Download 1 VIRGIN MUSIC (By Peter L.P. Simpson) Post Modernism Among

1
VIRGIN MUSIC
(By Peter L.P. Simpson)
Post Modernism
Among the many things said about post modernism, what best captures its idea or its importance,
at least for me, is the term "emancipation." Post modernism emancipates us from the tyranny of
modernism. In this sense post modernism is a thoroughly Western phenomenon, for modernism
is a thoroughly Western phenomenon. I understand by modernism a certain tradition of thinking
and acting that takes its measure and inspiration from mathematical science on the one hand and
from the philosophical propagandists of that science on the other. I think in particular of Bacon,
Descartes, Hobbes, but also of their several heirs and followers right up to the present day, in socalled Anglo-American analytic philosophy and in so-called Continental non-analytic
philosophy. The tyrannical things in this tradition of thinking are several, but I would single out
the following: first, that mathematical science gives us the sole accurate account of physical
things; second, that mathematical science is the paradigm of science and of reason and that what
does not conform to this paradigm is not science or reason; third, that history determines thought
and the progress of thought, or at any rate determines the several manifestations of thought that
history presents us with. I thus draw no serious distinction in modernism between the rationalism
of the Enlightenment and the historicism of German Idealism. They are both aspects of one and
the same phenomenon.
To make my point clearer, I would characterize the essence of this phenomenon, the
phenomenon of modernism, as the triumph of history over man. This triumph consists in the
claim that history precedes human thought and action and somehow creates or determines it.
Such a claim is most immediately associated with German Idealism. But it also expresses the
rather different and Enlightenment claim that our own particular thought represents a radical
breakthrough in understanding, one never before experienced or even imagined. This claim,
which, as I say, characterizes the ideology of the Enlightenment, quickly became, and has now
been for a long time, the instinctive and unreflecting opinion of the vast majority of Westerners.
Modern science, of course, is what plays the decisive role in propagandizing this opinion among
the population at large. Indeed it plays the same role among philosophers, above all those of the
Anglo-American analytic tradition. This tradition positively worships science and scientific
"reason" and regards it as the measure, not only of what exists, but also of what can be rationally
thought and said. An instance in point is what is now called "philosophy of mind," for the
questions and problems discussed in this "philosophy of mind" assume the truth of the scientific
method and these problems make no sense, or are pseudo-problems, without this assumption.
2
Certainly they are pseudo-problems without the scientific notion of "matter" and without the
corresponding Cartesian notion of "mind" (and Cartesianism is a sort of scientific propaganda).
It is this tradition of worship of science and scientific reason that feeds the historicist
ideology of German idealism. For one of the problems faced by the early propagandists of
modern scientific reason was why, if what they were saying was so radically new and yet was the
real truth about man and the world, no one had ever thought of these things or suggested them
before. The answer was that people were blind or ignorant or prejudiced before and were
somehow incapable of thinking the real truth. Their particular time and place in history had
blighted or cursed them to darkness. But our particular time and place in history, by contrast, had
blessed us to light and had freed us from the constraints and the follies of previous ages. Perhaps
it was merely accidental that enlightenment had come now and not earlier, but it was a fact
nevertheless. It was a fact, in other words, that time had favored us but not others or had allowed
truth to emerge now but not before. It was a fact, in other words, that time had determined human
thought and its access to truth. The step, however, is short from supposing that time has
accidentally determined thought to supposing that time essentially determines thought. But this
step is none other than the step from the rationalism of the Enlightenment to the historicism of
German Idealism.
