Avant Garde

An American Odyssey from Gertrude Stein to

Pierre Boulez

ROBIN MACONIE

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2012
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2012 by Robin Maconie

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the publisher, except by a reviewer may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maconie, Robin.
Avant garde : an American odyssey from Gertrude Stein to Pierre Boulez / Robin Maconie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8312-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Music—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Avant-garde (Music)—Un States—History—20th
century. I. Title.
ML 197.M124 2012
780.9’04—dc23
2011040954

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Pape Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO
Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

There is time because there are happenings,
and apart from happenings there is nothing.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

 CONTENTS

Introduction

1 The search for King Kong

2 Sacks’s agnosia
3 How not to listen
4 Recording angel
5 The secret life of savages
6 About Wittgenstein
7 La guerre du destin
8 Boulez in the underworld
9 The French connection
10 The poetics of Milton
11 An upside down unicycle
12 Alfred North Whitehead
13 Speaking in tongues
14 Two studies
15 Recent intelligence
16 Art and Realpolitik

Bibliography
About the Author
 Introduction
Hollywood myths of colonizing remote earthlike planets inhabited by flying blue humanoids, stories
of mute great apes brought back to urban civilization, of silent parasitic aliens running amok in cargo
spacecraft in transit back to earth, or of earthly invasion by aliens in flying saucers, can all be
regarded as unfinished business of the American Dream. What Hollywood technology in the west
turns into movie fantasy, MIT and Princeton in the east reinvent as communications science, and
Europeans as avant-garde art and music.
Wherever there is fear of aliens, from outer space, from another continent, or from across the
border, dealing with the imagined threat has to involve adapting to unknown cultures, learning their
language, and understanding and respecting alien traditions and beliefs. Communicating with
indigenous life forms in alien territory, whether a remote island in the Pacific, the planet of a distant
star, or the nursery, is a driving force in western civilization and culture. For the Founding Fathers,
freedom from European governance opened the door to refugees of all cultures and creeds, creating a
community of multiple identities connected by love of liberty, advanced technological capability, and
a desire for progress, but unable to communicate. In such a situation language is reinvented as a form
of state oppression, leaving the arts and music—and Hollywood—as a forum of dreams where
fundamental questions of possibility and reality implied by a belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of
freedom may still be entertained and discussed in the terms of myth and make-believe.
For over a century avant-garde music and art, science, psychology, and information technology
have been locked in a competitive struggle to discover and exploit the source codes of interspecies
communication. Music is the oldest and most experienced of the diplomatic arts; the cradle of
bonding rituals, belief structures, and identity ceremonies from the dawn of time to the present day,
and from the cry of the newborn to the last gasp of the tyrant.
In his lifetime a kite-flying Benjamin Franklin negotiated with British science, French
revolutionaries, and the power of nature itself. An American in Paris, Gertrude Stein negotiated with
language and cubism; her friend Alfred North Whitehead, a British exile in the United States, disputed
the power of reason and number to explain the mysteries of human identity, experience, and
knowledge. After ten years of occupying a key position in the cognitive sciences during the cold war
standoff with the Soviet bloc—a period of extraordinary fertility of invention—the status of advanced
modern music entered a period of decline and academic disbelief. Today the art of music is under
attack by frustrated experts in cognitive linguistics as an activity without rhyme or reason.
The present collection of essays defends the contribution of avant-garde music, and of music in
partnership with language and information science, as necessary, ancient, and authentic. Since in
Hollywood terms (explained in Chapter One) I am a Klingon visitor in western civilization, and a
specialist in the alien tongues of planets Stockhausen and Boulez, their story is my material. The
unexpected dimension, however, is the leading role played by the United States, in wartime as host to
exiled leading European modernists such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky, in industry and higher
education as the birthplace of advanced computing and music technologies for composition and
research at IRCAM in Paris, and as the cradle of a pragmatic realism and imaginative enterprise that
introduced the world of music to concepts of order and association that envious Europeans have since
claimed as their own. Gertrude Stein’s influence radiated outward from Paris back to the New York
avant-garde of John Cage; Whitehead’s rational existentialism triggered a wave of research in the
serialism of Milton Babbitt, set theory of Allen Forte, cognitive theory at MIT, stochastic music at
Indiana, and Elliott Carter’s and Conlon Nancarrow’s music of multiple timescales.
Leading Europeans Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen were among the first to take full
advantage of US ideas and innovations to create intelligent music for the Age of Information, looking
to contacts in the United States and forging alliances with Cage and other cutting edge American
composers to explore and define new musical idioms, new forms of musical speech, and new means
of engagement and dialogue with science and technology. Their success is real. It is ongoing. It is
international. It is peaceful. It is an American success. It deserves to be celebrated.
 1
The search for King Kong
In one episode of Ken Burns’s PBS television documentary series The War, with wry
incomprehension an African American services veteran recalls being stationed in Western Samoa in
1941, where curious and friendly females were eager to know if he and his countrymen had tails.1
Perplexed, he wondered why they would ask such a question. Someone must have warned them that
black people were a different species.
In 2009 James Cameron’s 3D production Avatar was launched in a flurry of publicity as the most
technically advanced movie of all time. Largely created at the end of the world, in digital animation
workshops based in Wellington, New Zealand, the movie is a story of exploration, contact, and threat
of exploitation by English speaking earthlings of the natural assets of alien blue-skinned inhabitants of
Pandora, a planetoid rich in raw materials (uwantium, ugotium) necessary for the survival and
continued growth of planet earth.
For blue read brown. In the language of advertising, blue products are the token of a sanitised
reality. These blue aliens can fly. They are a bird people. And they have tails. Their tribal or species
name is Na’vi. They speak a hybrid language based on soft brown Polynesian phonemes. The name
Na’vi is a sideways morph of Maui (Ma’vi).2 The plot and related love interest turn on whether
representatives of a technically advanced but materially (and by implication, morally and genetically)
exhausted Caucasian culture can successfully cohabit with alien species of nearhumanity existing in a
state of nature and in tune with their environment.
In European mythology, humanoids with tails are associated with the devil. In Avatar the movie,
they are reinvented as primeval beings able to fly like angels. In the terminology of anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the movie’s holistic message is that Nature is raw, humanity is cooked, and the
two need to get on.
The myth of inter-species relations that certain intermediate branches of the human species had
tails can be dated to Captain James Cook’s first scientific expedition to the Pacific Ocean in 1768–
71, and provocative accounts published thereafter of biologist and adventurer Joseph Banks’s alleged
dalliances with Tahitian royalty, and rumors of Pacific island life as loving, free, and unconstrained.
No doubt the coy matrons of Western Samoa who wondered if US black menfolk had tails were
prompted by the identical myth entertained by European intellectuals in the eighteenth century;
certainly their ancestors are likely to have been instructed in this particular myth by visiting
missionaries in the early nineteenth century. The Scottish jurist James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a
liberal judge and one of several experts in the history and evolution of language consulted by the
Royal Society in preparation for Cook’s expedition, instructed the Captain and his scientific adviser
Daniel Solander to report any human species with tails encountered on the voyage. On their return
Solander traveled to Edinburgh in company with James Boswell, Dr Johnson’ friend, to report to his
Lordship that no, the natives did not have tails.
To find a myth associated with Lord Monboddo’s theory of the human species still circulating in
the mid-twentieth century is a tribute to the persistence of oral memory. Historians tend to blur details
of science and scientific method, whose terms are unfamiliar, and be embarrassed at oral traditions,
which are simply hearsay. At a conference of historians in Sydney, Australia, in 1970, Cook
biographer John Cawte Beaglehole referred with customary wit to the experience of highborn
representatives of Pacific culture who traveled back to Europe in the late eighteenth century, and their
enthusiastic reception by polite society, as
live specimens that were given a trip to civilisation, the Ahutoru of Bougainville, the Omai of Captain Furneaux, all the fashion, in
their brief day, of Paris and of London; of some importance, in that day, as examples of the veritable, the unsophisticated, the ‘noble’
savage; of more importance, I think, in the march of romance than in that of science....
—And they had no tails. Tails would have added illimitably to their importance. In November 1772 Banks and Solander were in
Edinburgh, and Boswell has an interesting entry in his journal. ‘Went with Dr Solander and breakfasted with Monboddo, who
listened with avidity to the Doctor’s description of the New Hollanders, almost brutes—but added with eagerness, “Have they tails,
Dr Solander?” “No, my Lord, they have not tails.”’3

Such are the perceptions of the literary mind.

A movie is an ideogram. As in Chinese or Japanese, an ideogram is a combination of icons or
strokes, each with its own item of meaning. The progress of icons can be tracked from movie to
movie, or from movie to the historical record, and even from the historical record (another kind of
fiction) to actual events. Major plot icons in Avatar are travel to a distant place, a pristine
environment; motivated by the search for new sources of provision and raw materials, involving
contact and negotiation with alien life, in this case bird people with wings and tails; recognition of
the alien species as culturally evolved, similar to humankind in nature and society; respect for an
alternative lifestyle lived in harmony with the environment, and issues concerning the philosophy and
evolution of language.
Human-robot interaction is a significant secondary theme. Jake Sully, a lead character in Avatar, is
a paraplegic. Not that it matters. The human explorers interact with alien beings through artificial life
forms, avatars, into whom their minds are downloaded and with whom they maintain telepathic
contact. Such added refinements extend the range of narrative and philosophical threads into more
subtle issues of identity, artificial intelligence, morality and trust, and person to person
communication, none of which is particularly new. The cultural messages of Robbie the Robot and
R2D2 are already embedded in the literature and mythology of Frankenstein, King Kong, and
Gilgamesh.
Underpinning the myth of the robot servant is the gut issue of the silent companion. Behind the
silent companion—great ape or robot—is the silence of mind, which is troubling because one can
never be sure what a silent person is thinking. The decision to cast a leading character in Avatar as
paraplegic intensifies the theme of human dependency on technology by alluding to the actual situation
of a leading scientist of the present day, Professor Stephen Hawking, who is confined to a wheelchair
and speaks through a voice synthesizer. Hawking is a living embodiment of the urban myth of a
supreme intelligence totally reliant on technology for mobility and communication with others. He is
also a time traveler, playing with issues of reality, time travel, and media identity as a guest in the
television series The Simpsons, and ironically in a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next
Generation as a hologram playing poker—a game of chance—with fellow avatars Isaac Newton and
Albert Einstein.
Movie names are another form of sound icon. The names Klingon and King Kong are related: they
contain the same sounds [k]–[i]–[ng]–[on]. They are fakes. Klingon even sounds like a brand name
for cling wrap. But they are intelligent fakes, ideograms made up of a combination of speech
elements—phonemes—suggestive of kingship, exotic life, tribal culture, and the origin of species.
The [ng] sound is a giveaway sound in Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet, a system of writing
devised to assist Cook’s scientific explorers to notate the speech of exotic oral cultures encountered
along the way in a consistent and culturally unbiased manner. Hints and clues of Franklin’s
orthography survive in the spelling conventions of Pacific dialects. In Fiji the sound [ng] is
represented by the letter and sound [q]—thus the name of a former politician is spelt Qarase but
pronounced [ngarazé]. There is a reason for this curious substitution. In American English the sound
[ng] is usually found in the middle or at the end of a word, and is pronounced with a soft intonation,
as in singing. However in the eighteenth-century English speech of Franklin’s day, and at the
beginning of a word or name, the sound [ng] is pronounced with a hard accent: sing–qing. A Chinese
speaker might be tempted to pronounce Klingon as Kling-qong, a closer approximation to the sound
of King Kong.
Language is full of such evolutionary alternatives. The surname of the late Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi, depending on what news source you read, may be written as Gadhafi, Qaddafi,
Qadhafi, Kadafy, Khadafy, or Kaddafi. The name of former Great Leader Mao Tse-Tung is now
written and pronounced Mao Zedong. Peking has become Beijing. The romantic land of dreams
Coleridge called Xanadu is currently Romanized as the more down-to-earth Shangdu or Zhongdu.
Movies about space exploration are grounded in history and are really about exploration on earth
in the search for raw materials. The Alien series revisits the novels of Joseph Conrad about petty
merchant traders in the remote far east on the journey home with cargoes of raw materials and haunted
psychologically by the encounter with an alien way of life. The monster of Alien, like the great white
whale of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, is a monster from the deep, the same deep representing deep
space as the ocean depths. On occasion the nightmare encounter with a survival of primeval nature is
hallmarked as local and psychological in origin: the malevolent HAL computer program in Stanley
Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and equally discarnate “monster from the Id” as
described in the Freudian speech of Fred M. Wilcox’s 1957 movie Forbidden Planet.
For the boomer generation, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is reinvented as Captain Jim, James T. Kirk
of the starship Enterprise, a spacecraft on an endless “mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek
out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” For their
predecessors in the 1930s and 1940s the equivalent hero explorer is Flash Gordon in his rocket
submarine, facing up to the oriental menace of Ming the Merciless on Planet Mongo. The basic
ideogram is the same in both, its component icons high technology and travel, exploitation and trade
in raw materials, and encounters with wily alien cultures at the ends of the civilized universe. In later
series of Star Trek the alien life forms coalesce and morph into the Klingons, a civilized warrior
race: bronze-skinned, articulate, sophisticated, physically fit, confrontational in style but a
philosophically astute species typically costumed in body armor and identifiable by their distinctive
facial marking.
In movie fictions of the Star Trek genre the science is unquestioned, and advanced technology
more or less taken as read (“the Warp Drive is kaput, Captain, it may take a couple of hours to fix”).
What that series is really about, experienced as episodic distractions from the endless search for raw
materials, is soft philosophy addressing the nature and rights of alien peoples, the origins of language
and culture, and the defense of free enterprise.
All of these issues are old news. They continue to haunt the world of movie fiction because they
have never been resolved in the real world.
Time travel is a constant subtext. Science fiction invents the future to explain the past. There are
paradoxical consequences in explaining the past and thereby altering our perception of the present
and disturbing our sense of who we are. From Terminators I and II and the Back to the Future movie
trilogy to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and its numerous sequels, popular fictions like
to incorporate tantalising riffs on the theme of exploring the universe across time and space that
include journeying back in time. The journey motif has its own lexicon of cliché and stereotype. In
plots of the Terminator genre, the visitor arrives from the future on a mission to protect the present. A
recurrent motif is the circular paradox of traveling into the past, doing away with one’s own
grandfather, altering history and eliminating oneself, thereby releasing grandfather, history, and self to
begin the process all over again in an endless loop amounting to the science fiction equivalent of the
classic “All Cretans are liars” self-canceling paradox attributed to Epimenides, a native of Crete,
circa 600 BC.
Such logical twists and time-traveling plots are Hollywood’s way of conceding that stories about
space travel in the imminent future are in reality about stuff that has already happened in the distant
past. We all know the Empire under orders to strike back in Episode V of George Lucas’s Star Wars
series is the British Empire of King George III plotting revenge on the American colonies after the
Boston tea party episode. In Back to the Future III the complicated futility of time travel fiction is
laid bare in a storyline in which America’s rural past is suddenly a happier place, the mission is to
undo earlier attempts at altering history, and the hi-tech transport or cliché of futuristic technology has
morphed into a gull-wing DeLorean time machine, in 1990 a product without a future.
So if Avatar and Star Trek are actually movies about events and issues that happened long ago, it
follows that the time traveling is taking place now, in the minds of the movie audience, and has the
potential to rewrite an audience’s understanding of past history, and thus to alter irrevocably a
viewer’s sense of national and personal identity.
Both Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Conrad’s Lord Jim are characters of fiction based on the same
historical figure, Captain James Cook of the barque Endeavour. Their tales of exploration are
grounded in the reality of Cook’s scientific voyages to the relatively uncharted Pacific ocean in
search of a lost southern continent rich in raw materials and home to a civilization untouched by
developments in western history. When their fictional characteristics are taken into account, the
species of humankind idealized in movie fictions as the Klingons, and in more recent times as Na’vi,
are identifiable as generically Polynesian and specifically Maori. Body armor and facial decoration
identify the Klingon archetype with the tall, tattooed Maori king Hongi Hika, who spoke English,
visited Britain in 1820, was received at the court of King George IV, and received royal gifts of
armor and firearms. At their meeting Hongi introduced himself in English with the speech “How do,
Mr King George?” to which the amused monarch responded with a hint of a German accent “And how
do you do, Mr King Khongi?” Having received, as he saw it, license and arms from the British
monarch, King Hongi and his companions returned to the southern ocean where the chief proceeded to
wreak havoc and destruction among neighboring tribes.
The King Kong story speaks of a noble specimen of alien humanity transported back to western
civilization to become the innocent trigger of a deadly conflict of nature and culture. In movie
mythology, animations in particular, representing people as animals or robots is a routine and entirely
legitimate device for making a point about human nature and character. Are foreign people like us?
Are dolphins intelligent? If so, what are they saying and how should they be treated? The
controversial and politically highly incorrect idea that alien peoples can be identified with alien
animal species (and that urban civilization can get along with them) is addressed with candor and
engaging humor in the movie series Men in Black, in which the Men in Black duo constitute a roving
secret service priesthood without dog collars, their alien clients unashamed caricatures of immigrant
workers.
And what about Frankenstein? For readers in the nineteenth century, the message of Mary
Shelley’s ghoulish creation is equally relevant and just as fascinating. Here goes. A dead person is
history, but can continue to exist as a person in the written record. But this is not about bringing a real
dead individual back to life, but the more complicated fiction of bringing history to life by
assembling the best parts from a multiplicity of corpses. So Frankenstein is really about famed
eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, who assembled a body of evidence from a
variety of classic sources in order to bring the Roman Empire back to life for readers in his long-
running series The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the grand tradition of science fiction,
Gibbons’s history is also an experiment in time travel, transporting readers back into the past so that
they might be better able to face the future. But it was not about the Roman Empire. It was about the
present crisis facing the British Empire. From Gibbon, his contemporary Hegel learned the force and
acquired the art of extracting body parts from a library of sources to construct his own ersatz model
of world history out of which Germany would emerge as an inevitable and dominant force for
progress.
The iconic hero of King Kong is a mute giant ape—in other words, a “great ape”—captured and
brought back to civilization by a movie crew from the black and white travelogue era of the silent
twenties. By chance, or psychic osmosis, the movie King Kong was remade in 2005 by the same
animation workshop responsible for Avatar, effectively anchoring both epics in the southern Pacific.
A feature of the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong is that it reinvents the great ape as a sympathetic
creature of nature, capable of empathy with its civilized captors, though unable to speak. The tragedy
of the great ape physiologically incapable of speech is assimilated into the parallel myth (and
historical actuality) of exploited peoples in remote lands who do not have a voice.

What is human nature? What is knowledge, and how is it shared? What are the source codes of
language and civilization? Where do we come from? Understanding the origins of civilization, and
preserving ancestral traditions, are what reading the past is about.
The big questions are Stephen Hawking questions. The great man is a litany of big questions. Not
only linear questions about the beginning and end of time, and whether or not black holes are self-
illuminating escape routes to the past or other dimensions, but vertical questions, like Who am I? and,
What is he talking about?
I wrote to a good friend who is a philosopher. I wanted to know, is the voice of Stephen Hawking
the voice of Stephen Hawking? Is it his voice. Is it him? And if not, whose voice is it?
You get my drift. The man of science speaks with the aid of a voice synthesizer. The same voice
synthesizer is used by lots of other people. So technically it is not his voice. Second up: the words
that Hawking programs his synthesizer to speak are spoken in a sing-song mode that is also software
driven to match the grammar and how sentences are normally inflected. But the software can only do
so much. It can’t lean on a word to emphasize it, or bend it a little. Leans and bends are what give
speech personality and finesse the meaning of what is said. A machine can’t do that. So what
Hawking says through his synthesizer prima facie has no personality.
That just leaves the words. They are his words, all right, and spoken in English, which is his
language, but how do you know that? To know that you have to understand the content, and also
understand the sorts of things a Stephen Hawking would be likely to say. Personal stuff only he would
know. A taste in jokes. Certain words or figures of speech. These things, to an observer, and the
action of speaking (or having a server speak for him) are what his consciousness and identity consist
of. They constitute Hawking’s intelligence.
The message of Avatar, as of science fantasy in general, is plain and simple. This has all
happened before. You just weren’t looking.

To read the past with a better sense of what ancient writers had in mind, it helps to know the origins
of words, and how they were spoken and used in olden times. By the mid-eighteenth century western
scholars had extended their understanding of the origins of language east into the Levant, Persia, and
northern India, pushing beyond traditional sources in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, to surviving classics
in Sanskrit, an older tongue. Biblical scholars toiled over the scriptures in search of clues to the
migration of cultures from earliest recorded history. Among the oldest relics of Egyptian civilization
in private collections were a few bearing inscriptions in a picture writing that remained a mystery.
Scholars spoke with shining eyes of an “Egyptian learning” as a multi-strand pattern of migration of
peoples and languages from the land of the pharoahs to the ends of the earth.
That English castaways need to learn to communicate and coexist amicably with native
communities, on their terms, first came to public attention as the topic for discussion in Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, based on the real life experiences of castaway
Alexander Selkirk. Coping with alien cults in society is the subtext of the satire Gulliver’s Travels by
Dean Swift, published in 1726, also a work of philosophic fiction. In 1729 John Gay’s revolutionary
Beggar’s Opera attacked the pretensions of modish Italian opera seria to address the harsh realities
of life in the city. For European audiences, opera seria was the science fiction of choice: formulaic
dramatic inventions riffing on a limited range of stereotypes from myth and legend—an imaginary past
of fixed situations, elaborate costumes, formal rhetoric, familiar plotlines, and special effects,
brought to life by a variety of characters ultimately no different from the inhabitants of an imaginary
future.
Gay’s vision of an alternative reality opera based on popular song and addressing the sufferings of
the disadvantaged was the subject of a sympathetic painting by William Hogarth depicting a distraught
Polly Peachum pleading for the life of convicted robber Macheath. To satisfy the popular taste for
caricature, he followed up with The Beggars’ Opera: A Cartoon, a satirical engraving in the spirit of
a MAD movie parody depicting the spirit of harmony in flight, the band as a quartet of low morals
playing primitive instruments (saltbox, xylophone, bumbass, and washboard), and principal singers
with the faces of animals, braying and mooing on an outdoor stage, as having the voices, and by
inference the manners, or natural affections, of wild beasts.
Among European leaders of fashion and culture the power of speech was proof of a divine gift
elevating humanity above the animal kingdom, and the ruling classes over the lower orders. As the
eighteenth century advanced, the system of natural government came under attack from civil
libertarians. Advances in the socialisation of music—demonstrating the potential of a skilled working
class to work as a team and interpret and execute intricate tasks reading from coded instructions—
progressed with astonishing rapidity from the baroque orchestra of Vivaldi and Handel, teamwork on
a relatively modest scale overseen and directed by the composer seated at a keyboard, to the
symphony orchestra of Haydn and Mozart, a vast assembly line of players organized on an industrial
scale and precision timed by a conductor waving a baton.
By mid-century the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, himself a musician and composer, was
asserting that speech was musical in origin, and that inarticulate cries, moans, whoops, and sighs
were the natural animal expressions from which all modern languages are descended. The post-1750
symphony orchestra of Haydn and Mozart ushered in a new dynamic of industry, competition, and
enterprise dedicated to a vision of social harmony based on principles of universal literacy,
teamwork, and specialist expertise. The social implications of coordinated popular action on a scale
greater and more complex than the average platoon could not help but fuel the rise of revolutionary
consciousness.
At the time of Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in 1768, a journey of exploration to the remote
Far East was rightly regarded as a trip back in time. Since Abel Tasman’s brief and fatal encounter
with angry natives in 1642, maps of the world had remained tantalisingly incomplete: New Holland
(Australia) an unfinished outline, the Antarctic continent mere scattered extremities of coastline
connected by dotted lines. East of New Holland, Nieuw Zeeland (New Zealand) rose up in silhouette,
part of the profile of a vast continental land mass thought to occupy the unexplored region between
New Holland and South America, a counterweight to the land mass of the northern hemisphere
calculated as necessary to maintain the earth in stable daily rotation.
The Royal Society was concerned to prepare Cook’s first voyage well in advance. Its primary
purpose was to observe the transit of Venus. The ambitious Joseph Banks invested his wealth in a
voyage he conceived as an unprecedented field trip in botanical studies, with implications for
survival at sea and maritime trade. Royal Society advisers consulted with colleagues in the newly-
formed Society of Arts on appropriate terms of encounter with alien civilizations inhabiting a vast
continental land mass predicted to lie in the southern ocean. Among contributing members were artist
Hogarth, a specialist in facial expression; wordsmith Dr Samuel Johnson, compiler of the famous
Dictionary; Joshua Steele, a musician and expert in rhetoric, and the American Benjamin Franklin, at
the time lodging in London.
Issues of language, communication, meaning, and intellectual status were vital considerations for
Cook and his party embarking on their first voyage to the Pacific. Monboddo’s interest in people with
tails, and his determined advocacy of favored treatment of the great apes as honorary members of the
human family, were aspects of a wider interest in the kinship of languages as an expression of the
interrelationship of species. Observing their social behavior, and kindness to one another, Monboddo
declared that the great apes deserved to be treated with at least some of the respect accorded to an
increasingly militant working class, foreigners, and people of color. Today, given our history of
treatment of the deaf as intellectually disabled by reason of their inability to speak, the amiable Scot’s
defense of the great apes as kindred humanity, ridiculed by many on the ground that a person
incapable of speech is incapable of thought, no longer seems quite so eccentric.
Johnson’s Dictionary was published in 1755, and Franklin’s phonetic alphabet in 1768. A printer
by trade, Franklin put his knowledge of letter forms to good use to devise a simple phonetic alphabet
for the uniform and culturally unbiased transcription of alien languages. This register or code of letter
forms was deliberately adapted to the sounds of Italian speech, Italian vowels being the closest to
those previously reported by voyagers to the Pacific. Franklin discarded superfluous letters c, j, q, w,
x, and y, allowed for the addition of diacriticals for diphthong clarification (e.g., é for their), and
devised new letter forms for the sounds indicated in italics in the words of, up, the, engrave, shoot,
thousand, which.
Monboddo observed that the languages of oral cultures tended to be vowel-rich and incorporate a
high degree of redundancy compared to advanced print cultures such as German and English. Relying
on written reports, he was less confident in adjudicating the roles of rhythm and melody in speech as
indicators of temperament and intention. As a Scot, accustomed to the formal conventions of the court,
he opted for the safe assumption that expression in speech is chiefly conveyed in accent: arsis and
thesis, strong and weak beats, in the classical poetical and musical sense—a view coincidentally
defending the evolutionary advantages of evenness of tone and stiff upper lip of traditional British
speech.
 Monboddo’s view that absence of inflection is ideal for the purpose did not address the known
facts of native speech and was not the solution Sir John Pringle wanted. The Royal Society president
was concerned to classify the tonal and gestural sign language of unsophisticated speech, to guide
explorers in the Southern Ocean in how to interact with, and persuade primeval cultures of their
peaceful intentions. At Pringle’s request Joshua Steele entered into a dialogue with Monboddo
concerning the characteristic patterns of intonation of English speech, a study finally committed to
print in 1773 under the title Prosodia Rationalis. A pupil of Thomas Sheridan, the Irish elocutionist,
well trained in the exaggerated rhetoric of pulpit and stage, Steele recorded the rhythms and
inflections of popular rhetoric in a custom notation representing the gliding cadences of the voice as
curved lines on a musical stave or grid incorporating quarter-tone divisions, including scrupulously
observed vignettes of the opening lines of Hamlet’s soliliquy declaimed by actor David Garrick.
In 1764 the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then in his ninth year, came to London with his
father Leopold. There he was interviewed by lawyer and speech expert Daines Barrington for the
Royal Society. The English regarded opera seria as music drama, its purpose, an inquiry into human
nature, to be composed in strict accordance with a grammar of formalized mannerisms of speech
relating to key relations, tempi, rhythms and other parameters of expression, known by the German
name of Affektenlehre, a philosophical term meaning “emotional instruction.” Among connoisseurs
the particular attraction of Italian opera as a genre (compared to the national idioms of French or
German opera) was its suitability as a medium for expressing the full range of human passions, a
repertoire more volatile—therefore closer to nature—than phlegmatic British speech. The older
Italian language had ties to classical Latin, while vowel-rich spoken Italian furnished a greater range
of expressive nuance. More musical than English speech, it was, in Monboddo’s terms, a closer
match to the imaginary primal Aryan tongue.
Barrington was keenly interested in music as a medium of cross​cultural communication. His
examination of the young Mozart can be construed as part of a broader inquiry into the essential types
of human emotion, in their natural state, expressed in the abstract language of music, and
uncontaminated by adult learning. At interview, under his father’s watchful eye, the boy was asked to
improvise passages of music at the keyboard in the standard terms of Italian opera, conveying a
variety of typical emotions: rage, sorrow, elation, fear, and so on.
What Barrington wanted was emotions of a totally uninhibited kind. The Handel of Messiah
represented a generation conforming to a fixed language of musical signs. Whereas the rousing
rhetoric of “Hallelujah Chorus,” to take a famous example, is strictly based on classical Greek
archetypes of the tetrachord and mode, the interval of the fourth and melodies that run straight up and
down the scale, Barrington wanted to venture beyond the stereotypes of Affektenlehre into the wilds
of untamed human nature, and establish that emotions are ultimately intuitive, not learned behaviors.
The boy was a genius capable of expressing the authentic emotions of childhood in a pure and
unadulterated state. At a time of looming social change, he saw Mozart as key to understanding the
consciousness of a reformed social order. His father Leopold took down the boy’s bursts of
improvised emotion in notation and they were eventually published as “The London Sketchbook
1764.” Reviewing this set of pieces from the 2006 reissue of the Philips Complete Mozart Edition on
cd, Alex Ross observed
Hearing so many premonitions of future masterpieces, I got the feeling that Mozart’s brain contained an array of archetypes that
were connected to particular dramatic situations or emotional states—figures connoting vengeance, reconciliation, longing and so
on.4
 Comparative philology attracted educational reformers like Franklin and Johnson, religious
scholars eager to discover the ultimate meaning of biblical prophecy, and legal minds Barrington and
Monboddo, concerned for the human rights implications of language identity. They included naturalist
and poet Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and a scion of the same family tree as Vaughan
Williams. Pringle’s goal of reducing (that is, editing) the varieties of human speech to a universal
code of syllabic gesture was influential and longlasting. On the first voyage, aristocrat Joseph Banks
kept a journal in his own languid style and idiosyncratic spelling. His informal exercise in
comparative philology was grounded in a basic vocabulary of terms, of which he sought the
corresponding words of friendly natives at various staging posts along the way. The evidence was
compelling.
From this similitude of language Between the inhabitants of the Eastern Indies and the islands in the South Sea I should have
venturd to conjecture much did not Madagascar interfere; and how any Communication can ever have been carried between
Madagascar and Java to make the Brown long baird people of the latter speak a language similar to the Black wooly headed natives
of the other is I confess far beyond my comprehension—unless the Egyptian Learning running in two courses, one through Africa
the other through Asia, might introduce the same words, and what is still more probable Numerical terms, into the languages of
people who have never had any communication with each other. But this point requiring a depth of knowledge in Antiquities I must
leave to Antiquarians to discuss.5

What began as Banks’s informal register of key words and concepts grew to become a regime for the
compilation and comparative study of island grammars by missionary anthropologists, generating a
fund of material to be zealously sifted by nineteenth-century scholars Leonard Threlkeld in New
South Wales and Edward Shortland in New Zealand, in search of the fundamental particles of speech,
reduced to syllables such as pa, ta, nga, hi, ko. In a paper A Key to the structure of the Aboriginal
Language, published in 1850, Threlkeld goes so far as to attribute states of being to individual letter
sounds of the alphabet, A expressing actuality, B being, L action, M causation, R negation, W motion
etc. Based on evidence of identity and transmission of a vocabulary of single syllables, physician and
philologist Edward Tregear courted public displeasure to track the development of modern language
diversity back to a collection of key syllables and concepts in Polynesian, and Maori speech back to
its origin in East Asia. Tregear’s research has since been vindicated by recent linguistic and gene
mapping tracing Maori speech and ancestry back to its origins in the mountain tribes of Taiwan.
In the context of Cook’s voyages, the scientific study of alien speech necessarily acknowledges: 1.
that Pacific Island peoples are to be treated as members of the human family (unlike African slaves,
who were traded as a commodity); 2. native habits of life—that is, the cultural priorities and rituals
expressed in forms of ritualised speech—are to be treated with respect; and 3. figures of speech
relating to their way of life, including divinities (e.g., the Fish of Maui as an account of the origin of
the North Island of New Zealand) are part of the language.
Even after publication of Johnson’s Dictionary, the spelling of English remained relatively fluid.
The Dictionary was compiled as a lexicon of word definitions and a guide to standard spellings, and
at the time it was not Johnson’s intention, nor was it thought necessary, to guide the reader in
pronunciation, which had always been a matter of personal choice and accent. For Captain Cook and
his associates it was normal to spell words and names as they sounded in the accent of the speaker.
After Banks decided to withdraw from Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific in 1773, Daines
Barrington nominated Johann Reinhold Forster and son Georg Forster as science officers on the
Resolution. The father and son combination brought cultural advantages and assets of a central
European education, meticulous work ethic, and empathy for music. As traveled Europeans of
Scottish-German extraction, the Forsters were classically educated and had a command of languages,
in addition to their scientific skills.
Relations between Cook and the elder Forster were strained. Johann Reinhold attracted criticism
for intellectual coldness and indifference to bloodshed and acts of cannibalism. His deadpan
demeanor endures as the Vulcan Spock in the television series Star Trek. After their return, son
Georg, a livelier personality, would go on to publish an unauthorized and very successful account of
his travels around the world with Captain Cook, and German translations of English editions of
oriental literature by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and Sir William Jones. He became a celebrity and
influential advocate of social change.
Forster’s reputation in Europe as an advocate of social reform with first-hand experience of alien
tribes, one who had witnessed the Maori war dance or haka being performed on the deck of the
Resolution, endeared him to an intellectual elite including Goethe, Herder, social reformers, and
readers of his books and translations. During the 1780s he was an occasional guest in Vienna of
Countess Wilhelmine, wife of Franz Joseph Thun, the son of Mozart’s patron in Linz. Among the
Countess’s intimate circle were Haydn, Mozart, and the young Beethoven, Haydn’s pupil. All were
sympathetic to Franz Joseph’s passion to create a more just social order. In 1785 Forster and Mozart
were inducted into the same Masonic Lodge “Zur Wohltätigkeit” in Vienna. At this very time Mozart’s
opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, set in exotic Turkey, was drawing criticism less on account
of its racy subject matter than for challenging the prevailing ideology of racial superiority by altering
librettist Emanuel Schikaneder’s stereotype of the evil blackamoor to portray the Turkish Pascha as a
ruler of exemplary nobility.6
In Mozart’s last opera, The Magic Flute of 1791, a comedy of ideas set in a mysterious never-
never land, male and female avatars Papageno and Papagena are introduced as anonymous creatures
of myth, spirits of nature in feathered costumes seemingly alluding to caged Papageien or lovebirds.
As archetypes of a creation myth, however, these “bird people” ask to be identified as ancestral
human beings from the end of the world, spoken of by Georg Forster, Banks, and Cook, and visualised
in widely published images of Maori by Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges, Cook’s artists,
dressed in feathered cloaks and with feathers in their hair. At the premiere the role of Papageno was
sung by Schikaneder; in his libretto these exotic, magical spirits bear names clearly indicating their
status as father and mother of humanity: Papa parent, –geno and –gena signifying origin, race, or
species. The same iconic configuration of alien, primeval, and essentially benign traits expressed as a
human bird species, in tune with nature, returns in the Na’vi of the movie Avatar.
By the time of his death in 1794, ostracised and a victim of the same revolutionary forces he had
done much to encourage, Forster’s fame had spread throughout Europe, as far east as the Ukraine. His
translations are mentioned in Beethoven’s notebooks. The solemn slow movement theme of the
“Eroica” symphony, paced like a funeral march and performed at the Congress of Vienna under the
composer’s direction, is cited by experts as a lament modelled on Maori chant. Listening to the
repetitive stamping rhythms of the “Coriolan” overture it is not hard to imagine a red-faced Forster
demonstrating the haka or Maori challenge in front of a slightly intimidated salon gathering in Paris
or Belgrade. The same howling, foot-stamping message of defiance connects the warlike haka in
tempo and spirit with the Tribal Dance of Men and Boys of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, even as
late as 1912 exploding into action in the Adolescents’ Dance and Sacrificial Dance of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring.

Among oral cultures standard spelling and pronunciation do not exist. “Correct” spelling and
pronunciation are byproducts of the age of the printed text. Recognition of the dictionary as a standard
and arbiter of good education would eventually introduce a degree of tension between the claims of
authentic spelling (how a word or name appears in the written record) and conventional oral spelling
(how it is pronounced). In years to come, out of a revolutionary enthusiasm for standard spelling and
pronunciation would emerge a jingoistic bureaucracy of literary protocols as compulsory arbiters of
meaning, and linguistic performance as guarantee of class, identity, intelligence, and citizenship—a
conspiracy against freedom of speech engineered by de Saussure, endorsed by the French Academy,
parodied by Shaw in the play Pygmalion, domesticated and adopted by the BBC as “standard
English” pronunciation for national radio, anatomized by Wittgenstein, grimly satirized by Orwell in
the novel 1984, and since the 1950s maintained under life support by militant ideologues of cognitive
linguistics.
Both Johnson’s Dictionary and Franklin’s phonetic alphabet attracted criticism from the American
colonies. Their complaints had nothing to do with their authors’ wellmeaning objectives. Noah
Webster, originator of Webster’s Dictionary, first welcomed Dr Johnson’s efforts, then changed his
mind to align with Franklin’s view after Independence that American English spelling should express
a distinctively American nationhood and cultural identity. Webster took issue with the spirit of
oppression in
Samuel Johnson’s spellings, based upon the pronunciations of those Anglo-Saxons who spoke, according to Johnson, in a ‘wild
barbarous jargon’, a veritable potpourri of all the languages brought to England over a period of at least two thousand years. . . .
(Johnson’s] pedantry has corrupted the purity of our language, and . . . would in time destroy all agreement between the spelling and
pronunciation of words.7

Others reacted to orthodox English spelling as

a stumbling block to both readers and pupils who are required to accept non-fonetic spelling as an insult to their sense of logical
reasoning and rationality. . . . During the past 200 years posterity has struggled and suffered with the queerly inconsistent spellings
which have confused and frustrated many generations of English speaking . . . victims of a peculiarly insidious form of psychological
child abuse which has resulted in behavior problems, antagonistic attitudes, academic failure, and a too high percentage of functional
illiterates after years of forced ‘feeding’ in our public schools.

