From day one, not only were you allowed to jam, you were encouraged to.  And better yet, you didn't just jam; you jammed with professionals.  Just about everyone you communicated with when you were a baby was already a master of the English language.  And because of that, you are now a master."
        "A master?"  I inquired.
        "A genuine master," he confirmed.  "The only reason you are not called a master is that everyone else is just as good at it as you are.  Everyone is a master.  Think about it.  If you were as good at Music as you are at English, you would surely be considered a master.  Would you not?"
        "Oh my God!  You're right!"  Another unintended outburst.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading!

I've been introduced to a very interesting and enlightening new philosophy book by my friend Lisa.  On the surface "The New Existentialism" by Colin Wilson doesn't seem to be a book very much concerned with music but I assure you that it has much to say about creativity and music some of which I share below.  (The book was published in 1966 - read all the way to the end for a short discussion of Beethoven and Wagner.)

Quote

        But the questions with which I, as an existentialist, have been concerned, is not whether philosophy has a right to ask questions about the meaning of human existence:  this I take for granted.  There are other assumptions that seem to be made in every book on existentialism with which I cannot agree.  It seems to be generally accepted that existentialism is necessarily a philosophy of pessimism - or at least, of a limited, stoical kind of optimism.

. . .

        All the existentialist texts that I know - whether by Sartre or Marcel, Jaspers or Camus - seem to share this atmosphere.  It is an atmosphere we encounter a great deal in modern literature, even in writers who could not be described as existentialists - Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot.  It is completely unlike the atmosphere we encounter in Wells or Shaw or Chesterton, whose presuppositions are optimistic.
        But then, the presuppositions of a poet or a novelist are personal and emotional; they may be due to his upbringing, or even to his glands.  What business have such presuppositions in philosophy?
        Let me expand this.  Some years ago, an American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, felt the same kind of instinctive revolt against the 'atmosphere' of Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on sickness and neurosis, and decided that he might obtain some equally interesting results if he studied extremely healthy people.  He therefore looked around for the most cheerful and well-adjusted people he could find, and asked for their co-operation in his studies.  He soon discovered an interesting fact:  that most extremely healthy people frequently experience moods of intense affirmation and certainty; Maslow called these 'peak experiences.'  No one had made this discovery before because it had never struck anyone that a science calling itself 'psychology,' and professing to be a science of the human mind (not merely the sick mind), ought to form its estimate of human beings by taking into account healthy minds as well as sick ones.  A sick man talks obsessively about his illness; a healthy man never talks about his health; for, as Pirandello points out, we take happiness for granted, and only begin to question life when we are unhappy.  Hence no psychologist had ever made this simple and obvious discovery about peak experiences.
        The 'peak experience' is not necessarily a mystical experience, although mystical experiences are one form of peak experience.  A young mother watching her husband and children eat breakfast had a 'peak experience'; a hostess sitting alone in the room after a highly successful party had a 'peak experience.'  It is a sense of life-affirmation of the kind that Proust described in Swann's Way, when he wrote, 'I had ceased no to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal . . .'
        The interesting word here is 'accidental.'  For Sartre, the most basic characteristic of the human situation is what he calls 'contingency,' man's sense that he is somehow not 'necessary,' that he is an accident.  The suicide is, in fact, making a practical affirmation of this notion.  Sartre, Camus and Heidegger take man's 'contingency' to be a basic fact of human existence; man must recognize that he is not the object of a constant loving attention of God or Providence; in the universal sense, he is insignificant.  If we look through photographs of suicides in a volume on forensic medicine, this sense of man's contingency strikes us like a blow; the disfigured corpse seems to negate every human aspiration, and we are aware that the act of suicide sprang from a sense of the meaninglessness of life, or its pointless horror and cruelty.  Heidegger or Sartre, examining such a photograph, would say sadly:  'It is horrible, but it is true; we must face it.'
        The peak experience seems to be a denial of man's contingency, a sudden insight into meaning, when the suicide's negation is seen to be an unfortunate mistake, like a bankrupt who commits suicide a minute before the arrival of a telegram announcing that he has been left a million pounds.
        Now the peak experiences described by certain mystics - Pascal, for example - or conveyed on canvas by Van Gogh in his painting of the Starry Night, may be regarded as dubious testimony; a psychologist would point out that both Van Gogh and Pascal were sick.  Science makes allowance for the exceptions, but it builds its edifice upon the rules.  But if Maslow is right, peak experiences - that deny that life is accidental and meaningless - may no longer be regarded as the exception; we can no longer dismiss them by referring to them as 'abnormal.'  Modern literature and psychology play a considerable part in forming the picture that we have of ourselves; but according to Maslow they have been guilty of an underestimation of man's character and potentialities.

