Everything I am about to say is obvious, but it hit me with some force this evening anyway.

If a work of art requires for its success that I, as audience, bring to it a certain attitude/mode of perception, but I happen not to be in that mood or can’t seem to muster it intentionally, am I lazy or is the art failing? And if the answer to that question is a diplomatic “don’t worry, nobody is to blame,” how can the serious contemporary problem of widespread art-to-audience mutual dissatisfaction ever be solved?

Most art takes care to deliver its own message, but only some art takes care to deliver information about how best to receive that message. That’s a much harder task, and one that is only really necessary because of the chaotic overabundance of conflicting art cultures that coexist and interbreed in the modern world. In past centuries, when art cultures were established with much greater ubiquity, artists and audiences generally had closely congruent ideas about how the whole exchange would work, and so the risk of art-to-mindset mismatch wasn’t nearly as common and important as it is now. As a result, there isn’t much of a tradition of techniques for conveying that kind of contextual information, stuff like “this piece will work for you if you look at it from this point of view…”

In some ways, museums and program notes have taken on that duty – with hardly any success, in my opinion. Those art museum placards strike me as pretty ridiculous: they pseudo-informatively tell you that a piece is made out of “wood, glass, wax,” and everyone who passes by leans over to take this in, as though somehow it’s going to help them with the extremely difficult task of figuring out why they are looking at it at all. I’m not being facetious – it’s truly a difficult task, because the reason why you’re being shown one work in a museum might be thousands of miles away (historically, culturally, aesthetically) from the reason you’re being shown the one next to it. I realize that the placards don’t actually claim to be telling us anything truly helpful – they’re just identifiers – but people end up reading them looking for clues, because they need clues, and you take what you can get.

I started thinking about this stuff because just now, at my iPod’s suggestion, I was listening to John Adams’ orchestral work Fearful Symmetries (1988), and it was striking me as 100% vapid, devoid of value. This is a piece that I’ve heard several times before, and though I’ve always had some reservations about it, I’ve still generally enjoyed it. You can listen to the first minute of it at Amazon, but if you’ve heard any of John Adams’ other pieces from the 80s, you can imagine this one well enough. It basically chugs along, in various flavors of steady, pumping agitation, for about half an hour. It “goes somewhere” in very local ways, but on the large scale it doesn’t go anywhere, and this is readily apparent to even a first-time listener, after 10 minutes of shifting in and out of different gears. In the third quarter it kind of rolls into some mud and then grinds its way back out. Finally, it rises to a height of violence, which is suddenly cut off and is followed by several enigmatic minutes of very quiet new-agey synthy burbling, which eventually just sort of dies out. I respect the peculiar cheek of that ending, though it adds up to neither a truly “transcendent” effect nor a satisfying close. It’s just kind of a stunt.

My previous feelings about this piece were that it was just too undisciplined, too meandering, too pointless (it has hardly any recurring material worth mentioning, over those 28 minutes, beyond the general sense of pulsing forward motion). Too much like just goofing around on a fancy synthesizer. But I liked many of the sounds Adams had rigged up – his orchestrations are never less than gleamingly slick – and, well, there’s just something satisfying about hearing a full orchestra bouncing along with such force.

But tonight, for me, there was no such satisfaction. I felt that I was hearing the piece “clearly” for the first time, not as a whirring, pulsing machine, but as a collection of musical devices, as a discourse in notes. “That ostinato is still going; now those triads are going up and down. The rhythm of this layer is being tweaked with this chain of syncopations, while that other layer is still regular….” I was hearing it in that listening style that I think of as “rhetorical” (or “structural”) – the music was plugged into my language processing unit, and only indirectly, from there, into my emotional/aesthetic processing. Or so it felt. I had a vivid sense of my mind asking the music, “yes?” and the music shamelessly wasting my time with no real answer.

Having listened to and enjoyed a great deal of John Adams’ music in the past (including this piece), it was clear to me even then, in the midst of that dissatisfied experience, that the problem was my attitude. Of course this piece had nothing to say to me, if I was going to listen that way, and John Adams would be the first to admit it. “Structural” listening, in this case, was a surefire path to annoyance. I thought back to certain frowny music professors of mine whose eyes rolled involuntarily at the mention of minimalism, and remembered my sense of frustration with them: They were expressing their displeasure with unintelligent music, but they were the ones being unintelligent, I always thought, because they weren’t able to flex their minds enough to use a different listening model and enjoy the fact that this music “worked” completely unlike the music they taught. Instead, they rigidly and unimaginatively complained that it didn’t develop in a valuable way, that it just exploited simplistic gestures, that it was mindless – which is sort of like a knife professor complaining that a spoon isn’t sharp enough to cut anything and that it encourages the eating of soft, lazy food. Actually, I should make that “a conservative cutlery professor,” because the point is that he really ought to know better.

