Friends, starting today and going on indefinitely, I am donating every cent of my profits from I Am Sound to the American Red Cross, for hurricane relief. CDBaby.com set up a charity option for its artists, of which I'm one, and I readily agreed to participate. This means that the $9.00 I get from each individual sale goes directly to the Red Cross.
So this is an opportunity for those of y'all who haven't checked out I Am Sound to both acquire the CD and help those folks in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi who have been devasted by the worst US natural disaster in 100 years. I encourage everyone who doesn't have a copy of this record (which I'm quite proud of) to jump over the fence in order to give support to a vital cause. You can purchase multiple copies of the record, as well, to doubly help the relief efforts as well as give my CD to your friends as a gift.
There no other way to put it. Materially, emotionally, mentally, and essentially, what happened in the deep south—New Orleans, Biloxi, and surrounding regions—tears at and deflates the entire country. The loss of life and property is excruciating. The potential loss of socio/cultural history is deeply depressing. The ramifications upon American economy will be irritating. The rebuilding efforts beyond daunting. We all ought help out with whatever pennies and dollars we can spare, for the resiliancy of the human spirit is undeniable, but this is a blow felt everywhere in this country, and like the recent tsunami is South Asia, probably felt in most corners of the world.
If New York City is America East, Chicago America North, and San Francisco America West, despite its diminuitive size, New Orleans is clearly America South. Its role as a primary historical machine for the hybridization that is America is fundamental. French meets Haitian meets native tribal meets African meets Spanish meets Latino meets the Mystery. Near the Mississippi Delta (home of the blues), New Orleans is the spiritual home of jazz, America's music, which represents everything. When favorite son Louis Armstrong took a train north from New Orleans to Chicago to play in King Oliver's band, the American landscape was forever invigorated. The gumbo from the Crescent City's melting pot has fed a nation, and shaped our permanent mythology. At the mouth of the Mississippi River, and as the bed of the American amalgamation, New Orleans is the inlet and outlet of our red blood supply (or energetically, it's America's second chakra).
(AP)
When natural monsters such as Hurricane Katrina emerge from the wild of nature's ever-churning dynamic, you understand why every culture has generated allegories. These narratives are for coping and instruction. Our hyper-media saturated culture, where orbiting satellites beam images of events as each happen, creates the flattened imagery known as realism. This form of communication carries the brutal realities of such disasters, but also serves to veil the terrible yet instructive poetry of the larger perspective. Just as reality television suffers from lack of metaphor, reality life almost overwhelms our perspective with a torrent of details that used to be unreachable minutia. But this previously overlooked minutia becomes the primary drama when caught by the satellite's total reach, and the inumerable new dramas deconstruct (for some) the recognition of over-arching narrative. Who needs it when you've lost your house?
But this event is historic and far-reaching, moreso because it is not man-made. It is any wonder our ancestors bequethed us the stories/myths/folklore such as the Old Testament Flood with Noah's arc and the lost city of Atlantis? We deconstruct these are our peril. If anything, the brutal realism of satellite-beamed imagery of this week's tragedies ought remind us that the old myths, seen not as literal history but as metaphorical allegory, seek to counsel the living of how delicate our social institutions are, how easily each can topple, how close we are to anarchy and the conditions of pure survival. At the skin of nature's wild torrents, we are dust blown asway by the wind.
Allegories instruct about our irrefutable smallness in the face of nature. From a recognition of our smallness we gain a resolute human will. We can cope when we can accept. Whether a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Pagan, atheist, or part of other religion, to seek a reason, purpose, or higher causality for this kind of random destruction is completely understandable, to help us survive in the face of such horror, and tune out what we cannot cognitively handle. For the realism of the destruction is nearly too much to bear even from afar, as I type these sentences this morning in the safe haven of a skyscraper in Chicago.
We are closer due to the total immediacy of satellites and the channels of cyber communication. Only the most cold-hearted could not feel severe pain when faced with the blitz of realism of recent large scale disasters, from 9/11 and other terrorism, to the Bam, Iran earthquake and other natural phenomena. Media realism undoubtedly fosters a planet-centric moral sense. Our ocular capacity fosters both physical disconnect and a new proximity of emotional/mental intimacy. We can't touch all of our brothers and sisters around the world, but though our satellite eyes, we mentally touch their joys and pains, and indeed feel compassion and love in ways we could not previously. On a planet more water than land, it takes electricity and satellites for many of us to realize that we swim and drink the same fluids.
(AP)
Where does the naked brutality of nature through the eyewall to eyewall coverage of satellite media leave us? Where do we find solid ground on which to stand? Where do we begin to take our next steps?
Well, with humilty, and on whatever dirt we can find. Our bodies stand numb, but can activate. Our stomachs ache, but can fuel. Our hearts break, but can open. Our eyes wet, but can see new depth. Our minds question, but can accept the confusion as unsolvable. Our spirit, our will-to-live, is shaken, but can breathe resiliant through this impediment. Our ears drown in cacophony, but find new melodies. We sing, dance, and pray for the bloodletting to clot, cease, then self-repair. We give, we listen, we work, we hug, and we wait.
