2011 Reading and Listening

Listening highlights:

Pulse Emitter; Black to Comm; Leyland Kirby; Moritz Von Oswald Trio; Beethoven (string quartets, especially 12; piano sonatas, especially 30 played by Mitsuko Uchida); Chris Whitehead; BJ Nilsen & Stiluppsteypa; Ben Frost; Sun Araw; Jimmy Giuffre Trio; Keith Fullerton Whitman; Tim Hecker; Cordell Klier, I Believe; Tirath Singh Nirmala; Matthew Shipp (solo and in various groups); Christopher McFall & David Velez, Credence; Daniel Menche & Anla Courtis, Yagua Ovy; Twells & Christensen, Coasts; Luis Antero; Aethenor; Cleared; Birchville Cat Motel (solo/with Anla Courtis/with Matthew Bower); Mountains, Air Museum; more Beethoven (piano concertos 4 & 5; symphonies in Bernard Haitink’s recording); Stephan Mathieu; Daniel Menche, Feral; solo saxophone by David S. Ware, Peter Brotzmann, Anthony Braxton; John Fahey; Golden Retriever; Hive Mind; Sibelius (‘Finlandia’ & ‘Karelia Suite’); John Handy, Live at Monterey.

The two things that stand out in the year are, first, listening to a lot more orchestral classical music than I have before. That’s partly because I’ve had Classic FM and Radio 3 on a lot for my son, partly because I became somewhat obsessed with Beethoven. Second, I moved gradually away from my 2009-10 high-water mark of extreme noise (Daniel Menche, Lasse Marhaug, John Wiese, Yellow Swans) towards equally non-melodic and experimental but much less harsh music, often involving field recordings and often as free downloads from various netlabels. I still enjoy full-on noise (two records by Menche are on the list above, and I currently have records by Jazkamer and Skullflower on my iPod), but I’m not as focussed on it as I was.

Album of the year: 

Mitsuko Uchida, Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 30, 31, & 32—pure joy in being human. If I understand rightly, Uchida’s playing is at the ‘late Baroque’ as against the ‘full-blown Romantic’ end of the scale of Beethoven interpretation; I certainly like her lucid, conversational approach.

Reading highlights: 

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty; William Morris, News From Nowhere; Michael Jackson, Life Within Limits; Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye; John Fowles, The Magus; Robert Bates, Prosperity & Violence; Sebastian Junger, War; John Stuart Mill, Autobiography; Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands; John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs; Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence; Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild & Into Thin Air; Henry James, The Golden Bowl; Joe Simpson, Touching the Void; Maurice Herzog, Annapurna; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Martha Nussbaum, essays on The Golden Bowl in Love’s Knowledge; Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’; James Joyce, Dubliners;  Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba.

The main thing that stands out here is how few of my highlights are in my own discipline. I did read a fair amount of recently published professional philosophy for work and for interest this year, but none of it really grabbed me that much.

Book of the year: 

Henry James, The Golden Bowl—a huge reading project on which I almost gave up several times, but an astonishing novel. The best account I have ever read of what it’s like to be a self-attentive self moment to moment. Has ruined me for a lot of other fiction: it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Ethics lectures: Mill 2 and 3

Here and Here.

Christopher Logue is dead

Guardian obituary here, and here's an extraordinary recording of him reading from his All Day Permanent Red.


(Hat-tip for both: the always-interesting Languagehat.)

Music and embedded cognition

My friend and colleague Brian Garvey gave a work-in-progress paper yesterday about embedded cognition and the evolutionary explanation of morality. I'm not going to do justice to it, because I want to pick up on one small issue that intrigued me.

Embedded cognition occurs when we outsource cognitive work: when we write things down instead of remembering them, or use a calculator to do sums. One of Brian's other examples was the organisation of orchestras: the players outsource the cognitive work of keeping a beat, moving together, balancing different instruments, and musical interpretation, to a conductor; they outsource thinking about what notes to play, in what order, to a score.

I frivolously suggested that this explains why jazz is better than orchestral music. That claim is silly as it stands, of course, and I don't mean it. But there is an interesting difference here: jazz players do far less outsourcing than orchestral players. Jazz is centrally music in which the players are individually doing the cognitive work to produce a communal piece, without conductors or scores. (Not entirely: several features of jazz can be thought of as outsourcing techniques, or at least as techniques for reducing cognitive load. Part of a jazz musician's education, for example, is learning heads and changes - snippets of melody and sequences of chords which shape improvisation. That's what a jazz standard like 'Body and Soul' or 'Stella by Starlight' is: a melodic head plus chords over which players improvise, often in an alternating chorus/solo form. Free jazz, if we think this way about it, is an attempt to outsource as little as possible: to return all of the work of music-creation to individual cognition.)

That difference between jazz and orchestral music offers a way to defend a less silly version of my silly claim: jazz is better than orchestral music at engaging and interconnecting the many different cognitive capacities involved in music-creation. Where an orchestral player is using just some of her own musical faculties (at a very high level of skill and effort), a jazz player is using many more of those faculties, as well as meta-cognitive faculties to organise and coordinate them. So, if we think that the purpose of playing music, like the purpose of other human activities, is fully to express human and individual faculties, and jazz is better than orchestral music at fulfilling that purpose, then jazz is better than orchestral music.

That's a big 'if', of course...

One way seminars go wrong

For me, anyway. This week I found myself in a familiar, depressing pattern in a seminar on Mill's account of the good life. A talkative but not very well-prepared group gradually accelerated into a free-for-all in which we very rapidly and confusedly moved over a lot of ground, missing important distinctions and failing to stick to the question in play. I was slow to react: partly because I was slow to gather that the group as a whole hadn't understood the question I had asked at the start of the seminar (because most of them hadn't come to the lecture, and because many of them mistakenly believed that their A-level study of Mill had been adequate to the day); partly out of irritation at a particular, self-confident student repeatedly asserting that Mill's position was 'pretentious' (irritation not helped by his helpful definition of the word 'pretentious' when I said that I didn't understand what his argument was. Yes, thank-you, I know what the word means. What I am politely trying to convey is that calling Mill pretentious is a rather silly ad hominem).

What should I have done instead? I now think I ought to have gone back to basics: returned to the question at hand - what is the good life? - and the answers in play - hedonism, desire-satisfaction, perfectionism; insisted on the precise use of terms in discussing them. I'm wary of doing that kind of remedial work in seminars, because it too often reinforces the unfortunate impression that many students have of seminars as revision classes on the 'points' in the lecture. But perhaps I was too wary in this case.

For this particular group next week, I'm going to be rather more directive and careful about these basics, and see if that improves the quality of discussion.

Paul Motian is dead

The wonderful jazz drummer Motian died yesterday. He had an extraordinary ability to suggest swing, and to express ideas, with minimal means; he was a great musical conversationalist.

Ethics lecture: Mill 1

Here.