Random musings

Why is there something rather than nothing?

2010-05-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

This meta-philosophical question has been pondered by many since apparently Leibniz asked the question. Tomes have been written about it without, of course, arriving at any satisfactory answer. I suggest you use your favorite search engine to get an idea.

In my opinion most thinkers do not understand the concept of nothing, which I will hereinafter designate as Nothing. In all modesty, I believe my short essay about it is one of the clearest treatment of this topic.
It can be found at : http://www.paulhoffman.com/Philosophy/Nothing.htm

The essay concludes that we can not say anything positive about Nothing. We can only talk about what it is not. I suggest that if (please note the "if") Nothing existed, which of course is already a gigantic contradiction, nothing (lower case "n") could be said about it. No adjective, no adverb, nothing. Nothing admits no description. I want to make sure that you do not mistake this Nothing for Void, Emptiness, Space, Vacuum, null-set;
this Nothing admits no God outside--that is cheating. I mean truly Nothing, the only Nothing that makes sense to ask about.

I think Saussure would have to admit that Nothing has no referent. Perform an experiment. Try to imagine this Nothing. Take your time. I suggest you cannot. The best you can do is to fall back on thinking what it is not.

So: WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT NOTHING, THEY DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE (REALLY) TALKING ABOUT.

When they ask the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing", nothing in it is meaningless. They may as well ask:

Why is there something rather than blabalabalala? Of course, everyone would realize that "blabalabalala" is meaningless, or nonsense. Well, so is Nothing.
The only legitimate question to ask is:

"Why is there something ?"

The answer is obvious.

The Universe has no other choice.

Medal Count

2010-02-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

I am sorry—it’s easier to fulminate against something than write an accolade. Who would read this blog (not that anyone does) if I wrote about my love for Sara Teasdale’s poetry? So I write about the ubiquitous Olympic Medal Count, running along every Bottom Line.

Well, OK, if we need jingoistic self-assurance, and who doesn’t, at least we should weight the medals. Gold should certainly be worth more than bronze. We could arrive at a more realistic sum total: US maybe 872, South Korea 423. In Winter Olympics. So there!

And what the jubilation: "it has been the most successful Winter Olympics the US has ever had". Well, of course, we have garnered more medals than, say 30 years ago when half of the events had not even been invented. Nordic Combined Large Hill has been added for those who did not do well on the Normal Hill. Can Small Hill be far behind? Team Relay Was added in 1988. Too bad Team Relay Large Hill has not been invented, but it is only a matter of time. The US is bound to have more medals. More Jubilation.

And as long as we count, shouldn’t we take into account the size of the country, population, the amount of snow, amount of money athletes are subsidized with, and maybe a few other relevant statistics? Corrected for those ("normalized" the correct term) we might arrive at a more realistic "medal count".

While I am at it, I would like mention that as a former swimmer who swam the same events as Michael Phelps did at the Olympics, I am in awe of his performance there. Yet, I need to point out that when I swam, (around 1956) the total number of swimming events in the Olympics were fewer than Phelps’ total of eight. In 1956, for instance, only seven events were held; had Phelps won them all he could only have had seven Gold medals. Not eight.

The number of events escalate. It is only a matter of time until there will be Olympic Swimming 25 meter events, and who knows, 75, and more. Why ever not? And a new Phelps will have nine Golds in one Olympics. Or even more.

The Concept of Proportional Olympic Golds.

2010-02-23T05:05:00.000-08:00

Inequality in Olympic Medals: Not all "Golds" should be considered equal.

I am writing this during the 2010 Winter Olympics. There are universal sports, skiing or Figure Skating, and "specialty sports", like bobsled. Far more countries enter athletes in the former than in the latter.

I propose that the medals, especially the bandied-around "Golds" should be weighted according to the number of entrants in the particular event. I leave it to the statisticians to figure out the details.

Clearly, the winner of the Olympic Figure Skating should somehow have a heavier Gold than that of a member of 4-men bobsled, for instance. The latter could still get a Gold medal, but maybe with a magnifying glass attached to it. It would also save money to the Olympic Committee.

Let me generalize now about all Olympics. It is not fair that some events are so popular that only two persons from a country can enter, as in swimming; and some so scarcely populated that as many as three or even four per country can enter, as in short track skating, where seemingly half of South Korea is in every event. Golds in these events should be negatively weighted.

What about team events? Somehow an individual event should count more than a team event. So a Gold in a 4-person relay should be appropriately weighed by at least a factor of maybe ¼. I am conflicted about other types of team sports, like soccer or water polo, in which team play is also important. I cannot in good conscience suggest a factor of 1/11 for the members of the winning soccer team, but a full Gold is equally unreasonably.

My contempt is for other types of "team events", like team gymnastics, in which six members simply perform. No team work, no passing the baton, just do what they have done in the individual events. In women’s, China, US, and Romania are guaranteed to get a medal just by showing up. Full Gold? No way! They should be awarded 1/6th of a Gold, maybe. The same about such "meaningful" events as Team Ski Jumping. Worth, at best 1/4th of a Gold.

But may I ask the Olympic Committee, if it is so committed to increasing the number of events and medals, why not Team Figure Skating? Just add the scores of the three entrants form each country, and you have just manufactured another unneeded event. We could have Men’s Team Figure Skating, Women’s Team Figure Skating (all worth 1/3rd of a medal) and maybe even Mixed Team Events, adding the men’s and women’s scores. We would have an event worth 1/6th of a medal. Why ever not? As good, probably as the synchronized swimming medals.

I admit, the details have not been worked out perfectly. But you get the idea.

Once more with Hi-Tech swimsuits.

2009-08-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of ink spilled on this issue of late—most missing the point.

The way I see it, there are two more or less separate problems within the present controversy: the swimsuit, and what to do with the records.

The first one is relatively easy. The original and still the only purpose of swimsuit was to cover the swimmers’ private parts with as little drag as possible. So, as I will indicate, FINA must reset the clock.

The second one is trickier. If FINA were to do nothing, the use of improved swimsuits would keep on improving and so would records. Even FINA is unwilling to do that. Hooray! No matter what FINA does, any measure will of necessity doom future swimmers’ ability to set new world records. That is a given. So having mortgaged the future, FINA may as well do the only honorable thing, set the rules back all the way to the Mark Spitz era, records be damned. They all are already.

Maybe future generation of statisticians can figure out when the first non-Mark-Spitz-like swim gear appeared and can apply an asterisk to the thousands of records set since.

But that should come later.

The purpose of the sport is to see who can swim fastest, unaided by fancy suits. That can be assured with a ruling today. Why wait one day?

An immodest proposal

2009-07-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

Even the casual observer of the world of swimming must not be unaware of the efflorescence of World Records in the last several years. No no, not because of the big bad Steroid for once, it is rather due to the new fandangled swimsuit. Just about every new record has been set with the swimmer draped head to toe in the latest model.

If one plots the improvement of records over time a relatively smooth curve results, until we reach this “Age of the Swimsuit”. Clearly the swimmers have not improved that much; often they are the same ones as before, except now they are aided by the newest technological marvel.

Call me naïve, but I thought that the idea was, as much as possible, to compare the swimmers’ ability, not those of the manufacturers.
In the past, the purpose of swimsuits was to cover the private parts of the swimmers, not to aid them in their efforts.

In the spirit of the ancient Greek Olympics, I propose that the athletes, at least the swimmers, compete naked. The Ancient Greeks did so. This is not as outlandish as it sounds—some athletes have already exhibited their bodies thus outside the pool (like Amanda Beard, for instance), and I doubt the rest would be very much be bothered by the extra promotion. Nor do I suggest this from prurience. If needed, the water could be made opaque, or alternately the spectators could be made to wear opaque eyeglasses. But at least we could see (sorry) who is the best swimmer shorn of the swimsuits, and if the manufacturers would like to, they could have a race for their suits alone. I wouldn’t be surprised if some could set new records.

Über-Twitter

2009-06-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, as my ex-colleague, N. M. (not his real name) has pointed out, twitter can be used for far more than merely following celebrities from their bathrooms to their cars to their studio. Or wherever. In contrast to these trivial twitters, N. M. can create surprisingly erudite virtual groups which revel in their ability to express recursive witticisms or other philoso-mathematical comments, or reduce the essence of their ideas to 140 characters—which is already more than I can do with this essay only 1/3rd complete.

Of course, Mankind has always reveled in its ability to excel in limited forms:
Haiku and Sonnet are but two examples. Shakespeare excelled in the latter, for instance. But surely, he would have been severely limited had he not been able to write his magnificent plays, from Hamlet to Lear, from Richard III to Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. And we would have been robbed needlessly of these.

Similarly, Goethe excelled in lyric poems, but would have been stymied had he been forced to limit Faust to Twitter-length.

I shudder to think of what would have happened to Mankind’s greatest heritages: Odyssey and Iliad, not to mention Mahabharata. Entire nations gained their identities for thousands of years from these epic poems. Please note the word “epic”.

In music too, lovely melodies were written in about twitter length, but where would Beethoven’s mighty symphonies have been had they been compressed to twitter? Not mention Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion (which, of course, I have just mentioned).

Twitter is neat, twitter is witty, twitter apparently can create kindred groups. But could these groups not be created otherwise? I challenge a twitter group to respond to this essay twitterwise. But even if they could, they should also explain why.

Of course, people climb Mt. Everest “because it’s there”.

Why ever(est) not?

Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian; or maybe even in Russian or Eskimo

2009-06-18T19:12:00.001-07:00

Ever since I learnt the name Shakespeare back in Hungary, I have heard from my erudite Hungarian friends that Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian translation than in the original.

At first blush the argument sounds impressive. On second, on a deeper analysis, I am not even sure what it means. A translator has translated “better” than Shakespeare’s original? He or she has divined what the Bard had meant to say and said it better in Hungarian? (or Russian or in Eskimo?). That is hubris or Chutzpah beyond belief. Surely, even the translator cannot believe what his acolytes, or supporters attribute to his translations.

But let us for a moment assume that the above is the case: Reading side by side a few selected excerpts, in English and Hungarian, and the Hungarian “sounds better”. How many of those who claim superiority to the translated version speak good enough English to pass judgement. In my experience very few. But even if the Hungarian version “sounds better”, does that mean that that is how Shakespeare wanted it to sound? Surely, he was acknowledged as the greatest practicer of the English language. Who is to say that he did not want it to sound the way he wrote it?

But let us go one step further, let us assume that the poor Bard had a bad day, did not turn out the best Sonnet, one or two out of several hundred. He needed the help of the great Hungarian translators who “improved” on his English (according to the disciples). What does this prove? That the translator is a better poet? Or that if he has several days to perfect a single sentence in Hungarian, that it now is superior? After all, Shakespeare did not spend weeks on a single line of a Sonnet, and wrote his plays extremely fast. Is it surprising that a Petofi or an Arany, or Arpad Toth (great Hungarian poet/translators) can make some of his plays in 19th century Hungarian “sound better” than Shakespeare’s 17th century English. Though, I repeat, of my acquaintances who repeat the mantra that Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian, not one has read the originals in their entirety.

This belief will persists, because it supports some psychology of the believer that I do not understand.

About Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise

2008-01-25T07:12:00.001-08:00

It is an absolutely superb book: had I bought it outright instead of borrowing it from the library, I would have doubled the book’s length by my marginalia. But what struck me most in the last few chapters is the earnest desire of Leftist-leaning composers to write for the “common man”. Oh the idiocy of that wish! Oh the naiveté of that remark! As if the “common man”, the man of the street would have appreciated the liberating effect of atonal serial writing versus that of the “wrong” Beethoven’s. Most radical composers kept writing and performing for the very audience they presumably hated, and then complained that they were not understood or appreciated. Small wonder!
ps. Of course, I had to buy the book. It is one one must own.

Villains get off easy

2007-05-30T07:42:00.001-07:00

It is more and more difficult to find important topics on which someone smarter than I has not written. I myself have already written about the deplorably condition of only having three old, near-sighted, arithmetically-challenged referees doing the scoring in world championship boxing. Nobody has called me yet to design a better system. Oh well.

But I don't think anybody has written about a very unsatisfying ending of most Western and Science Fiction movies in which there is a villain who for 0.9995% of the action has perpetrated the most cruel and vile torture on innocent men, women, children, and other people. Most authors spend endless scenes showing the most barbaric tortures employed by these sub-human species. Yet, when in the last few milliseconds the hero finally arrives to save the one or two barely surviving specimen, the least one would hope that the villain now would be served similar punishment. In the early Middle Ages a poet named Dante in a rather longish poem modestly titled "Divine Comedy" has already dealt with the idea of just punishment. I cannot do justice to his tome--read the Cliff notes if you must--but in essence he wrote, "let the punishment fit the crime". You would think that Hollywood would put together a dream team of writers to think out heretofore unimagined tortures for the well-deserving villain. Maybe Fox channel could have an "American Villain" contest in which 70 million text messages could be sent with the best tortures to the winning villain. Surely, if we can send a man to the moon, we can think of some juicy tortures that would make the villain wish he had been never born. Or maybe even the script writers had never been born. Or the Universe had never been started. While he suffered eternal damnation the least he could do is SUFFER. But what does our hero do? Simply put a bullet in the villain's head and the movie fades out.
Is this justice?
Just
Paul

God, mathematics, and randomness

2006-05-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

Several writers have dwelled on the “unreasonable suitability” of mathematics to describe the workings of the Universe. Others have speculated on the ontological status of mathematics: is it “manmade”, or was “created” by God and has an independent “Platonic” existence. These topics have been covered by numerous writers in great detail so I don’t want to repeat them here.

For me the question is not so much whether mathematics was created by God but whether God (and infinite being) can solve all the heretofore unsolved problems and those that have been proven to be unsolvable.

Let me start with the simplest illustration. The value of π can not be expressed by a finite number of digits. Does God know all of them? If so, how does He do it? Even if God is infinite and eternal, π too is infinite.

A second, related question concerns the Goldbach Conjecture, that every even number can be expressed as a sum of two primes. So far this has not been proven and it may be that true that it is unprovable. Assuming that there is no proof, would God know whether the conjecture is true or false. To do so, He would have to go through an infinity of numbers which must be hard even for an infinite being.

Another problem that hounds me is randomness. I do not understand the master of randomness, Gregory Chaitin. But it is clear to me that even though the digits of π are random, they are not completely random because another being on another planet can arrive at the same number at, say, the 200th digit. Chaitin has come up with his famous Ω which sounds as random as they come. Except that apparently he and others have come up with even “higher order” of randomness. Can God predict the digits that these randomness formulas define? The way I see it, if the definition is in a closed form, then an infinite being should be able to see whether it is or not. But I don’t know enough about this topic.

But, quantum events are random. While we can predict average properties and events, we can never predict individual quantum events. Can God do it? If He can then these events are not truly random, and Einstein would be correct in that there are “hidden variables”, something the Bell inequality has disproved seemingly conclusively. If He cannot, then He must have difficulty knowing everything about the Universe: how could He if He cannot even predict the decay of an atom? But things look bad for Him even if somehow He could predict or observe: no sooner would He observe an individual subatomic orthogonal property (position and momentum or time and energy) the corresponding property would be unknowable even by Him. Or else Quantum Theory is incorrect or at least incomplete.

Modern opera staging

2006-03-30T13:18:00.000-08:00

In the last several decades the role and importance of opera directors and stage directors have increased dramatically. Operas are increasingly advertised and described as "new staging" by the famed film director, sociology professor, pornographic expert, and so on (you name your favorite). It seems that singers are almost secondary except for a few super-superstars like Gheorgiu, Alagna, Netrebko, and Villazon.

Increasingly the staging and the direction has little to do with the plotline, or fidelity to the text. The singer may sing about his beloved swan, but more likely that instead a motor boat will arrive, preferably with at least half-nude women, the beloved trope by directors who are out of ideas. If the libretto speaks of a sword it is just as likely that a pistol (if not a machine gun) will appear.

Most of these directorial "improvements" go against the expressed wishes of the composer or the librettist. My modest proposal is that as long as the director plays fast and lose with the story, why not re-write the text to fit the action since most of the audience doesn't speak Italian, Russian, French, let alone Hungarian. Once the audience and the all-too-eager-to-approve critics get used to the idea, the manager may as well hire a composer to re-compose the music to fit the ideas of the stage director. After all, if Gotterdammerung is staged to take place in Harlem, the music should also be appropriate: a bit of Duke Ellington, maybe Ragtime, or maybe a modern rap artist.
If the same opera is moved to Hungary, an appropriate czardas would take the place of a minuet.

Come to think there is no need to keep the singers, they could be replaced with today's pop, rap, country or other artist (if that is the right word).
I am sure Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner would applaud.

What music, stupid?

2005-11-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

Editor TAS,

At the risk of sounding like a Mediaeval philosopher, I would like to clarify the discussion occasioned by Robert Harley’s article “The Audiophile iPod” [Issue 155]. Or maybe I should, Socrates-like, ask “which music, stupid?”. Of course I realize that discussing essences, which is what this letter is doing, starts one down a slippery slope. Still, I believe that even though both bicycles and airplanes are vehicles, most people can tell the difference between them. It is to them that I offer this letter.

