Cultural Studies - Introductory Lectures: Frankfurt School

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Includes Bibliography for Parts One, Two, and Three of the Lecture-cast.

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NOTE: this is an unedited version of the transcript for the lecture-cast. It may differ from the final recorded version. That version and the other two parts of the lecture-cast can be found at the links below:

DESCRIPTION: We are going to take a piece of music (Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question) and look at how Bernstein and Adorno used it as a means to delve deeply into these questions regarding the meaning of crisis and the expression of social transformation. As a preliminary to that discussion, in part one we are going to review a few examples of the varieties of expression and experiences of Bernstein's "crisis of ambiguity". Can music be expressive of a time and place, and if so, what is the meaning of these expressions? Is Pierre Boulez correct when he says that: “An idea does not exist until we realize how it may be used. In musical terms, there is no such thing as an idea in itself, it is a reaction to our whole cultural environment." – Pierre Boulez. “Idea, Realization, Craft.” Music Lessons: Lectures at the College de France.

This recording was prepared for the course SS.235, Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise, Department of Social Science & Culture Studies, Pratt Institute. Spring 2020. Additional materials are available on the course LMS site.

Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, Part I.
https://archive.org/details/brbiii-20th-century-crisis-bernstein-ives-adorno-part-one
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/04/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html
Unedited Lecture Notes & Slides: https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/08/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html

Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, part II: Music and the Culture Industry.
https://archive.org/details/brbiii-20th-century-crisis-bernstein-ives-adorno-part-two-lq
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/04/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html
Unedited Lecture Notes & Slides: https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/08/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on_9.html

Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, Part III: An Anti-Critique.
https://archive.org/details/brbiii-20th-century-crisis-bernstein-ives-adorno-part-three-anti-critique
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/04/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html Unedited Lecture Notes & Slides: https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/08/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on_7.html

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PART THREE: Anti-critique

Greetings again everyone for this third part of the lecture-cast.

This time I want to respond to some criticisms that were made of the original version by a friend and colleague who was kind enough to ask some very important questions. So I will try to respond to her critique as best I can.

My critic raises the question:

“-When is a crisis a crisis, and when is it just historical change? (I am thinking of an argument Foucault makes somewhere in the Archeology of Knowledge)”

And further elaborates on this question:

“-The distribution of literacy already started with the printing press and the Protestant Reformation (another crisis?). Feudalism took hundreds of years to break down, and did so unevenly throughout Europe. In some places it never really took hold. It was always an ‘idealization.’ History has need of these big concepts that don't always reflect what was actually happening at the micro-level of forces. (Not saying I don't need the big concepts). I think historians of modernity and industrial revolution like to claim that their crisis was THE crisis, but what about the disintegration of the Roman Empire or the (warning: big labels) transition from medieval to Renaissance? Not saying that the crisis you are describing is not ‘our crisis’ …., and not really resisting the argument. Just [raising the question].”

Let me add to this the insightful mis-reading by one of your classmates, who referred to “Adorno’s Unanswered Question” in a forum post. This is one of those “fruitful errors” that leads one to open up new approaches to a problem. “Adorno’s Unanswered Question” not only restates the question of whether there is ever a single crisis, but also of whether or not there is only one “Unanswered Question”. After all, aren’t there are many “Unanswered Questions”?

Well, let me respond to both of these critiques by first saying that I was trying for a kind of “immanent critique” of Bernstein’s position, so I am sure that at times it might be unclear whether I am endorsing his position or merely trying to work through its’ structure in order to make its contradictions more obvious.

AND, I am certainly uncomfortable with some of the ways concepts like “crisis” have been constructed and deployed. As far as Bernstein is concerned, I think he making a retrospective argument, he is sort a stand-in for Benjamin and a personification of Klee’s Angelus Nova

because he too is looking at past events that he only just now understands as the very same forces that have structured his own life and propels us all into the future.

Likewise, only now after it has already begun, can we hear the crisis being expressed in Ives. And the interesting thing is that Ives’ compositions went virtually unplayed for much of his life. Musicians would refuse to play them saying that the songs were too hard, and other pieces were physically unplayable, or simply too strange.

Although, one can point to the composer Henry Cowell, a student of Schoenberg, having edited and published the score for The Unanswered Question as a sign that at least by the 1930s Ives was no longer ignored, at least by other composers. In 1951, Bernstein’s Philharmonic became one of the first to perform Ives’ works, but Ives was too old to travel down to NYC hear it in person and only heard on the radio (Adorno would have something to say about that, I bet). Ives was very surprised by the audience’s approval and appreciation of his music. I have recordings Ives did over the 1930’s when he rented a studio and performed solo piano versions of some of his works. Sad and haunting if one knows the story behind them, and so not to be taken as merely the sounds of an frustrated old man playing and singing as best he can.

