Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 4—Part 2

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

---

[182]

Part II
The aesthetic dimension

Aesthetic experience revisited

...   the aesthetic theory of art is not a comprehensive theory of all art. However, the notion of aesthetic experience pervades our discussion of art. ...

... the most popular conception of aesthetic experience claims that it is

the disinterested and sympathetic attention and

[183]

contemplation of any object whatsoever for its own sake.

... Our responses to artworks—let us call them art-responses—may encompass things other than aesthetic experience. Yet what is it when we experience an artwork aesthetically? ...

We can have what we call aesthetic experiences of artworks, or of everyday things, like nature. These experiences involve

attention

and

contemplation

as their most characteristic elements. ...

Moreover, what are called aesthetic experiences are

sympathetic,

at least in this sense

: that we

take cognizance

of the object in question and we attempt to let it

guide us where it will.

 

I think that, ideally, we would not attempt so hard. Ideally, we would only realize later (if at all?) that we had been guided.

If so, then we might as well go ahead and define 'interestedness' as 'whatever is preventing us from being "guided"'. And this, of course, includes trying so hard to be guided that we can't even breathe.

Yes, this all sounds too gooey and romantic. In one sense it is extreme. Why go quite so far? Because,

"Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

(Freud)

 

...   [The work] may be intended to lead us where we do not wish to go. It may

alienate our sympathies.

However,

our experience can still be called aesthetic

so long as we approach the work openly, ...

...

[184]

... We would not typically call an experience of a work aesthetic that altogether ignored the structures of the work and what they were intended to do.

 

I would hesitate to call an experience aesthetic if it made too much of intentions and not enough of structures . . .

 

... what of disinterestedness? Disinterestedness is generally regarded as the most important element of aesthetic experience. But is aesthetic experience really disinterested?

...   The existence of such a state is often inferred by considering certain examples and by proposing disinterestedness as the best concept for explaining them. For instance, if someone goes to a school play because her daughter is in it, and she spends all her time nodding beamingly at her offspring's performance, proponents of disinterestedness will suggest that we all agree that her experience is not aesthetic. What is wrong here? The proponent of disinterestedness explains: her attention is guided by her personal interests; it is not impartial; it is not disinterested.

Likewise, if a patron of the arts admires his recently acquired painting because he is sure it will make him world famous, his attention is motivated by his personal interests; ...

Finally, where a Bolshevik commissar reads a novel solely to confirm that all the references to Stalin are adulatory, he was not reading in a manner that most would call aesthetic. ...

Surely in these cases, there is something

wrong

or

deficient

about the way in which the audience members in question are responding to the relevant artworks.

 

As a friend of aesthetics, I ask: What tf is really, truly wrong with these cases as given? It's clear enough that they are deficient, if we insist on wording things that way. It's clear how they are "deficient," and in what they are "deficient." But what's really wrong with being deficient in just this way?

A parent may be smothering, a patron may be vain, and a commissar may be morally bankrupt and unfeeling, but of course this is not at all what Our Man means to suggest, and he is correct, presumably, that the (un)wisdom of these various stances is no more what is at issue in the diagnosis and consideration of "interested" attention than it is in the construction of ideals of "disinterested" attention.

What is at issue? It's a question of what is or is not happening. It's a simple question, really. The dialogue around it is so complex only because so many people, so much of the time, don't like the answers.

When the "happening" is cognitive rather than behavioral, it is extremely difficult to catch any glimpse at it at all; but that also is not what is at issue above. No matter on what side of the issue we have situated ourselves, by entering capital-P debate we presume to apply some deductive rigor to the problem as we see it; and if empirical investigation is difficult or impossible in the given case, that is no deterrent to such nonempirical methods as the capital-Ps deploy; if anything, a problem's intransigence to empirical methods actually validates the appeal to nonempirical methods.

So, speaking for a theory in which he does not personally believe, a theory which he has in fact made a career of opposing, Our Man Here professes surety that the Aesthetic Theorist thinks there is something wrong with "interested" attention paid to an artwork which (let us just presume) also affords the attention-payer the opportunity for aesthetic satisfaction. But how could there really be some big-picture moral principle at stake here? If there is such a principle at stake, then pretty much everyone who believes in a Judgment Day is in for a much tougher time than they realize, since pretty much everyone has been "wrong" about art in precisely this way, if not all the time then at least some of the time. Why? Because we are profoundly interested creatures. It's necessary, actually, that we reset ourselves to "interested" in certain situations! The above-given examples, each in their own way, suggest a few of the more salient human situations in which "disinterest" would be pathological.

Where I think friends of aesthetics have erred most often and most egregiously is in characterizing the effort to achieve "disinterest." For the longest time it seems this was construed as an effort of the aesthete to achieve some stance vis-a-vis the object of interest. I've never been sure how that would even work, since it seems . . . very "interested," explicit, and self-conscious to put forth just that much effort toward the taking in of some artwork. It seems possible to me only in the abstract that "effort" could be "disinterested"; in reality, I don't see how I could evince "effort" and "disinterest" together in a single thought or action: should this be demanded of me, then the demand itself has simply created an "interest"; or, if there is no real demand, then there can be nothing like "effort" either.

But the artist, conventionally speaking, makes an effort too: the artist can make an effort to entrain the subject into so-called "aesthetic" subjectivity; or they can make no such effort, or they can make some other effort, or (this one really caught on for a while) they can make great, valorous effort to entrain the subject into non-aesthetic subjectivity. If we really do think we can place a given artist on such a continuum, then we have surely identified one kind of "intent"; and then, for any "intentionalists" among us, there is the semblance of a principled reason for declaring there to be "something wrong" with the doting mother or (Urmson's example seized upon by Dickie) the greedy impresario. Something seems intuitively "wrong," or at least unfair, about all that noble art-effort coming to nothing on account of such base motives as attachment or greed.

Our Man does seem to believe in intent, and in intent-ional-ism. He seems actually, i.e. personally and professionally, to believe in it.

I do not believe in intentionalism.

I do believe that "disinterestedness" and "interestedness" both happen, and that the distinction between them is a coherent distinction, both abstractly and empirically.

I believe that "disinterested" aesthetic experience has an indispensible social function. However, this does not simply stipulate by implication that its "interested" counterpart is "wrong," either in general or in given cases, as above.

