On Ethnomusicology and Universality in Music

A Note on Recent Reading Methods
While I only read about 70 books cover-to-cover last calendar year, I've been doing lots of slow, intensive reading and re-reading of texts that my nervous system perceives as extremely dense, endlessly fascinating, and challenging to my self-miseducation. Scholars of reading like David Hall and Rolf Engelsing have confirmed and drawn out something I'd assumed: around 1750 or so, "intensive" reading - in which a reader reads a book or books over and over - gave way to our modern "extensive" way of reading a book, rather quickly, then moving on to the next thing. I know certain 20th century writers - Robert Frost comes to mind - were known for reading the same 20 books over and over. I think many of us do both types of reading. Some of the books I've been reading "in" without any real goal of "finishing," over the past year are: The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. by Sloane; How We Think, by Fauconnier and Turner; A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guattari, and George Lakoff's Philosophy In The Flesh. Each of these represent a boundless rich intellectual environment and they all intersect with each other...because I make them intersect.

One of the main themes of How We Think is that the highwater marks of 20th century thought were all formalist in assumption. Incredible formalist works were produced in cybernetics, linguistics, math, and psychology, but they all ran dry when they bumped up against meaning. In art there's no problem with formalist work, because it has no assumptions about finding some ultimate key to unlock the final secrets of the universe: Schoenberg's stuff is perhaps the ultimate in formal thought in music, and if you dig serialism, cool. If formalist thinking in color and shape is your thing in painting, rush to the Kandinsky exhibit post-haste! Schoenberg and Kandinsky (or Elliot Carter, Paul Klee and James Joyce) produced work that did not call for formal proofs from the rest of the community in order that research may build from there.

Currently I see the formalist works of Godel, Chomsky (in linguistics), Minsky and the pre-1980s AI giants, and all modes of structuralism as odd, wonderful intellectual works of art. They all ran aground and could not - will not - account for the way human nervous systems make meaning. Are they formally elegant works? I think so. But what I'm trying to do to my mind by immersing myself in the works cited supra is to get it out of the 20th and into the 21st c. I think it would be easier if I were 23, but I am not 23. Still, it's fun. And I'm not sure there is as clean a break between formalist modes of meaning and embodied ones. But the break seems fairly sharp. Hence, the re-re-reading of those dense texts and a few others like them.

                                          a Javanese gamelan

Ted Gioia and Universality In Music
Which reminds me: every now and then I read some article about "human universals" in some domain, and I remain piqued, even though I associate the search for universals with the 20th c. and hence formalist assumptions about "reality."

Which brings me to Ted Gioia's piece on universality in music from last October. He sees lots of new neuroscience as pointing to music as universal, but says musicologists seem to feel threatened by the idea. Historically, ethnomusicologists have always strived to show how each peoples' music was different from others. There were fears about ethnocentrism and Western hegemony, ideas about technology and "race" and complexity and who was "advanced" and who wasn't, etc. I still see their point; but Gioia's impetus was his own research for his books on music. It's a wonderful article and you really ought to read it. I think he brings up some very rousing issues: examples of musical similarities in emotional types of music that share striking similarities with peoples so far-flung that it's difficult to account for except by universality; Witzel's recent work in 50,000 year old monomyths that seem virtually worldwide - how come almost everyone has a Flood Myth, a creation-destruction myth, an Orpheus, a trickster?; how, against anthropologists of music, there have always been great systematizers and taxonomists who tabulated and cross-collated data in an attempt to obtain a universalist Grand Schema; how the current work in historical genetics in search of the African "Eve" is a universalist idea; how Jung's collective unconscious might have a resurgence with new neuroscientific/math techniques (even though I think Gioia's reading of synchronicity as merely a re-naming of "coincidence"- a Begging the Q - isn't nuanced enough); and I particularly like how he laid out six "Possible Explanations of Human Universals, which are:

1. Diffusion: transfer of social practices from one group to another (Gioia ain't buying)
2. Common Origin: when social groups separate and migrate, they retain their practices (sorta maybe-ish, not really)
3. Shared Biology/Brain Structure: humans share physiology and basic neurological tendencies (this is Gioia's main squeeze here)
4. Shared Archteypes  (Ted G seems to think this too woo-woo, but I see it the way Joseph Campbell saw myth: Jung and others like Frobenius and Eliade pretty much see archetypal templates as metaphorical biology)
5. Similar Contextual Situations (Both Gioia and I like this idea. Ever since I first started reading cultural anthropology, the idea that hunter-gatherers would have different modes of thought than pastoral-herding peoples made sense to me. Ideas about universality get a bit dicey here, but it's a good kind of dicey. This guy said it better.)
6. Coincidence: which Gioia thinks is functionally the same as Jung/Pauli synchronicity.

