Empire of Gold

Neumes, Memory, Improv, and Composition

Tim Morton stages a post on Ontolojazz in the following way:

These are ephemeral objects indeed, these jams. It's quite precious to have records of them. Anyone can download an mp3 of some “live” performance, with an ease that smoothes over the strangeness and difficulty of playing together, let alone of simply coexisting.

Trying to figure out why jamming is different from classical playing will take me some time. There are obvious reasons. You're not reading music, you're “reading” your inner state and your instrument and the people in the room, and a tune that you may be working on, perhaps a standard that you're reworking. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion, which I hinted at below, that the configuration space of jazz includes “classical” music as a much smaller, rather oddly stabilized and crystallized island within it.

I want to speak to the difference between ‘jamming’ and performing music notated in the Western classical tradition.

Let’s start with the obvious: No matter how complete the notation, the music’s not there on the page. There is a difference between playing the notes and playing the music. The notation requires interpretation if it is to be realized in an authentic performance, a moving one, a charismatic one. Interpretation requires intuitive knowledge of the inner life of music. And so does jamming. But jamming can be just as empty as a classical performance that gets the notes but misses the music.

One of the things that needs to be understood, then, is how that could be so. What are the mechanisms in play? We don’t know.

R E S P E C T

Ecstasy, Touch, and the Sense of Self

It looks like I may be doing some posting about music, so let’s gather some ideas. We need, for example, ideas about what came to be called altered states of consciousness (ASCs) back in the 60s – which, of course, invites the question: Just what are the ‘ordinary’ or ‘unaltered’ states of consciousness? So, we’re stepping into a conceptual minefield.

Still if you read widely enough, you’ll come up with accounts of musicians, dancers, and listeners experiencing loss of self (whatever that is), or even standing outside oneself: ecstasy, as the Greeks called it. No doubt you’ve had your own experiences in these directions.

I’ve offered some relevant personal testimony in earlier posts (gathered here), and I may well offer up some third-party anecdotes later on – I’ve got a bunch that I’ve collected over the years. But I want to go abstract in this post.

How is it that one could possibly be outside oneself? How could that happen? The way one approaches such a question depends, of course, on the conceptual system you use. I tend to favor one based on Western science. And that doesn’t give much conceptual equipment at all. It barely even admits of statements of the phenomenon. Still, there’s a little. And I took some of that and crafted it into these paragraphs from Beethoven’s Anvil (154-156):

A little roughage

Diversity, Schmaversity

Teh REAL Internet

Art and Civil Society in Tokugawa Japan

With an extension to graffiti in late 20th Century America (and the world)

I first published this in The Valve back in 2007 under the title "Tokugawa Blogging: Best of 2006." I'm republishing it here because it relates to some current discussions of music and community that are taking place here and there and the other place in the wider blogosphere.

Back in September of 2006 I was looking through the current issue of Science and saw a book review (requires subscription) entitled “Through Art to Association in Japanese Politics” by one Christena Turner. Given my interest in manga and anime, the title caught my attention. That Science was reviewing a book on such a topic, that really caught my attention. So I read the review, of Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Amazon.com) by Eiko Ikegami.

According to Turner, Eikegami argued that

Japanese sociability is characterized by an extensive repertoire of practices for handling the problem of how to interact with strangers. Somewhere between friends and enemies lies the domain of strangers. Somewhere between intimacy and danger lies the domain of civility. "The degree of 'strangership' may be an indication of the degree of civility in a given society," she claims. Civility permits ordinary people to be confident in interactions with those of unknown or different backgrounds, making it possible to form social bonds in the absence of friendship or kinship.

This is important because modern democracies requires a civil realm where individuals can form voluntary associations “outside the realms of both the political institutions of the state and the intimate ties of the family.” Ikegami argued

that networks of people engaged in interactive artistic and cultural pursuits created the bonds of "civility without civil society" that prepared the population of pre-modern Japan for its strikingly rapid transformation into one of the first and most successful modern nations outside of the West. Art created politics when participation in aesthetic networks taught people technologies of association among strangers that eased the transition toward institutions of a modern political economy.

That had me hooked. Not only would this book serve as “deep background” for my interest in manga and anime - “deep” because it's about a period, roughly 1600 to 1850, well before the emergence of those forms - but it also promised to be a volume that argued for the social value of art on an empirical basis, as opposed to asserting ideals. Since I'd already argued that it was music that made apes into humans, I was eager to read a more empirical, less speculative, argument broadly, if only loosely, consistent with that. Finally, it seemed that Ikegami's argument might be generally useful in thinking about how social networks function in the larger society.

The Hermeneutics of Description

Two Examples from the World of "Golden Age" American Cartoons

I’ve recently done a bunch of posts about two classic cartoon shorts, Bob Clampett’s Porky in Wackyland (1938), and Shamus Culhane’s The Greatest Man in Siam (1943). So far I’ve done four posts about Wackyland and seven posts about Greatest Man. But I didn’t set out to do that many posts in either case.