What is wrong? Intentionalism is wrong. Stuffed-shirt art-papistry is wrong. Calling a mother "wrong" for being unable to "distance" herself from her young daughter's school theater production is definitely super wrong! Labelling her connoisseurship of kid-theater as "deficient" is closer to the capital-P truth, but this is a bit rude and misdirected even for my tastes.

What can we say about the latter case? We can say much that will get us in equally hot water with a whole other department of the institutional Boomersphere leviathan. That is, we can refuse to agree that "disinterest" is in evidence when we have good reason to think otherwise, and we can refuse to agree that "interestedness" is not in evidence when it very clearly is.

We can simply notice

that this silly little example actually is fully paradigmatic;

that mother-to-daughter is only the most powerful of many particularistic attachments;

that these attachments do not need to be half this powerful to be, nonetheless, fully destructive of "disinterest" and constitutive of "interest";

that culture is "a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value" (Becker again), and that this is an "interest" that lives in every single human being, sometimes sublimated, other times exploding above the surface;

BUT, all the same, that such "interest" does not simply come and go at the same time, to the same degree, with same consequences, for everyone alike;

that every particularlistic attachment, every self-conscious tribal identification, every pang of hunger for "a feeling of primary value," every single one of these is a tidal wave of explicit "interest" countervailing any implicitly "disinterested" practice;

and that it is not possible for "disinterest" to simply push back with equal force, since the very essence of "disinterest" is that it is implicit, unspoken, and yes, therefore intensely fragile.

 

Fingerprints or Mushroom Stamps?

This is my Goodreads review of Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity.

---

Feeling horny? Grab this book and flip to page 153. You'll find a photo of Family Romance, a "mixed media" piece comprised of four half-realistic, fully naked mannequins representing mom, dad, bro and sis.

Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.

I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.

This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine.

KENDALL WALTON—Categories of Art

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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[53]

Categories of Art

KENDALL WALTON

[orig. 1970]

I Introduction

...

Paintings and sculptures are to be looked at; sonatas and songs are to be heard. What is important about these works of art, as works of art, is what can be seen or heard in them. Inspired partly by apparent commonplaces such as these, many recent aesthetic theorists have attempted to purge from criticism of works of art supposedly extraneous excursions into matters not (or not "directly") available to inspection of the works, and to focus attention on the works themselves. Circumstances connected with a work's origin, in particular, are frequently held to have no essential bearing on an assessment of its aesthetic nature—

Well okay, ALREADY we're caught between

criticism of works of art

and

an assessment of its aesthetic nature
.

Frederick Crews—Out of My System

Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
(1975)

---

[x]

...the effort to work out a consistent attitude toward radicalism in its newest guises proved to bear directly on the methodological inquiries I kept postponing. Essays that were written as acts of political self-scrutiny, exploring why I felt uneasy about movements I might have been expected to applaud, also amounted to partial reappraisals of psychoanalysis as a "radical" doctrine. At last I realized that instead of being continually diverted from my book, I had nearly completed it. Its true subject, I discovered, was not psychoanalytic method per se, but the difficulty of mediating between empirical responsibility and urges toward deep and revolutionary explanation.

FRANK SIBLEY—Aesthetic Concepts (ii)

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

[Sibley, "Aesthetic Concepts" (cont.)]

---

[41]

II

A great deal of work remains to be done on aesthetic concepts. In the remainder of this paper I shall offer some further suggestions which may help towards an understanding of them.

The realization that aesthetic concepts are governed only negatively by conditions is likely to give rise to puzzlement over how we manage to apply the words in our aesthetic vocabulary. ... One very natural way to counter this question is to point out that some other sorts of concepts also are not condition-governed. We do not apply simple color words by following rules or in accordance with principles. We see that the book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea is sweet by tasting it. ... This kind of comparison... is indeed familiar;... Yet whatever the similarities, there are great dissimilarities too. ... ...but certain differences stand out, and writers who have emphasized that aesthetic judgments are not "mechanical" have sometimes dwelt on and been puzzled by them.

FRANK SIBLEY—Aesthetic Concepts (i)

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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[29]

2. Aesthetic Concepts

FRANK SIBLEY

[orig. 1959]

The remarks we make about works of art are of many kinds. For the purpose of this paper I wish to indicate two broad groups. ... We say that a novel has a great number of characters ... ; that a painting uses pale colors ,... Such remarks may be made by, and such features pointed out to, anyone with normal eyes, ears, and intelligence. On the other hand, we also say that a poem is tightly knit or deeply moving ; that a picture lacks balance ,... It would be neutral enough to say that the making of such judgments as these requires the exercise of taste, perceptiveness, or sensitivity, of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation; one would not say this of my first group. ...

Rudi Supek—Freedom and Polydeterminism in Cultural Criticism

Rudi Supek
"Freedom and Polydeterminism
in Cultural Criticism" (1965)
in
Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium
ed. Erich Fromm
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965, pp. 280-298.

---

Culture
is very likely

one of the most
sensitive
areas of

social criticism.

Nowhere else
can

the inadequacy or absurdity of theoretical presuppositions or methodological procedures
be
uncovered so rapidly,

nowhere else
can

human creative activity
overwhelm
erroneous premises and conclusions with such promptitude,

and

nowhere else
can

such harm be
inflicted
upon the creative potentialities of human beings

as when

a dogmatic theory
is
imposed on cultural policy

by means of
social compulsion.

Richard Maltby—Story as the Cheapest Form of Novelty

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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[26]

THE CANNING BUSINESS

"After all, pictures are shipped
out in cans. We're in the can-
ning business."
Sammy Glick

... "There is ever present the obligation to entertain those who pay the price for what they believe will be entertainment." [Joseph] Breen's job was to ensure that Hollywood produced "entertainment which tends to improve the race, or at least to recreate and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life."

As well as this prescription, the movies were also expected to contain a number of known or anticipated ingredients, which can be characterized in several ways. In fulfilling its "obligation to entertain" the Hollywood movie had, like any other non-durable consumer product, to meet certain standards of quality. Predictable quality was indicated by the same criteria as might be employed by a manufacturer of canned food: the reputation of the producing company's brand name (MGM, Warner Brothers), and the quality of the product's ingredients (starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, [etc.]...) Commercially, film, like canned food, required that its customers could anticipate enjoying it by contemplating the mixture of known and reliable ingredients.