Study no. 20 (partial)

They are There! (first take)

Four Transcriptions from “Emerson” No. 3 ]

Charles Ives. Ives Plays Ives The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano, 1933–1943. New World Records.

What is ambiguous is exactly when Bernstein’s crisis occurs, and if it is true that Ives’ consciously recognized it, then what should we make of the irony that few heard or played this musical expression of the crisis?

I think we can see that for Bernstein, Ives’ Unanswered Question serves the same purpose that Gregor Mendel’s paper serves for genetics, that is, no one read Mendel’s paper until 50 years after it was published. Mendel only became the “Father of Genetics” after the field was already forming and those establishing it were looking for precursors and inventing a history for the new discipline.

I was trying to get across the idea that the meaning of crises are ambiguous, ideological, and open to interpretation. And that even if one believes that there was/is a crisis, its duration is not obvious nor are its origin(s) ever clear. A crisis may not be an emergency, a collapse of institutions, etc. --Rosa Luxemburg said that the proletarian revolution need not be violent, but rather might very well be cultural – A crisis may not be an emergency, but neither must it be an exception to the norm. That is where Williams’ Long Revolution and E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class come in because it is not just about one moment or one generation. So if listeners come away from these talks with the idea that notions like crisis, period, eras, tradition, influence, etc., as not being so neat and tidy, then that’s great.

I think that Foucault addresses this in the Archaeology of Knowledge and throughout his work and in interviews as well:

In what is called the ‘history of ideas,’ one generally describes change by giving oneself two expedients that make things easier:

1. One uses concepts that seem rather magical to me, such as influence, crisis, sudden realization [prise de conscience], the interest taken in a problem, and so on-convenient concepts that don't work, in my view.

2. When one encounters a difficulty, one goes from the level of analysis which is that of the statements themselves to another, which is exterior to it. Thus, faced with a change, a contradiction, an incoherence, one resorts to an explanation by social conditions, mentality, worldview, and so on.

I wanted to try, by playing a systematic game, to forgo these two conveniences, and so I made an effort to describe statements, entire groups of statements, while bringing out the relations of implication, opposition, exclusion that might connect them.

– Michel Foucault. “On the Ways of Writing History” in Power, edited by Rabinow and Hurley, p.328.

AND so, YES, absolutely, everyone thinks that their crisis is “THE” Crisis,

One can not help but think of the “THE crisis of Capital” and of the inevitable “Revolution” that will transform us all, but is always just over the horizon.

On the other hand, one can point to the ample evidence demanding a more complex understanding of crisis, catastrophe, and change. For example, Eldredge and Gould’s work on punctuated equilibrium: that there have been catastrophes that have dramatically changed life on the planet and there have been relatively long periods of gradual transformations driven by natural selection.

“The theory of punctuated equilibrium attempts to explain the macroevolutionary role of species and speciation as expressed in geological time. Its statements about rapidity and stability describe the history of individual species; and its claims about rates and styles of change treat the mapping of these individual histories into the unfamiliar domain of ‘deep’ or geological time— where the span of a human life passes beneath all possible notice, and the entire history of human civilization stands to the duration of primate phylogeny as an eye blink to a human lifetime. The claims of punctuated equilibrium presuppose the proper scaling of microevolutionary processes into this geological immensity….”

– Stephen Jay Gould. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 766.

Eldredge, Niles and S. J. Gould (1972). “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism” In T.J.M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman Cooper. pp. 82-115. Reprinted in N. Eldredge. Time frames. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985, pp. 193-223.

Gould, Stephen Jay, & Eldredge, Niles (1977). “Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered.” Paleobiology 3 (2): 115-151. (p.145)

Gould, S. J. (1982) “Punctuated Equilibrium—A Different Way of Seeing.” New Scientist 94 (Apr. 15): 137-139.

It is a theory that falls between Georges Cuvier’s theory of catastrophic revolutions of the earth and the gradualism – ‘natura non facit saltum’ – of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, who argued that the same processes that transformed the earth are still going on, but our existence is so short that we have difficulty grasping the implications of geological time scales.