Gioia thinks ethnomusicologists should work with brain researchers on this project, and I agree. Let's see what can be figured out! This exhortation to get the musicologists with the cognitive scientists seems to hermetically traverse boundaries, which we're all for. Why not use techniques once reserved for Naturwissenschaften to impinge on Geisteswissenschaften? Wot?

At the same time, the phenomenology of listening to "world music," for me, will not be changed much no matter how much is "proved" about the universality of music. When I listen to Tuvan throat singers, Balinese "monkey music," some Greek wiz on the Bouzouki, koto virtuosos, Zakir Hussein playing with anyone, any of the Alan Lomax recordings, jazz, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Hank Williams, Eno, Laswell, Kronos Quartet, or Celtic music: it takes me somewhere else. I want - and will inevitably find - an exoticism that alters my sense perceptions. Your personal "reality" and imagination will always be some remainder in the Total Equation, eh?

Ted G says a great many of us are interested in ideas about universality in music, and he cites Oliver Sacks's book Musicophilia and Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music. Hey, I loved both books. Here's Levitin, after citing Chomsky's idea of our innate capacity to learn any of the world's languages, due to genetic endowment and merely hearing the language during childhood:

"Similarly, I believe that we all have an innate capacity to learn any of the world's musics, although they, too, differ in substantive ways from one another. The brain undergoes a period of rapid neural development after birth, continuing for the first years of life. During this time, new neural connections are forming more rapidly than at any other time in our lives, and during our midchildhood years, the brain starts to prune these connections, retaining only the most important and most often used ones. This becomes the basis for our understanding music, and ultimately the basis for what we like in music, what music moves us, and how it moves us. This is not to say that we can't learn to appreciate new music as adults, but basic structural elements are incorporated into the very wiring of our brains when we listen to music early in our lives." (p.109)(This idea may answer some of the Qs I posed back in this blogspew?)

Now: is this part and parcel the same argument Ted Gioia makes? Or does it modify it? Does anyone think the implications here modify Ted G's idea about universality to the point a qualitative difference arises? Does this idea I've selected from Levitin have nothing to do with what Gioia's tryna get at? I'm not sure...Ted G says in his article that the "modern age of research on brainwaves and music can be dated back to the 1960s," citing Neher's "Auditory Driving Observed With Scalp Electrodes In Normal Subjects." Well, it may not have been "brainwaves" but Seashore's work in The Psychology of Music dates to 1938 and attempts to chart enormous amounts of data about the human nervous system and perception of music. It's not massively cross-cultural, but we can assume - because of #3 on Ted's chart: "Shared Biology/Brain Structure," that it has at least some relevance.

Finally:
Robert Crumb: Some Sort of Wonderful Musicologist Too
Get a load of Public Radio International's Marco Werman visiting Crumb, the giant of counterculch comic book artists in his house in Southern France, in 2004. I knew from the documentary Crumb that Robert was a tremendous collector of old 78s, but this interview yields proof of Crumb's cantankerous erudition and reverence for roots music that would put the most serious hipster to shame. Crumb asserts that when we listen to some of his very rare recordings, we "time travel" to some "lost world" and I couldn't agree more. Listen to the quote at 2:45 in the second sound bar, when he talks about the "effort"it takes to listen to some of this non-Western, alien, wonderful music. Note Crumb's delineation between the ethnomusicologist's strategy of going into some remote village and asking, "Who knows the old songs?" and the Music Business people, who ask, "Who are the best players around?"

What kills me - and maybe you too, if you listen to Crumb - is that he sounds dubious that anyone will want his massive collection when he dies. He says the idea that some university will want it is mistaken: he found Alan Lomax's recordings untended, falling apart. He was even allowed to take some home, as a gift, apparently. Jeez.

                                          above artwork by the brilliant Bobby Campbell

On Vision and Judgement

Just let me discuss three recent analyses of the topic before I get out of your hair?

"Experts" and Winners of Classical Music Competitions

So, among the more than 1000 people in the study on musical excellence that you agreed to take part in are ordinary people, musicians, and "experts," the last being the sort of people who judge the winner of the Tchaikovsky or Paganini International Competitions. There are many of these competitions, worldwide, and winning one may get you a tour or a deal to record a few CDs. You signed up for this study, and randomly any one of you are assigned to either 1.) only listen to the top three finalists and then try to guess who won; 2.) view and listen to the top three and guess who won; or 3.) only view the top three but not listen to them play.
Of course, this is a major competition, so all three are shredding, hot-assed players. They all kick ass and play gorgeously. Give it your best shot anyway.

You can probably "see" where this went: the third group - who only watched and never heard a note - guessed correctly at far above chance the actual winners of BigTime International classical music competitions. The group (made up randomly of musicians, ordinary people, and "experts") that only listened to the top three did the worst at guessing, but the group that both watched with the sound did only slightly better.