On the other hand, while one can's contents should taste exactly like another's, a film needed to present at least the illusion of being distinct from every other film. Even the most formularized B-film entailed a separate act of production and had to supply its spectator/consumers with an element of novelty to keep them engaged in its consumption, as well as the predictable ingredients which would initially lure them to the cinema. Advertising slogans often sought to make this joint appeal. ...

[27]

... Campaigns mounted around a star... offered the audience a novel experience from a familiar, reliable source, an idea perhaps most concisely expressed in the advertisements for Ninotchka, which simply announced, "Garbo laughs."

Michael Mayer—Music on the Eve of the Third Reich

Michael Mayer
"Music on the Eve of the Third Reich"
in
Towards the Holocaust : the social and economic collapse of the Weimar Republic
ed. Dobkowski and Wallimann
(1983)

[316] Stripped of ideological jargon, the crisis in music is an expression of the inevitable tension between institutional and dynamic art and between different generations of artists. Having matured to Germany's outstanding and internationally reoognized cultural institution, music suffered from its own success.

In other words, institutions are not a priori vehicles of autonomy, but may just as well be (or become) "external" impositions upon music.

[317] The response to an alleged crisis of modern music in the Weimar period involved progressive and conservative formulations that overlapped and became confused with ideological categories and positions. Musicians themselves have contributed to this confusion. At least by the time of Carl Maria von Weber they had become accustomed to explaining their artistic and technical principles in music criticism, music theory, and teaching, which readily expanded into general cultural criticism with ideological overtones. It has been argued that the need for explanation, as opposed to simply composing and musicmaking, might itself be regarded as a symptom of crisis.

Refusing to explain won't make a real crisis go away, nor will it cause people who have merely imagined a crisis to snap of it. But refusal does, at least, allow us to keep our own hands (relatively) clean. And that is not nothing.

[320] Adorno had moved from reductionist Marxian aesthetics, which characterized the earlier work of the Institute of Social Research, to the defense of music's autonomy, its utopian and even transcendental powers, because of his conception of music's crisis in this overly rationalized and administered world, no less represented in Zhdanov's socialist realism of the 1930s than in the market-oriented music of the Weimar Republic or the artificial and manipulated folk music of the Third Reich's Blut und Boden cult.

...

[321] Strauss, the future president of the Reichsmusikkammer, had introduced expressionism to opera with his shocking Salome and Elektra, thus initiating a musical trend of subjectivism, which culminated in the dramatic works of Schönberg and Berg.

This ascription of subjectivism seems problematic; as if subjectivity had not existed prior. The advent of "subjectivism" seems to indicate merely that a conceit or illusion had been shattered, i.e. the conceit to/illusion of an epistemological unity of transmission with reception. The onrushing musical trend could just as well have marked (still can mark) an Eriksonian crisis of development rather than a mere "crisis" of anomie and civilizational decline.

As Rank says, the application of "psychological aesthetic" to creation is "a fallacy." Which is to say, it always was a fallacy, it just took some time to reveal itself as such.

Adorno:

[321] "absolute subjectivity is also subjectless . . . ; the more of the I of expressionism is thrown upon itself, the more like the excluded world of things it becomes."

Yep!

[329] If hindsight seemed to guide many engaged analysts of the background to Auschwitz, there is no doubt that National Socialism had roots and synthesized much in German history: It was not an inevitable product of German history, but the fulfillment of a set among countless other sets of potentiality. What the empiricist thus is forced to document and has indeed traced through careful recording of thought and action in time--always being vulnerable to the charge of drawing on selective data in support of retrospective knowledge--theorists have explained, ordered in intelligible structures, and rendered as a negative program in opposition to and thus in confirmation of their own positive view of the world.

Lasch—On Ellul

Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)

Ch. XVII, "The Social Thought of Jacques Ellul"

According to The Technological Society, the last chance of revolution disappeared in the nineteenth century, when the revolutionary movement ceased to oppose technology with "spiritual forces" and adopted the materialist perspective as its own, thereby hastening the final triumph of economic man. "Proudhon and Bakunin had placed spiritual forces in rivalry with the economic order. Against them, Marx upheld the bourgeois order of the primacy of the economic. . . ." Unfortunately for this analysis, Marx never propounded any such thing as "dialectical materialism"—that was the contribution of Engels, who sought to establish the scientific credentials of Marxism according to the positivist standard of scientific truth that had come to prevail at the end of the nineteenth century. Marx was not a determinist; he did not deny the element of human will in history; he made no easy assumptions about the inevitability of progress; nor did he equate social progress with technology.

(p. 271 footnote)

[Ellul's] The Presence of the Kingdom is addressed to Christians, but it raises questions that all radical intellectuals have to confront, whether or not they approach them from a Christian perspective. The crisis of the faith is one aspect of the cultural crisis of our time, and Ellul's plea that the church speak directly and critically to social issues springs from the same concerns that have led other intellectuals, working from secular premises, to insist that culture must no longer be regarded as an activity having no relation to politics, that artists and scholars must abandon the pretense of neutrality, and that a new humanism, in short, is likely to take shape only if it makes connection with the struggles of exploited classes to change the world. In the years since The Presence of the Kingdom first appeared, pleas for culture to be "relevant" have once again become common and even fashionable; but as the level of political militancy rises, the advocates of cultural "commitment" have more and more reiterated the position they held in the United States in the thirties and which they have never ceased to hold on the European left—namely, that cultural radicalism means that intellectuals should enlist in the proletarian revolution (now seen as a global uprising of the non-white, colonized peoples). Ellul's work, taken as a whole, constitutes a sustained critique of this position...

(p. 272)

Well, is it necessarily emblematic of the pretense of neutrality to paint abstracts? What about painting abstracts in the epoch of reality tv, deep fakes, VR, and the social media echo chamber?

By reading the artistic surface for explicit political content or commentary, the meaning of the larger gesture and all that necessarily attaches to it vis-a-vis process, curation, criticism, distribution, etc., all of this is ignored. At our peril. A justice issue again, I would say...the quotidian kind of injustice that no one notices until a more total, cosmic variety has engulfed them.