Notice how Cuvier weaves together human and geological revolutions and transformations in this opening passage from his Essay on the Theory of the Earth:

If we are interested in tracing out the nearly effaced vestiges of the infancy of our species, in so many nations utterly extinct, why should we not seek to discover, in the obscurity which envelopes the infancy of the earth, relics of revolutions long anterior to the existence of all nations? We admire that power of the human mind, the exercise of which has enabled us to ascertain those motions of the planets, which Nature seemed for ever to have held from us; genius and science have soared beyond the limits of space; some observations, developed by reason, have detected the mechanism of the world. Would it not be some renown for a man, in like manner, to penetrate beyond the limits of time, and to discover, by research and reflection, the history of this world, and of a succession of events which preceded the birth of the human race?

….When the traveller passes over those fertile plains here the peaceful waters preserve, by their regular course, an abundant vegetation, and the soil of which, crowded by an extensive population, enriched by flourishing villages, vast cities, and splendid monuments, is never disturbed but by the ravages of war, or the oppression of despotism, he is not inclined to believe that nature has there had her intestine war; and that the surface of the globe has been overthrown by revolutions and catastrophes; but his opinions change as he begins to penetrate into that soil at present so peaceful, or as he ascends the hills which bound the plain; they extend as it were with the prospect, they begin to comprehend the extent and grandeur of those events of ages past as soon as he ascends that more elevated chains of which these hills form the base, or, in following the beds of those torrents which descend from these chains, he penetrates into their interior.

in closely examining what has taken place on the surface of the globe since it was left dry for the last time, and the continents have hence assumed their present form; at least in the highest parts, we clearly see that the last revolution, and consequently the establishment of present society, cannot be very ancient. It is one of the results, at the same time the most clearly proved, and the least regarded in sound geology; a result the more valuable as it unites, in an unbroken chain, natural and civil history.

– Georges Cuvier. 1817. Essay on the Theory of the Earth (a. k. a., Revolutions of the Earth), p. 8.

The stratified surface of the earth, just like the strata of societies, are subject to upheavals, revolutions, and catastrophes. It is not an acident that the concepts of social stratification and of social strata come into sociology via Lester Frank Ward, who was both a sociologist and a geologist.

Ward, Lester F. 1889. The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Plants. Washington: Goverment Printing Office.

Ward, Lester F. 1906. Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society. Boston: Gin & Company.

We must note that Cuvier was trying to defend creationism and the fixity of species in the face of his own discovery of the evidence for extinctions, catastrophes, and long geological eras recording the history of the Earth. His views dominated Natural History until Darwin.

[ Aside on Cuvier, Fixity, etc.

]

Darwin follows Lyell’s gradualism and opposed to Cuvier’s catastrophes, and so he observes crises not so much in terms of catastrophes and revolutions of the earth, but in terms of an everyday “struggle for life/struggle for existence” which he explains in this way:

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which on an average only one comes to maturity, may be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The missletoe is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched sense be said to struggle with these trees, for if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it will languish and die. But several seedling missletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the missletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.

- Darwin. Origin of Species, Chapter III. “Struggle for Existence.”

One might also mention in this regard that Darwin and Marx are closer to each other than Darwin and Cuvier. The crisis in the production, distribution and consumption within the social relations of Capital, are, just like the “struggle for existence”, momentary crises of everyday life. They are not a product of a “spirit of the age” or a “Spirit of a People (Nation, etc) or even of a some kind of a “world-picture” which was the term a certain fascist philosopher of the 20^th century used.

I think Bernstein wants to put his crisis up on a pedestal to support his vision of culture and the cultured person. So I would agree with my critic that his declaration of a crisis of 20^th century music is problematic

AND so is his solution, at least in terms of music, seems in the end to come down to:

listen to Stravinsky and Mahler, with some Beatles and Motown thrown in!

Of course, he takes no notice of Funkadelic, James Brown, or that King Crimson had already been touring for two years doing the material that would be released as the trilogy Larks Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black, and Red. Henry Cow had been performing already for 4-5 years by the time Bernstein is lecturing, just to name some contemporary markers. Robert Fripp and Brian Eno released No Pussyfooting in 1973, but had performed it live the year before, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was already 15 years old, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy had died a decade before, etc., etc.

Two years later, Bernstein could have pointed to another contemporary piece as an example of a “new Crisis”: Brian Eno’s Variation I on Canon in D Major (1975) with its’ progressive decomposition/deconstruction of the original

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCVke7TqlA

as a marker of a crisis in modernity and music that Bernstein at the very moment that Bernstein is lecturing. Or maybe not :-)

Let’s hear the beginning of the original, in case you are not familiar with it by name (it was once the most popular piece of classical music in America). After that, the first part of Eno’s Variation I

[Excerpt from Pacabel’s canon and first part of Eno’s Variation]

How’s that for your “Crisis in Ambiguity”!