This suggests a few things. One: we have an unconscious bias towards visual data even when dealing with the judgement of audio data. Visual data even seems to interfere with audio data. Two: "experts" once again tend to be full of crap. Three: As a longtime rock guitarist, this makes me laugh because it has always been quite an "open secret" that the coolest-looking guitarist will always be more impressive to the fans than the guy who is not all that attractive but plays circles around the cool looking dude. 

But classical music was supposed to be different. And I wondered  why so many of the female violinists on the covers of my classical CDs were so pulchritudinous. (Aye, but they play marvelously too! I don't hold their looks against them.) 

Funny: Here's how the study got going: Dr. Chia-Jung Tsay has PhDs in Organizational Behavior and Psychology, and a PhD in Music from Harvard. She studied piano at Julliard. As a kid, she entered piano competitions and noticed that the reception of her auditions seemed slightly different depending on when she only sent in an audio recording of her playing versus when she sent in a video tape. Tsay played at Carnegie Hall at age 16. Ah...and here is a classical music glamor shot of Dr.Tsay:

After doing her study, Dr. Tsay says she thinks the experts aren't judging solely on "superficial" (by which I think she means: hotness?) criteria, but that there's something about visual information that is very compelling to our brains. We have always been told we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but publishers and marketers know that we do anyway. When instrumentalists seem to be "hamming it up" they may be merely acting because they think it's what the audience wants, or their playing may be so embodied that they emote in a strikingly visual way, all while being far more "aware" of what they're doing musically rather than what they're doing with their body or face, or both. I have known both types of players. I have been both types. 

In the end, I think we might need to reconsider the idea of "purity" usually assumed by performance: if you're moved by a performance...you're moved by the performance. Just be aware that the visual aspect  (if there is one) probably shaped your experience. I think we can't get away from this; it's how we're wired. Maybe we should be a little easier on ourselves. It's biology! 

Link to a brief discussion of Tsay's study HERE. NPR and Tsay discussing her study, with a photo of famously emotive virtuoso pianist Lang-Lang.

Long ago I saw the piano virtuoso Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli play on the old Arts and Entertainment channel back when cable TV was "new" in the US, and they'd show an entire concert without commercials. He was near the end of his career (he died in 1995), and had let his hair grow long. He was a really hot player, firing off Liszt, but exuded a bitchiness come la prima donna, and he reminded me of when I'd recently seen Ritchie Blackmore play live: sneering, swaggering, total command over technique, dressed in flamboyant black, with a hint of lasciviousness. I found both Blackmore and Michelangeli captivating, even thrilling. 

Nicolo Paganini the Genoese came on the 19th century violin scene at a time when the "free agent" musician could make a lot of money and not have to answer to royalty, beg the aristocracy for money or rely on patronage. The new, more powerful "middle class" (AKA bourgeoisie) of Europe loved him. Paganini's technique was otherworldly, and he greatly inspired Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. But Paganini also cultivated a "demonic" image, which also put asses in the seats. He was the first Jimi Hendrix or Ozzy Osbourne, in a way. But he also pioneered dazzling violin techniques. Paganini may have been the first to exploit his visual, emotive self in a "flamboyant" way in an effort to accentuate his musical self.

HERE is Blackmore acolyte Yngwie Malmsteen's showmanship: the entire rock vocabulary, mixed with Bach, Paganini, and Hendrix.

HERE is Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg playing the finale of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, on American TV, accompanied by a pianist. She flubs a bit, but she's fiery and kinetic as all hell, an Italian-American "tomboy" who loved to play baseball in the street as a kid. I always found her incredibly emotive visually, in addition to her "pure" playing.

Experiment: click on the next link and LISTEN without seeing anything. Then watch the guy play. Do you recognize the name? Is he any good? He's a white guy wearing a t-shirt, apparently at an audition. 

The McGurk Effect

This one's really weird: it turns out that what we "see" people say influences what we think we heard, and we can be fooled. And it seems we can't do much to make amends for it. Vision influences hearing here, too. "Reality" seems to be warped in a surprising way. Watch the video!

The Demeanor Assumption

This is a term from lawyer and fraud specialist Robert Hunter. Emily Pronin of Princeton, who studies our ability to detect lies, calls it "the illusion of asymmetric insight." What is it?

I'm drawing on Ian Leslie's piece from New Statesman.

This month a court in England ruled that a muslim woman must remove her hijab/veil when giving evidence. Some experts applauded this, but thought this didn't go far enough: no one should be allowed to veil their faces in court, ever, reasoning that the more body language and facial expressions we see, the better for juries, lawyers and judges to ascertain who's telling the truth. Or who's lying. (I loved the CSICOP-sounding group the "National Secular Society.")

But it turns out we humans are under the illusion that we can determine who's lying. Studies show we're not very good at all. Frankly, we kinda suck at it. Liars can look you straight in the face and get away with it. The innocent can appear twitchy and nervous and suspicious. When I read about this, I thought of Kafka, and especially Anthony Perkins in Orson Welles's The Trial. Also, growing up a snotty thin long-hair "hippie" kid in a town that was not accepting, I was used to telling the truth and not being believed by adults. 

