Matthew Guerreri, whose writings on music I always enjoy and look forward to, heads his latest NewMusicBox column with a quote from 1842:
[Richard Monckton] Milnes brought [Thomas] Carlyle to the railway, and showed him the departing train. Carlyle looked at it and then said, “These are our poems, Milnes.” Milnes ought to have answered, “Aye, and our histories, Carlyle.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals
and I have to wonder – is this quote as useful as it is provocative? When I think of the 19th-century compositions I love and admire most, the words “steam engine” rarely come to mind. And yet I know the influence is there, both in its sonic manifestations and in the shifting ways in which artists perceived their terrain.
Still, I have a hard time attaching a qualitative assessment to how directly compositions address the latest technologies. It seems like something art would invariably do – incorporate current technology – but the degree to which it foregrounds that use doesn’t really tell us much, beyond the obvious: this technology exists.
Matthew Guerrieri’s coming series of articles will be rather superficial if it sticks to the boys-with-their-toys approach of his first entry. This gizmo did that, and this gizmo has become old fashioned. (Were there any women composers mentioned? How progressive and advanced is that? Nerdville.)
The larger theme of cultural isomorphism is much more difficult to describe – the way art conforms to the economic, political, religious, and technological ideals of eras. When I think of the human objectification and authoritarianism of the industrial age, I see correlations with the symphony orchestra. I see correlations between the rise of 19th century cultural nationalism, romantic music, and the eventual glorification of war and technology in the ideals of later groups such as the futurists. The catastrophic results are well-known. There are more ghosts in Schumann, Dvorak, and Bruckner than people know.
If there is any one common theme in music technology, I think it might be the disembodiment of music – a desire for pseudo-holistic instruments that stress the intellect and aren’t dependent on the body. You just pick the things up and toy away. In a search for transcendence, we see the body as an unnecessary hindrance to music-making, a limitation to freedoms of the intellect.
But what if there is no Cartesian dualistic person with a mind separate and independent of the body? What if its very structure of reason comes from the details of our embodiment? Philosophers such as John Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and George Lakoff view the body as inseparable from reason, the primal basis that shapes everything we can mean, think, know, and communicate.
Our gizmos are fun, but without the long, existential process of making an instrument and the body-mind one, we might weaken cognitive structures that are essential to musical meaning. To what extent will technical and aesthetic strategies for solving this problem formulate the future of electronic music? Or will the body indeed be by-passed? What will the long-term implications for the human being be?
And as you note, the even larger issue is that great art almost always transcends the biases of its era, the “latest track,” whether it be technological, economic, spiritual, or philosophical.
In any case, it’s nice to see your voice here – someone thinking outside the…er…Box, as it were……………..
Thanks, William. I’m guessing Guerrieri will take this in directions that aren’t so superficial, and even if he doesn’t, he such a good writer he can probably get away with being superficial from time to time.
I see the same correlations you describe, but then I see correlations between everything. That is, in part, what this blog is about.
In any case, I appreciate your kind words.
The first law of geography according to Waldo Tobler is “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” Broader historical and cultural views are often missing in discussions of classical music, especially when they reveal unpleasant topographies.
Love that geography law, that’s a good one. I’ve said maybe 10 words to my next-door neighbor over the last 10 years, and I discuss the things nearest to my heart with people I have never met from around the world. I spend an inordinate amount of time gazing at the moon, and somehow can’t be bothered to notice the weeds taking over my property. So distance can mean what we want it to mean.
But more to your point: who among us does not have the ability to be vicious? And who among us is devoid of tenderness? So Robert Schumann connects to both Adolf Hitler and Julius Leber. Can we argue which connection is stronger?
Nearness can mean many things. Tobler is a geographer which makes nearness easier for him to define than for those who look at the arts and culture, where defining nearness is almost impossibly complex.
There is a nearness called propinquity which social psychologists use to refer to the factors that lead to personal attractions between people. There are many kinds of nearness that create kinship, a similarity in nature between humans. Like attracts like. Perhaps propinquity is a form of nearness that creates culture.
The utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham spoke of propinquity, or kinship, as a factor in creating pleasure. It was part of a method he called felicific calculus, or sometimes hedonic calculus. He noted that people who are alike tend to bring each other pleasure. The correlations are defined by classic Euler diagrams that show the correlations between various sets. He defined seven factors that determine this form of nearness. These seven factors might also be used to define cultural relationships:
1. Intensity: How strong is the pleasure?
2. Duration: How long will the pleasure last?
3. Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the pleasure will occur?
4. Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will the pleasure occur?
5. Fecundity: The probability that the action will be followed by sensations of the same kind.
6. Purity: The probability that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite kind.
7. Extent: How many people will be affected?
In this world of infinite curves, felicific calculus might help us analyze cultures and their complex kinships. These seven factors provide interesting contrasts, for example, in defining the relationship between Schumann and Hitler, and how it’s fairly different from Wagner and Hitler. These factors can also help us better understand the correlations between transcendental romanticism and National Socialism. Small rays of light enter an opaque world of infinite nearness.
Lovely!
I’m always impressed when people make generalizations like “People who are alike tend to bring each other pleasure.” As Jane Austen would say, “Well, that’s more than I know.”