Neither science nor art provide any alternative to the prevailing chaos. On the contrary, science and art contribute to it: science, by divorcing itself from philosophy and becoming
[275]
merely a higher branch of technology; art, by giving up any pretense to make statements about objective reality, thereby dissolving itself in "self-expression." Neither science nor art any longer communicate anything except, in the one case, information required to solve technical problems—and even this is conveyed in symbols accessible only to specialists—and in the other case, inner experiences incommunicable by definition. Modern art, by opposing to technological domination a cult of the irrational, "guides us in the direction of madness." Faced with rampant disorder, men take refuge in the great "explanatory myths" of our time: "the bourgeois myth of the Hand of Moscow, the socialist myth of the Two Hundred Families, the Fascist myth of the Jews, the communist myth of the anti-revolutionary saboteur." These provide the only "means of intellectual coherence" in a world made meaningless by loss of continuity, loss of memory.

(pp. 274-275)

Well, when did art ever have anything more than

pretense

to show for itself when it comes to

mak[ing] statements about objective reality
?

Given

inner experiences incommunicable by definition,

why

bother

communicating

?

And why is

self-expression

the only other option?

At least the younger Lasch here seems more amenable than the elder to the notion that expression too is a mere

pretense
.

The turn away from these imperatives has an obvious justification if the imperative itself is shown to be merely

a cult of the irrational
.

What is left for art to do, then? To make its statements on the level of the artist's conduct of life rather than on the level of surface content. Surface content is too easily misinterpreted, and even more easily properly interpreted for the purpose of using or abusing its underlying intent. Sontag: "Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it." In "life" as opposed to "art" we have other names for such "uneasy" people, names which are even less flattering than specialist or irrational.

Treating art as a form of "speech" in the First Amendment sense entails the fringe benefit of placing it more accurately in the well-worn distinction between word and deed. And therein lies the need for "art" entirely apart from its potential bearing on "politics." The need is in the deed.

If the communicative imperative can be dispensed with, the landscape of rationality and irrationality shifts. Much art may then be "pointless," but not necessarily "irrational." At this particular historical juncture I'm quite at peace wallowing in "pointlessness" rather than being railroaded into making a statement, one way or another, with any type of artwork or "cultural" activity I might undertake. On the other hand, if I do in fact use a tuba where others use an iDevice, is that distinction simply to be disregarded on the grounds that my weird tuba music says nothing explicit about "technological domination"? How much more explicit does one need to be about it?

Endnotes to Ch. XXI. "The "Counter-Culture""

Seeing in these books [of Charles Reich, Theodore Roszak, Philip Slater] symptoms of a much deeper cultural malaise and appalled by the anti-intellectualism often associated with the new left—and more generally by a flood of irrationalism in modern society as a whole—those who still believed that a radical politics without critical reason was a monstrosity attempted, in effect, to construct an ad hoc defense of liberal culture, as in the manifesto on the "cultural crisis," that would still be distinguishable from a defense of liberalism as a political ideology. [sic] What is really required, however, is a more penetrating understanding of the "counter-culture" itself and of its social and cultural antecedents. Does the "new culture" represent merely the culmination of cultural modernism, as some have claimed—a democratization of the avant-garde? Or does it portend a regression to a more primitive consciousness? Increasingly events seem to point to the conclusion that it is precisely the premises of modernism that are being rejected in, say, rock music and street theater. If art traditionally has been an interplay between tension and its resolution, the new art banishes tension and seeks to dissolve all oppositions in direct, unmediated experience, non-verbal states of being, trancelike euphoria. Performers alternately assault their audiences, whipping up moods of subdued violence, and make "love" to them, in both cases hoping to merge the performance with "life" and to put both art and life safely "beyond interpretation."

..and therefore, the countervailing "cultural" tendency would be to land dangerously short of interpretation, no?

The audience is offended or, worse, titillated; it enjoys being verbally assaulted; it imagines itself instantaneously released from "bourgeois inhibitions." Relieved of the need to perform and act of imaginative identification, it is more passive than ever, while its lingering reservations about the new art are silenced by the fear that what is new must
[335]
be necessarily significant. "Great art is always ahead of its time." The rhetoric of the avant-garde is pressed into the service of an esthetic with which it has little else in common, in order to clothe the contemporary artist in an inscrutable authority that he claims to reject but uses in many ways to intimidate his audience and critics.

(pp. 334-335)

Part of the job of criticism today would seem to be to insist on the difference between attempting to give popular themes more lasting form and surrendering to the utter formlessness of the moment.

(p. 335)

Mumford—Art and Technics (xvi)

[Prefatory note: I struggled mightily with this final installment of the series, so much so that what should have been a centerpiece became an afterthought. It remains both incomplete and overlong. It is at least completed somewhat by recent posts, at the cost of adding verbiage rather than paring it. Such is the content-rich, editor-poor world we live in. Enjoy, if you can.]

Lewis Mumford
Art and Technics (1952)

The general effect of this multiplication of graphic symbols has been to lessen the impact of art itself. ... In order to survive in this image-glutted world, it is necessary for us to devaluate the symbol and to reject every aspect of it but the purely sensational one. For note, the very repetition of the stimulus would make it necessary for us in self-defense to empty it of meaning if the process of repetition did not, quite automatically, produce this result. Then, by a reciprocal twist, the emptier a symbol is of meaning, the more must its user depend upon mere repetition and mere sensationalism to achieve his purpose. This is a vicious circle, if there ever was one. ...people must, to retain any degree of autonomy and self-direction, achieve a certain opacity, a certain insensitiveness, a certain protective thickening of the hide, in order not to be overwhelmed and confused by the multitude of demands that are made upon their attention.
(p. 98)

...we only half-see, half-understand what is going on; for we should be neurotic wrecks if we tried to give all the extraneous mechanical stimuli that impinge upon us anything like our full attention. That habit perhaps protects us from an early nevous breakdown; but it also protects us from the powerful impact of genuine works of art, for such works demand our fullest attention, our fullest participation, our most individualized and re-creative response. What we settle for, since we must close our minds, are the bare sensations; and that is perhaps one of the reasons that the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say. In order to make sensations seem more important than meanings, he is compelled to use processes of magnification and distortion, similar to the stunts used by the big advertiser to attract attention. So the doctine of quantification, Faster and Faster, leads to the sensationalism of Louder and Louder; and that in turn, as it affects the meaning of the symbols used by the artist, means Emptier and Emptier. This is a heavy price to pay for mass production and the artist's need to compete with mass production.
(pp. 98-99)

The Radical Restriction of Perspective?