We know in the cold kosmic abstract that all is as it should be. Yet we must—must—remain attached (not enmeshed) to the suffering. For in a dispassionate abstract we are simultaneously forced to also accept the rightness of our intimacy with deep mourning, grieving, crying, and communal heartache. These hurts, too, are as each should be. To bleed when wounded is to reveal our most realistic human vulnurability. To cry is to reveal our most poetic. Whether or not we humans are actually One, in a spiritual sense, the worst disasters of nature sure make it feel that way. That soulful interconnecteness is the only thread of silver lining born of this otherwise all-terrible catastrophe.
Solace comes in the fact that history tells us that stoic faith and selfless giving are rewarded. New Orleans and the entire region will reincarnate and sing again. The soul, through the body, teaches the mind. Human blood regenerates through the dynamics of bone marrow, the liver, endocrine glands, the kidney, and the gut. America's blood will regenerate through a similar mass-effort—concerted, participatory, improvisational, redemptive, and incremental. Or essentially, it will happen like jazz, where skillfull means and engaged spontaneity are reimbursed with rhythmic orgasm that stubbornly enlightens.
Our task is the foster the conditions for America's blood to flow again through the vital organ of New Orleans. So first things first. Before the rebirth, and before the brass, comes the appalling pain of a long. . .hard. . .slog.
The quarterback of the Green Bay Packers is originally from Mississippi, with a house and a whole slew of family still there. Listen to this to get a sense of just one of the inumerable personal dramas wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
Yours truly authored their most popular post to date. Check out the piece, as well as the ensuing discussion, if you already haven't.
The only thing I'd change of the original post is that its subject—what I call the "1% Rule" for silent-style meditation—is not meant as a strict fiat, but as a flexible guide for peeps whose natural inclination leans away from quiet sitting on a pillow for hours on end. This came up in the subsequent discussion as a useful clarification.
People with a feminine disposition at the spiritual/essential level are not gonna wanna do the silent meditation thang as much as those with a masculine disposition at that level. I wrote the post having had the experience of many approaches to meditation, as an effort to give guidance to a buddy, Salamone, who was saying 'screw that' to silent meditation. My point was basically, 'wait, don't completely ditch it, because in even small doses it has value, and here's why...'.
And as I mention in the discussion thread, to read about my entire contemplative approach for my own life, check out my essay called Attention, Love, Music, and Witness, where I detail how silent meditation fits with other, non-silent, contemplative activities.
That is the conclusion of an informative article by Rich Lowry, which, after a run-down of the prominent statistics that show zero correlation between increased global temperature and increased tropical storms and hurricanes, ends with this rather poetic kosmic kwote:
None of this data matters particularly, since proponents of global warming will continue to link warming with hurricanes. It generates headlines in a way that debates about tiny increments of warming don't. And it feeds a conceit that is oddly comforting: that whatever is wrong with the world is caused by us and fixable by us. Alas, it's not so. Mother Nature can be a cruel and unpredictable mistress, and sometimes all we can do is head for the high ground.
All of which means nothing — or next to nothing — to the tragedies that resulted from Hurricane Katrina, but it maybe helps keep a certain amount of perspective as we temper the human tendancy to assign blame and fault for phenomena beyond our control. Or as we were instructed during our Bradley Method childbirth classes, Nature Is Wild.
Oh, and by the way, here is the link to contribute to the American Red Cross, an action I advocated yesterday but didn't provide a link for.
AKA, Coolmel, for the debut of his work on Ken Wilber's site, Integral Naked. (See here.) Rommel certainly has an eye for image, and I can say that taking in his photography was one inspiration towards my own Cellph Shots hobby/thang. So thanks to Big R/Big C for that juice.
The two of us go back a bit. I remember our first meeting, an Ethiopian dinner between me and him, while he still lived in Chicago back in mid 2003. Oh just like it was just yesterday. This was back before (I think) his blogaciousness literally exploded on the scene, and before he had any person to person contact with anyone in the then-very very very-small integral art scene. I had just returned from an IS of Art meetup, the integral artist collective that had three meetings in Boulder in 2003.
Rommel contacted me because he had read one of my early papers, so we arranged dinner in meat-space. Rommel was curious about how the IS of Art went, so I tried to impart both descriptions of the actual events as well as the general sense of passion for integral art that I had at that time (and I still do, obviously, but I've transcended and included my then-Boulder-centric perspective to one more centered on, well, the rest of the world). He was also part of the first Integral Chicago Art meetings, where he said that he didn't consider himself an artist, even though he both played music and took photographs.
What I liked about that statement is that it meant he had none of the 'airs' of a capital A Artist (pronounced ar-TEEEST) and instead just concentrated on the work. Even though the statement came from, I think, a still growing confidence, the rest of the artists gathered that evening all thought it was just a matter of time with Rommel before he wouldn't worry about whether to call himself an artist, because he obviously is/was one.
