The Sound of Philosophy
musical ideas of Milton Babbitt and John Cage.
Milton Babbitt and John Cage, two of the most notorious postwar American
composers, are often thought to be antipodal figures. Babbitt is straight,
Jewish, politically conservative, and southern, a skeptical rationalist
who talks like a mathematician on speed. Cagewho died in 1992was
gay, goyish, politically left, and Californian, a genial fruitcake whose
enthusiasms ran toward astrology, mushrooms, Zen, and anarchist politics.
Babbitts music is fastidiously organized, each of his notes carefully
placed within multiple nested rhythmic and melodic patterns. Cages
music, by contrast, is scrupulously disorganized, composed randomlyfor
instance by tossing coins or tracing astronomical maps onto music paper.
Not surprisingly, Babbitt is an academic, and has many students who
teach at music departments throughout the country. Cage, who never graduated
from college, was an auto-didact (more or less), and has had at least
as much influence on visual arts and popular music as on the world of
academic musical composition.
Yet behind these differences there lurks a fascinating, and more fundamental
similarity. Leave aside the fact that even expert listeners sometimes
have difficulty distinguishing Babbitts sophisticated musical
puzzles from Cages mystical soundscapes. The important point is
that Babbitt and Cage straddle the line between philosophy and art.
Beginning with specific philosophical ideas, each developed an utterly
original style of musical composition that reflects those ideas almost
perfectlyand in the process thwarts almost every conventional
musical value. This poses a real problem for music criticism. For beyond
talking about how this music sounds, it is natural to want to talk about
why it sounds the way that it does. (And, indeed, about what
role ideas should play in our appreciation of music.) This means that
the critic of Babbitt and Cages music needs to be a critic of
their philosophieswhich is to say, a philosopher himself.
In fact, if Babbitt and Cage
are to be believed, it is almost beside the point to talk about whether
their music sounds good or sounds bad. For both composers
would admit that their music does not "sound good" in the
ordinary sense: instead, they would challenge that notion, and replace
it with highly philosophical views that are meant to undermine our ordinary
is to deny the importance of taste: first, by questioning whether lay
listeners have the cognitive capacities to render aesthetically relevant
opinions about his music; and, second, by intimating that some expert
value-judgments may themselves be insignificant. Babbitt famously drew
an analogy between music and mathematics. The non-mathematical layman
who attends a mathematics lecture on "Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms"
may find that he does not enjoy the experience:
Under duress, our layman discloses precise reasons for his failure
to enjoy himself; he found the hall chilly, the lecturers voice
unpleasant, and he was suffering the digestive aftermath of a poor
dinner. His interlocutor understandably disqualifies these reasons
as irrelevant to the content and value of the lecture, and the development
of mathematics is undisturbed.
The development of mathematics
is left undisturbed for two reasons: one, because the layperson who
does not understand the content of the lecture is simply not in a position
to render competent judgments about it; and two (though this consequence
is implied, and not explicitly drawn by Babbitt), because judgments
of personal taste are much less important in mathematics than in music.2
(Mathematics, for all its beauty, is about discovering facts and establishing
truths; while music, despite its complexity, is about moving people
through the medium of sound.) Consistent with this vision of musical
works as sonic theorems, Babbitt eliminated from his compositions almost
every trace of musical expression. Instead, the main features of his
compositionsthe pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and even the large-scale
formal propertiesare part of a complex rational structure. His
music is like a giant cryptogram, dense with interrelationships but
devoid of emotional significance.
