.diminished discords (vii)

more stuff about music and metaphysics i guess

.

no man is an island, but a couple can build a boat.
(how you read the above says a lot about you, doesn’t it)

.

the only real war now is about preventing what is yet to be created.

some people say this has always been the case, but i don’t think that’s true. there were forward thinking eras, and stagnation eras. and gods and devils have been on every side, depending. because it’s all about timing. what you can and should do as a child is not the same as when you are an adult. and so for humanity, or cultures.

.

when the plot thickens God adds water and stirs. ask Noah. God doesn’t want humanity to become a thick paste.

.

something that happens only once has more power and is more interesting than something that happens all the time. in fact, the odd thing is what gives meaning to the regularity. so sophia ephemeris is at least as important as sophia perennis. rome wasn’t built in a day. but romance happens in a moment. both of these things are human.

.

i was going to use the metaphor of a dead body. the person is dead, the soul is gone, but the body will not remain as it is. it will keep changing, and transforming, until it is completely decomposed and no longer even a little what it used to be (or anything, really). but i don’t want to compare christianity (as an institution, and cultural influence) to a dead body. and except for the fact that i just did, i won’t.

(important note: i am talking about christianity, not Jesus. Jesus is fine. he’s overcome the world, as some of you may know. the question is: have you. i’m still working on it).

but the metaphor is not necessary. this happens all the time to everything. and we can use paganism as an example, to add a bit of irony. it died long before its body stopped moving and disappeared. some of its relics were even kept, and for a long long time, in the christian west. but it was really dead long before christianity became established.

and the same has now happened to christianity. Jupiter stopped answering the romans, and Jesus stopped answering the christians. this is obvious. there is no power or magic left in the churches. lots of people may say: but my church is wonderful, we do this and do that, and so on. but that doesn’t change the fact that the spirit going through your local or even home church is not infecting and affecting the world the way christianity as a whole thing did (it’s not supposed to).

the fact is, no religion moves the West (and beyond) anymore. but it obviously did, as any look into history will show. even a look around. the remnants of that incredibly strong motivation are still here. we like to visit such places. but we don’t do there what our ancestors did. and even when we do, we don’t feel like they did doing it.

C. S. Lewis, i think, once said that this was doubly true for paganism. that if we are removed from christianity, we are even more so from paganism. but now i think it’s pretty much the same. that gap has been closed. the more a body decomposes, the more it looks like the one next to it. (damn it, i ended up using the corpse metaphor; maybe it’s fitting since so much of christianity is about that; only mormonism focuses more on the resurrected Jesus than in the one hanging from the cross).

.

if both mortal life and man have some kind of cosmic purpose (and they obviously do), then it makes sense that the particulars of both can be applied in larger scales. and thus like a man is meant to grow from child to adult, so is humanity.

but growing up implies becoming one’s own. western man did so, and is suffering through growing pains. but these are necessary pains. and as such, despite the pain, they are in the end good. the pain has a purpose.

change is inevitable, and there is a purpose to change. this is the adult way of seeing things. we don’t have to deny like a child that change exists. and we don’t have to deny like an adolescent that there is purpose to change.

.

it’s better to be inwardly motivated, rather than the opposite. the problem is that you can be inwardly motivated for bad things, or even evil things, or in bad ways, or in evil ways. the possibilities of error are… uh… legion. but is it not worse to have no choice at all. or be only partially aware and responsible for one self.

that is assuming such a thing is even possible now (and it isn’t). but even considering it abstractly and in a vacuum, at least for me, it is far from ideal. i want to do good because i know it is good. not because someone told me it is good.

it’s like saint Paul says (typical…). because the hebrews were slaves to the Law, they were slaves to Sin, which was the reason for the Law. without Sin the Law has no point. the pagans had their own bonds, not that different from that of the hebrews, really. but that’s no way to live. it’s better to be free to fail, and to succeed.

(failure is more common than success; but then again, if success was very common, it would lose most of its value, as is the case for everything).

.

it’s not a new idea to say that humanity is going though adolescence. but usually this simile is negative. as if adolescence was all bad. but it’s not, unless it is perpetual. in its place adolescence has as much to contribute to the whole man as childhood does. in some ways, given what adulthood is and requires, adolescence has more so.

it’s not my experience in the least, but many people report being born in a faith, then becoming atheists in their teens, and then coming back to the faith later. but i would doubt they come back to it with the eyes of a child. they may do it through the eyes of children (their own; this seems likely and healthy); but not as children. they won’t feel as small, or be in as much awe, and so forth. they can’t.

so it seems fitting that, the West having reached cosmic adolescence, it would lose not only the faith it had, but any. faith is just not what adolescence is for. the fact that in most ways the adolescent is still dependent on the parents makes it an ironic age. but eventually that too ends. and this is my assessment of where we’re at: that’s over now. the Sky Father has kicked us out of the house. thank God.

.

new forms of consciousness breed new forms of expression. religious, artistic, cultural (these are actually part of the same thing). it seems likely that we have not yet learned what these are (we are making them as we go), and so have no tools or measures to evaluate greatness in any medium today.

it’s always nice to use words like Divine Beauty, or Platonic Forms, but one quickly finds problems when translating these lofty abstractions into the real world. if nothing else because in the real world things change, and we learn, and we grow.

for example, Mozart’s musical joke. it is one of the earliest examples of polytonality in classical music (but not in folk music, although no one would call it that there).

