How Music Works

aesthetics

Some very positive reviews in The Economist, The Telegraph, the NYT, and The Independent. I’d imagine that readers attracted to Byrne’s book might also appreciate Oliver Sacks’ book Musicopilia.

 Unless new profit-sharing models evolve, musicians can no longer make a living from recording. Something will have to give, he says: “I smell another revolution in the works.”

The flip side of the record—and the good news—is that digital technology has also freed music-making from its corporate straitjacket and returned it to the place it started: in bedrooms, on laptops, a free-for-all of experimentation in which authorship is less important than collaboration and performance.

His observations on the nature of pattern and repetition, and on people’s neurological response to aesthetic experience, apply to all creative fields. “How Music Works” should be required reading for all writers and publishers: this song is coming soon to an e-reader near you.

Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!: A Sonic Adventure

sound

Another lovely collaboration between Wynton and Paul. Read their chat about working together. As usual, Paul talks about the process.

The Victim of Thought: The Idealist Inheritance

oakeshott

The penultimate chapter to be trailed – David Boucher on Oakeshott’s idealism.

Oakeshott’s indebtedness to philosophical idealism has been touched upon by many commentators as incidental to their main concerns, and his relative silence after the Second World War compared with his defiant proclamations of loyalty before it gave rise to suspicions that he was no longer as committed to its tenets as he once was, or that if there were remnants of idealism to be detected in the later work they were almost unrecognizable. This is not a view unanimously shared. There may be many reasons why Oakeshott ceased to wear his idealist credentials on his sleeve, but the fact that he had abandoned them was not one. He seems to have had a certain sensitivity to the criticisms of him as a philosopher of the day before yesterday. On the presentation of his Festschrift, Oakeshott made light of the honor, expressing surprise given that he had read somewhere: “Oakeshott, yes, an interesting survival; out of date before he was born; you can’t take him seriously. Not the sort of thing to make one exactly glow with pride. True enough, though; and I thought that perhaps I really would be able to get over this vast expanse of sand intact leaving a foot-print” (BLPES 1/3, various speeches). After the Second World War the sorts of metaphysical and epistemological considerations that permeated Experience and its Modes were touched upon but not systematically addressed in his later writings. Some modifications in the vocabulary were necessary in order to accommodate developments in his thought and incorporate them into the larger point of view, but they were added in essays which deliberately left “much to the reader, often saying too little for fear of saying too much” (OHC vii). Commentators such as W. H. Greenleaf, Wendell John Coats, Jr. and Efraim Podoksik acknowledge the changes in vocabulary and nuance but insist upon a basic consistency in his philosophy. Podoksik, for instance, contends that Oakeshott’s philosophical framework and the nature of his engagements were “consistent throughout his writings, although he modified his views on some points.”

Herbert Simon in Red

Herbert Simon

Many of you who follow this website will know of my enthusiasm for Herbert Simon. Here is an unusual portrait of Simon painted by the very distinguished Richard Rappaport (wikipedia entry) that I chanced upon and for good measure, I include a link to Simon’s last interview.

Philosophy and its Moods: Oakeshott on the Practice of Philosophy

oakeshott

Extract from Ken McIntyre’s chapter:

Among non-academic intellectuals and political theorists, Michael Oakeshott is known primarily as a conservative political thinker who produced a series of essays in the 1950s which were critical of “rationalist” or “ideological” politics. Others who have read more deeply in Oakeshott’s corpus are aware of his contributions to the philosophy of history and of his considerable achievement as a philosopher of practical and political life. Although there has been a significant increase in the attention paid to Oakeshott’s contributions to the theoretical understanding of history and politics, Oakeshott’s understanding of the character of philosophical activity has remained relatively neglected. This neglect is unfortunate because Oakeshott was one of the few political philosophers of the 20th century who also provided a more-or-less systematic theoretical context to his political philosophy. Thus, an examination of his understanding of the character and activity of philosophizing is a necessary part of any treatment of his more generally known ideas about the logic of historical explanation, the nature of poetic experience, or the character of practical life and the place of politics within that life.

In this essay, I examine Oakeshott’s understanding of the character of philosophical activity. Oakeshott’s thoughts on the subject are scattered throughout his essays, but his most extensive and concentrated reflections on philosophy are found in three works: Experience and Its Modes, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” and the first essay of On Human Conduct. His treatment of the activity of philosophizing in these three different pieces manifests a remarkable degree of continuity in terms of the kinds of questions and concerns which animate his inquiry and in terms of the proper disposition of the philosopher. Oakeshott understands philosophical activity as informed by an unconditional commitment to the interrogation of the conditions of understanding, and thus maintains that the disposition of the philosopher is fundamentally skeptical toward the world as it normally appears. Philosophy is understood as a kind of mood which draws us away from the various practices in which we normally engage in order to question the logic of those practices. Thus, there is a distinction between the activity of philosophizing, which is expressive of a disposition toward appearances, and the particular conclusions of a philosopher, which, as such, represent a further invitation to reflect on their specific conditions and on conditionality itself. In terms of his own philosophical conclusions, Oakeshott’s work manifests a consistent commitment to conceiving various practices or modes of understanding, like history, science, and art, as quasi-sufficient, autonomous, and independent worlds logically unrelated to each other, and in viewing philosophy as a non-normative, second-order, explanatory activity in relation to the modes. However, his essays also reveal significant terminological changes related to Oakeshott’s various attempts to stress different aspects of the character of modality, and they strongly suggest substantial equivocation on Oakeshott’s part concerning the criterion of a successful or coherent set of philosophical conclusions.