In short it is a common supposition of modernism in all its phases that time determines
thought. As a result, modernism has also fostered the supposition that the thought of times and
places where the supposition that time determines thought has not prevailed are benighted and
not to be taken seriously. I mean it has fostered the supposition that the thought of such other
times and places was determined by those other times and places, despite the fact that the thought
of those other times and places denied that thought was determined by times or places. For
instance, it is standard among modernists to suppose that to understand the thought of other or
non-modern times and places it is necessary first to understand those times and places, or that it
is necessary to understand the historical context out of which that thought came in order to
understand it. But, of course, those other times and places deny that it is necessary to understand
their historical context in order to understand their thought. On the contrary, they say that their
thought, like all thought, is understandable by itself, regardless of time and place. But modernism
cannot accept any of this. It rejects this feature of the thought of other times and places and
refuses to consider that that feature might be true. Instead it forces all thought to be squeezed into
its own modernist mould and has to remake all thought according to modernist assumptions
before it can consider any thought to be or to be called thought. Modernism, in other words,
systematically destroys everything but modernism.
3
That is why I call modernism tyranny and why I say that post modernism, among other
things, promises us a real and long overdue emancipation from this tyranny, I mean from the
tyranny of thinking, or of being forced to think, that all thought is determined by time and place.
Post modernism releases us instead to think that some or even all thought is not determined by
time and place but is timeless and universal. Above all it releases us to treat all thoughts of all
times and all places as if they were all equally here now. It allows us to think and act upon any
thought whatever, however outlandish or outmoded it may initially appear, especially to a
modernist. Post modernism abolishes time and place as far as thinking is concerned and declares
that no time is out of date and no place out of bounds. All thinkers and all philosophers are
contemporaries and all are present here speaking to us now.
Virgin Music
What I have said about modernism and the way it tyrannizes over thought, applies to music too.
The music that now dominates our culture is another Western phenomenon, indeed another
modern Western phenomenon. Yet it presents itself as the only music or at least as providing the
only true measure for all music. It too tyrannizes over other music and other ways of
understanding and performing music and just as surely fashions the appreciation and
understanding of other music according to its own mould.
Let me explain what I mean by reference to a story taken from India about the king of the
apes, Hanuman, who happened to be very proud of his musical attainments. "Rama, the hero of
the Ramayana epos, devised a plan to humble him. In the jungles there dwelt a noble rishi who
caused the Seven Notes to become embodied in seven lovely nymphs. Rama took Hanuman into
the vicinity of the abode of the rishi, and Hanuman, wanting to show off his qualifications,
proudly took up the vina and began to play. Just then the seven lovely nymphs or notes passed
by; they were going to fetch water. Hearing the music, one stopped, swayed and fell dead.
Hanuman had sung that note incorrectly. The sister notes were comfortless and moaned and
lamented her death piteously; the rishi, seeing all this, smiled, took up the vina and struck the
notes loudly. As soon as the dead note was played correctly it revived and gaily rejoined its sister
notes and there was much rejoicing. Hanuman, thoroughly ashamed of himself, hung his head
and performed penance for his silly vanities." (From Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient
World, Norton, New York, 1943: 173-174).
Now listen to the following excerpt from the music of J.S. Bach.
[INSERT HERE A BRIEF RECORDING FROM BACH'S GOLDBERG VARIATIONS]
4
If the rishi's notes had been subjected to this music from Bach, they would now all be dead and a
great deal of retuning and replaying would be needed to revive them.
I will take these notes of the rishi as representative of what I shall call virgin music, not
only because these notes are personified as girls, but also because they are personified as girls
who cannot abide to be violated with respect to their purity of sound--and that would seem to be
the equivalent, for musical notes, of being robbed of virginity.
But why should the music of Bach constitute a rape of music's virginity? First and
principally because none of the intervals in Bach's music are pure (with the possible exception of
the octave). The scale he uses is the so-called well-tempered scale (his celebrated 48 Preludes
and Fugues are, one recalls, entitled the Well-Tempered Clavier). In a well-tempered scale the
intervals between each of the twelve notes of the octave (the interval of the semitone) are fixed at
an equal distance (that of 100 cents, to use the standard way of measuring musical intervals).