Cages approach to the problem of taste was very different. Rather
than denying the relevance of our aesthetic preferences, he acknowledged
them, but encouraged us to see his music as part of an important spiritual
struggle to overcome value judgments in general:
The value judgment when it is made doesnt exist outside the
mind but exists within the mind that makes it. When it says this is
good and that is not good, its a decision to eliminate from
experience certain things. [D. T. Suzuki, from whom Cage took courses
at Columbia University in the early 1950s] said Zen wants us to diminish
that kind of activity of the ego and to increase the activity that
accepts the rest of creation. And rather than taking the path that
is prescribed in the formal practice of Zen Buddhism itself, namely,
sitting cross-legged and breathing and such things, I decided that
my proper discipline was the one to which I was already committed,
namely, the making of music. And that I would do it with a means that
was as strict as sitting cross-legged, namely, the use of chance operations,
and the shifting of my responsibility from the making of choices to
that of asking questions.
In other words: to say that Cages randomly composed music "sounds
bad" is to engage in the un-Zen practice of making value judgments.
Instead, we are supposed to use Cages random music as an opportunity
to get beyond our likes and dislikes. By abandoning traditional
composition, using random procedures rather than making intentional
choices, Cage virtually ensured that we would approach his music as
part of his quasi-Buddhist project of overcoming our values. Like Babbitt,
he cemented the link between his music and his philosophy by eliminating
from his music those qualities that have been the traditional focus
of listeners attention.
Many critics have for this reason concluded that Babbitt and Cage cannot
be understood as composers in the traditional sense. Instead, it is
argued, they belong to a different artistic species entirelymusical
philosophers, perhaps, or composer- theorists, and their work is to
be evaluated in correspondingly more intellectualized terms. (Indeed,
the editors of the New York Times at one point insisted that
a critic describe Cage as a "music philosopher" rather than
as a composer.) This is sensible, but it raises some interesting problems.
For while Cage and Babbitts music is intimately linked to the
ideas that produced it, there areas we shall seereasons
to be deeply suspicious of those ideas. This means that if we are to
appreciate Babbitt and Cage as "musical philosophers," it
will be despite major reservations about whether their ideas are in
fact correct. And this, in turn, should lead us to ask about the relationship
between our appreciation of a philosophical idea and its truth. Thus
we may find that in thinking about Babbitt and Cage, we recapitulate
in the aesthetic realm an important debate about the nature and purpose
of philosophy itself.
ALMOST ALL OF BABBITTS music is composed out of arrangements
("rows") of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Each
note is allowed to appear once and only once, as in Example
1[requires Adobe Acrobat Reader] (and taken from Arnold Schoenbergs
Fourth String Quartet, op. 37).
Following Schoenbergs practice,
Babbitts rows may appear in four different forms: (1) transposed:
for example, the same interval pattern as Example 1one
semitone down, then four semitones downbut starting on any of
the twelve-notessay, F
sharp instead of D; (2)
backwards (i.e. B, F
etc., though again the pattern may start on any note, such as A or C
sharp); (3) "inverted"
or upside down (so that D, instead of moving down one semitone
to C sharp
and then down 4 semitones to A would move up by a semitone
to E flat,
and then up by four semitones to G); and (4) upside-down and
backwards (or "retrograde-inverted"), combining (2) and (3).
These rows are then assembled, somewhat like a musical jigsaw puzzle,
into complicated vertical structures that themselves contain exactly
one note of every different kind.
2 [requires Adobe Acrobat Reader], a simplified piece of pseudo-Babbitt
of my own construction. Observe that each of the four instruments plays
twelve notes, exactly one note of every kind. The second violin plays
an inverted version of the first violins melody: where the first
violin moves down by one semitone, and then up by five semitones, the
second violin moves up one, and then down by five (and so on). The viola
plays the same interval pattern as the second violin, but backwards
(from back to front: up one, down five, etc.) and starting on a different
note. The cello plays the same interval pattern as the first violin,
but again backwards and beginning on a different note. Observe also,
that each of the first three measures (and measures 4-5, considered
as a pair) contains exactly one note of every kind, though these notes
are drawn from the four independent rows that each individual instrument
plays. Thus each instrument makes a series of 12-note statements containing
exactly one pitch of every kind. Meanwhile, the music can be broken
into discrete segments of time, in which the total number of pitches
played by all the instruments contains exactly one pitch of every kind.