Or more than she wanted to know. Mark Twain couldn’t stand Jane Austin’s writing — said she was a Sunday school teacher. Personally, I love all her noble sentiments, even if her conceptions of social psychology were never very realistic and died somewhere along with Queen Victoria.
The other side of the tortilla is that people sometimes enjoy each other exactly because they aren’t alike, the inverse effect of a hedonic calculus. The enjoyment of these tensions can contribute to cultural growth.
Do you suppose Twain would have preferred Stephen Austin’s writing to that of any woman from his grandmother’s generation?
Yes, she meant it was more than she wanted to know. Not the kind of person who had much patience for chasing after lines of reasoning that — as you point out — are clearly flawed.
Not sure what Twain thought of Stephen Austin, but I notice that many things coded as feminine are given an secondary status, something that probably affected Twain. His cynicism in later life probably didn’t improve his view of Jane Austin’s work either.
The study of interpersonal attraction is a major area of research in social psychology. Countless studies suggest that similarity and complementary interaction between two partners increases their attractiveness to each other. I’m not a psychologist, and feel unqualified to comment on the validity of the view, how consistent it might be, or what variations might be found. Some reading:
Folkes, V. S. (1982). Forming relationships and the matching hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 8, 631-636.
Alvarez, Liliana; Jaffe, Klaus (2004). “Narcissism guides mate selection: Humans mate assortatively, as revealed by facial resemblance, following an algorithm of “self seeking like””. Evolutionary Psychology 2: 177–194. Retrieved February 9, 2011.
Walster, Elaine; G. William Walster; Ellen Berscheid; Karen Dion (March 1971). “Physical attractiveness and dating choice: A test of the matching hypothesis”. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7 (2): 173.
Jump up^ Murstein, Bernard I.; Patricia Christy (October 1976). “Physical attractiveness and marriage adjustment in middle-aged couples”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology34 (4): 537.
Goldman, J. A.; Rosenzweig, C. M.; Lutter, A. D. (1980). “Effect of similarity of ego identity status on interpersonal attraction”. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 9(2): 153–162.
Lydon, J. E.; Jamieson, D. W.; Zanna, M. P. (1988). “Interpersonal similarity and the social and intellectual dimensions of first impressions”. Social Cognition 6 (4): 269–286.
Markey, P.M.; Markey, C. N. (2007). “Romantic ideals, romantic obtainment, and relationship experiences: The complementarity of interpersonal traits among romantic partners”. Journal of social and Personal Relationships 24 (4): 517–533.
Mathes, E. W.; Moore, C. L. (1985). “Reik’s complementarily theory of romantic love”. The Journal of Social Psychology 125 (3): 321–327.doi:10.1080/00224545.1985.9922893.
Miller, A. G. (1972). “Effect of attitude similarity-dissimilarity on the utilization of additional stimulus inputs in judgments of interpersonal attraction”. Psychonomic Science 26 (4): 199–203.
Moskowitz, D.s.; Ho, Moon-ho Ringo; Turcotte-tremblay, Anne-marie (2007). Contextual Influences on Interpersonal Complementarity, Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(8), 1051-1063.
Ha, a reading list! You are something else.
A theory, and an observation. I think Jane Austen was spot-on with her social observations and conclusions. Same with Sigmund Freud. Both are easy to bash these days, but I believe it’s because interpersonal relations are less hard-wired, more malleable, than we would like to think. In other words, their insights were perfectly appropriate to their milieux, and no longer appropriate to ours. Similarly, I find that the books and articles about interpersonal relations I read and profited from in the 1970s and 80s hold less water for me now.
That like attracts like is, of course, self-evident. People who speak minority languages, for example, gravitate toward each other for the simple reason they can talk to each other. They usually bring with them a host of cultural perspectives and form communities that enrich society through diversity.
I think your very valid point is that cultural propinquity can also lead to an invidious attachment to groups manifested in racism, ethnocentricity, classism, sexism, and chauvinistic forms of patriotism and nationalism. Ferguson and countless police shootings of black men elsewhere illustrate we’re not past those problems. One more reason to study the social psychology of propinquity.
Ironically, Jane Austin knew that like attracts like. Much of her work addresses problems of classism and sexism — to the extent possible in her day. One of the most beloved conceits of her plots is frustrated love between two people who share similar noble sentiments – like attracting like but frustrated by some circumstance that is resolved in a happy ending. (I have a big weakness for her books.)
And to take this back to the Matthew’s original topic, technology also forms new forms of cultural groups around propinquity. Gamers, for example, have become a significant trans-national cultural group. It is interesting how they often share not only an interest in video games, but also have numerous other similarities in their lives.
The social psychology of propinquity is interesting because it helps us understand how culture is formulated and how it evolves over time. Hence my interest in how transcendental romanticism influenced National Socialism’s concepts of the hero and radical will, and how cultural nationalism metastasized into the chauvinistic nationalism and racism of the Nazis. For some more reading, I address this in a 5000 word article published by the M.I.T. Press:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/prophets.htm
But as John Cage once said, “Let us note once and for all that the lines we draw are not straight.” We live in a world of infinite curves.