I have felt for a long time that there are two distinctly contrasted ways of listening to music, or what’s the same thing, two levels on which music can “work.” I know them well, internally, though I’m not sure I can quite define and name them. Roughly, there is music that works like language, and music that doesn’t. Beethoven is like language – it has a syntax and each work is a sort of discourse. If you’re not following the logic of that discourse, then in a very real sense, you’re not following the piece. John Adams is not like language – it presents an experience, not a thought. If you, like I was, are examining how the roller-coaster is constructed, you aren’t on the roller-coaster.

Here’s another way that I think about these two modes of listening: one type of music embodies the voice of its composer or (in, for example, the case of Mahler) embodies some other voice for literary purposes – either way, the music itself is communicative, is a voice. The other type of music is not a voice; it is like an outside stimulus or an abstracted sensation. Debussy’s music is in no way like Debussy “telling us” anything – it is, quite intentionally, like natural phenomena, meant to elicit the same kind of responses as real natural phenomena. Debussy was not writing a musical discourse about the sea; he wanted his musical Mer to deliver the same sort of beauty as the real one. “There is nothing more musical than a sunset,” he wrote. Beethoven, by contrast, is generally talking directly to us, and we must listen to what he says or else risk losing the thread. His Pastoral is not an illustration of the countryside; it is a discourse inspired by and on the subject of the countryside. Its climaxes are rhetorical climaxes; Debussy’s climaxes are the actual crests of waves.

But again, this is just one angle from which to approach the nature of this dichotomy, it’s not quite the essence of the dichotomy itself. There are other angles on it, some of which overlap with famous dichotomies in art philosophy. You could argue that the “experiential” music has something to do with Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” principle and the “rhetorical” music with his “Apollonian” principle. These are often applied to aesthetics in the sense that the Dionysian appeals to the senses and the Apollonian to the intellect. But I’m not particularly fond of this model – there’s something Freudian and more than a little judgmental about the connotation of “Dionysian” – it implies that art that is not constructed on “high” structural principles is in some sense no better than booze, just a sensual indulgence with a familial resemblance to the orgies of Dionysus and the dark rumblings of the id. Plus, the Apollonian/Dionysian model implies that the two types are opposed forces, whereas I see these poles of impersonal Debussy and personal Beethoven as potentially combinable.*

John Adams himself recently called attention to another one of the old dichotomies: Schiller’s “naive” vs. “sentimental” art. Naive art is the direct expression of the artist who experiences the state he is expressing; sentimental art is the calculated expression of something external to the artist who constructs it. This is fundamentally quite unlike the distinction I’m talking about, but there are some valuable parallels: the “voice-like” music is intended to be perceived as emanating from a source that is “naively” experiencing the emotional content of the work; the “sunset-like” music is not intended to be perceived as emanating from any such source; it has been “sentimentally” constructed so as to create an impression that is as external to the artist (and the work) as it is to us.

Put it this way: in Liszt, the music itself experiences high emotion; in Ravel, the music attempts to bowl us over with a sunrise, but the sun does not feel emotion and has nothing itself to say. Those are the local effects, and I am talking about the analagous structural approaches: are the notes words in a sentence spoken by the piece, or are they tiles in a mosaic?

Okay, so there are these two types of music – from there I would go on to say there are also these two types of any art. Paintings where the significance of the scene depicted is the point, and the rest is just supporting craft…vs. paintings where the aesthetic flavor of the image is the point, and the subject is secondary. A religious painting and a still life may hang next to each other but it’s just numbing to think of them as functioning equivalently. One of them is an artist outright talking to you about something; the other is a silent object, made available by an artist for you to experience. Art-appreciation people may confusingly tell us that the still life is a case of an artist “telling us” things about light, shade, balance, etc. But of course this “telling” about the substance of the art itself is not a true “telling.” A book tells us something in its text; whether the design of the book “tells” us something about design is another sort of matter, several degrees removed. That sort of information is not, in fact, “told” to us, even though the artist may specifically hope we are aware of it. It must be actively extracted from the work, where it lives as mechanism, not content.