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Philip Roth once observed, before this kind of observation became a cliché, that the writer's imagination falters in the face of contemporary "actuality," which "is continually outdoing our talents." ... Our culture "tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.". ... In their bafflement and disgust, many writers turn away from the "grander social and political phenomena of our times"...and "take the self as their subject": the "sheer fact of self, the vision of the self as inviolate, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment.
(p. 130)


When social reality becomes imaginatively unmanageable, the imagination takes refuge, as we have seen, in self-defensive survival strategies: exactly the kind of strategies also adopted by the contemporary writer and artist, according to Roth, in their attempt to keep the artistic enterprise alive in an age of extremity. Overwhelmed by the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history, the artist retreats into a solipsistic mode of discourse that represents "not so much an attempt to understand the self," in Roth's words, as an attempt "to assert it." He conducts his own struggle for survival as an artist, under conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world, undermined the conventions of artistic realism, and given rise to a type of art that no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
(p. 131)

Lipstick Traces—Automatic Writing Is Still Monotonous, After All These Years

Greil Marcus
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989)

[My notes say:]

pp. 64-65—on what elsewhere gets placed under the heading The Democratization of Creativity

All of this being as it is vis-a-vis "You don't need nothin'. Just play it", it's worth recalling that the Situationists had quite early in their history realized that "We now know that automatic writing is monotonous." It should not have been difficult to see the analogous aspects of unrefined musical technique, especially not since that was well-known by this time in a couple of contemporaneous musical milieux. With THAT context front and center, the explosion of activity recounted so fondly here is much more lucidly viewed as the negative reflection of these people's prior ignorance rather than any kind of blossoming; and if the activity undoubtedly had value for them as individuals to achieve the feeling, if not the state, of agency/empowerment, one imagines that such individual afterglow was easily and precipitously shattered by the eventual realization that so many other musically unrefined individuals could and did do exactly the same things with their newfound agency. I think it is demonstrable that refinement per se was of less interest to the Situationists than was, say, functionalism (e.g. in architecture), ahistoricism/timelessness, etc. Those issues are not directly addressed by the punk aesthetic, as best I can tell from this account; refinement per se is not necessarily related.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[Now:] The Goodreads reviews of this book are vicious and seem to hit the mark. And so here I come, giving it attention it probably doesn't deserve. Ignoring it might be more appropriate. But indulge me here as you might indulge any unrefined technician searching for a sound.

Rereading these pages now, two stickier webs of intrigue leap off the page. First: "A lot of people...didn't think this was music at all, or even rock 'n' roll; a smaller number of people thought it was the most exciting thing they'd ever heard." (64) Great. Just like literally every other new style of music ever. But sure, let's then quote someone who is (1) part of the "smaller number" rather than the bigger one, and (2) famous; then we'll have them yatter about how great it all was; finally, the coup de grace, to make the implicit explicit, (3) we posit this famous person to be representative of all the little people you'll never meet and need not give a shit about: "what Westerberg said, so said countless other people." Sure. History is necessarily reductive, space is limited, etc. But only a broad and, ultimately, superfluous thesis has been thus reduced; Westerberg's own words, meanwhile, occupy quite a chunk of the page in full granular detail and thereby betray elements of his perspective which cannot possibly qualify him as speaking for "countless" others. Historical reductionism is one thing; but here we have, in tandem, an expansion of the personal, an arbitrary diversion which goes on for way too long, and which from a macro perspective thus works rather directly against the reductionist's conceit to authority. What gives? I think there is a sort of currency trading that art and music critics love to transact, whereby a dollar's worth of fame is thought to buy many shilling's worth of representativeness. I have been collecting examples of this. This one is not the worst of them, but it does exemplify the maneuver quite transparently. I gotta think it ain't very punk! So, for those who do think that "criticism" per se has any reason at all to still exist and to be taken seriously by anyone for any reason, I double dog dare you to do "criticism" without doing this. Just once. Please.

Second, "They made a blind bet that someone might be interested in what they sounded like or what they had to say, that they themselves might be interested." (65) Awesome. Regular readers know that I struggle to find the balance between acknowledging my own privilege and making honest sense of things other people say. This "blind bet" remains a crucial aspect of life. Everyone needs to give it a shot! For their own sake, that is. But let's also keep sight of all that has changed since this book was published. When everyone takes their shot, the effect on culture is now somewhat like the effect on the power grid when everyone turns on their air conditioners at the same time. The options at that point are few and they are not good ones: barricade oneself in some form of artificially constructed isolation or small community; or fight for negligibly small, temporary pieces of recognition on the present "mass" level. It's fun to place the bet, but it almost never hits anymore, and when the bet doesn't hit, it can literally kill people from the inside and/or lead them to hysterically kill other people on the outside. Cruelly, in the "long tail" paradigm of cultural consumption, recognition has been capped at an upper limit even for the high rollers, rather than being truly "democratized" or expanded to include everyone whose "blind bets" deserve, cosmically at least, a modest payout. As creativity has been "democratized," recognition has become scarcer. So, uh...are we sure it was their creativity that punks were reclaiming? Or is recognition per se always already at the table when we place our bets?

Now, in hindsight, it was possible to valorize the "blind bet" only because so few people had been making it, or perhaps because it was much more difficult than it is now to know how many people were making it and to what end. The more people who bet, the less valorous it becomes; to the point that nowadays I feel a twinge of guilt even about making a few extra off-the-cuff posts, like this one, which help me to meet my own needs of self-examination and arrogation-of-voice, but which cannot contribute much more than noise to the overall condition of humanity and certainly are quite unlikely (though I'll cop to holding out the same hope as you do!) to pay out much of anything in the recognition department, material or otherwise.

Flavor of the (Final) Month

Year-end retrospectives are everywhere, and jazz critics in particular seem to love them some list making this time of year. It always gets me thinking: how many times have they actually spun each of these records? Did they audit them on $1000 speakers or in the car on the freeway? And how many other new releases have they spun this year? How many times? Where?

Musicians are prone to wondering these things when it comes to questions of critical authority, but I wonder also out of a bit of insecurity. I haven't acquired or listened to a single record that was released this calendar year. It's quite rare for me to do so any given year, and has been forever. Real or imagined professional obligation as a player, composer, teacher and thinker has compelled me to spend an awful lot of time catching up on things that happened before I was born, and only secondarily on staying "up to date" with the latest developments. Whether I'm winning the battle or not, this is slowly changing: I've acquired many more records released in the 2000's over the last couple of years than I did during the years they were actually released. There's plenty going on today that interests me; it's just so hard to find that it's easier to wait a while and see what people are still talking about at the end of next year. I've learned the hard way that it's safe, nay, essential to ignore flavors of the month during the month in question. That goes for the final month of the year as much as any other.