My critic suggested several works that would be of interest to you. Zola’s Human Beast and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary track these social disruptions and Joyce’s Ulysses expresses the results.

Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” describess Baudelaire seeking “a holistic nature, in the face of industrial fragmentation” in “The Swan,” and the whole cycle of “Parisian Scenes”. Apollinaire’s “Zone” captures “the full domination of modernity….

“‘Second nature’ also developed by Georg Lukacs…. Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Thing’.… ‘Sacrifice without tragedy’ and Agamben’s concept of ‘sacred man’ aka ‘bare life’: life that can be killed without it being considered homicide or sacrifice (such as Proles toiling in a factory, being maintained in life enough to work but to barely stay alive)” and all of these should be consulted for a less American-centric reading than you have heard from me and

I’ve included these in the bibliography for you.

The final point is on music and language, and it is here that my critic and I noticeably disagree. Here is the comment that needs a more involved response because they are such good and important points for you to consider:

-The idea of ‘natural music’ seems to open the question of Cassirer of ‘symbolic forms’ and Panofsky on ‘Perspective as a Symbolic Form’: is artistic form a natural expression of its historical context? Bernstein seems to be seeing music as a ‘natural’ emergence from historical conditions. But humans are always in the ‘drive’ (Trieb) (instincts filtered through culture) and never purely instinctual (Instinkt), biological creatures (that's Freud and Lacan)

-In my psychoanalysis classes, I teach that language is distinctly human (and students always freak out): humans are embedded in the Symbol (a sign that refers to a whole system of signs in order to have meaning), whereas animals use sounds as indexical relationships (meaning dependent upon a specific use in time and space--I use Peirce and Terence Deacon, and of course Lacan). Music, I have not thought about...but I would go out on a limb and say that human music and birdsong is different. The question, how is language different from music is a tough one. Music always has this sense of being the expression of some natural animalistic rhythm, but if we are never totally ‘natura’ creatures, then what?

Well, here is where I think we part company in significant ways, so I will try to explain by addressing both comments at once.

I think that for Bernstein music is related language because both are natural to humans and, at the same time, they are each a natural result of the social context. However, I think that Bernstein’s views of languageare a romanticized reading of Chomsky’s theory. Whatever one thinks of if, Chomsky’s views are firmly grounded in rational empiricism. Chomsky certainly argues that language distinguishes us from all other animals. It is something that we share with each other, that identifies homo sapiens as a whole, but he does mean this in terms of biology/neurology/genetics. He now does say that language acquisition is not “hard-wired” for language but uses the language of genetics. That is why an chimp can not really learn English, he says, but that we can take a sentence like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and sort of make sense of it even though it is nonsense.

Moreover, I see Bernstein’s description of music is romanticized, i. e., his notion that music expresses some sort of natural truth and that this truth is our own value as humans; that the value of music is its expression of a crisis around the concept of what it means to be human.

To me there is a rather Platonic idea of the poet/artist/orator running through such romanticized notions. The notion of being “embedded in Symbol” sounds too metaphysical/theological to an Epicurean like myself, but that is my ideological bias.

I don’t mind if one defines language as being uniquely human.

So long as this does not exhaust the concept of language, I don’t have much of a problem, and it does leave linguistics solely focused on human language.

But this does not make human language particularly interesting, or at least, no more interesting than the ways other animals communicate with each other in order to live socially, forage, hunt, mate, etc. We maybe too limited to communicate with other animals using our vocalizations (excluding dogs, etc.), this does not mean that other animals do not also communicate complex information with each other that is no where encoded in their genes.

Actually, Darwin argued that music is quite natural to many animals and , not just humans, that in humans music came before language. For example, this passage from the Descent of Man:

All these facts [about the making and expression of musical sounds by humans and other animals] with respect to music become to a certain extent intelligible if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by the half-human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions. In this case, from the deeply-laid principle of inherited associations, musical tones would be likely to excite in us, in a vague and indefinite manner, the strong emotions of a long-past age. Bearing in mind that the males of some quadrumanous animals have their vocal organs much more developed than in the females, and that one anthropomorphous species pours forth a whole octave of musical notes and may be said to sing, the suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm. So little is known about the use of the voice by the Quadrumana during the season of love, that we have hardly any means of judging whether the habit of singing was first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind. Women are generally thought to possess sweeter voices than men, and as far as this serves as any guide we may infer that they first acquired musical powers in order to attract the other sex. But if so, this must have occurred long ago, before the progenitors of man had become sufficiently human to treat and value their women merely as useful slaves. The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other's ardent passions, during their mutual courtship and rivalry.