Even the normally urbane Richard Feynman is on record as complaining, in a talk delivered to young
Americans in 1963:
Things have gotten out of whack with the English language. Why can’t we change the spelling? Who should do it if not the
professors of English? . . . We’ll ask the philologists and the linguists and so on because they know how to do it. Did you know that
they can write any language with an alphabet so that you can read how it sounds in another language when you hear it? That’s
really something. So they ought to be able to do it in English alone.8

Objectors resented what they saw as an attempt by the British to assert British identity on the
American people by enforcing imperial standards of spelling and meaning on the language. Having
gained political independence and introduced some but not all of Franklin’s changes in spelling,
American scholars, Webster included, eventually conceded that Johnson’s definitions could be trusted
“perhaps because his Dictionary of the English Language was recognized as the most thoroly
researched publication of its kind at the time.”
Ironically, the same etymological skills excoriated by the American colonists as delusive
wordplay are salvaged and revived in Hollywood sci-fi culture in the mid-twentieth century,
emerging as the invented alien tongues of movie science fiction, evolving over the years from the
incantatory but meaningless gestalt sequence “Klaatu – Barada – Nikto!” of the 1951 movie The Day
the Earth Stood Still, into more coherent, though still rudimentary, Klingon and Na’vi alien
vocabularies.
The linguistic skills required for inventing a coherent alien speech are similar to those responsible
for advances in voice recognition, computer intelligence, and predictive linguistics. The same
perception of parts of a sentence as abstract weights and vectors in a universal grammar connects the
“Klaatu – Barada – Nikto!” of Hollywood with the celebrated but dull “Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously” of Noam Chomsky. Both are outmatched, in my view, by the finely judged geometrical
equipoise of “Do not share, he will not bestow they can reiterate” by Gertrude Stein.
Public opinion in England, after Cook’s death and the descent of Paris into chaos, feared the
consequences of a French-style revolution. The US colonies had broken ranks, the great southern
continent no longer existed as a trading alternative, and the morality of slavery, still a lucrative trade,
was under attack. The Scots had rebelled and been defeated in 1745, and Scottish poor were being
brutally rounded up and expelled from the land in the Clearances. In a poem penned in the early
1800s Henry Kirke White, a young divinity student at Cambridge University, imagined a future lone
New Zealander, a Maori Cook or Banks, returning to stand on Westminster Bridge and gaze on the
ruins of a once great civilization.
Britain was at a crossroads. Building on the initiative of the American colonists, a number of
visionaries consulted with an eye to developing an alternative to the slave trade, opening up a more
principled and humane, but still lucrative trade in human lives to other parts of the world. An
evangelical majority interest saw the transportation of human livestock to the colonies as a blessed
compensation to those who had lost a home and living in the Scottish clearances, but were opposed to
political principles of respect for indigenous culture. As British representatives in India, Halhed and
Jones had advocated policies of tolerance, study and respect for native cultures in territories
occupied by the British. Such tolerance of heathen custom was implacably opposed by the movement
for reform led by William Wilberforce and orchestrated from Cambridge University by Isaac Milner,
twice endowed Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and successor to Isaac Newton as
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Milner’s associates included evangelist older brother Joseph
Milner, John Newton, composer of “Amazing Grace,” and Scottish firebrands Charles Simeon and
Claudius Buchanan.
Isaac Milner was a brilliant chemist of working class origins whose conversion to radical
evangelism was fueled by a conviction that rhetoric, the musical component of speech, could be
harnessed as a force of nature akin to electricity and Newtonian gravitation, manifesting as “action at
a distance.” The bullying Charles Simeon would eventually inspire the fictional Simeonites of Samuel
Butler’s satire Erewhon, set in the New Zealand hinterland. In collected speeches published in 1811
ecclesiastical propagandist Buchanan inveighed against the “horrid rites of Brahma” and Maori as
equal defilements of human nature to be wiped out and purified by the moral force of the Christian
faith.
In 1811 Wilberforce and Milner jointly endorsed the appointments of Samuel Marsden and
Thomas Kendall to the inaugural New Zealand mission. They were an odd couple: Marsden the rural
farmer and disciplinarian, and Kendall the pale, aspiring ethnologist in the tradition of Halhed and
Jones. They arrived in New Zealand to begin their mission in 1814. In his alternate role as magistrate
in Sydney Marsden acquired a reputation as a bigoted and unfeeling sadist; but among Maori in New
Zealand he was affable and fair. Kendall and his family were taken under the protection of chief
Hongi Hika, who was both eager to learn English and gratified to encounter an Englishman with
Kendall’s enthusiasm for the finer points of Maori language, art, and religion.
Marsden and Kendall had very different views of their duty of care to the language and culture of
Maori. Marsden saw Kendall’s role as a compiler of a native vocabulary strictly as a means of
instructing the heathen and changing their ways. There was no place in his agenda for studying native
custom and tradition. As a consequence of this clash of loyalties, Kendall’s significance as an
ethnologist has been persistently discredited in the official record.

E.Pùrenghi ki té c Atuà
Mo té qAta
E. Jehovah ra té c Atuà Niui Na qau i
máī ai ngha meà katoa kidúngha ki te
Ranghi me ngha taongha katoa o raro
o te Uenua.
“A Prayer to God for Morning.” Fragment of an unpublished MS The New Zealanders First Prayers (1819) showing
Thomas Kendall’s use of diacriticals to aid pronunciation and inflection, including letters c and q surplus to Benjamin
Franklin’s revised Italian influenced orthography

Kendall’s first efforts at transliterating Maori speech were based on the Italian orthography, using
styles recommended by Franklin’s orthography to convey nuances of intonation, in reasonable
conformity with Royal Society protocols. Published in 1815 under the macaronic title A Korao no
New Zealand, Kendall’s first guide to the Maori language incorporates a collection of sample Maori
song texts in illustration of archetypal emotional states, after the model of Daines Barrington’s
interview of the young Mozart. Kendall’s scrupulous orthography, of which only the fragment shown
survives, indicates an awareness of Franklin’s phonetic alphabet, respect for Maori insistence on
exact intonation, familiarity with Monboddo’s strictures on vowel nuance, and attention to the formal
values attached to inflection by Joshua Steele in Prosodia Rationalis. A speech notation based on
diacriticals also made sense given the limited print resources available in colonial New South Wales.
Kendall’s attention to the detail of Maori culture offended Marsden’s understanding of his
contractual obligations to the Church Missionary Society in London. Responding to a raft of
complaints by Marsden to the CMS, in 1820 Kendall found the resources to return to Cambridge
University accompanied by Hongi Hika and cousin Hohaia Waikato, to defend his reputation and seek
academic endorsement of his research. The party was well received and presented to the King. At
Cambridge their host, the brilliant young Hebrew scholar Professor Samuel Lee unequivocally
endorsed Kendall’s motives and scholarly intentions. As a further gesture of support Lee procured
Kendall’s immediate elevation to the ministry during his stay at Cambridge, and ensured that their
joint revised edition of the New Zealand Grammar was published without delay. Lee’s carefully
worded editorial preface reads as a barely disguised admonition directed in answer to Kendall’s
detractors in the Church Missionary Society. As a guest of Sir John Cheetham Mortlock in London
Hongi Hika spent time studying maps and reports of Napoleon’s recent campaigns.9 The party also
found time to negotiate with a certain Baron de Thierry, a refugee from the revolution in France
enrolled as a mature student at Cambridge. De Thierry was musically trained; and had even shared
the same concert platform as Beethoven at the Congress of Vienna. De Thierry had a naive vision of
setting up his own royal estate in a Pacific island paradise, for which he was prepared to pay
handsomely. The question is how, as a relatively unknown Frenchman, he was able to gain access to
the party, and whether he succeeded in gaining an audience on a pretext of assisting in transcribing
Maori song into musical notation.
A reason for asking is the mysterious insertion of a paper on Maori music by James Arthur Davies,
formerly of Trinity College Cambridge, in Sir George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology, published in
1855. The substance of Davies’ insertion is a collection of Maori songs in music notation, allegedly
dictated by Maori of high rank. Once again, the songs represent distinct emotional types. They are
expensively engraved, but in an obsolete music typeface suggesting they may have been engraved and
intended for publication by someone else at an earlier time. Unusually, the conventions of typesetting
have been modified to indicate quarter​tones. These are not only the earliest printed specimens of
Maori song in music notation, they are the first notations of any music in quarter-tones. In a further
twist, in his own text Sir George Grey has nothing to say about its author, nor does he throw any light
on the origins and authority of the Maori song transcriptions, whose provenance remains a mystery.
There are no names attached to the melodies or their verses.
Davies entered Trinity College in 1826. This would make him a contemporary of Robert Willis,
shortly to succeed Isaac Milner as Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, on the basis of
influential research papers On Vowel Sounds, published in 1828, and On the Mechanism of the
Larynx, published in 1829. Willis corresponded with Charles Babbage on the merits of Maelzel’s
chess-playing automaton—exposed as a fake—and would later collaborate with Charles Wheatstone
on an improved Mark II version of von Kempelen’s Viennese speaking machine, employing free reeds
as tone generators.

American mistrust of the English standardized vocabulary, as a weapon of covert imperialism toward
emigrant oral communities who had left England as persecuted minorities and therefore had lost what
identity they formerly possessed, contrasts diametrically with Maori perception of English from the
perspective of a people secure in their identity with the land and trusting their English visitors who
understood the importance of a complete and total written representation of their own speech.
Concern for accuracy in recording intonation sent a message of the superiority of the spoken over the
written word. Willing cooperation with Kendall, Tregear and other European scholars reflected
Maori confidence in their history and identity, and a perception of English interest in their language
and customs, including structures of memory in myth and legend, as genuine and honorable.
Daines Barrington’s private epiphany of the boy Mozart as a supreme example of natural genius
asks to be understood in the context of a philosophy of language in which it is the role of music to
model, and to that extent codify, the affective or rhetorical component. Music embraces universal
traits of human nature, unlike words and accents which over time become increasingly local and
isolated. Complementary studies of the biomechanics of speech in animal species were undertaken in
Europe at the time by Dutch philologist and artist Petrus Camper, and in Vienna by Wolfgang von
Kempelen into the mechanical simulation of human speech. By comparing facial angles and bone
structure Camper hoped to discover the “hidden prototype of human anatomy.” His conclusion that
orang-utan and other great apes lacked the physical structures necessary for speech was seized upon
by Herder as disproving Monboddo’s claim of their entitlement to associate membership of the human
species. It was the opposite of what Camper was saying. Camper intended to prove that absence of
speech was merely physiological, not psychological in origin. Because it in no way inhibited the
formation of social bonds among the great apes, their inability to speak could not be interpreted as
evidence of mental deficiency.
Herder’s argument continued to be asserted by pious apologists for the slave trade. Locke’s
opinion of speech as proof of divinely-appointed rank and status, entailing that without language there
can be no thought, continued to be religiously maintained by Schelling, Schopenhauer, the Oxford
orientalist Archibald Sayee, Max Müller, and Benedetto Croce, and is still occasionally invoked to
this day to impugn the intellectual competence of the deaf community.
A Europe-wide challenge to anatomize speech into its smallest units inspired efforts to reproduce
speech by mechanical means. Children’s dolls are all that remains of ingenious attempts by Erasmus
Darwin in England, the German Christian Gottleib Kratzenstein in St Petersburg, and von Kempelen
in Vienna to store and reproduce childhood speech with a view to manufacturing singing musical
boxes. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven joined in composing and arranging music for mechanical
reproduction; others succumbed to a fashion for musical dice games, automatic systems for
composing waltzes, hinting at grand plans for the mechanization of creative inspiration itself.
Such devices connect the world of eighteenth-century technical innovation directly and intimately
with the mid-twentieth century new age of information theory, serialism and aleatory, artificial
intelligence, computer gaming, cute talking robots, and electronic music. There was a serious
philosophical dimension. Von Kempelen resolved to prove that speech was a natural expression of
human anatomical evolution owing nothing to the presence of a divine spark, nor predetermined by
any Chomskyan genetic program. Unveiled in 1791, the year of Mozart’s death, von Kempelen’s
contraption of plug-in modules of musical parts simulating the lungs and vocal tract, powered by
bellows and controlled from a keyboard, was able to pronounce words in a variety of languages (but
did especially well in Romance languages Spanish, French, and Italian, which have fewer gutturals
and plosives), and deserves to be recognized as a precursor, not just of Spike Jones’s comic
percussion orchestra and John Cage’s prepared piano in the forties, but of Stephen Hawking’s speech
synthesizer in the present era.
King Hongi spoke English, but did not engage in smalltalk and for that reason was popularly
supposed to be mute. At audience he spoke to George IV as one king to another, asking—How do you
maintain order among your people? The king said, I will show you my armory.—Why can a person so
powerful as the King of England not control his wife? (The King was going through a messy
separation at the time. Caroline was not being cooperative, and the scandal made headlines in all the
papers.)—No answer. Are you my friend? asked Hongi.—Yes, of course. —Will you protect my
people from the French? Hongi wanted to know. —I don’t know; Parliament has not yet decided.
At parties King Hongi endured the attentions of guests, in particular ladies of the court, who
simpered and jostled to touch his face and finger the dark maze of spirals chiselled in his face in an
unthinking abuse of his honor that provoked him to run from the room in tears of exasperation and
seek sanctuary in the library.
Buoyed in hope, his efforts entirely vindicated, Kendall returned to New Zealand to continue his
scientific studies of native art and customs. What followed was retribution and disaster. When
Kendall’s inquiries turned to belief systems and the conduct of human relations, subjects the
missionaries considered taboo, Marsden’s patience boiled over. Kendall was relieved of his duties
and dismissed in disgrace. He retired to Australia and was drowned in an accident. The Due de
Thierry’s Byronic ambitions to set up an idyllic royal estate in the remote South Pacific petered out in
confusion and acrimony, and he ended his days as an impoverished music teacher.

The Southern Ocean dream revived in the movie Avatar envisions a civilization in so intimate and
stable a relationship with Nature that it has experienced no need to evolve beyond a certain point, or
has resisted the temptation to do so. It amounts to a holistic or ecopolitical argument for a return to
nature, or at least for preservation of an existing social system presumed to be essentially stable.
For Cook and his contemporaries the term savage had no pejorative implications; like the French
sauvage it signified a creature of nature, living by instinct, not necessarily aggressive. As Stravinsky
quipped, the Attic Greeks designated as barbarians those who could not talk the talk in Attic Greek.
They were terms of difference or exclusivity, but not horror and disgust. Acts of savagery were
understood to imply behavior that is true to the nature of the person who commits them, just as the
treatment of slaves was regarded as true to nature and not out of willful cruelty. We distinguish
criminal acts that are deliberate transgressions from those judged to be involuntary by reason of some
mental disability. After 1820 however, the term savage acquires overtones of a genetic or
pathological disposition toward cruel or aggressive behavior, inherent lack of regard for others and
delight in inflicting suffering.
The warlike nature of Pacific islanders, drip fed by a succession of witness accounts—of
cannibalism during the first voyage, the killings of French explorer Marion du Fresne and of Cook,
the 1809 massacre in New Zealand waters of the English crew of the Boyd, and Hongi Hika’s bloody
campaign against his own people after 1820—all factored into a growing perception of primeval
humankind as indifferent to violence and death, and for that reason to be persuaded away from such
habits for the protection of English settlers. To that extent their warlike nature is to be treated as a
defect rather than honored as a tradition.
The romantic myth of the Noble Savage as a type of humanity living in tune with nature and in
control of natural instincts to rivalry and war, stood revealed as the wishful thinking of European
underclasses weary of exploitation, and ruling classes fearful of destruction of the existing social
order. For some aspiring to nationhood and recognition, native Pacific cultures provided a model of
primeval humanity and dignity to reinforce their vision of a new and more egalitarian social order.
For the English, such arguments were irredeemably tainted by witness reports of arbitrary acts of
offense and disproportionate retribution, extending to rites of cannibalism. Savagery is thus converted
from a plain term of truth to nature (the word “culture” did not emerge until after 1820), to a term of
censure and incomprehension of nature itself. This despite the fact that the medical profession
recognized the difference between natural behavior that is innocent in intention, and behavior that is
pathological in origin.
At the same time, the identical characteristics factor in to a renewed European perception of
human nature as brutal and warlike. Beyond the paradigm of original human nature based on the
classics in Latin, Greek, and latterly Persian and Sanskrit, arises the vision of a primal hinterland of
action and death to be reconciled with an Old Testament mythology of death and retribution, and New
Testament gospel of personal redemption through sacrifice. For European peoples anxious to assert
their authority and nationhood it became politically and morally acceptable to embrace the rhetoric of
racial purity, moral entitlement, indifference to sacrifice, and aggression toward others as noble,
“quintessentially human” qualities authorizing superior species of humankind to take the lead over
lower forms of animal and human life. Adherence to ritual and a propensity to retribution were the
authorized expressions of humanity in its purest and most authentic state. In his role as “whipping
judge” magistrate Marsden took grim delight in inflicting the severest physical punishment on petty
criminals and unbelievers, including women, with the ferocity and purity of conscience of the
selfrighteous true believer. The same ferocity fueled the violent restorative justice inflicted by the
French revolution on its people, and the German nation on the rest of civilization.

Notes
1. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick dir., The War, documentary series in seven parts for PBS (US), 2007.
2. “Maui, ‘Tommy Drummond,’ the subject of a memoir by the Rev. Basil Woodd, died in London in December, 1816. Mayree
(Meri), a young New Zealander who sailed from Port Jackson with Cowell, in December, 1819, died at sea on April 9th, 1820.
 In noting his death the Committee made the following observation:—‘He departed, as the Committee have reason to believe, in
the faith of Christ, and with his countryman Mavhee (Maui) is become the first fruits of New Zealand unto God.’—Proceedings
of the Church Missionary Society (1820–22), p. 199.” John Rawson Elder, Marsden’s Lieutenants. Dunedin: Coulls
Somerville Wilkie and A. H. Reed, 1934, 171.
3. J. C. Beaglehole, “Eighteenth Century Science and the Voyages of Discovery.” Auckland: University of Auckland, 1969.
(http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-BeaEight1-body1.html) (08/28/2007).
4. Alex Ross, “The Storm of Style: Listening to the Complete Mozart.” The New Yorker July 24, 2006.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/24/060724crat_atlarge (05/02/2011).
5. The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, August 1768–July 1771.
http://image.sl.nsw.gov.au/Ebindsafe1_13/a1193566.html (07/24/2007).
6. Hermann Abert, W. A. Mozart tr. Stewart Spencer, ed. Cliff Eisen. Yale University Press, 2007, 783–85.
7. Harvie Barnard, “When Noah Missed the Boat.” Newsletter, Spring 1986. http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j2/barnard.php
(01/27/2009).
8. Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of it All (1963). London: Penguin Books, 1999, 116–17.
9. “The naturally curious Hongi would have assuredly discovered and discussed Sir John’s experience of the Napoleonic wars. In
his turn, the Colonel would quickly have sensed the presence of the warrior in Hongi. Their relationship may help explain Hongi’s
legendary interest in Napoleon and his poring over maps of the campaign in the Cambridge library. While no written evidence
exists to verify this, it remains part of the oral tradition of his descendants.” Dorothy Urlich Cloher, Hongi Hika: Warrior Chief.
Auckland and London: Penguin Books, 137.
 2
Sacks’s agnosia
Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia was the second book on understanding music to reach the bestseller
lists in 2007, the other being Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. There are reasons to feel encouraged
that the market in popular reading material is now open to modern classical music amd the role of
music in cognition, the more so when such normally abstruse topics are addressed by writers of
obvious empathy and grace.1
In regular life Oliver Sacks is a clinical neurologist. His writing career was launched with
Awakenings, an account of case histories of surviving elderly casualties of a sleeping sickness
pandemic of the 1920s, people trapped in a conscious limbo whose minds were briefly and tragically
resuscitated after forty years by the administration of synthetic dopamine, a chemical trigger. The
results were not always good.
His book introduces the condition musicophilia, a literary device suggesting that love of music is
pathological in nature. Readers already confused in their relation to modern music may find such a
designation reassuring. Others directly engaged in the profession may feel insulted. By way of
returning the compliment, I have named a cognitive disorder in the author’s honor. A therapist so
reliant on the anecdotal experiences of others may wish to refrain from interpreting the evidence for
fear of alienating the very people on whom his wider reputation depends. If patient information is
privileged, then perhaps none of it should be disclosed, but then there would be no book. Since this is
clearly not the case, and his patient information is in fact freely and promiscuously reported—making
the new 2008 expanded edition less of a casebook and more like a chat show—there is surely little
excuse for the author having nothing new to add about the condition to which he has given a name, or
about music, or about the human condition. Maybe that is the point.
Since Awakenings the author’s public role has visibly altered from diagnosis and treatment to
chronicling the sufferings of himself and others, in doing so reinventing the imaginative life as
tentative, surreal, and visionary, and ordinary life by default as a vegetative state. Perhaps he is right.
The new and updated edition of Musicophilia is encumbered by voluminous and undigested footnotes
that resemble the stomach contents of a beached whale. This is not science. It is landfill.
Dr Sacks is a wellmeaning and lovable person, but he is not musical. He is clearly unable to note
perceptual cues in music-related behaviors that would be obvious to a musically trained listener.
More seriously, he construes musical actions in response to otherwise crippling incapacities not as
therapies but rather as symptoms of disease. These patients are most certainly suffering, but the point
is surely that music in its various manifestations is what enables the suffering patient to cope. Not
knowing enough about music has a variety of consequences. It means that what the author understands
by music is not what the rest of us understand by the word: a history, a repertory, the minds of great
composers, a set of guiding conventions, a civilizing discourse.
The issue I have with that degree of laissez-faire in a clinician and expert is that it leaves music
itself, and the author’s thesis—such as it is—exposed to infection by more toxic agents, or at least, to
ridicule.
I have a farm in Maine, and I love the fact that there are bears and coyotes living in my woods.... It matters to me that there are
wild creatures, descendants of wild creatures, living so close to me. Similarly, it delights me that there are concerts going on in the
 Boston area that I not only do not hear, but never even hear about.

The writer is Daniel Dennett, from his book Consciousness Explained.2 The Professor of Philosophy
and co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University (with Ray Jackendoff) appears
to be saying either that music has nothing to so with consciousness, or is irrelevant to explaining
consciousness, but in any case that he doesn’t enjoy it.
Steven Pinker, author of the exceedingly popular title How the Mind Works, is a little more direct.
Music is an enigma.... What benefit could it be to be diverting time and energy to the making of plinking noises, or to feeling sad
when no one has died? ... As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for
attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision,
social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually
unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to
stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.3

“Music is useless.” Ohh ... kay. Pinker, who judging by the above has been trapped in too many
elevators, is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the impressively styled Center for Cognitive
Neuroscience at MIT. Popular writing about music by high profile cognitive science academics in
terms of contemptuous ignorance is highly bankable, entertaining, widespread, and also pathetic. The
spectacle of experts who claim to know how the mind works being driven either into hiding or into
apoplexy by their failure to account for the enigma of classical music would be diverting if it were
not so offensive. Pinker continues
Just as the world’s languages conform to an abstract Universal Grammar, the world’s musical idioms conform to an abstract
Universal Musical Grammar. That idea was first broached by the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in The Unanswered
Question, a passionate attempt to apply Noam Chomsky’s ideas to music. The richest theory of universal musical grammar has
been worked out by Ray Jackendoff in collaboration with the music theorist Fred Lerdahl and incorporating the ideas of many
musicologists before them, most prominently Heinrich Schenker.4

All quite useless. We might imagine nonfiction titles aimed at the general reader to be largely the
original work of a single named author, especially if only one author is credited. In the United States,
however, such writing is often a collective effort, designed to reinforce the status of the group.
Pinker’s thoughts on music acknowledge Fred Lerdahl, while Daniel Dennett is a colleague and
intimate of cognitive linguist Ray Jackendoff, a disciple of Woody Allen lookalike Noam Chomsky.
Aformentioned Lerdahl and Jackendoff in turn are coauthors of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music,
acclaimed as the “definitive text” on musical generative grammars (more simply, the language of
music). Lerdahl and Jackendoff have never been able to accommodate nonwestern or twentieth-
century western music in their system of rules of connection. Instead they have elected loudly to
dismiss, in fact to condemn, atonal, twelve-tone, serial, and electronic music as unnatural, even
pathological in nature. A century ago, academicians were wont to disparage modern art in similar
terms of outraged disbelief. We laugh at them, and we should be laughing now. A theory of cognition
that cannot explain art as an expression of cognition cannot explain anything.
All of the above experts in cognition belong to the same community of computer related artificial
intelligence research. In principle, a theory of AI should be able to model, and thus explain, the
connections in the mind that make language and thought possible. When Wolfgang von Kempelen
unveiled his talking machine in Mozart’s Vienna in 1791, his purpose was to demonstrate that the
faculty of speech is a natural byproduct of human physiology, and not a divine endowment. In 2007,
after fifty years as Director and cofounder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Marvin
Minsky, another from the same cluster of experts, was asked if the robotics community were any
closer to understanding and modeling how the mind works. In a new book bearing the dystopian title
The Emotion Machine Dr Minsky now claims that the emotional mechanisms that define our humanity
are in fact compromises with normal (that is, fact-finding and problem-solving) intelligence. To be
human therefore is to be less than human. It is not pretty.5
When Daines Barrington of the Royal Society interviewed the eight year-old Mozart in London in
1764, interested in the child prodigy as a prototype of human genius, he asked him to improvise
recitatives and arias at the keyboard, in the style of Italian opera, expressing a range of classic
emotions: rage, fear, joy, etc. As part of a wider study of language and communications, eighteenth-
century scientists were concerned to determine the essential types and forms of human emotion, in
their natural state, uncontaminated by adult learning. There is an exact fit with the concerns of
information science in the second half of the twentieth century. Today Dr Minsky is anxious to make
the point that “modeling emotional states is the key to making AI more human.” More human. The
mind takes risks and makes shortcuts, in doing so putting problem​solving and precision thinking on
hold. But what that means in Minsky’s terms, is that to be moved by music is to be compromised
intellectually.
This anti-music prejudice is not new. Alan Turing, and zoologist and neurologist, 1951 BBC Reith
Lecturer John Zachary Young, were saying the same some sixty years ago. Young’s words are burned
into my own consciousness: “To describe any situation by saying it gives pleasure, is, as with ‘pain,’
a confession of failure to describe it in adequate detail.”6 What distinguishes present-day cognitive
theorists from natural scientists of ages past is the peculiar violence with which they choose to vent
the realization of their unsuccess.
From its untypically abrasive tone, a reader familar with Dr Sacks’s earlier writings gains the
impression that the author has allowed his Preface to be hijacked by the cognitive Religious Right.
This is not his usual style:
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species—billions of people—playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied
and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call “music.” This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that
puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. Curiosity brings them down to
the Earth’s surface to attend a concert, they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his “great ingenuity”—
while still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to
music, because nothing goes on with them.

It reads like the work of an advertising copywriter. The Preface goes on to include some of the nastier
bits of Steven Pinker cited above, along with the latter’s brazen speculation from 2007 that “many of
the arts may have no adaptive function at all.” From there it is all downhill: Stephen Jay Gould,
William James, Nietzsche.
Naturally, if music is the way to rid the world of alien overlords, I am all for it. Mozart rightly
despised those of his aristocratic patrons who treated him as an entertainer and idiot savant. Some of
us feel the same way about record company executives. For an Overlord to be puzzled or intimidated
by music is surely a failure of intelligence as well as a failure of authority. Loss of memory and the
ability to process information are also textbook symptoms of dementia. I have long suspected, given
its chronic failure to cope with contemporary music, that the profession as a whole was succumbing
gradually and inexorably to Alzheimer’s, member brains having been progressively invaded and
compromised by plaque​like fatty deposits of useless information.
Perhaps it is the Overlords who are in trouble, not the rest of us. They are the ones in difficulty,
who confess not to understand music, are so desperate to take control, and whose distress at their
inability to comprehend music is manifested in expressions of rage, contempt, and rejection of those
of us who do understand it, up to a point, and at least are content.
My own induction into the literature of music cognition, The Concept of Music (1991), began life
as an attempt to reason with science by interpreting musical conventions in language with which a
clinician might be more comfortable.7 I was supported and encouraged by Anthony Storr, author of
Music and the Mind.8 In a second title, The Science of Music (1997), I ventured to suggest that a
musician would tend to interpret the collection of behavioral traits associated with autism as natural
and rational responses to acute sensory overload. Storr agreed. Then a paper on the physiology of
autistic patients, published in Scientific American a few years later, indicated from a small number of
autopsies a possible link between the condition and identification of defective or absent structures in
the auditory processing systems of the brain. In 2008 new research summarized in the New Scientist
concluded that some varieties of autism are indeed characterized by symptoms of auditory overload
(meaning that sounds are heard as distressingly and unavoidably loud). The point I am making is that
sometimes a musician’s experience can help, and perhaps should be taken into account.
A notable precursor of Dr Sacks’s present study is Toscanini’s Fumble by Harold Klawans. In the
title story of his collection of case histories of music related brain disorders the author, a neurologist
and neurosurgeon, deduces with great diagnostic flair that a momentary blackout suffered by
Toscanini during his final televised concert was caused by an imbalance of blood flow to the brain
brought on by prolonged overexertion of the conducting arm.9
Another paper, also by a medical professional, of perhaps more direct relevance to the public
relations activities of cognitive science than to the clinical diagnoses of practicing neurologists, is
among the collection of essays Darwin’s Audobon: Science and the Liberal Imagination by Gerald
Weissmann. In this essay the author reflects on the infiltration of medical research by National
Socialism immediately after the Anchluss in 1938. One of his primary sources is Edward (Eduard)
Pernkopf, the politically appointed editor of the Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, and Dean of the
medical faculty at the University of Vienna. Bear in mind that the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn is also
the former home of wartime exiles Schoenberg, Freud, Ernst Gombrich, and Karl Popper.
[Nazism] is not just a bare idea, not a bare theory in the service of a politically motivated mobilization of strength; for us it is more
than that: it is a view of the world. Here we will have planned order in science, exactly as in art and economics....
Think of how a foreign spirit—which unfortunately was disseminated from Vienna—tried to disrupt our music by promoting
dissonant chords, how the atonal direction of melody—as the musical expression of Will and Idea in the sense of Schopenhauer—
threatened to destroy our beautiful Germanic music: who would deny the foreign origins of these corrupting trends? Indeed, proof
that these trends owed their power to alien influences is afforded by the observation that when—thank God!—these influences
were rendered powerless, they sank without a trace.10

The tone sounds horribly familiar. Weissmann comments:

Translation: Mahler, Berg and Schönberg ruined German music. Many of the prominent composers of dissonant or atonal music
were not only cosmopolitan but Jewish. When Austrian anti-Semitism and pressure by the Nazi party succeeded in removing Jews
from prominent positions in the musical world, the influence of atonal music waned; Vienna could return to three-quarter time.11

Today the Overlords of the eastern seaboard have assumed the mantle. They would have dissonant
and atonal music classified as symptoms of mental disorder and an offense to cognitive purity.

Tony Cicoria, a surgeon, is struck by lightning. On recovery, he becomes addicted to music, first as a
listener, then as a performer, finally as a composer. We are not told whether he is any good, but that is
okay. According to Jackendoff, it is not necessary to understand music in order to appreciate it. Since
Cicoria is able to resume practicing as a surgeon, the effects of his encounter with nature are not
significantly disabling (3–18). How is the sudden addiction to music to be explained? Nobody
knows. Observe that the patient’s instrument of choice is the piano. A piano is a digital—finger-
activated, discrete data—representation of the world of hearing. It has the capacity to make sounds
with the potential to fill a listener’s hearing, organized as a scale or spectrum of pitches from low to
high. Such a world exists, or is evoked, as a collection of isolated data points. The act of playing the
piano involves a discharge of energy from the brain coming out through the fingertips in actions the
effect of which is to excite an impression of wholeness and coherence out of an extenal sounding
body that is structurally fragmented and normally silent. I am not making a diagnosis. It is simply a
description. But the piano is part of the answer.
Dr Sacks conflates Cicoria’s experience with those of a number of female patients already on
medication for temporal lobe seizures. That is a mistake. Two of the female patients are addicted to
listening to music. The third acquired and became an active performer on the folk harp. There is an
obvious difference—as John Cage noted—between passively listening to music and actively playing
an instrument. For a listener the external source of music—in this case, the radio—is in control, but
for a performer, the patient is in control. To a reader’s surprise, Dr Sacks does not appear to notice
the difference.
In another chapter, patient Jon S. is an office worker, Eric M. a songwriter. Both are used to
hearing strange but familiar music in their heads immediately prior to experiencing epileptic seizures
(19–23). The music is melodious and not threatening. Melody expresses continuity of being in space
and time. It carries the thought, and in doing so carries the personality through a crisis or potential
interruption of consciousness. Such a music is completely internal, a mental representation
independent of any external stimulus. It is the brain performing.
A seizure triggered by hearing musical sounds or recognized idioms is something else entirely. In
the latter case the stimulus exists in the real world and it is hearing and recognizing it as music, but
equally as an external threat, that precipitates the adverse reaction. Dr Sacks identifies the condition
as “a fear of music.” That is neither logical nor consistent. The small collection of case histories that
makes up Chapter 3, “Fear of Music: Musicogenic Epilepsy” (24–31) begins with examples of what
might loosely be described as allergic reactions to music of certain styles. Fear has nothing to do with
it, since the patients in question do not experience fear. Indeed, patient C. enjoys being in his sensitive
state (27–29). Rather than quibbling with Macdonald Critchley, coeditor with R. A. Henson of the
symposium Music and the Brain, over whether the condition should be called musicogenic epilepsy
or musicolepsia, it would be more helpful if the author just attended to the facts. These are patients
easily distracted by invasive signals that interfere with their coordination. Such signals have to exist
in a world outside of themselves, and therefore be real and audible to others. For every sound there is
a particular reaction time related to frequency. The reaction time or delay in response has a protective
function of cushioning the listener from the effects of sudden loud sounds, so a patient with
unnaturally fast responses is likely to hear the same sounds as more sudden, louder, and more
distressing than they appear to a normal listener. What one expects from a practicing neurologist in
this connection is a comment to the effect that sounds in the environment are by definition alarm
signals, musical sounds (because of their greater internal organization) especially so, and sensitivity
to the possibility of alarm is a natural survival instinct. From which it follows that a large part of the
pleasure of listening to music arises from “giving oneself wholly to the experience”—that is,
allowing the music to think and react for oneself. The fear factor in such cases is therefore a fear of
letting go, and the risk that entails.
Dr Sacks is mystified that people hear music in their head, but do not hear everyday sounds in
their head. Professional musicians also rehearse complicated music in their head, just as actors
rehearse their lines in their head. Hearing music in your head is evidence of normal function and not
of a predisposition to epilepsy. Since music by nature is a memory aid, a mnemonic of emotional and
temporal location, one asks why a normal person should be obliged to consult research papers by
Zatorre and Halpern (2005), or Alvaro Pascal-Leone (2003), in order to confirm the obvious, that
“expectation and suggestion can greatly enhance musical imagery.” As if experiencing a sudden rush
of blood to the head, the author observes “If I ask what [Janacek’s opera) Jenufa, ‘Shooby Doin,’ and
Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue have in common, I would have to say nothing musically and
probably nothing emotionally (beyond the pleasure they have all given me at different times).” (37)
This is saying, nota bene, that a clinical neurologist does not get the message that three pieces of
music have music in common, or that they are linked emotionally by the fact that the author likes
listening to them. For that to make sense, terms liking and music would have to be taken as meaning
something different with each different experience, which is the sort of logic one’s elderly mother
might employ, but not a scientist. Again,
Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it—its beat, its melodic contours, so
different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection with the emotions. (43)

This is alleging that music has a particular power over the mind not because it is different from
speech, but because it is different from mind. If music however is more memorable than speech—
which is what music is designed to be, a memory aid—the logical inference would be that music
more closely resembles the mind in action than ordinary speech. Hence the characterization Sacks’s
agnosia. A profession committed to the notion that words and images are the only valid tokens of
coherent mental activity may want to believe that music is alien to how the mind is supposed to work.
But to insist on it is clearly delusional.
“We take our senses for granted,” the author suggests. “We feel we are given the visual world, for
example, complete with depth, color, movement, form, and meaning all perfectly matched and
synchronous” (my emphasis). Yes, we do, and no, we don’t. A neurologist familiar with auditory
anatomy should surely know that the world present to the senses is never perfectly matched and
synchronous. There are invariably natural delays in detecting and processing different types and
frequencies of sensory information. A low tone takes longer to detect than a high tone; a smell than a
blinding flash of light. Delays vary in duration, and what the average person has to do, instinctively
knowing that microsecond delays occur naturally, is reconcile the data processed with a
predisposition to recognize sense impressions as simultaneous.
For example, some, but not all, of a speaker’s voice is monitored by the speaker through internal
jawbone conduction—the sound of the voice traveling through the jawbone up to the ear. However a
critical region of higher frequencies does not travel by this route. Instead it is emitted into the air and
reflected from room surfaces back to the external ears, in the process incurring delay. These high
frequencies (mostly consonants) are high resolution noise which is optimized for spatial orientation
and shape recognition, especially by the visually impaired. So when we monitor ourselves speaking
we are hearing a constant microsecond delay between the bass to midrange frequencies that travel
internally through the bones of the skull and are heard first, compared to the higher frequency band
that arrives a whisker afterward. And that is why most people do not enjoy hearing their own
recorded voice, because in a recording all of the frequency bands are external, and all are exactly
synchronized.
In relation to external sounds and visual stimuli, Dr Sacks’s idea of a world of sense impressions
in perfect synchrony makes even less sense. If a sound comes from the left, the left ear hears it first.
Go figure. The art of sound recording is grounded on practical knowledge of auditory location. If our
eyes did not see the world differently from left and right viewpoints, we would have no concept of
visual depth. Such errors are elementary.
Apropos catchy tunes that will not go away, Dr Sacks observes:
There are attributes of musical imagery and musical memory that have no equivalents in the visual sphere, and this [sic] may cast
light on the fundamentally different way in which the brain treats music and vision.

It? They? On the following page, the author suggests repetition is such an attribute. He appears
unaware that pattern repetition is a guiding principle for Gertrude Stein, or that pattern repetition in
music and the applied arts is a constant thread running through Ernst Gombrich’s The Sense of Order
—to mention just two of many unaccountable lacunae in Sacks’s extensive but fractured
bibliography.12
Catchy tunes may irritate, but musical hallucinations are disabling, and in evaluating the many case
histories that bulk out the remainder of Part I a reader would like to be a great deal better informed
about the contributions of age, medical history (in many cases involving the onset and causes of
deafness), existing medication, work environment, and patterns of daily activity, to so crippling a
disability. In a few cases the auditory disturbance objected to is not music but noise. Noise has its
own particular regularities and can be diagnosed as a product of random activity of the auditory sense
and purely neurological in origin, whereas music, to be recognized as such, necessarily involves
memory.
Gordon B., a professional violinist, was initially attacked by invasive “horrible grinding noises”
that were succeeded the following day by a constant pot-pourri of musical fragments (68–72). “Was
this the brain imposing order on disorder?” asks Dr Sacks in a rhetorical footnote. No answer. Not
even a clue. No mention of the fact that a string player from the violin section inclines the instrument
toward his or her left ear, and monitors the room response simultaneously with the free right ear.
There is a split auditory process going on, amounting to a split brain process, perfectly normal for
violinists, violists, cellists and bass players, in which the left ear is listening to the instrumental tone
(often transmitted through the jaw via the chinrest or fingerboard), and right ear directed outward,
monitoring the room and other players in the group. In the case of Gordon B. the patient had suffered
mumps and a ruptured eardrum as a child (we are not told which eardrum). This information is all in
the case notes, and all of it asks to be factored into a diagnosis. But Dr Sacks makes no attempt to do
that. Yes, it makes sense to infer, if a perception of featureless noise is succeeded by a perception of
music, that noise on the line over which the patient has no control has given way to structures in
memory that, heard as music, are at least tolerable.
Without pausing for breath Dr Sacks links the condition of Gordon B. with that of Michael
Chorost, citing a paragraph from the latter’s account of his experiences in the book Rebuilt.13 On the
evidence of his own description, however, Chorost was not suffering musical hallucinations at all, but
a sense of hearing invaded by varying intensities and bandwidths of colored noise: “now a river, now
a jet engine, now a restaurant with a thousand patrons all talking at once” (69n). Colored noise is
random activity in the auditory nerves. It is not music. Because it is not music, memory is not
involved. The case histories are not comparable.
As an account of Dr Sacks’s experiences in music-related diagnosis his book and its ugly title
conjure up a Kafkaesque image of medical ignorance, addiction, and despair. Discussing absolute
pitch the author yokes together papers by Saffran and Griepentrog (2001), Diana Deutsch et al.
(2006), and a book The Singing Neanderthals by Steven Mithen (2005). The first proposes that
absolute pitch is innate but discarded in infancy because “infants limited to grouping melodies by
perfect pitches would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different
keys.” That is illogical. The idea that perfect pitch is an obstacle to acquiring language will be news
to many readers like myself who have perfect pitch and can also read and write. Dr Sacks comments
“The acquisition of a tonal language may be one of the ‘unusual conditions’ that lead to the retention
and perhaps heightening of absolute pitch” (138). In relation to what the study referred to is
proposing, his comment makes no sense; it also shows that Dr Sacks has no idea what a tonal
language such as Mandarin actually is, a speech where the inflection of a syllable up, down, or not at
all, is part of the meaning of a word, but in which a sense of absolute pitch (sensitivity to frequency)
plays no role, unless by absolute pitch one means high, middle, and low, equivalent to describing The
Three Bears as units of measurement. According to Deutsch et al. “absolute pitch, whatever its
subsequent vicissitudes, [is] crucial to the origins of both speech and music.” This is a nonsense.
Absolute pitch is meaningless and incomprehensible without a standard of pitch. All such a statement
can refer to is an ability to hold a tune in unison. Attachment to absolute pitch is a conceptual error of
a kind routinely encountered in psychoacoustics. Such conclusions have little to do with science, or
medicine, or the human condition. Collectively they are designed to promote the ideology that human
nature is bound to conform to the arbitrary laws of a privileged minority, in precisely the same
manner as music is supposed to adapt to the numerical and cognitive simplicities of set theory.
Steven Mithen speculates that music and speech have a common origin, and that speech evolved
from a sign language of grunts of a musical nature.14 Uh-oh. Dr Sacks wonders if this idea might have
originated with a suggestion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau “that in primitive society, speech and song
were not distinct from each other.” Wrong again: the suggestion of a mind without any feeling for
context or history who finds it difficult to distinguish categories of pastness. Infancy is one: growth of
the child and acquisisiton of language. Absolute pitch as innate is another: related to evolution of the
species. Neanderthals are an extinct branch of prehistoric humanity whose language faculties (if any)
depend on physiology, skull size and bones of the face. However, what Rousseau is speculating about
here is the persistence of sung forms of ritual among remote but contemporary oral cultures
designated by him as “primitive” and “uncivilized” merely for want of reading and writing skills. So
we are dealing with not one but four different areas of inquiry: child, species, bone structure,
literacy.
On the practicalities of hearing the author is no more reliable. It is misleading of him to speak of
“sound vibrations” following a path from the ear via the eardrum and ossicles to the cochlea and
basilar membrane, thence to hair cells and auditory nerves (140), while at the same time omitting to
mention that in the process atmospheric pressure waves are transferred first to stretched skin (the
tympanum), then to a percussive mechanism (hammer and anvil) that in turn excites one end of a fluid​-
filled pressurized container of a particular shape within which standing waves form at scaled
locations relative to their frequency. The bending of adjacent hair cells in response to pressure
fluctuations within the cochlea excites a pattern of pinpoint electrochemical reactions conducted as
impulses by the auditory nerves via a number of waystations to the brain. That is a hugely complex
process in which analogue information in the form of continuously modified atmospheric pressure
waves is filtered and converted to digital electrical activity within the narrowest of time constraints.
We are advised that “The average ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart” (141).
Not true. The ear has ways of making much finer distinctions, and does so all the time. If a noise is
coming from the left, it reaches the left ear about 1/2,000 second before the same sound reaches the
right ear, and that precedence effect is not a skill that has to be learned. Distune the second string of a
pair in a twelve-string guitar by 1/1,000 tone and play both at once, and you will hear the difference
as a pulsation or beat. Dr Sacks has found the reference to one​seventeenth of a tone in an old copy of
Carl Seashore’s Psychology of Music, published in 1938. There a reader will find the remark
The average threshold for an unselected group of adults is about 3 ~ [3 Hertz] at the level of international pitch. 435 ~ [tuning note
A, 435 Hertz]. This is 1/17 tone, but a very sensitive ear can hear a difference as small as 0.5 ~ or less, which, at this level, is less
than 0.1 of a tone.15

The operative relationship, as the original citation makes clear, is not the interval or fraction of a tone
discernible but the frequency or number of impulses (wave fronts) impinging on the ear. If two
adjacent tones of only one cycle per second difference are sounded together—say, 1,000 Hertz and
1,001 Hertz—the beat frequency of one per second corresponds to a difference of ca. 1/120 tone, the
“less than 0.01 tone” mentioned by Seashore for people with more sensitive hearing. But this is basic
acoustics. There is no excuse for an author to leap back and forth between expressions of subjective
ignorance to pontifical banalities on “the complex nature of sounds and the vicissitudes of sound
waves as they bounce on objects and surfaces.”
Dr Sacks’s Musicophilia is designed to delight music therapists and hypochondriacs, dismay the
profession, and sow doubt and confusion among music students and the vulnerable. It is a matter of
singular regret not only that Oliver Sacks’s professional reputation as a scholar and doctor has been
gravely compromised by this incoherent and unsightly compilation, but that a person of his good
nature has been dragged, I hope unwittingly, into a dark zone of academic controversy with deeply
disturbing connotations.

