Chopped-Up Chopin
In today’s New York Times, Michael Kimmelman has a quite devastating review of a concert in which the pianist, Lang Lang “twittered his way through Chopin’s F Minor Piano Concerto.”
In making his point, Kimmelman quotes some reflections by the estimable Anne Applebaum:
It brought to mind what Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about interpreting history these days. Writing for The New Republic, she reviewed a book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke,” about the lead-up to World War II, which stitched together, without comment, hundreds of nuggets culled from newspapers, memoirs and other (often secondary) sources to suggest a case for pacifism.
“A series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes,” Ms. Applebaum called these orchestrated tidbits. “Ripped from their respective contexts each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote.”
That’s not a bad description of what Mr. Lang did with the Chopin concerto. What Ms. Applebaum added is also true about music: “There are many legitimate ways to write history, even many avant-garde, nonlinear, novelistic ways to write history, as the historiography of World War II itself well illustrates.” But history persuasively told, like music interpreted, comes down to cogent arguments. The pianist Glenn Gould was an eccentric interpreter, but his interpretations, whether you liked them or not, had their own internal, neurotic logic. They made an elaborate case for themselves. The same could be said about playing by Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter.
Flashy passages strung together don’t make an argument. They make an assortment of fetishes. “Perhaps,” Ms. Applebaum wondered at one point about “Human Smoke,” “the whole book is a gigantic practical joke, a stunt intended to provoke.” I wondered the same thing during the concerto.
I take it that under “forms of thought” (Stanley Fish’s phrase, quoted in Matthew Boudway’s post below) one should include the ability to mount an argument in a coherent way, whether one is writing history or interpreting music. Diagramming sentences helped show the form of a sentence. But what about the form of a paragraph, of an essay, of a book?
In the current New York Review of Books, the philosopher John R. Searle makes an interesting observation:
It is much easier to refute a bad argument than to refute a truly dreadful argument. A bad argument has enough structure that you can point out its badness. But with a truly dreadful argument, you have to try to reconstruct it so that it is clear enough that you can state a refutation.
Form, structure, coherent argument — if we can’t bring back the nuns, at least bring back the ratio studiorum!
Every college graduate should have taken a good course in logic. Maybe two, but of different kinds,one focusing on logical forms and one focusing on identifying arguments in context.
We have four layers. The lowest layer, which we can no longer access directly, is Chopin’s “argument” – his musical conception and intent. Next is the way he recorded his “argument” – the score he left us, with its conventions and limitations. Third is Lang Lang’s (and the orchestra’s) interpretation. Finally, we have the critic’s reception and understanding of that interpretation of that scoring of that musical intent. None of these layers are purely objective, and some are extremely subjective. Words like “argument”, “account” and “coherent” are meaningful only by analogy in music, anyway.
It seems possible that Lang Lang’s account was coherent, but the critic didn’t understand it or didn’t care for it.
Btw – the music critics in Chicago can be tough on our own guys and gals (they never quite embraced Barenboim) but it would be rare for them to rip to shreds a flyover superstar like Lang Lang, even though we do get mail-it-in efforts here from time to time from the visiting royals. I admire the NY Times reviewer’s brass.
Why should we expect either the children or their teachers to be able to think and read/ About 30 years ago I had occasion to look up antecedents in A Handbook of English (McGraw-HIll?) and to look up how a nationally popular 8th= grade science text book treatedscientific method. Antecedents weren’t covered at all, and neither was scientific method. Apparently they weren’t worthy of attention. I wonder if they’re taught now.
Jean,
About grammatical form vs. content — you make an important point. I strongly suspect that Catholic schools don’t value critical thinking as much as public and other private schools (or some of them) do. Lack of even an interest in critical thinking is why we used to let the clergy pull the wool over our eyes so easily.
I also suspect that those other schools do not teach the limits of logic and scientifific method, which puts the Humanities at great disadvantage when they are vying for the students’ attention. Scientism reigns in the colleges in spite of the demise of logical positivism over 50 years ago. Articles such as Fish’s might turn the tide (Now there’s an ugly mixed metaphor for you)
Professor Gannon –
About other systems of logic —
Quantification logic makes clear differentiations between subjects, predicates, words expressing existence, quantifiers (e.g., all, some, none), relations and logical operations. English grammar doesn’t make these logical elements clear at all, at all. In fact., English is hell when it comes to logical vocabulary and structure. Many people, for instance, don’t know the difference between “nevertheless” and “therefore”, and they don’t know that conclusions can be introduced by different parts of speech (e.g.,therefore, I infer, it follows that, from, in consequence). It wouldn’t take a whole course in quantification logic to teach such vocabulary and the rudiments of logical structure.
Correction (blush, blush): “from” is sometimes used as a *premise* indicator, not a conclusion indicator.