The resulting music might be compared to a tapestry, where each note
has its place in two different musical "threads"the
"horizontal" instrumental lines (corresponding rows themselves),
and the "vertical" collection of notes found in each measure
(called "aggregates" by Babbitt).
Remarkably, Babbitt has applied
the same structure to other musical domains, such as rhythm and dynamics.
Consider, for example, all the notes marked "pp" (pianissimo)
in Example 2. These fall on (starting from 0) the 11th, 10th, 3rd,
7th, 6th, and 2nd sixteenth notes of their respective measures. (The
example contains a fifth staff of numbered sixteenth notes which should
make this clear.) If we were to number the 12 pitches of the chromatic
scale, starting with C = 0, and proceeding through C
sharp = 1, D = 2, and so
on, we would find that the first violin plays a series of pitches that
begins 11 (B), 10 (B
flat), 3 (E
flat), 7 (G), 6 (F
sharp), and 2 (D)corresponding
exactly to the sequence of sixteenth notes on which the "pp"
notes fall. (This correspondence continues throughout the example: the
series of "p" (piano) notes correspond to the second
violins pitches, the "f" (forte) notes to the
violas, and the "ff" (fortissimo) notes to the
If you are confused by the complexity of this system, dont be:
the important point is that Babbitt uses the most important musical
parameterspitch, rhythm, dynamics, and (in many pieces) timbreto
delineate a complex abstract system by which pitch and rhythmic relationships
mirror each other. The traditional concerns of music compositionexpressiveness,
melodic continuity, and dramaare addressed only after these prior
constraints have been satisfied.
The value of these procedures stands or falls on two questions: Are
the resulting structures musically intelligiblein other words,
do they lead to perceptible features of the music that can be understood
through listening? (I am assuming here that musical structure must be
perceptible in order to be relevant; inaudible features of the notation,
such as the color of the paper on which the music is written, are of
minimal relevance to the aesthetic quality of the work.) And more importantly:
do these structures lead to music that people find pleasurable or otherwise
compelling? Babbitts answer to the first question is that his
structures can be heard, but only by people who are specially trained
and have exceptional musical gifts. This is, in his view, why most people
do not like his music:
Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he
is unable to understand, music or anything else? It is only the translation
of this boredom and puzzlement into resentment and denunciation that
seems to me indefensible. After all, the public does have its own
music, its ubiquitous music: music to eat by, to read by, to dance
by, and to be impressed by. Why refuse to recognize the possibility
that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by
other forms of activity? The time has passed when the normally well-educated
man without special preparation could understand the most advanced
work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced
music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality
of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more
intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical
education usually has been even less extensive than his background
in other fields.
But the credibility of this assertion depends on there actually being
some substantial group of specialist musicians who are able to follow
aurally the mechanics of Babbitts music. (Just as there is
a substantial body of specialists who are able to understand lectures
on Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms.) If mathematics could only be
understood when it was written down, then both laymen and professional
mathematicians would find mathematics lectures to be boring. Similarly,
if Babbitts musical structures are only intelligible on paper,
then both specialists and laypersons should be equally baffled by the
experience of listening to Babbitts music. Conversely,
if experts really do enjoy Babbitts music on Babbitts terms,
then this must be because it is possible to perceive the structures
that are at the heart of his compositional method.
On this score, history has not
been kind to Babbitt. The study of music perception, in its infancy
when Babbitt first developed his techniques, has flourished in recent
decades. Numerous experiments have shed light on the perceptibility
of the operations that are at the heart of Babbitts syntax.4
And almost all of the available evidence suggests that Babbitts
music is well beyond the capacity of even the most expert listeners.