We kept in touch after that, even though he left Chicago (a silly mistake he can still rectify) for other environs. He was one of the first bloggers to give a cyber shout-back after my announcement that Hannah was preggers, and he did so with a super cool piece of art, taboot!
So, three polysemous cheers for Rommel -- one each for body, mind, and spirit -- and may he continue to both rock and roll with the insomniac blues of his fluffy-ass self. The integral-sphere wouldn't be the same without him.
By the way, probably my own favorite Noise/Sound Art is the OHM: Early Gurus of Electronic Music collection. It's eerie experimentalism in its most naive.
For space/ease of loading reasons, I moved the tracks of the seven-movement Spiral Suite for Alto Saxophone to this link. Click on it to listen to this conceptual/experimental large scale composition, written for my good friend Adam Maas, of St. Paul, Minnesota.
ARTICLE ON ID'S MICHAEL BEHE: "NOT SLOPPY SCHOLARSHIP, BUT DELIBERATE DISTORTION"
Professor Jerry Coyne claims the infamous Michael Behe committed an egregious misquote of his work, to support Behe's own contention that Intelligent Design (ID) is a viable construct. Here is the whole article.
From this weekend visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Twyla's first such experience. She slept, and I changed her diaper in the men's room. And all is right in the Dallman world.
I echo Jean's concerns for those unfortunately in the path of this natural monster. My heart dropped when I read that the roof of the Superdome has been partially torn off by the wind. None of the folks are probably online much right now, so I'm not sure of the real effect of a post like this — I can just hear 'whoo-dee-effin-do, people wrote a blog post. My house is gone.' — but events such as this keep priorities straight for us all, and I'll likely send a check to the Red Cross ear-marked for hurricane relief efforts. Even a small check helps, so perhaps blogs can help in this way, to encourage simple donations.
Salamonium linked me to commentary on a recent 'Noise Art' concert. You can read what he linked me to if you click here, from K-Punk. This is an interesting area for me to consider, since Noise Art is pretty distinct from the training I've received in the more or less conventional Western music tradition (though I have plenty of experience in rock as well). Here is my email back to Paul, which includes the K-Punk passage.
Paul,
Thanks, this is an interesting edge for me to consider, that of sound art, given that I'm a pretty trained composer who has studied conventions of the western tradition. I'm squarely in the tonal tradition, and I think that the rebelliousness of the 20th century, encapsulated by John Cage and others, will ultimately serve to not demolish, but renovate. Not reconfigure, but retool.
From a wide perspective, experimentalism with Noise Art and the like is functionally an experiment in timbre, for the basic tonal structures of beat, harmony, and melody are in some respects settled matters (that is to say, settled as far as ethnocentric composition is involved, for as W.A. Mathieu has demonstrated, when you examine how traditions from around the world have treated beat, harmony, and melody, each becomes far less settled matters of practical application in new music). Electronic equipment allows us the futz around with the way things sound, in terms of timbre/tone. That is where most of the action has been for the last 80 years of experimental music -- a 'producer's music'. The rest of the action was caught up in serialism, which failed due to excessive intellectualism and reliance upon mathematical formula. And, well, because it was boring to most people.
Here's the passage I found most interesting from the article you sent me.
The chief argument for Noise would be that it opens up sonic channels that 'music' closes down or off, but that case is immediately invalidated if the same few sounds are trotted out ad infinitum. This kind of Noise, like a great deal of Sonic Art, doesn't break out of the tyranny of music because it remains in a negative relation to it - it defines itself by assiduously purging any so-called 'musical' elements. The austerity is admirable but the effect of this hair-shirted self-punishment is too often not the revelation of a new affective range, but a dutiful boredom.
As a brief sidenote, the criticism of Sonic not breaking the 'tyranny of music' (whoa, I'd nit pick this to death, but not now) because of its 'negative relation' to music is the same point I make, in a much larger context, about the so-called 'postmodern' strain of art -- a good deal of 'postmodern art' is simply a reaction to the tenants of modernism, and thus ought be consider as 'late modernism' for that reason. Only a genuinely new set of tenants ought be central to a legitmately new epoch of art.
Whether 'integral art' is what the epoch is going to be called, I don't know, but the experimentation with 'full-spectrum polysemy' in fact is genuinely new, if for no other reason than our working definitions of 'full-spectrum' are constantly evolving. The idea to 'honor the spectrum' is perhaps the basic imperative from the otherwise flawed theory of Spiral Dynamics. But that idea is worth salvaging, because to 'honor the spectrum' is both a moral gesture at the planet-centric level, and likewise a gesture to honor our own roots as individual people who come from distinct but related lineages of our ancestors.
So creative/visionary representations that honor the phenomenological spectrum could indeed function as the basis for a new epoch in art. This is why, even though I have strong reservations about Ken Wilber, I have continued to develop my integral art philosophy. 'Integral', in the tradition of McLuhan, Dewey, Paglia and others, is where I draw my primary material from. Wilber, when you strip away the shoddy scholarship, has provided a useful basic shell -- quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types -- which I use in my work as touchstones. None of the other thinkers just named attempted to trademark 'integral' and it is repugnant that Wilber has made that attempt.