As for the authority question, I can't imagine putting out a list of my own even if I had done more work. I've found that I need 3 listens to settle on a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down. My opinion changes frequently before that point and almost never beyond it. But to rate a group of albums empirically against each other would require several more hearings of each. And of course, I'm not talking about listening in the car or while making dinner; the music needs to be the sole object of your attention if you're going to claim any authority whatsoever, even to yourself. (When I say "empirically," of course I don't mean "for everyone for all time," but I think that within your own aesthetic, you can certainly be clinical in going about this kind of thing. If you don't, you end up fooled.) This is not at all to say that you are not listening for pleasure or that you are otherwise contriving some foreign mode of perception; indeed, distracted listening is the most unfulfilling and foreign mode for me. I recommend the opposite.

So, have these critics sampled even several hundred of the several thousand new jazz records that have come out this year? Have they devoted ca. 5 hours of calm listening time to each? That's getting into the thousands of hours already, an average of 3-4 hours every single day of the year, and you figure at some point for work or play they will want to listen to something from last year or earlier as well. I doubt that all of these numbers are nearly this high, though one or two of them might be (just a hunch, but I suspect it's the total number of records that's high and the number of spins that's low). I think lists which are constructed with authority are entertaining and sometimes even highly informative, but I have to be suspicious of the year-enders. Even if the critics themselves are authorities, the task they've chosen is one which under present conditions simply cannot be achieved authoritatively.

Classical music is, of course, a different and much more difficult situation. Maybe I really am living in the dark, but I've long been struck by the differences between how jazz and classical musicians go about their business. I think classical music badly needs an "underground" scene. I think classically trained players need to stop taking as a given that it's only a matter of time before they land a $200,000 a year gig playing in a top 5 orchestra. I think they then need to be willing to get to work building something better without the promise of an immediate union scale paycheck. String quartets playing Metallica covers in a classical style for coffee shop yuppies is not "underground." Jazz, its precarious condition notwithstanding, still has an underground. There are still compelling jazz performances and records being made in places and by people that the NEA and the yuppie DINKs they survey can't wrap their heads around. Can you say that about classical music? I can't. I see the same slick coating as the jazz world without the underground bearings that have kept it alive in contravention of so many professional listmakers' dire predictions. And I see a clear and simple explanation for this in the petit bourgeois self-importance of so many classical musicians. Jazz players collectively are not perfect, they are not saints, and of course they are getting more bourgeois by the day and will surely have to face this issue soon enough, but right this minute, their tradition is alive because they go underground and eat ramen when they have to. Meanwhile, the classical brats are floating higher and away, sipping merlot in a hot air balloon that's on fire. So I applaud the jazz critics' for including in their year-end lists music that was actually created this year! That means someone thought to make it, found a way to realize it, and got it into their hands. We should try it, classical folk. Grab your flannel shirts and PBR and let's get the fuck down to business already.

Make-Up Calls

Twins manager Ron Gardenhire has won Manager of the Year in the American League, some would say more for his managing in the early-to-mid 2000's than in 2010. If hindsight is 20/20, maybe these awards should be voted on 5 years out rather than in the days after the regular season; everyone knows Gardy should have won one by this time, but as has been pointed out, once a snub is made, the make-up call pushes the next deserving candidate back a year, and a vicious cycle ensues whereby an honor supposedly tied to a specific time span becomes more like a lifetime achievement award.

The obvious comparison to the music world would be with the Pulitzer, but that horse hath been flogged. Rather, this also makes me consider the idea of "timelessness" in music, and the implications of building a value system around it. Critical, scholarly and popular fashions are fickle things: composers' legacies are at their mercy, and make-up calls are common. In some ways, we are stuck in a perpetual state of making up for our forebears' misidentification of merit in the music of their time. (It is not just mere "hindsight" that better suits later generations to this task, but also their pronounced lack of irons in the fire so far as careers and egos are concerned.) This is inevitable but unfortunate, since we could be investing that time in fighting our own era's battles, and maybe saving the next one some of the same trouble.

Esoteric composers everywhere are castigated for admitting that they're banking on receiving posthumous acclaim, but one must remember that "timeless" music reaches more listeners over time than any of us can reach during our lives. I don't think it's such a bad mindset to have, and I'm all for make-up calls in music.

Prodigy

There's nothing remarkable about prodigal talent. What's remarkable is when someone manages to recognize its existence.

Good/Bad Vibes

Today, I finally feel up to confronting the fact that this space is by and large a place for the airing of negative feelings rather than positive ones. I'm well aware that most of what I write takes issue with some other position, often aggressively, and rarely if ever issues compliments to other musicians and bloggers. This is because I've found that the best way to figure out what I really think about something is to try to write persuasively about it; this was what initially pushed me towards writing about music, and it continues to be my primary attraction to this activity. The desire to "go public" with these documents is, admittedly, somewhat self-indulgent, but it enables others to comment on them, which I often find just as useful as the act of writing itself (and an event which I wish I could say happened more often).

If I've carved out a niche as something of a spoilsport/buzzkiller/mudslinger always off pouting in the corner, I would defend this sort of behavior by citing the need for something to offset the torrents of quid pro quo backslapping that dominate most of the rest of the music world. A well-known problem with musicians writing about music is that you can't expect them to bite the hand that feeds them by saying something negative about someone whose support they need, even if that's how they really feel. On that note, I'll put my money where my mouth is and say that the first example that comes to my mind here is the ITEA Journal, in which I'm not sure I've ever read a negative thing about anybody, at least not since I've been a member and paying attention.

Grateful as I am for the occasional exposure I myself have had in their pages, a glowing review from a source that issues nothing but glowing reviews doesn't mean much. Though there's no reason to get unduly vicious purely for its own sake, it sure would be refreshing to see a drubbing or two every so often, as this would at least make it seem like they mean all the nice things they say about each other. The reviews of new materials (i.e. scores in particular) have their own way of dancing around making judgments, namely by focusing on information about the piece (range, difficulty, style, etc.) rather than the reviewer's opinion of it. Useful as this is in some cases, I again have to wonder if the social dynamics at work aren't to blame for inhibiting "real" criticism, which would not only be more useful to the readership, but would further the ultimate goal of getting people to take the tuba and euphonium seriously by proving that the people who play it do, too.