There are many reasons for this: some of the relationships in Babbitts
scores cannot be translated into sounds; some of the relationships present
in the sound cannot be apprehended as such. But the main problem is
the sheer, overwhelming blizzard of information present in Babbitts
scores. Following the relationships in a Babbitt composition might be
compared to attempting to count the cards in three simultaneous games
of bridge, all played in less than thirty seconds. Babbitts music
is poetry written in a language that no human can understand. It is
invisible architecture. The relationships are out there, in the objective
world, but we cannot apprehend them.
OF COURSE THERE IS A SECOND,
and deeper question that we have so far avoided. Even if the
mechanics of Babbitts music might turn out to be perceptible by
some extremely small minority of listeners, or even if we accept the
dubious proposition that musical structures need not be perceptible
to be relevant, one might still ask, what does comprehensibility have
to do with aesthetic appreciation? There are many things in the world
that we understand without enjoyingin my case, country music and
golf. Understanding may be a necessary condition for appreciating music,
but it is not in any way sufficient.5
Babbitts answer to this question takes us to the heart of his
philosophy. Starting in the 1950s, he launched a series of polemical
attacks on the language of music criticism; the aim was to defuse criticisms
of modern music by severely limiting the range of acceptable critical
discourse. Influenced by the logical positivist philosopherswho
asserted that the statements of traditional metaphysics were not so
much false as meaninglessBabbitt suggested that the statements
we typically use to express our enjoyment of music are actually empty:
musical discourse is a never-never land of semantic confusion,
the last resting place of all those verbal and formal fallacies, those
hoary dualisms that have been banished from rational discourse.
if the concertgoer is at all versed in the ways of musical
lifesmanship, he ... will offer reasons for his "I didnt
like it,"in the form of assertions that the work in question
is "inexpressive," "undramatic," "lacking
in poetry," etc., etc., tapping that store of vacuous
[my italic] equivalents hallowed by time for: "I dont like
it and will not or cannot say why."
there is but one kind of language, one kind of method for
the verbal formulation of "concepts" and the verbal analysis
of such formulations: "scientific" language and "scientific"
statements about music must conform to those verbal and methodological
requirements which attend the possibility of meaningful discourse
in any domain.
The suggestion seems to be that statements of valuesuch as "This
piece is more beautiful than that one"are devoid of rational
meaning. (The positivists compared them to the grunts and growls of
non-rational animals. Instead of simply saying "yuck," we
dress up our reaction in fancy aesthetic jargon, but the jargon adds
nothing of substance to the simple "yuck.") By contrast, statements
about musical structure, for example statements about the invisible
architecture of Babbitts compositions, are objective, verifiable,
and hence significant. If we add to this the idea that talk about music
should aspire to the meaningfulness of science (and Babbitt refers to
"that easily disposable, if persistent, dichotomy of arts
and sciences") we obtain the conclusion that unexplained
statements about musical likes and dislikes are simply not important.
This view is completely untenable, even by the standards of the positivist
philosophers who inspired Babbitt. For it was no part of positivism
to transform every aspect of human behavior into a species of science.
No: the positivists recognized (though in some cases grudgingly) that
there are areas of human activity in which scientific values simply
have no role. Ironically, Rudolf Carnap, who wanted to make philosophy
(but not poetry) scientific, once criticized Heidegger precisely
because he tried to express himself through philosophy rather than art.
(As Carnap asked: "When a metaphysician gives verbal expression
to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic system,
is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express
this attitude in an adequate medium?") Babbitt, by disavowing the
important distinction between art and science, ends up reducing logical
positivism to crass scientismindeed, to one of the more extreme
formulations of scientism that has ever been seriously proposed. Yet
this is the view that has motivated him for almost fifty years, and
we can hear its echoes in every note of his exquisitely complex, brilliantly
organized, and altogether inhuman compositions.
Cage is in some sense a less complicated figure than Babbitt, but this
is in large part because he is more successful. No difficult perceptual
issues dog his theory; no complex technical operations lie at the heart
of his musical syntax. Everything is quite charmingly on the surface.