Ian Leslie's article made me want to read his book, Born Liars: Why We Can't Live Without Deceit, about research into how lousy we are at detecting lies. He argues that, contrary to the court's opinion, we might "hear" the testimony and evidence better if everyone were veiled! 

When you meet me, most prominent in your mind are two things: 1.) my face; and 2.) your own thoughts. You probably think you can read my thoughts while your own are private. But...I'm meeting you, too. Why wouldn't things be the same for me? Leslie sums up this cognitive bias thus: "I am never quite what I seem; you are an open book."

How does this data about how bad we are at detecting lies reflect on the stuff about judging musical performances? Does the Demeanor Assumption throw off classical music "experts"?

I previously wrote on the topic of deception HERE.

Trailer for Welles's interpretation of Kafka's The Trial:

The Cello Suites, by Eric Siblin (2009)

If you only read one book on Bach the rest of the year, give this one a try. I missed it when it came out four years ago and serendipitously found it in a library search for something else, checked it out, and couldn't put it down.

Subtitled, "J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece," The Cello Suites carries off well what's famously difficult to do: write 300-plus pages about music, engagingly, for an intelligent lay audience. Check it out!

Siblin wrote rock concert reviews for the Montreal Gazette and happened to catch the cellist Laurence Lesser play Bach cello suites in 2000, 250 years after Bach's death. Siblin said he was listening to someone he'd never heard of play music he "knew nothing about." But he was tremendously moved by the music, did plenty of top-notch research and wrote this, his first book. I found it a refreshing middle ground between gushing Bach-worship writing and overly musicological and technical Bach writing, of which there is no end. Siblin incorporates Bach's history, the mysteries of his archives, scattered among his surviving sons, the original manuscript of the profound six Cello Suites in Bach's hand still missing and probably lost forever due to the ink he used; there's also a parallel history of Pablo Casals, who resurrected the Suites and lived 96 years, through exile from Franco's Spain. Prior to Casals's championing the Suites, they were thought of as overly-mathematical "exercises" for the cello, which, I confess, I still find difficult to understand.

I probably heard someone playing the Prelude from the G major Suite on radio KUSC in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, and thought it transcendent. I bought the music and read the bass clef as if it was written in treble and worked out, measure by measure, the fingerings for my Stratocaster. To this day I am stunned by every single measure in all 36 sections of the six Suites: given the economy of the cello, the voice-leading, melodic invention, thematic development, range of emotional register, and sheer bravura in even the slow movements - I make hundreds of mistakes; these pieces are deceptively difficult and yet a source of never-ending joy to even attempt to play! - seems like a miracle to me. Siblin, who plays guitar, writes about learning the G major Prelude with a tone of wonderment that hits home with me, and resonates with the experiences of my fellow rock guitarists who've tried to take on Bach.

Siblin does something I never tried: he takes cello lessons! For awhile. Hat's off to him for even trying!

What a delightful book; his love for the Cello Suites is infectious and the reader will probably feel a strong need to watch some of the Suites played live on You Tube, or even go out and buy one of the very many versions. I own Yo Yo Ma's version, but have listened to many from the library, and Rostropovich really floored me, I recall. Siblin tells us that Janos Starker probably holds the record with five different recordings of the Suites. Because the source was Anna Magdalena's copy and she didn't know bowing techniques or dynamics for the cello (or an arcane five-string cello-like thing that Bach may have written the Suites for, just one of many  Siblin relates), so, as Siblin writes, "The Cello Suites are a blank slate, a Rorschach test that allow cellists to put their own stamp on Bach and interpret the music as they see fit - or as they think Bach would have wanted his music played."

I felt a twinge of vindication when Siblin noted how, early in the Gigue from the 3rd Suite, there's a section that could've been written by Jimmy Page: "It is a bold, churning phrase that would not be out of place on a Gibson Les Paul wielded by, say, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Bach's audience, two centuries before the electric guitar was invented, could not have heard the notes in remotely the same way. Historical faithfulness has its limits."

In this, Siblin makes the case that those who insist Bach only be played on "period" instruments to ensure "authenticity" have their place, but their viewpoint is by no means the "one true correct one." On the contrary, Siblin seems the ecumenical Bach listener, and enjoys (or notes with amusement) versions of Bach played on xylophone, or African salsa-style Bach. He mentions Procul Harem and Walter/Wendy Carlos....and Glenn Gould, who actually liked the Swingle Sisters' early 1960s 8-voice chorus, and who had two best-sellers, singing Bach (Bach's Greatest Hits and Going Baroque), swinging the 8th notes. Siblin tells us the Swingle Singers covered some of the cello Suites, which I really must go out of my way to hear now. Glenn Gould is quoted about the Swingles, "When I first heard them I felt like lying on the floor and kicking my heels, that's how good I thought they were."