Let us for the moment skip the question of Platonic essences and not ponder what, say, Brahms’s 1st Symphony sounded like in Brahms’ head. For our purposes let us assume that the music is the way the Berlin Philharmonic plays it under the baton of one of our best conductors. When we reproduce it via the world’s best sound system using SACD (you put it together), we obtain a reasonable facsimile of the music, but not quite the music. But for our discussion let’s call that the music. Let us now imagine that we omit every second byte from the CD (or compress it in another way—the method doesn’t matter). It will, of course, still sound like Brahms 1st, but someone with your Harry Pearson’s acute hearing would notice that it lacks some overtones, some spatial clues, some tonal clarity, some ambiance, some “continuousness”. (Surely, if he can tell the difference between different optical cleaners and is even reputedly familiar with live music, he can notice these shortcomings). The general public may barely notice that anything is amiss. Let is now compress CD even more and listen to it via a portable radio. Will we still be listening to the Brahms 1st ? I don’t think so; we will be listening to a Brahms 1st, but not the Brahms 1st. Is this still music? Of course, it is. Can one enjoy it? Maybe so. But note that the word, “music” has undergone a subtle change. I do not want to debate the merits of iPod and its accoutrements except to point out that those who claim that they are listening to the music have made a clever switch from what in this letter I call the music. Of course, if they like, they can listen to it in Airports, gyms, on way to work.

Although I know that no analogy is perfect, allow me to give one. I am looking at a wonderful colored picture of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. If anyone asked me what I am doing, I would say: “I am looking at the Last Judgment “. But I am not, I am looking at a picture of the Last Judgment. Thus with compressed music.

I cannot speak for Brahms, but I suspect that if he were listening to compressed music via the best of iPod I rather think he would say, “Very interesting. It has the outlines of my 1st “. And if he were to use Stairmaster, I suspect he might prefer silence. Or maybe stop exercising.

Judging Boxing

2005-07-20T12:12:00.000-07:00

A note to ESPN

Gentlemen,
Much ink is spilled and many SoundBits launched whenever there is a controversial decision in boxing, like in the recent Hopkins-Taylor bout (you can add your own favorites). The most obvious solution is never mentioned: increase the number of judges to eliminate conscious or unconscious bias. For a multi-million dollar bout I am sure the organizers can afford more than three. Even amateur boxing matches have five judges, and amateur diving competitions and gymnastic events even more. In diving, for instance, the highest and lowest score is automatically discarded. A similar method could be fashioned for boxing, especially if the judges entered their scores to a computer. Present judging is primordial. Often two of the judges come from different camps, assuming that they will be partial, so the remaining one judge is selected from a neutral area. Often two will split the score and the single neutral judge's score decides the outcome.

Ridiculous!

Employing a competent sports statistician to eliminate those judges whose standard deviation from the mean is over a certain value at least would ensure some competence. Hiring presumably objective European judges in US events would contribute greatly to the perceived fairness of scoring.
My suggestions are not necessarily the best; to obtain more professional opinion you should employ a good statistician or consult experts devising scoring methods in other sports. (Watch some International gymnastic event to see how competent scoring is ensured).
Cheating can never be totally eliminated, but even the above minimal suggestions would ensure far more accurate judging.

Global Brain by Howard Bloom

2005-06-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

The correspondence below about my comments of Howard Bloom's Global Brain is the genesis of my having started a blog.

Paul:

Anyone who can write such glorious opinions should definitely have a blog! How can you not share them with the world? Depriving all but the select few of us who correspond with you of some of the best entertainment in town! I am laughing so hard tears are streaming down my face!How did you know that I love four box charts – I have them for nearly everything – in fact one was intimately involved in one of my early meetings with Jean – but then that is another story – perhaps for another cup of coffee….
Jane

The Review

Jane:

Here is a framework for you, a matrix with 4 members" Conscious and Competent (and their opposite). You can have four combinations: Conscious-Competent, Conscious-Incompetent, Unconscious-Competent, and Unconscious-Incompetent. Howard Bloom is Conscious-Incompetent, in other words an well-read-opinionated-supercrank, the worst of its kind. Frankly, talking about his book is a waste of ink. After twohundredwhoknowshowmany pages (which I raced through to stop the agony) I have no idea where his famed Global Brain or Global Network comes from or what it is. His breathless error-filled, simplified, poorly-written chapters, like Athens vs. Sparta, etc., support not a wit his thesis. Is it that we are linked with bacteria and honey badgers into a planetary web (check out the first inane paragraph on page 207). So what? Tell me what you have learnt from him that you can use. What happened to memes?, Do you now understand how other people or mitochondria think and receive your message. Can you now talk to the blue algae, like Dr. Doolittle? Can you send messages to your friend using your pet cow's, Abullard's mooings? Conjure up Pythagoras for an intergalactic travel, along with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the usual suspects?As you gather, reading The Global Brain, was extremely exasperating. I used up my allotted expletive, "Idiot", on the margin; I was forced to use "Idiot squared and cubed", borrowing infinities not dreamt of even by Cantor. By the way, I am certain Bloom will end up in an asylum, where he will consider himself diversity generator, talking to the viruses, quarks and leptons, hoping for another Big Bang so he could socialize with the protons. Nuff said. He heaps an awful lot of facts from the Big Bang to our time and beyond to arrive at his thesis (whatever it is), and I am not exactly persuaded by the facts that protons are social and bacteria communicate that there is a global network now. He believes his own metaphors. He plays fast and loose with facts, picks what he needs, ignores counter opinions, and if he brings them up, they appear as caricatures. Can't separate facts, hypotheses, verified, unverified, unverifiable, whatever. He clearly misunderstands genetics, let alone his bete noir, the selfish gene. Nowhere does he give a shred information on the mechanism for global linking. As for group selection, I am firmly against it because I can find no mechanism for it; Bloom's smarter colleague, D.S. Wilson uses Bloom's derided method of game theory and genetics to derive altruism from group selection, and he maybe right. So what, that is an intramural skirmish among scientists.
A framework that may be helpful to you guys is his five essential elements for the “collective learning machine”, even though even here I have to say that the best part is the fancy nomenclature. Maybe he should be a consultant. Any job openings with your company? How about it? If you are still around.

1. “Conformity enforcers stamp enough cookie-cutter similarities into the members of a group to give it an identity…”
2. “Diversity generators spawn variety. Each individual represents a hypothesis in the communal mind…”
3. “Inner-judges are biological built-ins which continually take our measure, rewarding us when our contribution seems to be of value and punishing us when our guesswork proves unwelcome or way off the mark…”
4. “Resource shifters shunt riches, admiration, and influence to learning-machine members who cruise through challenges and give folks what they want. Meanwhile, resource shifters cast individuals who can’t get a handle on what’s going on into some equivalent of pennilessness and unpopularity…”
5. “Intergroup tournaments…force each collective intelligence, each group brain, to churn out innovations for the fun of winning or for sheer survival’s sake.” Whatever...

But even here I can't resist pointing out that whenever in any system there is similarity, it is of course due to his Conformity enforcers; if there is a change, the Diversity generators are responsible, when there is a competition for anything he drags in Intergroup tournaments. It's like tarot cards. Or worse. I can come up with a framework:1. Strong beats weak 2. Slow outlasts fast, 3. Needy gets supplied first (or last), 4. Grasshopper syndrome (save now spend later). 5. If you don't use it (right away) you lose it. I can go through the history of the Universe selecting events that can be demonstrated using the above. Or using the "rule of three" which is no rule whatsoever: Driving Force, Resisting Force, and Resolution. Come to think about it, a murky philosopher, Hegel (now there is a man who would love Bloom and maybe vice versa) has already come up with something equally unverifiable, with which he held Europe in awe for a century: Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis. Or here is another or (you see what happens when I get started!): 1. Attraction wins, 2. Repulsion wins, 3. Revolving things. I bet I could make it works. If things move, Attr, beats Rep., if they decline, Rep. wins over Attr, and so on.I have read many so called systems theorizers: In history the most famous historiographers are Spangler (absolutely superb), and Toynbee (almost as good), and of course Carl Marx (I can tell you guys a few things about communism!). Of course, recently Fukuyama (The End of History) and Huntington (The Clash of Civilization). By far the best system builder is a (transpersonal) philosopher named Ken Wilber. In fact, in my opinion he is the best philosopher of the last 30 years. He is also a Buddhist or Eastern monk, but no one is perfect. I have read everything he has written, which is a lot, and some of it is not easy. He is crystal clear in his writings, but he has a lot to say. His Magnum Opus is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality but that takes commitment (worth it). An interesting starter is Theory of Everything.If I don't stop I will be longer-winded than Howard Bloom.

Paul

Spiritual science in Ken Wilber

2005-06-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

Ken Wilber is one of, if nor the, most thoughtful, articulate philosopher/visionary I have read. There is so very much I like and admire in him that it seems churlish to write down some of my objections. Still, I must, because I believe the issue is a pivotal one.

I am responding (belatedly, because I have been thinking about this for quite some time) to Wilber's preface to the third edition of his Eye to Eye in which (as in his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul) he repeats his usual spirited defense of transpersonal consciousness, arguing that the most important questions about Reality, mind/body, one/many can not be solved by reason, the middle of the three modes of consciousness, mind, matter, and spirit. They can only be grasped, if that is the word, via meditative intuition. The answers are intuited but cannot be articulated. When they are, they lead to paradoxes, like Reality is not one, not many, neither not one not many, and so on.

How does he know? Where is this written? He, of course, is philosophically driven to this position, having elevated mystical, mandalic consciousness to the pinnacle of awareness, and so has the perennial philosophic tradition which he so often cites. But that doesn't make it so.

There are several questions. Why are the most important truths only available to mystical contemplation? Why is it so that after they are made available through meditative techniques they cannot (must not?) be articulated to reason? And why is it automatic that the Kosmos, Reality, the Absolute must result in a paradox. After all, wouldn't it be just as likely that once the results are apprehended, they could be articulated? And that the results would not be paradoxical.

I suspect that he and the tradition he is espousing have vested interest in elevating mystical, spiritual, meditative mode of knowledge, whose edge can only be demonstrated if Reality (always capitalized; never defined) is indeed non-rational. It is not enough that it should not be revealed rationally, it must not be grasped rationally either. But Reality (which by the way cannot be grasped even by enlightened ones like Wilber) doesn’t have to be the way Wilber wishes it to be: it could be for instance such that there is only one substance, or Spirit is only transcendental, for instance. I suspect that Wilber and his fellow transpersonalists (and certainly Hegel and Plotinus who were not meditators) derived their position first philosophically, and then tried to perpetrate it via teaching and practices. The Absolute, the Spirit, Void, was too big for them to grasp via intellect, so had to come up with paradoxical terms to validate their gut-worldview. This has to have been the case with Hegel who was a philosopher. And probably with Plotinus.

The next point has to do with Wilber's elevation of the mystical practice to science. Of all transcendentalists he knows science. I do take his meaning and does an honorable job. A creative job even. Injunction, yes. But verification by the Sangha? No, absolutely no! On one hand he points out that practitioners verify the findings, but he also says that answers which don't accord with the views of the Sangha are culled out. Well, consensus is pretty easy this way. Einstein could never have come up or out with his theory is such a system, because his views would have contradicted by the prevailing view. A poor Zen adept who arrives at a different Reality gets punched; of course, he is going to agree to the consensus. Furthermore, the meditators are heavily bombarded by sacred texts whose validity they are supposed to experience. Of course, they will do so. I suggest the following truly independent test: take 100 intelligent ego-staged persons and have them meditate for 3 years. OK, they can be given injunction on how to concentrate on breath, candle, and mantra, whatever. Check them 3 years later and collect their thoughts. If they reproduce Hegel, Aurobindo, Nagarjuna, if they even say that the Absolute is neti neti, or “one taste”, Wilber's point is proven. Without such a confirmation, it is questionable. His statement that different traditions have come up with similar deep structure is only partly proof. (Different traditions have also thought the earth was flat). But most Eastern traditions have direct lineage to a single common philosophy even if independent Western traditions, admittedly don't. But even he has to shoehorn Plotinus, Eckhart, and Hegel to totally conform to the perennial philosophy. Besides, as I have pointed out, these thinkers have not arrived at their view via the meditative technique advocated by Wilber as the way to grasping Reality. As an aside, his selective quotes form the New Testament and Paul are really poor and totally taken out of context.

But let us now grant all that Wilber is saying. A novice takes the injunction, goes through the practice, and experiences Reality, can understand that Brahman is all, and all is Brahman, Nirvana is Samsara and vice versa, and that he is one with God and he is God, and there is no seer and seen, they are the same. What would this mean? To give an odious but apt analogy, assume we give the following injunction to a group of participants: drink 2 quarts of alcohol. Later collect the experience. The participants all see pink elephants. Does this mean that there are pink elephants? Of course not, this merely means that when human beings drink alcohol, they experience pink elephants. Their experience is reproducible, verifiable, and is real. But pink elephants are not. Similarly, most hash users have similar experience; the world has opened up, they can see and understand everything, they are omnipotent. But these are merely experiences.

In other words, experience and a level of consciousness is not the same as truth about Reality. The experience that one is God, and consciousness that all is one does not make it so. The same way as one can not arrive at ontological facts by rational means, one cannot arrive at ontological facts by spiritual means, however attractive that would be to Wilber and his followers. One cannot become one with God by thinking or meditating his way into it, one can only have the experience of being so. Maybe that is all there is, like beauty and truth, and all we need to know. It is noble, beautiful, elevating, but ain't necessarily so. To belabor this point, assume there is a Satanic cult. Through its rituals all the members think they are the Devil. (A bit like the Gaunillo's response to Anselm). I don't think they are the Devil. I do not even think there is one, though an objective review of Human History so far would go much farther in supporting that hypothesis than its opposite, that is a God, let alone a Spirit who somehow got unconscious and is working its way out of it through us.

On Codes and The Rule of Four

2005-05-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

General comments on “substitution” codes.

This is the most favorite type of code; The Rule of Four, and many others, rely on. It consists of a text which is a “dummy text”, containing the real, secret text which can be found when the code is applied to the dummy text. For instance, the simplest code is to read every third letter, or substitute a different letter for each one in the text. This is easier said than done. Let’s try:

Secret Text (ST):

Paul Hoffman is a very critical person.

Let’s “encode it” by substituting the next letter for each of the ST. Of course, in a real code we would not use capital letters or punctuations, because they are a dead giveaway. We obtain:

rbtm ipggnbo jt b wfsz dsjujdbm rfstpo.

Of course, this makes no sense. But anyone solving the code would easily realize that it is a code, not a text (let’s call it the dummy text, DT, masquerading as a real text, ST).

I challenge anyone to create a simple substitution code such that it codes the ST into a meaningful sentence (the DT). Try it. Not easy though possible. But imagine if the ST were an entire page, let alone a chapter, as is in The Rule of Four. I do not think it is possible, and I have never seen it done. I challenge the authors to produce the DT from which they keep producing the ST in their book with the greatest of ease. For that, I would pay 10 times the price of the book, and maybe even an English translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Or try a simpler one, assume my first paragraph is the secret message (ST). Develop a code, any code that would translate the first paragraph into a dummy text (DT) such that it too is belivable and makes sense.

Specific criticism of The Rule of Four.

There is nothing in the 15th century text, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (HP) that indicates that it contains anything secret, let alone an important one, on which the entire The Rule of Four is based on. There is no reason why Tom’s father (and his two friends, playing vital roles many years later in the book) should have spent so much of his time, neglecting his marriage, and ruining his son’s life. In the book there is constant reference to all the progress he, and his friend Richard Curry, had made prior to the events in The Rule of Four. Actually, he made no progress, except for luckily finding a piece of paper in an Italian library indicating the possible author of HP, which in my opinion is not an important point. The putative author is Francesco Colonna (turns out to be the correct one). If this finding is not fortuitous, look at the next: His (Tom’s father’s) friend, Richard then “finds” a diary by the 14th century “portmaster”, who becomes interested in Colonna’s goings on, had Colonna’s home invaded by a thief who knows what to look for, and copies the vital map. Amazing! Of course Colonna has the thief killed, but not the portmaster (that should have been so easy to do that it strains credulity that that didn’t happen), who continues to spy of Colonna, overhears vital discussions (Colonna, who takes more precautions than can be imagined everywhere else, somehow doesn’t notice this), and writes it down in his diary. Why? Of course, without the note and the diary there would not be a book, but I could think of many more credible backgrounds.

OK. The poor (and by now rich) authors need something to invent or else there is no book. So let’s go on. Paul, the other protagonist (the other two roommates really don’t matter in the book except for padding), has as a senior thesis nothing less than the complete “solving” of HP, something his thesis adviser, and presumably no one else had been able to do. This strains the remaining credibility. And the deadline is so important that he can only satisfy it by completing his thesis by solving the riddle of the book, something that isn’t even obvious is a riddle. I guess anything less would mean he flunks out.