Inspired by the Buddhist project of eliminating desires, Cage decided
to write music from which his own likes and dislikes had been excluded.
To that end, he generated his music with various impersonal mechanismssuch
as rolling dice, or tossing coins. The point of this endeavor was to
assist audience members in the task of getting beyond their own
tastes. As with Babbitt, Cages music almost transparently represents
the views that produced it, if only because there is little else there
that might distract you from those views. In the case of Cages
most famous piece, there is literally nothing else in it at all:
I think perhaps my own best piece, at least the one I like the most
is the silent piece [titled 4 33"]. It has three
movements and in all of the movements there are no sounds. I wanted
my work to be free of my own likes and dislikes, because I think music
should be free of the feelings and ideas of the composer. I have felt
and hoped to have led other people to feel that the sounds of their
environment constitute a music which is more interesting than the
music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall.
There are, it seems, two sides
to this project: one, the (Buddhist) endeavor of renouncing our likes
and dislikes; and the other, the (Emersonian, Transcendentalist) aim
of learning to love all of nature as if it were a beautifully constructed
work of art. Each is problematic in its own way. On the one hand, tastes
are a very natural part of the human organism, and the project of eliminating
them altogether may seem as unappealing as the project of removing ones
own fingers. Unless we adhere to Cages religious point of viewand
he was always a little vague on whether this was a requirement for enjoying
his musicit is unclear why we should want to get rid of them.
At the same time, our desires are not completely plastic: it may well
be impossible for human beings to come to feel, as Cage exhorted, that
"the sounds of their environment" are "more interesting
than the music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall."6
Or rather: it may be that the only way we can really get ourselves into
anything that resembles this state is by learning to deny, or harden
ourselves to, the real beauties of traditional, composed music. The
first step in loving everything equally is to stop loving the things
of which one is particularly fond. A central question in thinking about
Cages music is whether this first step is also the last.
Nevertheless, Cage was quite
shrewd to choose music as the medium for his quasi-Buddhist message.
Our sense of hearing is psychologically and neurophysiologically an
intermediate one: less directly connected to our emotions than smell
and taste, but more directly connected to them than sight. This means
that experimental musicians have less freedom than experimental painters
but more freedom than experimental cooks. Thus we can well imagine a
painter who worked more or less randomly splashing colors on a
canvas with little regard for how it all fits together. (It is even
possible to imagine that such paintings might come to be worth a lot
of money.) But it is difficult to conceive of a cook who proceeded in
this way. People are very picky about what they eat, and tolerate only
a few of the many possible tastes. Random sequences of musical notes
stand somewhere between these two extremes. We can certainly tolerate
random music, and some people have claimed to find genuine pleasure
in it. But the fact remains that most people consider random music to
be a taste, like clam chowder ice cream, that is not worth acquiring.7
The intermediate quality of musical perception makes it a very natural
arena in which to explore the Buddhist-Transcendentalist project of
overcoming taste. Imagine, by way of contrast, two hypothetical Cages:
one who worked in the medium of cooking and used randomly created food
to help us to try to overcome our own desires; and the second, a painterly
Cage, who randomly splashed paint on canvas with a similar end in mind.
Now Cage the chef would no doubt meet with failure, simply because the
prospect of eating random flavors is completely unappealingmost
of us would much rather engage in traditional Buddhist meditation then
expose ourselves to the prospect of noxious or galling food. But Cage
the painter would likely meet with the opposite sort of failure. For
canvasses with random paint splashes on them can actually turn out to
be reasonably appealing, or at least not unappealing, and it would be
too easy for us to appreciate them on a purely decorative level.
(Too easy, that is, for the paintings to carry the message that we should
try to overcome our own tastes.) Cage the composer managed to find a
medium in which we had some, but not too much, attachment to our tasteand
in this sense it is an ideal arena in which to explore Buddhist renunciation.
