Feet and Inches

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(from somewhere within Margolis, Philosophy Looks At the Arts)

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I confess that I also was completely unaware of this!

[emailed to self, 18 January 2022]

Mumford -- Art and Technics (viii)

"We ordinarily use the word technology to describe both the field of the practical arts and the systematic study of their operations and products. For the sake of clarity, I prefer to use technics alone to describe the field itself, that part of human activity wherein, by an energetic organization of the process of work, man controls and directs the forces of nature for his own purposes." (15)

"Art, in the only sense in which one can separate art and technics, is primarily the domain of the person; and the purpose of art, apart from various incidental technical functions that may be associated with it, is to widen the province of personality, so that feelings, emotions, attitudes, and values, in the special individualized form in which they happen in one particular person, in one particular culture, can be transmitted with all their force and meaning to other persons or to other cultures." (16)

"...art is that part of technics which bears the fullest imprint of the human personality; technics is that manifestation of art from which a large part of the human personality has been excluded, in order to further the mechanical process." (21)

Given these two definitions, it is more obvious how technics could get out of hand than art could, more obvious that the task of controlling/directing the forces of nature is fraught with invitations to material excess and destruction than is the seemingly private, scalable, immaterial task of "widen[ing] the province of personality." Art for the drawer can run amok in that drawer without doing any damage on the outside. It is not creation or expression per se but rather art's imperative to be "transmitted with all [its] force and meaning" where complications arise. Does whoever is on the receiving end of such transmissions get any choice in the matter? Are the technics of transmission not just as fraught as any other technical questions? Most of all, how much of this personality-widening inheres in mere creation and how much in transmission, reception, and response? This last question is, in my mind, one of the most important questions for artists living in the internet age. I would say that Cage's famous self-imposed belief that a work was not complete until it had been performed was rather out of step with his yet-more-famous conceit to the elision of the will and personality. Willfulness for the drawer is harmless, a tree falling which nobody can hear. Willfulness is not the problem, oversharing is.

[sc]airquotes (i)

"One important aspect of Afrological improvisation is the notion of the importance of personal narrative, of 'telling your own story'...

...An Afrological notion of an improviser's 'sound' may be seen as analogous to the Eurological concept of compositional 'style,' especially in a musically semiotic sense. Moreover, for an improviser working in Afrological forms, 'sound,' sensibility, personality, and intelligence cannot be separated from an improviser's phenomenal (as distinct from formal) definition of music. Notions of personhood are transmitted via sounds, and sounds become signs for deeper levels of meaning beyond pitches and intervals. The saxophonist Yusef Lateef (1985-88, 44) makes it plain: "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising. We feel that we can hear character or personality in the way the musician improvises...

...Interestingly, Cage's critique of jazz also likens it to personal storytelling. Cage's description of jazz seems to liken the music to a ring shout: 'The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking-that is, in succession-like in a panel discussion .... If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words' (quoted in Zwerin 1991, 162). This perceptive comment from a composer who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be portrayed as possessing any affinity with Afrological musical forms, provides some intersubjective justification for the notion that one of the central aesthetic demands made on Afrological improvisers is that the improviser 'tell a story.'

In any event, Eurological improvisers have tended to look askance on the admission of personal narrative into improvisative activity. I believe that, for postwar Eurological improvisers, the ideas of Cage have, again, had the greatest impact in this regard: 'What I would like to find is an improvisation that is not descriptive of the performer, but is descriptive of what happens, and which is characterized by an absence of intention'(quoted in Kostelanetz 1987, 222).

George E. Lewis
Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives
Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 241-242



Professor Lewis is more or less beyond reproach, and nothing he says here is debatable in the sense that it is inaccurate. I for one am struck, rather, by what is not said. The validity/usefulness/expressive power of personal narrative would seem to my Eurologically-inclined sensibilities to be almost completely dependent on the nature and content of the narrative in question, and not simply projectable a priori across an entire culture (less yet to others) without case-by-case evaluation of this content. In other words, apples-and-oranges characterizations fail when one prefers Granny Smiths to Clementines and Navels to Red Delicious. Mustn't we be allowed our own value judgments as to who's story matters to us? And if we simply don our dreadlocks and patchouli oil and decide that everyone's story matters, does anyone's story really matter?

Lewis makes no explicit endorsement of such expansive relativism, but nor does he avail himself of a readymade opportunity submit it to the same kind of fruitful interrogation the Eurological view receives in ensuing paragraphs. It's plain enough even to someone like me that, "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising," so plain, actually, that I'm not sure what we've really established by stopping there. The deeper questions, I think, are about the nature and importance of this knowledge to the listener and the citizen.

In any case, I continue to maintain that I'm not nearly interesting enough to be the focal point of my own music, or alternatively, that if the most interesting thing about my music is that I made it, I've probably not achieved much. The question of individuality, highly valued in Afrological thought according to Lewis et al, is thus related, but nor is uniqueness broadly construed any more sufficient, in my opinion, than narrativity broadly construed to confer value on any given work without considering what is unique and how the story actually goes.

A Blasphemous Thought on Cage

Ever since my first encounters with his writings (shallow readings to be sure, but having a lasting impact nonetheless), I just can't shake the feeling that Cage has even more to offer to traditionalists than to experimentalists. What I mean by this is that his trademark philosophies may have opened up a whole new world, but this doesn't mean they cannot or should not be applied to the old one. Perhaps this requires a certain amount of willful misreading, not only of Cage but also of what I am calling traditional music, yet I see few drawbacks and many rewards to this scenario. What a pleasure (not to mention a relief) it is to hear the sounds of the Eroica Symphony just being themselves; Beethoven's intent need not always be ours.