In addition to Zeppelinesque metal, Siblin hears in Bach's solo Cello Suites: jazz-funk riffs, a country fiddler in a beer hall cranking out tunes, sudden explosions of seemingly impossible polyphony on a four-stringed instrument in which chords must be arpeggiated, sections of almost Philip Glass-ian proto-minimalism, and the doleful expression of deep sorrow of death, probably of his first wife Maria Barbara. There are wonderful stretches of phenomenological-impressionistic observations about the listening of music that I found impressive in Siblin's writing, amid the discussions of Bach's lifelong quest to find a better-paying job, Casals rising to become a world leader in the peace movement in the 20th century, and the peccadilloes of backwater German royalty, among other things.

The ecumenical Siblin: "When I hear violinist Lara St. John play the solo violin works to the rhythms of the tabla, I can't help but want to hear the Cello Suites in a similar setting. 'MarimBach,' Bach To Africa, and Jacques Loussier all turn my crank a great deal."

A formal device that Siblin used I found delightful: he writes six basic chapters, one for each Suite, and divides those chapters up by starting with an epigraph of quotes about each of the formal dance-movements Bach used, for example: Prelude, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, Gavotte, and Gigue. Examples: for the Sarabande section of Suite number four, we get a quote from James Talbot in 1690 regarding the character of a Sarabande: "Apt to move the Passions and to disturb the tranquility of the Mind." Jules Ecorcheville on a Courante: "The transformations of the courante might be compared to the frolicking of a fish who plunges, disappears, and returns again to the surface of the water." Dimitri Markevitch says of the Gigue: "Produces an almost satanic effect with its repetitions of similar motifs." (And yet I see no parental warning stickers on the CD for Matt Haimovitz's version of the six solo Cello Suites. Did the God Squad mess up?)

Going back to the Prelude of the first Suite, Siblin gives his impression of the feeling of movement at the beginning, then notes that Robert Johnson, the seminal blues guitarist, seems to share something with the beginning of this Prelude, and that Bach's broken chords could power a rock anthem, and once again he cites Led Zeppelin. I wish I could have explained to Siblin that, indeed: those first chords that Bach uses (you've all heard them: see/hear below) ARE the basis of blues and rock: they're the I-IV-V progression that forms almost all blues tunes and exerted a tremendous influence on rock and roll. Here: this progression seems to be in the musical DNA of every Western listener; we get it like mother's milk.  Pause the recording after the third broken chord, then notice that you expect a return to the main chord, and indeed, Bach provides it before going off in a long strandentwining unfurling of seemingly foreordained and perpetually mobile pumping out of 16ths notes, before finally ending with an incredible build-up, climax, and gesticulated G major chord. (Bach had 20 children.)

                                      Nova Scotian Denise Djokic elegantly playing 
                                      through the G major Prelude
                                         

Yes, there is the occult-mathematical kabbalistic Bach in Siblin's book too, but not too much. (Those of who who geeked out on this aspect of Bach as related in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach won't find the same buzz here.) In kabbalah his name, J. S. Bach, adds up to 41, and there are 41 measures in this first Prelude; he was known to encode his last name in sequences. In German the B stands for B-flat, while the H represents B. Out of this quasi-chromatic sequence he spun motifs and combinations that flowed like a brook on the first days of a German Spring.

All in all, Siblin's book has a catchy melody and a rhythm I can dance to - like a Gigue that "ends in an atmosphere of optimism and cheerfulness," as Dimitri Markevitch said - and I give it a ten...or a 14, which is "Bach"'s value in gematria, and 14 was the number of fugues based on a single theme that Bach was writing when he died.

The Cello Suites seems an underrated book to me.

A Smattering on Odd Musical Instruments

Taxonomies of Instruments: Two Models
Standard "music appreciation" in Unistat seems still squarely in the strings/woodwinds/brass/percussion taxa; a few years ago I read a book by Bozhidar Abrashev, a Bulgarian composer/musicologist. I forget the title, but he was relaying a taxonomy of musical instruments that attempted to account for all instruments used worldwide and throughout history:

• Aerophones: these are any instrument in which the sound is produced by vibrating air, and flutes are a good example.
• Membranophones: sounds are obtained by a vibrating stretched membrane, like drums or the kazoo.
• Idiophones: any instrument that vibrates, due to the material it's made of, like glass, wood, or ceramics. A vibraphone works like this.
• Chordophones: the Big Boys: violin, piano, guitar...instruments that produce their sound via vibrating strings. 

In the strings/woodwinds/brass/percussion dealio, I remember what I thought was the Big Trick Question: what class does the piano fit in? A: percussion. Why? Because in Unistat "Music Appreciation" classes any instrument that uses a mallet or hammer was percussion, and pianos are teeming with little hammers inside.