But back to the issue at hand, that of Noise Art.
The first clause of the first sentence is most revealing to me. "The chief argument for Noise would be that it opens up sonic channels that 'music' closes down or off." I'm all for sonic art experiments. I do think that pure sound can be arranged in an artful form that serves as a conduit for contemplation. There is sublime in the ugly.
At the same time, there will likely always be a rather limited audience for this kind of experimentation -- as well as a limited amount of time that one can actually sit down and listen to Noise Art without wanting to scream -- because Noise Art tends to employ an abrupt break with tradition. Fundamentally, the potential of any piece of art is that it can simultaneously entertain, educate, and enlighten, and this goes for music. Some people are entertained by the sound of metal on metal, but not too many overall. That might change and certainly aesthetics is not a fixed concept. It is pretty simple. If people like Noise Art, then more of it will be made. Supply and demand is a basic feature of the art world.
Musical tradition is made of many factors, but importantly, the history of music is also the history of the human ear's capacity to recognize resonance. Semiotically speaking, when one hears sound art (beit tonal or nontonal), 'meaning' is in part generated by the unconscious comparison of the track at hand with the music one has heard in their life. You can't get around the human ear's need to hear holons -- aural recognition of a whole as a narrative in time, and aural recognition of the aesthetic/stylistic lineage of which any 'sound object' is a part.
In my own philosophy, there is sound, tone, and music, in that heirarchy (holarchy). Any of the three can be done artfully, to trigger signifieds in the listener that spring from the semantic responses. "Resonance" is basically when an interior signified or signifieds is elicited in the consciousness of a listener by means of sound, tone, or music (which is a heirarchy based upon organization, from least organized to most organized by a human musician/composer). Something outside (the sound/tone/music) matches with something inside or interior to the listener. Boundaries disappear.
The question is, 'what signifeds are represented in sound art?' And to me, the basic answer is that of the dissonance people can feel from the ambiguity that arises from disconnects from functional fit in society's workings. as well as sub-personality signifieds that appreciate pre-conventional sonic representations, the sheer rebelliousness of it. Are there postconvetional examples of sound art? Undoubtedly -- usually when a trained composer gets his/her electronica groove on. Steve Reich is an example of this. Others are surely coming down the pipe.
Finally, it is important to consider, as a sound artist, not that the world is a 'dissonant place', and thus ought be looked at as an inevitable response to that cacaphony of our age. But rather, what is the artist's commentary upon that cacophony? What is the attitude towards it? How can sound art be used not just for illustrative purposes, but for redemptive purposes? For to see, as an artist, that the world has dissonance is actually quite naive-- the world has ALWAYS had dissonance. Moderns exhibit ignorance when they claim social/cultural dissonance as their own.
Artists of yore created their music, in part, as a pleasing means of diversion and aural relief from a confusing world. (The world has always been confusing, too.) It is not the actual content of sound art in which I seek meaning, but the more subtle commentary upon it. Otherwise, we might as well just hit everyone over the head with a hammer. It would a lot quicker of a death, and there's a certain pleasure we get from hearing a hammer slam down on our own head. Bam, bam.
I have added the recent crop of Cellph Shots that I've developed over the last couple months to my online gallery. Take a moment and check out the new presentation.
Which I'm not all that impressed with (it has to do with the rather pedestrian idea that computer culture renders mortar culture less impactful -- like, no kidding, that is so 1998) but I link to anyway because of my general interest in the iPod as a tool for planet-centric musical immersion, which I wrote about here.
From the AP by By Randolph E. Schmid, AP Science Writer:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The giant iron ball at the center of the Earth appears to be spinning a bit faster than the rest of the planet.
The solid core that measures about 1,500 miles in diameter is spinning about one-quarter to one-half degree faster, per year, than the rest of the world, scientists from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The spin of the Earth's core is an important part of the dynamo that created the planet's magnetic field, and researcher Xiaodong Song said he believes magnetic interaction is responsible for the different rates of spin.
The faster spin of the core was proposed in 1996 by two of the current study's authors, Paul Richards of Lamont-Doherty and Song, now an associate professor at Illinois.
A wonderful physical metaphor for how our internal cores of intuition spin faster than our ability to capture that energy in form. Thus the magnetism we feel towards our imagination. It grounds us.
I realize that a hefty amount of examples and explanation is required because of the particular terms I've used in this diagram. The Daily Goose is basically an extension of my own intuition and conclusions, so the legwork obviously required for a statement such as the above is to come in my papers and books. It has been an interesting ride to get to the markings on this diagram.
But the larger-scale process of sign-creation is notable now. In simple terms, music is the extension of composer intuition (at some stage configuration fueled by an inspired state), by means of felt-resonances that accord with tonal rhythm (at various levels in various combinations), to construct an composition of tonal form (at some level of organization), which stirs audience response (at some stage through the lens of a worldview).