Notes
1. A review of Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Revised and expanded. London: Picador, 2008.
Review first published in Tempo Vol. 64 No. 2 (July 2009), 69–75.
2. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Boston and New York: Little, Brown, 1991, 45.
3. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1998, 528–29. This is a strange, out of date, and
unoriginal critique. “Plinking noises” refers specifically to pointillist and serial compositions of the period 1951–1953, when the
author was not even born (he was born in 1954). The description does not apply to any other modern music, so he must have
read it somewhere. The rest of his citation can be dated to a footnote by Theodor Adorno: —“Durkheim designated to the
universal both the delusion of the particular, as a mere mimesis, and the power that makes a particular of it in the ftrst place: ‘the
grief evinced at certain ceremonies is not a natural expression of private feeling, overcome by cruel loss: it is a duty imposed by
the group. One laments not simply because one is sad, but because one is bound to feel sad. It is a ritualized attitude one is
obliged to adopt out of respect for custom, but which for the most part has nothing to do with the actual state of feeling of
individual members of society. All the same, an obligation enforced by penalties of a mythical or social nature’.” [Now that
really is sad.] Adorno’s citation is from Emile Durkheim, “Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totemique en
Australie.” Paris: 1912, in Travaux de L’Année sociologique, 568. In Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics tr. E. B. Ashton.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (repr. 1990), 326.
4. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 529.
5. Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
6. J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960, 117–18.
7. Robin Maconie, The Concept of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
8. Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind. London: HarperCollins, 1992.
9. Harold Klawans, Toscanini’s Fumble and Other Tales of Clinical Neurology. London: The Bodley Head, 1989.
10. Edward [Eduard] Pernkopf, “Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft.” Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 51 (1938). Cited in
Gerald Weissmann, Darwin’s Audobon: Science and the Liberal Imagination. New York: Plenum, 1998, 196.
11. Weissmann, Darwin’s Audobon, 197.
12. Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
1979.
13. Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How becoming part computer made me more human. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
14. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 2005.
15. Carl Seashore, Psychology of Music (1938). New York: Dover, 1967. Since the book was first written, the orchestra reference
tone A 435 Hertz has been raised to A 440 Hertz, and more recently in some orchestras to A 442 Hertz. An increase in number
represents an increase in string tension and accompanying increase in brightness of tone quality.
 3
How not to listen
Some years ago I was leading a course in music appreciation for students of art and design in the
United States. Few among them had studied music seriously, and even fewer were emotionally
connected to classical or contemporary art music. But virtually all of them listened to music on
headphones from a portable recorder as a matter of course while they were working. Music created
an acoustic exclusion zone in which they were able to focus on the job in hand without interruption.
The music was there, but they were not listening to it. You might say the music was a form of active
silence.
For some listeners the idea that music serves a useful purpose when you don’t listen to it may
seem like a paradox. But we all do it. It’s a radio thing. Perhaps you are doing it now, listening with
half an ear because it is more comfortable to have the radio on than to be working in total silence.
Only there is no such thing as total silence, as John Cage reminds us.
But music is also designed to help the listener deal with pain and suffering, and experience
uncertainty and extreme emotion. Audiences pay good money to be entertained by war and disaster
movies, and music is a part of that too. Others flock to the opera in their best dress to watch the
female lead play at dying slowly of lung disease while singing at the top of her voice. The rites of
religion, in which music plays an important role, are about suffering and recovery in everyday life. To
all those who are put off by modern music, the answer is a variation of something else Cage once
said: In that case, don’t listen. Or at least, try not to listen. In the long run it can actually be more
interesting not to like modern music than to like it, because only when you don’t like it are you in a
position to inquire, what is it exactly that I don’t like? And what does that say about music, and about
me? If you only ever listen to music you already like, such questions hardly ever come up.
Here is the catch. In order not to listen to music, it has to be there, present, available to be listened
to. The music has to be playing. You can’t ignore somebody who isn’t there. By all means try to
switch your mind off. This is what it is about. But not the music. You can’t switch the music off. That
would be cheating.
I happen to enjoy being musically challenged, and by Stockhausen especially, because his music is
a challenge that will not go away. In a lecture on intuitive music, which is a music inspired by a few
words of poetic text and created on the spot, he had this to say:
When I say, I am thinking—who is saying this? Then this person who is saying, I am thinking, can just as easily say, I have decided
not to think now. One is not identified with the brain, but with the brain activity, and that activity, the thinking activity, is something
that is responsible to a higher self, one which uses the brain as a computer. That is all. So acting, or listening, or doing something
without thinking, is the state of pure intuitive activity, not requiring to use the brain as a control.
. . . [Aloys Kontarsky] said, it’s impossible, I think all the time. What you are asking is absolutely impossible. Well, I said, can’t you
stop? He said, no, no, I can’t stop thinking, that’s ridiculous. . . . I said, stop it. He said, how? . . . Most people can’t do that. They
haven’t even thought about not thinking.1

My problem is the opposite, how to listen to a music that actively resists attention. Finding a
wavelength is always the challenge, and forcing the issue by concentrating is not the answer.
Understanding difficulty is hard. Rejecting difficulty on principle is a major reason why we do not get
to hear this music more often on radio or in concerts.
 I said to my students, since you are not really listening to the music you already know, because you
already know it and are simply using the noise it makes as a means of shutting off the outside world,
then how about trying not to listen to another sort of music instead? I will make available four hours’
listening, on three cds, of music examples we will be discussing during classes. By substituting these
tracks for those you already don’t listen to, I am not asking you to pay attention to them, but to get used
to them and be aware of the kind of sound they make. So when a particular item comes up in class,
you will be aware of it socially. And so that is what they did, and for many it appeared to work.
When we really got to discuss a piece, there was no barrier to listening, because they had already
leaped over the barrier, and they had done it without thinking. At the end of the course some young
artists said that not listening to this music, rather than not listening to the music they used not to listen
to, had ended by changing their way of thinking about art.
Listening to modern music, and Stockhausen’s in particular, does not have to be an unrewarding
experience. In fact, exposure to modern music (I don’t mean loud or frantic music, just challenging
and complex music) can help to train your mind. To improve your mind and for this music to make a
difference, a higher degree is not required. You don’t need to learn a set of rules, or how to read
music notation. Just having it playing in your earbuds while you are doing something else is enough.

Stockhausen acknowledged a prophetic quality in music, and himself as a medium through whom
prophecy is transmitted. Let me explain by way of analogy. There is a wonderful wall painting by
Giotto, created 700 years ago, called The Last Judgement. It depicts Christ in majesty floating in a
glowing acoustic bubble borne by angels and surrounded by a Hallelujah Chorus of heavenly
dignitaries. Above the figure of Christ there are real windows in the wall through which real light can
shine (though in practice they are covered up to protect the artwork from damaging ultra-violet rays).
So what Giotto is depicting is a world of painted light and image, but one contained within a second
reality of real light and real people, including the person looking on. As if to emphasize the message
of a layered reality, a pair of angels on either side at the top of the painting are shown peeling back
the painted surface to reveal yet another reality behind that.
Stockhausen’s friend Henri Pousseur liked the idea of a musical score with windows in it, like a
children’s book, through which you could see through to the music on the next opposite page. In
Hymnen, a tape work dating from 1967, Stockhausen peels away the musical surface to reveal the
composer and his American assistant David Johnson at work in real time in the electronic studio of
Cologne Radio. They are talking about the response higher up to a decision to incorporate the Nazi
rallying song, the “Horst Wessel-Lied” into the fabric of national anthems as an authentic if grisly
memento of recent German history.
It begins with a sudden clunk of the tape stopping. Stockhausen is saying that Otto Tomek (the
station director) thought inserting the song would create bad blood, but for him it is just a memento. It
is an editorial insert pasted into the composition, to explain why the song is there. That it is a staged
insertion becomes clear when he says the same words a second time, with a subtly different
inflection. What you are hearing is a take, not a spontaneous act. Actually a rough cut. A very rough
cut.
Unknown to the composer, his assistant Johnson is recording the informal studio discussion
concerning this rehearsed conversation on a separate machine. We can take this another dimension
deeper, he says. —How so?—What we are now saying, is also on tape. A pause.—Ah . . . so! says
the composer, as realization dawns. You can hear the smile on his face.
Layers of music and speech—for example, the simultaneous lectures of John Cage, in which the
speaker is accompanied by recordings of himself delivering three different speeches, sounding like a
conference of US attorneys on prime time television—are layers of time. Stockhausen is one of a
generation of composers who grew up with radio and whose music plays in virtuoso style with
speech, music, and sound effects on an equal footing. What you hear is what you get. What you get is a
kind of aural magic that plays with the illusions that are taken for granted in radio or the movies, but
appear very strange in the concert hall.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in a village in the country northwest of Cologne, a city famous for its
magnificent Gothic cathedral. Cologne is also associated with radical developments in modern art, in
1928 with German surrealism and the painter Max Ernst. Nonh Germany has a long tradition, shaped
by Dürer and Matthias Grünewald, of religious an of grotesque, intricate realism, exquisite torture,
and high symbolism, all of which shaped the mentality of the young son of a country teacher growing
up during the rise of Nazi Germany.
It was a hard and cruel upbringing. He was barely into his teens when war was declared. His
mother had fallen into an incurable depression, was hospitalized, and ultimately killed by lethal
injection. As the war progressed, his anxious father, unable to face German defeat a second time,
sought a hero’s death on the eastern front while his son lived out the final months of the war as a
stretcher-bearer for a field hospital caring for suffering and dying casualties of both sides, speaking
English to Allied soldiers, witnessing the frightful damage of Allied phosphor bombs on the
wounded, and playing popular songs by request on the piano to help take their minds off the
excruciating pain.
After war ended Stockhausen worked on the land and as rehearsal pianist for a village music
society while completing his school certificate. At first he studied to be a teacher like his father, and
had ambitions to become a poet. But at Cologne music school he discovered he had an aptitude for
composition, got engaged to a pretty fellow student, Doris Andreae, the daughter of a wealthy
Hamburg shipowner, and caught the attention of Herbert Eimert, a prominent Cologne music critic and
radio host who recognized Stockhausen as a rare talent and intervened to help launch his career.
In Stockhausen’s makeup, and in his music, a listener can detect a hint of the order and complexity
of J. S. Bach, an attraction to Wagnerian ritual and drama, and more than a touch of Richard Strauss’s
sense of mischief, mordant humor, and gleeful decadence, all held together by a meticulous and
demanding technique. Defiance of authority, gallows humor, and plaintive emotion are already
established in the Drei Lieder (Three Songs) for alto voice and small orchestra, composed in 1950 to
verses by Baudelaire and himself. The songs form a self-portrait in an ironic mix of styles embracing
elements of Kurt Weill and Spike Jones. Song number one, “The Rebel,” to a translation of
Baudelaire, sings of the defiance of the fallen angel, whose destiny it is to refuse to submit to
authority. Number two, “Free” is a fable about a joker in the court of twelve-tone music who refuses
to play by the academy rules, and cuts the knotted rope, or official measure, with the king’s sword, a
gesture for which he will pay with his life. (The knotted rope is also a knot-row, or note-row.) The
third song, “The string player” pictures a street musician after the style of Picasso’s blind guitarist,
tearing at his strings with bleeding fingers in search of the perfect note while the public hurries by
unconcerned.
With the end of war, the psychological rebuilding of morale in Allied occupied Germany directed
special effort into renewing art and musical culture, in particular rehabilitating those modern artists
and composers who had suffered persecution under National Socialism. At the 1951 Summer School
of Music in Darmstadt, Stockhausen made friends with a mystical Flemish composer, Karel
Goeyvaerts, a recent student of Olivier Messiaen. Goeyvaerts had a fabulous vision of a new kind of
music reduced to points or atoms of sound arranged in crystalline shapes of perfect symmetry. Both
young men admired the austere perfection of Webern’s music, in the few scores which had circulated
clandestinely during the war, and were thrilled by Messiaen’s piano piece Mode de valeurs et
d’intensités, prototype of a musical speech reduced to isolated syllables rather than words.
Stockhausen decided to study in Paris under Messiaen. He took with him a set of four piano pieces
of formidable difficulty. His new friend Pierre Boulez was ecstatic and wrote to John Cage to tell him
about the new young genius. Stockhausen saw the need to organize the alphabet soup of pointillist
music, so to speak, to jockey the individual letters floating on the surface into forming words and
messages. In Kreuzspiel, from 1952, intermittent points and shafts of piano tone descend from on high
to be reflected as laconic floating melody threads played by oboe and bass clarinet against a jungle
backdrop of beating tom-toms.
After his Paris studies Stockhausen was welcomed back to Cologne to assist in the new electronic
music studio directed by Herbert Eimert. His instructor was Werner Meyer-Eppler, a communications
scientist with connections to the United States artificial intelligence community, now leading seminars
at Bonn University. The free world was in the grip of an information science revolution set in play by
Shannon and Weaver and embracing emerging intelligence and computing technologies. In this brave
new world, music was accorded refugee status as a primitive form of speech with potentially useful
applications. At a time when Cage and his friends in New York were playing musical games of
chance in an effort to draw out latent protocols of music communication, Stockhausen was busy
attending serious classes in information science and predictive linguistics at Bonn University under
Meyer-Eppler. Although the more esoteric subject areas such as higher mathematics were beyond
him, mere immersion in the information matrix of hearing and cognition added enormously to the
imaginative brilliance, coherence, and underlying theoretical integrity of his compositions in the
1950s. High on the list is Gruppen (Groups) for three orchestras, completed in 1957 when the
composer was still in his twenties. The work is a fabulous invention for more than 100 players split
into three groups arranged in widescreen format, left, center, and right, under separate conductors,
often beating at three different tempi at the same time.
Stravinsky liked Gruppen immensely. “It really is in groups,” he said. He admired the way
Stockhausen constantly varied the color and density of part-writing, not only to left and right, but high
and low, and loud and soft. At a time when the elderly Russian composer was striving to come to
terms with a new twelve-tone musical language for the dance suite Agon (whose title literally means
“a struggle or contest”), Gruppen was the proof Stravinsky was looking for that ballet and the series
could be compatible and mutually vitalizing influences.
In 1958 Stockhausen traveled to the United States on a scouting mission. What began as a couple
of invitations quickly snowballed into a nationwide tour lasting several weeks. He was surprised to
see so many science academics in white coats and young students packing into his lectures
showcasing the latest electronic music. The Americans were proud of their progress in information
science, but unable to match the virtuosity, complexity, and quality of new music being created in
Europe in the name of information science. Visiting a nightclub in New York with pianist John Lewis
of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Stockhausen was impressed by the fluid improvisations of Count Basie
and his orchestra. This American ability to pick up an idea and run with it was completely alien to
German musicians who liked to have everything written down in detail. On the other hand, many
American players with the gift for improvisation he admired were not so good at sight reading from a
score sheet. On his return to Europe Stockhausen composed Zyklus, a study for solo percussion
player surrounded by a forest of metal, wood, and skin instruments. It sounds like a German
interpretation of a jazz break, and the graphic score is stunning to look at, but behind all that, the piece
is designed to give the player a choice whether to progress from order to chaos, or from chaos back
to order. Whichever you choose, at the end of the journey you are always back where you started,
which is a real achievement and a sign of real genius.
Stockhausen’s career was beginning to take off in 1960 when Meyer​Eppler suddenly died. He was
devastated. The 142-times repeated chord that begins Piano Piece IX is as though the composer is
pounding the table with his fists. His life changed. He put away the dark suit and white coat and grew
a pony tail. He fell in love and moved in with the artist Mary Bauermeister, the daughter of an
anthropologist whose apartment studio in Cologne was open house for visiting radical American
artists. At a time when musical opinion was hardening against Cage and the US avant-garde,
Stockhausen continued to defend Cage’s controversial ideas about music and intuition, ideas which
Meyer-Eppler and information science had always treated with respect.
The sixties produced a number of major length compositions. A score from the early years, Punkte
(Points) was dusted off and revised, each of the original points teased and tufted to create a magic
carpet of densely woven texture. It was followed by Momente (Moments), a cubist cantata dedicated
to Bauermeister in which the serial world of musical possibility is reinvented as anthropological
myth, with elements of tribal ritual and African American gospel tradition incorporated for good
measure.
Time, too, is a physical measure to me, and in music I must feel a physical here and there and not only a now, which is to say,
movement from and toward. I do not always feel this sense of movement or location in, say, Boulez’s Structures or those
fascinating score-plans by Stockhausen (I have not yet heard his Momente for voices and thirteen instruments, but the title augurs
well).2

A world of meaning lurks in these few Stravinsky comments. Points and Moments look like
fashionable buzzwords from the modernist lexicon, but they actually derive from analytical
philosophy. In a series of lectures published as The Concept of Nature in 1926, the mathematician
and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead defined the term punct or point as a fundamental datum of
thought, and moment as a singular event, for example, as is implied by the gambit “once upon a time.”
Stockhausen always insisted that the correct term for his original music was punktuelle Musik, most
definitely not pointillisme or pointillist music. That implies a rational basis for his use of the term
Punkte, and an understanding of sorts of the philosophy behind it. Since the first version of Punkte
dates from 1952, before he began his studies in Bonn, he may have learned about the concept as a
reader of popular books in the philosophy of science, as a part-time student of philosophy at Cologne
University in the late 1940s. A knowledge of the terminology of mathematical logic throws additional
light on some of Stockhausen’s most difficult writing from the Die Reihe years, the paper . . . how
time passes . . . written in 1956, published in the intensely theoretical Vol. 3 of Die Reihe in 1957,
and rendered in impermeable English by Cornelius Cardew in the US edition published in 1959. The
essay ahnost certainly benefited from his tutorials in information theory with Meyer-Eppler.3
Of especial interest is not only that the terms Punkte and Momente are theoretically grounded in
Alfred North Whitehead, and that the music composed under these names is alluding to a train of
thought associated with the coauthor of Principia Mathematica, but that from his comment on a score
he has not yet seen, Stravinsky is aware of this too, since he locates the composition in a context of
the philosophy of time, and his own music in relation to that philosophy.
But I am straying. Whitehead and time are discussed at length elsewhere. Momente is also a
departure for Stockhausen in its nature as a themed composition of manifestly US sympathies,
combining elements of nightclub jazz and African American gospel music with multilingual messages
of love and peace. In Hymnen, his next big project, the subtext is US information theory and
international relations. Nor is it easy to ignore the political implications of a leading German artist in
the sixties creating major works on themes of love and reconciliation in the era of Martin Luther King
and Vietnam.
When I arrived in Cologne as a student in 1964, Stockhausen and a team of players were working
on one of the strangest pieces of music you are ever likely to encounter. Mikrophonie I is music
inspired by the movies in which the roar of the MGM lion is married to the tam-tam of J. Arthur Rank.
A music in which an enormous tam-tam two meters high is rubbed, nudged, scratched and scrutinized
by two teams of players with hand-held microphones stationed on either side of the vibrating surface
to create a growling impression of alien creatures from another time and place peering though a space
portal that is the movie screen.
The trend away from cold war science to peace and love reached a climax in 1968 with
Stimmung, a seventy-minute long meditation for a sextet of a cappella voices on the overtones of a
drone chord in the key of B flat. At its Amsterdam premiere this gentle piece provoked howls of
impatience among a cahoot of potsmoking Dutch composers driven to distraction by a dominant ninth
that refused to go anywhere. Part of the meaning of the unresolved chord—which Boulez described to
a reporter as “the endless chord: how very German”—is frankly erotic, the endless moment of
ecstasy. Putting all of that to one side, Stimmung succeeds on its own terms as a timeless music to be
listened to with eyes closed, in the middle of the night, at 35,000 feet, and the more you listen, the
more you hear, and the more animated and interesting the music becomes.
Throughout the sixties Stockhausen was pushing ahead in search of a new kind of generative
grammar for music, more controllable than the Markov chain probabilistic method of information
theory advocated by Meyer-Eppler and more elegant than the cut and paste interpolation and
substitution routines adopted by Max Mathews and others at MIT (and parodied in Hymnen’s hybrid
national anthems). Prozession (Procession) and Kurzwellen (Short waves) are among a group of
pieces composed in relationship schemata based on plus, minus, and equal signs, in which specimens
of music are inspected and compared as it were through a microscope moving in and out, or up and
down to show more or less of the sample in gross or in detail. The plus-minus notation seems to have
been inspired by a classification scheme for myth introduced by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, or
one similar adopted by linguist Roman Jakobson for phoneme classification, both influenced by
information theory.
In 1968, at an extreme moment in his life, Stockhausen composed From the seven days, a series of
text pieces in which even sign language is abandoned and players are given only the briefest of clues
about the state of mind they should be in. When pianist Kontarsky protested that he could not imagine
how to react to “play in the rhythm of the universe,” Stockhausen said, “have you never thought about
the planets circling in the cosmos, or constellations of the stars?”—Oh, you mean Webern? said
Kontarsky: Well, okay then, let’s start.
Stockhausen’s life changed again when he and players were invited to perform in the German
pavilion at the Expo ’70 world fair at Osaka. A geodesic dome was built to Stockhausen’s design and
lined with speakers controlled by the composer from what he called a “sound mill”: winding
apparatus with a crank handle to spin the live sound up and down and around the heads of the
audience in an infinite variety of ways. Mill is an interesting word. I can imagine the term sound mill
or sound grinder alluding to the chocolate grinder of Marcel Duchamp, centerpiece of the artwork
The Bride stripped bare. Or possibly a reference to the mill at the center of Charles Babbage’s
Analytical Engine. Either way the device was a great success, made Stockhausen very happy and a
great many Japanese citizens more than a little dizzy.
During time off from his Expo duties he worked on something completely different. Mantra for
two pianos and electronics is a musical Alice Through the Looking-Glass reverting entirely to
classical notation. With this work Stockhausen began to develop a visual dimension of music theater
in which some or all of the players are role-playing as well as interpreting notes on the page. He
added a raft of new theatrical elements to Momente, and in 1971 composed Trans (through, or trance)
with theatrical interpolations to enliven an actionless and intimidating comedy in which a screen of
string players bathed in crimson light acts as a visual and acoustic barrier preventing the audience
from clearly hearing multiple orchestral maneuvers in the hinterground. Despite the disturbing left to
right clatter of an amplified weaver’s shuttle, the acoustic curtain refuses to open, and at various
times members of the zombie orchestra appear to lose their cool or suffer minor personality
breakdowns.
A huge team effort went into Inori, a 72-minute commission by a Japanese patron for large
orchestra and mute soloists on high perches whose prayer-like gestures and poses, like an abstracted
deaf speech, are reflected in instrumental music of extraordinary delicacy and implicit decadence.
The same year, 1974, he composed a set of twelve miniature melodies for musical boxes,
representing the twelve signs of the zodiac, to be used as call-signs like the character motifs in
Wagnerian opera. They are employed as characters in the glittering science fiction fantasy Sirius,
music theater based on an unfinished project by Antonin Artaud and Edgar Varèse, and composed for
electronic music and a quartet of armor-plated space invaders riding in like Valkyries on flying
saucers. The same melodies also feature in Music in the Belly, a children’s fantasy for musical boxes
and percussionists, and a range of concert items of moderate difficulty for solo players.
Another Japanese commission yielded a delightfully quirky version of ceremonial theater titled
Der Jahreslauf (The Course of the Years) for choreographed actors and instrumental ensemble
modeled on a Japanese Gagaku orchestra, including three harmoniums. The Japanese have an acute
sense of timing compared to people in the west. The action is all about time. Throughout the
performance, four actors confined to slots in the stage corresponding to the digits of the date of
performance (at the premiere these were 1–9–7–7) freeze, sway, lope, and scurry back and forth at
speeds corresponding to the units, tens, hundreds, and thousand values, like digits on an auto
odometer. The point, in Samuel Beckett’s phrase, made famous by composer Luciano Berio in
Sinfonie, is not to stop: “Keep going!” because if the music stops, progress stops and the world will
come to an end. It is a dramatised variation on the theme of time passing already considered in
Punkte and Momente.
Four temptations intervene during the flow of time in attempts to stop proceedings and bring time
to a halt: bouquets of flowers (the kind given to the winner of a sporting event), an offer of “exquisite
food” from a food trolley, distraction of entertainment by a clown riding onstage on a moped playing
tunes on a battery of klaxons, and oldfashioned sex in the shape of a lap dancer posing to lurid
noncopyright jazz.
This is music theater in the spirit of traditional village entertainment in India or Indonesia, as much
as modern Japan. Hidden under the finger-wagging and solemn humor are a few magic moments
where the sounds of everyday life are transformed into music, as in the first temptation where the
regular and dotted rhythms of footsteps stamping, running, and skipping on the stage surface are
magically transformed into the random sounds of people clapping in the air, an effect like a flock of
geese taking flight.
That year, 1977, a year after my first survey of his music appeared in print, Stockhausen embarked
on a hugely ambitious project, a series of seven operas, one for each day of the week, under the
overall title LIGHT. It would be his legacy, his “Guernica”: a monument to serialism, a vast mural of
twentieth-century life, and a time capsule written in code, like Aztec myth or the hieroglyphs of
ancient Egypt, to be dug up and interpreted thousands of years hence, after the long-awaited
Apocalypse of atomic war. But the expected war never materialized, and the Work in Progress finally
came to an end in the early years of the twenty-first century, leaving critics and experts still dazed and
confused about what it all might mean.
The way the seven operas of LIGHT are designed to fit together is a bit like the wonderfully
complicated Isenheim Altarpiece by the painter Matthias Grünewald, a sacred icon in multiple
infolding layers that open out to reveal different images for different festivals of the year (like the
“fold upon fold” imagery of Boulez’s Pli selon pli settings of Mallarmé). Painted in a time of plague,
these are uncompromising images of extreme suffering and sublime humanity. In drawing on his own
life experiences for the seven operas, Stockhausen is following in the tradition of Berlioz in
Symphonie Fantastique and Richard Strauss in Ein Heldenleben, to evoke character studies of his
own family and pass sardonic comment on the declining social morality of his time. Like Grunewald,
but unlike Strauss, Stockhausen is an unstinting realist, drawing without apology on the baffling
reality of a world gone mad, and the agony and ecstasy of a life dedicated to suffering, like
Baudelaire’s disobedient angel.
The opera Tuesday from LIGHT is dedicated to service in battle, and summons up imagery of
hand to hand conflict and aerial bombing based on his own experiences as a stretcher-bearer. The
imagery of hand to hand combat is lustrous and congested, like the Battle of San Romano painted by
Paolo Uccello. Wednesday from LIGHT is dedicated to peace and compromise in scenes of United
Nations style exchanges and formalities of reconciliation, brought to a close with a sweet
oldfashioned chorale in the key of F sharp, “Liebe tönt in Deine Stimme” (Love in your voice is
sounding), which could almost pass for a page out of his 1950 student portfolio.
The mythology of LIGHT is constructed around three personas: Michael, Eva, and Lucifer,
representing duty, love, and implacable reason associated respectively with heaven, earth, and the
inferno of science. The character of Michael, assigned to Stockhausen’s son Markus, plays the
trumpet and his motif is a rising fourth, like a bugle call. The role of Eva is composed for the
composer’s companion the American basset​hornist Suzanne Stevens, and specializes in gliding tones
that often sound like weeping and wailing and represent the uncertainty of the female mind. Obsessed
with number, the Lucifer figure has a counting fetish; his instrument is the trombone and his motif an
eleven times repeated tone, symbolizing indecision or incapability of movement. The symbolism is
exact. Complications arose when a young Dutch flautist, Kathinka Pasveer, appeared on the scene.
Stockhausen fell in love and she joined the household and was written into the script. On another
plane of reality Pasveer was a fortunate discovery, since the flute completed a symbolic trio of
fundamental waveforms: sine wave (flute), square wave (basset​horn), and sawtooth wave
(trumpet/trombone).
Monday from LIGHT is dedicated to womanhood and childbirth. The prevailing voices are high
registers: soprano, treble, alto, and tenor, and of course melodies that sigh, wail, inflect and glide
with subtle shades of meaning. Stockhausen worked with his two female companions to develop a
precise notation for microtones, extremely subtle divisions of the scale. In Xi (the Greek letter X)
these extremely fine gradations of tone come to life in a limpid and beautifully shaped pastorale for
solo flute.
Possibly Stockhausen’s most astonishing invention of the entire opera cycle is the Helicopter
String Quartet from the Wednesday opera. In this scene each of the four members of a string quartet
(at the premiere the Arditti Quartet, by whom it was commissioned) flies aloft in a small helicopter
and plays furiously up and down the scale while the sounds of both players and aircraft are beamed
down to the audience on the ground, who follow every movement on giant television screens. The
idea of harnessing the sounds of airplanes and automobiles to make music was first advanced by the
Italian futurist Marinetti around 1914, but it took the genius of Stockhausen and the goodwill of the
Dutch authorities to make it happen. Against all odds, the Helicopter String Quartet has become one
of the composer’s best-known and most talked-about compositions. At first hearing, however, I had
the sudden and distinct impression that this music was saying goodbye. As the four helicopters (of the
Apocalypse) descend to earth, the accompanying music forms a classical harmonic progression in the
spirit of Estonian tintinnabulist Arvo Pärt, which is quite a surprise and poignant in its own way.
After LIGHT was completed in 2004, Stockhausen started work on a cycle of chamber pieces with
the title KLANG (Clang): The Twenty-four hours of the day. The term “clang” in English has
associations with bells and bell-ringing, and signifies a compound tone with inharmonic partials.
Only twenty-one pieces were completed at the composer’s death, but the number corresponds to the
twenty-one moments of the original Momente and (for those of a numerological persuasion) to the
twenty-one songs of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Magic numbers are scattered thoughout the history
of music and art of German tradition, and 21 is both a perfect number (the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 +
6) and also the seventh term of the Fibonacci series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21). So the series is unfinished
but complete.
Among the collection is a strangely moving piece, Heaven’s Door, for solo percussionist,
performed on a specially made panel door with tuned panels in a ceremony of door-knocking or
hammering evoking Martin Luther nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the Door of Wittenburg Church, or
Black Rod banging on the door of the House of Commons in England. Commissioned by the American
Stuart Gerber, the piece is rich in US allusion, its wooden sounds referencing the giant marimbas of
Harry Partch, and its title, the melancholy Bob Dylan song “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s
door” from the sixties. The idea of passing through a wooden door to paradise could also be a
reference to the artwork Tu M’ (Tu aimes: thou lovest), farewell creation of French American artist
Marcel Duchamp.
The end is dramatic. When the door finally opens after desperate pounding, the percussionist steps
cautiously into the darkness, followed by a little girl, the picture of innocence (like the little girl
accompanying the blinded Minotaur in Picasso’s etching). From the darkness behind the door can be
heard the wail of sirens and the clash of metal. It is the world of Varèse, but transformed into a desert,
a vision of Chernobyl.