         In the present volume, I am concerned to show how the existentialist picture of man - as presented by Sartre or Heidegger or Camus - errs greatly on the side of pessimism, and to show how this error has arisen.

. . .

Sartre
For purposes of exposition, Sartre remains the best representative of the modern existentialist tradition.  All its problems and its faults can be seen most clearly in his work.  His work also makes it plain why existentialism has advanced so little after Kierkegaard.
        The first thing to note about Sartre is that his temperament is naturally gloomy and pessimistic.  He is the opposite of what Heidegger means by a poet.  Like Heidegger, he is preoccupied by the fact that the world 'exists' quite apart from our minds; but he seems to find this separate existence disquieting - or even nauseating.  His novel Nausea concerns a historian who has always seen the world in terms of his own intellectual patterns, but who has sudden experiences of 'awakening' when 'things' somehow slip past his intellectual guard; the result is a paralyzing sense of nausea.  The point worth noting is that this experience is basically the same as the poet's except that the poet suddenly sees reality with a shock of delight.  Wordsworth describes rowing on a lake and suddenly receiving a sense of 'other modes of being' from the outline of a mountain in the darkness.  For Sartre, the alien modes of being are not a source of hope or pleasure but of nervousness; he feels threatened by them.  As we read Sartre's novels, it is clear that he does not like the real world; it always disgusts him slightly, and he usually describes it with adjectives like 'sticky,' 'slimy,' 'oily,' 'nauseating.'  His autobiography Words, describing his childhood, has none of the usual delight or magic of accounts of childhood.  When he describes the sexual act, in Intimacy or Childhood of a Leader, it is always disappointing or disgusting; there is none of the Lawrence vision of sex as a redeeming force.  Again, in Words, he writes: '. . . the boat seemed to have detached itself from the lake, and in a moment would be gliding above that rippling swamp' (p. 158).  Why is a lake, for Sartre a 'rippling swamp'?

. . .

        It is to be expected, then, that Sartre's account of the human situation will be devoid of the natural poetry and delight that most of us feel at least once in a while - in short, of 'peak experiences.'

. . .

There is a chapter in the history of existentialism to which I have not so far referred, although it is of crucial importance.  In fact, it provides the way out of the cul de sac.  I am referring to the philosophical method founded by Husserl, and known as phenomenology.

. . .

        This, in essence, is Husserl's message:  philosophy wishes to be a science, and it consequently sets out to study the universe scientifically - that is, to ask questions and make observations.  But philosophy is not a science while it fails to recognize that there is an equally large area for study inside man himself.  Consciousness must not be taken for granted as something too obvious to need further questioning.  Consciousness itself must be studied.  After all, psychology is also a science - the study of that which is inside man.  While philosophy confines itself to the external universe, it is only half a science.  And it is possibly because it is only half a science that it finds itself at a standstill.
        This leads Husserl to define phenomenology as 'the study of the structure of consciousness.'  The word 'structure' may give some difficulty at first; after all, structure usually refers to buildings.  But then, in Freud's view, the mind is a kind of building, with the unconscious mind as its cellar (while some students of extra-sensory perception suggest that it also has an attic - a kind of super-consciousness - which is also beyond our everyday consciousness).  Husserl uses the word 'consciousness' for the whole mind, but apart from this, his view is not fundamentally unlike Freud's.

. . .