Thus the interval of a fourth (from C to F, say) is measured at 500 cents (or five semitones), and
that of a fifth (from C to G, say) is measured at 700 cents (or seven semitones), and the
difference between these two intervals (from F to G) is measured at 200 cents (or two semitones).
If, however, these intervals were to be measured accurately or according to purity of musical
consonance, the intervals would in fact be slightly different.
I mean by purity of consonance purity of ratio between the notes constituting the interval.
For instance the interval of an octave sounds at a ratio of 2:1. The higher note is resonating twice
as fast as the lower one in the sense that the peak of every wave of sound of the lower note
coincides with the peak of every second wave of sound of the higher note. That is why the ear
hears the octave as a harmony, because it hears the notes resonating together. The interval of the
fifth resonates at the ratio of 3:2, in the sense that the peak of every second wave of sound of the
lower note coincides with the peak of every third wave of sound of the higher note. The interval
of the fourth resonates at the ratio of 4:3 in the sense that the peak of every third wave of sound
of the lower note coincides with the peak of every fourth wave of sound of the higher note. The
octave, fifth, and fourth are the most readily detectable harmonies, closely followed by the major
and minor third, which have ratios of 5:4 and 6:5 respectively. As so calculated they constitute
the natural harmonies (for they constitute the coincidence of the natural phenomenon of sound
waves detectable to the human ear).
However, it so turns out that, when translated into cents, these intervals do not constitute
a tempered scale. The natural interval of the fourth, for instance, is actually 498 cents and not
500, of the fifth 702 cents and not 700, and of the interval between them 204 cents and not 200.
5
Now these discrepancies are, to be sure, too small to be noticeable to the human ear, but when
they get repeated often enough they soon do become noticeable. Now such repetition is actually
what happens if one constructs or tunes all the notes of one's scale using the natural intervals and
not the tempered intervals (that is to say, if one tunes all notes using some such method as the socalled up and down method: up a fifth from one's first chosen note, say C to G, then down a
fourth from G to D, up a fifth from D to A, down a fourth from A to E, and so on). The upshot is,
to cut a long story short, that while one will thus get natural harmonies in one key (they key of
C), one will not get harmonies (whether natural or tempered) in other keys, but the intervals will
sound more and more out of tune. To get natural intervals in other keys one has to start afresh by
tuning or constructing one's notes in that key. But then, of course, one will lose the natural
harmonies in one's original key, and so on and so on. The only way to keep tolerable harmonies
among intervals across all scales (without having laboriously to retune one's instrument each time
one changes key) is to fudge or temper each note so that they are all slightly out of tune with
respect to each other, but not so out of tune as to sound harsh to the ear. This way one can move
freely from one key to another without losing too much harmony in the process. This fudging is
what we call temperament, and the resultant fudged keys are what we call well-tempered.
It is for this reason, therefore, that I say that Bach's music would kill dead all of the rishi's
virgin notes; because the rishi's notes are pure and Bach's are not. Bach, of course, is just one of
many composers of modern western music, but I choose him because he is one of the first, and
certainly one of the first to try and popularize the well-tempered scale. That, after all, was partly
what the 48 Preludes and Fugues were supposed to be about. Experiments had, indeed, been
going on before Bach's time to achieve a tempered scale, and the experiments have continued
after Bach as well. But Bach represents the beginning of what we now know in the West as
music, for later developments have just followed his lead.
There are, however, other features of Bach's music, related to that of temperament, that
also need noting and that are equally part of its impurity. For one might wonder why there should
be so much interest in having a well-tempered scale if music before Bach's time had managed,
for so many centuries, to get by pretty much without it. Partly, or perhaps mainly, it is because of
the desire to have a multiplicity and a variety of notes all sounding together. For a feature of the
excerpt from the Goldberg Variations (and even more a feature of music after Bach) is the piling
up of notes to produce multiple note chords and chordal progressions (which is pretty much what
we mean by counterpoint, of which Bach was such a past master). But because of what has just
been explained above, it is impossible to have much harmonious piling up of notes, of chordal
progressions, and so of counterpoint, without a tempered scale. The purer one's notes, in other
6
words, the more one is forced to play single notes separately instead of many notes together.