II

To many people electronic music belongs to the world of science fiction and robots and has nothing to
do with civilization as we understand it. But that is mistaken. Western music, music machines, and
civilization go together. Among the earliest music machines on record is the Hydraulis or water-
powered pipe organ invented by an engineer in Alexandria in the third century BC. In fifteenth-
century France, the builders of Beauvais cathedral celebrated its completion by commissioning an
elaborate clock to keep track of the cycle of religious festivals and inspire the faithful with a
mechanical enactment of the Day of Judgement. The history of music and music notation in the west is
critical to the development of western science. The tempered scale is a navigator’s grid, and every
keyboard instrument is a form of acoustic calculator. The art of western music oscillates back and
forth between extremes of ideal precision and pure affect. Mozart, Stravinsky, and Boulez lean
toward mechanical perfection, whereas Mahler, Debussy, and Schoenberg incline in the other
direction, toward a music capable of conveying the finest degrees of human emotion.
Benjamin Franklin developed a musical instrument of nested crystal bowls pedal-rotated in a
water trough to moisten them, and played like wineglasses with the tips of the fingers. The glass
armonica was intended as a scientific device to synthesize voice harmonics in pure tones. A number
of composers created studies for the instrument, some of which are compiled and performed on a cd
recording by Thomas Bloch. They include a tiny one-minute “Melodrame” by Beethoven, composed
in 1815 and curiously similar in spirit to the disembodied purity of Stockhausen’s Zodiac pieces for
musical boxes, also miniatures, of 1975.
During the nineteenth century mechanical music spread across the western world. Player pianos,
barrel organs, orchestrions, and elaborate musical boxes and mechanical birds provided home
entertainment from instructions encoded in pin cylinders, perforated paper rolls, and metal discs.
Mechanical reproduction gave rise to the coin operated bar-room piano and the square-cut rhythms of
ragtime. By 1900 major reproducing piano companies in the United States and Europe were
competing to record not just the notes of music, but also performance traits specific to actual
musicians, incorporating expressive variations of tempo, accents, and personal flourishes.
Archive piano rolls by Debussy, Mahler, and Rachmaninov survive on cd. Stravinsky created a
multi-track edition of The Rite of Spring on a single roll, treating it as a virtual synthesizer a
generation in advance of Conlon Nancarrow. The Australian Percy Grainger experimented with
moving clusters on piano roll a generation before Stockhausen attempted to do the same for live
pianist in 1961 with Piano Piece X, now a party piece performed by Maurizio Pollini on YouTube.
In 1987 Michael Tilson Thomas and jazz band recorded the original version of George
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the composer himself as the rather spooky soloist on piano roll
(Gershwin died of a brain tumor in 1937). In 1925 American composer and Hollywood gossip
columnist George Antheil created a sensation with Ballet mécanique, a futuristic musical
pandemonium for multiple keyboards, sirens, electric doorbells, and the recorded sound of a
propellor airplane.
By the time Stockhausen was born in 1928, machine music was well established. He was just
three years old when the first performance took place of a Konzertstück for solo trautonium and
strings by Hindemith, a strangely conservative exercise in neoclassical style for an important
precursor of the Moog synthesizer.
A German engineer Kurt Stille invented a metal tape recorder in 1929 which was acquired by the
BBC in 1931 in a version under the name Marconi-Stille. Metal tape was an improvement on the wire
recorder from which it was developed, was suitable for voice recording, and had potential for music
recording. The BASF company developed paper tape recording in 1936, and this technology
remained jealously guarded by the German government. The sound quality was only so-so for speech,
but paper backed tape was simple to edit. By wartime, when Stockhausen was at school, the
technology had vastly improved. German Radio was broadcasting special news reports on the state of
the war. While they appeared to be genuine despatches from the front line, in reality these were
created on tape in the studio with recorded Wagner music and prerecorded sounds of gunfire and
divebombers, a virtual reality existing only in the imagination. Such blurring of the lines between
documentary reality and imaginative fiction would haunt Stockhausen for the rest of his life.
His life in electronic music began in 1952 as a student in Paris, when Boulez persuaded Pierre
Schaeffer to admit Stockhausen to the French Radio musique concrète studios. At that time, most of
the materials available for making music were pre-recorded sound effects from a disc library used
for radio drama. Tracks were copied to soft acetate disc and mixed in a style to be revived in the rap
and digital era, but in 1952 the possibilities were limited to disc speed and balance. Tape was only
just becoming available, and Stockhausen was one of very few students able to practice editing skills
on tape, with rough and ready but interesting results in the Konkrete Etüde (Concrete Study).
He kept in touch with Meyer-Eppler and Eimert in Cologne, who were in the process of setting up
a sound laboratory on a more scientific footing. On his return to Cologne he had access to some of the
best equipment available, including high-speed quarter-inch full-track and half-track, and half-inch
four-track tape recorders, switchable waveform generators, an impulse generator called a “chopper”
(it also sounded at times like a helicopter of that name), and a range of custom equipment including a
melochord, a trautonium, and a pair of ring modulators.
From the beginning Stockhausen envisioned a sound world of unimaginable lightness and purity.
Crafted exclusively in sine tones, his Electronic Study I of 1953 sounds just like an elegant French
musical box from the nineteenth century. Its liquid sounds were criticized in the United States for not
conforming to the tempered scale of western music. But why should they? Major and minor scales are
historical conventions with little basis in nature. By starting from scratch and experimenting with
different scale divisions (or rather, units of difference), the Cologne group were able to make rapid
progress while their US counterparts at the University of Illinois and elsewhere struggled to program
a computer of limited memory in the rules of harmony and counterpoint.
For two years Stockhausen attended seminars in information theory with Meyer-Eppler, who
regarded him as a prize pupil. The focus of study was speech recognition: how the flow of speech
actually breaks down, and is heard to break down (not the same thing) into smaller and smaller units;
how words and phrases interface to make larger units of meaning, and ultimately how phonemes and
syllables can be stored and recombined into new words and syllables. What came out of that period
of inquiry was Gesang der Jünglinge, the “Song of the young men in the fiery furnace,” a five-
channel electronic cantata in which a boy’s singing voice praising God magically condenses out of an
electronic plasma of voicelike syllables. Musically and technically, it is still a breathtaking invention
of genius.
In 1958 Stockhausen traveled to the United States. His American audiences were highly impressed
and among them was Percy Grainger. He visited the Columbia-Princeton Center codirected by Otto
Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and the leading US serialist Milton Babbitt. Babbitt had staked his
reputation on a piece of custom equipment called the RCA Mark II Synthesizer, controlled by punched
tape from a typewriter keyboard. Its tone generators were a set of twelve tuning forks. Stockhausen
knew immediately that the Mark II was only ever going to produce music of an academic and
formulaic character.
His next electronic composition, Kontakte (Contacts) took shape in 1959 and was completed in a
rush with the assistance of Gottfried Michael Koenig to meet the deadline for the Cologne IGNM
Festival of New Music the following year. The title “contacts” refers to the way artificial waveforms
are constructed out of snippets of tape, and how they alter in character as they move through the
spectrum of transformation in pitch and time, so that a simulated drum sound gradually changes into a
piano, then into a glockenspiel or triangle, depending on the speed of change. In a version for four-
channel tape, piano, and percussionist the live players attempt to catch the electronic sounds like
butterflies and haul them down to earth. After fifty years these handmade sounds still appear fresh and
crisp. Emotionally the work takes the listener back to the raw sound world of George Antheil’s Ballet
mécanique. The archive Wergo edition still available on cd is from the original mixdown and may
sound a little unfamiliar. In those days of balance engineering, people were unused to mixing down to
stereo, let alone four channels into two. But the sounds are crisp and clean.
During the sixties Stockhausen focused increasingly on the challenge of intermodulation, a process
where the character of a sound, for example a speaking voice, is impressed on the material of a
second, such as the noise of a train or jet plane. The precedent for intermodulation was set by a piece
of obsolete equipment called a vocoder, which could produce stunning results but only with a short
sample at a time (the sample was sliced mechanically into layers, and the contour of each layer
transferred to the carrier sound and the slices assembled like a layer cake). But Stockhausen did not
approve of the vocoder. Somehow it offended his sense of authenticity (it had been used successfully
to scramble voice despatches between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war). Without Meyer-
Eppler on hand to advise him, Stockhausen resorted to primitive ring modulation, the acoustical side
effects of which tend to be painful on the ear. In Mixtur for orchestral groups and ring modulation he
appears to be striving after a studio technique called flanging, produced when a complex sound and
its tape recorded image move out of synchronization causing a frequency spike to move up and down
through the musical texture like an acoustic searchlight scanning the orchestral fabric from top to
bottom. The results with ring modulation were noisy and caused a rift with Boulez, who could be
very fussy.
Stockhausen put ring modulation to one side to create Hymnen, the monumental tape panorama
(with optional instruments) based on national anthems. The work is designed to give an impression of
navigating through the radio sounds of civilization as they might appear to visitors hovering in outer
space. Listeners are invited to spot familiar anthems (or not so familiar) and follow their
transformation and recombination to create Frankenstein polyglot anthems using processes of
dissection and interpolation borrowed from the rule book of US information theory. National songs
are dismembered, pulverized, and reattached in a radio style narrative at times uplifting, at times
comical, and even today still fresh and approachable.
In 1966 he took a month-long break from Hymnen to visit the NHK Studios in Japan, where the
Tokyo radio station had taken delivery of a prototype six-channel tape recorder. The Japanese also
provided more advanced amplitude modulation technology (envelope following, like the vocoder, but
better). Working at high speed he created the electronic work Telemusik from largely pure waveforms
impregnated with ethnic music from Japan and other nonwestern cultures, framed by ritual drum and
gong sounds from the Japanese classical tradition.
Mantra, composed in 1970 for two pianos and electronics, represents a turning back from musical
machine code to notes on the stave. This is Stockhausen in neoclassical guise, but the duo piano sound
is overlaid with electronically modified timbres, as though one were listening to a hologram and not a
live event. The technology is a vast improvement and a considerable artistic breakthrough. The word
“Mantra” means a prayer formula to be repeated over and over until one attains a state of grace. Here
the formula, a layer of musical syllables in the right hand overlaid on a different sequence in the left
hand, is put under the microscope, as it were, undergoing a series of transformations and expansions
in pitch and time, and also in its internal ratios, illuminated by a changing spectrum of electronic
reference tones that heighten different aspects of the formula to make them glow or stand out
acoustically.
During the 1970s the Cologne studio acquired an EMS Synthi 100 analogue pin matrix synthesizer
designed by the British engineer Peter Zinovieff. Despite having only a limited range of waveforms,
the device came with a bonus in the form of a sequencer, a loop storage voltage control facility able
to store and recycle three melodies simultaneously. The idea of constantly circulating but constantly
varying melody forms inspired Stockhausen to compose the Zodiac melodies for musical boxes. It
also led directly to the conception of the opera cycle LIGHT composed entirely from a basic formula
of three superimposed melody layers.
The Synthi 100 and its sequencing possibilities were demonstrated in the electronic cantata Sirius
commissioned by the federal government of Germany as a gift to the United States in its bicentenary
year. At a time when Boulez, with the help of a team of American experts from MIT, was busy putting
together a French government-sponsored digital music research facility to be based in Paris,
Stockhausen struggled to remain competitive at a moment in time dominated by Carl Sagan and
rumors of contact with aliens, with a curious mixture of Close Encounters style science fiction, cult
prophecy, and metallica. The result is hard, gleaming and defiant music accompanying a quartet of
interplanetary robocops.
By 1984 Boulez’s IRCAM digital sound laboratory was officially in business with the full
premiere of Répons for orchestra, solo keyboards, and computer-generated sounds. The event was a
political and personal triumph for the French composer. During week-long visits to IRCAM in
December 1983 and August 1984 Stockhausen realized accompanying computer music for the flute
composition Kathinkas Gesang for solo flute and electronics, a scene from the opera Saturday from
LIGHT. The electronic music is composed in the image of a tornado interior from sampled
waveforms of extremely rich timbres. The partials of each waveform are separated out and rotated
independently at different speeds, coming together every once in a while to create the effect of a
detonation or hammer blow. The task stretched IRCAM engineers to the limit, but the resulting sounds
are a fascinating series of delicate color-changing textures.
For most of the 1980s Stockhausen’s personal assistant in electronic sounds was his son Simon
Stockhausen. By the mid-1980s commercial synthesizers had appeared on the market which were able
to handle gliding tones and chords, seeming to promise a greatly extended range of musical
possibilities and special effects. These were put to the test in the opera Tuesday from LIGHT to
depict the battle scenes between the forces of reason and intuition, including ack-ack fire flying
upwards and bombs falling, images from the past the composer had endured as a young conscript in
1945.
These are supposed to be the sounds of war, but compared to the handmade sounds of the tape era,
the combination of Synthi harmonies and Yamaha glissandi, while skillful in their own way, appear
flabby and inert, giving an impression of a war of knights in plastic armor with light sabers in day-glo
colors. The problem has partly to do with composition of the sounds themselves, which lack body
weight and realism, and lack resistance, and partly with problems of projecting the sounds with the
necessary impact.
Since Lee DeForest and others discovered electrical amplification in the early 1900s, the art of
electrical sound synthesis, from a music industry perspective, has been fixated on the simplest
possible process, of modeling a waveform in miniature, and then simply upscaling the result. In
musical acoustics however, it is not enough just to make a scale model and then make it bigger. It does
not work with dinosaurs or giants, because if you try to upscale a human being, fly, or dinosaur, the
life form is doomed to collapse under its own weight. Twice the size means four times the weight, and
skin and bones cannot handle the extra burden.
In sounds it is the same. Lower sounds demand more power, travel much longer distances, and
shake buildings, but higher frequencies give a sharper and clearer image, and reflect off surfaces. For
low sounds the air is thin and easily penetrated, but at very high frequencies the air itself becomes
thick like molasses. Most synthesizers are based on the idea of simple waveform expansion, without
taking into account the power and atmosphere implications. An analogy that comes to mind is the
difference between a baroque keyboard, made of wood, and a modern grand piano, strengthened by
an iron frame and built to withstand the tension stresses of a suspension bridge. In synthesizer terms,
if you want to scale up to attain the power and reverberation of a modern grand piano, you need to
have multiple circuits for each note in the same way as a piano has multiple strings for each note, to
give a result that is heavier and more resonant. (And you also make sure the circuits are not exactly in
tune, because inexact tuning creates liveliness in the sound.)
Simon Stockhausen was also responsible for the electronic sounds of Friday from LIGHT, dating
from 1994. These have greater density and warmth, and are a considerable improvement. After
Friday Simon retired from the team and was replaced as chief synthesist by Antonio Pérez Abeliàn.
Abellán brought new qualities of subtlety and refinement to his sound vocabulary, but at the expense
of density and weight. At times the synthesizer is beginning to sound like a parish church organ. There
are interesting spatial effects to be heard, but within the context of a smaller and more intimate space.
At a moment of high drama in the opera Thursday from LIGHT the young knight is received in
heaven with joy and gifts of symbolic crystal. The tension is broken by the sudden arrival onstage of a
beggar woman off the street, shouting “What are you doing here? It’s late. Go home!” To which the
choir replies, in words of ineffable sadness, “We have no home to go to. Like you, angels are
endlessly wandering, unable to find rest (immer unterwegs).” The haunting image of an endless
journey in the afterlife returns in Stockhausen’s last cycle of pieces, titled KLANG. I recognize the
feeling of being trapped in limbo from personal experience. When I came to London for the first time,
years ago, a world away from home, I lost my way in the Piccadilly Underground at Gloucester
Square, in those days a smoky labyrinth of dimly lit tunnels through which tube trains would emerge
and pass by at thunderous speed to the sound of screeching brakes.
The pieces of KLANG form a meditative sequence of solo and group combinations, perhaps
intended to evoke the stations of the cross, but that might be more aptly described in country music
style as stations to Redemption City on the Urantia Line, after the American book of New Age
prophecy. The impression of a dark tunnel or vortex is sustained by Cosmic Pulses, the last grinding
gesture of a long line of turbulent electronic tornados, a loud, violent, and truly visceral experience
that conjures up a vision of travel through a black hole and emerging in another universe, at another
time.

III

Normally we think of a legacy as a lifetime’s achievement passed on to future generations. But

because they attach to traditions expressing the entire history of a culture, the legacies of art are able
to influence our perception of the past as well as the present and future. Picasso devoted a great deal
of effort late in life to reimagining great works of the past. The power to transform history is a sign of
authentic greatness, over and above individual talent. Stockhausen’s music has that power to
transform the way we hear and understand music of the present as well as music of the remote past.
In the time I knew him, from the first face to face encounters in a classroom in 1964 to the last
email in 2005, Stockhausen insisted on his uniqueness and the uniqueness of every new composition.
In an early profile published in Die Reihe in 1958, Dieter Schnebel writes of the artist’s duty to
disengage from the past and seize the historical moment. He makes mention of the remarkable
discontinuity of Stockhausen’s musical evolution over a lifetime career, at the time, of barely six
years. During the time I was his student, and again when I began to study his music in earnest in the
1970s, he disallowed any direct comparison with the music of another composer, and took serious
offense at any hint of a possible influence from another source. In this respect the trio of Stockhausen,
Boulez, and Cage were united in a desire to wipe the historical slate clean and begin afresh. I had a
different agenda. My task was to discover if there was any truth in the heroic claim of 1952 that
Schoenberg is dead, the past is another place, and we have nothing to do with any of that.
Since then of course Boulez has discovered Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, promoted the music
(some, not all) of Messiaen and Varèse, made innumerable recordings of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du
Printemps, and gone on to win new audiences for Wagner and Mahler. As a young composer on the
rise, Stockhausen met and formed an instant bond of friendship with Edgar Varèse, composer in 1934
of Ionisation for thirteen percussionists, not a melody in sight. Stockhausen’s encounter with
Stravinsky in 1957 at Cologne Radio changed the lives of both composers. Today it is possible to
read the coded messages passing back and forth between Stockhausen and Boulez from the time of
their first meeting in 1952 to Stockhausen’s death in 2007. Cage used to dine out on the story that
Stockhausen once asked him how he should compose a work for the singer Cathy Berberian. Cage
said he would write for the singer. That’s the difference between us, shot back Stockhausen. I would
write music. As if by diplomatic agreement all three composers, Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen,
continued in public to draw attention to the unbridgeable differences between them, while secretly
conspiring all the time to outwit one another by discovering answers to common design problems.
But that was then, this is now. And the older we get, the easier it is to hear the connections and the
resemblances that bind them.
When Stockhausen premiered Stimmung in 1968 and Boulez joked to a reporter “Oh yes, the
endless chord, how very German,” he probably had in mind Wagner’s endless chord from the
overture to Das Rheingold. But the joke in reality is on Boulez, because a better comparison would
be with the setting of “Viderunt Omnes” composed by the Paris based French composer Perotin in the
thirteenth century. Like Stockhausen, the Frenchman is interested in exploring the microstructure of a
waveform, in the guise of a musical prayer, and equally capable of imagining words stretched to
breaking point until it is possible to hear the inner vibrations of every syllable. And the music of
Perotin also dances, and incorporates in-jokes. At times I had the impression that Stockhausen thought
I was accusing him of plagiarism, in making connections of this kind. I would no more do that than
accuse Picasso of plagiarising a bicycle in his sculpture of a bull’s head made out of a bicycle saddle
and handlebars. To be truly original is to grasp the essence of something in such a way that our
understanding of it is permanently altered. The influence, and the consequential alteration of
perception, can go either way. Sometimes the allusion is deliberate, as at the end of the percussion
piece Himmels-Tür (Heaven’s Door) when the wooden door opens to reveal a soundscape from
Ionisation by Varèse. A leap back in time. Varèse is godfather to the percussion solo Zyklus and the
electronic work Kontakte, in my view two of Stockhausen’s greatest inventions.
But, you may say, this is modernist stuff, it all sounds the same, and such resemblances are
superficial and mean very little. Very well, let’s go with that view. There are equally convincing
parallels to be drawn between Stockhausen and music that is totally familiar and easy to grasp.
Stockhausen was not only a child of the radio era, he was also a child of the age of the wind-up
gramophone. When you play a 78 rpm platter on a wind-up gramophone it is possible to move a slide
control and change the speed. The faster the turntable spins, the higher the pitch; or if the turntable
slows down, or if it is losing power and needing to be wound up, the recorded music and voices
descend to an incoherent mumble. Variable speed is not only a defining influence on twentieth-century
music, it is also a connecting link to Einstein’s theory of relativity—the unsettling idea that the reality
of what you hear may be dependent on the speed at which time is passing for you.
Concealed in Stravinsky’s ballet music for Firebird is the experience of a world of variable
speed. The music begins with slow rotating figures in the deep bass, and gradually winds up, as
though accelerating in speed, until it reaches a timescale corresponding to normal human perception.
But not content with earthly speed, the acceleration continues until the music is fluttering at
superhuman speed high in the air.
Stravinsky’s friend Maurice Ravel employed the same musical image of life as a gramophone
record, in the ballet La Valse. It is the image of a wealthy, civilized Vienna going off the rails and
spinning out of control. With great finesse Ravel orchestrates the sound in real time of a record
wavering in speed, up and down, wow and flutter, arms akimbo, as if the machinery of time itself is
falling apart. I cannot be certain how many listeners in the twenty-first century would recognize what
is going on. We have mostly lost touch with the idea of time as a physical substance that can be
speeded up and slowed down at will. But such a concept of relative speed, leading to the idea of a
music accelerating to escape velocity and flying away, is a permanent trait of Stockhausen’s music.
We also hear it quite clearly in a few pioneer works of musique concrète and electronic music, for
example Ernst Krenek’s portentously titled Spiritus Intelligentiae Sanctus, and most famously in
Stockhausen’s Hymnen. It also helps to explain Stockhausen’s lifelong fascination with rotating
processes and loops of sound, from the rotating sounds of Kontakte made with the help of a discarded
studio turntable, to the spinning rotors of the Helicopter String Quartet. And for sheer excitement it
would be hard to beat the orchestral rotations in Carré for four orchestras completed in 1960, which
are mass instrumental effects (like whirling Ligeti) without any electronic assistance whatsoever.
Stravinsky admired Carré even more than Gruppen, particularly the choir noises (recalled in the
“Libera Me” of Requiem Canticles) and the device of a snippet or offcut of sound giving the
impression of part of something much bigger and more mobile, encountered in the Symphonic
Variations and Abraham and Isaac.
When Stockhausen first met Boulez in 1952, the Frenchman was in recovery from a setback. The
premiere of his first major composition for orchestra, Polyphonie X, had not got at all well, despite
being performed by one of the best German orchestras, the South West German Radio Orchestra of
Baden-Baden, under one of the best conductors of modern music of the day, Hans Rosbaud. The
premiere tape survives and has been issued as a historic cd, and audience murmuring is very audible
in places. Boulez’s music was intended to showcase a new pointillist aesthetic for music,
corresponding to tachisme in modern art. Although Boulez withdrew the score and has not played it
since, the old tape no longer sounds extreme. It could easily be taken for an orchestral sketch from the
seventies by veteran American composer Elliott Carter.
Stockhausen lost no time in tackling the problem of pointillism—or as he preferred to call it,
punktuelle Musik. He composed Spiel (Game) for orchestra, then Punkte (Points) for orchestra, both
in pointy style. Like Boulez, he was not entirely happy with the results, and put both scores back in
the drawer. The challenge of creating a music consisting of a cloud of points of sound is that it will
have no discernible shape or direction. In nature we think of the sound of a swarm of bees; in music,
of Ligeti. Boulez had thought the answer lay in providing a system of harmonic controls, and it is
interesting to see that Elliott Carter employs the same or similar in his music for large-scale forces. In
a typical piece of lateral thinking, Stockhausen changed the rules in Kontra-Punkte (its title a pun:
Contra-Points) to make the orchestral cloud of points appear to condense and eventually converge on
a single instrument, the piano, like an explosion in reverse.
This is not only a brilliant solution, it changes our understanding of the baroque orchestra. In the
history books we are used to the idea of a loose collection of players assembled round a conductor at
the keyboard as a primitive precursor to the modern symphony orchestra. Thanks to Kontra-Punkte
we can see this arrangement somewhat differently, as a secular alternative to music for grand organ,
translated from the heavy acoustic of a church into the light and responsive acoustic of a secular
environment: a music in which instead of the various stops and registers of the mechanical instrument,
the conductor at the keyboard cues and controls mixtures of real instruments played by live
performers with human powers of expression. In Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony No. 45, at the end of
which the players one by one blow out their candles and tiptoe out of the room, leaving Haydn at the
keyboard, the Prince their patron is being reminded that the orchestra is not a machine but a team of
skilled players, precisely the same point.
Stravinsky found a great deal to admire in Stockhausen’s notational and formal skills. The young
German was able to dream up and write down musical constructions that were completely new, for
example the mathematical groups of Piano Pieces I–IV, influenced by set theory and Euler’s
definitions of contingent relationships, e.g. an event A is either larger than, smaller than, or equal to
an event B, and is either containing, or contained by, or separate from, or overlapping it. This view of
a chord as an assembly of notes that coincide or do not coincide, may begin at different times but end
together, or form a chain as a melody, introduced a new dimension to musical expression and
melody–harmony relations. In Movements for piano and orchestra from 1959–1960 Stravinsky brings
together the neobaroque keyboard/orchestra control model suggested by Kontra-Punkte with a group
rhetoric and serial variation technique very similar o Stockhausen’s Piano Piece I.
In turn, I like to think Stravinsky also gave back. When the Russian composer visited Cologne
Radio in 1957 he went out of his way to praise the younger generation. Just a year before, he had
premiered Canticum Sacrum, commissioned by the city of Venice. In the Canticum Stravinsky
discovered a new voice, a new musical language, and new courage to express himself. Compared to
the cool reserve of Stravinsky’s Mass, a genuflection to the English choral tradition, Canticum’s
assertive noise and unearthly double-bass harmonics came as a shock. It was once again okay to be
loud and to experiment with strange new sound combinations. Despite obvious differences in idiom,
the general spirit as well as makeup of a sacred cantata of renewal, and instrumentation of choir, solo
voices, brass, woodwinds, and organs, makes the sound world of Stockhausen’s Momente in its 1964
version strikingly similar to Canticum Sacrum.
Hans Mersmann, newly appointed head of school at Cologne Music School at the time
Stockhausen was enrolled as a student, was a modern music advocate and supporter of Schoenberg.
Mersmann was also a fan of the music of Bartók, for many the voice of musical modernism in the
years immediately after the end of the war. For his graduation thesis Stockhausen made a detailed
analysis of Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion, considered a very radical composition
dating from 1936. The acoustic symmetry of opposing grand pianos with percussion in the center is
replicated in another work by Bartók from the same period, the Music for strings, percussion and
celesta in which the role of the two pianos is taken by matching string orchestras. Both works are
connected with the Swiss conductor and patron Paul Sacher; both works also coincide with
experimental developments in stereophonic recording in Britain and the United States. So it is
interesting to observe an analogous symmetry in arrangement of piano and percussion keyboards in
Kontakte for electronic tape and live players, and again in 1970 with Mantra for two pianos and
electronics.
In a recent online interview for a San Diego website the American composer Roger Reynolds
recalls his dismay at hearing the electronic sounds of Kontakte in the sixties at a lecture given by
Stockhausen to a group of students. How can you endure these sounds? he asked. They sound awful.
This is not the opinion of a novice. Reynolds is speaking as an experienced listener and acquaintance
of Cage and Boulez. He has a track record with IRCAM. So if after all these years he still feels the
same way about the tape sounds in Kontakte there is reason to believe that his opinion is shared by
others. The unstated assumption seems to be that electronic music sought to sound elegant and
attractive, perhaps like Tinkerbell’s fairy dust in the movie Cinderella. Personally I don’t hear the
problem. To me the sounds make perfect sense. One has to wonder if Reynolds’s criticism is implying
that musical sounds should never give offense, which if true would give the transitional dissonances
of J. S. Bach a hard time. Similar objections on aesthetic grounds have been directed in the past at
Cézanne, for example, or Picasso, both of whose styles are still apt to offend conventional notions of
pictorial beauty. But it is surely necessary and useful to come to terms with willful and dissonant
effects in music as in art, in the same way as the buyer of fine wine appreciates the positive qualities
of a young wine so full of tannins and harshness it appears undrinkable, knowing that over time all of
that harshness will turn into intense color, flavor, and depth.
In the third movement of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, composed in 1937, the solo violin part
juggles with three characteristic motifs. The first is a trumpet-like upward call, leaping in fourths; the
second is a tremolo scurrying continuously up and down the scale; the third a tremolo that does not
move but remains fixed to the spot, like a person trembling in fear and unable to move. In the
background the orchestra slips and slides, as though the whole world is falling over. In the third
minute of the third movement I suddenly discovered a passage similar to a passage in the electronic
music of Kontakte.
The resemblance was electrifying. I could hardly believe it. When I asked him to comment,
Stockhausen was extremely annoyed. Afterward he continued to deny any connection between the two
pieces. However in the wake of that denial, in 1977, Stockhausen published the superformula for the
opera cycle LIGHT, a triple layer formula in which the contrasting motifs of the Bartók violin
concerto—rising fourths, glides, and tremolos on one note—make a new appearance as the three
character motifs of the Michael, Eva, and Lucifer personalities. The up and down weeping and
wailing string tremolos also make a return appearance in the rising and falling tremolos of the
Helicopter String Quartet, so from all of that evidence there is no doubt in my mind of the strict
influence of Bartók on the German composer.
No doubt there are many listeners who find the idea as well as the musical substance of the
Helicopter String Quartet unpalatable and hard to believe. The outward roughness of this music is a
challenge to players to find ways of performing (or recording) this music that make sense and allow
the hidden beauty to shine through the pain. We have to approach this music like a surgeon learns to
perform an operation to save a life: without flinching, but also without inflicting unnecessary
suffering. It may come as a surprise to discover a precedent for the Helicopter String Quartet in the
storm scene from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “The Pastoral,” fourth movement. This is music quite
possibly composed to illustrate the sense of elation and danger of Benjamin Franklin’s famous
experiment of flying a kite into a gathering storm to tap into the power of electricity. Don’t take my
word for it. Listen to both pieces on YouTube. Like Stockhausen, Beethoven’s kite rises into the
thunderclouds on trembling strings, and then descends to earth.
In an interview published in my book Other Planets Stockhausen argues that such comparisons
dilute the experience. Speaking for the listener, I don’t agree. I think that both sides are enhanced, and
that is the test. So today when I listen to, or watch, Boulez’s Sur Incises for multiple pianos, harps,
and percussion, which the composer tells us is a work of deconstruction of piano tone, it is not a one-
off event but only the latest link in a chain stretching all the way back, via Mantra and the Percussive
Trio of 1953 (a very strange composition for piano and timpani) to John Cage’s Sonatas and
Interludes for prepared piano.
When Stravinsky made his first and only visit to New Zealand in 1961 a press reception was
arranged in which the subject of electronic music came up. Stravinsky said he admired Différences by
Luciano Berio for live instruments and tape. Knowing how laborious editing tape could be, I still felt
bound to ask the nearly eighty year old composer whether he could ever contemplate composing
electronic music. Laying a hand on my arm, with the air of sharing a secret, Stravinsky replied “My
dear: I know what electronic sound is. I know what electronic noise is. But electronic music . . . I
don’t know, what that is.” But as I later found out, there was a catch. What he meant by the remark
was that while his ear might be influenced by electronic sound and noise, his music would always be
delivered by conventional instruments.
There is no doubt that the electronic music Stravinsky enountered in the fifties changed the way he
composed. It was not Webern who converted him to a miniaturist style, since he was already a
miniaturist in 1913 when he first encountered Webern’s music. The real influence for change was the
tape medium. Tape alters the way you listen to sounds, how to edit them together, and how they are
transformed. Stravinsky’s last big work, the Requiem Canticles of 1966, is a sequence of short
movements each of which asks to be considered as a study in techniques of serial relationship. Every
single idea is clearly imagined and beautifully worked out. Many, indeed most, of the ideas can be
sourced back to Stockhausen, like tiny contact prints of ideas from Momente.
But in one case, the “Interlude” for the unusual combination of four flutes and four timpani,
Stravinsky returns to Stockhausen’s Electronic Study II of 1954, the iconic score printed on glossy
paper of rectangular and triangular shapes arranged on a great stave. The unifying feature is blocks of
sound of even density: electronic in Stockhausen, instrumental in Stravinsky. The sound of flutes
corresponds to electronic sine tones, and of timpani, also sine tones transposed in pitch into the bass.
This latent identity of timbres is secret knowledge of a kind that could only be known from prior
familiarity with the sound vocabulary of Stockhausen’s electronic study. The refrains of “Interlude”
are also cut and edited together abruptly, like lengths of tape.
When an artist reaches a great age, he may suddenly decide “the hell with it” and go his own way,
entering a phase of wonderful freedom of invention where one is no longer fussed by what the rules
might say, or other people might think. Toward the end of his life, Matisse became so crippled by
arthritis that he could no longer hold a paintbrush, but he found new energy and inspiration in creating
a series of jazz-inspired artworks in cut paper expressing the joy that comes when war is over and
peace is declared. In the 1990s Elliott Carter was finally allowed to emerge from the shadow of
Aaron Copland to claim long deserved status and respect as the senior voice of American new music,
heir to the mantle of Stravinsky, and advocate of the European modernism of Boulez and Stockhausen.
To mark Carter’s ninetieth year a record was issued of Symphonia, his largest work to date, and I
rushed out to buy a copy. Something about the frrst movement sounded curiously familiar. Its title
“Partita” is the Italian word for play. The German word for “Play” is Spiel. What I was hearing was
a tribute and gesture of support from the eighty-nine year old elder statesman of American music to
the genius of a Stockhausen at twenty-four years of age.

Notes
1. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stockhausen on Music, compiled and edited by Robin Maconie. London: Marion Boyars, 1989, 124.
2. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (1968); n.e. Dialogues. London: Faber and Faber, 1982, 127.
3. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “. . . how time passes . . .” tr. Cornelius Cardew. Die Reihe 3, Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1959,
10–40.
 4
Recording angel
Some people are impossible to like. Schopenhauer is one. He looms large in the philosophy of music
and is one powerful voice behind the idea that in art and music as well as in business, life is about
winning. In a lifetime of inquiry I have never encountered an artist or composer of originality who has
had anything nice to say about him, though that is less significant than the fact that his writings have no
explanatory value for the art and music that came after him. He is of interest in the present case
because in addition to vanity he expressed a poisonous contempt for women, a disdain for the female
of the species as a lower form of humanity that infected an entire culture, including some very great
artists and composers.
The other is Freud. Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis in his own image on the basis of a
failed diagnostic technology for assessing character from the sound of a person’s voice. That
technology was the phonautograph invented by Belgian Léon Scott de Mandéville, and it failed
because against expectations the recorded waveform, a negative trace scratched on waxed paper,
proved impossible to read or analyse. Assuming the role of recording angel, rather than record the
pressure variations of the sound of a patient’s voice by machine, Freud wrote down the patient’s free-
flowing monologue in secretarial shorthand in real time. Instead of subjecting the waveform of the
speaking voice to Fourier analysis as the inventors of the phonautograph had intended, the analyst
constructed a meaning out of the poetic imagery of the patient’s sentences. That his enterprise
succeeded is a reflection on the extreme temper of his times, and I suspect on the power of suggestion
of technology over a credulous and beleaguered male population in awe of an advancing
consciousness and respect for the role of women, animal instincts, evolution, and the primacy of the
act and drive of sex in human affairs. Freud promoted himself as an analyst on the back of fanciful
deconstructions of patient consultations, specifically women, diagnostic fictions concocted and
calculated with ironic flair to play to the secret anxieties of clients and fellow clinicians alike.
“I have a theory”—wrote Charles Chaplin after Albert Einstein and his wife came to dinner and
he learned that the theory of relativity was created in two weeks of intense calculation interrupted by
bouts of piano practice—“that scientists and philosophers are sublimated romanticists who channel
their passions in another direction.” Chaplin does not mention Freud in his autobiography, perhaps
unsurprisingly since Freud would have little to say of an artist whose genius largely consisted in
saying nothing. The Viennese doctor’s methods appear calculated to flatter current intellectual
fascination with the irrational and occult, while claiming admiration as a method of addressing and
formalizing social and cultural behaviors widely perceived at the time as deviant and a threat to
public morals.
A science of human motivation arising at this moment in history was potentially capable of
addressing and managing the perceived social ills of hedonism in a romantic movement in art and
literature opposed to the tide of industrialism and authoritarianism in human affairs. In claiming to
serve the greater good by exposing the private motivations in human affairs the new science asserted
a licence for prurience and indeed a clinical duty to override respect for the patient and natural
justice, while by identifying the patient’s subconscious as the source of his or her distress, at the same
time contriving to relieve society of any taint of responsibility for the disability. Freud’s tactic of
isolating, manipulating, and interpreting patient behavior at the behest of a paying client seeking
public exoneration shares a number of features with the new science of semiology propagated by the
Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure. Freud’s magisterial contempt for the patient is consistent with the
assumption by de Saussure of the authority of the state to decree what words may signify, a power
licensing an authority figure to rewrite a witness statement to suit his thesis on the grounds that
individual testimony is by definition incapable or corrupt.
Semiotics claims to determine what language is capable of saying and therefore what limits should
be placed on individual expression, along with how much the individual is to be believed. An attitude
typical of the era of Dreyfus and Zola; though even now the French continue to act as though it were
the government’s duty to control what words shall be permitted for inclusion in the official
vocabulary—a view still worth bearing in mind by readers of Lacan and Derrida. If the state controls
language as a public utility then offenses against language are equal offenses against reason and the
state. Under such a regime the artist or scientist no longer has the right to have his words taken
seriously or at face value if what is said challenges convention or implies a criticism of what the state
allows to be said. Here the psychoanalysis of a Freud—who claims to speak for the patient on the
pretense that the patient refuses to speak for his or her repressed inner self—meets the philosophy of
a Wittgenstein, whose claim to speak for the individual arises from an inner conviction that language,
as a social system, is incapable of speaking for the individual case.
Freud’s situation is embodied in the signature image of Francis Barraud’s famous painting of
Nipper the Dog for the record company “His Master’s Voice,” the iconic image of public perception
of sound recording technology in its launch phase during the final years of the nineteenth century. At
this time the infant technology was far from synonymous with popular or classical music. For the
generation of Thomas Edison the cylinder phonograph was essentially a telephone message recorder
or office dictaphone, a speech recording device and temporary storage medium to assist in the
regulation of inter-office and office to office communication and time management. The image of the
dog listening is clearly of a domestic pet with head cocked, its attention transfixed by audio quality
sufficient to persuade a creature of instinct and adequate hearing but limited intelligence (implying a
servant, a female secretary, perhaps, or an illiterate) to recognize the squeaky tones issuing from the
horn as the voice of its master.
An animal cannot be persuaded to recognize a recording as the voice of its owner, so for Nipper
to do so is a way of suggesting that what the technology is able to do is capture the actual personality
—or one might say, the soul—of a living human being. Since the point of the demonstration is that the
voice being recognized is of a person who is manifestly absent, and may even be no longer alive, the
total picture is of a technology not only able to capture the impression of a living person with
complete fidelity (the dog, the faithful servant), but also capable of preserving and extending the
influence of that “life” beyond the bounds of space, time, and mortality. In a brief souvenir recording
made in 1890 and still available online, in vibrant tones and with telling insight Florence Nightingale
expresses the hope that her voice may perpetuate her life’s work long into the future, when she is “no
longer even a memory, just a name.” Her statement is a reminder of late nineteenth​century perceptions
of the new medium as capable of preserving personality in the sound of a person’s voice. It also
identifies tone of voice (personal charisma and rhetorical skill) rather than content (the text) as the
defining ingredient of a person’s nature and character. It is her voice, not her words, that matters.
The Scott-Koenig phonautograph was originally devised in the mid-1850s as a voice recorder and
aid to medical diagnosis. That the sound of a patient’s voice can assist in diagnosing a patient’s
physical and mental state was well known to physicians of ancient Greece. In principle having the
means to make a permanent record of the voice as a wavy line on paper would allow the physician to
share information with others, and lead to the development of a reliable symptomatology of vocal and
speech traits in the disabled. That such technology was widely understood to have scientific and
medical implications is clear from the many researches undertaken by telephone and graphophone
inventors Charles Sumner Tainter and Alexander Graham Bell—whose own wife was deaf—for the
relief of the hard of hearing and speech-impaired, in the nineteenth century a relatively large
constituency.
The classic image of Freudian psychoanalysis depicts a patient (usually female) reclining on a
chaise longue and dictating freely to a clinician, the latter seated at the head of the couch, out of view,
taking notes in shorthand. As with the trade mark image of Nipper the dog, the typical scenario is a
configuration of three elements: a voice of authority, an act of recognition of the voice as verification
of identity and personality, furthermore a process of authentication unrelated to speech content (the
dog does not understand words), but rather based entirely on the music of speech: tone, rhythm, and
other consistencies of voice physiology and production. Only one ear is cocked however, suggesting
an element of doubt, or that the audio quality could well be improved.
The relationship between the dog and the voice is of master and servant and the function of the
voice in this relationship is to reinforce a mutual bond in which the role of the master is to rule and
that of the animal is to obey. The social relationship is essentially static. The dog is responding to the
voice by sitting still. The idea of a relationship in which the participants are sitting still and only one
of them is talking is a transferred epithet from reading, hence of education. One learns to read in order
to take instruction. In reading the reader is the listener and the authority fugure is the author. The
learning relationship is one of giving and taking orders. It is not dialogue in the sense of equality of
participants, but it is dialogue in the sense of reinforcing a social structure. The reader is invited to
concur with an implied subtext that reinforcing a master-servant relationship is actually what dialogue
is all about.
Now consider the psychoanalyst in action. Again the participants are in a static relationship where
one is speaking and the other silently listening, and where the listener is portrayed as “knowing” the
speaker in terms of the latter’s absence i.e. in her voice alone, separated from her actions, out of her
normal domestic and social context, and talking as it were into a vacuum. The listener recognizes the
personality of the speaker not in the sense of what is being said, but from tone of voice. The analyst is
in the role of a recording device, stimulated into making coded marks on paper in real time by the
patient’s voice. A critical difference is that the analyst is writing down words, not recording an
accurate impression of the sound of a person’s voice. It is ostensibly from features of what the patient
is saying, not from features of the tone of voice, that a diagnosis is made. It is a cognitive evaluation
not an acoustic analysis.
The analyst is cast in the role of Nipper the dog, in a relationship of listening to the patient’s voice
without comprehending what is being said, in a role of friend and confidant based on assumptions of
trust and companionship. It is after all Nipper who validates the sound as the voice of his master, as
Freud wishes to be seen as the listener ultimately responsible for verifying the persona of the patient.
But in so doing Freud contrives to invert the relationship of speaker and listener so that, like the dog
Brian in the television series Family Guy, the confidant takes over as master of the situation while the
junior partner in dialogue assumes a dependent role.
Development of the phonautograph followed the rationale of the familiar stethoscope. Invented in
1819, the stethoscope is a hearing aid to allow a physician to monitor the unseen internal rhythms of a
patient’s heart at specific observation points on the skin surface, and apply that information to reach a
diagnosis. It is an art of diagnosis by listening. The heart being a pump, its internal rhythms are
normally cyclical, allowing deviations from regularity to be readily identified and reconciled with
other diagnostic cues.
The stethoscope diagnostic of arriving at a total “in the round” image of an unseen functioning
body organ by combining a number of viewpoints from different directions created a theoretical
foundation for a geometry of field analysis that would lead in due course to the development of
stereoscopic photography (imaging visual depth) and the unexpected discovery by French telephone
engineer Clément Ader of binaural audio (lateral auditory space). During the 1914–18 war engineer
Sir William Bragg devised a system of underwater echo-location using carbon telephone
microphones to detect the exact location of enemy submarines. Further development of the same
microphone technology would lead to radar for the detection and tracking of enemy aircraft. While the
US audio industry favored the use of multiple microphones for saturation coverage of a sound field,
disregarding the resulting incoherence, British audio expertise under His Master’s Voice binaural
expert Alan Blumlein continued to develop stereo as the commercial byproduct of an essential
defense objective of precise echo-location, to meet which a geometry of coincident range sensing was
developed and out of which radar was soon to emerge.
The art of the stethoscope involves an ability to audit the quality of a beating heart from patterns of
vibration detected at the surface of the body considered as a sounding board or resonator. It requires
good hearing and a degree of musical acumen in interpreting harmonic and rhythmic traits of a
composite signal. The stethoscope made its first appearance at a time when Chladni’s observations
had drawn attention to the characteristic vibration patterns of membranes and plates in response to
excitation at different points. Rapid progress in materials science and industrial engineering
throughout the nineteenth century led to a flurry of collateral innovations in musical instrument design
and manufacture. Welcome advances in public sanitation and bridge design led to the emergence of
new musical instruments of the brass and woodwind families, and significant changes in tuning,
materials, and construction of piano and violin families.
Older sibling of Scott’s phonautograph, the museum barograph is also a sensing device to monitor
and record changes in atmospheric pressure as a wavy line on a paper wrapped round a cylinder.
However the pressure fluctuations associated with everyday speech are many orders of magnitude
more rapid than those resulting from changes in the weather, so require apparatus of considerably
enhanced sensitivity. Certainly the devisers of the phonautograph understood that speech is
propagated as pressure fluctuations in the atmosphere, and in devising the equipment as a diagnostic
aid, endorsing the general view that in addition to a text the sound of a voice also conveys vital
information about the age, state of mind and physical condition of the speaker, cues revealed in the
timbre or tone spectrum of the voice, as well as in performance indicators such as rhythm and tempo.
In his treatise on architecture the Roman master builder Vitruvius draws attention to the installation of
great empty vases at vantage points around a public arena as listening aids for the hard of hearing.
The vase-like prototype phonautograph created by Léon Scott in 1850 appears to have been fashioned
after the classical model of assisted resonance described by Vitruvius and is designed to intercept
sound waves from a speaking voice, bring them to focus on a compliant surface, like light waves to a
lens in a camera, and use the vibration to activate a pointer and trace a mark on a coated paper
surface.
The medical basis for sound recording is found in conceptual and operational similarities linking
the stethoscope and its application with the phonautograph and its potential as a diagnostic aid. Both
devices are intended for auditing body vibrations by noninvasive techniques employing a membrane
as resonator: in the former case the patient’s skin acting as a membrane transmitting the heartbeat, and
in the latter an artificial membrane moving in sympathy with the patient’s voice. In the somewhat
mystical language of nineteenth-century physiology the organs in question—heart, lungs, vocal cords,
teeth, lips—are instruments answering to a higher power, the heartbeat speaking for the health of the
body, and the voice for the health of the mind or soul. Because the sound signals detected by
stethoscope are an unintended byproduct of the action of the heart, they are reliable indicators of a
patient’s physical condition. Similarly the timbre, rhythm and other musical qualities of speech of an
individual patient are to be trusted as involuntary indicators of the person’s state of mind, relating to
traits of the physical act of speech and unaffected by the meaning or content of what is said. The
concept of the phonautograph as a stethoscope for the mind is justified as a means of monitoring the
actions of the mind in terms of specific regularities of the acoustic vibrations emitted as a byproduct.
Diagnosing the mental and physical state of a patient from the sound and rhythm of the voice properly
ignores the content of what is being said as on the one hand irrelevant, and on the other hand as
potentially misleading, since what a patient says is decidable and may therefore intend to deceive. In
Freudian psychoanalysis, however, appeals to the superior knowledge of the clinician combine with
ideological mistrust of the suffering patient supposedly to justify the practitioner ignoring what his
patients are saying and substituting his own interpretation, on the ground that message content is by
definition irrelevant or corrupt.
On the principle of listening in to a patient’s state of health, the phonautograph comprises a
resonant container to receive the voice, a membrane to vibrate in sympathy, and a bristle as stylus to
engrave the resulting waveform onto a coated paper surface as a permanent record of traits indicating
temperament and physical and emotional wellbeing, along with more transient features connoting
sobriety, pain, elation, intellectual coherence, and so on.
Assessing the wellbeing of another by monitoring his or her involuntary speech is not rocket
science. Everybody does it all of the time, socially in casual conversation, as well as anonymously in
times of emergency by specialist personnel, traffic officers, and the teaching profession. Assessment
involves very different diagnostic criteria from the norms of direct question and answer dialogue.
What patients tell their doctor about their symptoms is how they feel as well as what they have in
mind to say, along with involuntary cues to what and how the person is thinking at the time. Since
words can be intended to mislead as well as inform, they cannot always be taken at face value;
however tone, timbre, and rhythm are status indicators independent of word content and virtually
impossible to disguise, and therefore more reliable in assessing physical and mental condition.
At the time Freud came to public attention, Saussurean semiotics was emerging as a science of
personal and national identity entailing the hypothesis that oral speech is subjectively contaminated.
Since he relied on shorthand transcription of a patient’s speech and was unable to record tone and
accent traits in any detail, Freud had no direct evidence of musical traits of speech on which to rely,
and to cover the deficiency feigned not to recognize a distinction between tone of voice and speech
content. It was a necessary move, also smart, a move that nobody thought to challenge. In place of the
higher acoustic domain of personality to be revealed by phonautography (hopefully by monitoring the
acoustics of a voice in a manner analogous to a cardiogram) Freud created a factitious alternate
psychic reality, a region of personal identity where the soul is expressed in terms and symbols that not
even the patient, only the clinical specialist, is qualified to read.
Freud was far from being the first physician to pay attention to speech as an indicator of mental
acumen. Basic training in music had long been part of the physician’s diagnostic armory for
interpreting the mental condition and anxiety level of those whose age, nationality, injury or affliction
rendered normal conversation out of the question. In the 1760s, in preparation for Captain Cook’s
voyages to the Pacific in search of a lost southern continent and alien civilization, prominent Royal
Society members and associates joined forces to develop a body of research aimed at uncovering a
vocabulary of fundamental syllables or atoms of speech that might aid in establishing diplomatic
relations with primeval cultures, and to unite and explain the evolution of European languages and
civilization. Musical knowledge provided a valuable contribution. Joshua Steele devised a reliable
method of pitch notation, more elaborate than conventional music stave notation, for transcribing the
inflections of natural and dramatic speech. Jurist and ethnologist Daines Barrington published studies
on the musical speech of the eight year-old Mozart, interviewed in London, and the English child
prodigy William Crotch. As a byproduct of a broader inquiry into the origins of infant speech
Erasmus Darwin, ancestor of Charles Darwin, devised the mechanism by which children’s dolls are
able to say “Ma-ma” and “Pa-pa.” The quest for the origins of language and civilization attracted
scientists of all persuasions. Benjamin Franklin invented a new alphabet to allow the consistent and
culturally neutral transcription of alien tongues and, anticipating Hermann Helmholtz by almost a
century, constructed a glass armonica as a laboratory aid for the simulation of vowels. In Mozart’s
Vienna the Hungarian von Kempelen labored to perfect a modular keyboard operated speech
synthesizer. In London, mathematician and musician Thomas Young, the originator of Young’s
modulus, brought formidable linguistic and musical skills to the challenge of decoding the Rosetta
Stone. Among early nineteenth-century English physicians are many remarkable linguists and
specialists in analysing the distinctive traits of alien cultures, as well as the speech of the emotionally
disabled. To his researches in mental health, Bristol physician James Cowles Prichard brought a
profound knowledge of the evolution of cultural difference and the origin and migration of Sanskrit
and Celtic languages.
There was one major problem with phonautograph recording. The process worked but the results
were unreadable. Why did Scott and Koenig not foresee that their sample traces of speech would be
too short and impossible to read? After all, tone of voice and expressive nuance are very easy to
detect by ear. All the clinician is asking for is a way of fixing specimens of speech in recorded form.
Why, if tone of voice is so simple to monitor by ear, should the same features be so difficult to gauge
by eye in a visual recording? My reason for thinking that the difficulty of reading a visual speech was
unanticipated, is that similar disconnects between theory and practice have also occurred in more
recent history, in the field of automated speech recognition. It is interesting to note that precisely the
same error occurred in the cold war era when voice recognition software for covert phone tapping
and associated theories of cognitive linguistics to operate them were being developed at MIT and
elsewhere. Because name recognition is so easy to do in real life, it was assumed to be just as simple
for a listening device to be programmed to detect a keyword (such as “comrade”) in the continuous
flow of a telephone conversation.
What its proponents should have known but failed or were reluctant to realise—since their
paycheck depended on it—was that it is virtually impossible for a machine to detect keywords in
continuous speech. They should have known, because it had happened before: a full century before, to
Scott and Koenig. If an intelligent human operator has difficulty in detecting single words in the visual
trace of a phonautograph voice recording (as difficult, say, as detecting the sound of a trumpet in the
waveform of a symphony orchestra) it is more than likely that a primitive analogue listening machine
of limited memory is going to have difficulty in finding keywords in a randomly intercepted telephone
transmission of already degraded quality. Today in the twenty-first century the voice recognition
software operated by telecommunications helplines is still disconcertingly primitive, and generating
high levels of customer frustration. If the combined might of US computing and intelligence expertise
in the cold war era was unable to foresee the difficulties of programming a machine to pick out
individual words from a telephone conversation, Scott and Koenig deserve to be excused for
harboring similar expectations for the phonautograph. Perhaps they may even have imagined the
waveform resembling a transcription by hand, that is, a line of writing organized in packets
equivalent to words, and not an unintelligible continuous wavy line.