Incongruously, then, I'll close with a compliment. Daniel Wolf, whose blog is among my favorites, put it well in a post from last year on a topic on which he has been an articulate and accurate observer:

...on the topic of boycotting competitions (in particular, those with high entry fees and low prizes), I have received 22 emails in support of my position and none against, and as gratifying as the echo was, it was a bit disturbing that not one of the 22 was willing to go public. While I might understand it if the emailer doesn't want to be associated in public with me...I dislike the idea that he or she doesn't want to upset the competition applecart by speaking out, and profoundly dislike the idea that she or he has chosen anonymity in order to preserve their own competition chances.

Well said.

Buying and Listening Habits

In talking to several acquaintances recently, I have learned that most of them have at least one quirk when it comes to their CD buying and/or listening habits that seems very counterintuitive to me.

I know someone who buys lots of CD's and listens to them only a few times. Schoenberg said that to like something one must first be able to remember it; probably too broad of a generalization, but certainly one that I find myself identifying with most of the time. In any case, if you can't remember it at all, how's that any different from never having listened to it in the first place? It's also good to give everything a fair shot; early on especially, I found that things that sounded "weird" at first I often ended up far more attached to in the end than the things I liked right away. This, however, is changing the more experience I gain; nowadays, my early reaction is much more indicative of my eventual "final" judgment.

I know someone who has almost stopped buying recorded music completely. This seems very strange to me. The more you know, the more you don't know, right? New recordings are being made at an alarming rate, and this only adds to an already staggering cumulative body of work that is available. The more music one is exposed to, the more one becomes aware of what one hasn't heard. It starts to appear unmanageable sometimes, but rather than get discouraged, it comes to seem even more imperative that one continue to investigate. Time is running out, you know? I can't imagine living without hope of anything interesting ever materializing again. That would really suck.

I know someone who does not expect a CD to last more than a couple of years. Many concerns have emerged about the durability of CD's. I treat mine poorly, and yet I have had no problems yet that were not due to gross neglect (i.e. major scratches and scuffs). My earliest computer burned CD's have also held up quite well considering that they are supposed to have a much shorter life span than their commercially produced counterparts. I'll be holding my breath as the oldest among my CD collection enter their second decade.

I know someone whose CD collection is heavily weighted towards only a few favorite artists. Conversely, back when I was starting from scratch, I figured that I ought to focus on breadth rather than depth simply because there was so much out there. I figured that I could start to specialize after I got a decent idea of what I was dealing with in the first place. I seem to recall developing this approach based largely on what I was hearing and reading from jazz pedagogy, although come to think of it, I can't place the exact source right now. I seem to think that Aebersold advocates this somewhere, but I'm not sure. Lo and behold, I have stuck to this mindset for almost a decade and the sum total of all recorded music seems more unmanageable than ever. I've also found that, according to acquaintances, this is probably my oddest quirk as a consumer of recorded music; nonetheless, I plan to stick by it for a while to come. The toughest issue is posed by major figures who have reinvented themselves multiple times: Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton, Gyorgy Ligeti, etc. One does not simply pick one CD by one of these artists and call it a representative sample, so essentially, you end up counting music from different periods of the artist's career as if it were made by different people. There's so much out there that you're going to miss some of it no matter what. If nothing else, the creative process demands stimulation (if not downright influence), and I think my approach works well in this way. I also think that there's a certain amount of professional obligation to be aware of what's out there, as well as to stay abreast of new developments (if not as a player or writer, than at least as a teacher).

Finally, check out the comment to here. Critics selling their review copies of CD's before the official release of the album? You'd expect there to be an unwritten rule against this in the profession, but either it doesn't exist at all, or it isn't a sufficient deterrent. I guess chronic exposure to less-than promising releases leads some critics become so cynical about musicians that they have no conscience about this.

What are some of your buying and listening quirks?

Sweating The Details

If you read The Nation, you may have noticed that the May 14 issue featured a sizable piece on Ornette Coleman and the long-overdue awards he has received recently¹. It's always nice when a worthy music-related story gets covered by a non-musical publication with wide distribution. What was not so thrilling this time around, however, was the terminological malfeasance committed along the way.

In attempting to put Coleman's musical innovations into historical context, author David Yaffe wrote the following:

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue had come out a couple of months earlier, just a few months after John Coltrane's Giant Steps, each disdaining chord changes in favor of solemn inquiries into chords and modes. Davis's So What coolly navigated between a couple of minor Mixolydian modes; Coltrane's Giant Steps circled the circle of fifths.

For all the presumed good intentions here, this passage is nothing short of an embarrassment. It is possible (remotely) that the term "minor Mixolydian" is a provincialism of which I was not previously aware, but I cannot confirm this. In any case, it is quite obviously a poorly chosen one given that the mode in question already has a Greek name of its own².

There is perhaps less reason to get worked up over the circle of fifths reference. Though what Yaffe wrote is technically incorrect, we have all seen the term used in this colloquial manner before. Giant Steps is based on a circle of sorts, but it is actually a circle of major thirds, an interval which symmetrically divides the octave and hence lands on only three of the twelve key centers contained in the circle of fifths. Sure, I'm speaking musician-speak because I am one, but how many "average listeners" could phenomenologically confuse one circle for the other at the time Giant Steps was released, when it sounded to most such people like it came from outer space? It's not just that the term "cirlce of fifths" literally refers to something else, it's that this something else was, even in 1959, totally mundane, whereas Giant Steps was simultaneously earth-shattering and profoundly alienating, depending on one's sensibilities.

The misuse of terminology certainly risks detracting from the authority of the article in the eyes of navel-gazers like me, but is there anything more to this? I think that there very clearly is, and that it most likely betrays pretensions to hipness above all else. That is to say that the fatal error in Yaffe's process was not his particular choice of words but rather his choice to invoke technical jargon at all. Considering that he has a PhD in English, I suspect that if clarity were his motive he probably has the writing chops to make good on it. Then again, considering that he is a music critic with a PhD in English, the hipness/clarity (im)balance is totally predictable.