In music, this distinction between mechanism and content is hard to make – Beethoven’s “rhetorical” notes also always sound like something nice! (on the other hand, Schoenberg’s don’t, particularly) – which is part of the reason that learning to listen to the “voice” of a piece was so difficult for me and is (in my estimation) nearly impossible to teach. In a paper that I wrote in college on a related subject, I proposed that “surface” meaning (which is here sort of like “sunset music”) and “structural” meaning (which is here sort of like “voice music”) were just points on a spectrum, and that beyond “surface” meaning you had ultra-surface-y stuff like listening to the timbres of the individual instruments, and beyond “structure” you had ultra-abstracted stuff, like a piece of music as a whole being used as a symbol for something else (as in the car commercial language of Mozart=classy!). It was a sloppy and unconvincing theory, but I stand by it at least insofar as I don’t think that “surface-y” and “structure-y” are two isolated points with nothing between them; obviously, there’s some kind of middle ground that needs to be involved.

The three-axis system of visual abstraction proposed by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics is worth a look and probably relevant.

But for the sake of this entry, which I desperately want to have finished writing since it’s now been 5 days since I was listening to Fearful Symmetries and nobody’s going to read this far anyway, let’s assume that there is a clear distinction to be made between one kind of music/art and another, as described above. The general bias in the intellectual world seems clearly to be toward the “discursive” music, the “structural” kind. The prejudices I pointed out in the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy are deeply felt, it would seem, by most people who want to say something about art. It’s right there in the several meanings of the word “superficial” – surfaces are associated with ignorance. Music that communicates syntactically appeals to the mind more than to the senses, and is thus more edifying, and is thus more valuable, and is thus better.

Part of me wants to resist this logic. Aren’t exquisite non-linguistic non-structural experiences far “superior” to stupid structural ones, in every possible sense? Yes, obviously. And as many have pointed out, intellectuals generally favor those things that allow them the most opportunities for intellectual display. Big old sensory experiences are much harder to theorize and argue about than structurally elaborate constructions. As a friend said the other day, it’s a lot harder to say something interesting about plot than it is to say something about symbolism, so even though symbolism isn’t all that important to most readers, it gets discussed constantly.

But on the whole, it does feel like there’s some kind of objective, inescapable truth down there – a pretty picture of a sunset is one thing, but an insightful thought about a sunset will always be higher, more edifying, more valuable …

…except what game are we playing? A-ha! This is the key. We are playing the game of intellectual value. If we were playing the game of prettiness, the picture would win.

So my question was, “Is Fearful Symmetries actually bad?” The answer is “no.” I’d enjoyed it before and probably will again. For all I’m concerned, that’s the end of the story.

Next question: “When I’m in a mood where I’m enjoying it, am I just settling for lowbrow thrills?” The answer is “I suppose so, but the disapproval you’re implying is silly. What, are you supposed to never enjoy “thrills”? Is the only worthwhile aesthetic activity placid contemplation of weighty substance? Give me a break. Grow up.”

Final question: “So why is it that I feel like I’m discovering its true worthlessness?” The answer is “You’re listening for a voice and it’s not there. That seems negligent on the part of the artist, to you. However, if you were listening for thrills and instead there was serious content, you would never think to blame the artist, even though you would be equally disappointed. This is because you associate the ideas of blame and negligence with the realm of intellectual value, but not with the realm of entertainment and thrills. These associations are your own biases. Ultimately, nobody is to blame for this mismatch. The piece simply isn’t offering the sort of thing your mind wants to hear right now.”

This brings me, finally, to where I intended to start, with the question of “if nobody is to blame, then how will we ever improve the drastic contemporary problems of audience alienation?” But I am sick, sick, sick of writing this entry and refuse to go any further. Some other time.

* One of the reasons I am such an admirer of Medtner is because at times he seems to have achieved this sort of combination.**

** Several weeks later: I keep thinking about that previous note and regretting it – Medtner is actually one of the most devoutly Beethovenian of composers, and the idea that any of his music is a “combination,” I have realized, is left over from my initial impressions of pieces whose developmental life was so dense that I got lost and ended up just enjoying the scenery, which is indeed also very lovely. But after I came to know those pieces better, there was really no question which side of the fence they fell on. A proper example of a composer who really and intentionally achieves a fusion of the two kinds of music would be Stravinsky.