(it’s a bit sinful to talk about music in an analytical way; much like religion, again).

anyway, people weren’t offended by polytonality. they just thought it was a bit of fun. and they didn’t see any potential for expressing deeper, more complex feelings than is possible with pure tonality. it would take another two centuries or so for it to be the case.

here’s a digression on harmony so we can get to why. simply put, harmony is two or more melodies happening at the same time. now, we are able to follow a single melody easily. but the more notes we stack, the more individual melody threads we have to follow. polytonality and extended harmony is exactly the same process, except more complex. more threads to follow. like a developed palate, or an appreciation for serious literature, or anything else really, it requires some intention and learning until it becomes second nature, until we can feel it without mediation.

and this process happened in a larger scale with modern man too. but we should not exaggerate it. outside of Stravinsky and a couple others, classical music is still either about the eighteenth and nineteenth century, or it is minimalist (which is not necessarily tonal, but is the opposite of harmony, more often than not; what it is is easy to rehearse, and thus cheaper to produce). twentieth century dissonance is really not that popular anywhere (except in film scores, perhaps; but very formulaic, as it must be). people take refuge in tonality, and for a good reason. but to do it exclusively is a diminished experience. the fact that to follow more than three or four musical threads at once requires focus and active listening is probably why it’s so unpopular, as these are in short supply in our time.

.

Bruce pointed out to me that i had been unfair to folk music. that the ‘magic of the moment’ i was ascribing to jazz is really part of any true musical experience, and of folk more so (because local, rooted in culture and season, etc). much more so than classical music. this is definitely true.

i’ve seen inspiring and innovative folk concerts, and boring and uninspired jazz ones; i even wrote about these two things specifically in the Alice book because i found the true experiences the scenes were based on so striking; a jazz legend plays the most monotonous set imaginable in a big festival; and an obscure folk group plays with immense intensity at the private afterparty.

and it’s not just the ‘magic of the moment’ either. it’s structural too. in many ways folk music is more adventurous than classical music (or some of it). lots of folk music from all over the world, including the west, makes use of odd meters, or complex tonality, or even microtonality. yet it is still, always and ever, confined to formula and tradition, to social life, not to individual expression (which is another way of saying final participation).

so i still stand by the generic analysis that there is not as much room for deviation from the norm and evolution and expression in folk music (and by necessity; and it’s a good thing, too; i don’t want to do away with folk music; although it too will have a hard time surviving as a living tradition, probably no longer does exist in the west anywhere anymore). yet indeed, every sincere instance of musicianship (even in a milieu as restricted as orchestral music, for example), always partakes of the ideal i was attributing to jazz.

.

Bruce also objected to the prominent position i was attributing to improvisation. that composition (structure), and the particulars of expression (timbre, phrasing, etc), are all more important.

now, to be clear, improvisation, individual expression in music (like anywhere), does not mean complete absence of structure or guiding principle. it’s participation, not solipsism. but it’s conscious, and individual.

and it partakes of all those things. for one, it requires structure, and is a form of mastering structure. it includes composition (not just in the moment, by the improviser, but in the thing over which one improvises), plus phrasing, timber, rhythm, etc; and everything else (including interaction with the other musicians, if one is not playing alone).

also composition really is improvisation slowed down. when writing, the inspired part is not the editing. and the same is true when composing music. of course, with composition and writing one can tinker afterward. but that’s not where the heart of it is. the heart of it comes in a moment.

Mozart said so himself, if i remember correctly: that he grasped the whole piece at once, or something to that effect. musical improvisation is the same, except faster, where a sort of editing is also done in the moment. but anyone who can improvise does hear the notes before he plays them.

.

which leads me to Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which Bruce always singles out as the great villains of western music, so we’ll use those. maybe he’s right. in a way all these people threw away centuries of music, but i would rather say that they merely refused to accept defeat, which is what repetition is. and there was nowhere to go forward except beyond tonality (much like there is nowhere to go but beyond traditional religion). in these pursuits, dissonance was not only inevitable, but sought after. and like everything everywhere, most of it is crap.

but so what.

.

i keep making the point that contrast is the fundamental given of life, if it is to be any kind of life at all. the light shines in the darkness. a place of only light is a place where you can’t see anything. it’s true in painting too. to highlight something you must give it a dark shadow or outline. then it appears light, whereas before the dark edge, it faded into the background.

life can be thought of as acquiring more and more relief from a previously blank slate.

and so the ironic truth about music is that dissonance is its blood. it’s where the life of it is, really. if you don’t believe me, sing a single note. over and over. in whatever rhythm. that is the only perfect consonance. add any other note and bam, you just added dissonance. which means, like everything, it’s a matter of degree.

in music, as in the cosmos, we’re still tuning up. which is the title of today’s music portion, so called because it’s Varèse’s attempt to depict an orchestra tuning their instruments before a concert. it was commissioned for a film that never got made, and Varèse never finished it or got paid. (one of his students completed it decades later).

i find it beautiful on its own without the added subtext. but i may be completely insane, so there’s that.