        All of this may seem interesting enough, but of dubious relevance to the question of a new existentialism.  But we now make the leap to a most important point.  We 'read' the world around us; it is actually a confused mass of sights and sounds.  Our senses filter out about ninety percent of the sights and sounds so that we do not even have to notice them.  (The nerves have small gaps called synapses; strong impulses can jump these gaps like an electric spark, but weak ones are filtered out; otherwise we should be aware of every minute change in the temperature of the room, and wearing a woolen vest would be like wearing barbed wire.)  The senses then learn to find their way among the confusion of the remaining ten percent by inventing convenient formulas and short cuts (like the little rhymes at school that helped us to remember laws of physics or the order of the colours in the spectrum).  It sorts the world out into convenient symbols, and attaches more or less importance to various symbols according to its inclination.  G. K. Chesterton has an interesting Father Brown story called The Invisible Man, in which a murderer manages to get in and out of a home without being seen, although the house is under observation.  The murderer turns out to be a postman, and no one has noticed him because a postman is not thought of as a man; he is merely a symbol of a social service.  The Chesterton plot is perhaps a little far-fetched, but it points a truth:  to see something really means to notice it, to give significance to it with one's vision.
        But there is a still further point.  Through millions of years of evolution, the human eye has succeeded in an apparently impossible feat:  in distinguishing between energy with a wavelength of seven hundred thousandths of a centimetre and energy with a wavelength of four hundred thousandths of a centimetre.  In fact, it is capable of distinguishing far finer shades of energy, for the two figures I have given are the wavelengths of red and violet light, and the eye can actually distinguish all the colours between the two ends of the spectrum.  It does this by a simple and obvious method - by inventing the seven colours of the spectrum, and attaching these to different wavelengths.  The eye cannot, at the moment, distinguish any smaller wavelengths than violet - there would be no point, since very few bodies emit energy of such wavelengths; but if it suddenly became necessary for the survival of the human race for the eye to distinguish higher wavelengths than violet, it would simply 'invent' new colours, which do not at present exist.

. . .

        For both Husserl and Heidegger were driven by a certain optimistic intuition:  that somehow, man would discover the secret of the working of consciousness, and become for the first time a truly free creature, a truly human creature, if we define an animal as a creature of stimulus and response.  In Nausea, Sartre says of a moronic cafe proprietor, 'When his cafe empties, his head empties, too.'  That is to say, his consciousness is completely dependent on external objects to draw it forth; when these vanish, it goes to sleep.  This should have led Sartre to recognise that a more satisfactory kind of man would be less dependent on objects, more capable of controlling his consciousness.  But the idea of 'controlling consciousness' suggests a 'controller,' and this Sartre could not allow.
        Both Husserl and Heidegger felt that the phenomenological quest would give man the possibility of 'mystical' experience without the need for specifically Christian or Yogic disciplines.  Husserl said that the study of intentionality in action would lead towards the 'keepers of the key to the ultimate sources of being' (a thoroughly Heideggerian phrase), and to the 'unveiling of the hidden achievements of the transcendental ego.'

How Phenomenology is applied
Now it is necessary to say something more about the disciplines of phenomenology, and their actual aims.  It should be admitted at once that there are as many different kinds of phenomenology as there are phenomenologists.  This is as it should be.  Phenomenology is a method; in fact, it is little more than another name for science, an attempt at the most rigorous form of science.  Different scientists have different aims, different fields to which they apply the scientific method; so it is with phenomenology.  One of the most important of modern phenomenologists, Roman Ingarden, spent his life applying phenomenology to the art-work; Merleau-Ponty was concerned with the phenomenological analysis of the body as a giver-of-meaning.  Psychotherapy is a particularly rich field for the application of phenomenology - in fact, perhaps the richest of all.  Whatever its field, phenomenology is an attempt to observe things as an emanation of consciousness, and ultimately to increase the control of the human being over his own existence.
        It will be seen at once that Husserl's aim is basically identical with that of Jaspers.  Jaspers wants us to grasp knowledge as a living process, and the human relation to it as dynamic - so that we throw off the old fallacy that we are passive creatures in the face of it.  A child might be overawed by a great city, but a civil engineer knows that he might demolish it and rebuild it himself.  Husserl's philosophy has the same aim:  to show us that, although we may have been thrust into this world without a 'by your leave,' we are mistaken to assume that it exists independently of us.  It is true that reality exists apart from us; but what we mistake for the world is actually a world constituted by us, selected from the infinitely complex reality.  It is there, just as a city is there.  But the city was built by our fathers, and our world was built, was chosen, by our ancestors, who passed on their vision to us in the genes.  A city is a convenient place to live in, which is why it was built.  But if we are living in a city that depresses us with its ugliness, we can move to another one (or even build our own).  The same is true of the constituted life-world into which we are born (and which Sartre, for example, shows a persistent tendency to identify as the world).
        What does a phenomenologist actually do?  He applies the phenomenological method to whatever may be his own field.  Something must be said briefly about this phenomenological method.
        If I am listening to a piece of music which excites me, I am aware of it purely as meaning, i.e. what it is doing to me.  If I happen also to be a musical scholar, I may well recognize, at the same time, precisely how the composer is managing to move or excite me.  But if I get too curious about this latter aspect, and turn my attention upon the mechanics of the music, I shall cease to feel its meaning, and cease to enjoy it so deeply.
        Now this world in which I live is very much like a piece of music.  My day proceeds like a symphony, with dull passages and exciting passages, passages that arouse sadness, passages that arouse rage or determination, passages that almost lose my attention entirely.  My 'life world' - the world of my lived experience - presents itself to me as a series of meanings or half-meanings.  But just as I can turn my attention from the meaning of a symphony to its mechanics, so I can examine the structure of my experience, of my 'life world.'  The phenomenologist is the counterpart of the musical theorist who is interested to find out how the composer achieved his effects.  But with this important difference:  the phenomenologist is aware that he himself is the composer.
        Music, then, has two levels, and we can switch from one to the other.  If I wish to concentrate entirely on the mechanics of the music I shall have to try to prevent being moved by it at all, because this will distract me.  Husserl calls this process of concentrating on the structure of the music 'bracketing.'  I 'bracket out' the meaning, and concentrate on its structure.  Husserl calls each act of bracketing an 'epoche.'