Since I read Abrashev I've thought both models complement each other. I later learned that the Aero/Membrano/Idio/Chordo model/taxonomy was invented in 1914 by Erich von Hornbrostel and Curt Sachs. It's probably only one of them "coincidences" that one guy has "horn" in his name and the other guy is a homophone for the Sax.

Someone else tried to add Electrophones to the Sachs/Hornbrostel model, I forget who. These instruments would be any that used "juice" to get sound: anything amplified, anything plugged-in to the wall. So, the guitar goes from Segovia's chordophone to Hendrix's electrophone. I remember reading the argument for adding this class. It sounded good: what is a Moog synthesizer, anyway? How about a Theremin? But then the writer added that any instrument that had been recorded in a studio had become an electrophone, and I took the next off-ramp. How did it help to think of Bach's flute stuff as being played by electrophones?

My Take on De-Extinction
I've been reading a bunch of stuff on synthetic biologists and cloning and bringing back animal species that had gone extinct. It's called "De-Extinction." I find it thrilling, marvelous stuff, and I think "they" will be able to do it, but it's such an amazing idea that I want to see a lot of it before I'm convinced. Will there be chimeras, monsters, hybrids? Probably. But then I found out a similar process of de-extinction had been going on with ancient musical instruments. Some archaeologists dig up something that looks like it may have been used for music, and then art historians, computer scientists, anthropologists, musicologists (of course!), historians, engineers, and experts in the area of physics called acoustics all get involved and network around the world, trying to figure out how these things were played, and especially how they sounded. They even networked a bunch of computers to help solve this problem. (This seems like a wonderful puzzle for academics and a chance for much interdisciplinary work. And grant-money. See HERE and HERE.) We now "know" how the epigonion (an ancient harp) sounded, how the salpinx (ancient trumpet) sounded, how the barbiton (like a 2000 year old bass guitar) sounded, how the aulos (archaic oboe) sounded. And the syrinx, too (an old pan-pipe).

This all seemed almost as marvelous as resurrecting extinct animals, but when I found out that they ended up simulating the sounds of these old instruments through MIDI, so that the guitarist or keyboard player can flick the switch for epigonion or salpinx, I worried a bit. First off: there's enough doubt that the simulation, as run through our ultra-modern gadgets, wouldn't become "interpreted" somewhere down the line as being a lot like what we already know about sounds. Then I wondered about the problem of understanding tuning and scales. The Greek modes as Plato understood them are not the same as the way modern players understand those modes. And modern well-tempered tuning only came in during Bach's time. How much would get washed out in those areas?

What I thought was an even bigger problem was the aspect of physicality of playing. If you're a player, you have a strong feeling for the way your whole body plays the instrument. And the way an instrument is made very strongly influences the way it's played. By obtaining a very complex algorithm-model for the way the instrument probably sounded, then feeding that into our electronics so that the keyboardist can play those sounds with a piano-player's body? (Or, more precisely?: A piano-player's nervous-system's sort of orientation in the culturally-sanctioned "ways" plus physical parameters of the musical instrument itself-as-it-interfaces-with-a-Western-trained musician who has deep grooves burned into neural circuits in her brain that have much to do with the practicing of millions of idiomatic iterations which qualify as distinctive features to her particular instrument?) I had my doubts. I think Jean-Pierre Rampal's (flute virtuoso) physical approach to his instrument was different than Charlie Haden's (jazz bass virtuoso); and I think Ivo Pogorelich's (piano virtuoso) was different than Vilayat Khan's (sitar virtuoso) approach. Viktoria Mullova (violinist extraordinaire) had a different physical approach to her axe than John Coltrane (tenor and soprano sax wizard). They're all different personalities playing music at the highest level, aye; but the 20,000+ hours of practice and performance on their particular axes, with those instruments' own programed-in physical demands, peculiar to that instrument alone? That seems a vastly underrated aspect of what Derrida may have called differance. 

Imagine you're an insanely wealthy person and you hire each of the paragraph-above-mentioned virtuosos (or their living equivalents) to come to your birthday party and play you their own version of "Happy Birthday." The melody and rhythm's the same; the effect and expression are another thing: they have to do with the instrument, what's possible on it, and its interaction with that unique human nervous system playing for you, as you grin like you're tripping on Ecstasy in some gold sequined jump suit that you wore on your helicopter ride, cake dotting the corners of your mouth, your butler near at hand, Viktoria Mullova standing in your massive kitchen, where the acoustics are quite good, surprisingly.

<Ahem!> Back to my take on the route to de-extinction of ancient instruments. Your take may differ. Check out this video of the Lost Sounds Orchestra "playing" these ancient instruments, together with modern sounds. It sounds to my aural reality labyrinth like the stuff you hear when you go into a "New Age" bookstore, looking to stock up on incense, or candles, or maybe some book on modern pagans. I found it disappointing, but then I wondered: how much "weirder" can some old instrument made of wood, bone, bamboo reeds and animal skin sound, to me? Was I expecting too much from the de-extinction of these ancient instruments? Probably?