Practically -- this map can be used as a touchstone for inquiries. Such as -- how fully informed is my own intuition? how full and satisfying is the beat/harmony/melody/timbre of my music? how able am I to compose at the broad levels possible? what are the responses my music receives from others? -- what is this stuff and how do I apply it? -- all of which can catalyze the use of different experiments to foster more felt-fullness. Fundamentally, composers can commit to the practice of singing as a comprehensive way to inform their own intuition (see my essays on "Tone Yoga"), which has far-reaching effects on one's entire music sensibility.
A piece of music at any level of form can be utterly beautiful and take your breath away. Sonorous brilliance belongs to no culture. The temptation to assign levels of form to various traditions ought be restrained, because (as I will explain in my upcoming revision to The Embrace of Sound, posted soon) each level of form can operate in any culture or tradition of music from around the world. Cultural chauvanism can be cut through and the opportunities for composers to learn the particularities of organizational form can be enhanced.
The point of semiotics for integral musicians is simple -- to realize the fundamental dynamics at work when we compose objects (which are essentially 'tonal signs' or 'tonal symbols'), to realize there is a basic terrain through which we carve our own unique paths in the course of our object creation, to isolate methodologies in each areas that help us cultivate our capacities to compose better music, and to name what we already know about music so that we create the conditions for a radically new emergence in music to occur beyond what we can now map. I mean to take our understanding of music to the edge of our knowledge about music, so that we may proceed past into astonishingly fertile musicianship.
"Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing."
Fuck. Seen in this way, music composition (my artistic passion) is akin to, if not greater than, philosophy through words (my scholarly duty). Does it mean I work to create a tight art philosophy over the next 5-10 years, then let it go in favor of full-time music composition, which would seek to forge through tone into as-yet still intuitive areas of philosophy?
Hmm. And then there is this from the Schopster:
"The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake."
Perhaps in the same vein, this is why JS Bach felt composers needed no spiritual/religious practice besides their studies in music (which is a quote I know I read somewhere but can never find when I need it, like now). And 'magnetic somnambulist' -- what a turn of a phrase.
This is a devastating account of Wilber's poor scholarship when it comes to his advocacy of meditation. It is called "Ken Wilber on Meditation: A Baffling Babbling of Unending Nonsense", by Jim Andrews. For me, the primary issue is not whether meditation itself is good or bad (I'd say it's both, depending on the person, place, community, and context) but instead, the primary issue is the intellectual honesty of Wilber's work. If he is going to be lionized with the greats, his work ought fulfill the scholarly requirements of, well, high-school term papers.
In my still-early readings of major works by both Hegel and Schopenhauer, I've come across two notions with which my own art philosophy has affinities. Produced while the rational worldview was still alive and kickin, as avant-garde as anything today (for its day), the works of these two thinkers just beg very slow reading. I'll comment more upon whatever lasting value their catalog offers to integral art philosophy as I proceed to wind my way through their sequential phoneticisms. But meritous ideas have already popped.
From Schopenhauer, there is this notion, particular to music theory (he was the last major philosopher to have a workable theory of music have a fundamental place within his metaphysics) that rhythm is the fundamental dynamic of music, that arranges and holds together the music object. What I'd add is that it is crucial to distinguish rhythm from beat. Beat is what we tap our feet to, what we clap to, what we use to dance to; it is the outward sound that reflects a piece of music's tempo. On the other hand, rhythm is a more flexible term that applies to any aspect of music's raw materials. There is a rhythm of beat, a rhythm of harmony, a rhythm of melody, a rhythm of timbre. Much like how (from Wilber) matter is the outward sheath/manifestation of consciousness at every level of being (body, mind, essence), rhythm is the outward manifestation of every architectural level of music as it operates in time. 'Rhythm' has commonly meant many things in the study of music, and that is because it is, to speak plainly, the wardrobe that every aspect of music wears.
There are four basic levels of music architecture -- beat, harmony, melody, and timbre. Music's levels reflect states of the soul. Each level is a representation of energy that resides in human consciousness -- each connects to consciousness through metaphor -- and thus each level is a kind of material signifier, which represents subjective signifieds of consciousness. The large scale grammar needed for a whole piece of music is the 'syntax', and the cultural meanings/interpretation/responses to music wholes are the 'semantics'. To connect signifieds, signifiers, syntax, and semantics is to speak in terms of semiotics, the introduction of which is an ongoing part of my essay, The Embrace of Sound.
Here is the diagram specific to musical signifiers part of a semiotics-based discussion. The diagram connects Schoepenhauer's basic notion of rhythm's fundamental place with my notion of the basic elements of music in a holarchy (i.e., a heirarchy in which levels transcend and include those previous).
Beat is fundamental; harmony (or 'harmonic space') transcends and includes beat; melody transcends and includes harmony; timbre (the goal of orchestration) transcends and includes melody. And each aspect functions through rhythm.