. . .

        Is it not possible that it is Van Gogh's vision that should be called 'normal' (i.e. truer to the underlying reality of the perceived) while our everyday perception, which we assume to reveal 'reality' to us - an extremely dull reality for the most part - is distorted by thoroughly negative assumptions such as fear, boredom, assumption of our own insignificance?  Fifty years ago, such a question would have been regarded as hopelessly idealistic and unscientific; nowadays, because of the work of men like Cantril, Maslow and the existential psychologists (of whom I shall speak later), it has a meaning that can be tested in the laboratory.
        The phrase 'truer to the underlying reality of the perceived' may strike some readers as an attempt at verbal sleight of hand; after all, why call either vision 'normal,' when we admit that vision depends upon what we put into it?  But to think in this manner is to fail to grasp the full implication of the phenomenological outlook.  It is true that our perception is thoroughly prejudiced and selective.  But then, in a sense, the 'reality' out there is a buzzing chaos, like the sounds of an orchestra tuning up.  Through millions of years of evolution, we have developed a capacity for distinguishing the different instruments; our senses 'filter off' a great deal of the chaos so that it never reaches us; our nervous systems handle the rest to give it meaning.  But our perception is still a second best, many degrees better than the original chaos, but a long way from its possibilities of seeing order and meaning in the universe.  We might express the state of affairs by saying that the present 'order' that reigns in our perceptions is a kind of martial law.  Life is not easy; it is too complicated, so we have to limit our perceptions to cope with it, just as an army commander has to declare martial law in a city that might get completely out of hand at any moment; but no one pretends that martial law is an ideal condition for nurturing a City of the Sun.  The martial law has led to what Heidegger calls 'forgetfulness of existence.'  So it is no loose thinking to use a phrase like 'truer to the underlying reality' in the phenomenological sense.  The error arises from the old assumption that perception is passive, and that therefore it is a purely relative matter which we regard as 'normal.'  All perception is intentional; Van Gogh's perception is more intentional than our everyday perception, and since there could be no perception without intentionality, it is not at all a relative matter, but a matter of life and death.  No intentionality, no perception.

. . .