If a voice recording looks like a wavy line and not words, the reader asks why do we hear words and
not just a wailing wavy-line sound? And if the answer is yes, what we do in fact hear is a wavy line,
what that implies is that life is experienced as a wave of which words and objects are particles,
momentary abstractions. With that, the enigma of continuity of being addressed by Augustine in
Confessions returns to the witness stand, philosophically in the stream of consciousness of William
James, literally in the multilayered interior monologues of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel
Beckett, and intellectually in the doctrine of extensive abstraction of Alfred North Whitehead.
If a phonautograph record of speech is practically illegible, the question is whether an alternative
means of speech transcription can be put in place. The art of shorthand developed by Isaac Pitman in
the mid​nineteenth century may have induced a wily Freud to substitute shorthand for mechanical
recording. Such a subterfuge would only be likely to succeed on a presumption that a majority of
clinicians regarded shorthand as an equally alien system of writing. Shorthand was new, and to the
untrained eye perhaps just as illegible, but it did actually work as a method of taking dictation in real
time. Objections that shorthand would be unsuitable for transcribing speech sounds, and written by a
human being rather than a machine, were perhaps unlikely to be expected from professional
colleagues for whom note taking from dictation was already a menial task assigned to operatives
regarded as little more than office machines. Whatever transcription method Freud might choose to
employ, what ultimately mattered were three factors: 1. the value assigned to the text content of a
patient’s speech, as of a mechanical transcription, is of no account, simply an expression of the mind
draining itself; 2. that the transcription be produced in real time as the patient is speaking; and 3. that
the clinical shorthand record be illegible and incomprehensible to anyone but a trained specialist, as
if it were produced by a mechanical device in the first place.
From their short duration and insensitivity it may be presumed that phonautograph speech samples
were always intended for analysis as waveforms rather than examples of question and answer
dialogue symptomatic of thought processes. As waveforms they were too short in duration for the
naked eye to detect any traits or irregularities of a kind similar to telltale signs in a cardiogram. The
distinctive qualities of a medical condition, for example the slurred speech of intoxication, or high-
pitched keening of a subject in pain, might be recognized by ear but not register in a recording. The
technology was of severely limited sensitivity, owing to the natural inertia of diaphragm and stylus
absorbing energy in setting the diaphragm in motion, and the hog’s bristle stylus having to push against
the resistance of wax coated paper. Resistance takes energy away from the high frequency elements of
speech, consonants in particular. And it is on precisely these high frequency elements of speech that
hearing relies to dissect the continuous flow of a voice into separate words. That the phonautograph
was intentionally designed to record only short samples of speech at a given time is yet another clue
that the role of voice recording was initially conceived as sampling a patient’s tone of voice to assess
the harmonic quality of vowel sounds, rather than sentences of intelligible speech requiring a broad
spectrum of sensitivity extending to higher frequencies. Vowels inhabit the stronger midrange
frequencies, are more coherent internally, and tend to form steady-state waveforms. In other words,
vowels are the musical notes of speech, while consonants are the percussion. A method of voice
sampling specific to vowel sounds is also consistent with analysing the harmonic structure of the
voice by Fourier’s method of waveform analysis. A determination of the personality behind the voice
would then be reached in accordance with music-related criteria of temperament and tone color, in a
similar way that a patient’s electronically monitored vital signs in a hospital ward are routinely
inspected for distinctive features or alterations.
Early experiments in phonautography would reveal in any event that because human beings are
creatures of impulse, the sound of a speaking voice is erratic and uncertain by nature, in contrast to
the vibration of a beating heart, which naturally tends toward regularity of waveform. Under Freud
instability of voice, a sign of intelligence and liveliness, is reinvented as a distortion of composure.
In the absence of a credible diagnostic method the specialist is naturally predisposed to seek out
patients of abnormal personality of whose condition it is possible to allege that their speech is
symptomatic.
According to musical convention, temperament and timbre refer to persistent, stable features of a
performance, and by association, with a speaker’s oratory and personal charisma. The word
temperament in music applies to the tuning of a musical scale affecting the emotional character of the
music performed, and for speech analysis it applies in a similar fashion to the scale of notes
representing the octave range of a speaker’s voice. Tone quality or timbre is a combination of
resonant characteristics of the vocal cavity, constant and distinctive physical traits unaffected by
alterations of personality. Unpredictable traits and deviations arise naturally in everyday speech in
direct response to the unpredictable nature of human existence; indeed it is mainly through such
contrived instabilities that meaning is communicated at all. We instinctively regard monotone,
monorhythmic speech as robotic and pathological for that very reason. A classic perception of oral
speech as a fundamental distortion of expression and personality is found in the art of Leonardo for
whom the Mona Lisa’s faint smile, while not a sign of madness, is all the same a subtle and endearing
expression of human frailty. Freud’s science of personality has more in common with the eighteenth-
century physiognomy of Johann Kaspar Lavater than an understanding of acoustics.
In speech we show personality and state of mind as well as exchange information. What we talk
about, meaning the information content of the words we speak, is something over which a speaker
normally has total control. The way a person speaks, along with the emotional impression on a
listener of tone of voice and manner of speaking, are distinctive features more difficult to control,
unless the speaker is a good actor. In evaluating the natural character and temperament of a speaker,
words by themselves are irrelevant. It is through monitoring the involuntary features of a speaker’s
manner from which a listener is most likely to learn about how that person actually feels, and whether
he or she can be trusted.
On the basis that a person’s speech conveys information about the person’s state of mind and
physical wellbeing, the idea of assessing patient health by visual inspection of graphic traces of
unprovoked natural speech recorded in real time makes clinical sense. With the aid of a
phonautograph, transcription is effected mechanically to yield a complex waveform capable of being
Fourier analysed into harmonic constituents of specific amplitude and phase. The success of EEG or
brain wave analysis, pioneered by English physician Richard Caton in the 1870s, and
electrocardiography, heartbeat analysis, developed in the same decade, is based on the assumption
that the human body is a homeostat, tending to constancy in its internal rhythms, meaning that a visual
recording of an internal body rhythm is bound to exhibit certain well-defined regularities. The goal of
such research is a better understanding of the nature and quality of biological waveforms and their
deviations that may lead to the recognition and diagnosis of specific medical conditions.
For a mechanical real-time recording of a patient’s voice to be perceived as fulfilling the same
clinical role as a transcription of the patient’s words in a version of shorthand effected in real time by
the consultant physician, may appear a bit of a stretch. If on the other hand we imagine phonautograph.
waveforms of recorded speech to be another form of writing—the machine automatically translating
the sounds of speech into mechanically written words and sentences—the comparison appears less
far-fetched. To see that science can fall into so basic an error, and allow it to prosper unchecked, one
need look no further than the annals of automatic speech recognition in the 1950s. Massively funded
by the military, this initiative went ahead on the naive presumption that a machine could be
programmed to recognize specific keywords, correct for grammatical error, compensate for regional
dialect, and break down a continuous stream of spontaneous oral speech into neatly formed words
and sentences.
In truth oral speech is a kind of acoustic turbulence in which one element merges imperceptibly
with another. People think in words and sentences, but communicate in a continuously modulated
stream with few if any audible joins. By an ironic twist of fate, speech recognition software is seldom
encountered outside the arcane and dysfunctional social environments of telecom customer service
interfaces.
Phonautography was hampered by two constraints: one, samples were invariably of short duration,
and two, the voice proving to be a highly volatile instrument subject to direction by the mind, in
marked contrast to a self-regulating natural process such as the heartbeat. Inventors Bell and Tainter,
Charles Cros, and Thomas Edison sought alternative ways of improving the fidelity and storage
capacity of voice recording devices, but all were united in agreement that visual inspection of a trace
recording was not the way ahead: the only viable method of recovering original speech from an
engraved recording being through reversing the process and reproducing the information acoustically.
Freud may have been innocently misled in imagining shorthand and acoustic voice transcriptions
to be equivalent. He would have to be improbably dense not to know the difference between dictation
and voice print analysis. For office dictation, Pitman’s certainly had the advantage. A shorthand
transcription could go on for as long as one liked, subject only to fatigue, whereas the phonautograph
was limited to a few seconds, and even the most advanced Edison dictaphone could only record up to
four minutes at a time.
Such practical concerns tend to obscure the fatal flaw that a shorthand transcription is a record of
audited words and sentences, not the visual impression of an acoustic signal as a fluctuating pattern of
energies. Whereas a recording device is indifferent to the health and temperament of the speaker, and
meaning of words and sentences, aiming only at a faithful recording of rapid changes in air pressure
associated with the speech act, psychoanalysis by contrast requires that the patient and physician
share a common language, and implies that the patient submit to verbal direction by the physician.
Such a situation constitutes a power relationship in which the physician remains in charge during the
patient audition as well as the assessment process. It authorizes a situation where the diagnosis is
undertaken simultaneously with the consultation and voice recording, rather than being addressed
afterward, elsewhere, and ideally independently. In that situation the physician is tempted to abandon
neutrality and actively intervene in the recollections of the patient.
Because shorthand is not designed to convey timbre, accent, tone of voice, or temperament, all that
a physician has left on which to base a diagnosis is the word content, such as it is, of a patient’s
speech, hence to an invented symptomatology of grammar and imagery. The inadequacies of such an
approach are outlined for public amusement in G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion, a comedy in which voice
expert Professor Higgins is exposed as a petty Svengali with unseemly designs on a poor but honest
flower​girl. In the play Higgins is portrayed as an expert in modern cylinder recording technology,
clearly exposed as part of the stage furniture. The implication is that Higgins’s expertise is
acoustically grounded, and that what he knows of Eliza Doolittle is entirely based on the sound of her
voice. Since Eliza agrees, that is fair enough.
Shaw’s thesis goes on to lead Higgins into the fatal error of falling in love, as the original
Pygmalion fell in love with his creation, but for the Irish playwright this lapse from clinical neutrality
involves the additional hubris of seeking to use his science to manipulate his protegée to a point
where she is outwardly transformed into a different person, a lady of manners able to mix in high
society. The strategy falls apart in the long run because the young lady does not enjoy being
manipulated by a dominant male for his own amusement, and the audience is invited to agree with her
good judgement in rejecting the mixed advantages of artificially engineered personality and status for
the secure if meager returns of true love.
In his preface to Pygmalion Shaw equivocates over who may have inspired the figure of Henry
Higgins, saying he is partly modeled on the Oxford phoneticist Henry Sweet. Freud does not rate a
mention. And yet Shaw’s entire play of ideas and manners can be read as a none too subtle critique of
the Viennese analyst. All of the ingredients are in place: an expert academic who can read a person’s
identity from the evidence of her everyday speech, and whose expertise is identified with the
mysterious power of the cylinder phonograph—arising, that is to say, from the new medium enabling
him to take and analyse recorded samples of the subject’s voice. This expertise in speech has meaning
above and beyond its employment as a superior form of amusement, reinforcing the higher cognitive
status of the male specialist over the lower orders, chiefly women. Higgins’s friend Colonel
Pickering, the Sanskrit expert introduced in Act I, references this history of linguistic expertise to the
British colonial presence in the East India Company of Sir William Jones, and Britain’s leading role
in researching the history of Indo​European languages (the search for primeval speech). The British
presence in India brings together themes of expansionist trade and political supremacy (the Empire)
with the search for the origins of civilization (Sanskrit) and interest in alternative stable models of
society (notably those of India, China, and Japan, which being static and hierarchical by tradition
reinforce the social inequalities of imperialism). There are a number of agendas at work. So in
addition to setting his drama on the streets of Covent Garden in the rain (a location, characters and
treatment seemingly inspired by the photographic unsentimentality of 1888 Royal Academy exhibit St
Martin-in-the-Fields by artist William Logsdail) Shaw is also contriving, in a play written in 1912,
to put an Anglo-Irish spin on the urban myth of a science of manipulation of (female) human nature
associated in popular fiction with the character of Svengali in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby
(1894), in reality with the ministry of Dr Freud, and in the imminent future with Rasputin and the
opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg.
To be sure, the Irish playwright is considerably more urbane than his Viennese alter ego. The play
after all is a comedy, and nobody is hurt. However it seems only fair to imagine there is a serious
point being made in a satire of contemporary attitudes and values. Eliza Doolittle is a different kind
of character from the male orphan Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Eliza is female and a
survivor, but she also has a loyal family, a sense of her own identity, and no other grand expectation
than to be treated with respect. Her fate is to be “plucked from the crowd” as a subject to be
experimented on and delivered up as a model of female emancipation who at the same time is totally
unpoliticized. Her street confidence in defending herself—precisely, her sense of self—and spirited
mistrust of Higgins, are identified as qualities to be admired. Shaw is making the point that women
should not be held to ransom as passive and compliant ornaments of a society run by men. At the same
time, Higgins is portrayed unashamedly as a misogynist, referring to Eliza as “a creature” of low
caste. Her response to his treatment, her redeeming feature and the key to Higgins’s ultimate undoing
as a social engineer, is that she defends her low position in society and is uncomfortable with the idea
of her status and image being changed.
Shaw’s Henry Higgins is a manipulator claiming to take control of a person’s identity by changing
how she speaks. The darker purpose of elocution lessons is to change Eliza’s perception of herself
through altering her speech. The implication is threefold: first, that how a person speaks naturally and
normally, and therefore what personality may be spontaneously revealed, is at the behest of a hidden
authority beyond the conscious reach of the uneducated; second, that a sense of private identity is
undesirable; and third, that society rewards those who are prepared to erase their individuality and
conform to the neutral speech of a middle-class majority.
Hidden in the psychological drama is the message that a recorded voice in being “on the record”
passes out of ownership of the speaker. In taking samples of Eliza’s voice for study purposes (action
which does not happen in the play, but is clearly prefigured in Shaw’s detailed set of Higgins’s studio
laboratory), the audience is invited to imagine the speech scientist as capturing, if not her mind,
perhaps her soul. That the character and personality of a recorded voice can be manipulated by
someone else is noted by Shaw in a BBC radio script entitled “How to Speak Correct English”
recorded in 1927, in which he describes the change in perceived character of the recorded voice of
his friend the political figure Ramsay MacDonald, after passing by and hearing the recording being
played at the wrong speed outside the entrance to a gramophone and bicycle shop.
A few days ago I heard a gramophone record of a speech by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, the parliamentary chief of the British
Labour Party, who has a fine deep Scottish voice and a remarkably musical and dignified delivery. What I heard was a high pitched,
sharp, cackling voice, most unmusical, suggesting a small, egotistical, very ill​mannered man, complaining of something. I said, “That
is not Mr. MacDonald, I know his voice as well as I know my own.” The gramophone operator assured me that it was and showed
me the label on the record to prove it. I said, “No, that is not Ramsay MacDonald. But let me see whether I cannot find him for
you.” Then, as the record started again, I took the screw which regulates the speed, and slowed the record gradually until the high-
pitched yapping changed to the deep tones of Mr. MacDonald’s voice, and the un-musical, quarrelsome self​assertion became the
melodious rhetoric of the Scottish orator. “There,” I said, “that is Mr. MacDonald.”
... Now the worst of it is that I cannot tell you how to find the right speed for me.... If what you hear is very disappointing and you
feel instinctively, that must be a horrid man, you may be quite sure the speed is wrong. Slow it down until you feel that you are
listening to an amiable old gentleman of seventy-one with a rather pleasant Irish voice. Then that is me. All the other people, whom
you hear at the other speeds, are imposters.1

What Shaw is saying is astute, but not rocket science. He is pointing out that a listener’s impression of
personality in a recording is time-sensitive to a far greater degree than the content of speech is time-
sensitive. Words and personality occupy different time zones that are not always compatible. Manual
speed regulation in record players of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came about
because nobody, including manufacturers, understood either the concept of real time passing, or the
need for consistency between recording and playback speeds. The omission was not confined to
sound recordings but also a feature of the movie, telegraph, and player piano industries. Looking back
on a period of deeply mystical ruminations on the nature of time and motion in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, it is worth remembering that great minds grappling with relativity lived in
an era when consistent standards of recording and replay speeds in new media did not exist because
nobody (apart from a few pioneer stop-motion photographers) thought they were needed.
Technologies such as the telephone and live radio operate in real time, delivering voices and
music across great distances at their actual speed as well as in real time. But in business, if it is
possible to deliver prerecorded material at accelerated speed, there will be a significant economic
incentive to do so. Already in the 1870s, with a view to save time and maximize service, Edison
experimented with faster than normal transmission of telegraph messages in Morse code. It was
actually through listening to a fast rewinding recorded message on indented paper tape and hearing a
speechlike quality in the resulting burble that he realised the medium could potentially be employed
for speech recording and transmission.
In its early days, sound recording was a voice medium as much as a music medium. The market for
records was initially dominated by political speeches, notable thespians, music-hall acts, and stand-
up comedy. The “quarrelsome self-assertion” noted by Shaw is an apparent change of personality in a
recorded voice when it is played at a higher than normal speed. The same tactic can be adopted in
radio drama to heighten a sense of urgency and clarity of definition, and has the added advantage of
compressing the resonances of the speaking voice the better to fit within the limited frequency range
of domestic loudspeakers, improving reception. Increasing the speed of a recorded voice also saved
time and money. Public perception of faster than normal playback of a recording as adding authority
and urgency to a leading voice led to the cultivation of a naturally edgy style of radio and newsreel
news delivery lasting from the thirties of Edward G. Robinson and the Hindenburg disaster to the late
fifties of Senator Joe McCarthy, Ed Murrow, and JFK. Wide use of the ringing Westrex microphone
nurtured a preference in the industry for voices of nasal, penetrating timbre and harder, textured tone,
acquired and preserved by constant cigarette smoking sponsored and encouraged by grateful
manufacturers.
For over a century Scott’s experimental phonautograph records languished in the archives until the
arrival of digital audio signal processing enabled the original threadlike waveforms to be mapped
onto graphs representing electrical signals and then reconstituted as sound, in a reversal of the
orthodox recording process. In 2008 to great acclaim experts at Stanford University announced
success in retrieving audio signals from a number of these recordings and posted samples online on
Wikipedia and elsewhere. The Stanford team had previously attempted—with only partial success,
since the wax cylinder had seriously deteriorated—to restore an 1889 amateur phonograph recording
of Johannes Brahms at the piano (of which a number of rival editions are also posted on YouTube at
the time of writing). The comparative advantage of working with Scott’s sample recordings was that
they were already expressed as visual traces and therefore did not have to undergo further distortion
in playback.
Of particular poignancy was a featured fragment of a young female singing a few lines from the
folksong Au clair de la lune. It was conjectured that the singing voice was the inventor’s daughter,
though subsquent investigations would indicate that the original recording was made at half speed by
a male voice, presumably Scott himself.
The very idea of hearing a young female voice released from the remote past calling to Pierrot at
dead of night, in the moonlight, in words and images of dream or madness, laden with symbolism
(“open the door: my candle is gone out”) is astonishingly evocative of the dream world of Arnold
Schoenberg’s expressionist song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, composed in 1912 to twenty-one verses by
the symbolist poet Albert Giraud—by coincidence a fellow Belgian and contemporary of Léon Scott
—rendered in German translations by Otto Erich Hartleben.2 Schoenberg was more than just aware of
Freud: in fact he was inspired by the claims of psychoanalysis to the point of creating a style of music
directly answering to the subconscious. Fraught late romantic imagery of desire and delirium
expressed in heated lyrics, combined with anxieties in his personal life, drove Schoenberg to stretch
tonality almost to breaking point in Transfigured Night for strings (1899)—a musical accompaniment
to a poem by Richard Dehmel that remains unspoken throughout, like a silent movie—then abandon
tonality altogether in a sequence of astonishing works of self-analysis including the song cycle Book
of the Hanging Gardens (1908–09) to verses by Stefan George, composed after Schoenberg’s first
wife left him, the monodrama Erwartung “Expectation” (1909), to be followed by the ecstatic
miniature Herzgewächse “Heart’s increase” (1911) for extreme soprano and chamber ensemble.
For almost a century, in a mixture of respect for the composer’s artistry and deep suspicion of his
aesthetic motives, Pierrot Lunaire has been regarded in isolation as a beacon of expressionism to
rank alongside Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. Only recently has the earlier perception of
Pierrot as Hogarthian commedia dell’ arte dressed in the style of Aubrey Beardsley begun to yield on
closer examination to a better understanding of Schoenberg’s method and achievements, which are
technical as well as psychological. The acoustic imagery of Pierrot Lunaire is designed to convey
the cloistered experience of an early studio recording in which the sound of the voice is
overwhelming and the music behind the curtain reduced to fractured multiple echoes swirling around
it like the speaker’s thoughts.
Instead of singing in the art song tradition, the vocalist speaks in a singsong manner outwardly
modeled on Viennese cabaret but in other respects designed to evoke the atmosphere of a surreal
monologue of a psychiatric patient. To notate the rise and fall of the voice with optimum clarity but
without descending into song and breaking the emotional spell, Schoenberg devised a brilliant system
of notation with the precision of art song but allowing for the approximations and uncertainties of
pitch of recorded speech. If the unmusical Freud had wanted a readable scientific notation in which
to transcribe the emotional state of his patients, he might have needed to look no further than this
composition. In 1907 the English phoneticist Daniel Jones, a student of Shaw’s correspondent Henry
Sweet, published The Pronunciation of English incorporating a simplified notation devised
specifically for transcribing and studying speech from a gramophone recording. Pierrot Lunaire
deserves credit as a challenge to Freud and the English method of transcription. It is a matter of
delicious irony that mezzo-soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson and conductor Pierre Boulez, whose
recordings of Schoenberg have been of inestimable value in making atonal music more widely
appreciated, should both continue to maintain, a century after the event, that the female vocalist in
Pierrot Lunaire is intended to sing the part rather than declaim it in a heightened speech. Since
sprechstimme is clearly intimated in the musical cadences of Florence Nightingale and other early
recordings, this is a missed opportunity. Versions of Daniel Jones’s speech notation would eventually
be adopted by Stockhausen for the voice parts of Carré (1959–60) and Momente (1964–72).

Notes
1. www.swisseduc.ch/english/readunglist/shaw_gbtranscript_english.html] (04/25/02011).
2. The lines “Au clair de la lune/Pierrot répondit” were conceivably selected because each syllable in succession is sung on a
different note, or highlights a different vowel or tone color.
 5
The secret life of savages
“No Gossip!” said Stockhausen, and Bingo! I was extinct, banished, persona most definitely non
grata. I had ceased to be, in the Monty Python sense, mere months after having been invited to join the
official Stockhausen website, and on the strength of a single contribution, a set of made-up FAQs
designed to get the ball rolling. Jim Stonebraker was very decent about it, and offered me space on
another portion of his web real estate.
On the substantive thesis that one should only speak with respect and circumspection about great
art, I don’t agree. Along with Cage, whose publications are peppered with anecdote, I know that
gossip is good. Gossip is about listening to what people say. About flavor. Personality. The moment.
A choice of words. A casual remark is almost always more revealing of a person than the formal
pronouncement, which is one reason why Boulez and Stravinsky in informal conversation are
infinitely more interesting and informative, and more amusing, than Boulez and Stravinsky at the
lectern, though the same is not always the case, say, of a Leonard Bernstein or Lukas Foss.
On a deeper level, informal conversation has tone, and tone is normally lacking from an official
statement. An aside can reveal more about a person than a direct question, because though it may be
irrelevant it is all the same an element of a train of thought, and in that sense true and unconcealed.
Cage understood that lecture by anecdote was truer and more useful than talking directly on a subject,
because it gives a reader a better idea of how the speaker thinks, and what is important to him. It is
one reason why I get more from reading Joan Peyser on the situation of music in the 1970s, than I do
from reading Paul Henry Lang or Andrew Porter, good as he is. There is a special innocence in the
eager writing of an ingénue that is scrubbed away in the writing of the connoisseur. And there is more
than a hint of irony in the fact that because Ms Peyser comes across as a camp follower (she is in
reality more astute than her writing suggests), the composers with whom she is speaking sometimes
choose to patronise her, and in doing so lower their guard, and reveal more than they might have
intended.
Excommunication for starting a conversation on the mystery of the opera cycle LIGHT in August
1998, at a time when no conversation on the opera was to be had anywhere else, was an interesting
reaction not only for its timing, suggesting a moment of crisis in the composer’s own life, but also for
its naivety. Is this a European thing? Why should anyone want to start a website from which free
speech is banned? Especially for a host ostensibly based in America, not Vichy France. Banning free
discussion is never smart, because it changes the rules of engagement. A contributor regarded by
default as an enemy opponent—and not as loyal opposition in the Parliamentary sense—can afford to
be a little more vigorous in attack. Or in defense of gossip, of smalltalk.
If you discover something really new, which affects human experience, I mean there’s no discussion, it’s just the way it is. All the
rest is minor talk with little details. (Stockhausen on Music, 104)

The general view that pre-existing conditions—psychological, sociological, technical or otherwise—explain artistic innovation, is
wrong in so far as my work is concerned. (SoM, 130)

In the final desperate months of World War II, when the life of a young, musically gifted hospital
orderly consisted in dodging phosphor bombs by day and playing American jazz on the piano to
console the dying by night, the Propaganda Ministry launched a major new movie in a last-ditch effort
to distract an exhausted and disillusioned population from the grim realities of imminent moral and
technological defeat into a world of technicolor fantasy and amazing special effects. It centered on the
life and times of the fictional Baron Munchausen, teller of outrageous and endlessly inventive tales of
fabulous exploits, extravagant machines of war, romantic conquests, miraculous escapes, and ultimate
survival.
Fifty years on, Stockhausen’s LIGHT reinvents autobiography as myth. Its narrative structure,
scenic actions, and dramatis personae in all their permutations and interactions, amount to a fictional
creation entirely modeled on the visionary theories of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Born in 1908, Lévi-Strauss came to public attention in 1958, his collection of essays Structural
Anthropology proposing a radically new model of social structure. Based on reinterpretations of the
classics along with field investigations of tribal myth, structural anthropology claimed to discern and
codify features of a universal code of human protocols determining the permitted relationships of
members within the family, within the tribe, between neighboring tribes, and between humanity and
animal species (the natural environment). Significantly, Lévi-Strauss put music at the center of human
culture. His powerful thesis, conflating the structural analysis of language and the interpretation of
dreams, brought welcome intellectual validation to the avant-garde and its methods, notably
serialism, which prior to 1960 had been operating as a subset of semiotics. Lévi-Strauss became the
darling of the hippie generation who interpreted his thesis as officially sanctioning an ideology of free
love and multiple relationships, a doctrine immortalised in the musical Hair in the line “coffee-
colored people by the score.”
In 1960 Meyer-Eppler, Stockhausen’s “best teacher,” suddenly died. That year at Darmstadt Pierre
Boulez delivered a lecture on musical form. “I should like to begin,” he began, “with an observation
of Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘Form and content are of the same nature and amenable to the same analysis.
Content derives its reality from structure; what we call “form” is the articulation of local events
which comprise the content’.” The same year Stockhausen left his wife Doris and young family,
abandoned the Catholic church, and began a relationship with Mary Bauermeister, the artist daughter
of a well-known anthropologist. The revolutionary change in lifestyle coinciding with the death of his
mentor amounted to a religious conversion from the clinical austerities of information science to a
new and frankly voluptuous model of integrated human relations.
Structural anthropology’s idea of a universal “deep structure” of kinship and power relations not
only endorsed the serial imperative in musical composition but also provided its chief exponents,
notably Berio and Stockhausen, with an excuse to invent their own mythologies. On the political level
exploited by Berio in Sinfonie and elsewhere, it offered an alternative rationale to the power
structures that had produced a culture of war and indifference to modern art. For Stockhausen it
provided an opportunity to embrace musical traditions and practices hitherto excluded from the serial
canon, such as opera, dance, and folk music. It led directly to the composition of Momente, a
dramatic cantata of great vivacity and humor in which for the first time structural qualia K, M, and D
are identified with real-life personalities Karlheinz, Mary, and Doris, and a work whose formal
structure openly expresses a non-deterministic order of increasingly refined permutations, organized
after the style of a Malinowskian genealogical tree.
LIGHT is Lévi-Strauss writ much larger. Unlike Momente 1964 the opera cycle is constructed on
a fixed, extremely rigid family, social, and power structure into which dramatic events, real and
imaginary, are forcibly inserted. Stockhausen’s dramatis personae in LIGHT conform to permutations
of musical relationships in exactly the same way as the tribal folklores in structural anthropology
express permutations of social relationships. Even Stockhausen’s hybrid names echo Malinowski’s
tribal genealogies: a reader encountering the tree diagram TABU—TAMA—KADA/TUWA—
LUBOU—EGO (now there’s an odd one)—BWADA—LATU in Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of
Savages cannot avoid the connection to Stockhausen’s cast of characters KAINO, LUDON etc. and
their position in the LIGHT hierarchy—just as they already do for the cast of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle
(SIEG-FRIED, FRIEDE-LINDE, SIEG-LINDE, SIEG-MUND etc.).1
In Lévi-Strauss’ usage, myth has no location in chronological time, but it does have certain characteristics which it shares with
dreams and fairy-tales.... Mythology starts out as an oral tradition associated with religious ritual. By the time myths have become
available to any would-be analyst, they have been written down and ... completely divorced from their original religious context.
Even so, Lévi-Strauss asserts that the stories will have retained the essential structural characteristics which they possessed in the
first place.

If we consider any corpus of mythological tales at their face value we get the impression of an enormous variety of trivial incident,
associated with a great deal of repetition, and a recurrent harping on very elementary themes: incest between brother and sister or
mother and son, patricide and fratricide, cannibalism.... Lévi-Strauss postulates that behind the manifest sense of the stories there
must be another “non-sense” [technical term], a message wrapped up in code. In other words he assumes with Freud that a myth is
a kind of collective dream and that it should be capable of interpretation so as to reveal the hidden meaning.2

Semiotics asks how we know what we know and what it is that passes between us. This science of
communication is Francophone in origin and its central proposition is that language and speech are
not the same. Language (la langue) is the social system, while speech (la parole) is the individual act
of self-expression. The science to which it aspires—semiotics occupies a position somewhere to the
right of science and to the left of philosophy—aims to interpret language as a system of signs.
Language interactions are directed by social protocols that have meaning independent of the content
of a given conversation.
The argument runs as follows: 1. Without language there can be no communication; 2. Language is
a social enterprise because meanings are subject to collective agreement and communication is a
social act; 3. Thus individual speech acts only have meaning as expressions of agreed social norms.
Traditional semiotics ignores musical dimensions of intonation (melody, rhythm, emphasis) that give
spoken language its meaning. It also refuses to acknowledge—as invincibly mysterious—the process
by which speech communication is acquired in infancy.
In defining speech as a subset of language, semiotics reinforces the myth that language as a social
system is essentially stable and coherent, whereas individual speech is ephemeral and prone to error.
(Nowadays of course we tend to the opposite extreme, regarding individual speech as sacrosanct,
autonomous, and self-verifying, and language—advertising, politics—as systemically misleading.)
LIGHT asks to be understood as a literally monumental synthesis in mythic cast of the composer’s
terrestrial life and times, influences and beliefs, one that in a comic inversion of Lévi-Strauss aims at
rendering obscure that which was clear, and pre-ordained that which was merely accidental. As well
as remodeling Stockhausen the life as Munchausen the movie, the composer has created a scrapbook
of images that allude among others to the surrealists Apollinaire (of Les Mamelles de Tirésias) and
André Breton, and borrow freely from Kandinsky’s working notes for The Yellow Sound (not to
mention the painter’s Green, Violet, and Black and White), Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Friedrich
Murnau and Fritz Lang, through to Jean Cocteau, Varèse’s Ecuatorial (the battle scenes of Tuesday
from LIGHT). the spatial innovations of Henry Brant (Samstag), Antonioni, Fellini ... (the list is
endless)—all relived from the perspective of Breton’s “certain point in the mind from which life and
death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, what is communicable and what is incommunicable,
high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictory.”3
 Commentary: Lévi-Strauss observed recently, “if electronic musicians sought to understand what music is instead of trying to
produce it, we would make tremendous progress toward solving the problem which music sets the science of man.”