Thus to say that music is a rhythmic artform is only accurate if by that you mean that music, taken as a whole, is a multi-aspect entity with each aspect operating through rhythm of various kinds. 'Melodic rhythm' is quite different than 'timbre rhythm' is quite different from 'harmonic rhythm' and 'beat rhythm'. But rhythm is at at every level - it is the regular (or irregular) occurance of aural events of different organization. So in fact, music is a rhythmic art form if seen in this way (which stresses the formal musical object).
Now from Hegel, there is this notion that a piece of artwork is a question. For Hegel, artwork is "an address to the responsive heart, an appeal to affections and to minds", and thus an aesthetic object with both material and internal (to audiences) manifestations. The reason I like the idea that an artwork is a question, however, is on the 'story of the artist' end of the larger artworld. It well-frames in practical terms what it means to make artwork (or at least one way to make art). This transdisciplinary notion suggests that to make artwork is the result of, essentially, a broad scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, result (from Wilber). It is particular a notion well-suited for those artists willing to experiment with their art form. It is best used by artists who have learned their medium's conventions, and thus can earn the right to look for novelty in a wide-open postconventional space. Artists have to pay their dues in order to truly treat their artwork production with the elegant simplicity of 'the question'.
But it can be used by artists of any level. Recently, I've posed the question, 'what would it sound like to combine acoustic piano and drum machine?' Previously, I've posed the question, 'what would it be like to combine the spirituality of the 'who am I?' koan with 16th century Italian sacred choral tradition -- the result is my 'Who Am I Motet'. Treating artwork as a question, for working artists, is basically the foundation of experimental art. Whether the result is preconventional experimentalism, conventional experimentalism, or postconventional experimentalism depends upon the development and skill set of the particular artist.
And what if we were to connect these basic insights from Hegel and Schopenhauer? It would be something like the following. When we compose music, we do so as the exploration of a particular question of rhythm and how rhythm might operate on the various levels of musical architecture. Or simply, music -- it is a question you pose in rhythm. And to the composers and artists out there, I ask -- what is the rhythm of your most nascent intuition? Can you take that which pokes just over the horizon behind your every breath and make some kind of form of it? I ask these because if you are looking for your own edge, it lies in just that sort of question.
Update -- Salamone gave shout out on this post in his blog. This inspired me to recut this entry with slightly finer cloth, so thanks to Signor Salamonium for the bounce.
POSTED OVER AT VOMITTING CONFETTI, ON PAGLIA AND MORE
Tuff Ghost asked, on his blog, whether I was familiar with a certain essay by Camile Paglia. Here is the link to the essay, in PDF. Here is my response to what was originally posted here (as comments), and on this blog slightly tweaked cuz, I dunno, I can.
I had read that Paglia essay -- Cults and Cosmic Consciousness -- back in the day when it was released. It is a phenomenal work, one I heartily recommend to the burgeoning collection of artist/scholar/bloggers in our rag-tag group.
On the phone call, he asked me what her conclusion was. (Now, I was nervous since this was a call between just me, him, and two others, the first such call, so I may have sounded jittery and stuff...). I told him it had to do with the standarization of the Hindu/Buddhist insights in regular curriculum, which Paglia's 60s generation only haphazardly experienced through early planet-centrism and, well, acid-trips and subsequent blowback. Wilber naturally thought his conclusion was interesting.
I then added that I thought it was strange that her essay basically traced the lineage of the American spiritual/new age movement with strong mentions of Esalan and Michael Murphy and many others, including figures in Boulder -- but that there was no mention of Wilber anywhere. He reacted with what I interpret as a kind of defensiveness (might just be me) and said that she knew about his work and probably didn't want to lump him into the 'new age' camp.
In retrospect, I think it he was very relieved not to have been mentioned in the essay (although, in truth, he should, since his work is a logical extension of pretty much everything in the new age, including retroromanticism, which is deemphasized in Wilber's work but still appears, for example, in his characterization of the 'avant-garde' as 'always meaning to be on the leading edge of consciousness' (I'm paraphrasing) which is a claim that is highly debatable, and frankly, highly French (poststructuralism, multiculturalism particular to Europe, artist as misunderstood genius trope, etc).
(And, again, we see in Wilber's commentary on his 'avant-garde' little to no actual case made that his view of the avant-garde is appropriate given the historical record, which means you just have to take him at his word, which is the height of arrogance, given his position.)
Anyway, having had this little conversation with Wilber (where he also praised Paglia's work to highlight what Wilber calls boomeritis, and likewise reduced her work with his familiar 'true as far as it goes' (which implies his work goes further, which is not the case when it comes to art and cultural commentary -- and also, where's the mention of her work in his if it is as imporant as he made it sound when he said he'd read her?), I realized a couple things.
1) the difficulty in discussing one major thinker/writer's work with another major thinker/writer
2) that in order to use Paglia's work in any official papers I wrote for IU, I'd probably have to characterize her within Wilber's system, through the name of 'subtle reductionist', where a thinker's model reduces knowledge to systems-theory, which since Paglia calibrates so much of her work to the forces of nature, is an accurate summation only from 500,000 feet above earth, and to the benefit of no one save Wilber and his model.