Darwin, C. R. 1871. Descent of Man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray. Volume 2. 1st edition.

http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F937.2&viewtype=text&pageseq=1

In terms of whether music and language are instinctual, again I think this depends on how one defines instinctual. I think that the Darwin quote addresses this, but also there is the chapter on “Instincts” from the Origin of Species in which he notes, particularly in reference to the so-called “instinct for slavery” – which was claimed to exist in species of slave-making ants and in humans, too. Indeed, this “instinct for slavery” was used as a scientific justification for slavery in the American South. Instead, using his observations of colonies of slave-making ants, Darwin surmised that this “instinct for slavery” was neither fixed nor the product of design or creation. In fact, instincts vary within species, not just between them, and that instincts are malleable and subject to natural (and sexual) selection. This showed, by the way, that slavery in humans was not natural, nor are any humans “naturally” slaves or “slavish”.

As some degree of variation in instincts under a state of nature, and the inheritance of such variations, are indispensable for the action of natural selection, as many instances as possible ought to have been here given; but want of space prevents me. I can only assert, that instincts certainly do vary – for instance, the migratory instinct, both in extent and direction, and in its total loss. So it is with the nests of birds, which vary partly in dependence on the situations chosen, and on the nature and temperature of the country inhabited, but often from causes wholly unknown to us: Audubon has given several remarkable cases of differences in nests of the same species in the northern and southern United States. Fear of any particular enemy is certainly an instinctive quality, as may be seen in nestling birds, though it is strengthened by experience, and by the sight of fear of the same enemy in other animals. But fear of man is slowly acquired, as I have elsewhere shown, by various animals inhabiting desert islands; and we may see an instance of this, even in England, in the greater wildness of all our large birds than of our small birds; for the large birds have been most persecuted by man. We may safely attribute the greater wildness of our large birds to this cause; for in uninhabited islands large birds are not more fearful than small; and the magpie, so wary in England, is tame in Norway, as is the hooded crow in Egypt.

….Therefore I can see no difficulty, under changing conditions of life, in natural selection accumulating slight modifications of instinct to any extent, in any useful direction. In some cases habit or use and disuse have probably come into play. I do not pretend that the facts given in this chapter strengthen in any great degree my theory; but none of the cases of difficulty, to the best of my judgment, annihilate it. On the other hand, the fact that instincts are not always absolutely perfect and are liable to mistakes; – that no instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but that each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others; – that the canon in natural history, of ‘natura non facit saltum’ is applicable to instincts as well as to corporeal structure, and is plainly explicable on the foregoing views, but is otherwise inexplicable, – all tend to corroborate the theory of natural selection.

– Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species, Chapter III: Instinct.

When one considers other primate and mammals, birds, and some marine animals, it seems clear that culture not generated from the outside to mediate an exchange between the instinctual and the environment/society. I think that Freud uses instinct as derived from his medical studies and maybe Haeckel’s reading of Darwin, though of course I don’t know how Lacan is using the concept. If we were a graduate department, we could have a PhD student do a dissertation on this!

And so it follows that I don’t think that language and music set humans apart, but rather show the continuity homo sapiens with other species. My use of Darwin’s quote perhaps shows my own biases. However, to acknowledge the French, one might consider Olivier Messian’s use of bird-song in his compositions and his studies of bird songs, too.

Olivier Messiaen.

Catalogue d’oiseaux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Izpdkjrhk

“Les orioles” from Des canyons aux étoiles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grJCyW6KZ2A

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Hooded_Oriole/

Reveil des oiseaux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgNeH9_8l0w

Not to ignore Messiaen's own deep religious devotion verging on mysticism. I suppose that in many ways, questions about the relation of language to music, or whether both are unique to humans, are for me questions originating in the conceits of humans, i. e., in the starting points of all anthropology and metaphysics.

After all, THE Symbol is all too often nothing other than a idol (or to use Marx’s term, a fetish) that subsumes us while offering an escape from Nature ….

a Nature that is said to offer nothing better than the way of all flesh? ;-)

Language, Music, Nature, and Second Nature

I would push back on this idea of a special place for humans – unless perhaps in our use our natural endowments of culture, language, and writing to destroy our own habitat and that of countless others. –

More specifically on language and music as unique to humans, I would like to conclude by pointing out these four recent articles:

The first by Crockford et al. from 2018 titled “Chimpanzee quiet hoo variants differ according to context” found that chimpanzee’s use quiet “hoos” when traveling, resting, and while alert for danger in order to exchange a range of complex information about the location, health, and intentions of the members of the group: “we identified three acoustically distinguishable, context-specific hoo variants. Each call variant requires specific responses from receivers to avoid breaking up the social unit. We propose that callers may achieve coordination by using acoustically distinguishable calls, advertising their own behavioural intentions.”