We can, then, listen to Cages music (unlike Babbitts) more
or less as he intended it. Listening to Cage, one can tryand one
does try, inevitablynot to dislike what one is listening
to. One can reflect, naturally enough, on the motives that cause the
music to be as it is, and about what it would be like if the ambient
sounds of urban life were just as beautiful as Brahms (it would be distracting,
actually). And one can think about Cage himself, our postwar Thoreau,
isolated in a tiny musical cabin of nondesire and coin-tossing. This
experience is not always pleasant, and it is not for every day, but
it can sometimes be quite powerful. Especially if some Brahms also appears
on the program.
SO HOW ARE WE TO EVALUATE these musical philosophers? Do we say that
Babbitts music is bad because his version of logical positivism
is unconvincing? Or that Cages music is good because Buddhism
is one of the worlds great religions? Should we focus on the remarkable
way both figures tried to translate abstract philosophical thought into
the language of musical tones? And, if so, should we judge that Cage
is a better composer because he made a better translation? Or should
we just forget about philosophy altogether, and simply focus on Babbitt
and Cages music in itself?
This last temptation is particularly strong in Babbitts case.
Many critics have tried to "save" Babbitts music from
his philosophy by arguing that while the theory itself may be dubious,
the music it produced stands on its own terms. (One can, of course,
make the same argument about Cage, and some critics, such as James Pritchett,
do, by arguing that Cage needs to be understood as a composer
rather than musical philosopher. But the pressure is less acute, since
Cages philosophy is less badly in need of repair.) Here I think
there is the risk of falling into a genuine philosophical confusion.
The problem is that there are two seemingly reasonable principles which
suggest that we may not be able to evaluate Babbitt or Cage except by
way of their theory.
1. In the case of simple sensuous
the object of our appreciation is limited by our discriminative capacities.
So, for example, if I claim to like Mozarts 40th Symphony, but
I am absolutely unable to distinguish it from any other Mozart symphony,
then I cannot be said to enjoy the 40th in particular. Instead,
what I enjoy is something like "Mozart symphonies in general,"
or "the Classical Style."
2. In evaluating the successfulness
of an artist, the features that are the cause of our enjoyment must
be non-accidentally related to the artists intentions. So, for
example, if a blind person were to claim to derive enormous pleasure
from running his or her fingers along the surface of the Mona Lisa,
or if some strange creature were to eat the painting and find it tasty,
these facts would not count to establish da Vincis skill as a
The difficulty is that these two principles are liable to work against
each other. In the case of Babbitt, for example, we know that listeners
are unable to discern the structural complexities that characterize
his music. Thus, though they may have pleasant experiences while listening
to Babbitts music, those experiences are probably caused by very
general rhythmic and textural features that Babbitts works share
with a broad class of other musics. (For instance: with hypothetical
versions of Babbitt pieces in which all the pitches have been replaced
with randomly chosen notes, close to but not exactly the same as the
original pitches.) In this sense, they cannot be said to enjoy Babbitts
music as opposed to pieces in this more general class. But these
general features of the work are arguably just accidental byproducts
of the structures that were the primary focus of Babbitts attention.
For it is not as if Babbitt developed his techniques to produce the
effects that they actually have; rather, he generated them in an attempt
to produce different effects altogether, effects that depended
on the appreciation of the musics complex syntactic structure.
(Much in the same way as the flavor of the Mona Lisa is only
accidentally related to the visual experiences that da Vinci intended
to evoke.) So while no argument can show that (some) people do not have
pleasant feelings while listening to Babbitts music, these sorts
of considerations can suggest that these feelings do not necessarily
bear on the question of whether Babbitt himself is a good composer.
