1. The soundscape
Noise, texture, gesture over pitch, rhythm, harmony. You thought serialism was information poor. Well contemporary music is possibly worse.

2. Process over outcome
John Cage was a brilliant artist, but as Schoenberg says, he’s an inventor, not a composer. If he was a composer of anything, it is of art, his art form being some sort of syncretism, most often sonic performance art. It’s not music per se. However, somehow people took him to be a composer of music. Big mistake. A lot of modern music is actually more conservative than Cage’s ideas, but the key philosophical change took place when his work came to be considered “music.” Now a particular outcome is no longer important, and the composer’s role is intentionally diminished. It’s an alluring idea, because not only is less work required, but more seemingly innovative work could pop out. It’s really the easy way out though, because the innovation is fake. It’s not an innovation of sound. The composer has abdicated the responsibility to fully realize the intended sonic idea in mind. It could be argued that some parameters are not important, because it’s a new language of expression. But I haven’t seen a theory of contemporary music that convincingly demonstrates what is important and what isn’t in this language, and why. It also begs the question of why we’re stuck with instruments that are built to realize a different language.

(gesture music with archaic instruments)

3. Academicism
The reason that the title of “legitimate heir to classical music” is important is that whoever holds the throne inherits the trappings of elitism. With it comes the tradition of authorship and the enforced boundary between composer vs. performers. Unlike jazz or other improvisational arts, the trajectory of classical music by the time it got to be an academic discipline was toward a fully literary tradition. That means culturally performers are not equal partners in composition and have no compositional independence and only performative independence. The distinction may seem slight but it makes a big difference — the performers have the limited freedom of interpretation but not the full freedom to innovate from a blank slate like the composer. They will always feel that leash of censorship given the unequal power relationship. And this stratification is especially enforced by the habits of academia where credit is a highly valued commodity — i.e. any innovation is still credited to the composer. As a result, real innovation is neither forthcoming from the performers who are not incentivized, nor from composers who abdicate creative responsibility with impunity. The secondary problem is in-group perspective bias. Academia is the small, specialized in-group of music creators who will always be more enamored by the “process endeavor” of generating literature than the outcome because they derive their professional value from the former, the latter having been put into the hands of other professionals. But to an audience, it is the outcome that is important. The two sides are difficult to reconcile when they are spending their time thinking about different things as music, with attendant different goals.

(bad minimalist music)

It’s sad that the rightful claim of classical music has passed on to this — or any — specialized group. There is a lot of sound to explore yet, or else all music (including pop — which is innovating) would have stopped. Wouldn’t it be nice if the title were held by more deserving offshoots? Classicizing/fusioning non-classical influences is very much in the classical tradition. Philip Glass’s minimalism and the inspired electronica certainly form a legitimate branch if intended as timbral expansion rather than a process gimmick. Avant-garde jazz (but not free jazz) is a legitimate branch in terms of harmonic expansion. Similarly, polyrhythm/microtonal are legitimate branches in terms of prosodic and scalar expansion, respectively. These forms are all expanding the information-bearing components of sound itself, hence music. Aleatoricism/indeterminacy/gesture art is not an expansion of the music language. It’s an expansion of the process of music making. It does make sound, but it doesn’t attack sound directly and therefore no surprise that it fails to innovate on that front. Process is always a part of composition as a precursor to outcome, but conflating the two is dangerous, and leads to a dead-end.

So lately I’ve been considering whether there is some organization to better understand some milestones of (Western) art history, which get period labels like:

premodern, classicist, medieval, renaissance, baroque, rationalist, romantic, modern, and postmodern.

And I thought, without prejudice to those who do this for a living (by this I mean I could be totally wrong), that I would group these in the following way:

I. classicist -> renaissance -> rationalist
II. medieval -> baroque -> romantic
III. premodern -> modern -> postmodern

I conjecture that the human condition has always embraced two competing threads of philosophical inquiry, and the aesthetic experience surely parallels this: one is rational, the other emotional. This split shows up in various pseudoscientific personality inventories and left-brain right-brain claims, so whatever the validity, altogether many people believe there are these two traits. Rationality requires thinking, emotion requires feeling. As time went on, people got better at accessing and expressing both. That makes the first two chains. Classicism and renaissance art are sort of a crude version of the more polished later rationalism, emphasizing rules of regularity rather than the essence of logical rigor. Similarly, medievalism and baroque emphasize the ornate or religious form, a particular representation, rather than the underlying emotional content that is abstractly expressed in late romanticism. Rationalism is not easy, it requires political organization, order, and an optimistic view of progress. Perhaps when things are going well, people gravitate toward the rational, and when things are not going well, in times of turmoil and chaos we fall back on our innate emotions that link us more to our primeval past.