Stravinsky: Electronic musicians, at least the ones I know, are not unconcerned about the nature of music, but they would scarcely
think of turning to the philosophy and science of what they are doing instead of just doing it, definitions of art being not only of no
use to artists but possibly some encumbrance.4

Leach on the anthropologist as visionary:

Lévi-Strauss is a visionary, and the trouble with those who see visions is that they find it very difficult to recognize the plain matter
of fact world which the rest of us see all around. [He] repeatedly makes an assumption that other modes of cultural expression,
such as kinship systems and folk taxonomies, are organized like human language. He always seems to be able to find just what he is
looking for.... In his view, the universals of human culture exist only at the level of structure, never at the level of manifest fact. The
influence on Lévi-Strauss of [Roman] Jakobson’s style of phonemic analysis, which derives in turn from much earlier work of de
Saussure, has been very marked.5

Most composers would like their music to be understood in a certain way. Stravinsky said, “When I
compose something, I cannot conceive that it should fail to be recognized for what it is.”6 That
attitude at least allows for the possibility of discussion, while reserving to the composer the right to
have the final word. There was a time when Stockhausen and his contemporaries were only too keen
to discuss, debate, and deliver lengthy theoretical articles in often obscure technical language on the
tendencies of the modern music in which they were jointly engaged.
Around 1965 conversation ceased. In 1998 there is an information vacuum. At interview the once
charismatic intellectual leaders of postwar music appear evasive, enigmatic, detached. They no
longer talk seriously about the serious issues that unite and also divide them, and there are few people
around to ask serious questions. Just look around. Boulez issues a new recording of Répons (DG 289
457 605-2) but diplomatically avoids the opportunity to discuss the aesthetic imperatives of this
fascinating piece and the meaning of the dialogue between live instruments and 4C computer. Instead
he talks to the hi-fi press about the joys of conducting Richard Strauss. Meantime Stockhausen
engages in empty discussion with fifteen-minute wonders from the world of techno music. Just who is
doing the gossip here?
As long as there is new music people will wonder how and why it is made. There is nothing
threatening in discussion. Two centuries of Bach scholarship has not made his music any the less
awesome, and thirty years of dialogue among early music scholars and performers has in fact done
wonders for public appreciation of the splendors of neglected medieval and renaissance masters.
Composers may object if their works are misrepresented in print, but as long as music is performed it
will raise questions of interpretation that have to be talked about. Music tells its own story of success
and failure. The story is laid out in the score for anyone interested to read. The cultural history of the
composer is also a given.
In 1958 US composer Milton Babbitt published an article under the title “Who cares if you
listen?” Not a smart move. Years later he tried to blame the title on the editor of the magazine High
Fidelity, but by then it was too late, the damage was done. People should ask questions about new
music. They have a right to do so and to ask questions is a sign of a healthy culture. Composers ought
to be willing to give straight answers. That is their responsibility. Discussion is what gives meaning
to artistic activity. It is the reason why music is released into the public arena. Any art that is
avowedly not intended for public discussion is by definition no longer a matter for public concern.
You are always referring to my music, my music. What does it mean, my music? It’s just something that has come into my mind and
I am working all the time and that’s it. (Stockhausen on Music)
This is saying it is meaningless to ask a composer to explain his source of inspiration because he is
only a vessel (Stravinsky, Le Sacre), a medium, or in Stockhausen’s case, a radio receiver for the
divine (Jonathan Cott, Conversations with Stockhausen). The argument echoes philosophers Hegel
and Heidegger, according to whom the individual derives his individuality not by his own
achievement but as ordained by a higher power, namely society, in the sense first that individuality
can only be characterized in terms of language and behavioral norms that express the collective will,
and second because in fact individuality can be no more than a manifestation of formal possibilities
that reside in the state or community as a whole.
In the past such sophistries have been used to exonerate individual actions committed at the behest
of the state, for example in times of war; it is curious therefore to find the same arguments being
trotted out in defense of artistic freedoms, in effect claiming that the individual artist is not
responsible for his actions but is only following orders from on high. The defense that one is a radio
is a subtle variant to evade the charge of individual responsibility on the ground that a radio is not
even a human being: human invention no doubt, transmitter of information assuredly, but a machine
nonetheless. Who would dream of criticizing a radio? That would be sad.
Musical activity that is grounded in science may claim the Noli me tangere defense that in science
results are not predetermined and that the activity is its own justification. In linguistic (speech
recognition) research the aim is to discover the ground rules of language communication which are
thought to reside in music. The results of scientific experimentation can be rated as more or less
successful inasmuch as a valid plan of inquiry is undertaken exhaustively and methodically. A
negative result is still a result. If a musical experiment turns out to be based on incorrect assumptions
or is carried out inconsistently, it may nevertheless lead to interesting new ideas and aesthetically
pleasing results. When composers invoke the science defense they need to acknowledge the
possibility of uncertainty and error. They also lay themselves open to criticism on scientific grounds.
John Cage acted from much the same motives, even though his overriding aim was the avoidance
of predetermination. But while both serial and chance methods may lead to unpredictable results in
performance, each is still liable to interpretation as a system of preconditions that are in fact open to
examination, classification, and evaluation in relation to the quality of the resulting musical
experience. The “work in progress” is one such; Stockhausen’s text pieces From the seven days are
another.
Adorno put it this way:
In the sociology of primitive religions, Durkheim made the substantial discovery that qualities asserted by the particular are imposed
on it by the universal. He designated to the universal both the delusion of the particular, as a mere mimesis, and the power that
makes a particular of it in the first place.... According to Hegel, “without the universal, the particular is nothing. Consciousness of
the spirit must take form in the world, in the consciousness of a people.... It is the substantial part of a people’s spirit—even if the
individuals do not know it.”7

Compare Lévi-Strauss: “We do not claim to show how human beings think in terms of myth, but rather
how myth thinks itself in the actions of mankind, even when they don’t know it.”8 Doubts whether
necessity is a good thing are promptly knocked down by Hegel with the avowal that, rain or shine,
necessity is freedom. As Adorno says, “It is [in the domain of] the particular where the fighting goes
on to exhaustion and partial ruination. But it is precisely from the struggle and ensuing fall of the
particular that the universal results.”
The artist “must be free to act from inner necessity.” Where have we heard that before. Tortuous
citations from competing socialist ideologies are allegedly relevant if serialism is to be justified in
the larger sense of giving rise to rational structures leading by logical deduction to otherwise
mysterious social and individual behaviors. On the way we do find unexpected illuminations. Hegel
could be talking about Momente when he says “not only particularity but the particular itself is
unthinkable without the moment of the universal which differentiates the particular, puts its imprint on
it, and in a sense is needed to make a particular of it.” Again, the Hegelian doctrine of “the struggle
and ensuing fall of the particular” seems to shine a searchlight on the mythic contest played out in
LIGHT between the forces of darkness and light.
However, despite all claims to the contrary, avant-garde music did not erupt spontaneously in
1950. The generation of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio was born in a decade of rapid and
significant technological innovation. Public radio started up in 1922, electrical recording came on
stream in 1925, and sound film in 1927. In 1931, when Stockhausen was three years old, conductor
Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra were assisting RCA and Bell Labs in
experimental hi-fi stereo full bandwidth broadcasts, and with the arrival of optical sound in 1932 the
same team began movie-related experiments in stereo and surround-sound recording. In England at
this time, largely singlehandedly, Alan Blumlein of His Master’s Voice was developing microphone
and disc-cutting technology for two-channel “binaural” sound, some twenty-five years before stereo
was launched commercially. In the mid-1930s a chance meeting between Stokowski and Walt Disney
in a Beverly Hills restaurant led to the commercial development of Fantasound surround-sound
technology for the movie Fantasia which eventually premiered with surround-sound in 1941, an
incredibly short ten years after the first stereo experiments, and a full fifty years before Dolby
ProLogic emerged on the home theater market.
These Stokowski sessions involved experiments in new orchestra layouts for optimum balance in
front of a studio microphone or pair of microphones, and techniques of multiple orchestras, multi-
speaker sound projection, and systems of recording and reproducing sounds appearing to rotate above
and around the heads of the audience. A major stumbling block to reproducing sounds in rotation is
preserving phase information which varies with the frequency of partials of a complex tone: a kind of
multiple Doppler effect that on a scale from low to high alternately stretches and compresses the
individual partials of a moving sound. So a moving trumpet sound, for example, even though it is a
single sound, has to be treated as a complex of separately-rotating partials each varying
independently in phase. The challenge was immense, but the Fantasound team managed to crack it.9
So when Stockhausen tells a Cambridge (England) audience in 1971 an amusing story about a time in
1955 when he asked if the Cologne chapter of the Musicians’ Union would allow players to be
suspended in chairs from the auditorium ceiling and rotated over the heads of the audience, what the
anecdote is actually saying is that the audio technicians of North West German Radio had heard
rumors about the rotational movement of instrumental sounds in space actually happening in the movie
Fantasia but that they could not explain how the effect was achieved.
Radical inventions and discoveries in the field of audio have ways of impacting on musical
consciousness despite the relevant technologies remaining a mystery to the composers involved.
Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta of 1936 and the Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion of 1937, along with Bohuslav Martinu’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Piano,
and Timpani of 1938 form a cluster of compositions sharing the same distinction of being laid out in
triptych formation, percussions in the center flanked on either side by carefully balanced forces. The
deliberately symmetrical layout, very different from published layouts for movie and radio studio
recordings of the period, conforms in obvious fashion to the practical requirements of the RCA-Bell
three-channel stereo system of 1932. But these works were created in Europe and Stokowski appears
to have had nothing to do with their performance at this time. Both orchestral works were
commissioned by conductor Paul Sacher for his Basel Chamber Orchestra, giving rise to the
intriguing question whether Sacher may have entertained plans to make his own concert movie in
stereo, as a counter to Disney’s Fantasia, the cartoon ballets of which were hardly calculated to
impress European high society patrons.
Composers also make gaffes. There are ways of distinguishing a technical influence from a
musical influence. For example, one might argue that Bartók and Martinu are simply adapting the
triptych orchestra layout to the antiphonal tradition of the Monteverdi of Vespers or the Vivaldi of
Lauda Jerusalem for matching left and right choirs and orchestras. Sacher was a specialist in Italian
baroque as well as a patron of modern composers, and is certain to have been aware of the presence
of spatial effects both real and illusory in Monteverdi (front-back symmetry, and also left-right and
up-down, etc.), and the rapid back and forth dueling exchanges in the Vivaldi, which at times
resemble a tennis match. If either Bartók or Martinu were genuinely influenced by Italian masters, one
might expect an equivalent sophistication in their handling of spatial effects. But it is not there. There
is a disconnect between what the layout promises and what the music delivers. Bartók clearly has no
real understanding of bilateral auditory effects. The left-right-left canons are mere Augenmusik,
varying unpredictably in direction and timing, and often overlapping. Certainly these changes of
direction do not work convincingly in the concert hall. They may work for the conductor in the center
listening to each orchestra with a different ear, but for the majority of the audience—and even in a
modern stereo recording—listening to both orchestras with both ears, the switch effect from left to
right and back takes place within too narrow an angle to make an impression, though the same might
well be more impressive experienced in a movie theater on a big screen.
Such disconnects happen from time to time, and are hardly ever fatal. Audiences still enjoy the
Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and that’s fine. The more a composer ventures into the
unknown, however, the greater the risk. Take the spatialized dynamics of Stockhausen’s Inori where
the orchestral balance is minutely controlled with the intention of creating a new plasticity of 3D
sound appearing to wax and wane from the center outwards. The composer’s poetic image of
wavefronts of tone like ripples in a pond, getting thinner and weaker as they expand out into
nothingness, can only be appreciated, if at all, from the podium at a live event, or on a recording
made using a special binaural microphone setup mounted directly above the conductor’s podium.
Another small example is Mikrophonie I, a work for solo tam-tam clearly set up to exploit
pseudo-stereo imaging from the interaction of left and right channels representing opposite faces of a
figure-of-eight microphone diaphragm. In theory, reading the score, one can imagine such a setup
leading to virtual 3D sounds floating in mid-air from the interaction of speaker channels that are
versions of the same complex vibration but in reverse phase relative to one another. The principle is
standard Blumlein practice from the 1930s, and would be well known to Cologne Radio engineers,
and to Meyer-Eppler. On disc such effects fail to materialize, no doubt in part from postproduction
balance engineers at Columbia or DO not quite understanding what is going on, in part I suspect
because the composer was uncertain about how to obtain in reality an effect he knew only in theory.
(A similar disconnect is observed in the orchestral work Mixtur from the same year. The published
schema and score clearly suggest a work based on flanging, at the time a new effect. But the piece
does not deliver a result because the composer has not fully understood the technical issues.)
Tape recording originated in the 1920s with the Blättnerphone, a cumbersome instrument adopted
by the BBC and later replaced by the improved Marconi-Stille steel tape recorder. These early
recorders were used to store radio bulletins for broadcast by the BBC World Service in the wee
small hours to listeners on the other side of the world. While tape editing was possible it was
inconvenient (one had to solder the ends together, a slow process) and sometimes hazardous (the tape
was as sharp as a handsaw, spooled at a reckless 60 inches per second, and had an alarming habit of
despooling all over the studio floor). Magnetic coated paper tape arrived in 1935, and with it the
possibility of tape montage. Tape recording technology remained an exclusively German industrial
secret throughout the 1939–45 war, and in the war’s latter stages German radio exploited the
propaganda potential of the new medium in Front Line reports and Special Reports
(Sondermeldungen) purporting to come from the front line but actually produced in the studio. The
success of these high quality, realistic tape reports, designed to give an impression at home and
abroad of continuing victory when victory was actually slipping away, established a lasting
reputation for tape as a medium of illusion and fantasy at a time when radio was still the dominant
mass communications medium.
A clandestine information war was simultaneously being conducted by public radio and military
communications with the aid of ciphers and codes incomprehensible to the layman. Every side was
engaged in the ongoing battle of wits to maintain the security of their own operational messages while
at the same time intercepting and decoding the strategic signals of the enemy. The same codemaking
and codebreaking expertise stimulated a frenzy of postwar research and development in technologies
of information processing: encoding, storage, transmission, and retrieval, leading to the computer
revolution of the cold war era. In these various ways the experience of wartime perpetuated a culture
of secrecy, based on a command structure issuing classified instruction invisibly through the ether and
meaningful only to initiates, from secret locations on the ground.
Classified technology also found its way into the public domain. In the aftermath of war, allied
occupied German radio studios were raided and precious tape recorders spirited away to be taken
apart and copied by rival manufacturers. Wartime AEG Telefunkens, the pride of German radio
propaganda, would soon re-emerge in the United States as Ampex machines, peacetime media for
major shareholder Bing Crosby singing “When you wish upon a star;” others were spirited away to
Britain to be recreated for the BBC and the postwar British movie industry as BTR and Ferrograph
recorders. Pioneering audio technologies that survived the war in secret or underground as prototypes
or patent files, in technical journals, and in audio engineering lore, were suddenly ready for the
attentions of a younger generation with creative imagination equal to the challenge of new media.
Add the ever-present threat of nuclear war, and voilà! the intellectual climate in which the avant-
garde came to prominence after 1950. Dismissing Stravinsky as a collaborator and Schoenberg as
insufficiently radical, these young composers styled themselves as originators of a completely new
musical aesthetic. This was a group with a mission to wipe the slate clean and construct a new
international style from “ground zero,” an idiom answerable only to information science, free of the
taint of nationalism, political partisanship, and most important, free of the taint of history.
In reality, while publicly renouncing neoclassicism and the politics that promoted it, these same
composers were innocently embracing the technical innovations generated during the identical period
of the 1930s and 1940s at the behest of those very same governments responsible for endorsing
neoclassicism and promoting nationalist hysteria. The postwar Neue Sachlichkeit neorealist aesthetic
signalled by Boulez in Polyphonie X and Stockhausen in Punkte was a self-proclaimed culture of
codes and ciphers, special effects, sounds surgically reconstructed on tape, multiple orchestras, and
musical images moving in space.
But let’s be fair. They were absolutely right. The new information age was the only way to go, and
the profound influence this generation of musical innovators has had on late twentieth-century music
is justified tribute to their initiative in “boldly going where none had gone before” in quest of the
absolute fundamentals of music and musical speech.
There were however hidden agendas. For reasons that have nothing to do with aesthetics and
everything to do with cold war intelligence, a number of studios for experimental music were set up
in US universities and European radio stations. Ostensibly run by composers, these same studios
were discreetly funded by governments in unprecedented alliance with psychologists, semiologists,
philologists, and computer scientists. Music had been innocently coopted into a collective and covert
research effort to codify the fundamental elements of spoken language, together with the rules of
association that determine meaning.
Technology that in the 1990s allows cosmologist Stephen Hawking to talk, was in its infancy in the
1950s. The issue was automated speech recognition and synthesis, and the motivation was political,
not so much to enable speech as to be able to ensnare the speech of others for security reasons. This
single issue connects all branches of avant-garde music in the 1950s, from Cage, Feldman, Brown,
Hiller, Forte, and Babbitt in the United States to Schaeffer, Boulez, Eimert, Meyer-Eppler,
Stockhausen, and Berio in Europe. Sonagram technology pioneered by Bell Labs in the 1940s by
Visible Speech scientists Potter, Kopp, and Kopp pointed ahead to a relatively simple classification
of the acoustical elements of speech from which rules of pattern recognition might be deduced, that in
turn might lead to a machine programmed to monitor a telephone line by multiple bandpass filter and
record any suspicious conversation at the trigger of a keyword.10 For such an initiative to succeed,
one had to be able not only to deconstruct speech into its basic elements, but also to reassemble the
latter into coherent speech, and perhaps even translate from one language system into another.
The task proved infinitely difficult, in part because individual voices differ in so many ways, a
level of difficulty leading over a crucial number of years, from 1950 to the foundation of IRCAM in
1977, to the witting or unwitting conscription of young composers to work in discreetly government-
subsidized studios in music studies that might assist in the search for a new atomic science in speech
and its laws of association. A leading scientist in this area was Stockhausen’s Bonn University
mentor, speech scientist Werner Meyer-Eppler. The same science agenda that inspired Boulez’s Le
marteau sans maître and pushed a reluctant Pierre Schaeffer (with information scientist Abraham
Moles peering over his shoulder) in a futile effort to create a taxonomy of “musical objects,” also
encouraged Morton Feldman and Earle Brown to pursue a goal of musical graphics based on
sonagram imagery at a time when Cage was busying himself in exploring techniques of random
association (and by implication, machine compatible pattern recognition). While Hiller and Isaacson
at Illinois worked on their own pattern recognition algorithms based on the music of Webern (it’s
true), Berio and Bruno Maderna at the aptly titled Studio di Fonologia in Milan made themselves
useful editing sampled vocal and instrumental sequences on tape into elegantly surreal collages. The
Americans visited Europe, the Europeans took study leave in the US. Everyone was interested in
everyone else.
Where are they now? The initiative failed on every level: technical, linguistic, musical. The
technology failed to deliver. Linguistics and cognitive philosophy hit the glass ceiling of Google
Translate: unable to master oral speech, software intelligence was forced to resort to text recognition.
Noam Chomsky, poster boy for linguistic science, research paid for by the US Navy, doesn’t deliver,
goes viral and for fifty years since has mounted his own propaganda war against US foreign policy.
Will these hands ne’er be clean? In more recent times the gurus of cognitive science have launched
their own propaganda war to discredit music as an expression of intelligence and purge the history of
AI of any mention of the role of music in the intelligence agenda. Where once music was at the center
of investigations into speech cognition, today the reader has to contend with a neverending stream of
vacuous and strident denials and denunciations of music by academic propagandists using the
arguments of Pinker and Dennett, and of modern music by educationists using the logic of Lerdahl and
Jackendoff, in a collective and frankly disreputable attempt to rewrite history that has even sucked in
the benign and lovable Oliver Sacks. In 2008 the latest word on the subject was philosopher Denis
Dutton’s The Art Instinct; as expected, all Dutton has to say about music is simply recycled
memoranda from MIT and Tufts.11 The contribution of music to the recent history of information
science rates barely a mention in James Gleick’s latest title The Information, at the time of writing in
2011 the most recent blockbuster.12 It reads as if the entire intelligence community were in denial.
Is it so strange that musicians should be involved in research into speech? From the time of the
ancient Greeks and Egyptians, music has been driven by speech issues, mostly the natural human
desire to be able to perpetuate the inflection patterns proper to sacred prayer. The ancients sought to
encode and preserve oral information in musically patterned—literally digitized—form with the aid
of wind and plucked string instruments tuned to scales or modes expressing emotional states. Before
1600, the only way the full implication of written documentation could be fully understood in Western
European cultures was by intoning it aloud. Medieval plainchant notation, from which modern
notation is descended, is in essence a system of enhanced punctuation written to preserve the correct
intonation of a sacred text, and thus its authorized meaning. It was not a desire to make and preserve
music, but research into speech and spoken meaning, that prompted the invention of voice recording
devices by Scott and Koenig in the 1850s, notwithstanding later developments of audio and music
reproducers by Bell and Tainter, Berliner, and others later in the century.
Throughout history western music has profited from discoveries and innovations in technologies
of speech storage and reproduction, so it was in effect business as usual when sonagram, tape
recorder, and computing technologies were brought to bear on the challenge of automated speech
recognition in the 1950s. So one should not be surprised to find speech recognition and resynthesis
emerging as the hidden link connecting experimental studios at Illinois, MIT, Columbia-Princeton, and
Stanford in the United States with those of Cologne, Paris, and Milan radio. A common concern with
musical semiotics provides the underlying rationale for compositions as diverse in outlook as Le
marteau, Gesang der Jünglinge, and Berio’s Circles, not to mention a plethora of more specialized
inspirations by Schaeffer, Hiller, Max Mathews, and yes, well, Milton Babbitt.
Composers had the knowledge, they had the aural perception, and they had an aptitude for the
notation of subtle effects. Stockhausen most of all. As a graduate of Cologne municipal music school
he took off to Schaeffer’s Club d’Essai at Paris Radio, the studio for musique concrète where Boulez
composed his Deux études. After a difficult time in which he realised a Konkrete Etüde for tape,
Stockhausen joined Eimert at the advanced electronic studio of Cologne Radio to produce, in a very
short time, two substantial electronic studies in synthesized vowel sounds, the first based on
waveform science, the second on vocal tract simulation. It does not take a genius to discern a
relationship between his electronic music and speech processing research. The Universal Edition
published score of Studie II not only looks like a Bell Labs sonagram, it is intended to look like a
Bell Labs sonagram, an association underpinned by a sonagram image of Eimert’s Glockenspiel
Etüde published in Book I of the official journal Die Reihe. What that says is, this music is science
based.
For all their serene beauty, Stockhausen’s two electronic studies also revealed the stark
inadequacies of a science and technology knowhow that could only lead to the production of inert,
static, so-called “dead” sounds. Stockhausen had good reason to enrol in Meyer-Eppler’s classes in
information science at Bonn University, after which he was ready to compose Gesang der Jünglinge,
a hugely ambitious exercise in speech synthesis going far beyond mere vowel spectra to embrace an
entire phonemic universe, synthesized consonants and all. An underlying covert speech recognition
agenda is clearly hinted in the composer’s sleeve note, saying that “whenever the speech becomes
comprehensible, it is to praise God.” It is an exercise about rendering speech comprehensible. It is
however a simulated rather than a practical and viable demonstration of speech recognition. The real
success, to come some years later, was Kontakte, by which time the information age of Meyer-Eppler
was over, and a new era of myth, mystery, and social protest was about to begin.

Notes
1. “Genealogical diagram of relationship.” In Mary Bouquet, Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese refractions of British
kinship theory. Manchester: University Press, 1993.
2. Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss. (1970) 4th edn rev. James Laidlaw. London: Fontana, 1996.
3. André Breton, Second Manifeste du Surréalisme: La Révolution Surréaliste, 12.1929.
4. Interview with Commentary magazine, reprinted in Igor Stravinsky and Roben Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions. New
York: Knopf, 1969.
5. Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
6. Igor Stravinsky and Roben Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.
7. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1973). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1999.
8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1964). London: Pimlico, 1994.
9. The original Fantasia soundttack was reissued in 1994 in surround sound on double cd DSTCD-452 D.
10. Potter, Kopp, and Kopp, Visible Speech. New York: Dover, 1967.
11. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
12. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. London: Fourth Estate, 2011.
 6
About Wittgenstein
Among the unexpected codicils of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the question whether civil
disobedience is logically defensible or just morally objectionable. In Cambridge University the
exiled Austrian philosopher found a congenial environment in which to inquire, inconclusively and at
considerable length, into words, their meanings, and attendant contractual and moral obligations.
Whether Frege’s action in recommending him to Russell was a bid to save Europe and halt British
philosophy in its tracks is unclear but not out of the question. Why the young upstart should have felt
more at ease in complacent England than feverish Europe remains unaddressed. Wittgenstein’s
anatomical assault on language (or to be more precise, on the validation of meaning) was motivated
in part by an idealist conviction that the written and spoken word may aspire to the uncontaminated
objectivity of mathematics, or be interpreted as such, as implied in Frege, the Principia Mathematica
of Russell and Whitehead, and elsewhere. For whatever reason, his choice of England as the place to
launch a devastating critique of language in general as a vehicle for meaning makes a great deal of
esoteric sense for a greater Europe on the cusp of war and the radio age, radio in Britain from the
outset being ordained as a factual news medium, in contrast to other national interests where radio
was embraced as an accessory to political propaganda.
When radio intervened to test the thesis of objectivity on a mass scale, along with other German
and Austrian exiles Wittgenstein was able to witness the intellectual and moral consequences of a
BBC under Reith committed to language as an instrument of public service, truth, and impartiality, in
contrast to radio services elsewhere in Europe who were only too ready to compromise with
objectivity in the interest of national pride and political power. There is a necessary connection
between the manipulation of language for private gain and opposition to freedom of information. The
same tension played out in the airwaves between BBC impartiality and German propaganda inspired
Wittgenstein’s younger contemporary Karl Popper, exiled to faraway New Zealand, to write his own
scholarly polemic, The Open Society and its Enemies, opposing the misuse of language for political
ends. Popper’s name and reputation are forever linked with the doctrine that statements cannot be
conclusively verified, only falsified, and that therefore the test of a statement is not whether it is true
but whether it may be tested. Underpinning the information war lay a history of philosophical and
cultural opposition to the principle of language neutrality established with the foundation under
Charles II of the Royal Society, an institution perceived by an influential minority of European
intellectuals, Goethe, Herder and Schopenhauer among them, as handing authority to the English
language of Newton on matters of science and conscience, and thus as a form of cultural oppression.
Established in the direct aftermath of a lengthy period of religious conflict in relation to the just
interpretation of sacred text, the Royal Society ethic of language neutrality was international as well
as interfaith in implication, agreeing protocols of international discourse free of bias or recrimination
of individual morals or faith. If a morality may be read into Royal Society principles, it is one that
endorses uniformity of terminology and clarity of exposition, along with the principle of freedom of
access, for all who can read, to the unbiased description of real world events.
In today’s world of international trade, language neutrality is no longer an emotive issue, at least at
a trivial level. One takes for granted that the multilingual instructions enclosed with a newly
purchased item of hardware are factual, internally consistent, and culturally unbiased; but for a
number of non-English speaking cultures initially affiliated with the Royal Society the practical
advantages of an international language of science were offset by suspicions among a few prominent
intellectuals that personal identity and values were compromised by the imposition of what appeared
to be rules to determine individual veracity. Opposition to Newton as the figurehead of Royal Society
dominance was animated by a conviction that the ideal of a puritan scientific discourse from which
every last nuance of personality is to be eliminated, making it virtually expressionless, represented a
denial of morality as well as of language in its role as an expression of identity and emotion.
Eighteenth-century intellectual opposition to Royal Society protocols of language neutrality is echoed
not only in the mutable prose of Gertrude Stein but with equal if opposite force in Wittgenstein’s
revealing definition of the “language game”—not only in characterizing communication as a game,
hence a recreation and contest in which there are winners and losers, but in its implication of a way
of language formally unrelated to the actions and impulses of normal life: language reduced to
abstract terms unrelated to the realities of personal suffering, in which subliminal values of empathy
and truth are ignored in favor of logical equivalence and consistency.
Having observed the practical and social consequences of BBC and Nazi theories of language on
a mass scale throughout the propaganda war of the 1930s and outbreak of hostilities, Wittgenstein
changed direction in favor of a utilitarian and more consciously demotic approach to words and their
meaning. A factor in so abrupt a change of direction may have been the publication in 1931 of
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, an event fatally undermining confidence in the mathematical
certainties of Russell and Whitehead on which Wittgenstein’s earlier hopes of language rule
validation were grounded. Like Nietzsche, whose intensity of self​belief drove him insane, Gödel and
Wittgenstein adhered to a culture of faith in human perfectibility fueled by a sublime conviction that
acts of intelligence entail moral consequences. In Gödel’s case it is possible to read the
incompleteness theorem as a Faustian gift of superior logic that so disturbed his peace of mind it
would eventually lead him to starve to death. For Wittgenstein, the moral consequences of pursuing a
mistaken ideal were mitigated by a decision early in life to renounce worldly goods and embrace a
life of minimalist austerity. The extenuating absence of personal gain would allow him suddenly and
without regret to abandon a prior objective of total determination for a radically different approach to
language and meaning. So stunning an about face is consistent with a view of intellectual life as a
game.
If the verification of any statement is shown to be a meaningless or logically unattainable goal, the
aim of philosophy is no longer to examine how agreement is attained, but to inquire how and why the
concept of agreement arose in the first place. From which one progresses by easy stages to a
proposition of language as an expression of mutual interest of which terms are merely tokens. If
agreement cannot be reached in an exchange of words, that would appear to signify that at a
fundamental level words are reduced to ritual signs, and dialogue to the exchange of expressions of
intention by one party toward another. It is this alternative concept of language that would come to
dominate artificial intelligence studies.
A European such as Wittgenstein may well have suspected that to challenge the viability of
language was a subject in which the urbane British, masters of contract law since the Magna Carta,
and guardians of the sanctity of science from the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth
century, had special interest and expertise. The collective of booksellers who commissioned Samuel
Johnson to compile a Dictionary of the English language were in no doubt of the utility of the printed
word as an embodiment of thought, nor of the advancement of literacy as a meaningful and needful
objective. Books were essential to meeting the demands of industry for workers equipped with basic
reading, writing, and calculus skills for an age of rapid industrialization and urban growth. Johnson’s
Dictionary can be seen as extending Royal Society principles of standardization of meaning and
spelling from the domain of science into public life. Precise interpretation and contingent
accountability of printed documentation were issues of considerable substance at a time of increasing
British trade in the far east, while the expansion of Empire imposed a responsibility on imperial
powers to adopt consistently styled terms and definitions in instruments of authority. An increasingly
literate international economy looked to uniform standards of word derivation and spelling as
essential for the legal interpretation of a written text, even while acknowledging that the trend to
neutrality and uniformity was bound in effect to expunge every last trace of personality and regional
accent from the record.
Unsurprisingly, publication of Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755 excited suspicion in the American
colonies as another strategy to advance British control of language as an instrument of political
influence and contract law. Whether the definitions and derivations compiled by Johnson were true
and fair made little difference. To the colonists their publication in book form was taking control of
the faculty of speech and freedom of speech away from the people in a move designed to perpetuate
the very politics of oppression to escape which the pioneer settlers and their beliefs had quit Europe
in the first place. The war of the dictionaries began, and at the end of it American English emerged as
a distinct and separate speech. Unfair dues and taxes enforced in word and form on the colonists by a
remote and uncaring Crown could now be resisted by the free colonies taking control over the
interpretation and spelling (that is, meaning and tone) of the texts under which their lives would
henceforth be regulated.
For the authors and signatories of the Declaration of Independence freedom of speech signified
freedom to speak a plain speech unburdened by precedent and wholly negotiable in meaning.
Inevitably the assertion by a people of political and moral authority to determine the meaning of
words entails a repudiation of history. The dangers of losing touch with the roots of language were
real and considerable; they come to life in nineteenth-century English popular fiction in the abrasive
character of schoolteacher Wackford Squeers in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby implementing
the new educational philosophy of words representing commands (“C-L-E-A-N clean, W-I-N-D-E-R
window: then he goes and does it”). We find it in Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty in Through the
Looking-Glass (“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”), and the amiable
nonsense of Edward Lear, regarded by many as a vital precursor of surrealism. The call for universal
freedom of speech and control over the meaning of speech is heard not only in newly liberated
colonies but among intellectuals of revolutionary Europe as a badge of personal and national identity,
and article of social equality among the liberated. The introduction of American English made
changes in the spelling of words for ease of learning reading and writing, but at the expense of
interpretation and scholarship. Its goals of neutrality and equality are consistent with the principle of
a verbal discourse accessible to all, local in character, individual in tone, sociable in use, and
infinitely negotiable in business terms.
Eighteenth-century colonial suspicion toward the English language as a covert instrument of
political oppression chimed with expressions of resistance in Europe and elsewhere to Newtonian
science and industry as instruments of social injustice and oppression. The issue once again is not that
the laws of science are invalid or delusional, but rather that their effects are real and inhuman and
should be recognized as such. Blake and Goethe regarded the imposition of Newtonian terms on
humankind as degrading, immoral, and destructive of personal happiness. From their ivory towers,
leaders of taste sought to resist the vast impersonal forces of Enlightenment science by complicated
arguments expressed in a style of vanity rhetoric intended to control meaning by subterfuge, seeking to
dress national identity and origins in the classical imagery of Greek wisdom and Roman conquest,
while simultaneously fictionalizing the past as Ossianic idyll. Nations vied with one another in
tracing their present glory back to an imaginary past. Underpinning Edward Gibbons’s Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire is the reality of Britannia’s own imminent decline as a maritime power,
and how that decline might be halted and reversed by a return to Roman era values. For proud
German intellectuals the way to international respect lay in becoming more methodical in argument
than the Greeks, and more disciplined in warfare than the Romans, while perfecting a rhetoric of
international relations as beguiling in its own way as English law, but playing to the transient
advantages of nationalist sentiment and identity politics, and intentionally resistant to compromise or
dialogue. The path of slippery rhetoric would eventually lead Europe to war, intellectual self-
immolation, the wartime casuistry of Heidegger, and after war, peacetime regimes of cynicism and
defeat rising from the ashes of occupation and collaboration.

Whether Wittgenstein’s views are correct or not is not the point. That he had them is the point, and
why they should be confronted.
[Wittgenstein’s] anxieties about publication are marked throughout his later work and were written into all drafts of the Preface. His
detestation of contemporary civilization, his deep cultural pessimism and sense of alienation ... inclined him to doubt whether his
attempts to say what he had to say could possibly be understood (let alone the Weltanschauung that informs what he says). [9–10]
The tactical level is no less baffling. Wittgenstein begins the book with a sketch of Augustine’s remarks on how he conceived
himself to have learnt language. What is the point of that? ... Is the single sentence about the standard metre being neither a metre
long nor not a metre long a piece of wilful obscurantism (does he really mean to say that the metre bar has no length)?1

Commentators insist that Wittgenstein’s remarks are best understood (and in some cases, only
understood) “in context.” As a caution of language in general, that is a truism; as an academic
observation, even a banality. But what context? A reader cannot be certain. To understand the context
of Wittgenstein’s writing it is necessary to understand a Viennese perception of what language is for,
which in the world of philosophy includes a taste for lofty humor, execrable puns, supercilious
rhetoric, bad faith and a desire to win. A world of language games is a world resigned to the belief
that language is a game, one expressed to the highest degree in warfare conducted in elaborate code.
Analytical philosophy is another context, the irony in this case being that language as a whole would
normally be said to correspond to the larger context of which analytical philosophy is merely a part,
making a context of which it is the whole and language the part the linguistic equivalent of an
impossible object, a Klein bottle (a container which contains and is continuous with itself) or Möbius
strip (a surface turning in on itself so that at the end of its length the writer is back where he started).
For a Viennese at Cambridge issues of translation from Viennese German into Cambridge University
English comprise a vital subtextual complication of questions concerning the essence of meaning from
which the ordinary reader has every right to be spared. Whatever else it may imply, for Wittgenstein
to cast himself as a latter​day Augustine, asking how it is possible for an infant to acquire speech, is
already a sure indication that Wittgenstein’s notion of context extends beyond what individual words
and word combinations may be said to signify into a zone of abstraction in which words and word
combinations may be understood as strategies of consciousness: in other words, the radical idea that
speech interactions have a primary (or primeval, or evolutionary) function of dealing to the world,
and only secondarily of influencing the actions of other people.
For him to say that speech operates at a level of gesture is an idea welcome to musicians because
it is one level at which music operates. In addition to having the concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein as a
brother, Ludwig was a passable musician himself, with a reportedly excellent ear, quite possibly
perfect pitch, and a love of the classics. As a student in Vienna he was acquainted with Schoenberg
and his music; in common with many Viennese, including Ernst Gombrich, while finding atonal music
intellectually interesting he did not like it very much, preferring Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.
The musical likes and dislikes of a major philosopher of language are matters of considerable
interest. A love of Mozart is a love of symmetry and sublime purity of line. Love of Beethoven is
consistent with an appreciation of the power of rhythm, repetition, and rhetoric. A love of Schubert
and Schumann is a love of line, lyric poetry, and the melodic gift, allied to a romantic despair that the
destiny of melody is never to be fulfilled.
Wittgenstein’s musicality is a topic of interest because it can be seen to inform his and the reader’s
understanding of what language is and how it works. Music has two aspects: note data corresponding
to the text, and intonation and rhythm which are features of rhetoric or mode of delivery.
Wittgenstein’s reported musical sympathies—melody, rhythm, harmony—tend to be rhetorical rather
than linguistic in nature. He expresses little interest in the operas of Wagner (selfwilled and
incoherent) or Verdi (cheap and vulgar) and is dismissive of Schoenberg (too self consciously
modern). All the same, one might have expected a Wittgenstein to notice that Wagner had extended the
art of rhetoric, loosely based on classical recitative, into a new naturalism molded after the intonation
patterns of informal speech. That he does not in fact admire Wagner would appear to suggest that he
does not approve of Wagner’s style of rhetoric, since in all other respects Wagner is an admirable
exponent of musical speech as an expression of continuity of being—in some respects the German
antecedent in music of Gertrude Stein in prose. And Wittgenstein dislikes Verdi, but Verdi too is heir
to a worthy tradition of vocal expression, so one has to conclude that what he dislikes is a musical
speech that draws spontaneously on folk elements and traditional formulae. And he rejects
Schoenberg despite the fact that the vocal lines of Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung are modeled with
enormous care on the natural inflections and mannerisms of contemporary Viennese speech. That
would appear to suggest an approach to language that does not allow for extremes of tone or
expression, or unorthodox sense. Another way of imagining it would be that he sees clarity and
simplicity of meaning as prior conditions for analysis, and his task as leading from an appearance of
transparency of objective meaning to a reality of subjective uncertainty.
It may have appealed to Wittgenstein that the “rules” of classical and romantic tonality were self-
evidently true, since they were instantly understood by all listeners, including the unmusical, and
enabled those who could read and play but not understand music to participate in a collective musical
experience and be improved emotionally by the participation. To value music in this sense is to
interpret music as a moral activity and also as a learning activity (reading and playing in a group); but
understandable only by the few as a philosophical activity capable of being discussed in terms of
ideas.
The young Wittgenstein was a source of fascination to Russell just as the boy Mozart was a source
of fascination to Daines Barrington in 1764: a Viennese genius with a gift for anatomizing natural
language. The case of Wittgenstein is of interest because at the time he was subjecting the bases of
mathematical logic to detailed scrutiny, Russell’s coauthor of the Principia, Alfred North Whitehead,
already critical of some of Russell’s conclusions, was engaged in long conversations with Gertrude
Stein. Stein was connected to the US pragmatist William James, representing a very different view of
the meaning of language. James advocated a view of language as a kind of trade: if two people were
able to agree on something, that was what mattered, not the precise detail of what they were agreeing
on, because you can always find a reason for disagreeing with someone on something. In the
Principia partnership, Russell was the logician, and Whitehead, his senior and tutor, the
mathematician. Through a method of defining natural numbers in purely logical terms, Russell sought
to establish that mathematical propositions are not only consistent but necessarily true. Whitehead
thought this was going a bit far. In abandoning the closed world of Tractatus for the open house of
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein effectively ditched Frege and Russell for William James.
In what might be called the error of evidentiality philosophy asks what is it as though what it is
(a) is the end of it; and (b) that what a thing is has nothing to do with the observer, or a process, or an
intersection of processes in the real world. It is a Kafkaesque mental landscape in which nothing is
real that cannot be accounted for. If I am stopped in the act of pushing a trolley down a particular
aisle and asked, what are you doing and why are you here? I may be stuck for an answer. Perhaps I
have just selected a packet of pasta and am on the way to find a jar of pickles, but I am not where I am
for any particular reason. I am not even intending to be there, I am just passing through, and that is
how it works in the real world: things are in transit, they are in the process of happening. The
problem is how to define a world that is in the process of happening, and that is where William James
and Gertrude Stein enter the picture.
Why so esoteric a topic should be of interest to musicians is because music allows a listener to
entertain a conception of a world in continuous transition while at the same time knowing exactly
where one is located at every point along the way. In Schoenberg’s music, which Wittgenstein did not
enjoy, that comforting sense of knowing exactly where you are en route is replaced by a disconcerting
sensation of never-ending motion resembling the slightly nauseated feeling of standing on a travelator
at an airport.
That Frege recommended Wittgenstein to go to England and study with Russell may have to do
with a European perception of Principia Mathematica as an attempt by the British to reconcile a
fixed Newtonian world view with fluid Kantian mathematics and set theory.
For nonmathematicians set theory may be described in approximate terms as a species of higher
arithmetic. The mystery of arithmetic is that it consists of propositions in number relations.
Wittgenstein makes this same point that it is possible to consider number as a measure of quantity
(say, five red apples) and go on to claim that the fiveness of five apples is the same as five of
something else, say bricks. If the fiveness of five apples is a true statement, and the fiveness of five
bricks is also true, then can it be concluded that number or quantity relations are also true in an
absolute sense.
On the one hand this is a money question. The cost of five apples is not the same as the cost of five
bricks, but both apples and bricks are paid for with the same money. It is why money was invented.
So then, the relative value of five apples and five bricks is a ratio of quantity—5a and 5b, identical
fivenesses—expressed in the same currency (dollars and cents). The question is whether that ratio
expresses a necessary truth, and after that whether it is a necessary truth that anyone needs to know.
Russell and Whitehead thought that it was enough that this was a relationship that could be stated
at all, and were convinced that fiveness (abstract number) being true and the same for apples and
bricks, and currency being the same in both cases, gave the equation of relative value a mystical truth
of its own.
Frege wasn’t sure that the argument from economics would stand up in court. Wittgenstein saw that
the issue of relative value and absolute value had importance for the British, who are a nation of
shopkeepers, merchant bankers, and accountants. His aesthetic interest as a European lay in the
challenge of proving that monetary value is ultimately neither provable nor meaningful. By way of
example, to say at a given moment in time that a Stradivarius violin coming up for sale at Sotheby’s
has an estimated value of $50m is a verifiable statement of what the item is likely to sell for, but is
arguably not a true statement of its value as a musical instrument.
The music analogy is useful and specific because Russell was not a musician, had no conception
of musical value, and was fascinated and flummoxed to encounter Wittgenstein’s intensity of fixation
on the higher truth of a nonquantifiable value that was not about money but about the whole of western
civilization.
Wittgenstein was a musician by persuasion and instinct and what he enjoyed about classical music
was that it combined verifiable precision in instantaneous relations (harmony) with a logic of
predictive relations from one harmony to the next (rules of harmonic progression). So his challenge
would be to show one way or another if Russell’s mathematical logic could prove to be as truthful in
an absolute sense as he perceived the propositions of Mozart and Schubert to be true in an absolute
sense.
What he eventually discovered by painstaking and self-flagellating analysis was that there are
statements in logic that are beautiful but not necessarily true in an absolute sense, forcing him to
acknowledge the antithesis, that there are statements in music that are logical but not necessarily
beautiful. It taught him that absolute terms like beauty and truth in mathematical logic have a timeless
dimension, and to that extent are incapable and incomplete as criteria of truth statements about a
world in continuous motion. During Wittgenstein’s time of trial, Schoenberg was developing a method
of composition, twelve-tone music, better suited to describe the cascading dynamic of moment to
moment relations of a world revealed in the unsteady terms of a hand-held movie camera. Twelve-
tone music made explicit the dynamics of motion photography by emphasising the shadowy,
provisional, and ambiguous nature of musical relations at each and every instant of an experience of
constant transition that is all the same perceived as coherent and directed.
A clue to Wittgenstein’s view of language as a game can be found in the famous conundrum in
Philosophical Investigations, #50, preserved as a marginal annotation:
There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long, and that is the standard
meter in Paris.