3) Paglia has worked within the system (publishing, peer-review, academia (as a professor)), and Wilber has not, and Paglia's work is better off for it, in terms of widespread recognition, independence from enormous metaphysical model to recognize its truths, and more able to embrace the nuances of the concrete art object and offer useful commentary and practical advice.
4) Wilber might use her essay's conclusion to back up his striving to create a university around his work (which he, admittedly, has yet to do).
5) Our phone call was about to end because he was confronted with a major essay that should have mentioned his work but didn't. And, on that count, I was right.
Forget Coldplay and James Blunt. Forget even Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2, has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them.
Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.
Here is the link. As I have said before in several places, Paglia (without need for popularized philosophical model) is doing more to make the art world integral than anyone. By this, I mean more aware of history, more attune to artisanship and master/student lineage, more aware of the limits of poststructuralism, and more open to roles that sexuality, psychodrama, and passion play in the representation of the sublime and the beautiful through visionary artifacts, or works of art. In the works of art produced by those who have an integral worldview, Paglia is our greatest public midwife. Her work, more than anyone else's, is the greatest influence upon my desire to develop an art philosophy that is not paralyzed by disembodied and impractical theory for its own sake. Art philosophy has to help people, directly without excuse. At least that is my view for my own work.
Here's not one but two kosmic kwotes. Here's the first, about the need she sees for artists (by extension of her logic) to worry less about productivity and most fundamentally about quality.
And the thing is, I am a public figure, OK, and I’ve been off the scene and the point is there is all this pressure on you. On me, on the publisher. There are pressures on unknowns, people just starting out, to like, “Publish, publish, publish, get it out there, you gotta make a mark.” And I am saying that that is terrible for our culture and we need examples of people holding work back, working with it for quality.
And the other, about the results that years of 'shock art', to use a catch-all term, have wrought on the contemporary art world.
The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, “We’re avant-garde.” The avante-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell’s Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avante-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avante-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, “Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.”
Now, what is the result of this? Mainstream America looks at art and the artist as a scam and they don’t want to support government funding of the arts. Who pays the price for this are working-class talented young people who don’t have access to arts programs. Across the country school budgets are shrinking, the arts programs are being dropped right and left. I’m saying to the art world and all these coteries in Cambridge, San Francisco, Manhattan, “You have not been good stewards of art. You need to get out of this. You need to be apostles for art.” ... I am saying in order to respond to great art people on the left have to learn about the religious impulse. That’s my New Age-y side. I really respect mysticism and the spiritual dimension, even though I don’t believe in God.
Something I added to the Santana/Wilber/Levels post from Friday, pasted here and then expanded upon. This is one of my most recommended experiments (or for Wilber-folk, injunctions):
In terms of assessment, only the simplest form of levels holarchy -- i.e., preconventional - conventional - postconventional -- seems to really be useful to the working artist. To use this conception for assessment practically, simply identify what, in your medium/tradition of art, is widely considered to be 'conventional' -- what would the normal person expect of your work when you told them you are a poet, a composer, a singer/songwriter, a sculptor, a playwright, a metalsmith, a cook, a filmmaker, and so on? If you isolate, in general terms, what the common expectation would be, then you are in the ballpark for what 'the conventional' is for your form of art. This is valuable knowledge.
Why? Again, for self-assessment. If you haven't yourself mastered something of that convention (maybe not all of it, but enough of it), then get to work, because without a concretized skill set of 'the conventional', your development in this case leans on the 'preconventional side'. On the other hand, if you have mastered the convention (again, maybe not all but enough of what is standard in your medium), then you can rightly say, for this particular instance or aspect of your art form, that your work veers on the postconventional side. You have earned the right, essentially, to be as novel in your artwork as what pleases you and your audience.
This is why the art of imitation has such lasting value, as a means of study. In copying the work of some master in your field, you immediately gain intimacy with those components and details of the artwork that give it the ring of art. Obviously, there are many, many aspects to an art form, taken both as wholes and parts, so there are many avenues to master convention. This ought be an exciting, not overwhelming prospect, because there are so many ways to learn about your art medium. In music composition in the West, there are the aspects of melodic sense, counterpoint, voice-leading, harmony, rhythm, setting of text, theme and variation, orchestration, and more, each of which have a bar set at some kind of standard (based upon the tendancies of our greatest composers).
The space of 'preconventional', 'conventional', and 'postconventional' are large and should be taken lightly. The point, ultimately, is not to fit into some essentially vague notion of 'postconventional' but to make great art, with merit that stands upon its own. This exercise to move beyond 'the conventional' is no guarantee that you will be called a 'genius'. But you will be respected by your peers, you will have the sense of artisanship that comes with a bag of developed skills, your art will probably be more interesting art with more details, and you are a helluva lot closer to your authentic artist voice that you were before you began your journey to study, and then transcend, your medium's conventions. That has to be not only desired, but earned through toil.