Some Modern Odd Instruments 
Quartz Harmonica
Gerhard Finkenbeiner's glass (quartz) harmonicas seem pretty cool. Zeitler's lookin' all Ben Franklin-y 'cuz Ben was very much interested in an older version of this instrument, before Finkenbeiner innovated:

Player Pianos, Airplane Propellers, Electric Bells and Much More!
George Antheil's Ballet Mecanique: friend and collaborator with Fernand Leger, Dudley Murphy, Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Ezra Pound, this is Antheil's most famous piece. He later came back to America and ended up in Hollywood writing film scores that were oh-so-tame compared to this! When it was premiered, multimedia-style, in Germany in 1924, it caused a Rite of Spring-like riot:

Theremin
You all know this one, but I still think it's soooo cool. Here's Theremin himself playing his Thang:

If you haven't seen the documentary about Theremin's life, strongly consider it. It's heartbreaking, filled with intrigue, and TRUE!

Sonically, the theremin seems to want to be "violinistic," but I also think it sounds like a second cousin to the musical saw. (Maybe the first exhilarating and weird buzz I ever had seeing someone play an odd instrument beautifully was some guy on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, circa 1972. As I remember it, the guy played "Genie With Light Brown Hair," and it was transcendent.) How much the theremin differs from the violin as a way to physically play the instrument! The theremin is never touched; the violin seems quite the opposite to me, being intensely touchy-feely in its nature.

Olfactory Organ
Purely theoretical. Now we're getting Out There. You can't make stuff like this up. When I stumbled across this article, I thought it was a put-on, but it appears to be a "real" idea that the editors at the magazine Science and Invention took seriously, in 1922. Driven by the 1857 book by French perfumer-extraordinaire Septimus Piesse, The Art of Perfumery. Synthaesthetic in aim, the idea was that people would dress up and go to a concert hall, but instead of hearing an organist play pleasant sounds, they would watch (and sniff?) as the organist played odors or scents. Piesse was fond of using musical metaphors for scents, and it looks like the geeks at Science and Invention got carried away. Read the article for yourself (it's short) and the jokes write themselves! I will trot out a favorite word, for this special occasion: cockamamie!

Philodendron, Schefflera, Snake Plant and humans doing algorithms
Listen to the music here. Read how it was derived. Plants composing/playing music with the help of human interpreters. It reminds me of much of Brian Eno's ambient recording oeuvre, and other ambient music.

                                           Philodendron giganteum


Hydrocordion
This one does seem like a Rube Goldberg-ish way to make noise, but I still think it's cool. Would I sit and listen to it for the better part of an hour? Well, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea listened to a record of whales singing while stoned (Shea and Wilson were stoned, not the whales), so I think I could, with the right amount of weed. A "bum workout," indeed:

Katzenklavier
This one seems to have, roughly, the ontological status of the Olfactory Organ. I first read about it in a book on Athanasius Kircher, and John Glassie's recent, excellent bio of Kircher, goes over it. Supposedly a bunch of cats were placed in separate boxes and arranged chromatically according to the pitch of their meows, their tails stretched out so that a keyboardist would "play" the cats by hitting a key on a keyboard, and a nail would come down on a cat's tail and cause it to yell out. Now, I'm a cat lover and this just seems heinous, not to mention fiendishly hellish to listen to, were anyone to actually make one and play it. The idea has been attributed to Kircher, but it seems doubtful he actually made one of these. The effect was supposed to be "funny." Today, the ASPCA and PETA would be all over the asses of any asses who tried this shit. HERE's an article on it.

Player-Piano (Pushed to Insane Limits!)
I had not realized how seriously some people took the player-piano, but then I read a piece about a modern composer named Conlon Nancarrow, who had studied under Nicolas Slonimsky, Roger Sessions, and Walter Piston. He was known for composing music so demonically difficult for player-piano that no single human could play the piece, no matter how much they practiced. His stuff now seems to prefigure composing for computers. If you check You Tube, you'll find all sorts of amazing things by Nancarrow. A lot of it strikes me as Cecil Taylor on some LSD cut with lots of speed.

The player-piano included here is not so much an "odd musical instrument" but more a very radical approach to a established instrument.

Taking a page (<---HA!) from Nancarrow, get a muthafreakin' load of this piece, "Circus Galop" (sp?), by Marc-Andre Hamelin, who composed it to stress-test MIDI equipment. At times there are 21 notes being played, so no single human could pull this off. I can't help but think that, were Charles Ives around to witness this, he would have approved. I saved the best for last, and it truly is INSANE! Enjoy:

P.S: I realize I've left out Harry Partch and his found-in-the-desert industrial waste instruments, but you probably know all about that schtuff anyway.