Of course, the boys solve the riddle. HP, it turns out contains many of the hardest riddles 14th century experts, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, doctors, linguists, artists (did I leave anything out?) could devise. In Italian, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and so on. Needless to say, our intrepid undergrads can speak fluent Italian (can even read the text which modern-day experts have a hard time doing), are familiar with the myriad quaint references required to solve the riddles, needed to decode the dummy text into the secret text, and of course, not only know the texts but know how to apply them for the solution. Well, to me, it is reminiscent of how Sherlock Holmes “solves” his murders—he couldn’t. Just read the stories carefully and see how many he could solve.

The “solutions” look so easy. So let’s see how these work: suppose that I pose a riddle that is needed for the cipher: “It is fated by its creator”.
Suppose 500 years from now someone needs this for a cipher. It is by no means obvious that the reference is to Beethoven’s 5th symphony? And it is not at all obvious that Paul Hoffman is Hungarian, therefore the 5th should actually be “ötödik”, which means the same in Hungarian. I doubt that anyone 500 hence except the future authors of another The Rule of Four could solve it. And this is not even a good riddle because most people know Beethoven and the Fate reference. I could dig out a work only 10 mavens today have read and use it for setting the riddle. 500 years from now the person trying to solve it would have to know which arcane work I used, and how to use that book to solve the riddle. Once the author gives the solution, it sounds inevitable, even obvious. Backwards. But try going forward. It is hopeless. To repeat, writing a book in which the protagonists run across the word “ötödik” and try to solve what it means of course could have several charming chapters, after which they finally had a brainstorm realizing that Paul Hoffman was Hungarian, he was a classical music lover, he probably liked Beethoven and the 5th symphony could have been his favorite. The reader would believe that the protagonists were so smart. Would that they were!

Here is another, more typical example: Suppose the riddle is “the greatest music”. So the writer-geniuses 500 years hence will read about composers. They try Beethoven’s 9th symphony. By trying I mean do all kinds of ciphers, 9th, Beethoven, and so on. While it doesn’t work, it allows the authors to educate the future readers on Beethoven, symphony, and so on, thereby prompting the reviewers to unheard-of accolades about their erudition. The writer-geniuses next move on to Bach. The same erudition, but no dice. Not even Pachelbel!!! So somebody has the bright idea that the reference is not about music but art. (Why not furniture polishing?). That allows the writers to wax about Leonardo, Picasso, and so on. No luck. Next Philosophy. They now think it may be Pythagoras because of his music of the spheres (few people actually know what he meant by this) but the Greek sage isn’t the answer You cannot imagine the amount of work required to find out that no combination of Pythagoras, etc. “doesn’t work” so they can rule (no pun) him out. On to literature, allowing them to educate the unwashed about Homer, Dante. Then to the Romantics. By then they are so exhausted that they are figuratively dead, ready for a funeral. One of the budding authors says, “I want to be cremated”. Be put in an urn. AN URN, AN URN, scream both of them Of course!!!!!! Keats, Keats,

KeatsKeats,keatskeatskeats keatskeatskeats …

So they read the poem to each other so we (who didn’t have English Lit) would know what it’s about. Of course, of course, it is unheard music that is the greatest. Eureka! (This is a good spot to write a bit about Keats’s Romanticism). So they try everything until they figure out that the cipher is urn and of course it is “urn” in Greek. Easy, ain’t it?

Call me for a riddle of this kind and see if you can solve. But be prepared to speak Aramaic, know Mathematics and the Continuum Hypothesis, Ukiyo-e, and be familiar with ancient Urdu and Hungarian texts. Among others.

Well, of course if I am so smart… May I close with a joke about the proverbial little old lady who won a million dollars on the daily double. A reporter asked how she arrived at the winning combination. “In my dream the Virgin Mary appeared and showed me six lambs and seven geese”. I realized that six times seven is forty-one, so I bet on horses 4 and 1 and won. “But madam, six times seven is forty-two” cried the reporter. “If you are so smart, how come I won the million dollars”.

Quite.

On multiple performances of the same classical music works

2005-05-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

I have been listening to classical music for most of my life. I have also been reading music review magazines like Gramophone, Fanfare, and Americal Record Guide for the last 35 years.

As is well known, it is permissible for the same artists and conductors to record the same works several times in their career. I have often wondered whether over time performances have remained the same, changed in a predictable fashion, or differed from each other in a random fashion. I have especially been interested in the reviews about such occurences. The following few paragraphs have been buried in one of my earlier posts, but I thought I would make it more accessible here.

I have found that the reviewers had a field day comparing, say, early, middle, and late Karajan. Or shall I add intermediate Karajan (he had a habit or recording the same work quite a few times)? Or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Schubert songs, which he recorded many times? Or Brendel in Beethoven sonatas? The critic often finds great and significant differences in, say, the second movement subsidiary theme which is now significantly slower, or the transitional 3-bar motif, where in the remake the second clarinets are allowed to shine. Indeed they do. And the artist now, alleluia, takes the second movement exposition repeat (now there is a Ph.D. industry for you!). Of course, differences are inevitable. Somewhat more questionable whether we are any closer to the Platonic essence of the work.Given the ephemeral nature of our audial memory, a cynic might even wonder that if the above critic, unbeknownst to him, were to listen to the identical record twice on different days would he not find significant differences in the two performances, attributing them to significant new interpretive insights. It is similarly questionable whether the same artist can reproduce the same performance twice in a row. Different takes of Mengelberg, or Toscanini, indicate that this is by no means the case: the performances vary. I have a CD of Josef Hofmann's in which he plays the same Chopin Waltz four times in a row. Each is different.

A devilish thought occurs: we need not wait seven years for the artists to record the same piece, we can have them record the same piece five times in five days. Keep four in the can and issue them in periodic intervals. They will be different. This suggestion, of course, is in jest, but only partly, to allow me to state my possibly controversial thesis. It is that periodic remakes and pirated performances of an artist even over a span of several decades seldom show a recognizable arc toward a deeper understanding of a composition, or even a clear movement toward a different interpretive pole. The different performances are rather chance variations on an innate artistic mean, owing to the momentary circumstances of different venues, orchestras, personal and historical events, and aging. Even such a thoughtful conductor as Furtwängler, who spent a lifetime pursuing the Beethovenian truth, evinced no clear interpretive movement in his 10 or so published performances of Beethoven's Choral Symphony or in others. Similarly, Schnabel's three performances of the Emperor Concerto bear a constant creative imprint that is quite different from Arrau's several remakes. Heifetz' constancy of performances is well known, but if one looks at Szigeti's three Beethoven violin concerto performances, or his several available Bach unaccompanied pieces over decades, one cannot espy a clear movement, except the inevitably effects of Father Time. If this is how it goes with the Olympians, are today's mortals any different? More to the point: can the average, non-specialist record collector keep up? I fear not. Does he care? I think not.

Salome and The Absolute Sound

2005-05-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

Editor (The Absolute Sound):

“Veils are lifted…” wrote Paul Seydor, describing the $28,000 Boulder 2008 Isolated Phono Preamplifier on page 50 of Volume 151. It is indeed a rare issue in which at least one reviewer did not report that still another veil has been removed. How many veils are there? And what happens when all are removed? Even Salome only had seven. And we know what happened to her, as reported by the reviewer, Oscar Wilde.

This may throw further light on the topic: The following verse was inscribed on Aubrey Beardsley's proof of the unexpurgated version of the Salome illustration “Enter Herodias” (see picture below)

Because one figure was undressed
This little drawing was suppressed.
It was unkind—
But never mind—
Perhaps it was all for the best.

An alternate approach to "Naming"

2005-05-24T18:17:00.000-07:00

Dear friend RC,

The more I think about the problem of naming and Bertrand Russell’s solution via the theory of types (i.e. Scott is the author of Waverly ) the more I think it may be a philosophical overkill.

There is a human who lives next door. How do I know he is a human? It has the attributes of a human: he looks human, he walks on two feet, he drives a car, he talks to me, and so on. Could I call him a human if he had no attributes whatsoever? We know “things” by their attributes (extensions?). Look at your waste can and see if you can think of it without recognizing it attributes.

How do we know a bird is a bird? Plato worried about this. He would probably have said that if this particular bird resembles the "heavenly form" of a bird, it is a bird. I would merely simplify by saying that if it has wings, if it flies, it is likely to be a bird. Could he be an airplane? Without describing a thing with an infinite number of attributes there is always a possibility of something else having the same attributes. In my opinion, this even applies to Plato's treatment, but that's another story. So read on.

Let’s get back to my neighbor. Could he be non-human? Of course! He could be a machine with exactly the same attributes as my neighbor. In a possible universe (beloved by philosophers), it is quite possible that my neighbor is not human. But let’s forget this for the moment. How do I know he is my neighbor? He has lived next door for 10 years, he mows the lawn, he has cook-outs during holidays, his children mess up my flower garden, and so on. Could he fake being my neighbor? Of course. But what is the difference between my neighbor and a person who fakes being my neighbor? Ask Bertrand Russell. Suppose I ask my neighbor his name. His says, “my name is John Neighbor”. So I call him Neighbor. Whatever I said about him when he was simply my neighbor is still true when I refer to him with a capital “N”. Suppose I call him John. He is still the same person with all those attributes. Of course there are zillions of Johns who are not my neighbors just as there are zillions of humans who are not my neighbors. But that is true of every “thing”.

I tell you about John my neighbor. Do you need Russell to know who I mean? Of course not. When I tell you that John kept his loud party up all night do you know who I mean without Russell? Do you even need to have seen John to know who I mean? Of course not. Suppose my other neighbor is called Scott. When I tell you that in my absence Scott mowed my lawn you don’t have to be a philosopher to know who Scott is. Of course Scott is not Scott without attributes, and many of these can be the attributes of non-Scotts. But that is the predicament of Life. When I tell you my car broke down you have to think of some attributes or you cannot think of my car. So what is the difference between Scott who is my neighbor and who mowed my lawn and Sir Walter Scott who lived in the eighteen hundreds and wrote Ivanhoe? In my opinion very little. You know my neighbor from my description and we know Sir Walter from the testimony of others. If it turns out that I lied or Sir Walter’s contemporaries had the fact wrong, well that’s life.

But read on for a slightly more detailed treatment.

AN ALTERNATE APPROACH TO NAMING

For several decades of my life I thought that Sir Walter Scott was just Sir Walter Scott, without thinking anything else. Then I read Bertrand Russell, came across his theory of descriptions, and life was never the same. After that I was willing to substitute “the person who wrote the novel Ivanhoe “(I always preferred it to Waverly that Russell used in his examples—but this has nothing to with the topic. Sorry!) and figured that was the end of the story. That is until I read Kripke’s book, Name and Naming, and realized that things were even more complicated than that. Since then I have been trying to think of a simpler way to figure out who we mean when we use the name of somebody. The following is my attempt at an approach. It is based on two concepts, pointing and designation. You will have to read this short but by no means easy paper (so my friends tell me) to understand what these mean and follow my suggested approach. It would require a more monumental ego than mine to think that I can improve on these giants of philosophy, but I think I may be on to something.

In reading the approach please be indulgent about my nomenclature; I admit it is not elegant, and it may even be slightly confusing. Instead of hurling unheard invectives at my head, try to see the spirit behind the letters.

Undoubtedly, I got most of my ideas for the following from Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Familiarity with that work would help the reader with the following.

I think the entire problem of Names and Naming got off on the wrong foot. It got tangled up, unnecessarily with existence and non-existence, and with descriptions.

At least two specific, related problems emerged. We, who never met Scott can, according to Frege/Russell translate Scott to the description: "the author of Waverly", and this, supposedly unique, description "the author of Waverly" can now be used in place of Scott. The first, typically philosophical question is whether the two are identical. To start with, nothing is. This string of letters: "Scott" are not identical to this, second string of letters "Scott", because they have different temporal and special coordinates, are made up of not identical pieces of ink, whose molecules are not even identical to each other, nor its atoms, because they have different electrons, not one of which can be identical to another because of the Pauli exclusion principle, and could not even in theory be identical since, according to the Uncertainty Principle, their location and momentum could not be ascertained simultaneously; furthermore, it doesn't even make sense to ask the question of location and momentum even in principle. So strict identicity (or, identity) is an impossible requirement even in principle.

Even Aristotle's A is not not A can not be satisfied, since in nature there is no "not not A". Everything is "not A", including this "A" on this page. Instead, what may be discussed profitably is whether "the author of Waverly" may be used in place of Scott. Well, yes, and of course no. Because, so the argument goes, Scott may not have been the "real author", or there could be another novel Waverly, or he really wrote Maverly, which was renamed accidentally as Waverly. The number of counterfactual scenarios philosophers can dream up is truly amazing. All of this is summed up flippantly in the saying that the author of Hamlet was not Shakespeare but another person whose name was Shakespeare. And off we go into a Philosopher's La La Land of speculations, discussing the obvious, that in the counterfactual case Scott is not even synonymous with the "author of Waverly". Obviously, when the phrase "the author of Waverly" does not uniquely describe its author, it is not a unique descriptor. Of course, I am joking, "the author of Waverly" uniquely describes someone, except not necessarily Scott, but its real author, whoever he may be. Of course, that person is not "necessarily" the author, since one can imagine a "world" (a favorite expression of the School of Counterfactualists, including Kripke) in which Waverly was not written by that author either. In fact I can imagine a world in which Waverly must needs be described by one and only person, though I cannot imagine a world in which Waverly need not have been written or created by someone or something. And off we could go again....

The second related problem has to do with existence. Moses’s existence is one of Kripke’s favorite example. If Moses is known by his aggregate descriptions like "the person who brought down the tablets from Mt. Sinai", "the person that led the Jews out of Egypt", "the person who made the Red Sea part", etc., how many of these must be true for him to have existed? And since, to avoid Kripke's sin of circularity, none of these descriptions are necessarily unique to Moses, he might have existed even if he did not do any of these. What if these were done by someone else? Would he be called Moses? Did he necessarily exist? What if his name too was Moses? And another merry-go-round can start, replete with learned definitions. Kripke spends endless time on these, without resolving the issue.

Suffice it to say that I believe the above all miss the point. I would like to show an alternate approach, which avoids the above logical cul-de-sacs.

Of course, like so many amateur philosophers, I probably oversimplified the above situation, except to say that the situation is confusing. But a detailed discussion is unnecessary for the following.

Names started for reasons of simplicity. So let us see how the process may have started. For instance, a hypothetical couple on a remote island begetting and giving birth to a baby need only to refer to it as 'he' or "she', or, if they know the meaning of the terms, "son" or "daughter". If anyone were to ask them who they mean by these terms, they could simply point to the baby, saying "this thing here". For this approach, pointing is essential. And accepting pointing as a means of designation equally so. If pointing and designation are not accepted as a unique reference, my approach will not work, but then there is no hope for an intelligent treatment of this subject, because it means that nothing subsequent to this can work.

Now it may come to pass that the couple has another baby. If the first is a boy, the second a girl, they may just continue referring to them by those terms. The terms are not names, nor are they descriptions. To me, they are tags, simplifying the language from having to say "this thing here" etc., or saying "the thing that now moved from there to here", or "who is sleeping", etc. If both children are boys, the couple may well resort to the Chinese custom of calling them, NOT NAMING THEM #1 son and #2 son, etc. Now there is no problem with a stranger coming and referring to the #1 son as "the person you two call #1 son". Contrary to Frege and (pace) Russell, there is no description assigned to the term. I use the neutral word "term" since I cannot think of a better one: I hesitate to use the word "designation", because it comes with almost as much philosophical baggage as "name" or "referent". Let us stick with "term".

So a third person can ask the second about #1 son, and is told that he is referred to as "the person the original two call #1 son". So the third person can refer to the child as "the person to whom the second person refers as 'the person the original two call #1 son'". Please note the reference within the reference, marked by different quotation marks, or rather single and double quotation marks. I could go on ad infinitum. For instance, a person on another island can hear about #1 son. If asked who he means, he could recite the string: {the person I was told about by the fourth person, [who referred to it as (the person to whom the second person refers as {the person the original two call #1 son})]}, (I am not sure of the quotation marks anymore, so I use parentheses, hope I get the point across). The point is that by this method it is ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH A DIRECT LINK TO THE PERSON WITHOUT NAMING HIM, This link contains an initial pointing and only reference to persons who were told by other persons about other persons.

Of course our ancestors were practical people, not given to playing infinity games, so they attached a name to #1 son, probably something like Tall, Red, Short, etc, not with the aim of describing #1 son but to have a simple tag. From here on the link still operates 'the person to whom his parents refer as Tall' can be iterated endlessly, like I showed above with #1 son. If Tall did something, we can still go on with the chain: Short said that Red saw Tall do something. The point is that each statement can be verified, and the process proceeds one step at a time. Hence only direct observations and pointing are involved.