In response to one of his posts that discusses the use of the concept of 'levels of consciousness' as a means for employment assessment, using alleged examples from Carlos Santana and Ken Wilber. I find this strategy deplorable and unhelpful when used to assess a particular person. Here is a slightly edited version of what I posted over there.
Another good find, DASHH. Wilber has suggested and implied over the years that his AQAL model, which includes, obviously, the various kinds of developmental level/stages/waves found in the work of various researchers, can be used in assessment, such as with the Santana and Wilber examples, if these are true.
But there is a gap in understanding here. What hasn't been demonstrated by Wilber, in his work, in any satisfactory fashion is how exactly the kind of assessment using levels that he has in mind would actually work, in practice. In my own work, I have neither come across or come to a reasonable speculation that suggests that a levels assessment is a viable idea when used for a particular person. Something might be out there, and if so, I'd like to see it.
(In terms of assessment, only the simplest form of levels holarchy -- preconventional - conventional - postconventional -- seems to really be useful. If you are an artist, for example, to use this practically, simply identify what, in your medium/tradition of art, is widely considered to be 'conventional', and if you haven't yourself mastered something of that convention, then get to work (cuz your development in this case is on the 'preconventional side'. If you have mastered the convention, then you can rightly say, for this particular instance or aspect of your art form, that your work veers on the postconventional side. Obviously, there are many, many aspects to a art form, taken as whole and as parts, so there are many avenues to master convention. The point, ultimately, is not to fit into some essentially vague notion of 'postconventional' but to make great art. At the very least, very interesting art tends to be the result of postconventional art production.)
On the other hand, I've successfuly used the general notion of levels as a starting off point for an experiential exercise based upon voice dialogue (the technique which underpins 'Big Mind'). In other words, you just assume that the participants have some sort of access to the entire spectrum of levels, even if weak on a level or two, and create an exercise that brings out each person's capacity to speak from that level of their own voice/recognition/awareness. In that way, you can invite people to experience more of their own potential, firsthand. You have to be very careful to create the proper environment before someone uses this approach haphardly, of course.
It is useful to remember that the conception of levels, based upon both case studies and speculation, is strongest when it is phyllogenetic -- in other words, when 'levels' are patterns observed in an appraisal of many many people. The determination that levels exist is based upon the interpretation of data received through various tests, and, quite frankly, I'm not at all sure how much real scrutiny has been given to the work of the thinkers/researchers that Wilber cites when he talks about levels. But the level scales that seem the most solid are morals (egocentric to sociocentric to planetcentric) and worldviews (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral) because both are collective-based. The debates about levels in other lines for individuals (cognition, witness, interpersonal, emotional, and more) have the questions of actual case studies, conflicting data, and researcher bias that make for altogether more complicated pictures.
Wilber has written that to say someone is at a particular level is to say that, if tested, 50% of their responses are at that level, but 25% are above and 25% are below. Importantly, I have never seen one study that backs up his claim, which leaves me to wonder if he just made it up, or bended it from some real study so as to make his own model more palatable to those people who might particularly give pause when faced with the notion of heirarchy, and how it has been used in deplorable ways (such as the two examples you cite).
But to deal with people like Bruce Kuhlman or the couple who (allegedly) helped Wilber, and make assessments in this way is to proceed on the level of a single person and their psychological reality. Or in other words, now you are at the level of ontogeny, more nuanced, particular, and complicated than the more general view of phyllogeny.
Phyllogenetic concepts do not seem to work very easily in situations that call for an ontogenetic approach. In trying to use SD as an assessment of a particular person or couple, you make the mistake of superimposing subtle species patterns over the psyche of a single person. Blaming a white man you see walking down the street for black slavery is an example of the impossible match of phyllogeny and ontogeny. This sort of assessment is a morally indefensible thing to do, but sadly quite common, at least in America.
Basically, what Wilber and Santana did sounds like pure avoidance masked as some sort of science. They probably just wanted to fire the people involved, for whatever reasons.
Finally, I noted that the author of the INaked post was Brett Thomas. Which, if the same Brett Thomas who has been heavily involved with IU, II, and even IN as one of the avant-garde artists, is rather interesting.
ANOTHER REASON WHY ROGER EBERT IS A NATIONAL TREASURE
In today's Chicago Sun-Times, page 4 (!) has this column by Roger Ebert, which responds to the letter from the producer and director of a recent film ('Chaos') that Ebert gave a particular bad review. Read the whole piece (which includes the letter) but here is the kosmic kwote, which I believe is both a perfect glimpse into not only the mind of perhaps the most intellectually honest film critic the world has known, but also, in a small but undeniable way, speaks wonderfully to the issue of why we need artwork in today's age:
Animals do not know they are going to die, and require no way to deal with that implacable fact. Humans, who know we will die, have been given the consolations of art, myth, hope, science, religion, philosophy, and even denial, even movies, to help us reconcile with that final fact. What I object to most of all in "Chaos" is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers and theologians more than ever.
Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender.