        Men are driven by the 'three S's - self, sex, and society, and most psychological illness is caused by the maladjustment of the self to sex or society.  Once this adjustment is achieved, the only urge of importance that is left is the will to dominate, to establish superiority over the rest of society.  It is a negative picture.  George Orwell pointed out in an essay on No Orchids for Miss Blandish that this highly unpleasant gangster thriller is only a translation into fictional terms of the 'realist' ethic and philosophy of our day.  (The same might be said of the James Bond thrillers of the late fifties.)  The moral atmosphere of these books, with their violence and sadism, is the moral atmosphere of nineteenth-century science with it element of 'reactionary idealism' (against religious and political oppression) subtracted.  Just as behind Chaucer there seems to stretch the whole panorama of the mediaeval church; just as behind Dickens there is the whole weight of British protestantism and humanism; so behind Hadley Chase or Ian Fleming there stretches the universe of nineteenth-century science, in which the earth is a grain of sand in an empty universe, and man is an evolutionary accident who was clever enough to feed on the animal who wanted to feed on him.
        It might be objected that all psychology recognises the importance of the 'need to know'; after all, it was Freud who demonstrated that neuroses could be cured by giving the patient an insight into their causes.  But in this picture, the need to know is still a mere servant of the will to survival.  The implications of Maslow's views goes much further.  In 1914, Shaw used the phrase ' . . . an appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life.'  If the 'need to know' is simply one manifestation of this appetite (although perhaps the most important), then it will be seen why it cannot be interpreted as a part of the will to survival and self-assertion.  The chief characteristic of the human being is that his interests extend far beyond mere survival and comfort.  The need for survival is a mere subdepartment of the 'appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life.'
        Here it must be admitted that I am using the word 'human' in a special sense.  Sartre's cafe proprietor whose head empties when his cafe empties is human in the biological sense.  But recent centuries are seeing the wholesale emergence of a type of human being whose 'minimum requirements' go beyond a full stomach and a compliant sexual partner.  In his autobiography, H. G. Wells comments that people can now ask a question that would have been incomprehensible five hundred years ago.  'They can say:  "Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but - what do you do?" '  This life of the mind becomes increasingly important to increasing numbers of people, and Wells goes on:  'I do not now in the least desire to live longer unless I can go on with what I consider to be my proper business.'  That is to say that Wells' minimum requirement from life is not mere survival, or even sexual or social self-assertion, but his 'originative intellectual work' that has become the whole meaning of his life.  He said:  'We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion.'
        To historians of the future, it may well appear that the year 1800 is roughly the dividing line between the old and the new epoch.  Large numbers of these creatures with a new 'minimum requirement' begin to appear in the western world, and profoundly affect the whole life of the epoch.  Judged by purely animal standards - there is something paradoxical about these 'romantics,' and they themselves recognise this, and wonder whether their strange appetite for mental freedom is not a disguised suicidal urge.  (It was for this reason that I coined the word 'outsiders' to describe them.)
        The reasons for this change do not concern us here.  It may be, as Wells suggests, simply that the increased leisure in modern society leads people to seek new satisfactions.  Or it may be that since orthodox religion is disappearing, the religious urge is re-appearing in a new form.  Whatever the reason, the emergence of the 'amphibian' is a historical fact.  Sartre's cafe proprietor is still a sea creature, whose mental life is a reflection of his environment; he is incapable of supporting the burden of his mind without help from outside.  The 'amphibian' aims at a new degree of freedom, but he is by no means yet a land creature; the burden of his mind quickly exhausts him, and he is glad to return to the sea - to everyday preoccupations that support some of the weight of freedom.  But it is clear that the word 'human' no longer covers the cafe proprietor and the land creature that the amphibian might one day become.  The truly human will indicate an entirely new degree of freedom.  The problem that is of importance at the moment is how this can be made to happen.

Existential Psychology
Professor Maslow would describe himself as an existential psychologist, and this is reflected in the title of one of his most important books, Towards a Psychology of Being.  The word being is used here in the sense in which Heidegger uses it.
        Over the past twenty-five years, a world-wide school of existential psychologists has sprung up.  Their common assumption is that psychological illnesses cannot be explained entirely in terms of social or sexual maladjustment.  Some of these psychologists - Erwin Straus, Eugene Minkowski and V. E. von Gebsattel - are influenced chiefly by Husserl; others - notably Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss - derive more closely from Heidegger.  One of the leading members of this movement, Viktor E. Frankl, was confined in a Nazi concentration camp throughout the war, and simply observed that the prisoners with the best chance of survival were not those with the strongest animal will to survival or self-assertion, but those who were supported by some sense of purpose or belief.  It need not be a religious purpose; it may be an interest in mathematics, that led Jacob Trachtenberg to create his system of swift calculation in a concentration camp; or simply in human motivation, like Frankl's.  Subsequently, Frankl made the same discovery in therapy that Maslow made separately:  that certain neuroses responded only when problems centering about the meaning of human existence were faced.
        Existential psychology, in fact, is simply a psychology that recognises that Maslow's 'need to know,' Shaw's 'appetite for a high quality of existence,' are as fundamental to human beings as the sexual appetite or the need for social security.  (Here, of course, the word 'human' is used in the sense defined above.)  In Heidegger's language, a human being is characterised by a need for contact with 'existence'; with the reality that underlies the banality of our social existence.
        One immediately notices a certain difference in quality in studying case reports of existential psychologists when compared with the kind to which we have become accustomed in the works of Freud.  Freud shows a distinct tendency to 'reductionism,' to cut men of genius down to size (as in his analyses of Leonardo or Dostoevsky) and to deny the reality of idealistic or creative impulses.  (* Although the late Ernest Jones pointed out to me that Freud continually changed his standpoint - he was the reverse of a dogmatist - and his later works reveal the emergence of an increasingly non-determinist standpoint.)  The existential psychologist is inclined simply to accept that creative frustration may be as important a cause of neurosis as the usual negative fears and anxieties.  And what is important here is to understand what is meant by 'creative.'  True creation is always related to self-development - in fact, is almost synonymous with it.  Self-development is always related to the meaning of one's existence.  The phrase 'meaning of existence' may have a very broad and obvious meaning, as in the world of Kierkegaard or Heidegger, or a very narrow one - as, for example, in the life of some totally untalented individual whose mental health is nevertheless bound up with his love of freshwater fishing.  But even in this latter case, it is possible to see that the fishing is bound up with genuine creative elements - solitude, individual enterprise, communion with nature - that, in fact, are connected with the sense of the meaning of existence, even if the impulse is so feeble that the question never really has a chance to emerge.  It can also be seen that a Freudian psychologist who saw the fishing as an outlet for aggression, or a symbolic sexual act, would be ignoring the most important element in the case.