I’ll just throw this out there for your consideration, but think about the analogy of soldiers marching and drilling while singing, or workers timing their movements to work songs.

It so happens that a few hours ago a primatologist I follow on Twitter posted this video of bonobos using “vocal coordination” to organize a safe crossing of some open grassland. It might give you a better idea of what is being discussed.

Zanna Clay

https://twitter.com/zannaclay

I rediscovered this old vid I made of wild #bonobos crossing the savannah at MbouMonTour NGO project, DRC. It was my 1st time seeing wild bonobos, I was so excited. Wonderful to observe their communication & coordination- as the community emerges from the grasses #GreatApes

https://twitter.com/zannaclay/status/1255794957941604353

and here's a juvenile bonobo in the savannah, having a pre-departure solo-play :) #NkalaCommunity #wildbonobos #MbouMonTour #WWF

https://twitter.com/zannaclay/status/1255802491607883776

p.s. loudest vocal coordination is at the very beginning, rather cool!

To provide a comparison with another familiar social mammal, we can look at the 2013 article By Mazzini and others titled “Wolf Howling Is Mediated by Relationship Quality Rather Than Underlying Emotional Stress. Which found that wolfs howl together both to maintain social cohesion, and that this howling is voluntary, showing that “ control over their vocalizations, using them in flexible ways mediated by the animal’s understanding of its surrounding social world”

Mazzini, Francesco, Simon W. Townsend, Zsófia Virányi, Friederike Range. 2013.

Wolf Howling Is Mediated by Relationship Quality Rather Than Underlying Emotional Stress. Current Biology. Volume 23, Issue 17, P1677-1680, September 09.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.066

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2813%2900823-3

While considerable research has addressed the function of animal vocalizations, the proximate mechanisms driving call production remain surprisingly unclear. Vocalizations may be driven by emotions and the physiological state evoked by changes in the social-ecological environment [1, 2], or animals may have more control over their vocalizations, using them in flexible ways mediated by the animal’s understanding of its surrounding social world [3, 4]. While both explanations are plausible and neither excludes the other, to date no study has attempted to experimentally investigate the influence of both emotional and cognitive factors on animal vocal usage. We aimed to disentangle the relative contribution of both mechanisms by examining howling in captive wolves. Using a separation experiment and by measuring cortisol levels, we specifically investigated whether howling is a physiological stress response to group fragmentation [5] and whether it is driven by social factors, particularly relationship quality [6, 7]. Results showed that relationship quality between the howler and the leaving individual better predicted howling than did the current physiological state. Our findings shed important light on the degree to which animal vocal production can be considered as voluntary.

Wolf Conservation Center

@nywolforg https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1255458054952214528

In the third article from the Royal Society, published in 217, Filippi, P. et al. is titled: “Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals.” Let me read the short abstract:

Filippi, P. et al. is titled: “Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals.” Proc. R. Soc. B284: 20170990. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0990

Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participant so judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes—Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system.

And the fourth and final article is also from the journal Ecology Letters and is, I think, also important in giving some context to the other three. This study, titled “Fear of humans as apex predators has landscape-scale impacts from mountain lions to mice” by Suraci, Clinchy et al. found that the very sound of the human voice can have far reaching disruptions to ecological relations.

Humans have supplanted large carnivores as apex predators in many systems, and similarly pervasive impacts may now result from fear of the human ‘super predator’. We conducted a landscape‐scale playback experiment demonstrating that the sound of humans speaking generates a landscape of fear with pervasive effects across wildlife communities. Large carnivores avoided human voices and moved more cautiously when hearing humans, while medium‐sized carnivores became more elusive and reduced foraging. Small mammals evidently benefited, increasing habitat use and foraging. Thus, just the sound of a predator can have landscape‐scale effects at multiple trophic levels. Our results indicate that many of the globally observed impacts on wildlife attributed to anthropogenic activity may be explained by fear of humans.

Pervasive fear of humans may also precipitate widespread community-level changes by disrupting natural predator–prey interactions. Human-induced antipredator behaviour could compromise top-down ecosystem regulation by large carnivores (Kuijper et al. 2016) and limit medium-sized carnivore suppression of small mammals (Leviet al. 2012). (Venter et al. 2016), we suggest that the fear we human ‘super predators’ inspire, independently of our numerous other impacts on the natural world, may contribute to widespread restructuring of wildlife communities.

Justin P. Suraci, Michael Clinchy, Liana Y. Zanette, and Christopher C. Wilmers. 2019.