Slime Mould, Extended Mind and Stigmergy

stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Those familiar with my work will know that I’ve been banging on about the idea that while mind is not extended in the sense that Adams and Aizawa rightly I think take issue with, i.e. specifying the “mark of the cognitive”, it is extended in the stigmergic sense – and this seems to me what’s being proposed here even though they do not invoke the term stigmergy.

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

Spatial memory enhances an organism’s navigational ability. Memory typically resides within the brain, but what if an organism has no brain? We show that the brainless slime mold Physarum polycephalum constructs a form of spatial memory by avoiding areas it has previously explored. This mechanism allows the slime mold to solve the U-shaped trap problem—a classic test of autonomous navigational ability commonly used in robotics—requiring the slime mold to reach a chemoattractive goal behind a U-shaped barrier. Drawn into the trap, the organism must rely on other methods than gradient-following to escape and reach the goal. Our data show that spatial memory enhances the organism’s ability to navigate in complex environments. We provide a unique demonstration of a spatial memory system in a nonneuronal organism, supporting the theory that an externalized spatial memory may be the functional precursor to the internal memory of higher organisms.

Satchmo At the Waldorf

jazz

Here is a play based upon Terry Teachout’s excellent biography. Also check out this time period in Ricky Riccardi’s equally excellent and touching description in his biography. Update: another review from Slant.

po’boy

food

All about the po’boy

My po’boy is a hot mess. The spicy smoked sausage, slicked by its own fireball-orange grease, is determined to slide out the sides of the Leidenheimer loaf. The links are further lubricated by two types of mustard (yellow and Creole) and a slather of chili that ramps up the ooze factor. By the time I’m done with my sandwich at Domilise’s Po-Boy & Bar, I’ve gone through at least a dozen napkins.

But I savor my “dressed” flavor bomb because I know that with each indelicate chomp I’m biting into history – not just the history of this beloved po’boy shop in Uptown, but the very culinary history of New Orleans.

Eric Hobsbawm

Marx

The name Hobsbawm was virtually institutionalized at Birkbeck. While there I felt obliged to read a bit of Hobsbawm at a time when I was also reading G. E. M. de Ste. Croix – the latter so much deeper and more compelling than the former. I took inspiration from De Ste. Croix’s paper “Why were the Early Christians Persecuted” published in Past and Present, a paper that after all these years still stands as one of my favourite pieces of critical scholarship, “Croicks” later taking on the task of assimilating Jerry Cohen’s very difficult Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence‎. So why did Hobsbawm make little or no impression on me? Struck by the rather bland but certainly prominent obituary of Hobsbawm in The Economist I give this brief assessment.

I had three problems with Hobsbawm’s Marxism. The first is the he never was able, or saw the need, to explain why he became a Marxist in the first place. He came from a Marxist background and assimilated the creed. There was nothing else to think, given his German background: that’s what comes across from his autobiographies. When you think of the reflectiveness of English communists, the contrast is poignant. He wasn’t a Marxist because of the crisis of capitalism, which was the (reasonable) ground of much English Marxism. He was just a Marxist and could give no more account of it than a child brought up by Jesuits can explain why he’s a Catholic.

The second is that he doesn’t do micro-history. If you read EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, here you see a historian working from a messy mass of primary material and illuminating it with a marxist analysis. He’s not putting up a prefabricated house; he’s, in Oakeshott’s metaphor, building a dry wall brick by brick. Hobsbawm by contrast takes big events & trends and sets them out in a stereotyped Marxist narrative. If you read Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916/17) you already know what Hobsbawm is going to say, what line he is going to take, about Western imperialism.

Thirdly, as for the claim that he separated his ideological commitments from his historical scholarship, which he kept scrupulously pure and objective, this is just a lie. Read all you want by Hobsbawm on postwar East European and Russian history, and where are the gulags? Where is the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe? The man closed his eyes to every inconvenient truth and finished up – oh exquisite irony – lauded for his scholarship. Which, by the way, is wholly secondary. I don’t think he knew what an archive was.

A final consideration is that he showed no interest in the more sophisticated brands of Marxism that were produced by a string of writers from Gramsci to Althusser. He never moved on from Ernst Thälmann!  . . .

What I didn’t know about EH was his interest in jazz:

Alongside history and politics, Hobsbawm was an important figure in the New Orleans Revival (the introduction of jazz to Britain in the Forties and Fifties). He started writing jazz criticism in 1947 and had a weekly column as jazz critic of The New Statesman from 1955 to 1965 under the name Francis Newton.

Even here his purpose was often polemical: Jazz he believed to be “a musical manifestation of populism — where jazz plays its most important part and has its real life in the common tradition of culture.” He wrote a number of books on the subject including The Jazz Scene (1959) and Uncommon People, Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (1998).

Perhaps EH on jazz will be more interesting and palatable. I’ll give it a go sometime.