John Cage at 100: Ideas About "Silence"

The fine non-fiction writer Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) wrote a book about radical biologists who climbed the tallest redwood trees in the most remote areas of Northern California. This book was titled The Wild Trees. Think of climbing a tree that's 350 feet high. There, above the old-growth redwood canopy the tops of the trees knitted together and one could walk around, there were new species to discover, an entirely new niche. And Preston writes of the overwhelming silence up there, only windsounds if any. Sound, time become warped. Space-sky and perception, silence overwhelming. 


John Cage, with one of his Nocturnes from 1948 in background, talking about sound. How much more zen-masterishly can you get? It's 9 minutes. It might slow your cells down and make you forget Mitt Romney and Barack Obama:

"Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity of his nature. A violent wind does not last for a whole morning; a sudden rain does not last for a whole day. To whom is it that these (two) things are owing? To Heaven and Earth. If Heaven and Earth cannot make such (spasmodic) actings last long, how much less can man!" - Tao Te Ching, from chapter 23, Lao Tze, James Legge trans.

The firebrand schoolteacher and critic of public schools John Taylor Gatto thought one thing schools do to kids is a "manufacture" of "restless anti-solitude" and that schooling stood in the way of the problem of "solitude's mastery." Kids in Unistat grow up not knowing how to be alone with their thoughts.

Morris Berman, another radical critic of Unistat society, thought corporate consumerism and advertising militated against a possibly dangerous to the social order solitude among citizens. He quotes the great literary critic George Steiner, that we live in a "systematic suppression of silence."

"It can't get too quiet for me." - William S. Burroughs

"The marvelous and mysterious which is peculiar to night may also appear...in the remarkable silence that may intervene in the midst of lively conversations; it was said, at such times, that Hermes had entered the room..." - Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods

The poet Gary Snyder once wrote of eustacy, which looks like ecstasy, but he defined the former as "silent, solitary illumination."

When we're in very unpleasant mental states, it seems the last thing many of us want is silence, solitude. Or as my friend Mari L'Esperance put it in a line in one of her poems, "Silence ticking like something alive."

Wine-hearted solitude,
Our mother the wilderness,
Men's failures are often as beautiful
as men's triumphs, but your returnings
Are even more precious than your
first presence.
-Robinson Jeffers, "Bixby's Landing"

The aforementioned Burroughs (was he joking?) thought silence was once the primary reality. In this he probably was using Alfred Korzybski's idea about silence at the event-level of phenomenal experience, pre-verbally. Burroughs took this idea and made brilliant variations on the theme: language as a virus. We talk because the word-virus had found a host: us. I find this one of the funniest and most amusing ideas of the 20th century.

Marshall McLuhan, riffing of one of his favorite themes, the relation of figure/ground:
"New media are new environments. That is why the media are the message. One related consideration is that antienvironments, or counterenvironments created by the artist, are indispensable means of becoming aware of the environment in which we live and of the environments we create for ourselves technically. John Cage has a book called Silence in which, very early in the book, he explains that silence consists of all of the unintended noises of the environment. All of the things that are going on all the time in any environment, but things that were never programmed or intended - that is silence. The unheeded world is silence. That is what James Joyce calls thunder in the Wake. In the Wake  all the consequences of social change - all of the disturbances and metamorphoses resulting from technological change - create a vast environmental roar or thunder that is yet completely inaudible."- "Address At Vision 65," p.225, The Essential McLuhan

And the Greek irony: McLuhan the Great Talker suffered a stroke that pretty much knocked out his ability to speak. Oy! (see Philip Marchand's bio of McLuhan, pp.281-287 for the horrible, profoundly moving deets.)

Ez Pound's silence was self-imposed. He'd fucked up everything with his idiotic antisemitism, he'd hurt everyone he loved, he'd been a damned fool, his entire life was botched, like the civilization he thought he was trying to save. And Allen Ginsberg visiting him in Rapallo, singing Hari Krishna, playing Pound his Bob Dylan records, trying to get Pound to realize that sure, his antisemitism was his "fuck-up," but his poetic revolution had been a success; he'd influenced everyone, etc. Ginsberg to silent Pound, about Julius Orlovsky, "Manichean who wouldn't speak for 14 years because he believed all the evil in the universe issued from his body and mouth." - What Thou Lovest Well Remains, p.33

Pythagoreans and silence. Leary reading Gravity's Rainbow in solitary confinement. Buckminster Fuller, ready to commit suicide because of failure-feeling, deciding he didn't have the right to: he belonged to Universe. Bucky goes silent for a year to see if language was tripping up basic golden thinking-in-pictures. But once Bucky began speaking again, he never stopped. One wonders about the experiment of silence and his prose style.

I'm not sure if any of these thought-snippets on silence made any sense, and 57% of me doesn't care.

Here's a performance of Cage's Imaginary Landscape Number 4 , for 12 radios, etc:

Celebrating Cage's love of wild mushrooms
Alex Ross on Cage turning 100: The John Cage Century
The John Cage Database