What gives this note added interest in present context is that Marcel Duchamp is also the inventor of a
paradox of length. So too is Alfred North Whitehead, who being English refers to the unit of length
not as a meter, but as a yard. One paradox about the length of a meter is bad enough, but to encounter
three dating from about the same time suggests a conspiracy, like waiting for a London bus (you wait
for ever for a bus, then all of a sudden three of them arrive at once).
That the Paris meter is neither one meter long, nor is it not one meter long, is a true statement
because to say that anything is of a certain length by convention has to involve a comparison enabling
one to conclude, as Euler would say, that it is of the same length, or longer, or shorter. To prove that
the official Paris meter is a meter long, or not one meter long, it would have to be measured against
itself, which either is impossible or if it were possible would lead to an inconclusive result. We are
mistaken in regarding the above as a logical puzzle when it is in fact a question of what one can say in
plain English or in any other language. To measure a standard meter against itself is not possible, and
comparison of a measure with any other thing would not be a measurement of itself. Hence one also
cannot say that the standard meter is not a meter long, since that would only mean that it is the same,
or not the same, as something that is not itself.
Wittgenstein’s airy excuse that one doesn’t verify the headlines by buying another copy of the same
morning paper is unconvincing, because in fact people do check the headlines by buying a different
paper, and they buy a different paper because the news is not defined by one paper but by many
papers not all of which employ the same measurements. To say otherwise is to suggest that the only
discussion that can take place is on his terms, which is another aspect of Wittgenstein’s approach to
game theory, that as master of the game he is setting himself up to control the message by controlling
the terms of reference. No wonder Russell was impressed.
To allege that “one meter” means two different things, a specific length, and a standard of length,
is unduly confusing. There is a musical dimension. In a lecture on Congruence, Alfred North
Whitehead observes
Measurement presupposes congruence. For example, a yard measure is applied successively to measure two distances between
two pairs of points on the floor of a room. It is of the essence of the procedure of measurement that the yard measure remains
unaltered as it is transferred from one position to another. Some objects can palpably alter as they move—for example, an elastic
thread; but a yard measure does not alter if made of the proper material.... We know that it does not alter because we judge it to be
congruent to itself in various positions. In the case of the thread we can observe the loss of self​congruence. Thus immediate
judgements of congruence are presupposed in measurement, and the process of measurement is merely a procedure to extend the
recognition of congruence to cases where these immediate judgments are not available. Thus we cannot define congruence by
measurement.2

Why should a musician be interested in any of this? Because in music we recognize two notes in
unison as the same when the length of the string is different in each case. The open string top E played
on a violin is a frequency of ca. 660 Hertz, and on a guitar ca. 330 Hertz. The former has a
wavelength of about 8 inches and the guitar string, an octave lower, has a wavelength of about 16
inches. (A wavelength is the distance between pressure peaks radiating through the air.) So a musical
note is also a length, and a precision musical instrument, such as a tromba marina, can be used to
measure space, the distance between two walls.
However the same note and wavelength can also be produced on the same instrument using an
adjacent open string of lower pitch. To bring the lower string up to the same pitch, a musician will
shorten its length by pressing the string against the fingerboard. We then have a situation where two
strings of different length are able to agree in playing a note of the same wavelength. Compensating
for the difference in length between the lower and higher strings, is the tension to which each is
wound up.
What Alfred North Whitehead is talking about is fairly esoteric. He is talking in one sense about
length as a relative concept, in the sense that fractal mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot has shown us
that the length of a coastline is a relative thing. Measure the outline of an irregular segment of
coastline between two points with a yard rule and you end up with a measurement in yards; but do the
same using a flexible tape measure marked in inches and the same portion of coastline is likely to be
longer, because the tape is a better fit and can take account of nooks and crannies that the yard rule
simply lies across and ignores.
In another sense Whitehead is grappling with Einsteinian relativity in time and space. Let’s not go
there. Rather, let’s say that when the same note is played by different strings, what is changing is not
the wavelength but the scale of measurement. Music that changes key between verse and chorus is
changing its scale of measurement, just like a road map has alternative scales of measurement in miles
and kilometers. A special feature of western classical music, in comparison to music of most other
cultures, is that it has a habit of modulating from a home key to a related key, and another, and another.
Each change of key is a change of scale, and each change of scale is related to a set of ratios of
wavelength. As a rule of thumb, a move to a sharper pitch and smaller scale corresponds to a higher
tension and degree of emotional resolution. Modulation in music has been around since 1600, long
enough for people to get the point that wavelength (frequency, periodicity as timed by a clock) is an
equation of tension, mass (the weight of the string), and relative length. The art of modulation in music
is an art of changing scale until you find the one that best fits the intervals you want to sing. Every
change of scale implies a change in the set of applicable ratios, and subtle readjustments of the tuning
of the song as a result. When Whitehead says “we cannot define congruence by measurement” he is
saying the same thing as Mandelbrot, that the coastline is never the same length after you change the
unit of measurement even though it is still the same coastline. Similarly, the value assigned to a
musical note is bound to change every time the music changes key, even though the wavelength
remains the same. The value is an artifact of the unit of measurement.
Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages are also statements about relative length, string,
and a lot more. In 1913, Duchamp cut three pieces of thread of a meter length from a standard rule,
allowed the threads to fall to the floor, and fixed the resulting curves with a fixative to preserve their
outlines. When the threads were dry he transferred them one by one to three identical wooden
straightedges which were then cut to the same curves. The end result is a set of three rulers which are
no longer straight but whose curved edges are all the same length of one meter.
In this case the title Standard Stoppages is clearly a reference to the concept of a standard length
in the sense that Wittgenstein uses the term “standard meter” to refer to the Paris official measure of
length. But what Duchamp is doing goes beyond the merely intellectual, or logical and mathematical,
question of how a standard can be said to measure itself, to the practical reality of how length is
dependent on curvature of the space in which the standard length has extension. Since the length of
each thread is the same but the curvature of each is different, it is more correct to speak of their
differences as relating to the same measure being applied to spaces of different curvature, than to
their not being the same length.
Whereas Wittgenstein’s wit is limited to abstractions of language and number, from Duchamp’s
example one is able to draw a host of further conclusions. Duchamp is saying, for example:
1. That a “standard meter” (in the sense implied by the Paris standard straight-line measure
between two lines engraved on a bar of platinum​iridium alloy) is an expression of straightness as a
condition for length itself, as well as for accurate measurement (“stand up straight, so I can measure
how tall you are”). That being the case, straightness is not an absolute condition for length—given
that the Three Standard Stoppages are all different, yet all of the same length—but rather a
convention of length conditional on the fact that space itself is uniform, that is, “flat” or “straight,”
which after Einstein was no longer thought to be necessarily the case.
2. Duchamp is also making the point that to speak of an object having length is to attribute unity
and continuity to the object being measured, and also implying that measurement is instantaneous as
though the object were frozen in time (it is not seen to vary in length between the act of measuring one
end and measuring the other end, as might be the case if one were trying to measure a live
salamander). To say of something that it is of a certain length correlates to an assertion of it occupying
a space of uniform straightness. To say that an object has length is to say it has continuity of extension
from one end to the other, hence measuring it amounts to a declaration that the space it occupies is
likewise uniform and continuous. A. N. Whitehead devotes considerable thought to these very issues
of space and time in the same connection.
3. Finally, Duchamp is making the point that length does not have to equate to distance in a straight
line between the two ends of an object, or indeed between any two points on the same object. This
may be less about trying to measure a live fish than a reflection on the measurement of a sound, or
indeed of a voice. In real life a musical note is identified primarily as a frequency, and only
secondarily, if at all, as a duration. A perception of frequency (what your ears hear as a tone of
specific pitch) is strictly related to the physical location of a zone of stimulation in the cochlea, and in
that sense is independent of an external standard. All the same, it is a perception ultimately dependent
on time: a rise time of a minimum number of oscillations per second, a standard measure of time for
frequency to have meaning, and the physical duration of the sound, including the time taken for it to
die away.
In alluding to space as curved rather than flat Duchamp could be referring to speculative physics,
or simply reflecting on the practice of recording as a trace on a paper, wax, or tinfoil surface
wrapped round a cylinder. The act of drawing a continuous line on a plane surface curved round a
cylinder is equivalent to bending space on itself so that if a traveler heads in a straight line in a fixed
direction, he will eventually reemerge into space from the opposite direction.
Wittgenstein opens his Philosophical Investigations with a ruse or game. In confessing an ongoing
difficulty in putting his thoughts in order—in English, “arranging my philosophical thoughts
sequentially”—the author feigns respect for the convention of arranging his thoughts in an order, in
order to advance a counter-claim, not that he has neglected to do so, but that it is in fact not possible
or reasonable to expect an outcome in which one thought follows another. There is of course another
sense in which his use of the word sequential may refer to time, implying a degree of logical
necessity residing in the order in which thoughts occur to him, as much as in the chain of connection
relating to the content of each. To distinguish logical order from temporal sequence is perfectly
reasonable, and also suggests that a way of reading information ought to be available in which either
order can be followed. We now have such a means of interrogating and presenting information, called
the web. At one point he appeals to music’s ability to sustain multiple threads at once, though not
entirely in terms a musician would readily comprehend. What he appears to be saying is that a music
of multiple threads is like a freeway in which it is possible to change lanes at will in the process of
driving toward a destination. In musical terms this is an interesting possibility, but does not make
sense. In classical polyphonic music, multiple themes overlap continuously in such a way that each
can be followed separately, the collection flows continuously and forms a coherent hierarchy in
which a principal melody is dominant and other parts play supportive roles, but all coexist
harmoniously. In counterpoint the same criteria apply, but all of the threads may be of equivalent
status in a homogeneous texture in which each line or voice plays an equal role.
Wittgenstein goes on to assign a serial number to each thought out of which a system of cross-
referencing may be established to enable a reader to select from a multiplicity of possible lines of
development. To a reader in the twenty-first century, this strategy is readily interpreted as an early
attempt at configuring a multipath format resembling a web page with hyperlinks.
But the concept of multiple pathways is relatively trivial, even in Wittgenstein’s lifetime. It
corresponds, in McLuhan’s term, to the mosaic field of a newspaper in which the order in which one
reads headline articles has no effect on their information content and the information totality is
ultimately unified and intelligible in relation to the date of publication. Wittgenstein’s scruples appear
likely to have more to do with an absence of a priori links (other than accidence of time), hence
absence of logical connection between adjacent thoughts, apart from the fact that they are his thoughts.
Such anxiety over the location of ideas in sequence affecting their capacity for meaning would not
normally trouble a poet or composer of music.
At another remove, Wittgenstein may be advancing the idea of each thought being both autonomous
and at the same time primed and capable of uniting with others in combinations determined by inner
structure, content, and valency to create compound thoughts—and including some for which he may
not wish to be held responsible. The chemical analogy is attractive up to a point. It suggests that each
thought has a particular charge attractive to a range of other thoughts. The limit to the analogy is that
chemical bonds tend to form stable compounds resistant to further change or combination, suggesting
a natural limit to the accumulation of complexity by sequential variation. In his poem Un coup de dés
Stéphane Mallarmé creates a variety of possible pathways by the fairly obvious grammatical trick of
elaboration by parenthesis and subordinate clause allowing the title epigraph “A throw of the die
never eliminates chance” to be read in a number of sequential orders without sacrifice of meaning,
though sadly without the possibility of variation in sequence having the power to alter or amplify its
content of meaning. A reader appreciates the aesthetic intention behind a poem of infinite variation
while at the same time recognizing the poet’s achievement in practical (or indeed, logical) terms as a
non-event. In similar fashion we can understand Wittgenstein’s anxiety as a desire to make his thought
processes wholly transparent to the reader as well as himself, and simultaneous reluctance to
abandon the principle of spatial and temporal sequence as a determinant of meaning. Or simply a
shrug of the shoulders that thoughts linked in different orders give rise willy-nilly to different
compound concepts.
Whichever it may be, from the amount of attention he devotes to the topic of succession it is clear
that Wittgenstein recognizes an important distinction between organic thoughts that are complete in
themselves (numbered, and by implication instantaneous) and groups of thoughts arranged in an order
after the fact to make statements of a hybrid logic that all the same cannot be said to correspond to a
single train of thought, but only to the appearance of continuous thought. The same paradox of meaning
by juxtaposition is addressed by Whitehead in philosophy, in the movies by Eisenstein (the
pseudologic of montage of unrelated images), and in music by Cage, Boulez (for example the quip
“Messiaen does not compose—he juxtaposes”) and Stockhausen (Momente). The art of transitioning
from single thoughts to groups of thoughts is also seen in Stockhausen’s compositional evolution from
“points” to “groups.”
Ultimately Wittgenstein exposes a tension between the capacity of words to embody concepts, and
the capacity of grammar to legitimize their connection. There is also a political dimension, since in
disputing the exactness of words (and its inversion, facing up to the possibility that words are
invariably inexact) Wittgenstein is emphasizing that the reader has the freedom, hence obligation, to
interpret words in a sense that may be rationally justified. Words in this sense correspond to state-
sanctioned directives. What such a view implies is the real possibility of words being deliberately
used by the state to mislead, and of a situation where the reader is not allowed the freedom to object
or refuse.
Later in life Wittgenstein abandoned the impasse of a commitment to absolute truth in number
relations in the Mozartean sense, to follow Goethe in turning instead to a species of transactional
holism grounded in the naivety that truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. In one sense the
move was pragmatic, in accepting that language is not a self​contained system but a medium founded
on agreement entailing at the same time that mutual acceptance of a proposition as meaningful did not
amount to proof of its truth in an absolute sense. In another sense his change of mind acknowledges
that instruments of thought in general make sense in relation to their situation in time and space, in the
same way as mathematical logic makes sense in relation to the stock market.
The later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations influenced the music of John Cage, and is
of particular relevance to music developments in the information age. There we can discover the
makings of a rationale for an aesthetic of musical relations between events otherwise emptied of
intention, but harmonized in time, place, acoustic, and observation. That chance compositions are
neither independently verifiable nor objects of conventional beauty in a Mozartean (or even a
Schoenbergian) sense does not alter their significance but through negation increases their potential to
reveal the truths of a particular situation, or at least draw attention to them in their nakedness. It is the
aesthetic of the moment of truth.
A moment of truth is realizing that when Wordsworth speaks of a dreamlike epiphany of floating
“as a cloud” and suddenly being aware of a host of nodding daffodils, what the vision is really about
is of being led to the scaffold in a daze, and becoming aware in the numbness of terror of a sea of
cheering faces joyfully awaiting the moment of execution.
What is your moment of truth and what is mine in a given situation may not be the same, and the
drawback of holistic visions is that while they can be shared they cannot truly be known. At least with
Mozart there remains a score, and notes, and the possibility of repetition, and a host of detail on
which it is possible to agree, even if none of it is absolutely verifiable.

Notes
1. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Vol. 1. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1980, xiv–xv.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: Tarner lectures delivered in Trinity College November 1919. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1926, 120.
 7
La guerre du destin
Igor Stravinsky said words are the instruments of thought. For Gertrude Stein, words are clearly
physical and the act of writing the excretion of thought though she did not say so in those words. Like
many American writers of her generation, she was fascinated by the process and enjoyed and used the
act of writing as a means of inquiry into the mind’s digestion. The result is personal, intimate and
occasionally revelatory. In order to read her I have composed a paraphrase of Gertrude Stein’s
lecture “Composition as Explanation” dating from 1926. A paraphrase is not what Gertrude Stein said
but my own reading of what her words may have intended. The original lecture is lightened by
occasional flashes of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It can also be read as a convincing manifesto of
American minimalism in music.

Putting it all together

—There is no particular distinction in the order of words making a narrative other than what the
reader intends in reading. To compose is to put together. How words are put together is how they are
read as well as how they stand on the page, and the only difference there can be between how they are
read and what is on the page is how the reader reads them and that changes from generation to
generation. If it were not so then every reading would be the same and everybody would know.
If a reader is inclined to continue reading it is likely that what is being read is of interest or that
the act of reading is giving pleasure: something they know or something they enjoy doing. Neither of
which changes what is on the page. The only difference is who is doing the reading, and how and
what a person reads depends on how the world is accustomed to read at a particular time. This makes
it very difficult to understand the author’s intention in putting words together in a certain way to make
a composition, not knowing which words lose definition and can only be known as words in an order.
From generation to generation the words remain the same and what changes is how they are read,
and reading is an act of composition, of putting words together so that their order has meaning. Lord
Grey warned the generals of 1914–18 of the folly of planning to fight a nineteenth-century war with
twentieth-century weapons. War decides its terms and conditions of engagement. To think otherwise is
academic. War is an engagement you prepare for, not a formula to be executed. It is the same for
writers and painters, some of whom are generals while others are foot soldiers. The most decisive
leaders in war or writing are those most closely attuned to current events, and I am here to tell you
what it is like to be a writer in this sense in this day and age. Naturally one does not know at the time
how things will turn out, but to begin one has to make a start, and look to expect a sense of direction
to emerge some time down the track.
To resume, the only difference between reading then and reading now is in the imagination of the
reader, how words are put together and the time in which you live.
No writer is ahead of his time, but a style of composition may be ahead of its time for a reader
who is used to an older style of an older age. There is no obligation on a reader to accept an
unfamiliar style of writing with which he is not comfortable, if being comfortable with language in the
style one is used to is important. Either you are engaged or you are out of it; not taking part only
becomes an issue if all of a sudden you need to have an opinion of what you have previously avoided.
However the artist may not have such a luxury of choice. Most artists engaged with creating a
language in tune with the present day are recognized only after they are dead, because only on death
can their work be said to be complete and only when something is complete can it find its proper
place in the scheme of things. That is why an artist is a radical outcast all his life, then instantly a
classic the minute he is dead. From one to the other in the space of a moment, with no halfway stage
in between. It is a shame for the artist, to be sure, and equally a shame for the public who has missed
out in all that enjoyment which was available from the moment the work was first created, not that
they would notice any difference, being incurious by nature. Nations unthreatened by war, as Lord
Grey has said, fall behind the times in military preparedness, and it is the same for a readership that
is unchallenged aesthetically, that they end up several generations out of date and unable to deal with
new developments. It would be much more exciting for everybody if everyone were in tune with the
present day.
Almost instantly, the artist changes from a social pariah to a classic. For the refusé in art and
literature the transition is always sudden and total. That brings another difficulty, which is that as
soon as an art work becomes a classic, it is suddenly a Work of Art and that is all anybody wants to
know about it. What was formerly rejected by the majority is suddenly canonised as an object of
value and beauty. It is only laziness that has prevented them from seeing the beauty before, and yet
where they used to see no beauty in it before, they now cannot imagine it being anything but beautiful
afterward. As soon as the times have caught up with it, the art work is automatically an object of
infallible beauty.
At which point you move on. That is the nature of art, to begin again and again. To have to move
with the times and be constantly redefining yourself in terms of the changing times is perfectly natural.
So you will now appreciate what I mean when I say that the words remain the same but the way the
words are composed in the mind of the reader changes with time, but the time of writing is the time of
the writer and the time of the reader is not the same time.
The composition is what you make of it in the terms of your present life. What you make of it is the
narrative of your life in your time, and coming to terms with the composition is what living is about.
That is the only difference, you can be sure. Its time and your time and how long it takes are what
composition is all about and the only things about it of which a reader can be absolutely certain.
Nobody thinks about such things in the course of reading or coming to terms with the composition,
naturally because you cannot properly come to terms with what you are reading until you have
finished reading.
Composition in that sense is the goal which is yet to be achieved but in the act of composing we
are not there but only on the way as we know.
Between the then and now of composition the only difference is how the world appears and how
the world appears is affected by everything that is going on. This can make the world of now a very
different place from what it was before and the object of revealing the world as it is now is not only
different but potentially confusing. From one generation to the next, what changes is how we see the
world, and adjusting to change in how to see the world is what composition is about.
Now the few writers who are facing up to the challenge of coming to terms with the world as it is
at present, are those who recognize that the world is constantly evolving and that their art must evolve
with it. Bear with me and I will tell you how this works. Naturally you have to commit to the process
because at the time you cannot know for sure how the world will evolve or things are likely to turn
out until you are up to speed.
Every time of life differs from any other time of life, not because the living changes but the way
life is lived changes, and the conduct of life is what composition is about. When a pattern of living
has become established everybody does it and everybody knows how it is done and eventually does it
without thinking for as long as it lasts. For an artist it is the same, you compose according to
convention and without thinking and that is that.
The way things are and the way they are composed is the same and nobody notices until all of a
sudden the way life is lived is no longer the same and what they are composing is no longer in terms
of the present, it is about the past and art built on the past is classical and no longer relevant.
Imagine then what it is like to begin from scratch when the world is no longer the same as it was
and living in the world requires new terms of reference and a new way of thinking. And that is before
we even begin to compose, since what we compose is in the future and until a way of composing is
found it will forever remain out of reach. At least that is how it seemed to me.
I do not know how many of you are familiar with my work. Perhaps it would be as well to tell you
from the beginning.
My induction to writing was the book Three Lives written in 1905, of which one life was the story
Melanctha about a black woman. This story is told in the continuous present. Naturally I was aware
of past, present and future as conventions of storytelling, but this was a story that to me unfolded in an
ongoing present tense. To compose stories in a continuous present is now quite normal and has
become increasingly normal in the past thirty years. So in telling the story in a continuous present I
was doing something which came so naturally to me I did not have to think about it, even though it did
not seem very natural to other people.
After that I wrote a very long book The Making of Americans of about a thousand pages.
Again, it was natural for me to write in a continuous present though to do so for so large a subject
became more and more complicated. Once you begin writing in a continuous present you remain in a
continuous present, even for almost a thousand pages.
Continuous present is one way of composing and beginning again and again is another way. You
can choose to write in one way or the other. Or you can write about what and how you are writing in
real time.
To compose in real time, in an inclusive present, brings us back to the art of composition at the
point where we began. In Three Lives and The Making of Americans the reader comes face to face
with a story that unfolds in a continuous present, complicated by a narrative technique of constant
reiteration of events, and a prose style intended to convey the telling of the story by a real person in
real time.
In the earlier book it was a struggle to achieve a continuous and inclusive present.
I was feeling my way toward a sense of an inclusive and continuous present and combining that
with the perception of a world in constant renewal, of beginning again and again.
Having done so I read what I had written as you do and from a reader’s point of view it was not
quite as I expected and I lost orientation. I resolved to do it differently next time, not change what I
had written but begin afresh.
From the beginning I decided to write The Making of Americans continuously without pausing to
reflect and kept on writing page after page until I arrived at a way of composing more continuous and
seamless than before, and richer in content and more thorough in relationships and always on the crest
of a wave.
On and on for a thousand pages.
 I began by writing my impressions and recollections of people and things as they appeared to me
in one moment of time, each one based on the continuous expansion and elaboration of a striking
characteristic or trait of that person or event as it seemed to me. From the process of observing each
one as it were through a microscope it was a natural progression to combine these portraits into a
bigger unity. However there are limits to composition because naturally it is never possible to
accommodate everything within one continuous present whether it is an indefinitely prolonged present
or an infinitely extended instantaneous present. So then of course you begin again. And that is what I
had to do in the nature of things, I would find a way of starting again. And in beginning again I would
naturally find myself in the midst of things.
And since it follows from beginning in the midst of things that what follows after is not the same
but is changed, what follows after that is also changed and so it goes.
When I realised that was the case the solution to reconciling the reality of a continuous present of
experience with the descriptive necessity of constantly beginning again became more clear. What
follows on is nearly the same but not the same; it includes everything that was before so in being
nearly the same as before it must naturally be changed only a little bit and very simply. So I naturally
kept it simple.
So then what is a simple difference and how can it be made to appear natural. To understand the
concept of simple difference led me to compile lists of changes which over a period of time grew into
series of changes, and the more I think about my work at this period the more I find a natural tendency
toward simple difference in succession. By not changing very much and keeping to simple difference I
found myself able to begin again without disrupting the impression of a continuous present; and
through maintaining and not disrupting the impression of a continuous present I was also relieved of
anxiety over having to update every detail because the impression created would be of a unified
single continuous present that was in a continuous process of modifying itself in details and not all at
once, which is how it is in nature. This came as a great relief. After starting as a bit of a muddle of
lists of degrees of change, of shifts of location from subject to subject and from subject back to the
same subject, and having to juggle with multiples of four and three, or as many as five and four at a
time. When so much is changing at once it is easy to imagine a conception of change as natural
difference being difficult to articulate in practice, and so it was slow to resolve itself to a point
where things evolve and change in a natural way so Que sera, sera.
So far the progress toward what I had in mind was consistent with the spirit of the times as you
well know how the times have evolved in recent history.
On the other hand, as I said at the beginning, there is also the much longer history of humanity to
consider, which is the totality of how anyone has felt and acted and which by nature does not change
from person to person in which sense all of us are still the same.
The only difference from one time to another is in what you have in mind to see and what you see
depends on how the world is conducting itself.
You will see by now that the information does not change except the way it is organized and the
way it is organized reflects the priorities of the time in which it is composed.
Everything is the same except in respect of how it makes sense, but since how it makes sense is
subject to change, in practice everything is never quite the same. As one living in a particular time, I
was feeling my way toward a style of narrative unfolding in real time, an inclusive and recurrent
present in which things change very slightly and simply while appearing to remain much the same.
And that was how it was until the outbreak of war in 1914. Until then all things being equal all things
carried on much as before, but after war was declared all things remained as they were but they were
not the same because everything was charged with emotion.
The emotion grew over four years and the world became more and more a different place even
though nothing seemed to have changed. The change was the emotion in people and the emotion was
war, which is a phenomenon of nature. And that changed everything.
The war coming was natural and inevitable because for several generations there had been no
change in how the world was conducting itself and how it was composed, and so war happened
naturally because of the pressure of need for a new way of composing oneself that was in tune with
the present time, and that is achieved by war which makes everything contemporary and forces
everybody to live in the present and see the world in contemporary terms and recognize that modern
composition in fact does read the world in present day terms and has discovered the words in which
to express how it is at the present time. So instead of being banished from consideration until we
were long dead as would normally have been the case the artist was recognized in his lifetime and the
way art construes the world was also recognized and accepted. In effect war advanced public
understanding or shall we say reduced the delay in public appreciation of modern art by some thirty
years.
And now with the war having ended there is no more talk of the avant garde leading the way, we
now have peace and in peace what happens will happen and then something else after that.
In the new peacetime situation where decisive action for change is no longer required it becomes
necessary to find a balance and that involves words as well as actions and an interest in relations of
words and actions as well as between words and composition. In that way the artist may begin to see
that through changing the language to express the present time the artist is able to reveal the character
of society to itself and for society to be revealed to itself can be a means of preventing war from
having to happen. In times of peace there is every reason to ensure that a balance is reached between
innovation and change so that change can happen naturally and gradually without there having to be a
crisis.
When all is said and done the composition remains of its time and in the terms of its time and there
is no difference except how it is read and by whom and when.
The time of composing is of its nature as a composition and the time it is read is of its nature as an
interpretation of its present time.
The time of writing is the time of composing whether past or present or future, in real time or in
anticipation or attempted recollection. The effort is all. My time of writing began in a continuous
present of constant renewal and constant starting over, with a focus on the mechanism of change in
series by degrees of similarity leading gradually to difference in which it was the same all of the time
and different some of the time, always evolving in its own time and in its own fashion. In the time of
composition itself I mean.
One other thing which is the letting go and what it feels like to be letting go and after letting go of
the time of composition at the time of letting go. One is unsure or afraid of letting go or one is decided
and sure of the rightness of letting go but there is always a lingering doubt that the life of a
composition will also go and that is a problem.
How to ensure that the life in a composition is its own life and has its own momentum so that when
you stop writing the composition carries on in its own time from its own inner life. That is what I
mean by distribution and equilibration. In former times the artwork occupied its own time and that
was accepted as perfectly natural but the situation now is one in which a balance has to be sought
between what is certain and of the present and the present of the reader which is no longer certain.
For me in the beginning the way out of confusion lay in a continuous present. Later there came the war
and imposition of romanticism and a drive for change as an escape from confusion. And now the
world is defined by competition and free trade and equal opportunity and there is no longer certainty
of direction. That is the most troubling feature of art at the present time. The emphasis has changed
from composition to distribution by which I mean with greater freedom of access and expression
comes confusion of time and a relapse into indifference of the role of art in conveying the spirit of the
time.
For now and afterwards.
For now.—

Apologia
A paraphrase allows the reader to access what a writer is talking about without risk of becoming
confused or overwhelmed by the writer’s tone of voice. It is no longer the writer speaking but more
like a sermon that expatiates on a text of scripture in order to alert the listener to what the text may
have to say that has meaning beyond its status as a sacred text. That art and poetry are about real life
and have the function of helping the reader to enjoy life is a thought remote from many academics and
their readers who are brought up to treat the printed word as a sacred relic that should not be
interrogated.
I have found this attitude in curators of oral history who imagine their business is to store the
recollections of others as specimens of thought representing earlier times and manners, and who are
concerned to preserve difference against the threat of interpretation on the mistaken ground that the
task of understanding how people of other times thought from the way they spoke and what they said
can never succeed and should not be attempted because in the long run everyone is lost in their own
time and speaks an invincibly personal language.
In truth and in fact that attitude is a mistake. In truth because people do continue to read and
converse in the belief that it is pleasant and interesting to read and exchange information, and that the
process works satisfactorily at the quotidian level and that it is possible from time to time to achieve
a high degree of intimate knowledge of another person’s thinking of one’s own time or of a much
earlier time when that person has long ago ceased to live. In fact because if as Gertrude Stein is
saying all reading is composition and the composer is the reader as well as the writer and that the
reading changes with time and the reader while words remain the same, then all reading is
interpretation and approximate and the way to deal with approximation is to read over and over and
talk it over until the approximations become less and less and the reading and the thing read are as it
were merged into a continuum.
If as I do you read Stockhausen or Cage or Boulez or Adorno and what you are reading does not
make sense then you at least have a choice either of concluding that what they say does not make
sense or that you do not understand them. And the question then is what to do next, either you do not
understand them because your understanding is deficient or because they do not want you to
understand them perhaps because they do not fully understand themselves. In which case the meaning
is there and something of it is communicated but the rest is a desire to persuade and be listened to
rather than simply hand over their knowledge without a struggle. There is an apt remark by Gertrude
Stein in this connection:
Giving it away. Not giving it away. Is there any difference.
Giving it away. Not giving it away.
A Hamlet-like remark (“To be or not to be, that is the question”) but which asks the question
“Knowing what I do, what shall I do?” However for Gertrude Stein the question is “can I disclose
and if so should I be disclosed, and is the point of disclosing what is said or the act of saying it and is
it ultimately about what I have to say or that it is me saying it?” All very confusing and tragic since it
leads to a situation where nothing can be said that is not personal and mortal and therefore there is no
need to decide whether what is being said has meaning beyond time and place and personal mortality.
For prince Hamlet the issue is that with knowledge comes obligation and that knowing what you
know you have no option but a moral obligation to act even though your actions may destroy
relationships and even lives: your parents, your girlfriend, your mentor, all of whom have lost touch
with reality and morality and are isolated in their own fantasy worlds. For Stein who trained as a
biologist the issue is both self​determination as a reporter and female and also as an advocate of a
distinctively American view of the world which is easy and natural in speech like the Shakers and
homely and direct in thought like the Declaration of Independence. She is in essence an eighteenth-
century persona driven by the same beliefs and anxieties as the Founding Fathers who separated from
Britain because the British control over language was being used against them, who rejected Samuel
Johnson’s Dictionary as an instrument of obfuscation and deceit, and allied themselves with French
and German nationalist philosophes in shrill opposition as much to the implications of language as a
repository of meaning, as to the Royal Society concept of a scientific language of international
currency free of cultural bias or inclination. The difficulties of such a view of language entail a
rejection of standard forms and privileged vocabulary in favor of an impoverished but assertive
rhetoric of the virtues of plain speaking and standing up for oneself.
The error of rhetoric for Stein as for Hamlet is that privacy of language tends to self-absorption
and the priority of having one’s own way as the inevitable consequence of mistrusting language, even
plain speaking, as a guarantee of trust in agreement. For Stein clarity of speech is replaced by dogged
persistence to a point where the reader or listener is worn down, and it is also the case that her style
of continuous recapitulation while hypnotic and agreeable in its own way can also be regarded as a
rhetorical ploy to retain the initiative as a cover for lack of argument or precision. In her paper
“Henry James” she likens the American novelist to a general, and in the lecture paraphrased above
she compares leadership in art and writing to leadership in battle and of war as a natural process of
implementing change. To speak with the rhetoric of war is to embrace again the nationalism of Goethe
and Schopenhauer who were opposed to the language of science and insisted that the only true
purpose of language is as an assertion of identity and authority. In “Henry James” she says
It is not clarity that is desirable but force. Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no
matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you
mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realise that you know what you mean and so they will
agree that you mean what you know, what you know [in your heart of hearts] you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to
understanding any one.

The italics are added and also the cliché in parenthesis to draw attention to the less pleasant
implications of a devotion to rhetoric over substance, which is on the one hand a sentimental
attachment to the sound of one’s own voice, and on the other hand a determination to be respected by
force of intimidation, both of which are I suppose inevitable in the circumstances though neither is
wholly acceptable.
To describe her speech as excretory in implication is not intended to be offensive but to emphasise
a tactile attachment to the process of expression and the underlying nature of the process from the
perspective of human biology. As human beings in infancy feed and excrete by intuition so they
acquire a dual sensibility if not understanding of feeding as action over which they have some control
and excretion as passion over which they have less or no control. The action of feeding is organized
repetition leading to satisfaction and fulfillment largely at the behest of the individual feeding and in a
time expressed in the time of feeding and the time of reaching satisfaction. The passion of excretion is
of a process of elimination dictated by the body in its own time and without regard to the comfort of
the individual in whom it is taking place. There is a pressure and occasional pain of elimination
ending in relief and overall a perception that what is taking place is doing so of its own accord which
can be pleasing and also distressing.
In reading Gertrude Stein one is sometimes aware of an intention and desire to express herself in
conflict with a reluctance to comply or perform, entailing patience and repetition as protocols for
dealing with a creative process that is organic and refuses to be hurried. It is self-evident that Stein
herself feels the process of composition as simultaneously a rite of elimination and from time to time
that the degree of comfort associated with the experience of expressing herself is apt to vary in
proportion to the matter in expression as well as to the digestive process.
It is difficult to ignore or dismiss a correspondence between a mode of composition exhibiting the
experience of a continuous present or a process of constant renewal, and the subliminal memory of
feeding and digestive processes in nature. For Gertrude Stein to do so is consistent with an aesthetic
of art going back to its primitive roots, consistent with a training in biology and interest in the
primitive bases of art and culture, and ultimately in keeping with the intellectual priorities of a time of
cultural desperation when new answers were sought in the hybridization of art and science and
language reduced to a bland emulsion to be spread thickly on the aches and pains of a distracted
middle class. A crisis of conscience represented in part in the rejection by European artists of
classical conventions of beauty in favor of fetishistic imagery drawing on primitive art representing
the wellsprings of humanity, and elsewhere by Sigmund Freud’s rhetoric of female inferiority as
science sanctioned by scripture and natural selection as well as innate self-disgust.
The soaring ascendancy of Freud to masculine scientific eminence may excuse or explain a
reciprocal tolerance of Stein’s comparatively benign and unthreatening but in some measure
equivalent and essentially feminist advocacy of uninterrupted self-expression. Both see themselves as
artists following a poetic as much as a scientific vision, and both are relying implicitly on their
scientific training as justification of their respective theories of mind. Both indeed are products of
their time, and their respective emphases—Freud the intellectual driven by a mixture of fascination
and loathing for women, Stein the sage animated by naive domesticity and a desire for fulfillment—
should be seen as national and cultural archetypes as well as gender-antitheses in a personal sense.
Gertrude Stein would be and is a match for Freud, as Mahler was a match for Freud. Toward the
end of his life Mahler retreated from sex with his wife to conserve energy and was reluctantly
persuaded to meet Freud briefly on neutral ground. Not being in the least musical Freud did not know
how to advise him other than to love his wife as the epitome of womankind. Mahler who was not only
a great composer but had plumbed the depths of his own nature in search of a means to express an
exact consciousness of his times was happy to discover that Freud was just as lacking in confidence
as himself but also clever enough to recognize that Mahler was a greater artist with a far greater
understanding of the human condition than himself.
More to the point however is that to understand Gertrude Stein in her own terms of composition is
to appreciate perhaps for the first time that what Beethoven is composing in his Fourth and Fifth
symphonies and also elsewhere is an interrogation of time and recurrence of the same nature to her
own struggle but of infinitely greater density and depth. What is all the more meaningful in a musical
context as Paul Valéry observed and the French symbolist poets well knew is music’s purity of
language, repeatability and above all freedom from the distractions and obligations of personality and
exact definition. The constant repetitions and repeated modifications of Beethoven’s so-called
“Victory” motif dit-dit-dit-dah accumulate authority and meaning and intensity of urgency without the
listener succumbing to boredom and without losing direction or momentum. In music the listener is
not caught in the experience of a turbulence which arises from personality or incoherence of thought,
but rather an external force of nature that is impersonal and truthful and that simply has to be endured
and in being endured is respected as real and necessary and in being so greater than mind.