Before I go on, let me shorten the above procedure by abbreviating the long string of “person “n” said that person (n-1) said that person (n-2) said that person (n-3) said that…the first person said
as the “string” of Ps(n)=(P(n)<>Waverly “. Instead, the construction would require to say [Ps(n) Scott], meaning “the person who heard that the other person heard that his brother saw that the last person in the chain saw Scott. In other words, [Ps(n) Scott] means Scott definitely and rigidly. Or if Scott has the Fingerprint no. 2,3,5,9,0…., than Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0….is Scott. There is no descriptive entity called "the author of Waverly “ We could, of course, construct a chain (see below) that starts with a person who saw Scott writing Waverly in which case Scott would rigidly be the author of Waverly .

Instead of the ontological problem concerning the status of “the author of Waverly” there would merely be a simple question of whether the information of all P's and ours is correct. If it turns out that P1 saw Scott (alias Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0…) write a manuscript titled Waverly, and P2 heard him open the publisher's door, and P3 saw the publisher pay him, and P4 printed the book, and P5 wrote about it in a newspaper which was read by P6, etc, etc, .... then we have reason to say Scott wrote the novel Waverly. If the statements are incorrect, it must be only because one of the elements in the P-chain contains a mistake.

There is no counterfactual case regarding Scott. There are an infinite number of things Scott did not do, which doesn't mean he didn't exist, and there are an infinite number of potential beings who might have written Waverly. But not the book described by the chain of Ps. I don't know about the status of an entity "the author of Waverly”. He may not be real or not exist. But the way I see it the person Scott (i.e. Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0…. ) is real, as much as anything empirical can be real. In my opinion, the description "the author of Waverly" is nothing but a string of ink pattern, not an alternative to a name.

Moses? What about Kripke’s favorite Moses? If he was fingerprinted as F 1,2,3,4,9,8… and/or a different chain of Ps reported to see or hear him, he existed as the subject of verifiable claims. Without anyone reporting about him, his existence is analogous to that of the sound of a falling tree in an unobserved forest.

Decline and Possible Fall of the Classical Record Industry

2005-05-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

CANTATA ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE CLASSICAL RECORD INDUSTRY.

Prologue.
Malthus for records.

The Eighteenth century population theorist, Malthus, opined that while
population increases geometrically, food supplies increase only
arithmetically. Sooner or later, the widening gap between supply and demand
must end in war, famine, and general misery.

Several decades later, the poet Wordsworth, concerned about his country sang:

"Milton! thou shouldst be living in this hour
England hath need of thee; she is a fen
Of stagnant waters…"

Several centuries later, Heavenly Music Powers, concerned about the state of our classical record industry, reincarnated Wordsworth as the editor of Classical Music Review magazine. He promptly re-applied his muse in this manner:

"Malthus! thou shouldst be living in this hour
Our industry hath need of thee; she is a fen
Of stagnant musick…"

Malthus too reappeared as a concerned classical music lover. He took stock of the situation and realized that his former thesis, re-phrased, describes the plight of the classical record industry perfectly: "While the supply of CDs increases geometrically, record collectors increase only arithmetically. Sooner or later, the widening gap between supply and demand must end, if not in war, famine, and general misery, at least in the demise of Tower Records and the classical record industry".

Introduction.

What the modern-day Malthus meant is that the so-called standard repertoire has become essentially fixed. The most important compositions have already been recorded by most of the important conductors and performers. These recordings are endlessly re-issued in an amazing variety of guises and disguises. The same compositions are endlessly re-recorded by the still-living established artists. They are joined by the newcomers, mostly each-year's competition winners, wanting to try their wings on the same compositions. Orchestras, cities, countries, venues, radio stations have joined in the fray by issuing mammoth packages of essentially unauthorized performances by the famous artists in the same repertoire. The result is a surfeit of recordings. Meanwhile, the demand for these recordings is diminishing, die-hard classical record collectors have plenished and replenished their collections already and are dying out. They are not replaced in large enough numbers and in kind by the new generation. The classical record industry is certainly in decline and hovering at near fall.

The causes of a decline and fall are seldom observed while they are happening. Posthumous diagnoses, of course, abound. The following general comments, however, can be made. It appears that most human endeavors, ideas, technology, movements, and even entire civilizations go through a similar evolutionary pattern. Historiographers, like Marx (Das Kapital), Spengler (The Decline of the West), and Toynbee (A Study of History) have provided seemingly inexorable blueprints for these. Unfortunately, they were not avid record collectors, so their views on the record industry's decline are not known.

Being a mathematically oriented Chemical Engineer, I like to illustrate the evolutionary pattern with the aid of the graph reproduced below. The horizontal axis is a measure of time, the vertical axis is some measure of the "vitality" of the endeavor in terms of more quantifiable parameters, like the number of new ideas, patents, per cent growth of the entity in question, market share, or even income. For the classical record industry the axis might represent the number of truly novel ideas, or new innovative approaches. The S-shaped curve is the most typical of the growth curves. The gentle initial shape represents the slow, hesitant beginning, during which the "teething problems" are worked out. The rapid rise following it traces the efflorescence of the idea, technology, movement, or civilization, the so-called "Golden Period". After spectacular growth, inevitably, it seems, the ideas become stale and the original vitality now turns reactionary, standing in the way of new vital movement. The inevitable slowdown follows, and the curve flattens out.
What happens next is crucial. There are three possibilities, all illustrated by dashed lines. In most cases a decline follows (lower dashed line). On occasion, the essentially flat trend continues indefinitely, reaching a "steady-state" condition (flat dashed line). In even rarer cases the movement renews itself, in essence splicing a new S-curve onto the end. The beginning of the new S-curve is shown as the upward arcing dashed line.

At present the classical record industry is poised at the end of the solid line, facing one of the three outcomes. Describing the reason why we find ourselves in this spot is beyond my present objective. Nor am I prescient enough to indicate how to move to the next upturn. My aim is to describe the present dangerous practices which, if persist, will surely lead to further decline. The skeleton of the problem is indicated below.

The same performance is endlessly recycled by the same company.
The same performance is leased to other companies.
The same performance is reissued in new sonic garb.
The same performance is appropriated by the "independent minors".
The same repertoire is endlessly re-recorded by the same artists.
The same repertoire is diluted by orchestral issues.
The same repertoire is diluted by unauthorized issues by every venue.
The same repertoire is recorded by all newcomers.
Few people complain.
No one offers a viable solution.

In the following I would like to add a bit of flesh to the above skeleton.
Part 1. Variations on a recording

Like the Goldberg, this one starts simply. A famous artist records a famous composition. It is issued by one of the major recording companies. A few months later it cannot be found on the shelves. It finds it way to Berkshire Records, the Mecca of cutouts. Some time later the same recording finds itself back in the catalogue by itself, as a double album, or as part in a giant set, or coupled with a wide variety of matching and non-matching partners. Imaginative marketing executives may designate it as part of "Essential Classics". Others, thinking that the average music lover listens more on weekends, may assign it as part of "Weekend Classics". Can "twofers" be far behind? Of course, not. If the artist subsequently fades from public view, it will have the epithet "legendary" added to his name and his recording can pass into the "Legendary (never "historical") Recordings", or "Legendary Performers" series. If the artist, becomes a cult figure, "famous" or "great" will be his Homeric epithets, and the same recording will receive the Nobel prize equivalent of the recordings and move into the "Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century", or perhaps included in the "Great Conductors" series. The final bestowal is the entry into the Walhalla of records, inclusion into the "Great Recordings", or into the "50 Great Recordings". Simultaneously, several new "plain reissues" may accompany of the above, in one of the dozen remasterings, all claiming substantial sonic improvements. (See Part 2, below).

A new strain enters. The recording reappears in an entirely new label: as Testament, Classics for Pleasure and even Naxos, one of the true heroes in our time.

If old enough, and legendary enough to be exempt of copyright laws, "the independents", who paradoxically depend on previously issued performances by the majors, are allowed to market the same performance. As so often in Beethoven, as in the last movement of Eroica, the variations become increasingly difficult to follow. There are two kinds of independents, the scrupulous and the unscrupulous. The first group, often hampered by the unavailability of the master tapes, tries to add its grace notes to the basic theme by improving its sonics. This too comes in several versions. Often the sonic improvement consists in leaving all the original hiss in the performance to contrast this version to the original, in which the majors eliminated all hiss and most of the upper partials. More often, however, the independents hire wizards, who not only can restore the lost original sound, but can also perform time travel, can enter the minds of the performer, and magically confer sonic improvements not found in the original (see Part 3, below). Often several wizards contest each other for the palm for the best re imagination of the original.

In contrast, the unscrupulous companies merely copy others, have no wizards, no wizardry except that of invisibility, and can best be distinguished from others by the fact that they leave no address on the back of the jewel box.
By now, only a select few can trace the path from the original. No wonder one of the fastest rising profession in the US is the discographer!

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Part 2.
New wine in newer bottle: Adventures with Toscanini. 1 bit,16 bit, 18 bit, 20 bit. SACD, DVD-A.

Technological improvements are welcome in most walks of life, seldom more than in sound reproduction, in which field we are a long way from mistaking a record for the live performance. May I indulge myself making a running start with LPs, to indicate that the phenomena under discussion are not new? Just wearing thin.

It was in the nineteen-sixties, under the financially disastrous influence of Mr. Harris Goldsmith, then with High Fidelity magazine, that I first encountered Toscanini on records. The canonical nine of Beethoven were as good a place to start as any. So I purchased all nine on RCA VIC-800 thinking that was it. Incomparable though frantic performances, wretched sonics, Emery board-like surfaces. Still, I figured, with a little luck they would last me long enough so I could go on investigating other interpretations. How wrong could I be! Shortly thereafter, one of the unofficial cheerleaders of the American Record Industry, Mr. Richard Freed of Stereo Review magazine started extolling the virtues of artificial stereo, which would flesh out, sonically that is, Maestro Toscanini's lean sound. At his advice I purchased as many of the VICS-xxxx(e) records as I could find before RCA would withdraw them from circulation. If that's the way the Maestro sounded, who was I to dispute it? I did not. Others did, notably the aforesaid Mr. Goldsmith and Mr. Mortimer Franks of Fanfare magazine, "Joint Keepers of the Original Toscanini Sound". Realizing that they might be right, I rummaged through countless used record shops on both sides of the Atlantic until I found the "ur-pressing", RCA LM 6901. A different sound for sure, mono of course, maybe a few reverbs here and there, ticks, pops, scratches, but I could finally rest on my (or Toscanini's) laurels. At least until I found out from the above duo that even these recordings had been deleteriously altered by RCA engineers, who, having flunked Conducting, went into Audio Engineering. Furthermore, I was also informed that there existed pristine overseas versions boasting impeccable surfaces as well. (Actually, one did not have to strain too hard to improve on the US pressings).

So off I went on another quest to collect as many British RCA AT records as I could. Alas, these were the times when German engineering epitomized the best Western technology, so it did not take much, on the basis of articles in The Absolute Sound magazine, to convince me of the superiority of the German AT issues, like RCA AT 600. Of course I switched to these and their siblings. If only the Japanese hadn't come along with their extra thick, ultra silent, 100% virgin vinyl pressings! I had to have them and I did.

It was about that time that Franklin Mint issue its monumental, integral Toscanini issue, which I was forced to forego because of near financial insolvency. At least, until the Italians came out with their half-speed mastered, equally integral
RCA VL versions. On stereo, no less! Or was it stereo? At any rate, I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, as we were rapidly running out of countries, unless the UN wanted to enter the field.

Then, disaster struck again: CDs. I had to start over. But at least they were perfect replicas of the Platonic master tapes still existing in Mr. Goldsmith's and Mr. Franks' heads. As usual, the Japanese were first out of the starting block, and I am sure I was first out of my block of apartments in Philadelphia who absolutely had to have every Japanese CD, guaranteed to sound like the real thing, whatever that was. Even at exorbitant prices they were a bargain, holding out hope that they would last a lifetime, or until, believing Stereophile magazine, one treated them with Armorall. At any rate, I thought the Eroica was one of the early Japanese offerings. Alas, once more, the entire series turned out to be shrill and unfaithful. If I recall, RCA subsequently withdrew them, replacing them with US versions (probably made in Japan). Of course, it was only a perfect replacement if one was willing to accept the 1949 performance for the one recorded in 1953.

I will not describe a similar journey in CD land. Apparently, age was catching up with me and I resisted the urge to purchase the entire BMG series. While a blow to the Economy, it was lucky for me. Because on the horizon were more undreamt-of improvements. I am now talking about the entire industry, not only the Toscanini industry. Philosophically speaking it is difficult to improve on perfection. But what escaped the philosophers of yore was accomplished by the Industry, they improved on the perfect replicas the original CDs had been supposed to be. Homer, or better yet, Aristophanes, might have done justice to the war between the so-called "golden eared" audiophiles noting sonic flaws, and the yes-men of and for the record industry, who heard no evil. I cannot. But it needs to be pointed out that the constant string of supposed sonic improvements were seldom accompanied by an admission that earlier claims to perfection had been misleading. Just as the newer ones soon turned out to be. Where is the new Gibbon to describe the gradual changes from 16 bit to 18 bit, 20 and so on, each promising sonic Nirvanas? The latest ones, Super Audio CDs (SACD) and DVD-A promise to deliver what the Industry had claimed 20 years ago. But how many times can the average record collector be expected to re-purchase the same performance? The famous "point of diminishing return" is now operating.

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Part 3. Masters of remastering. Hyphenated Stokowski.

In the golden age of recordings, articles abounded dealing with great controversies of the correct way of interpretation. Toscanini vs. Furtwängler, Heifetz vs. Szigeti, Schnabel vs. Arrau were passionately debated in musical magazines. Progress was being made: Bach-Stokowski, Handel-Beecham were slowly giving way to Bach and Handel on modern instruments, and later to period instruments. These days, ironically, we have hyphenated Stokowski and Beecham, as in "Stokowski-Marston" and "Beecham-Obert-Thorn".

Articles are now devoted to the minute differences of a Mengelberg performance as remastered by these two acknowledged masters of the remastering industry. Mark, I do not wish to diminish the contribution of these two and others; we owe them debt of gratitude for making the music of the hissy, noisy, shellacky remote past so enjoyable. But nothing is more symptomatic of the lack of vitality in the record industry than the shift in emphasis from the performance to the remastering. From the artist to the craftsman. It is as if the discussion of Rodin's statues were shifted to the discussion of the various foundries casting the bronzes.

We can now not only chose a conductor to guide us in a Beethoven symphony, not only whether it be early, middle or late Furtwangler, but also whether on EMI, as remastered by one of the majors, or on Pearl, Biddulph, or Dutton Laboratories, as remastered by the Marston, Obert-Thorn, Seth Winner, and their colleagues. There may even be cases when "early" Marston is reviewed against one his later incarnation on the same performance.

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Part 4. 7-year itch, Same composition, same artist

In a kinder, gentler, and less ego-driven era, artists would wait decades before tackling the Mt. Olympus of music, Beethoven symphonies, and sonatas, and the equally hallowed tops of Bach Das Wohletemperierte Klavier, or Mozart Piano Concertos.

No more. As reliable as the return of Haley's comet, but far more frequent, is the appearance of another issue of the mighty nine by one of our conductors. Admittedly, Karajan or Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau are hard acts to follow. By popular demand Connan Doyle had to resurrect Sherlock Holmes; in similar fashion in this age of medical advances might not the industry bring back Karajan? Until then we have to do with lesser lights. Even Abbado is only on his second cycle. But he has time on his side.

It takes a monumental ego on the part of the artist, and equally monumental cupidity on the part of the industry to believe that he has significant new insight into the well-traveled great works, every seven, ten, or even 20 years. If ever.

Of course, the reviewers have a field day comparing, say, early, middle, and late Karajan. Or shall I add intermediate Karajan? Or DFK in Schubert songs? Or Brendel in Beethoven sonatas? The critic often finds great and significant differences in, say, the second movement subsidiary theme which is now significantly slower, or the transitional 3-bar motif, where in the remake the second clarinets are allowed to shine. Indeed they do. And the artist now, alleluia, takes the second movement exposition repeat (now there is a Ph.D. industry for you!). Of course, differences are inevitable. Somewhat more questionable whether we are any closer to the Platonic essence of the work.

Given the ephemeral nature of our audial memory, a cynic might even wonder that if the above critic, unbeknownst to him, were to listen to the identical record twice on different days would he not find significant differences in the two performances, attributing them to significant new interpretive insights.

It is similarly questionable whether the same artist can reproduce the same performance twice in a row. Different takes of Mengelberg, or Toscanini, indicate that this is by no means the case: the performances vary. I have a CD of Josef Hofmann's in which he plays the same Chopin Waltz four times in a row. Each is different.