The third chain is a recurring attempt at synthesis. The premodern form is sort of a backdated attempt at describing what must have existed in an uninspired form of synthesis — that is, whatever existed naturally by dint of our existence, which naturally has elements of both rationality and emotion: this is what defines us as humans. But following the (for now) pinnacle achievements of the rational and emotional movements — “pinnacle” only because they have delivered to us our current state of the world — we’ve been in a state of modern synthesis perhaps to try something different or to come to terms with the duality. It’s hard to classify the likes of impressionism and expressionism, which I see as sort of the rational-slanted and emotional-slanted precursors, respectively, of full-blown modernist abstraction. Impressionism uses rational language, but an intentionally imprecise one that somehow recalls emotional content. On the other hand, expressionism uses emotional language, but an intentionally distorted one that tends to evoke rational retrospection. Modernism in general creates, by abstraction, a distance from the human, and in this way, synthesizes the rational and emotional from the vantage point of a duality better observed. Nevertheless, modernism still gives the human element a place among equals, perhaps a slightly privileged one, still. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is more adversarial, which in its deconstructionist drive, removes the natural place that the human occupies in artistic expression. One would believe that ultimately, postmodernism would fail for this reason, but one can’t be sure… For there is a long road to synthesis yet, especially as it is set up for a future where artificial intelligence may join us. And from the papers on aesthetics in the opening, there may be a shorter distance between the rational and the emotional, and between the human and the algorithmic, than we think.

This is one of the nicer stations. Still looks like a 19th century dungeon, though; which of course, it is.


One of the nicest things about the subway stations is the porcelain-tile wall art. Since the trains are always late, one can spend a lot of time observing these oddities.

But have you noticed that it’s not trivial to make these pieces all line up and look nice — because the letter strokes make non-right angles? See how the tile alignments are fudged, near the bend of the letter Y on the left side? There is a long side of a triangular piece aligning with a side of a square piece, where the hypotenuse of the triangle has to be a little bit longer. So they just jam it in there. It sticks out a little bit.

And here is a letter V. Clearly when they do the tiles, they make each line of tiles for the \ strokes before the corresponding / strokes, because the \ tiles run longer.

These were all taken at the station called 23rd and Ely. Of course the station names don’t correspond to where the exits are. One stop at 49th Street actually produces exits mostly on the 47th Street. Another at 42nd Street actually opens onto 40th Street. Go figure. Actually, station names in Manhattan itself are almost consistently “wrong” in this way, which leads me to believe that Manhattan streets have been renumbered at some point.

Sure enough, it was, and you can see it on Youtube.

Some local Seattle event is a bit far from the UK, and sure enough the Daily Mail never reported on this back in the day so far as I can tell. A bit of artistic liberty, surely, but perhaps there is more to it.

Now I’ve always found media subject to money incentives to gravitate toward entertainment. And entertainment being — perhaps — an art form, somewhat like advertising is an art form, the use of images tends not to be about depicting reality, but rather merely to suggest reality, or the reality being conjured up by the writer with words, an analogic reality. Images are nowadadys understood like visualizations on Powerpoint. Fire up an image gallery like Corbis and pick something that fits the words and job well done. If nobody notices, all the better. That is an interesting phenomenon, especially when it comes to news reporting, I must say.

So here you find BusinessWeek discussing Suzhou as one of the world’s worst places to work. And what do you get? This nice photograph to go along with it. And you say, wow that’s some smog all right. Then, you quickly notice that it doesn’t look like Suzhou at all, but rather awfully like Shanghai, which is a completely different city. And you’d be right, because it is Shanghai. It is a shot of Suzhou Creek in Shanghai! A suggestive photograph, yes. Suggestive of the name, even. But unfortunately not Suzhou. As much not, as a random house on a random Washington Street would not be a valid depiction of George Washington’s erstwhile place of abode. Suzhou being quite polluted notwithstanding, we still do not know what Suzhou actually looks like at all. Great. Analogic reality.

As a certain celebrity makes his annual pilgrimage to his funding sponsors and idolators around the world this month and next, will we see more analogic reality like we did last year? Some instances of this art form are after all more egregious.