If it had been up to me, I would have eschewed the jargon altogether and instead written something like this:

Both Miles and Coltrane were moving away from the dominant jazz style of the late 1950's, but in quite different directions. In So What, Miles implemented more static harmonies and a relaxed tempo; Coltrane did the opposite in Giant Steps, saturating musical time with novel chord changes and blowing through them at a blistering pace. Later exponents of both tendencies eventually went to such extremes that traditionalists questioned whether this was jazz at all. Some musicians would eventually ask themselves this question too and realize that the short, rigid, repetitive nature of songform-based jazz no longer permitted them to play what they felt. This was the winding path many later took to "free jazz" which relaxed or abandoned such constraints. Coleman's brand of it was, in hindsight, not among the more radical departures, especially vis-a-vis the role of the drummer, but he had helicoptered in so far ahead of everyone else that visionary status was inevitable. At a certain point, all that remained was for those pesky traditionalists to catch up with everyone else.

It is notoriously difficult to explain obscure technical topics in plain English, regardless of the subject, and editors are justifiably weary of articles that are too technical. One way to ease that fear is to hire people who simply don't have the technical background at all, but in Yaffe's case as in so many others, the results of that strategy speak for themselves. My explanation is less technical than his, but no one without a strong technical background could have produced it.

I don't think this is by any means too much to expect out of the critical establishment. Musicians as a group may not be a model of intellectual potency, but I would venture that there are more than enough who deal equally well with music and the English language to make a more attractive solution possible. I hesitate to invite readers to peruse the blogosphere in search of support for this claim, but given that it is no easier to make a living as a jazz musician than it ever has been as a writer, you can bet your life that there are more than a few qualified people who would accept most any offer to function in both capacities. What's more, the well-known conflict-of-interest that arises when musicians are charged with publicly chronicling and/or evaluating the work of their peers isn't such a big problem in the case of a figure like Ornette, who doesn't have many peers and won't be working with most of them anyway. I have to think that there are plenty of musician-scholars who could have produced a piece on Ornette that was every bit as well-written and well-informed, yet also technically correct and entirely comprehensible to non-musicians.

Whatever the real reason for Yaffe's slip-up, the larger point is that the jargon was simply uncalled for here: musicians don't need to be told the harmony of So What and non-musicians won't understand if you try to tell them. The only people who actually seem to inhabit a grey area between these two levels of understanding are the critics themselves.

Lest I be seen as taking personally-directed cheap shots purely for sport, I trust that most anyone taking the time to read this knows that "terminological malfeasance" happens all the time. I wish to level these criticisms at the entire world of music journalism, not just one author or one publication. This case merely pushed me over the edge (although I have to admit, I'm almost starting to like it over here). Of the top of my head, the following anecdotes from my college years come most immediately to mind:

•I recall spending most of a class session in Jazz Combo with Phil Hey at the U of MN unpacking the assertion made during the Ken Burns Jazz documentary that Charlie Parker was the first jazz musician to improvise solely on the structure (chord changes) of a tune rather than the melody. You can see the selfsame reductive process at work here that resulted in Giant Steps becoming a Circle of Fifths composition...but seriously, did anyone on the editorial level over at PBS actually listen to Louis Armstrong?

•there is, according to one source of mine, a prominent local writer who frequently confuses rhythm and meter.

•one music-major cohort of mine who took a jazz history class taught through non-music academic department and taken by students from a variety of majors emerged with a laundry list of faux-technical missteps committed by the professor and clear evidence of the students' lack of a musico-technical background that would have made a technical approach valid in any case.

Now it's time to anticipate the inevitable cynical rejoinder to my complaints here: "Who the hell cares, and why?" I would hope that it might be self-evident to a good number of readers that intellectual integrity is crucially dependent on the accuracy of the article from top to bottom. Certainly a large quantity of the correspondence I receive here is aimed at correcting small factual errors, and a hell of a lot more people read The Nation than read my blog. Many have remarked on the "gotcha" mentality that modern social media platforms encourage, but as the errors add up, it's not unreasonable to question the overall accuracy of the work, or even the publication as a whole. Yaffe says that Ornette once asked a doctor to castrate him; that certainly makes for great cocktail party banter, but how do I know this is accurate coming from someone who describes Giant Steps as disdaining chord changes?

Even if you think lapses in usage are truly harmless (I would disagree), it's still not right, or at least not as right as it could be, and the fact that self-interest is not sufficient even for commercial publications and professional writers to clean up their collective act is telling. I think that we owe it to them to make them owe it to us. How's that for clarity?

Somehow, I'll condense all of this into a paragraph and send it to The Nation. I'd be the first to agree that they have more important things to worry about, so I doubt they will print it. The outside chance that someone might read it and really think about it, however, is enough for me³.

notes
4/8/16
1. The article is now online, which it was not at the time this post was written.

2. At the risk of being over-thorough in my revision here, I can report that today Google returned only thirteen results for "minor Mixolydian mode" and one fewer than that for "minor Mixolydian modes," the latter including a reference to this post on another blog and the original article itself (and NOT my blog; that hurts, Google). Of the remaining pages, only this one uses the term as Yaffe does; the rest are merely lists of terms and topics where the words occur in this order by virtue of having been alphabetized. This lone corroboration was posted on a message board in 2001, so technically I could/should have been able to find it in 2007. Perhaps it is a parochialism issuing forth from the Balkan clarinet community? Frankly I don't think it really matters: if it was not truly an authorial boo-boo, it was still an editorial one, and this is the larger point.

3. The final insult: The Nation did amazingly enough publish two letters regarding Yaffe's piece. One offers some minor factual (not terminological) corrections; the other, longer screed by one John Provost is a meandering, faux-poetic, personal reflection on a 2004 Ornette concert. I'm willing to accept whatever abuse the more sanguine among us might have for the sentiments I expressed in this post, but if we're going to absolve authors and editors for their less-than-ideal terminological compromises based on space constraints, then it becomes ever more perplexing why a letter like this was printed. It certainly is more perplexing even to me than Yaffe's appeal to jargon, for which the explanations actually are too-obvious.

Here, according to the sent folder of my email account, is what I sent to The Nation that May 29:

Thank you so very much for your recent piece on Ornette Coleman (David Yaffe, Art of the Improviser, May 14). Yaffe should, however, be embarrassed at having used a made up term ("minor Mixolydian") in the course of referencing one of the most famous, most simple, and most famously simple jazz standards in history, Miles Davis's So What. A more musically competent writer would not only have known that So What uses the Dorian mode, but could have managed a perfectly decent explanation of Coleman's early 1960's innovations without resorting to jargon at all, hence making to article more comprehensible to non-musicians.