A devilish thought occurs. We need not wait seven years for the artists to record the same piece; we can have them record the same piece five times in five days. Keep four in the can and issue them in periodic intervals. They will be different. The suggestion, of course, is in jest, but only partly, to allow me to state my possibly controversial thesis. It is that periodic remakes and pirated performances of an artist even over a span of several decades seldom show a recognizable arc toward a deeper understanding of a composition, or even a clear movement toward a different interpretive pole. The different performances are rather chance variations on an innate artistic mean, owing to the momentary circumstances of different venues, orchestras, personal and historical events, and aging.

Even such a thoughtful conductor as Furtwängler, who spent a lifetime pursuing the Beethovenian truth, evinced no clear interpretive movement in his 10 or so published performances of Beethoven's Choral Symphony or in others. Similarly, Schnabel's three performances of the Emperor Concerto bear a constant creative imprint that is quite different from Arrau's several remakes. Heifetz' constancy of performances is well known, but if one looks at Szigeti's three Beethoven violin concerto performances, or his several available Bach unaccompanied pieces over decades, one cannot espy a clear movement, except the inevitably effects of Father Time.
If this is how it goes with the Olympians, are today's mortals any different?
More to the point: can the average, non-specialist record collector keep up? I fear not. Does he care? I think not.

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Interlude #1 Discoveries, discoveries. Bernstein in Paris, Mengelberg in Budapest, Oistrakh in Timbuktu, Szell in Tokyo.

The avalanche of new issues cannot be halted. Every city, every orchestra ever visited by a famous artist joins in the fray. In an average year a touring virtuoso will easily give 100 performances, mostly in different venues. Even conductors guest-perform, or take their orchestras (which of the many?) on tours. There are easily 200 artists in public, with an average performing lifetime of 30 years. Most of these performances are recorded. Do the math! The possibilities are staggering. (They come out to be only 600,00). What's worse, they are being turned into reality. Most great artists have had high standards, often vetoing the release of a record that did not meet theirs. Dead, or prevented from objecting, their every slipshod performance can now find its way to the public. Admittedly, reviewers often bemoan this practice, but then continue gleefully with the review. Maybe a refusal to review would be a more apt response. After all, all magazines make editorial decisions on which issues to review.

There are cases in which this practice is welcomed. Owing to many factors, several great conductors and performers could not land lasting recording contracts. Issues of their performances can act as corrective by giving us a more complete picture.

Beyond these comments I can only repeat what I said discussing reissues. In the case of established artists with ample available commercial documentation, these issues rarely provide great additional insight.

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Interlude #2 Enter the orchestras.

As if the above-described CD avalanche were not enough, orchestras have entered the field, flooding the market with gigantic boxes of taped in-house performances. Kind critics will find soothing words about them, but the truth is that the ratio of diamond to chaff is extremely low. They give occasional, unaccustomed glimpses of the familiar performer, of interest to the specialist, but rarely to the general public.

Such boxes are now de rigeur for major, not so major, and minor orchestras. If the Chicago box appears can New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland be far behind? What about the "Aristocrat of the Orchestras"? They too enter. I don't have a US map while I am writing so I cannot be sure if there are cities not yet in this business. Holland certainly is, issuing great quantities of Von Beinum and Mengelberg tapes. Some of these may even be valuable to collectors of historic recordings and collectors of large boxed issues. A new variant is exemplified by such issues as NY Philharmonic: The Masur Years. Ten discs, one of the smaller ones.

Conductors are famously long-lived. With this proviso, this time I will let you calculate the number of potential issues. However, as a bonus, in the Appendix I will indicate the possibly disastrous effects of collecting these giant boxes.

Of course, the Russians don't want to lose this race too. They have issued hundreds of cough-ridden, wretched-sounding performances from their archives.
Not only do we get a view of the fabled soloists dishabille, as it were, but we also get the fabled teachers of the fabled pianists. Who knows, their teacher, Anton Rubinstein may yet appear.

Most of these pale besides the vaults of the mighty BBC. Of course, their performances are all legendary (even if obscure).

The eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that one of the headlines in the previous section is true. I made up the other ones, but who knows, maybe performances will turn up. George Szell; Live in Tokyo 1970 available from the Cleveland orchestra, parts of it already included in Cleveland Orchestra's giant package. Of course, there were differences between these and Szell's other recordings, as meticulously observed by Mortimer Franks on page 234 in Fanfare 25:4. I repeat what I have said before: it would be a miracle if there weren't any. Mr. Franks catalogs all the differences, but does not offer his own preference. So what's the point? Commenting, for instance, on the differences between Sibelius Seconds, Mr. Franks indicates that, "...the major difference between them being the more expansive pace of this live finale". Well, yes. But is that good, bad, or indifferent? Does he like it? Should we? At least to Mr. Franks' credit (who laudibly synchronized the two performances on different players---how many people would do that?) he did not finish with the often-used tautological cliché: "Szell compleatists will, of course, want this. They will. By definition. Will anyone else?

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Part 5. Brave new Horowitzes.

Each year countless young musicians go forth in search of the Holy Grail: the winning one of the increasing number of competitions thereby gaining admittance to musical Camelot. As a reward, they get to perform the same standard repertoire their elders have performed every seven or so years legally, and on countless pirated occasions as chronicled above. Alas, the market can only accommodate a finite number of fire-eating Russian, Horowitz-like pianists, or diminutive Oriental wundergirls playing toy violins, or even Valentino-sex-appealed acrobatic conductors.

Most young artists are innocent. Their only sin is that they were born too late. Too late to make meaningful contribution to a fixed number of masterpieces by providing anything new. Beethoven symphonies, for instance, have been played in every conceivable way from the fiery Toscanini to the metaphysical Furtwängler, from the sane and objective Weingartner to the warm and fuzzy Bruno Walter, from the theatrical Stokowski to the mercurial Mengelberg, from the hyperkinetic Solti to the plodding Klemperer, from the hydra-headed ubiquitous Karajan, to the elusive, balanced Carlos Kleiber, from Abbado to (extending the list to other repertoire as well) Nikisch, Boehm, Rosbaud, Oscar Fried, Horenstein, Krauss, Abendroth, E. Kleiber, F. Busch, Jochum, Keilbert, Knappertburscht, Scherchen, Krips, Schuricht, De Sabata, Cantelli, Giulini, Ansermet, Desormier, Cluytens, Markevich, Monteux, Munch, Reiner, Leinsdorf, Beecham, Coates, Boult, Barbirolli, oh all right, Britten, Talich, Ancerl, Mravinsky, Barshai plus all those many Russians, Bernstein, Stock, Hendl, Szell, Ormandi, Dorati, Rodzinsky, Rudolf, Sternberg, Mitropoulus, Kubelik, Von Beinum, Haitink, Koussewitzky, Celibidache, Kertesz, Fricsay, Ferencsik, Tennestedt, and maybe others?

Where is the Beethoven pianist to go if he is to avoid Schnabel, Kempff, Annie Fischer, Arrau, Pollini, Brendel, Goode, Russell Sherman, Solomon, Kovacevic, Claude Frank, Richter, Gilels, Backhaus, and Gieseking?

Pity the poor violinists, their repertoire is even more severely limited. Do they or their promoters seriously believe that they can provide new gloss on the standard repertoire already mined by the likes of Kreisler, Thibaud, Elman, Heifetz, Schumsky, Milstein, Grumiaux, Szeryng, Fuchs, Adolph Busch, Szigeti, Stern, Menuhin, Schneiderhan, Kulenkampf, Bustabo, Huberman, D. Oistrakh, Rosand, Ricci, Francescatti, Morini, Soames, Laredo, Igor Oistrakh, Oleg Kagan, Pavel Kagan, Suk, Wilkomirska, De Vito, Jeanette Neveu, or even the more elusive Vasha Prihoda, Tosha Seidel, Gingold, Enesco, Zimballist, Kolchansky, Spalding? Or the newer ones, Pearlman, Zuckermann, Kung Wa Chu, Amoyal, Accardo, Mutter, Midori, Vengerov, Kennedy, Bell, Fodor, Sonnenberg, Hahn, Mullova, Zimmerman, Chang, Sitkovetzki, Tretiakov, Spivakov, Zehetmair, Tasmin Little, Pamela Frank, and others?

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Finale. Handmaidens of the Decline.

Who are at fault? I have a little list:
The composers, who at one time abandoned their audience.
The audience, which makes nary an effort to keep up with the new trends.
The music departments, which confuse mathematics and computer sciences with music.
The performing artists, who with minimal exception keep catering to the public by performing the same war-horses.
The orchestras that are similarly stuck.
The Record Industry that has neither vision nor strategy to make a transition to the new.
Concert-going parents, who don't impart their love of the classical the their rockenrolling offsprings.
Concert hall managers, who think that all it takes to interest young audiences is modern architecture.
Critics of modern, music, who mistake each novel composition for a masterpiece.
Conventional critics, who cannot call a halt to the proliferation of essentially indistinguishable performances.
Magazines that stick their editorial heads in the sand.
And commentators like me who only keep complaining without suggesting remedies.

Any wonder why the Industry is in trouble?

Appendix. The mathematics of CD collecting.

Let's do the math. It is instructive. Let's assume that one the giant orchestral boxes have dimensions of 5 in. x 8 in. or 40 sq. in. It comes to almost 0.3 sq. ft. Let us assume the average CD enthusiast buys 100 boxes a year. That is 30 sq. ft. of CD! Assume that the average record stand is 3 ft high, his acquisition will take up 10 linear ft. each year. Well-healed collectors may have a rectangular dedicated listening room whose long sides are 20 ft. If they stack CDs on both sides, they will have a total of 40 linear ft. of space. In 4 years, they will have to buy a new house. Or buy fewer CDs. This is something homebuilders and record companies should take into consideration.

The mathematically advantaged will know how to redo the calculation for different combinations or for different purchase patterns.

Notes.

1. These are not exactly Malthus' words, especially because he changed them considerably between the first edition of his "Essay on the Principle of Population" (London, 1798), and the second edition in 1803.

Greek mythology and fable for the young

2005-05-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND FABLE FOR THE YOUNG.
Tell me a story.
"Tell me a story". This is what most children say as soon as they can speak and understand. In every country and every civilization. And now it is happening to you.
You are visiting your girlfriend who has a 5-year old brother Johnny with the annoying habit of hanging around too long. You wish he would go to bed. So he finally does, and when you are just about to leave when he says:
"Tell me a story before I go to sleep".
"OK", you say to yourself, "Let's get it over with, it should be relatively easy".
So you start, "One day, as I was watching baseball, the doorbell rang."
Johnny could barely stifle a yawn. You try again and again and it is not working. "This kid will never go to sleep", you say to yourself.
"So what do you want to hear about?" you ask.
"Tell me about old old times, about monsters, bad men, gods, and heroes, beautiful princesses and dragons".
"Well, OK, this might just work", you think. "It shouldn't be too hard".
Let's create a Hero.
So you finally decide to tell Johnny a story about a hero. So you start:
"There is a hero. He is called Bill. He lives in the next house".
Johnny interrupts: "There is no hero called Bill. And I know the person in the next house. He is no hero".
"Here we go again!" you think, "this kid will never let up, he wants a specific story".
So you sigh and start again: "There was once a hero. He was named Edward. He lived in Pittsburgh"
"Oh, OK. What did Edward do".
"Well, his boss wanted him to work late but he refused".
"That is no hero. And the story is boring. Tell me about a real hero".
At this point you realize you are in some serious trouble. This requires some real thinking.
"Tell you what, kid. Let me think a little. Let me go into the library, and I will come back in an hour and tell you a story you will really like".
So you do a bit of thinking and a bit of reading and come up with the following formula for a hero:
(1) The hero's mother is a royal virgin,
(2) His father is a king, and
(3) Often a near relative of his mother, but
(4) The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
(5) He is also reputed to be the son of a god.
(6) At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grandfather, to kill him, but
(7) He is spirited away, and
(8) Reared by foster-parents in a far country.
(9) We are told nothing of his childhood, but
(10) On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom.
(11) After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild
beast,
(12) He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor, and
(13) Becomes king.
(14) For a time he reigns uneventfully, and
(15) Prescribes laws, but
(16) Later he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and
(17) Is driven from the throne and city, after which
(18) He meets with a mysterious death,
(19) Often at the top of a hill.
(20) His children, if any, do not succeed him.
(21) His body is not buried, but nevertheless
(22) He has one or more holy sepulchres.
Now you are in business! You start again.
"There once was a hero. His name was Zebedion. He lived many years ago. His father was a king, but his real father was a god. The king hated him. He decided to kill Zebedion. But his mother saved him. He grew up, slew the bad dragon, killed the king, and married the king's daughter.
Do you want to hear about this story? If you do, I will tell it"
Johnny is in heaven. And soon you can re-join your girlfriend.

The Greeks excelled in these kinds of myths and stories.
So why read them?
Can one be called educated if he/she is not knowledgeable of the Hellenic mythology? Hardly. This is what the great English poet, Shelley, said: "We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece." In my youth I have found mythology and fables interesting. They were part of my background and shaped my life. Why?

At this point I have a decision to make. I can outline several reasons, intellectual, psychological, artistic, and try to influence you. But that's not how I came to love mythology. That love came from the delight I got from reading the detailed stories. Not outlines, not abbreviations, but the most complete versions. They say, "the devil is in the details". I don't know about the devil, but I know that the beauty of the stories is in the details; the creative, scintillating inventiveness of the Greeks is stunning. By no means do I encourage sexual promiscuity, but I can't help but smile at that old lecher, Zeus. He pursues maidens in myriad guises: as a shower of gold, as a swan, as a bull, and many more. His wife, Hera, is equally imaginative in posing obstacle after obstacle to her amorous husband. Similarly, the legendary Hercules is not only strong, any dumb hero can be that! But he also has to learn to perform service, a much higher degree of difficulty. And not any service, but 12 of the most imaginative ones, each teaching a lesson. In the body of this paper I will discuss the myths about Zeus and Hercules in some detail and point out the highlights.

So why else should you read them?
Because they are wise. The stories are eternal. They stories survived because they are the best Mankind has to offer, and because they deal with situations that are timeless. They matter today as much as at any time. That is the hallmark of great literature. They arose from our collective unconscious and continue to speak to us because of our psychological need for understanding and resolution.
Because their psychological insights are unparalleled in the history of Mankind. From the Oedipus complex to fear of castration, from penis envy to blood feuds, from conflict between duty and love, from the dangers of excessive self-love, to the hubris of trying to fly too high, they have it all. Nothing has been done in the last 2200 years that equals these insights, the nurturing effect of the stories.
Because they have infused Literature, Music, Painting, Sculpture, with eternal sources of inspiration. Except the Bible, nothing equals their creative influence.
As I said, it is lucky person who has such heritage. Maybe it's time to dip into it and see what they are all about. And see if our latest baseball hero is not an incarnation of Hercules, if Madonna is not our modern Helen of Troy.

In the following I would like elaborate some of these points.

Three myths.
Zeus (Jupiter for the Romans).
What can you expect of a god whose father swallowed all his siblings and is about to swallow him? But that is what happened to Zeus (known as Jupiter to the Romans. In one of the typical prophecies the Greeks loved, his father the king, Cronos (known as Saturn to the Romans), was told that one of his children would depose him. I have never understood why people react this way? If they believe that the prophecy is true then surely they can't do anything to circumventing it. If they think they can outsmart the prophecy, it means they really don't believe it. Well, needless to say, Cronos believed the prophecy, and having already swallowed five of his children was ready to do likewise with Zeus. Cronos's wife, Rhea, outsmarted her husband, gave him a stone wrapped in clothes to swallow. Cronos swallowed the switch. Zeus survived. Cronos (Saturn) swallowing one of his children is one of the greatest paintings of the Spanish artist, Goya. It is also one of the most frightening in the history of painting. It illustrates the primordial terror Geek myths can evoke. The Greeks never shrank from the darkest night of the soul.

So Zeus, of course, survived. When Zeus had grown up, he had Cronos's attendant, Metis, give Cronos a drug, which forced him to disgorge first the stone and then the children whom he had swallowed. And with the aid of his brothers and sisters Zeus waged war against Cronos and the Titans. This is how Zeus became the ruler of Heaven.