Ecology Letters.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.13344

So be quiet when you are walking in the forest, because the very sound of your voice is having a disruptive effect.

This might be a good point to remind you of Bernie Krause’s discussion of acoustic niche and how that might be useful in explaining what these researchers found.

Though I obviously take a very different view of language and music than my critic or Bernstein, I clearly think this is a fruitful line of discussion to pursue. I am grateful for the comments and criticisms, as they led me to further research and explore the questions raised.

It seems like a good place to end is with a quote from Aldo Leopold that seems relevant in terms of where I am coming from in thinking about questions concerning the relation of music, language, nature, and human nature:

“I never realized before that the melodies of nature are music only when played against the undertones of evolutionary history”

(Aldo Leopold from an unpublished manuscript in the Library of America collection of his writings, c. 1935).

Cumulative Bibliography of Parts One, Two, and Three of the Lecture-cast.
An * marks those suggested by my critic in Part Three.

Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Philosophy of Modern Music. New York, Seabury Press.
https://login.ezproxy.pratt.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat...
Adorno, Theodor. “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being” from The Current of Music.
Adorno, Theodor and Hans Eisler. 1947. Composing for the Films.
Adorno on Music and Popular Protest: https://archive.org/details/RicBrownTheordorAdornoonPopularMusicandProtest
Adorno, Theodor. 1972. “Kultur und Verwaltung” in: Collected Writings Vol. 8, Sociological Writings I, Frankfurt am Main. Broadcast: 26.07.1959, SWF location: Baden-Baden, Kunsthalle location manager: Biallowancz.
Adorno, Theodor. 1936. “On Jazz” from Essays on Music. University of California Press.
Adorno, Theodor. 1998. Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait. Verso.
Adorno, Theodor. 1956/1969. Aesthetic Theory. University of Minnesota Press.
Adorno, Theodor. Three Short Piano Pieces (1934/1945).
Adorno, Theodor. Three Poems by Theodor Däubler for a Four-Woman a capella Choir. Number 3.
Adorno, Theodor. Two Orchestral Songs from the Unfinished ‘The Treasure of Indian Joe’.

*Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Standford University Press.

*Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1965. Alcools. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2001. Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1929- 1932. Aufklärung für Kinder. http://www.ubu.com/sound/benjamin.html
*Benjamin, Walter. 1968. "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books.

Bernstein, Leonard. 1958-1972. Young People's Concerts.
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Bernstein, Leonard. 1973. The Unanswered Question, part 6: The Poetry of the Earth.
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Bernstein, Leonard. 1981. The Unanswered Question. Harvard University Press; Revised edition

Boulez, Pierre. 2006. Pierre Boulez conducts Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps). Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala. Milan.
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Boulez, Pierre. 2019. “Idea, Realization, Craft.” Music Lessons: Lectures at the College de France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Burroughs, William S. (with Phil Proctor). “The Control Machine” from Nova Express:
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Burroughs, William S. The Limits of Control [Sections VI, VII, VIII, X]
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Cage, John. 4’ 33” A performance by William Marx.
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Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Boston: Mouton & Co.
Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Clay, Zanna. 2020. Video of wild bonobos engaging in vocal coordination.
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Crockford C, Gruber T, Zuberbühler K. 2018. Chimpanzee quiet hoo variants differ according to context. Royal Society Opensci. 5: 172066. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.172066

Cuvier, Georges, and Alex. Brongniart. 1822. Description Geologique des Environs de Paris. Paris: Defour et D'Ocagne.

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Curvier, Georges. 1826. Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe et sur les changemens qu’elles ont produits dans le Regne Animal. Paris: Defour et D'Ocagne.

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Darwin, Charles Robert. 1859. On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the

Struggle for Life. London: Murray.

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Darwin, Charles R. 1871. Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex. London: John Murray. Volume 2. 1st edition.
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“Caricature group portrait of Charles Darwin and the Crew of the HMS Beagle”. Watercolor by Augustus Earle of “Quarter Deck of a Man of War on Diskivery [sic] of interesting Scenes on an Interesting Voyage”. Earle was the first official shipboard artist on the HMS Beagle, tasked with recording the botany, fossils and other specimens en route.
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Eldredge, Niles and S. J. Gould (1972). “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism” in T.J.M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman Cooper. pp. 82-115. Reprinted in N. Eldredge. Time Frames. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985, pp. 193-223.

Ellison, Ralph. 2002. “A Snow of Blizzard Proportions” from Flying Home and Other Stories. New York: Modern Library.
Ellison, Ralph. 2013. Living with Music: The Jazz Writings of Ralph Ellison. New York; Modern Library.