Confronted with someone who criticizes da Vinci as a painter, it is
beside the point to respond by saying that the works are nice to nibble
At the same time, it is equally difficult to appreciate Babbitt and
Cage as philosophers. The problem, it seems, is that we cannot
disconnect Babbitt and Cages music from the ideas that produced
it; but at the same time (unless we follow Babbitts positivism
or Cages Buddhism) we cannot fully endorse the philosophical views
of the composers themselves. Thus we are left needing some explanation
of how it is that we can appreciate philosophically a set of
views that we do not ultimately believe to be correct. The answer to
this question is by no means obvious, and there are in fact many philosophers
whoseeing philosophy as part of sciencewould simply deny
that false beliefs are in any way interesting.
I disagree. While it is important
that a composers work be good to listen to, it is not always necessary
that a philosophers beliefs be correct. Quite the contrary: many
of the philosophers that our culture most admires, from Plato and Kant
to Nietzsche and John Rawls, have at least occasionally made questionable
assumptions and suspicious arguments. Philosophy is not science, and
we do not evaluate philosophers simply in terms of the truth of their
views. (Doing so would reduce the philosophical canon by a worrying
degree.) Instead, we value philosophers because they are interesting
thinkers: because they develop compelling visions of the world, or of
humanitys place in it, and because their arguments, though sometimes
wrong, are tempting, or instructive, or otherwise rewarding to think
(Occasionally, of course, we like them because they are right. But even
here they tend to be more right about why their predecessors were wrong
than about how things actually are.) Babbitt and Cage fit neatly into
this tradition of compelling speculations: each propounded radical,
extreme theories about the world and musics place within it, and
each managed to live those ideas, changing the musical world
in the process. Furthermore, Babbitts and Cages views push
us to think very deeply about music (or more generally, art) and its
place in our society. Indeed, I would venture to guess that most contemporary
composers have thought seriously about Babbitt or Cage, and that many
of these have had their views about music changed in the process.
Why? Partly because each composer took such an extreme position, and
defended that view so determinedlyboth in theory, and in their
compositions. This represents a challenge to the rest of usnot
only to say where the two of them went wrong, but also to develop our
own ideas about music to the point where they can rival those of Babbitt
and Cage in their ability to compel conviction. (Babbitt and Cage were
above all seriousadmirably convinced of the fundamental
importance of music composition, and its place in the modern world.)
But partly, also, it is because there seems to be something inherently
fascinating about visionaries as such.
I think that there is nothing
wrong with this. Cage and Babbitt are exciting figures, precisely because
of the way their (otherwise somewhat boring) music reflects their (admittedly
somewhat outlandish) ideas. The two composers belong to a tradition
of exciting, extreme thinkersa tradition that includes serious
philosophers, utopian politicians, philosophical poets, and many other
speculators whose thoughts, though compelling, have not made their way
into the austere canon of recognized science. We should not be shy about
valuing this tradition: the reasonable and the proper can sometimes
be a bit disappointing, and it is often exciting to encounter figures
who have managed to elude these constraints. Visionaries are the outlaws
of the intellectual world, and when, as a freshman in college, I first
met Milton Babbitt, I was instantly captivatedby his charisma,
by the baroque intricacies of his musico-philosophical system, and by
the sheer exhilaration of finding someone who was more original (and
more different) than anyone I had ever met before.11
It may be that philosophy no longer has as much room for these kinds
of radical personalities: the progress of science, coupled with the
pressures of academicization, may be making philosophy less tolerant
of provocative speculation that it used to be. (Contemporary philosophers
do tend to spend more time discussing the radical thoughts of past thinkers
than developing new, provocative thoughts of their own.) And this in
turn may be driving philosophy closer to the sciences. If so, then it
is all the more reason to celebrate those people who, working in the
more tolerant realm of The Arts, are managing to engage in something
like the visionary philosophy of the past. Twenty-five hundred years
ago Diogenes lit his lantern at midday and walked through the marketplace
saying, "I seek an honest man." That was called philosophy
then. Today we would call it performance art.
Dmitri Tymoczko has
written for The Atlantic Monthly, Lingua Franca, and Transition.