In both cases my method has been analytic and descriptive, and most of what I’ve written has been primarily descriptive – though not exclusively so. That’s what this post is about, the informal logic of arriving at descriptions of such complex and poorly understood phenomena as cartoons. My point of conceptual departure is the observation that, in the two cases, my initial posts were quite different in character. And, in fact, my initial intent was different as well. I approached Wackyland as a descriptive venture and Greatest Man as an interpretive venture, though I’ve ended up devoted more energy to descriptive matters in the latter case and managed to wander into interpretive waters in the former.

I attribute these differences to the nature of the cartoons themselves and the challenges each presents to analysis. My first post about the Clampett was an analysis that divided the cartoon into six segments, which I revised to seven in my second post about the cartoon. In contrast, my first post about the Culhane was devoted to a single segment late in the cartoon.

Why the difference?

Reed Zoom

The Siam Paradox

Though perhaps it’s not quite a paradox. And it certainly has nothing to do with Siam, but then neither does The Greatest Man in Siam. But I’m calling it the Siam Paradox because it occurred to me while thinking about that cartoon.

As I argued in my first post about that cartoon, the dramatic climax is a 20 second segment where the trumpeter and the king’s daughter do a wild and joyous Lindy. They dance to swing music on the soundtrack, and that music features a trumpet solo. A really good trumpet solo. Astonishingly good trumpet solo. It took the trumpeter 20 seconds to play that solo. It took Pat Matthews, the animator, hours upon hours to make the 200+ drawings required to animate the scene.

That disparity is what this ‘not quite a paradox’ is about. I’m just blown away that these two streams of activity – the 20 seconds of music, the hours upon hours of drawing – lined up so well. The animator, of course, knew what he was doing. He compared his drawings, frame by frame, as he executed them. I supposed he was constantly riffling the stack to see how the flow went. And he probably filmed tests of preliminary drawings. So, there were procedures to be followed.

But I’m still astounded. The trumpeter was deep in his lizard brain. He had to be to play hot music like he did. What about Matthews’ lizard brain? When did it get to jump and jive? Sure, it was the human-level monkey brain that executed the drawings. But it was the lizard brain that did the ultimate match between the drawings and the music. Why do I think that? Because it’s the lizard that’s most sensitive to and cares most deeply about the match.

How’d Matthews train his monkey brain to draw to the tune called by his lizard brain?

The Red

In Praise of Cartoons: Lantz Does Conceptual Integration

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the Walter Lantz cartoon, The Greatest Man in Siam. I've listed the other posts at the end of this one. YouTube has the cartoon.

Over the past two months or se, even as I’ve been viewing, reviewing, and writing about the The Greatest Man in Siam and Porky in Wackyland, I’ve been thinking about the more general question: Why cartoons? Why do we watch them? Why do they give us so much pleasure? There are, I suppose, many factors to consider in approaching those questions. I’ve got one particular factor in mind: conceptual integration.

The notion of conceptual integration, or conceptual blending, has been pioneered by Mark Turner and Giles Fauconnier and a host of others in the cognitive sciences over the past two decades or so. The basic idea is simple: one of our principle ways of grasping the world is to combine concepts from different domains into a new concept. We do it so often and effortlessly that we rarely notice it. Yet it is ubiquitous and fundamental.

In this post I’m going to take an informal look at conceptual integration in The Greatest Man in Siam, and then conclude with some more general remarks on conceptual integration in cartoons. Those who’ve been following my series on that cartoon will be familiar with that material; those who haven’t may wish to look over some of the earlier posts.

Orientalist Fantasy & America

In the large, we can think of The Greatest Man in Siam as being staged in a blend of two conceptual spaces: 1) a generic pop-cultural Orientalist fantasy of the Arab Middle East (though Siam, of course, is not in the Middle East), and 2) mid-20th Century America. The Orientalist fantasy provides the physical setting and costumes and is the ‘cover’ for the central conceit of the cartoon: a king declaring a competition for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Mid-20th century America then obtrudes in this setting in various ways; in particular, we have references to the ongoing state of war (the cartoon appeared in 1943).

Here’s the opening shot of the film:

This is pure Orientalist fantasy. A bit later we see this car pull up:

This could, of course, be the car of a rich Arab and so be a proper part of the Orientalist fantasy. But it could also be a mid-20th century American car. It’s thus ambiguous between the two spaces. When the car door opens, a rotund man in Arab dress emerges and nails a proclamation to the wall. Here’s the last part of that proclamation:

OOOrange

Orange was Frank Sinatra's favorite color.

I wonder what he'd think of Object-Oriented Ontology?

Probably not much.

Ringa-ding-ding, here comes Spring.

 

This is your brain on creativity