Yet the piling up of notes and sounds in modern Western music is not just a matter of
having many sounds coming from one and the same instrument, as in the Goldberg Variations,
but also of having many sounds coming from many instruments, as in the Brandenburg
Concertos. For another feature of Western music is the large orchestra, which got much larger
after Bach, indeed, than it did during his life time. But how is one to get many instruments
playing many notes all at the same time and preserve some sort of musical harmony? The only
solution is to make all instruments conform to some common measure or standard, so that,
despite differences of quality and timbre, they all do play the same notes or notes conforming to
the same intervals. Now it is a feature of most instruments that they have few if any fixed
intervals. Most stringed and wind instruments, for instance, have the potential to play an infinite
number of notes at an infinite variety of intervals. A violin string can be stopped at any point and
notes can be played, not only a tone or a semitone apart, but also a quarter tone or an eighth tone
apart. Indeed even these intervals themselves can be varied infinitely, and a given tone can be
played now higher and now lower, or now sharper and now flatter, entirely as one wills. But
since all instruments can do this, getting them all to keep sounding tolerably in tune when played
together requires fixing on them all a common set of notes and intervals. This requirement is met
by having an instrument with fixed notes at fixed intervals from which all other instruments are
made to take their cue, as it were. This is where the keyboard comes in, or more particularly the
piano. For the very idea of a keyboard is fixed notes at fixed intervals (the guitar, of course, has
the same character because of its frets, and the guitar has, interestingly enough, achieved the
same dominance in what we nowadays call pop music as the piano has in what we nowadays call
classical music). That is why the dominance of the piano in Western music has come hand in
hand with the dominance of the well-tempered scale. Both are inseparable from the desire to
have a multiplicity and a variety of notes from a multiplicity and variety of instruments sounding
all at once.
Now the dominance of the piano in Western music is not just evident from the fact that
all musicians, whatever other instrument they may play, are required to be at least minimally
familiar with how to play the piano, but above all and much more from the fact that all music is
taught and all music composed using a system of notation that fits the well-tempered keyboard
and only the well-tempered keyboard (and also the guitar to some extent). I refer, of course, to
the standard five bar staff which we use to write music. For this five bar staff allows one to write
only twelve notes to an octave and only at evenly fixed intervals. Systems of notation designed
for instruments and music played with an infinite variety of notes at an infinite variety of
7
intervals (such as in non-Western and non-Modern musics, at least as regards notes played
between the pure and fixed intervals of fourth and fifth) do and must look very different. Indeed
the one notation will hardly be intelligible in terms of the other.
Now these features of modern Western music, which are very much distinctive of it,
namely the well-tempered scale and the dominance of the keyboard, are all related, as I have said,
to the desire for variety and multiplicity of sounds. But one might well be puzzled or intrigued by
this desire itself. For it manifests itself also in Western music in another way, namely in the love
of novelty and the desire for ever different sorts and styles of music. For it is not just variety of
notes within a musical piece that is desired, but novelty of pieces too, and this love of novelty,
once let loose, knows few bounds. That is also why Western Music presents us with such a rapid
succession of periods and styles of music that have come and gone since the days of Bach. For
from Bach's period of the Baroque we pass in a matter of decades to the Classical and then to the
Romantic, ending in what we now call the Modern or Twentieth Century only because of lack of
any other name. For this last period is marked by such a dizzying succession of novelties that it
defies any definite single characterization. The passion for novelty means, indeed, that each new
generation of composers has to do something different from its predecessor to gain attention and
have its music played or recorded. All the better, therefore, if the novelty is not only new but
even goes out of its way to shock. For what shocks gets more attention. Hence the fact that the
development of Western Music is often marked by shocks (as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring) which,
however, after a while cease to be shocking because the novelty wears off. Hence also the
premium placed on new and more sophisticated instruments and on highly developed technical
skill among players.