Eno, Brian. 1975. Variation I on Canon in D Major (1975) from Discreet Music.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1995). “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‛Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817” in Terry, Jennifer and Jacqueline Urla (Ed.) Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, 19–48. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Filippi, P. et al. : “Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals.” Proceedings of the Royal Society. B284: 20170990. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0990

*Flaubert, Gustave. 1992. Madame Bovary. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://archive.org/details/gustaveflaubertm00heat

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.
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Gould, Stephen Jay, & Eldredge, Niles. 1977. “Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered.” Paleobiology 3 (2): 115-151.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1982. “Punctuated Equilibrium—A Different Way of Seeing.” New Scientist 94 (Apr. 15): 137-139.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

*Heidegger, Martin (referred to in part III as “a certain Fascist philosopher of the 20th century”). 1930s’/revised 1950s/1971. ‘The Thing’ in Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Collins.

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Huber, M. P. 1820. The Natural History of Ants. London: Longman, Hurst.

Charles Ives. 1933-1942. Study no. 20 (partial); They are There! (first take); Four Transcriptions from “Emerson” No. 3 ]. Ives Plays Ives The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano, 1933–1943. New World Records.

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    https://imslp.org/wiki/The_Unanswered_Question_(Ives%2C_Charles)
Ives, Charles E. “On the Antipodes” from Songs.

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*Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House.
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Krause, Bernie. 2015. Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes. Yale University Press

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*Lukacs, Georg. 1968. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Marx, Karl and Fredreich Engels. 1846. The German Ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/
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Gregor Mendel. 1866/1901. "Experiments in plant hybridization" trans. by C. T. Druery, and William Bateson. Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. 26: 1–32.

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Messiaen, Olivier. “Les orioles” from Des canyons aux étoiles.
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Messiaen, Olivier. Reveil des oiseaux.
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Monty Python. 1975. King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

Norris, Frank. 1901. The Octopus: A Story of California.
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    And for fun, as one in the original graphic novel series:
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Pachelbel. Canon and Gigue in D major. Christopher Hogwood. The Academy of Ancient Music.

*Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time. Volume I: Swann’s Way. New York: Modern Library.
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Qureshi, Sadiah (2004). “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’”. History of Science 42:233–257. http://www.negri-froci-giudei.com/public/pdfs/qureshi-baartman.pdf

Rossellini, Roberto. 1952. Europa 51.

Satie, Erik. Douze Petits Chorals (1906-1908) - XII. Choral No 12. 12 Petits chorales: No. 12, Grave. Christiane Oelze, soprano -- Eric Schneider, piano.

Schaffer, John. New Sounds: Hand-picked music, genre free. 24/7 radio from New York City. https://www.newsounds.org/

Suraci, Justin P., Michael Clinchy, Liana Y. Zanette, and Christopher C. Wilmers. 2019. “Fear of     humans as apex predators has landscape-scale impacts from mountain lions to mice”. Ecology Letters. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.13344

Thompson, E. P. 1964. Making of the English Working Class. New York : Pantheon Books.
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Ward, Lester F. 1889. The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Plants. Washington: Goverment Printing Office.
Ward, Lester F. 1906. Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society. Boston: Gin & Company.

Webern, Anton. 4 Lieder nach Gedichten von S. George (1908-9). Christiane Oelze and Eric Schneider. Pierre Boulez conducts. 1. “Erwachen aus dem tiefsten traumes-schooße”; 2. Kunfttag I; 3. Trauer I; 4. Das lockere saatgefilde lechzet krank.
Webern, Anton. 1927-28. Symphony Op. 21. Berliner Philharmoniker with Pierre Boulez, conducting.

Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. Broadview Press.

Wolf Conservation Center.
    https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1255458054952214528

*Zola, Emile. 1890. La Bete Humaine (The Beast Within). Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier.

    https://archive.org/details/TheMonomaniaclaBeteHumaine/page/n15/mode/2up

See also:
Andreyev, Samuel. The Unanswered Question: Analysis.
    https://youtu.be/IEAa_MH0iCw?t=1
Andreyev, Samuel. Anton von Webern, explained in 10 minutes.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt2SJrcIJh4
Andreyev, Samuel. Anton von Webern's Drei Lieder, Op. 18: Analysis.
    https://youtu.be/IEAa_MH0iCw?t=1
Anton Webern's Zwei Lieder, Op. 19: Analysis.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK1iqTTrphM

Pages

Monday, March 8, 2021

Contents

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, Part III: An Anti-Critique [Unedited Notes & Slides]