There is a great Man living in this country — a composer.
He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn.
He responds to negligence by contempt.
He is not forced to accept praise or blame.
His name is Ives.
(Schoenberg)
John Dewey's system of formal logic is one of the more peculiar animals in the philosophical menagerie. Less a description of the thoughts that it might be possible to have about a given thing, it is more a guide for the perplexed -- in order to help them be more efficiently perplexed -- sort of talking them through the process of thinking about something. (With the implicit contention that this is what the other fellows were doing as well, at root.) Santayana's response was quite simple: Is a naturalistic metaphysics a contradiction in terms?
Music, like metaphysics, is associated with a tradition that runs from grand style to primitive (or perhaps primordial) and austere. Like mathematics, its basic building blocks are sometimes regarded as divine, or at least ideal. And the result is inevitably made subject to social scrutiny and deontic force.
Discarding the received seriousness of the art can come across as flippant, or popularizing, but (especially at the beginning of the last century and shortly before) it can also be an attempt to cut to the quick of the question, to avoid being caught up in the senseless repetition of the past. Grandchildren of Emerson and his ilk, those New Englanders who took the idealism from German idealism and used it to free themselves from the iron nominalist fears and laws of British philosophy and American religion, these puritans (in the best sense of the word -- cf., again Santayana) strode fearlessly into the performance halls and lecture theatres of the old forms, and attempted to make things not practical, but pragmatic. (The distinction, as C.S. Peirce said, is that the first is essentially meaningless to deeper inquiry, and the second serves some existing human purpose. Henry James essentially said that it helped to translate the question into more immediate terms.) The emphasis was on the actual.
So now, after many many years, we have these works in the artistic repertory and these books on the shelves that seem almost childlike in their simplicity, bookended on either side by artists and thinkers who returned to the older forms as a more true choice, together with the iconoclasts who were breaking everything in sight both before and afterwards.
Eavesdropping on this week's concerts at the NY Phil via the lobby Jumbotron, after a day of studying James and Peirce, I encounter Ives. (Whom I also encountered several years ago at the outdoor festival on the plaza outside, with marching bands criss-crossing the complex, but that was a long time ago -- even the stone in the plaza was different, almost all travertine marble, since replaced by patterned asphalt.
The piece was the second set of orchestral pieces, closing with a sound-painting of an NYC El station on the day that the news came in that the Lusitania, sailing out of New York, had been sunk off the coast of Ireland. The gentle cacophony of the first movement had the whiff of iconoclasm to it, but in a pragmatic sense, this seeming chaos was in service of an existing human purpose, and notion of beauty. As Schoenberg said to Adorno, when being told that his twelve-tone system was quite popular in some classical music circles: "Yes, but do they use it to compose with?" Just as Dewey was attempting to serve the purposes of formal logic itself with his naturalistic metaphysics, the attempt to compose in freedom is distinct from the effort to bring freedom to composition. The moment of the spontaneous hymn at the end was an austere tension, made all the more heartfelt for having observed none of the usual proprieties. Just around the corner, at the fire station behind the theatre, there was a similar moment after 9/11, when the crowd at a scripted vigil (perhaps at the prompting of the present writer) broke into an unscripted verse or two of "Amazing Grace". While the Phil responded admirably to those events -- I remember watching from the back of the balcony as Masur strode onto the stage and to the podium and struck up the National Anthem. And then there was the Transmigration, of course.
Classical music venues and ensembles seem to feel an obligation to present a canon composed of all times, not allowing the art of any one time to inflect the common project too substantially. And so, arrayed on the shelf, the notion in these late 19th c. and early 20th c. works that it might be possible to escape from the past seems confounded, and the (perhaps more critical) desire to escape from the future is defeated before it even arose. But each work still makes a proposition on the evenings on which it is performed. Each book still makes a proposition in the hours in which you are alone with it. This evening belongs to that hope. And some hopes are stronger than others. The work fills the evening, even still.
And now, into Rautavaara's First Piano Concerto, with a soloist striding brashly onto the stage in the thinnest and shortest of 'flapper' dresses. One of the listeners in the lobby, perhaps from the adjoining housing projects, utters a loud cry and rushes off to the WC.
The composer: "I was disappointed at that time with the strict academic structuring of serialist music and the ascetic mainstream style of piano music, which I found anaemic. In the concerto, therefore, I returned to the aesthetics of expressiveness and a sonorous, “grand-style” keyboard technique."
The tradition indicates that a modern, or postmodern work should take a certain style in order to accomplish its purposes, but something in the composer rises up against that historically informed form, feeling that it doesn't do the work of composition. Perhaps we can think of the work of composition as being a habit of the composer, originating in his or her conceptual purposes, but becoming a way of living life, of having his or her existence, a way of knowing what it is to be themselves when they are most themselves. This, then is what gives the rule to the experimentation with styles, and distinguishes practical work from pragmatic work.
This habit of work, then, whether in composing philosophy or writing music, imparts a certain naturalism to the work. It's the sort of thing a reasonable person might write or compose. And this is what provoked Santayana's reaction to Dewey's informal formal logic, querying the notion of a naturalistic metaphysics, with the implication that metaphysics is not merely characterized by its historic forms, but constituted by them. And the same might be said for music. Perhaps the important thing is not that the work seems naturalistic, but that the one who made it was so present and alive to the possibility of the work that the work retained so many traces of his will.
Some analytic philosophers distinguish object naturalism from subject naturalism; one of these schools thinks the things in the world to be the sort of things one finds in nature, and the other (subject naturalism) says that we're looking at the things in the world in the manner that a human being in our position might be thought to. Similarly, there is in some aesthetic criticism, the notion of process naturalism, which, assuming I have the concept, is the subject naturalism of the creator of a work of art.
But all of these labels are applied to existing works, written or performed, in the repertory, characterizing the form of the work. And this, perhaps is what a healthy Deweyan naturalism should cause us to query. The work's first existence is music, or philosophy, or what you will. And, when things are going well, we're not exactly sure what any of these things might be, and when things are going very well, the present object of our attention seems to trace out a fullness that teaches us what music, or philosophy, or the other things are. As opposed to being constituted by their historic forms.
And now, the conductor, a composer of some note, launches the ensemble into one of his own works, a prophecy composed for the NY Phil on the occasion of the turn of the millennium. In short order (it's a short piece), we're in a cacophony worthy of Ives, but just like the joyful noises earlier in the evening, this is in the service of a vision of the time, and therefore pragmatic, not practical, and actually a more conservative view of composition than found with the iconoclasts, since we say that there are purposes to music and ways of carrying these intentions out in the music.
Which is not to say that the Ives and this work are working from the same playbook. This piece isn't about overheard music, but a heartfelt, entirely ingenuous warning about the inherent dangers of time, perhaps. We are less distant from the object than we are with the Ives, and comfortably in the rich acoustics of the concert hall, not wandering through the New England forests.
By freeing itself from the historical forms, music can perhaps contemplate the nature of the time (or a moment in time twenty-five years ago), and then stand affixed in the repertory, between the timelessness of the past gods of the classical repertory and those to come, the work of a human (so much so that this seems to be its defining characteristic). Perhaps it is attempting to accomplish the historic work of the art form without being bound by its historic forms. It purports to be a living and intelligent effort; but take it for what you will.