Yet all this novelty and variety arises and takes place against the background of an
abiding and unchanging sameness, I mean the sameness of the tempered scale and the fixed notes
and intervals characteristic of the keyboard (and the guitar). There can thus appear to be a certain
simplicity and dullness lurking beneath the ever changing surface of Western music. Certainly
something like this is what many have noticed who have been trained and brought up in nonWestern music. The story is told, for instance, of an Eskimo singer who, upon hearing a
recording of a modern Western song, said, "Many, many notes, but no better music." Another
story is told of an Albanian folk musician taken to hear a performance of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, who said afterwards, "Fine, but very, very plain." Again, there is the story of the
educated Chinese lady who, after hearing Mozart's Requiem, acknowledged its beauty but
thought little of its "superficiality" (Curt Sachs, The Wellsprings of Music, Martinus Nijhoff, the
Hague, 1962: 217-218).
8
What is it that such people are missing in Western music that they evidently find in their
own non-Western music? Well, consider the following excerpt from one of the ragas, the
traditional music of India.
[INSERT EXCERPT FROM AN INDIAN RAGA]
This music has virtually all the opposite features to Western music and to the excerpt from
Bach's Goldberg Variations. It does not use the well-tempered scale; it is not based on or tied to
the keyboard; it is not marked by a multitude of notes or by chords and chordal progressions; it is
relatively spare and unadorned; compared with other ragas it will seem, at least initially, very
similar and lacking in novelty and variety. But what it thus lacks in the obvious or immediate
impression it creates, it makes up for in its depth and penetration.
For there are dimensions to music that our modern Western music tends to obscure, or at
any rate to deemphasize, but which in other musics come fully to the fore. I mean, in particular,
the cosmic, the psychic, and the ethical dimensions of music. These dimensions of music are not
entirely unknown to the modern Western consciousness, as witness in particular Schopenhauer
(one of the few modern philosophers to treat music with the philosophical seriousness it has been
given in other places and times): "music expresses in a perfectly universal language, in a
homogeneous material, mere tones, and with the greatest determinateness and truth, the inner
nature, the in-itself of the world" (The World as Will and Idea, book 3, sect. 52).
But what Schopenhauer tried to recapture for music among us has been a commonplace
in other traditions of music. One recalls the old idea, going back to the Pythagoreans, of the
harmony of the spheres, that as the spheres revolved according to perfect ratios, so they sounded
in perfect intervals, and thus gave voice to the inner order of the cosmos. One recalls how
Orpheus is said to have tamed animals and made the trees and rocks move at the sound of his
singing. But such ideas are found in the Bible and among the Indians of the subcontinent and
among the Chinese too and probably at an earlier date. For instance, in China "the four seasons
were separated from one another, not only by definite amounts of time but also by musical
intervals: there was a fifth from autumn to spring, a fourth back to winter and a fifth to summer."
And again: "in music man took the heavy responsibility for either strengthening or imperiling the
equilibrium of the world. And his responsibility included the world's truest images, the dynasty
and the country; the welfare of the empire depended on the correctness of pitches and scales. As
a consequence, the readjustment of music was one of the new emperor's first acts; for would the
preceding dynasty have been eliminated unless its music was out of harmony with the universe?"
9
(Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, 109-112). Plato expressed the same idea
about the decline of Athens, that it was because of a failure to keep to the ancient music. In India
the different ragas, or melodic patterns and modes, worked on and belonged to certain hours of
the day and seasons of the year, and the story is told of a certain musician who sang one of the
night ragas at midday: "the powers of his music were such that it instantly became night, and the
darkness extended in a circle round the palace as far as the sound of his voice could be heard"
(Ibid., 174-175).