His essay on tolerance
and religious diversity appeared in our December/January 1997-98
issue. His essay on Beethoven
and Kant appeared in our December/January 1999-2000 issue.
1 Of course, the critic can always ignore these philosophical views,
treating the music "as music." But since Babbitt and Cages
music is not meant to be music in the ordinary sense, this amounts to
applying a potentially inappropriate standard of evaluation: it is as
if the critic were to insist on treating a basketball game as a strange,
and inadequate form of ballet.
2 We do not usually say of a mathematics paper, the way we ordinarily
do say about a symphony, that it simply doesnt move us.
Instead, we tend to explain our judgments: to say why the papers
conclusions are not correct, or why they are not likely to be significant.
These explanations involve value judgments, of course, but of a very
different sort from those that are involved when someone says that she
prefers chocolate ice-cream to strawberry, or Rimsky-Korsakovs
Scheherezade to Francks D-minor symphony.
3 There are also "rhythmic aggregates" corresponding to the
"pitch aggregates": just as measure 1 contains one pitch of
every kind, so, too, do measures 1, 2, and the first beat of 3 contain
attacks on each of the 12 possible sixteenth notes in the measure. (In
measure one, there are attacks on the 2nd, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 11th sixteenth
notes; in measure two, there are attacks on the 1st, 4th, 6th, 7th,
and 10th sixteenth notes; and on the first beat of measure 3, there
are attacks on the 0th and 3rd sixteenth notes.) The rest of the excerpt
contains a second "rhythmic aggregate."
4 See, for example C. L. Krumhansl, G. J. Sandell, and D. C. Sergeant,
"The Perception of Tone Hierarchies and Mirror Forms in Twelve-tone
Serial Music," Music Perception 5 (1987): 31-78. Other useful
references can be found at http://dactyl.som.ohio-state.edu/Gibson/research.summary.html.
5 Interestingly, Schoenberg sometimes talked as if there was no difference
between understanding and appreciation. For instance, in talking about
dissonances he constantly emphasized the question of their comprehensibility
to the exclusion of issues involving enjoyment. See, for example,
"Composition with Twelve Tones (1)," in Style and Idea
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975 ).
6 Note the typically Cagean contradiction here: even though we are
supposed to abandon our "likes and dislikes" we are still
allowed to judge some works of art as being "more interesting"
than others. I dont know that Cage ever directly addressed this
inconsistency, but I suspect that he had in mind a distinction between
tastes, which are passionate and emotion-driven, and more dispassionate,
intellectual value-judgements (such as "interestingness").
7 Another important fact is that music is temporal. We look
at a painting for as long as we want, but we listen to a piece of music
for as long as it lasts. This is no doubt one reason why there is a
smaller audience for avant-garde cinema than for avant-garde painting.
8 As distinguished from more complex forms of contextually mediated
enjoyment. I may value my friends painting for reasons that have
nothing to do with how that painting looks, just as I may value a wedding
ring for reasons that are independent of my respect for the jewelers
craftsmanship. What I am considering here is a more restricted kind
of sensuous enjoyment that abstracts away from these sorts of historical/contextual
9 Note that this is a condition on the evaluation of artists, not about
the more general task of determining whether a given artwork is enjoyable
or not. This is of course a large and controversial issue. Unless we
take intentions into consideration, though, we are unable to account
for the fact that most people think that there is an important difference
between the artist who produces good art deliberately, and the
one who does so only accidentally.
10 Saying exactly what makes philosophy great is as difficult as specifying
what makes great literature (or, for that matter, what makes a mathematical
proof beautiful). It is clear that cogent rational arguments are important,
but there are other values at work as well.
11 Of course, not everyone feels this way. I would argue, however,
that our culture as a whole seems to. If we want to explain philosophy
as a tradition, or cultural practice, then we need to invoke the inherent
fascination that radical, visionary speculation seems to have.
Originally published in the October/
November 2000 issue of Boston Review