Much as I would like, I cannot due justice of the wealth of myths that are associated with Zeus. Each story begets another story. Instead I would like to concentrate on two aspects of the stories, the punishments he meted out, and his romances. Zeus was no shrinking violet when it came to dealing with his adversaries. The slightest disrespect met with swift, imaginative, punishment. For instance, Sisyphus was sentenced to the Underworld to push a boulder up a slope. Whenever he almost succeeded, the boulder plunged and he had to start again. Forever. Sisyphusian labor, one that never gets done, has become a byword in Western literature. An almost as imaginative punishment befell Tantalus. He was sentenced to hang from the bow of a tree, almost able to quench his thirst from a pond below. Whenever he was about to reach it, the water receded. Similarly, whenever he reached for fruit on the tree, it too shrank from his reaches. Tantalusian torture too has come to live in Western art. And of course, there was Prometheus, who according one myth helped mankind by giving him life-sustaining fire. For this, Zeus tied him to a rock and had a vulture constantly tearing his liver. Fire-giving Prometheus became a symbol of Western art. Countless plays, paintings, and poems celebrate the story. It illustrates the perils of giving knowledge (for that is what the fire symbolizes) to man. And also knowledge itself. For me, the story parallels that of Adam and Eve, who were banished from Paradise for eating from the tree of knowledge. The Greeks too knew the danger of knowledge and the independence from god it encourages. It's time to move on to lighter topics, or at least to more amorous ones. Zeus seemed to have been lucky in both wars and love. The maidens he pursued are a legion. His imagination and persistence is amazing. Not for him the brute force, but the art of transformation and disguise.
But before I do that, I should mention how history repeats itself. Zeus coveted the maiden Metis, who assumed many shapes in vain to avoid Zeus. She became his first wife. It had been foretold that she would bear a son who would be the lord of heaven. As they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, from fear of that prophecy, Zeus swallowed her while pregnant. When the time came for the birth to take place inside Zeus, Prometheus, or Hephaestus smote the head of Zeus with an axe, and, Zeus's child, Athena, fully armed, leapt up from the top of his head at the river Triton.

But I have to digress again. It is the beauty of the Greek myths that they can be read at many different levels. It would be overly simplistic to read the many myths about Zeus and women as simple womanizing. I don't think the Greeks looked at it that way. On one level, each generation needs to feel that it has divine origin. Almost all of Zeus's offsprings became important heroes from whom entire nations sprung. Hence these stories were important to the descendents. The stories also contain much encoded wisdom, as exemplified by the story of Semele, one of the maidens loved by Zeus in disguise. At the height of love, Zeus promised Semele to fulfil any wish she would care to make. Foolish promise! Semele has longed to see Zeus in his real form, something no mortal could endure. The horrified Zeus tried to talk her out of this suicidal request; in vain. So he appeared in his blinding splendor, and Semele was burnt by the fire. Clearly, the story talks about man's desire to behold god, and the danger of beholding the terrible aspect of god. This is far more than a simple story of conquest! And in a way it is touching to see the loving Zeus, protecting his beloved, and trying to make sure that no harm befalls the offsprings; not always an easy task.
I cannot do justice to all of Zeus's conquests, but here is a list, not necessarily alphabetically.
Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus, was carried off by Zeus, who had taken the shape of an eagle, to the island then named Oenone but now called Aegina after her.
Antiope too was loved by Zeus. Zeus, who seldom repeated his tricks twice, took the shape of a Satyr to approach her. Zeus, apparently in his normal form, also made love to Leto. For this, Zeus's jealous wife Hera hunted her over the whole two continents Finally in Delos, she gave births to two gods, Apollo and Artemis. Zeus seduced Callisto taking the shape of Artemis. To make sure she would not be detected by Hera, Zeus transformed her into a bear. Hera detected the ruse and had Artemis to shoot the wild beast. Zeus approached Eurymedusa, daughter of Cletor, after having assumed the form of an ant.

At least on one occasion Zeus has shown prudent restraint. Even though he loved the Nereid Thetis, upon hearing the prophecy that her son would be mightier than his father he withdrew. Zeus then, bade his grandson Pelus to marry her. From this union the hero Achilles was born. I am sure you know his pivotal role in the Trojan War. Niobe was the first mortal woman with whom Zeus consorted. She is a daughter of Phoroneus, who is said to be the first man.
The indefatigable Zeus seduced Io while she was a priestess of Hera. When detected by his wife, Hera, Zeus turned Io into a white cow by a touch and swore that he had not known her.
Zeus fell in love with a Phoenician princess called Europa, and having taken the form of a bull, he carried her off and took her across the sea to the island of Crete. This is the origin of the name of the continent, Europe.

The above should give you small idea of Zeus's amorous activities. I have reserved two more in another section later in this article.

It is now time to move to the greatest of Greek heroes, Heracles (or Hercules). The link, of course, is another of Zeus's romance, as describe below.
Alcmena was the last mortal woman with whom Zeus lay. Zeus took the form of Amphitron (her husband) to deceive her. When Heracles, Zeus's child by her, was about to be born, Zeus declared among the gods that the next descendant of Perseus, who would be born next would reign over Mycenae. He fully expected Heracles to be the person. But he, once more, failed to reckon with the jealous Hera who conspired to retard Alcmena's' delivery, and contrived that her favorite, Eurystheus should be born prematurely. By this ruse, Eurystheus became king of Mycenae, and Heracles his subject.

Heracles (Hercules for the Romans).

The most famous of the Greek mythological heroes, Heracles is known to most people for his legendary strength, and for his labors (The Labors of Hercules).
As I indicated above, the story of Hercules was embroiled in treachery between Zeus and Hera.
When Heracles was eight months old, Hera, desiring his death, sent two serpents to his bed. But he strangled the beasts with his hands. And when he was eighteen years old he slew the Lion of Cithaeron. In a story too complicated to tell, Heracles was driven mad by Hera, and killed his wife. As punishment he was compelled to serve Eurystheus for 10 years, during which Eurystheus made him perform 12 of the most seemingly impossible tasks (the labors).
A later myth indicates the choices many heroes, as well of most of us, had to make. When Heracles was about to enter adult life he met two women describing each a different road through life. One called herself Happiness (Eudaimonia), but said her critics call her Vice (Kakia) and described an easy road, while the other, called Virtue (Arètè), described a road of hardship and hard labor. As you will see, Heracles chose the latter, indicating a submission to god's will rather than emphasizing his brute strength. His first labor was to destroy the Numean Lion. Heracles shot an arrow at him, but when he perceived that the Lion was invulnerable, he broke its neck with his bare hands. As a second labor he was ordered by Eurystheus to kill the Lernaean Hydra, offspring of Typhon and Echidna, a monster with nine heads, one of them being immortal. He chopped all heads and the immortal one he buried putting a heavy rock on it. As a third labor he was ordered to bring the Cerynitian Hind alive to Mycenae. The Hind had golden horns and was sacred to Artemis. So Heracles did not wish to wound it, but at the end he shot it just as it was about to cross a river. He caught it and hastened through Arcadia towards Mycenae. But Artemis and Apollo met him, and rebuked him for attempting to kill her sacred Hind. But Heracles put the blame on Eurystheus, pleaded necessity, and so he appeased Artemis's anger and carried the Hind alive to Mycebae. As a fourth labor he was ordered to bring the Erymanthian Boar, which ravaged Psophis, alive. The fifth labor was to carry out the dung of the cattle of Augeas, king of Elis, in a single day. Heracles went to Augeas, and without revealing the command of Eurystheus, said that he would carry out the dung in one day, if Augeas would give him the tenth part of the cattle. Augeas was incredulous, but promised. Having taken Augeas' son Phyleus to witness, Heracles made a breach in the foundations of the cattle-yard, and then diverting the courses of two rivers, he turned them into the yard. When Augeas learned that this had been accomplished at the command of, he would not pay the reward. When arbitrators were called Phyleus bore witness against his father and Augeas ordered both Phyleus and Heracles to leave Elis.

I am not going to describe all the labors; that would be a Herculean task. But I will mention that the ninth labor was to fetch the Belt of Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons. She had the belt of Ares for being the best among the Amazons. Heracles was sent to fetch it because Admete, daughter of Eurystheus, desired to get it. Heracles killed Hippolyte and stripped her of her belt.
You will have to read the rest of the labors, and find out what happened to Heracles--some story. But before I leave this section, I want to indicate another reason why I like the Greek myths. This can be illustrated with the following events involving Heracles. In one of his journeys he came to Libya, where there was a ruler, named Antaeus, who used to kill strangers by forcing them to wrestle. Antaeus was son of Gaia, the goddess of the Earth. He became stronger when he touched the Earth because he derived his strength from it. At first Heracles was unable to defeat him because he kept regaining his strength. Finally, Heracles killed him while holding him in the air. Antaeus is not a nice character, but the story at another level illustrates that we are invincible while in touch with our mother, or home, our home base, our background. Another lovely reason to revisit the Greek myths.

Theseus.
One of the most important heroes, especially important for Athens. He was the son of either King Aegeus (from which the Aegean Sea gained its name, sea below) or Poseidon. Before King Aegeus left home, he placed his sword and sandals beneath a huge rock and told his wife Aethra that when their son, Theseus, could lift the rock he was to bring the gifts to his kingdom in Athens. At the age of 16 Theseus lifted the rock and began his journey, during which he freed the countryside of various monsters and villains. When Theseus arrived at Athens, Medea, then wife of Aegeus, tried to kill him. Aegeus, however, recognized the sword and sandals, saved Theseus, and exiled Medea. Theseus subsequently had numerous adventures. His most famous exploit was against the Minotaur of King Minos of Crete. Athenians, who had been at war with King Minos of Crete, were forced by him to send every year seven youths and seven young women as a tribute to the Minotaur (half bull, half man). Theseus insisted on being one of the seven youths and seven maidens of Athens to be sacrificed to the monster as an annual tribute. He promised his father that if he were successful in killing the Minotaur he would on his return voyage replace his ship's black sails with white ones. Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a magic ball of thread to be dropped at the entrance of the labyrinth; it led Theseus to the Minotaur, which he killed, and he then followed the unwound thread back to the entrance. He left Crete with Ariadne but abandoned her at Naxos. The myth is clearly an allegory, symbolizing Athens' anger over having to pay the heavy taxes to Minos, its resolution brought about the myth of killing the Cretan man-bull.
When Theseus reached home he forgot to raise white sails. Aegeus saw black sails, and, thinking his son dead, the grief-stricken father threw himself into the sea, thereafter called the Aegean. As king of Athens, Theseus instituted several reforms, most notably the federalization of the scattered Attic communities. Theseus abolished all local courts and administrative offices, and made Athens the sole location of government. Then, as he had promised, he surrendered his royal power. He journeyed to the land of the Amazons, where he abducted Antiope, who bore him Hippolytus. A vengeful Amazon army invaded Athens, but Theseus defeated it. Some say Antiope died fighting beside him in the battle; others claim that Theseus killed her when she objected to his marriage to Phaedra. Later Theseus was imprisoned in Hades until Hercules rescued him. Upon his return to Athens, he found his once great kingdom a turmoil of corruption and rebellion. He regretfully sailed away and came to rest at Skyros, where he was treacherously murdered by King Lycomedes. Although Theseus is generally thought of as legendary, the Athenians believed he had been one of their early kings.

Why do Myths work?
So you may begin to wonder: why do hero myths work? Or more broadly, why do myths work? It is clear that for a myth to be universally meaningful, to survive over generations and even centuries, they have to be in a particular way. Not every hero story works, and not every other supernatural story becomes a myth.
It appears that we are constructed in such a way that our psyche, or our soul, is pre-tuned to receive certain stories. Only those that fit our soul's template become lasting. The great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, believed that myths arise out of our collective unconscious, a repository of Mankind's psychological history. If he is correct, it makes sense that only these ones will find resonance in us. And the equally great Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud believed that only those myths survive that contain something deeply psychologically meaningful.

The Greek myths, and especially the hero myths, in which the Greek excelled, satisfy these criteria. I think they encode two separate but parallel experiences. The same way as an embryo in its development recapitulates the evolutionary development of the entire species; the hero myths speak of individual as well as general human experiences. For the individuals, for us, the hero myths speak to our subconscious desire to slay, to supplant our father and re-occupy our mother's undivided affection and even her bed. They describe our secret belief that we are somehow special, surely God's favorite, surely of higher birth than our own. The myths describe our coming of age after hard struggle.

There is a near parallel for the development of Mankind in the era of rationalism that the Greeks ushered in after many centuries of darkness and superstition. The heroes fulfil an important role, they stamp out tyranny, and in their quest they kill monsters which stand for fear, chaos, and unreason. Unfortunately, in a male society these monsters were often female, the feminine for the Greeks, as indeed for most men, represents that which is irrational and to be feared. Thus the Greek gods have supplanted the previous Great Mothers and Goddesses, reflecting the change from matriarchal to patriarchal society. The myths reflect this change.
We are still mostly the descendents of the male Geek society, the recipient of their male-inspired and male-oriented myths. That is why they continue to exercise fascination in most of us, especially in artist. There are other types of myths, which were alien to the Greeks. There are other types of myths, which were alien to the Greeks. They did not do heroines well if at all; admittedly they had goddesses, but they were either sex symbols (Aphrodite/Venus), chaste hunters (Artemis), or wise/warlike (Athene). They had monsters but did not do truly evil well. They had, interestingly, nothing equivalent to Darth Veder or the Shadow in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, for instance. For these we have to turn elsewhere, as well as for truly female-oriented myths. But for the rest, the Greek myths survive and keep inspiring our subconscious and our art, which so often renders the subconscious visible.

There is another type of story that also has its origin with Ancient Greece, the fable. It shares some characteristics with myths. I will also touch on it later in this article.

The Influence of Greek Mythology on Western Art, Literature and Music.
Artists were some of the first who recognized the timeless importance of Greek mythology for Western life. In fact, Greek mythology, along with the Bible, was the most important creative fertilizer of arts. I would just like to indicate this by a few examples. Along the way I will also sketch two of the stories that inspired art. It will give you an idea of the richness of the Greek myths. I have borrowed the description of myths from my favorite website: http://www.hsa.brown.edu/~maicar/. You can visit it for more information.
The influence of Greek mythology on music was mostly in opera. From the 17th century until the beginning of the 20th century it dominated the operatic topics. Because I have written a separate article on this, I do not want to repeat myself. Those interested can look at it in my web site: http://home.att.net/~paul.hoffman1/grdrmpsound.htm
Here I would like to mention the three highlights, Richard Strauss's Elektra and Ariadne auf Naxos and Enesco's Oedipe. If you like music, or even if you don't, I urge you to try some of these, especially in a video format.
The next important field would be literature. Here, however, there is a paradox. The myths are an important literary source, but the three great ancient playwrights, Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides have dealt with these topics so superbly that few subsequent writers dared to follow them.

It would be more profitable to indicate the influence of mythology on painting and sculpture, by using two myths and their interpretations in the arts. The myths themselves are interesting, demonstrating the best features of Greek mythology, and they have inspired many works of art. I have chosen two of my favorites, surely pinnacles of Western art. The two myths will be about, Perseus, and Leda and the Swan.

Perseus

Danae's father King Acrisius ofArgos once questioned the oracle about the future. The oracle prophesied that Danae would give birth to a son who would kill him. Fearing that, the king built a brazen chamber under ground and there he guarded Danae. Zeus, who lusted after Danae had intercourse with her in the shape of a stream of gold, which poured through the roof into Danae's lap. From that imaginative union Perseus was born. When her father afterwards learned that she bore a child, he would not believe that she had been seduced by Zeus. He cast her with her child in a chest, and cast it into the sea. The chest was washed ashore on the island of Seriphus, which is one of the islands called Cyclades, where Polydectes was king.
Polydectes, who colonized Seriphus and there became king, fell in love with Danae but was unable to be with her because of Perseus's. And as a time-honored method to get rid of uncomfortable persons he gave Perseus a dangerous assignment far away. Polydectes sent young Perseus to fetch and bring back the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, a seemingly impossible task, since anyone who looked at Medusa died. Fortunately, Perseus had help; he was guided by Hermes and Athena. In order to find his way he met the Graeae, who were sisters of the Gorgons, old women from birth. The three Graeae had but one eye and one tooth between them, and these they passed to each other in turn. Perseus, taking their tooth and eye, compelled them to show him the way to the Nymphs who had the winged sandals and a wallet (kibisis). Once the Graeae had shown him the way, he gave them back the tooth and the eye, and coming to the Nymphs, he managed to get the sandals and the wallet.
He then slung the wallet about him, fitted the sandals to his ankles, and put the Helmet of Hades on his head, which made him invisible. And having received from Hermes an adamantine sickle he flew to the ocean and caught the Gorgons asleep. With Athena guiding his hand, and looking on his brazen shield, in which he could see reflected the image of Medusa without injury to himself, he beheaded her and put the head in the wallet.

This story has been a source of a number of great art works, none greater than Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. It is one of the greatest Renaissance sculptures, resembling and rivaling Michelangelo's famous David. It shows a superbly muscled Perseus triumphantly emerging with the severed head of Medusa. Seldom has a work of sculpture capture the moment so perfectly as this. The work, a perfect blend of Italian classicism and Greek dramatic gestures, deserves to be better known.

Cellini's Perseus

Leda and the Swan.

Zeus consorted with the beautiful Leda in the form of a swan. Apparently Leda was no shrinking violet, since on the same night she also lay with Tyndareus. Four children were born of the two unions. Polydeuces and Helen, children of Zeus, were born from an egg laid by Leda, while Castor and Clytaemnestra were children of Tyndareus.
This story contains in it the beginning of the great Greek epic story about the Trojan War. Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, of course, was the cause of the war, while Klytemnestra (in English spelling) was the wife of one of the Greek heroes, Agamemnon, whom she had killed. In return, she was killed by their son, Orestes. The Trojan War provided the source material for the Iliad, while the story of Agamemnon and Kytemnestra, was re-told many times, maybe most dramatically in Aeschylos's Oresteia.