Similar stories expressing similar sentiments could be multiplied from all parts of the
globe. But the message in each case is the same: music has great cosmic, psychic, ethical, and
political power, and one can effect changes, for good or ill, in each of these spheres by the music
one plays.
We are inclined to dismiss such ideas as mere myth and legend, symptomatic of the
ignorance of primitive and superstitious ages. But perhaps it is we who are ignorant and primitive
or at least superficial. For it is hard to believe that ideas which are so universal and run so deep in
human life could be wholly lacking in truth. Probably both sides are right, because they are
speaking of different sorts of music. Modern Western music, because of its many impurities and
multiple additions of sound on sound, probably is deficient in cosmic, psychic, and ethical
power, while other musics, because they are purer and less overlaid, are as rich in such power as
they are rich in their inner musical life. In such music "each note is an entity in itself, calculated
to evoke in the mind of the hearer a special reaction...The impression made by one note is
followed by another, still another. There is thus a compelling, inevitable suggestion of a mood,
an atmosphere..." (Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, 108-109).
Doubtless, the subtleties of non-modern and non-Western music need to be discovered by
much learning and meditation and are not open to immediate view. Doubtless, their power too is
equally hard to appreciate. Indeed, even proponents of these musics themselves openly declared
that not everyone could appreciate every music, but that some music was fit only for the wise and
the virtuous, while other music was fit only for the vulgar, the crude, and the uneducated (Curt
Sachs, Ibid, 105-106; Aristotle Politics 5(8).7). We are dealing here with things that defy and
even affront standard Western prejudices. But that is no reason to ignore or dismiss them. Indeed,
if we are to be true to the promise of post modernism, we ought to go out of our way to try to
understand and even embrace them. For suppose such music does have the powers attributed to
it. Suppose indeed that all music, including Western music, has some such power, more or less.
Suppose, in other words, that the lives we lead, the cosmos we live in, are affected, for better or
worse, by the kind of music we enjoy and give ourselves to. Could we then remain so complacent
10
in our preference for Western music--I mean we as a culture (for individuals present many
differences)?
Our life, after all, whether public or individual, is what we make it; or our life is a product
of our art. Life is, in this sense, artificial life. But art does not operate in a vacuum; it uses what it
finds ready to hand from which it draws out the latent possibilities. Music is an art of life applied
to sounds and is likely to reflect what we are doing with the rest of our life generally and to
express the same attitudes and embody the same expectations and drives. A certain kind of
fevered pursuit of pleasures, of fairly obvious and common pleasures, seems to characterize the
life we make for ourselves within Western culture (and this pursuit of pleasure is not unrelated to
our Enlightenment love of science, for science provides us with the tools for satisfying many
obvious and common pleasures, nor unrelated to our Modernist historicism, for historicism, by
declaring all thought save our own outmoded, shields us from taking criticism seriously and
salves our consciences in doing so to boot). Western music, as described above, has much of the
same character, for the love of many and varied sounds all present together is a love of obvious
and common pleasures. The subtler and purer pleasures of non-Western musics--the pleasures, if
I may so speak, of virginity over indulgence--require time and meditation to appreciate. Of
course there is a place for common and obvious pleasures as for subtle and virginal ones. But we
in the West would seem to have an abundance of the first and a dearth of the second. The artifice
in our lives is rather limited and one-sided (and this, surely, is no mean factor behind the
problems, moral, political, and ecological, that we have been creating for ourselves). We would
do well to sit at the feet of other cultures for a while and learn some of their artifice to balance
our own. That, at any rate, is what I see as one of the promises of post modernism for Western
culture: that we do not presume on our own art to make our lives, as has been all too
characteristic of modernism, but that we call that art, along with its philosophical
presuppositions, genuinely into question, and open ourselves up to other art and other artificial
life--even, good heavens, the artificial life of virgins (in the many senses of that much maligned
word).
Peter L.P. Simpson
New York.