. . .

        But what is perhaps most exciting about this experiment is the possibility of its development into a general method.  If what characterises the drunk is his unawareness of his freedom, then all human beings are drunks, even the greatest.  Certain men of genius excite our respect because they succeed in preserving a high degree of freedom throughout their creative lives.  Too many men of talent make a great initial effort and transform themselves into creative personalities, and then simply allow the new personality to ossify until it becomes as much a prison as the old one.  Ernest Hemingway is a clear example; he becomes increasingly a caricature of himself as he gets older.  But it is not difficult to think of examples, since, regrettably, most men of talent find it difficult to continue to develop.  On the other hand, a Beethoven, a Blake, a W. B. Yeats, excites admiration because of a capacity for self-renewal; a certain tough core of the being continues to develop.  What is so remarkable is not, perhaps, the capacity to keep on growing, but to keep on doing it consciously and intelligently, with the aid of self-analysis.  No one denies Wagner's greatness; but at an early point in his career, he made the familiar romantic mistake of identifying ultimate freedom with death; this means that the development of his art after Tristan is completely predictable; it is bound to turn into the overripe, over-sweet fruit of Parsifal.  Yeats, on the other hand, had the strength to reject his early death-romanticism, at the cost of revising all his early ideas about life and about himself, with the result that he went on to become a great poet.
        But such development depends upon an unconquerable optimism and faith in life.  The great poet or artist is the man who has somehow instinctively mastered the trick of inducing peak experiences; but sooner or later it deserts him - and at this point, he becomes the self-parodist.  The difference between the poet in his greatest moments and in his 'everyday' moments is about equivalent to the difference between, let us say, an enthusiastic school teacher and a habitual drunk.  What has been lost is the creativity, the sense of freedom.

Edit:  I think I have shared this long quote here mostly for my own benefit, since I will have to return the book eventually.  But for those who get through it, I hope that, like me you consider musical composition your 'originative intellectual work' and that sharing your music and listening to it induces in you 'peak experiences'.  Thanks for reading!

5 hours ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

I've been introduced to a very interesting and enlightening new philosophy book by my friend Lisa.  On the surface "The New Existentialism" by Colin Wilson doesn't seem to be a book very much concerned with music but I assure you that it has much to say about creativity and music some of which I share below.  (The book was published in 1966 - read all the way to the end for a short discussion of Beethoven and Wagner.)

It’s too long man…

On 3/2/2024 at 12:01 AM, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

I will just list 2 for each categories haha.

On music theory I love “Harmony and Voice Leading” by Aldwell very much! “Introduction to Post tonal theory” by Straus is great too.

On Form I love “The Classical form” by Caplin, “Sonata Theory” by Hepokoski, 

On counterpoint Kennan’s is an essential read and I also like Jepessen’s book on 16th century counterpoint!

For music history Taruskin’s history is so great, but I have only read the first two volumes and have the other 3 still in my cupboard……

Henry
 

 

this is gold!! thank you!