The story of Leda and the swan became the creative source of many subsequent paintings, and at least one great, oft-anthologized poem by the Irish William Butler Yates, given below the painting.

My favorite painting is that by Leonardo da Vinci, left to us only in a copy. It depicts a surprisingly loving Zeus in the form of a swan, affectionately nuzzling Leda, while the four children, are about to be hatched form the two eggs. If Helen became half as beautiful as her mother, Leda is on this picture, I can see how she could launch a thousand ships in the Trojan War. The painting has all of Leonardo's hallmarks, including for me the famous Mona Lisa-like half smile, as if she could already foresee the mayhem in Troy and the tragedy of the house of Atreus (Agamemnon, Klytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, etc.) that followed from her union with Zeus.

Copy of Da Vinci's Leda and the Swan

Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

by William Butler Yeats

The Fable.

Nearly as old as the Olympics, bigger than Dinosaur, older than the Titanic, more complex than Pokemon and more of them than Beanie Babies are Aesop's Fables. Every day hundreds of entire classrooms of kids from all over the world read them, learn from them and enhance their living experience by it. So let us see what are these Fables?
In addition to the myths, the Greeks also excelled in a special kind of story the fable. You may have read several of them in your childhood. The distinction between mythological stories, tales and other forms is not easy, as you can see from the following:
The Tale, the Parable, and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated with the teaching of any moral lesson. The Parable is the designed use of language purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than that contained in the words themselves; and which may or may not bear a special reference to the hearer, or reader. The Fable partly agrees with, and partly differs from both of these. The Fable aims at one great end and purpose--the representation of human motive, and the improvement of human conduct. It cleverly conceals its design under the disguise of fictitious characters, by clothing with speech the animals of the field, the birds of the air, the trees of the wood, or the beasts of the forest, that the reader shall receive advice without perceiving the presence of the adviser. The moral of the story is easier to accept this way.
The imagination of Aesop, who single-handedly invented the Fable, is vast. Of his many Fables I have picked three which illustrates them well. You may want to see whether you can figure out the moral of the stories. In case you are too lazy to do so, below each story I am also giving the morals.
THE MAN AND HIS PURCHASER.
A man wished to purchase an Ass, and agreed with its owner that he should try out the animal before he bought him. He took the Ass home and put him in the straw-yard with his other Asses, upon which the new animal left all the others and at once joined the one that was most idle and the greatest eater of them all. Seeing this, the man put a halter on him and led him back to his owner. On being asked how, in so short a time, he could have made a trial of him, he answered, 'I do not need a trial; I know that he will be just the same as the one he chose for his companion.' MoralA man is known by the company he keeps. A perfect example of why parents are concerned about your friends.
THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER.
In a field one summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart's content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest. "Why not come and chat with me," said the Grasshopper, "instead of toiling and moiling in that way?" "I am helping to lay up food for the winter," said the Ant, "and recommend you to do the same." "Why bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; we have got plenty of food at present." But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil. When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew:
Moral
It is best to prepare for the days of necessity
THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE.
A Hare one day ridiculed the short feet and slow pace of the Tortoise. The latter, laughing said: "Though you be swift as the wind, I will beat you in a race." The Hare, deeming her assertion to be simply impossible, assented to the proposal; and they agreed that the Fox should choose the course, and fix the goal. On the day appointed for the race they started together. The Tortoise never for a moment stopped, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to the end of the course. The Hare, trusting to his native swiftness, cared little about the race, and lying down by the wayside, fell fast asleep. At last waking up, and moving as fast as he could, he saw the Tortoise had reached the goal, and was comfortably dozing after her fatigue. MoralSlow but steady wins the race.
So why should you read Greek Fables and Mythology?
Because the stories belong to all Mankind. Even more, they belong to Western civilization, which became its heir. And finally, because as descendents of the Greeks you are inheritors of these priceless myths. And civilizations lose they vitality and ultimately perish if they do not retain what is best of their past. Greek mythology is one of these.
SUMMARY:
This article discussed why Greek Mythology and Fable are still relevant for the young. It described several of the most important myths, pointing out their most interesting features. It discussed why myths work, and how they have influenced Western Literature and the Arts. It indicated the following main reasons for reading them:
1. They are plain fun. They contain exciting stories, interesting characters, gods, goddesses, heroes, bulls, maidens, at least as interesting as those of modern stories.
2. They are wise. The stories are eternal. They stories survived because they are the best Mankind has to offer, and because they deal with situations that are timeless. They matter today as much as at any time. That is the hallmark of great literature. They arose from our collective unconscious and continue to speak to us because of our psychological need for understanding and resolution.
3. Their psychological insights are unparalleled in the history of Mankind. From the Oedipus complex to Narcissism, from penis envy to blood feuds, from conflict between duty and love, they have it all. Nothing has been done in the last 2200 years that equals these.
4. They have infused Literature, Music, Painting, Sculpture, with eternal sources of inspiration. Except the Bible, nothing equals their creative influence.
5. Because the stories belong to all Mankind. Even more, they belong to Western civilization, which became its heir. And finally, because as descendents of the Greeks you are inheritors of these priceless myths. And civilizations lose they vitality and ultimately perish if they do not retain what is best of their past. Greek mythology is one of these.

On prophesies

2005-05-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

History abounds in prophesies. A famous one is in the Bible about Herod (by the way, there were many Herods, who were conflated in the Bible): presumably a child would be born who would become king. Similarly mythical stories are about Oedipus and others. In most of these dire consequences are prophesized (I don't want to get into details because that's not the point): the child would kill his parents. Believing the prophesy, the father, most often king, tries desperately to kill of the child, but of course fails. The child ultimately kills his father (Freud would love this--he actually did). So the question is: why would the father try to kill the child? (Herod is "father image"). If he believes the prophesy, he should know that he cannot avoid it. So he might as well sit back and listen to classical music. If he thinks he can circumvent it, it is obvious that he doesn't believe it. In which case he might as well sit back and listen to classical music.

The same is true about modern-day soothsayers who presumably had foreseen some catastrophe and were desperately trying to warn the Authorities. The same inconsistency obtains. Don't they believe their own visions? If they do, why bother?

There are carefully worded ways in which a prophesy can be true and help allay a disaster--they are similar to careful time travel stories. But history or religion were not written by philosophers or mathematicians.

Here is one possible construct of a prophesy that is both true and actionable: "Either the father/king can find the child and kill him, or the child will kill his king/father (and maybe marry his mom)". This prophesy is not trivial, it has a truth value, it says something that had not been known before, tells the king to get off his ass (and stop lusting after his step-daughter, Salome), and it prophesizes a previously unknown outcome.

The same is true about those annoying, catastrophe-predicting soothsayers. In this case the prediction could be: "Unless the soothsayer succeeds in notifying the authorities about the impending catastrophe, the Empire State Building will crash into the Grand Canyon".

The Historical Jesus and The Elusive Messiah

2005-05-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

Dear friend RC:
As I said on the phone, Crossan’s The Historical Jesus should be required reading; not so much for the general public as for those who undertake another Jesus study. The man, Crossan, is familiar with the many “images” of Jesus. He quotes seven, the Zeolot, the sage, the magician, the King, the itinerant cynic, and so on. As he rightly points out, many “biographies” of Jesus turn out to be autobiographies of the writers.

Before I go on, let me quote from a previous letter of mine in which I summarize Raymond Martin’s summary of the different types of Jesus scholars, which helps to place Crossan in a wider perspective. Of course, Crossan in turn categorizes others. I just love these neat taxonomies!

Raymond Martin, wrote a book, The Elusive Messiah, comparing the different scholars, writers, and especially their methods in search of "the historical" Jesus, his sayings, and so on. The author is not so much interested in the question I have been: just who was Jesus. Rather he compares methodologies. The book has been a revelation for me in the way it demonstrates how different assumptions, acceptance or rejection of certain evidence leads to different conclusions. Martin's greatest contribution is to separate historians and theologians, and provide a 2-fold characterization of all these scholars. He divides them into "conservative" and "liberal", depending on whether they see Jesus as an eschatological prophet or not; and "Naturalists" and "non-Naturalists", depending on whether they seek natural or supernatural explanation. He also reviews the rebuttals sympathetically. He also points out that the acceptance or rejection of The Gospel of Thomas, and Q, and the ordering of the writers of the NT makes a great deal of difference in the conclusions reached by the various scholars; methinks it is the other way around. While sympathetic to the writers' claim for brand new revelation in their books, he focuses instead on the amazing amount of agreement among the scholars (not Barbara Thiering, whom he ignores but for whom I have a soft spot even I if don't belive her conclusions). There seems to be a consensus that John was no disciple, wrote last, and wrote his own theological agenda into his (their? if you believe as I do Fortna's theory of multiple authorship) Gospel. There is similar agreement that we do not know who wrote the other Gospels; the names and characters were added, wistfully, more than 100 years later. Furthermore, contrary to previous opinion, the Synoptics not only did not provide independent confirmation of the events, but clearly copied from each other (or from an Ur-text). The vast number of near identical quotations and their order precludes almost all other possible explanation. They also think that the differences are not due to lapses of memory but due to different aims by the writers. At least one other interesting consensus concerns the outright rejection of the "birth stories" by the two writers who include it, Matthew and Luke, and the rejection of John, whom they see clearly writing his own agenda. As for the birth stories, aside from the fact that the two in the Gospels are irreconcilable, the scholars claim there was no census, and if there had been one, requiring citizens to register in the city of their ancestors would have created a mass exodus and a bureaucratic nightmare. Besides, assuming that most people would even know their lineage, there must have been over 1,000 descendants of David (assuming he was from Bethlehem) still living (I have a mathematical argument showing that there were vastly more than 1000, which I will send you later) ; registration would have been where people lived so they could be taxed, not where they had been born; and it is highly unlikely that Augustus would have made an edict about the house of David, out of power for over 500 years, since it might have conferred some legitimacy over the ruling houses of Hasmodians and later Herodians.

Martin, fortunately, also agrees with me that the historians, Crossan (of whom he thinks very highly), and the Jesus Seminar axiomatically reject anything supernatural, hence their conclusions are almost given from their premises. That is a grave error; after all we do not know if there was a virgin birth, raising of the dead, let alone Resurrection. I prefer those works that question these on the basis of other factual information, for instance, Jesus' older brother, "virgin" meaning "young woman", or the confused accounts of the Resurrection stories, or their retrofitting into Mark, or Barbara Thiering's alternate explanations.

He and I also agree that if the most theologically historical "facts" in the Gospels were to be proven untrue, or highly questionable, it would place the basis of faith on very shaky grounds. As you know, I am even a bit more forceful. I have difficulty with claims of faith independent of history. Or rather unshakable faith, regardless of the facts. After all, the individual's belief was originally based on the belief of the basic correctness of much of the NT. Once this faith strengthened, the individual, of course, can claim that his faith is strong enough to withstand any revelation about the NT and the events therein. But he would never have had such strong faith, had it not been inculcated in him by a belief in the factuality of most items. (I know you disagree).

Crossan points out that most writers pick and chose the lines in the NT to buttress their positions without indicating how their picks accord with the entire NT, without explaining the counter-evidence. He proposes a three-fold triadic (3x3=9) method which takes into account archeology, history, literature, textual criticism, and so on. He also divides the evidence into chronological strata, 0-30, 30-60, 60-90, etc, and also characterizes the events according to the number of independent attestations, including all 20 Gospels.

By and large he agrees with Mack, Klopsock, and the Jesus Seminar in his “Gospel of Jesus”, restricting it to the sayings of Q. As for the rest, he considers it in the context of his triads, fully aware of the various agendas of the writers. To give you but one example, he does a superb job in disentangling the various types of “son of man” titles. He says that in most cases it merely means “I”, the speaker referring to himself. He likens it to the uses of “one” in English. In American, “One should help the needy” means that everyone should do so. In British, “One flies first class” means that the speaker flies first class. You will have to read it for yourself.
To this I can add that in Hungarian "emberfia", meaning "son of man" is simply an apellation to another person without any theological implication.

The philosophical concept of "Nothing"

2005-05-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

I have always been fascinated by the philosophical concept, “Nothing”. The following contains my ideas about it. It would be a surprise to me if it was found to have the depth of thought of a Wittgenstein or Russell, but perhaps it is not without interest. Among its virtues are brevity and I believe clarity—not always found elsewhere.

Nothing
In my opinion, "nothing" is one of the most misunderstood philosophical, mathematical, and mystical (these are probably all equivalent) concept. The misunderstanding is about different ways we think of existence. When we use a word, "it, or something, comes into existence". When we say "the absence of something", something indeed comes into existence. But that something is merely a word, not the thing. (Quine probably has said it better). The problem is vastly confounded by the fact that in English, as in many other languages, the suffix "thing" is appended to "some" and "no" as in "something", as well as to "nothing", or in Hungarian, valami and semmi ("mi" means "thing" in Hungarian). At least German and French don't have this problem. For them half the battle is won.
But I am already ahead of the game, in that I have already committed the first mistake, saying that the opposite of something is nothing, because that usage already confers and ontological existence to "nothing". Maybe I should have said "not something", or use the negation ~something (to stand for not something). In the rest of this article, I shall use ~S to mean not something. And the ~S is not a "thing".
At any rate, the mistake is not to realize that when we name something, what exists is the name, or to be more precise, a series of sound waves, signifying saying the thing, or a pattern of dots on paper which we read. In our minds, to speak loosely, we decode the waves of sound or light and assign a meaning to it. So the sound waves exist, the light packets exist, the thought and its neurological "forms" (neuronal changes) exist, but the "thing" named does not. This can best be seen by speaking of a logical contradiction, like for instance, "square circle". In a sense it exists, but what exists are the words "square and circle" or the joined concept "square circle", but not the square circle, which obviously does not exist, Many writers have used "the Golden mountain" when talking about this problem. The golden mountain is not the best example, because its existence is merely unlikely, not impossible. I prefer square circle, since its existence is impossible. No amount of naming game can bring it into existence. This is true about a less obvious contradiction, "the largest prime". After the Greeks, we can talk about "it", whatever "it" is, but only in the sense that "it does not exist". Of course we are already in trouble again. We cannot name what does not exist, we can only utter words, which do exist. The sentence "the largest prime does not exist", of course can be simply demystified using the form suggested by Russell, "there is no "x" such that "x" is the largest prime". But even mathematicians can get in a bind using concepts like the "null set".
There are several things to consider. One of the firsts is the idea of opposites. For instance, it is to us intuitively obvious that the opposite of up is down or of left is right, things by no means obvious to a creature with circular symmetry. Certainly positive and negative charges are only opposite of each other in that one attracts the other repels. More insidious is the couple, "true or false". A statement has two values, true or false. But the two do not have equal contents. This can best be seen by a trivial example, lottery. If I enter, I can either win or lose. True or false, equal chance? By no means so. To win I have maybe 0.000001% chance, to lose 99.99999%. The two possibilities may be opposites in one sense, but not in another. Let us now look at true or false statements. A statement such that my shoes are in the closet can be true only in one configuration, if the shoes are in the closet. The statement can be false in an infinite ways; the shoes can be in the hallway, stolen, lost, burnt in a fire, and so on. To generalize, P can be true in only one way, its opposite, the falsehood, ~P, can be true in an infinite number of ways.
We should keep this in mind when we consider "nothing". In one way, it is the opposite of "something", but in what way? All the other examples, up-down, positive-negative, attraction-repelling, and so on consist of similar things on both sides. But something and its absence are not similar things; in fact, the latter is not a thing. Treating them equally is to commit Ryle's category mistake.
The difficulty with trying to treat "nothing" (form here on abbreviated as "N") is that it is impossible to visualize it. This difficulty can be seen best in comparison with other hard-to-visualize concepts. Even "impossibilities" can be visualized. Admittedly there is no such thing as "the largest prime", but I can think of a large number which could be just that; if a mathematician could prove (I know it is not possible) that there is such a thing, I would have no problem saying "aha, so it is 128994300000000002340001". Of course, one cannot square the circle: there is no square with an area identical to that of a circle. But if one proved that Pi is not transcendental (I know it is) it would cause me no great discomfort, and I could imagine a square with the requisite properties.
The same can be said about eternity, infinity and similar concepts. I can at least visualize infinity, thinking of an infinitely large number as a very large number to which I can keep adding and it will never end; if it is a distance, I can think of walking on and on and on along a road. Admittedly it is not quite infinity, but at least I can visualize something which for me is infinity.
In contrast, I do not even know how to approach total N. I cannot get to it by successive approximation. I cannot get to it by taking one thing at a time away and trying to visualize what happens when everything has been taken away. What remains is still space, vacuum, or void, all surrounded by something. This negative limit of existing things cannot lead to the non-existent, to N. The physicist's vacuum is teeming with Heisenbergian virtual particles. The Buddhist's void is one out of which things are created. They are not pure N.
One can not arrive at the properties of something by enumerating what it is not. N is not this, not that, does not exist, and so on do not help. And I am not referring to such mystical concepts like ineffable, unnamable, "neti, neti", not this, not that. All of these assume that the Spirit, God, Godhead, Intelligence, and so on exist, but they do not have attributes with which we are familiar.
N in my concept is not "neti, neti", the latter is at least a thing, the former is nothing, a vast fundamental distinction. Hence, when the mystics think they are talking of "nothing", whatever they are talking about is not N. N truly cannot be talked about except as a concept, and be left at that.
The problem of thinking of N is similar to the question, "why is there something instead of nothing?" We, as beings in space and (I think in time, though time is more questionable) cannot conceive of non-being, I suspect because of the fact that, contrary to traditional belief, our reason is shaped and limited by our biology. And our biology is in space and in time. For us to conceive N is impossible.
In my opinion, there should be a moratorium on discussing N, except by discussing the concept of N.
Since nothing intelligent can be said about N, I believe we should take Wittgenstein's injunction, one he did not take himself, and remain silent whereof we cannot speak.
Ps. A few more comments about thinking about and naming some item. When I think of my house, I have a definite image in my mind. I can describe it; I can draw it even. When I think of the North Pole, I can no longer rely on my own image. But I can trust others' description, or describe it on the basis of my understanding in such a way that if I were at the North Pole, I could point to it, saying, "this is the North Pole". When I think of a concept, or an idea, it is not this simple, in that I cannot point to something. But talking about the number 3, in an analogous manner, I can pick it out from all other numbers, I can describe it, give its properties. Things become more difficult when I extend the process to the number 1/3. I know what it is, but I do not see it all; 1/3 is actually not a number, but a definition for calculating one, 0.33333333…Since it goes on to infinity, I can never think of the exact number. Still, I know what it means; I can give a formula for calculating it, give its next digit at any time. So naming 1/3, or 0.3333…. still names a real item, assuming a number is real. Naming Pi becomes still a bit more difficult, because when talking about it, I cannot even encompass all of its digits, cannot in theory name the next digit. But even here, saying "Pi" means something, a real thing. The next step, however, is far more difficult. What do I mean by "the largest prime"? It clearly refers to a number, except to no existing number; in fact to a number which cannot even exist. So "the largest prime", whatever it is, is not a "thing", it is not a definition, it is possibly a concept, although with our present knowledge an impossible one. Curiously, it is not a necessary contradiction in the same way as the concept of "a married bachelor" is, because there is nothing a priorily contradictory about the "largest prime", except to one blessed with infinite mathematical knowledge. So what do we mean by "the largest prime"? I will not try to answer this, except to indicate that whatever we mean by it, naming it does not, and cannot point to a real thing.
This thought process should indicate that great deal of thought should be given to the correspondence between referring to "something" and its referent. Whatever we may be referring to may not correspond to anything.

Greek drama, philosophy, and mythology in classical music

2005-05-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Two of my loves have been ancient Greek lore and classical music. I have noticed how many classical works were based on ancient Greek topics. At the behest of one of my Greek friends I wrote an article connecting the two areas. I have been very pleased with the article, since I don't think there are any works specifically discussing this topic. The following is the beginning of the article. I hope it will whet your appetitet to follow the hyperlink at the end, which contains the entire article, including paintings and opera excerpts.

GREEK DRAMA, PHILOSOPHY AND MYTHOLOGY IN CLASSICAL MUSIC

I: SUMMARY
It is a curious fact that, while the influence of ancient (or classical) Greek accomplishment has been dealt with in Philosophy, Science, Literature, Fine Arts, and Architecture, similar influence on Music has been much less acknowledged or discussed. This, despite the fact that with the exception of the Faust and Don Juan figure, most other art archetypes have been based on the ancient Greek models. This article has been written to redress this balance. It has a 2-fold purpose: a) to indicate why the re-creation of the ancient Greek drama, mythology and philosophical thought in musical form should be of interest to the reader, whether a musician, an artist of sorts, a historian, a politician, a teacher, and especially, a Greek American, and b) to describe some of the important works well enough to serve as a guide for those who, true to Greek form, will want to keep on learning.
This article will show that far from being dead, Greek thought is still relevant and serves as a creative fertilizer to artists and musicians. Furthermore, music is universal, and as such can serve to make the original works available to people not familiar with the original. Also, great art can shed new light to great art; great musicians can illuminate aspects of the original that may have been dormant in it.
To make the treatment more tractable, I divided the works in three categories.
1: Greek Drama in Music (Oresteia, for instance), 2: Works about Greeks (Socrates, Symposium, Heraclitus, etc.) 3: Works based on Mythology or Poetry(Hercules, Ariadne, etc.). I will also include a list of the most important works and some relevant facts in the Introduction Section. Works in the first two categories will be discussed in some detail, those in the third somewhat less so. I will steer a balance between historical, musicological, and musical comments.
If I had to pick a single opera to recommend about the surviving Greek dramas, it would be Harry Partch's Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a frighteningly original musical play, a modern American version of Euripides' The Bacchae. But why stay with a single recommendation? Enesco's Oedipe is for me the most successful over-all musical rendering of a Greek drama (actually two); Richard Strauss' Elektra is the most dramatic, brutal, deservedly best known; Stravinsky's opera-oratorio, Oedipus Rex in Latin (!), the most monumental; Taneyev's Oresteia, though in Russian, is probably most conventionally operatic, easy on the ear for those not overly adventurous, at least musically. And to hear a great singer like Maria Callas (as captured in records) in Cherubini's Medea, almost two hours of beautiful, dramatic music, showing Medea's love, rage, and anger is to be endlessly thrilled, experiencing that complex, tragic character anew.
These are some of the pleasures offered to those willing to re-experience their Greek lore in music.
II: INTRODUCTION
To introduce this article with a discussion of why the ancient Greek accomplishment is still of interest would be to preach to the choir. Besides, Hanson's and Heath's book, Who Killed Homer? has carried out that task most admirably. My task is a more difficult one, to indicate why the re-creation of the ancient Greek drama, and Greek figures and thought in musical form should be of interest to the reader, whether one is a musician, an artist of sorts, a historian, a politician, a teacher, and especially, a Greek American. This can best be done by demonstrating, as the article will indicate, that far from being dead, Greek thought is still relevant and serves as a creative fertilizer to artists and musicians. Furthermore, music is universal, and as such can serve to make the original works available to people not familiar with the original. Also, great art can shed new light to great art; great musicians can illuminate aspects of the original that may have been dormant in it. Finally, it is just great fun.
It is a curious fact that, while the influence of ancient (or classical) Greekaccomplishment has been dealt with in Philosophy, Science, Literature, and Architecture, similar influence on Fine Arts and Music has been much less acknowledged or discussed. This, despite the fact that with theexception of the Faust and Don Juan figure, most other art archetypes have beenbased on the ancient Greek models. When I started writing this article, I thought I might be able to cover most important works inspired by the Greek originals. To my surprise, I have found such a vast number of such works that an exhaustive treatment became clearly impossible. In hindsight, this is not surprising, since, along with the Bible, the Greek lore has been the main source of Western artistic subjects. Early operas by Monteverdi and Cavalli in Italy, Lully, Rameau, and Charpentier in France almost exclusively used Greek subjects. In fact, to give you even a small indication of the wealth of Greek-inspired classical music, I needed to restrict the present treatment to works still in the present repertoire, from approximately 1800.
To make the treatment more tractable, I divided the works in three categories.
1: Greek Drama in Music (Oresteia, for instance), 2: Works about Greeks (Socrates, Symposium, Heraclitus, etc.) 3: Works based on Mythology or Poetry(Hercules, Ariadne, etc.).
I plan to discuss the most important works in the body of the article. However, the table at the following website:

www.paulhoffman.com/Greek/grdrmpsound.htm

gives you and indication of the vastness of musical literature inspired by the Greek lore.

String quartets; what is in a name.

2005-05-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have always been unhappy with the names of string quartets. No matter how many times string quartets (and trios) change personnel they use the same name. I think they should at least indicate the change. This is a letter I wrote about it to the Editor of Fanfare magazine, my favorite classical music review magazine. Reading it has cost me a lot of money--all worth it.

Editor,

I always read with interest your reviewers’ often heroic “genealogical” attempts at clarifying the make-up of string quartet groups like the Borodin (28:5, p. 84), the Takàcs (28:5, p. 86,), the Juilliard, or the Budapest of yore. Frankly, I find these difficult to follow, let alone remember.

I know keeping the original name is a time-honored tradition. Still I wonder at the desperate attempts of the groups to keep the same name even when the thread with the original name is extremely tenuous, and when even their styles of playing is drastically different from those of the seminal members. I suspect that no little financial consideration is involved in keeping the original name; after all I don’t think the audience in the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society would still flock to the performance of the 8th generation of the Juilliard Quartet if instead of that hallowed name the group took on a different one. Nor would record companies be nearly as eager to contract them to record still another traversal of the same repertoire, as has been the case, for instance, with the ever-young Beaux Arts trio, which too has gone through more metamorphoses than was dreamt of in Ovid’s philosophy. I suspect, like death and taxes, the Juilliard or the Takàcs will always be with us.

As a contribution to truth-in-advertising my recommendation for your reviewers is to at least append a numeral to the name of the Quartet to indicate the descendancy. After all, it was done to all the French Kings called Louis.

May I suggest the following designation for the Juilliard . (I am not a discographer so it is possible that the list is not correct):

Juilliard 1: 1946-55, Mann, Koff, Hillyer, Winograd
Juilliard 2: 1955-58, Mann, Koff, Hillyer, Adam
Juilliard 3: 1958-66, Mann, Cohen, Hillyer, Adam
Juilliard 4: 1966-69, Mann, Carlyss, Hillyer, Adam
Juilliard 5: 1969-74, Mann, Carlyss, Rhodes, Adam
Juilliard 6: 1974-86, Mann, Carlyss, Rhodes, Krosnick
Juilliard 7: 1986-96, Mann, Smirnoff, Rhodes, Krosnick
Juilliard 8: 1996-? Smirnoff, Copes, Rhodes, Krosnick
Juilliard 18: 20??

Blogstart and Global Brain by Howard Bloom

2005-05-19T05:54:00.000-07:00

My very first blog. If my friends could only see me now. Being computer- and Internet-challenged, and using 1.45 fingers while typing, I never thought I would make it, especially because blogstart has rejected 17 (a prime) of my proposed PIN names . I finally resorted to a nickname my friend gave me back in Hungary, swearing that if that doesn't work I stop. It worked. Needless to say that the site rejected an even higher number of my proposed website addresses (http something). How do people do it? (I used to wander about that in another context in my youth). I finally came up with "elkepzelheto" (without the required accent mark on the second "e" and an umlaut on the "o" used in Hungarian--not an easy language, that's why I switched to English). Oh yes, the word means imaginable. I figured the odds of anyone using it would be vanishingly small. I was right.
At any rate, the grateful readers can thank Jane X for my start, as can be seen from the exchange below on Howard Bloom's acclaimed (?) book, Global Brain.

review of GLOBAL BRAIN (or lack of it)

Paul,

Anyone who can write such glorious opinions should definitely have a blog! How can you not share them with the world? Depriving all but the select few of us who correspond with you of some of the best entertainment in town! I am laughing so hard tears are streaming down my face!

How did you know that I love four box charts – I have them for nearly everything – in fact one was intimately involved in one of my early meetings with Jean – but then that is another story – perhaps for another cup of coffee…. Our dear friend Jean is leaving for France, so we will all have to wait until June for more coffee and good conversation….

Later,

---Jane

Jane,

Here is a framework for you, a matrix with 4 members" Conscious and Competent (and their opposite). You can have four combinations: Conscious-Competent, Conscious-Incompetent, Unconscious-Competent, and Unconscious-Incompetent. Howard Bloom is Conscious-Incompetent, in other words an well-read-opinionated-supercrank, the worst of its kind. Frankly, talking about his book is a waste of ink. After twohundredwhoknowshowmany pages (which I raced through to stop the agony) I have no idea where his famed Global Brain or Global Network comes from or what it is. His breathless error-filled, simplified, poorly-written chapters, like Athens vs. Sparta, etc., support not a wit his thesis. Is it that we are linked with bacteria and honey badgers into a planetary web (check out the first inane paragraph on page 207). So what? Tell me what you have learnt from him that you can use. What happened to memes?, Do you now understand how other people or mitochondria think and receive your message. Can you now talk to the blue algae, like Dr. Doolittle? Can you send messages to Jean using Abullard's mooings? Conjure up Pythagoras for an intergalactic travel, along with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the usual suspects?

As you gather, reading The Global Brain, was extremely exasperating. I used up my allotted expletive, "Idiot", on the margin; I was forced to use "Idiot squared and cubed", borrowing infinities not dreamt of even by Cantor. By the way, I am certain Bloom will end up in an asylum, where he will consider himself diversity generator, talking to the viruses, quarks and leptons, hoping for another Big Bang so he could socialize with the protons. Nuff said.

He heaps an awful lot of facts from the Big Bang to our time and beyond to arrive at his thesis (whatever it is), and I am not exactly persuaded by the facts that protons are social and bacteria communicate that there is a global network now. He believes his own metaphors. He plays fast and lose with facts, picks what he needs, ignores counter opinions, and if he brings them up, they appear as caricatures. Can't separate facts, hypotheses, verified, unverified, unverifiable, whatever. He clearly misunderstands genetics, let alone his bete noir, the selfish gene. Nowhere does he give a shred information on the mechanism for global linking. As for group selection, I am firmly against it because I can find no mechanism for it; Bloom's smarter colleague, D.S. Wilson uses Bloom's derided method of game theory and genetics to derive altruism from group selection, and he maybe right. So what, that is an intramural skirmish among scientists.
A framework that may be helpful to you guys is his five essential elements for the “collective learning machine”, even though even here I have to say that the best part is the fancy nomenclature. Maybe he should be a consultant. Any job openings with your company? How about it Jean? If you are still around.
1. “Conformity enforcers stamp enough cookie-cutter similarities into the members of a group to give it an identity…”
2. “Diversity generators spawn variety. Each individual represents a hypothesis in the communal mind…”
3. “Inner-judges are biological built-ins which continually take our measure, rewarding us when our contribution seems to be of value and punishing us when our guesswork proves unwelcome or way off the mark…”
4. “Resource shifters shunt riches, admiration, and influence to learning-machine members who cruise through challenges and give folks what they want. Meanwhile, resource shifters cast individuals who can’t get a handle on what’s going on into some equivalent of pennilessness and unpopularity…”
5. “Intergroup tournaments…force each collective intelligence, each group brain, to churn out innovations for the fun of winning or for sheer survival’s sake.” Whatever...
But even here I can't resist pointing out that whenever in any system there is similarity, it is of course due to his Conformity enforcers; if there is a change, the Diversity generators are responsible, when there is a competition for anything he drags in Intergroup tournaments. It's like tarot cards. Or worse. I can come up with a framework:
1. Strong beats weak 2. Slow outlasts fast, 3. Needy gets supplied first (or last), 4. Grasshopper syndrome (save now spend later). 5. If you don't use it (right away) you lose it. I can go through the history of the Universe selecting events that can be demonstrated using the above. Or using the "rule of three" which is no rule whatsoever: Driving Force, Resisting Force, and Resolution. Come to think about it, a murky philosopher, Hegel (now there is a man who would love Bloom and maybe vice versa) has already come up with something equally unverifiable, with which he held Europe in awe for a century: Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis. Or here is another or (you see what happens when I get started!): 1. Attraction wins, 2. Repulsion wins, 3. Revolving things. I bet I could make it works. If things move, Attr, beats Rep., if they decline, Rep. wins over Attr, and so on.

I have read many so called systems theorizers: In history the most famous historiographers are Spangler (absolutely superb), and Toynbee (almost as good), and of course Carl Marx (I can tell you guys a few things about communism!). Of course, recently Fukuyama (The End of History) and Huntington (The Clash of Civilization). By far the best system builder is a (transpersonal) philosopher named Ken Wilber. In fact, in my opinion he is the best philosopher of the last 30 years. He is also a Buddhist or Eastern monk, but no one is perfect. I have read everything he has written, which is a lot, and some of it is not easy. He is crystal clear in his writings, but he has a lot to say. His Magnum Opus is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality but that takes commitment (worth it). An interesting starter is Theory of Everything.

If I don't stop I will be longer-winded than Howard Bloom.

Paul
Ps. I reread a bit of The Lucifer Principle. The thesis is that aggression is "innate" in animals and men (unlike the Seville document--check it out on the 'Net). He demonstrates it in mindnumbing detail. I think he thinks that Mother Nature (always trouble when someone writes this) arises out of the ashes and creates anew, better and better. I think he is still mining this ore in Brain