In her talk What is English Literature of 1934 addressed to American audiences Gertrude Stein
identifies the Englishness of English literature with a widespread perception of literature written or
published in the English language being dominated overwhelmingly by British culture and tradition as
the literature of an island nation by nature and definition insular in character. By insular she notes that
“sometimes the poetry and the prose has had something to do one with the other and very often not”
meaning not only that English writers tend to be either poets or prose writers and rarely both, which
is true, but also alluding to the tradition that has grown up in the United States of politicians and
scientists and biologists being poets and writers as a normal and natural extension of their
professional lives, which is less the case in English literary tradition. Whether this is true or not is
not the point, it is a distinction of American writing she wishes to make, that to be a writer does not
have to be a career it may be a recreation and that it is not unusual for a writer of prose to be a writer
of poetry as well.
Having read avidly and widely by her own admission Gertrude Stein is pleased to reflect that so
much English literature is contained inside her as if to possess so much reading is a notable
achievement in itself as well as a necessary condition for becoming a writer. It is in any case a fund
of nourishment on which she is able as a writer to draw at any time. The question for a writer is
whether to serve god or mammon. In her view the duty of the writer is to serve god by which she
means express herself as an American and not to serve mammon by writing to historical formulae laid
down by the English. So her purpose in writing from the age of sixteen became to perfect the practice
of writing.
She does not speak of style or clarity of expression at first but of what literature does do and is
intended to do and then how it is done. Not of writers but of writing and reading and those things that
people who read wish to read about. Hers is a practical approach in keeping with a settler tradition
of Benjamin Franklin a printer by profession who was also an inventor, scientist, diplomat and
musician, in other words a versatile communicator and citizen.
English literature is descriptive of how things are and the way people are feeling, and it may also
be prescriptive of the way things should be and how things would be if they were different. People
are attracted to English literature because they are looking for answers, and some because they are
looking for reassurance, and she says what is most distinctive and welcome about English literature is
its certainty of expression, which comes directly from its isolation as an island nation. From the time
of Chaucer English writers have been secure and content in depicting daily life and things as they are
and continue to be which is perfectly natural for an island culture. Today however there are fewer
great English writers emerging and their focus is less and less insular.
English poetry is also completely self-contained and enclosed in on itself and because of the
power of routine of a tradition of living in isolation English poetry has acquired a lyric precision and
rhythm of speech that to an outsider appear disciplined and beautiful but are among the consequences
of a way of life of a people restricted in their freedom of movement.
As though to contrast the restricted movement of an island culture with the experience of a writer
in America or on the continent Stein recalls as a child reading and being greatly impressed by the
phrase “he who runs may read.” What exactly the phrase means in Brewer’s Dictionary or as a
biblical quotation from Habbakuk is neither here nor there because for Stein reading and running are
manifestly cause and effect, hence a lifelong habit of reading has equipped her with the energy and
inspiration to function as a writer and human being. The further implication of running as an American
is the freedom and power to take her writing wherever it may lead and not be restricted to the narrow
limits of an island existence. It is a metaphor for freedom of movement claimed as their right by those
of English descent who were forced out or by choice removed themselves from England to establish a
new way of life in the United States.
It is of interest to note the qualities Gertrude Stein attributes to English literature and poetry in
consequence of being an island tradition “shut in” by enforced daily routine and restricted freedom of
movement. To live in perpetual isolation from outside influence and conditioned to routine can be
attributed the fluency and precision of English writing and its fullness of identity, qualities that have
always come naturally because there was no escape from them. To be shut in is to be free because one
who is shut in knows where he belongs and who he is. “They need not run because there is nothing to
run with or from.” The life of an English poet thus consists in reciting the familiar values of a safe and
cloistered existence. For a writer in America or continental Europe that sense of security, she
implies, does not exist.
Stein indulges in a little wordplay in distinguishing a style that those who run may read from one
that those who read do not run. What she appears to be saying is that those who rule (run) are the
writers of law and moral code, meaning that those who control the language and instruments of
publication are those who exercise political authority, which could be a reference to the power of the
English monarchy over the American settler communities prior to their secession from British rule. In
that sense those who read and do not run are seeking rules to live by and are therefore disposed to
accept the authority of whatever is put in front of them to read. That could equally be a reference to
the imposition of literacy on a people as a means of subjugating them to imperial will, as in
eighteenth-century Europe and America with the introduction of mass education of a newly
industrialised working class.
When T. S. Eliot speaks of English literature as an American he is speaking of a history of names
and works forming a tradition. But when Gertrude Stein speaks of English literature she is speaking of
a biology and an environment and the conditions in which people live and their effects on how people
behave and their mannerisms. It is the same for France. For Eliot France is French poets and French
poetry and the art of composing in the French style and in the language like learning to cook. For Stein
on the other hand France is people and activity and being able to provide food and conversation for
struggling artists and buying in food from Félix Potin rather than cooking for yourself, which for a
writer of ineffable domesticity is curiously strange.
In 1942 at Glasgow University Eliot said “I would remind you, first, that the music of poetry is not
something which exists apart from the meaning. Otherwise we could have poetry of great musical
beauty which made no sense, and I have never come across such poetry.” For a writer of his
distinction and disciple of French symbolist poetry to say he had never come across the writing of
Gertrude Stein or Edith Sitwell would be highly improper as well as factually untrue, so in saying
that the music that is the rhetoric of poetry does not exist apart from the meaning he is managing to
imply that poetry in which it appears that music has priority over sense may be missing something,
knowing his audience would understand him to be referring to Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell,
while claiming to say no such thing. As a matter of interest Eliot goes on to praise Edward Lear, the
very English poet of nonsense and inspiration of Eliot’s own verse The Hippopotamus, a playful
satire of religion. Of Lear he says “his non-sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and
that is the sense of it” which is almost the remark a Gertrude Stein might have said and almost as
musical if not as sensible.
So then one asks where is the meaning and where the non-sense in Shakespeare’s rhyme “It was a
lover and his lass/ With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny-no/ With a hey nonny nonny-no”? Is it not the
case that the music of the words is a full and sufficient meaning, and would it be any advantage to
anyone for the words to be more explicit? I do not think so. Nor can it be right to suggest that
Gertrude Stein’s writing, or Lear’s, or even some lyrics by the Beatles, are parodies of sense because
the speech act is primarily a musical performance and only secondarily a communication of
substance. This is really the point. Gertrude Stein is the voice of an oral culture and Eliot represents
the view of a literate culture. A literate culture is a culture of print and print has no tone of voice, it
has only words and their order and meaning. And that is the error of linguistics and artificial
intelligence, to imagine that verbal communication is primarily about instruction when it is actually
mainly about accommodation.
When Gertrude Stein speaks of having all of English literature inside her there is pride in her
words as if assiduous practice in reading made her the mother of English literature. But what she is
saying is addressed to American college listeners and may be saying to them that through hard work it
is possible for American readers to possess all of English literature for themselves and without
losing their freedom. And she is also reminding them of Walt Whitman’s defining remark “I am large.
I contain multitudes.”
Another curious saying of Gertrude Stein is the poetry of England being what it is in consequence
of being “the poetry of the things with which any of them are shut up, that is shut in, . . . in their daily,
their completely daily life. It makes very beautiful poetry because anything shut in with you can sing.”
What is that about. She may be saying in a knowing scientific manner from reading James Clerk
Maxwell that the motion of particles in a rigid container will naturally tend to organize in patterns and
for cavities of fixed shape the patterns in which the particles self-organize correspond to musical
notes which is very true. So the poetry of England is musical and beautiful because England itself is a
resonant container and its speech in consequence is influenced by being restricted. However it is also
a strange observation for Stein to make because music is not one of her strong suits. Perhaps the
answer lies in the fact that the American word song is a term for music in general, not restricted to
words set to music, hence to speak of English poetry as beautiful because it sings may intend to refer
not so much to musicality of speech as to an easy and conventional harmony of language use and
delight in orchestration of public ritual.
Added to which it would be strange for Stein to attribute musicality to English poetry in the
classical sense for the compelling reason that as an island nation gravely affected by religious
conflict England after Purcell, Byrd, Gibbons and a few others produced few composers of
significance and by the mid-eighteenth century was importing its major composing talent from
Germany, France, Ireland and Italy.
On the other hand she is simply referring to singing as the sound of words in full flow: “a sound
that gently sings that gently sounds but sounds as sounds.” And distinguishing the older art of poetry as
placing words together in a sounding relationship from the later preference for choosing words that
go together in a meaningful relationship. That is the view one expects of an oral culture in the time of
Chaucer and how different it was from the poetry of the end of Shakespeare’s time when the choice of
words to go together is becoming contaminated by meaning and a sense that poetry is about words in
their meaning not their sound deciding which is chosen and how they go together. And Stein insists on
this point “the minute they all begin to think what they want to say and how they want to say it they no
longer choose” by which she means that as soon as meaning takes over then language takes over and
the function of poetic language changes irrevocably from what it feels like to be alive to what it might
be that might be wanted to be said. And as soon as meaning takes over grammar and word order take
over and the poet is left with no way of saying other than what has already been decided as
meaningful and worth saying. That is what is meant by serving mammon because it is working to a
formula and not being true to oneself. In place of the music and expression of oral poetry there arose
self-contained structures of thought that were clear and admirable but ultimately lacking in
individuality. And in the late eighteenth century that emphasis on correct writing and adherence to
formulae of thought rather than personal freedom of expression led to a huge growth in writing that
was neither poetry nor literature but journalism and historical analysis, that is writing explanation and
instruction, not expression and not personal but how to write about what has already happened and
what is acceptable to write and how to write it to the correct formula. After that came the Napoleonic
wars, and everything changed very quickly. The clarity of classical style was gone as well as the
liveliness of oral literature of earlier times. In its place arose a preoccupation with explaining the
nature of life and of suffering as a condition of living. “The nineteenth century discovered explanation
and . . . the relation between explanation and sentimental emotion [of the kind] the nineteenth century
wrote. Is there any. Yes there is. There is a very distinct connection.”
There is a quite wonderful interview in Donald Sutherland’s Gertrude Stein: A Biography1 in
which with remarkable lucidity her take on speech is conveyed from the position on the one hand of
an alien intelligence or Overlord attempting to come to terms with what human language is about and
how thoughts are formulated in relation to the reality of existence, or on the other hand from the
perspective of a John von Neumann trying to formulate language in terms comprehensible to artificial
intelligence. It is astonishing to think that Stein has cracked the problem that stumped everyone after
her, including Chomsky, including Turing, and one can only speculate that she was led to such insight
through pursuing the gist of her earlier contacts and conversations with Alfred North Whitehead.
Q: Would you care to make a statement?
A: Gladly. “If we say, Do not share, he will not bestow they can reiterate, I am going to do so, we have organised an irregular
commonplace and we have made excess return to rambling.”

It is a “sample statement” of the kind dreamed up as a memory test by psychologists, and on the
surface it appears to be nonsense (or non-sense, if one has to be pedantic) of a deliberate kind, like
the famous “So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple pie” of Samuel Foote.
The words form a structure as spare and elegant as a weathervane, or a sample phrase from a quartet
by Webern. By rambling she means random access memory, and by excess she means redundancy, so
her statement is a definition and example of irregular (nonstandard) commonplace (that is, natural
and demotic) speech observed as a random collection of terms whose meaning is indicated through
searching for redundancy.
The conversation is a gem, and should be much more widely known. In addition to its value as a
primer of human-machine intelligence, and as an introduction to the indirect speech associated with
John Cage, what is particularly outstanding is Stein’s total confidence and evident pleasure in the
explanatory power of her constructivist approach to language in relation to great literature. Her
enthusiasm is infectious, much as a reader feels Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for the transformative power
of the movies on the descriptive poetics of classic literature, which is the ability to look past content
and focus on the presentation of images in sequence, and montage, and simultaneity, and direction.
Any sentence is in itself an organization of experience. . . . It is all, both in the manner and in the literal sense, full of a vital tension.
This tension is stabilized by the fact that “Do not share, he will not bestow, they can meditate, I am going to do so” all as sentences
express a relation between the present and the future, a relation that is modulated from sentence to sentence through several
degrees of immediacy and closes in its highest degree of immediacy.

Sutherland asks, is this about people? She replies, It was, once, but that connection is not what is
important; it is a statement of relationship, which is ongoing. Sutherland asks, do I have to read all of
that meaning into those four sentences? She replies, not unless you care to.
She saves the best for last. Here she is speaking for Whitehead, now teaching in retirement in
America, where his occasional students include the composer Elliott Carter and young cognitive
scientists.
The realities we are talking about have been made clear and articulate in other than literary terms, and we lack a specific
terminology for the literary forms of those realities. Sooner or later criticism will have to get used to thinking in terms of forces,
tensions, movements, speeds, attractions etc., as well as in terms of constructs and animals. Not because science says so or
philosophy says so but because life is conducted more and more in these terms and it is the way life is conducted in a time that is
the prime source of steady energy and solid reality in a work that outlasts its time.

The sculptor Henry Moore speaks of the wonderful solidity and weight of a woman’s back in a small
12 × 13 inch oil study by Cézanne for his monumental Grandes Baigneuses.
It’s the only picture I ever wanted to own . . . and the joy of my life. . . . It’s not perfect, it’s a sketch. But then I don’t like absolute
perfection. I believe one should make a struggle toward something one can’t do rather than do the thing that comes easily.
Perhaps another reason why I fell for it is that the type of woman he portrays is the same kind as I like. . . . Not young girls but
that wide, broad, mature woman. Matronly. Look at the back view of the figure on the left. What a strength.2

He could be speaking of Gertrude Stein. There is a poise, and weight, and grace and inscrutability in
Moore’s kings and queens that also speak of the virtue of endurance which is a sense to which a
reader is led by her writing also. At the end of his life when he was no longer able to sculpt Moore
took to drawing sheep, and there is the same wonderful bulk and poise and softness in a sheep that
blocks your way in a country road and looks at you with a calm and steady patience.
Marcel Duchamp and his European friends were witty and playful and played with words and
images. Francis Picabia discovered the phrase “M’amenez-y!” as a cavalier and bitter slogan for the
victims of trench warfare. The words mean “Lead me to it!” or as we would say today “Bring it on!”
but the words you hear sound the same as amnésie which in French means a forgetting. Another
example of wordplay is the title of the movie L’Age d’Or by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí a
scandalous attack on religion the words of which refer ironically to “The Golden Age” but sound
erotically as “Ah! J’adore!” to the unsuspecting listener.3 Similar inversions of sound and meaning in
primitive mythology were destined to capture the attentions of a younger generation including
anthropologist and disciple of surrealism Claude Lévi-Strauss. Marcel Duchamp whose interest in
time and the fourth dimension was a source of fascination to Gertrude Stein invented a female persona
whom he called Rrose Sélavy perhaps in reference to her characteristic epigram “a rose is a rose is a
rose is a rose.” A charming invention and tribute but at the end missing the point that for Stein words
are tangible and malleable and have substance whereas for the Europeans words are mere names
without substance. All the same a name is a name and it is more than likely that with or without her
knowing her young European artist friends may have played with her name as a given in search of a
meaning which is hidden. The name Gertrude Stein is front and back of solid German origin; Stein in
addition to being terse and monosyllabic and containing the word sein, in German the Hamlet verb
“to be,” is also the word for “stone” implying solidity and weight and “tankard” or measure of beer
signifying conviviality, all of which is true. In French however her name may be pronounced
differently but to equal effect as Guerre du destin signifying the struggle with language, or ask the
question La guerre, estu certaine? (“are you sure, war?”) to which Guerre, étude certain may be an
answer. Or when war ends revealed anew and at length as the triple adjective Gaie, érudite,
distinguée which perhaps is best of all.

“The end” said Eliot “is repetition.”4

Notes
1. Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of her Work. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1951, 180–203.
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-interview.html (04/10/2011).
2. Philip James ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture. London: Macdonald, 1966, 190–93.
3. One wonders if it would be stretching a point to extend the pun to apply to the Large Door of Duchamp’s final masterpiece Tu
M’.
4. Alfred North Whitehead could be referring directly to Gertrude Stein in an otherwise obscure passage discussing what he calls
“the formation of each occasion of actuality” in the chapter “Past, Present, Future” in the collection of Harvard lectures
published as Adventures of Ideas: “In the formation of each occasion of actuality the swing over from re-enaction to
anticipation is due to the intervening touch of mentality. Whether the ideas thus introduced by the novel conceptual prehension be
old or new, they have this decisive result, that the occasion arises as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its
future. . . . But when there is conceptual novelty made effective by its reiteration and by the added emphasis on it throughout a
chain of coordinated occasions, we have the aspect of an enduring person with a sustained purpose originated by that person and
made effective in that person’s environment. Thus in this case the anticipation of kinship with the future assumes the form of
purpose to transform concept into fact.” A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933). Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1942,
226.
 8
Boulez in the underworld
In “Propositions,” an early polemic, Pierre Boulez declared “Je pense que la musique doît être
hystéerie et envoûtement collectifs, violemment actuels.” An exercise in verbal montage in the high
tone of French classical theater: the kind of remark a follower of André Breton might be expected to
say. The literal translation furnished by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise (“I think that music should be
hysteria and collective spells, violently of the present”) is not much help. The composer’s meaning
lies in the juxtaposition of key words hystérie, collectifs, violemment, and actuels, alluding to Freud
and the superego (hysteria and dreams), art politics (Jarry’s Theater of the Absurd), the collective
unconscious as a space for artistic activity, and repudiation of history. What the sentiment means
today, I think, could be expressed more temperately and along the lines of “The musical experience
should create maximum impact and provoke mass astonishment.” But the period rhetoric of the
newsreel era is part of the picture.
In many ways Boulez’s career and mission for music compare with the creative goals and
achievements of another Pierre at the ends of the earth, moviemaker Peter Jackson, Boulez’s junior by
a generation and a half. The parallels are striking. Both are self-taught directors noted for attention to
detail and a passion for technical innovation. Both have a soft spot for the bizarre and the grotesque.
Both came to international acclaim with new interpretations of the “Ring” cycle, one by Wagner, the
other by Tolkien. Both have invested their talents and creative energies in bringing world leading
technical laboraries and research programs to life, IRCAM in Paris, and Weta Workshop in
Wellington. Both leaders are consummate negotiators. Both have brought new intensity and emotional
depth to their interpretations of the classics, for Boulez the music of Schoenberg and Mahler, for
Jackson the urban legend of King Kong. Both have continued to push the envelope in major
productions involving a mixture of live action and cutting edge technology—Anthèmes and
Explosante-Fixe by Boulez, and King Kong and The Lovely Bones by Jackson—in search of new
expressive modalities.
New Zealand’s musical and artistic ties with France go back to the time of Mozart. Imagery of
Pacific life and art compiled by Joseph Banks spread throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century,
and in 1820 inspired an exiled French nobleman to seek an audience at Cambridge University with
visiting Hongi Hika, the original “King Hongi,” to ask permission to establish an estate in the
Southern Ocean. The musically talented Philippe de Thierry had shared the concert platform with
Ludwig van Beethoven and his Seventh Symphony at celebrations in honor of the Congress of Vienna
in 1814. It was de Thierry’s persistent efforts to establish a French presence in New Zealand that
finally provoked the British to take official possession of the colony and push through the still
disputed Treaty of Waitangi with the indigenous peoples. De Thierry ended his days as an
impoverished music teacher in Auckland.
In other fields, New Zealand’s debts to French culture are obvious, and I don’t just mean wine and
cheese. That it has a movie industry at all is due to French inventors of the 1890s. Its animation
industry, now a force to be reckoned with, is descended from the art of Georges Meliès, the French
pioneer of stop-motion photography. In 1877 a French genius and inventor Charles Cros lodged the
original patent for disc recorded sound. As early as 1881, Clément Ader, a French telephone engineer
and entrepreneur, was the first to broadcast classical music in stereo by cable (landline) from the
Paris Opera stage to paying customers at an industrial exposition a few blocks away.
It was at another Paris exposition in the late 1880s that a young Claude Debussy encountered, and
was overwhelmed by, the traditional gamelan music of Indonesia, and inspired to create a radically
new music of exotic scales and sonorities. Debussy was equally inspired by French Pathé movie
technology to invent a new kind of musical narrative emulating the jump cuts and discontinuities of
film, a style taken to an extreme by Stravinsky in the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. Paris in 1913 was
a haven for unconventional artists, many of whom entertained visions of the South Pacific as a remote
paradise. At the Cabaret Voltaire in 1917 the dadaist poet Tristan Tzara chanted the praises of life
among the savages in an exuberant parody of the Polynesian tongue. A revised map of the world
published by the surrealist movement in 1929 depicts the islands of New Zealand in splendid
southern isolation as the fulcrum and final resting place of Western civilization.
Debussy’s music found its way to the Deep South of New Zealand in the wake of a steady influx of
European settlers and exiles throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century,
leading to the formation of a domestic musical culture of surprisingly advanced taste. In the 1890s the
Nelson School of Music, funded by local subscription in a relatively small coastal town in
Marlborough in the South Island, today a leading wine producer, was set up under the direction of
Michael Balling, a viola alta virtuoso and artistic associate at different times of both Wagner and
Brahms. As a youth growing up in the 1920s in Lyttleton, near Christchurch, on the South Island
eastern seaboard, Frederick Page studied piano with Ernest Empson, whose own piano tutor, at the
time still living in Christchurch, was a former pupil of Clara Schumann. Empson dreamed of studying
in Europe with Busoni. He introduced Fred to the music of Debussy. Fred was entranced by the sheer
beauty of this strange and exotic music.
When the Nazis came to power in Europe, European intellectuals at risk of persecution found New
Zealand a dour and spartan refuge. At Canterbury University in Christchurch during the mid-thirties,
Fred Page befriended a number of European exiles including the philosopher Karl Popper, eventual
author of The Open Society and its Enemies. Before he became a philosopher, Popper studied music
in Vienna, and had been a follower of Schoenberg. At this time Schoenberg himself was living in
uncertain exile in Los Angeles. Astonishingly, he was even contemplating a move to Auckland, where
his wife had family, the Richard Hoffmanns, living on Mount Eden Road. This is a history unknown to
a majority of New Zealanders.

Pierre Boulez was born in 1925 in Montbrison on the northern edge of the Loire valley, a region of
sauvignon blanc and pinot noir. He was the second son to be called Pierre, the firstborn having died
in infancy. The disconcerting experience at the age of four of seeing a gravestone with his name on it
convinced him that he was the chosen one, the survivor. At school he excelled in mathematics and
piano. When his parents insisted he train to become an engineer he refused, ran off to Paris and joined
the analysis class of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. The devout composer, amateur
ornithologist, and organist of Saint-Trinité had lately been detained in an internment camp and was
regarded by a majority of his professional colleagues as a mystic and slightly mad. His Quartet for
the End of Time, composed during internment for an ad hoc quartet of violin, clarinet, cello, and
upright piano, includes an otherworldly and spooky nocturnal “Liturgie de Cristal” (Crystal liturgy)
evoking the atmosphere of mystery and danger, for a population in resistance in occupied France, of
secret radio transmissions monitored at night by crystal set, wailing and gliding cello harmonics
imitating the sound of a clandestine radio receiver tuning from station to station in search of words of
encouragement from across the Channel.
Paris in 1943 was under occupation by the German military. In between items of news, coded
messages were broadcast by the BBC to the underground Resistance movement. Under dictatorships
right- and left-leaning, abstract art and music were officially banned or condemned as morally
subversive and politically suspect. At some risk to his own safety, Messiaen analysed the music of
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern with his Conservatoire students. The class of Boulez reacted strongly
against Nazi-approved neoclassical traits such as variation form in Schoenberg and quotation in Berg.
Demanding an aesthetic purged of neoclassicism in any form, they challenged Messiaen to show
moral leadership by taking twelve-tone music to even higher levels of abstraction. To his credit the
master duly obliged.
Boulez scoured Paris for advice on new music wherever it could be found. Lessons with the
conductor René Leibowitz, a hardline disciple of Schoenberg, came to grief. Arthur Honegger
recommended Boulez, who was studying counterpoint with his wife, to the acting partnership of Jean-
Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud as a musical arranger and performer on the ondes Martenot, a
kind of synthesizer. Boulez found himself in the midst of a distinguished group that included Louis
Aragon, Paul Claudel, Paul Eluard, and Darius Milhaud. The group maintained clandestine ties of
loyalty with the exiled avant-garde in New York through Antonin Artaud, the absurdist playwright
whose theater of cruelty greatly appealed to Boulez as a moral disinfectant. Artaud’s taste for cultural
invective and direct action would find an echo in the brutally direct manifesto “Schoenberg is Dead”
issued over Boulez’s signature after the exiled Austrian composer’s death in 1951.
When the Germans were forced out, US and British advisers moved in to purge and dismantle the
wartime propaganda apparatus from top to bottom. The walls of the citadel, observed Barrault, were
fatally cracked:
We were confronted with a massive clean-up operation. It would not be enough to expunge alien influences from their own territory.
The real courage would consist in confronting the enemy aliens in our own midst.1

With American aid the annual Darmstadt Courses in New Music came into being as part of a cultural
recovery program to repair the damage of ten years of censorship under Nazi rule. For their part, the
British sent representatives to oversee the reform of German radio, the most powerful weapon of the
propaganda war. Today we recognize the sane British​accented boffin, on a mission to purge the free
world of Daleks, emerging from an antique blue police emergency phone booth to the strains of
primitive electronic music, as the legendary Dr Who. But for civilian life across Europe after the war,
the BBC presence was a reassuring reality.
In remote New Zealand, 1946 was the year the arts came out of hiding. Frederick Page was
invited to head a music department at Victoria University College in Wellington. At St Peter’s School,
a boarding school founded after the English model in the country town of Cambridge in the North
Island, musician Owen Jensen inaugurated the annual Cambridge Summer School of Music on the
American model. In Wellington, the capital city, a National Symphony Orchestra took shape, and in
the Scottish settler town of Dunedin, poet Charles Brasch published the first edition of the literary
quarterly Landfall.
In Paris, a liberated Radio service made studio space available for an experimental center for
musique concrète under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer, a radio drama sound effects technician and
turntable operator with artistic ambitions. This was a Hell’s Kitchen for musical noises led by a chef
whose own confections included Doodle in C and A Study in Pots and Pans. The group’s activities
were discreetly observed by a man from the ministry, the auspiciously named information scientist
Abraham Moles. Schaeffer’s turntable aesthetic made a distinct impression on Boulez, and also on
guest Darius Milhaud, who took the concept of orbiting loops of sound off to America, birthplace of
Gertrude Stein, from where it would eventually make a comeback in the sixties as minimalism with
Milhaud’s pupils Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Despite doubts that musique concrète would ever get
its act together under Schaeffer, Boulez remained at the Paris studio until the arrival of Karlheinz
Stockhausen for a short but intense visit in 1952.
The award of a music prize for Sonatas and Interludes brought John Cage to Paris in 1949.
Armed with a note of his address, the American went looking for Boulez with a collection of scores
in his briefcase. Boulez was impressed to hear of the American composer’s refusal when
Schoenberg, who was offering to teach him for free, insisted that Cage first obtain a solid grounding
in harmony and counterpoint. Boulez was equally attracted to the formal rigor and exotic timbres of
Cage’s scores for prepared piano, an instrument creatively distuned by the insertion of carefully
chosen mutes and plugs between the strings. An impromptu concert was hurriedly organized at the
home of Suzanne Tezenas, a wealthy patron of the arts, and attended by a full house of supporters
including Schaeffer and Messiaen.
Despite harboring serious reservations over the prepared piano’s ramshackle tone quality, Boulez
realized that Cage’s use of the piano keyboard as a control interface was a discovery of major
importance. Messiaen was inspired to go hunting for new mixture stop combinations on the organ, and
went on to compose Mode de valeurs et d’ intensités, a solo for prepared piano in all but name. In
turn, the Mode de valeurs would inspire Boulez’s serialist masterpiece, the brilliantly exuberant
Structures Book I for two pianos.
Cage returned to New York, and Stockhausen to Cologne Radio where an electronic music studio
had been set up with technical help from Bell Labs in the States. This was clearly a more disciplined
operation than Paris. Behind the US commitment to cultural freedom lay a cold war agenda of
robotics, computer-aided intelligence gathering, and voice recognition and translation. Speech
recognition was the key. Serial thinking was everywhere, and from a scientific viewpoint, essential.
Composers were coopted into this initiative on account of their special hearing and communication
skills, which included music notation. The high point of the first phase of research activity was the
electronic masterpiece Gesang der Jünglinge by Stockhausen.
Boulez considered the possibility of creating an electronic work in Cologne, but the composing
procedures in place there were hugely labor​intensive and he did not have the time. Instead he
composed a song cycle for unorthodox but conventional forces, Le marteau sans maître for alto
voice, alto instruments, and percussion, a work in which serialized tone relations inspired by
electronics are recreated in instrumental terms (a strategy also adopted by Stravinsky). Le marteau is
similar to the electronic Gesang der Jünglinge in a number of crucial respects. In both works a solo
voice and text move in and out of focus against a backdrop of deconstructed component syllables
forming a layered spectrum of abstracted tone qualities, from red to violet, as if passed through a
prism. An admiring Stravinsky (who adopts a similarly layered instrumentation for the Introitus in
memoriam T. S. Eliot in 1965) described the sound of Le marteau as resembling ice cubes clicking in
a tumbler. To others it sounded like the musical equivalent of an action painting by Jackson Pollock.
Some years later Boulez resumed work on a composition to combine live instruments and tape
after the fashion of Déserts by Edgar Varèse. He moved to Baden-Baden where a studio had been put
at his disposal by South-West German Radio. The outcome was Poésie pour Pouvoir, a despondent
setting for double orchestra and tape of misanthropic verses by Henri Michaux, surrealist, follower of
Baudelaire, and connoisseur of hallucinogenics. More upbeat and engaging is Figures, Doubles,
Prismes, a rarely heard but confident and elegant study for two orchestras treated as a stereo pair, in
which allusions to the dynamics of Varèse and the subtle stereo simulations of Berio are clearly
heard.
As the locus of attraction for electronic music passed from Paris to Cologne, Boulez focused more
energy on the Domaine Musical, a concert platform for the avant-garde extending a hand to Hans
Werner Henze, Iannis Xenakis, and a revitalized Igor Stravinsky. Public interest in new music was on
the rise. The sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet, launched in 1957 with a music of coyly titled
“electronic tonalities” by Louis and Bebe Barron, caught the public imagination at a time of optimism
for the future of space travel. At the 1958 Brussels World Fair, the convoluted mathematical curves of
a tent-like Philips Pavilion, designed by engineer and composer Xenakis for Le Corbusier, provided
a backdrop and projection space for a multi-channel Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse. At the
year’s end, a whistle-stop tour by Stockhausen of American university music schools attracted packed
houses of white​coated information scientists, eager students, and outraged academics. In Paris the
Domaine Musical premiered Differences for instruments and tape by Berio, a commissioned piece of
electronic mischief in which the upper-class decorum of a live concert gradually subsides into chaos
and delirium, like a bad trip.
A tour of New Zealand in 1958 by the Parrenin String Quartet brought taste of the Domaine
Musical to the southern hemisphere. Hearing their performance of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite as a
schoolboy, at the Little Theatre in my home town of Lower Hutt, changed my life. Exciting sounds out
of Europe could also be heard on public radio. At Victoria University, Frederick Page planned a long
overdue sabbatical. Richard Hoffmann Jr., now at Oberlin, urged him to visit Darmstadt and check
out the new music scene. He did. And he took notes.
It was a vintage year with Nono, Stockhausen, Pousseur, Madema, Cage lecturing, demonstrating, talking about music.... When it
became known that I had played the Berg Sonata in remote New Zealand I was pointed out as a matter of wonder.

On to Donaueschingen to hear Stockhausen’s Gruppen and quartets by Webern and Bartók.

The local Ladies’ Guild came at me with cups of tea, overjoyed to hear that I came from New Zealand.... In Paris, Unesco was
running a conference of East-West music.... One evening, following Indian music, came two works by Boulez, Le marteau sans
maître and one of the Mallarmné Improvisations. I found myself moved to tears by the freshness and purity of this music....
After the concert the players had vanished leaving Boulez on the stage, a lone figure, putting together the parts of his scores. I
asked if I might call on him. He was surprised to hear that we had the scores of his Structures on our shelves at Victoria.
“Monsieur Boulez, I would like to play your music back in New Zealand,” I said to him. “I am a fairly competent pianist but
when I opened your Structures the difficulties of reading it were so formidable I nearly fainted.” “Monsieur,” he replied with a
blend of seriousness and amusement, “vous commenÇez” (you just make a start). The answer delighted me, but I countered further.
“You write for guitar, marimba, bass flute, E flat clarinet, for odd instruments. We haven’t got such players or instruments in the
country: what then?” “Monsieur, we too had these difficulties in Paris, we too had no players. But we found them, trained them, and
now have a group keen to play this music.” Faced with this integrity my questions seemed flabby and feeble.2

Fred Page returned to Wellington loaded with scores and bursting with confidence. In London, fellow
New Zealander John Mansfield Thomson was working as an editor at Faber and Faber on the English
edition of the Stravinsky-Craft Conversations. Together Page and Thomson hatched a bold plan to
invite Stravinsky to New Zealand and he arrived to a hero’s welcome in November 1961. In his first
book of conversations the veteran composer is full of praise for the younger generation of Boulez and
Stockhausen. To listeners in the sport-loving dominion, Stravinsky’s own late works in which he
embraces serialism, such as the ballet Agon and the Movements for piano and orchestra, appear to
combine the fluidity of Boulez’s Le marteau with the energy and physicality of the Silver Ferns, a top
national netball team.
 A major issue of musical continuity emerged in the 1960s. This was aleatoric or mobile form. The
term mobile refers to a music composed in modules that can be rearranged in different orders. A
fierce debate broke out after publication in the late 1950s of Piano Piece XI by Stockhausen, and
Piano Sonata 3 by Boulez, both by Universal Edition. Piano Piece XI, which comes in a cardboard
tube with a collapsible wooden stand, created a sensation. The idea of playing segments of a piece in
any order, and even changing the tempo and expression of segments from one order to the next, was
unheard of. A perplexed Stravinsky wondered why the composer would want to go to such lengths to
specify the work in such detail and then leave the order of events to chance. In separate interviews
Cage said, on the contrary, the piece left almost nothing to chance, while Boulez considered that
changing the order of events would be okay, as in his Constellation-Miroir, just as long as the
performer was provided with traffic signs and a road map.
They were all missing the point.
The point is this. It is not about aesthetics. It is about modeling speech in information theory. Such
thinking is responsible for what we now know as Google Translate, and the thinking behind it
explains why the software is still not perfect. If your goal is to develop machines with language
recognition, that can respond intelligently to spoken or (pace Turing) typewritten commands, you need
a theory of language that allows for different word orders and degrees of emphasis, because that is
how language works in the real world. Musical exercises in variable form from the sixties relate to
the larger objective of developing a theory of parsing the same collection of key words in varying
orders, like Tristan Tzara creating poems by taking words at random out of a hat. The broader
intellectual challenge generated a group of major avant-garde compositions that are modular in
structure and rearrangeable in practice, including Pli selon Pli by Boulez, Momente by Stockhausen,
and other titles by Berio, Pousseur, Cage, Earle Brown, and Lutoslawski.
Boulez turned to the poet Mallarmé. The French were pioneers in word association. Paris based
immigrant writers, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett, were caught up in a
stream of consciousness aesthetic inspired by Debussy and the movies in which classical rules of
grammar are abandoned in favor of impressionistic and intuitive processes tapping directly into the
unconscious. Poetry is already a world of elevated speech where word order is routinely changed
and inverted for expressive effect. Mallarmé belonged to the generation of Debussy; he was
impressed by the fact that in the movies normal rules of logical or grammatical association no longer
seem to apply, but nobody seems to mind and the result still appears to make a kind of sense. In
Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés, which means a throw of the dice, the verses are laid out on the
page in such a way that the reader can select from a variety of narrative pathways.
Information scientists in the sixties were faced with the hugely difficult challenge of developing
intelligent software with the flexibility to parse keyword phrases in different orders. A young New
Zealand composer, Barry Vercoe, traveled to the States to join the design team at MIT’s Media Lab,
where his musical skills were welcomed as a valuable asset.
By the mid-1960s Boulez had published a few short essays in variable form, among them éclat for
piano and instruments, and Domaines for solo clarinet and instrumental groups. Stockhausen
meanwhile worked on a transformational grammar for music applicable to any collection of “musical
objects” and reduced to plus, minus, and equal signs. For Boulez the long years of hard work finally
came to fruition with the composition of a gorgeous memorial setting for choir and orchestra of the
poem “birds, here, inventing air” by the American poet e e cummings, who died in 1970. Boulez had
been introduced to cummings’s poetry by Cage; as a young man cummings had come under Gertrude
Stein’s wing while living in Paris intermittently in the 1920s. His abbreviated poem of a scant few
syllables is set out more or less vertically on the page, in a manner reminiscent of Japanese
calligraphy, a device allowing a certain amount of flexibility in sequencing words and phrases.
When Stravinsky died in 1971 the English music periodical Tempo asked a number of composers
to contribute a short musical In Memoriam for a special edition. To the editors’ delight Boulez
obliged with a detailed sketch plan for what was clearly a major composition, the mobile form
Explosante-Fixe for solo flute and chamber ensemble, all voices orbiting round the note E flat (Es, or
S for Stravinsky). The title is a quotation from André Breton. The work’s planetary mechanism
recalls Messiaen’s “Liturgie de Cristal” and the overlapping loops and multiple turntables of Pierre
Schaeffer. From the outset Explosante-Fixe was intended to incorporate electronics, but in early
attempts including a BBC Prom premiere, the Halophone, a customized German modulator device,
did not perform satisfactorily and hummed terribly (the resemblance of its name and role to the
Stanley Kubrick Space Odyssey computer HAL is probably just a coincidence). In 1986 Boulez
published a short, fully worked-out “Originel” version of the piece without electronics under the title
Mémoriale. It is a tiny miracle of instrumentation.
When William Glock offered Boulez the role of principal conductor of the BBC Symphony
Orchestra, it seemed to represent the pinnacle of his career and final vindication of his long campaign
on behalf of twentieth-century music. Almost immediately Boulez was offered the conductorship of
the New York Philharmonic, and to Glock’s enormous chagrin Boulez accepted that appointment as
well. This was not about Boulez being greedy. The BBC post was a great honor. But there were other
issues at stake. To be accredited to New York was the chance of a lifetime. The Americans were
finally on board. He was bound to accept.
The undigested facts are laid out in Joan Peyser’s excitable and occasionally prurient biographical
sketch Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma.3 Just a few months before, at the height of the student
troubles in Paris, Boulez had submitted a proposal for a computer music research laboratory to be
housed at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The proposal was vetoed by Werner Heisenberg.
President Pompidou got wind of it and offered the French government’s backing on condition that the
Institute be built in Paris and Boulez return to France. This long overdue update of the Columbia-
Princeton Electronic Music Center initiative of the fifties would be drawing on the enthusiastic
cooperation of US knowhow from Bell Labs and MIT on the east coast to Silicon Valley in the west.
To that extent, Boulez’s appointment to the New York Philharmonic can be seen in retrospect as a
quid pro quo to enable him to spend more time and be available for consultation in America with
assisting technical experts.
As conductor of the NYPO Boulez took measures to ingratiate a skeptical New York music
establishment. He set up rug concerts for edgy new music, and perfonned Haydn symphonies along
with prizewinning new works by Princeton academics. In return he got immunity from the media.
Harold C. Schonberg, chief music critic of the New York Times and a scourge of modernism, was
under strict instruction to be nice. In between concerts, Boulez lobbied and consulted assiduously
with the infonnation science community, people like Max Mathews4 and John R. Pierce.5
The outcome was IRCAM, Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music, a
compact subterranean bunker set in the heart of Paris and furnished with a performance and recording
studio with a programmable acoustic, teams of specialist musicians, technical staff and software
designers, and some of the most advanced audio processing facilities in the world. Fittingly, it was
Boulez who composed the first masterpiece of the digital age: Répons (Responses) for six soloists,
orchestra, and computer controlled relays, premiered in full in 1984. Boulez’s choice of title could be
construed as a distant allusion to Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet composer whose life and career
were put on the line in 1935 after Stalin and his henchmen took offense at his modernist idiom. As a
penance his Fifth Symphony, composed the following year in the anodyne style approved by the
communist party, was forced to bear the shameful motto “A Soviet composer’s response to justified
criticism.” Against that background, in that historical context, it would be good to think of Boulez’s
“response” of 1984, along with its Orwellian timing, as a resolute and triumphant response on behalf
of composers of all ages and persuasions whose freedom of expression has been compromised by the
state.

In twenty-first century New Zealand, Laputa of the South Pacific and Erewhon (Nowhere Land) of
Samuel Butler, Boulez’s music remains largely unheard on radio or in the concert hall. In 1986
Boulez finally visited New Zealand in person. I like to think he came looking for Fred Page, but alas
Fred was no longer around to welcome him. The Ensemble InterContemporain performed Le marteau
and Boulez spent time meeting and encouraging young composers and rehearsing a little of their
music.

Notes
1. “To the Surrealists, the citadel had cracks in it: form and content must be blown up simultaneously.... The revolution struck me as
an extraordinary cleaning operation, beginning with the brains. Automatic writing, waking dreams, hallucinations. To blow up the
Others lock, stock, and barrel is not enough. The real courage consists in blowing up one’s own lock, stock, and barrel.” Jean​-
Louis Barrault, Memories for Tomorrow tr. Jonathan Griffin. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974, 78. The above literal
translation does not fully convey the author’s political message.
2. Frederick Page, A Musician’s Journal. Compiled and edited by John Mansfield Thomson and Janet Paul. Dunedin: John
McIndoe, 1986, 105–6.
3. Joan Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma. London: Cassell, 1977. In retrospect, Boulez ’s cooperation with the
author makes sense as part of a larger deal intended to “humanize” the composer’s formidably intellectual persona for American
audiences.
4. Max Mathews, doyen of American computer music, co-developed the Fortran based MUSIC V programming language.
5. Displaying bold graphics from Stockhausen’s Zyklus on the dustjacket, John R. Pierce’s Scientific American title The Science
of Musical Sound (New York: Freeman, 1983) set out a uniquely pro-Boulez, pro-IRCAM, and pro-European agenda for a US
music title of the period. Its publication provoked a strident and ongoing anti-European backlash from a number of established
US composers seemingly mortified at being left out of the loop.
 9
The French connection
The student of twentieth-century advanced music has much to learn from Célestin Deliège’s massive
survey Cinquante Ans de Modernité Musicale,1 a personal legacy of the author’s experience of fifty
years of musical high modernism in Europe, known as the Darmstadt era by reason of its association
with the Darmstadt Summer Courses in new music founded in 1946 at the end of hostilities, through to
the IRCAM era in the 1990s, located under the pavement of the Pompidou Center in Paris. A thousand
pages of close formatted text cover an extensive and valuable archive of documents, interviews,
commentary and opinion on the aesthetics and theory of advanced postwar music, delivered from a
distinctly European, specifically Francophile perspective. Underlying his narrative is a fierce and
still active moral conviction, reflecting the spirit of wartime French Resistance, that the musical
avant-garde stands for freedom of speech, freedom of aesthetic choice, and freedom of inquiry in
opposition to dictatorships of the left or right, political and intellectual, who assume the right to
decree what art and music shall be permitted expression, and to punish offenders. The author is
widely known outside his native Belgium as a concerned advocate of new music and what it
represents, and in particular as a commentator on the music and ideas of its leading exponents, most
notably Pierre Boulez.
Compiled as a mainly educational text for European students, the book’s size and scope make it a
valuable one-stop resource, written in a French that is comfortable to read. Reading between the
lines, however, it is also a very deliberate statement about a distinct and unified period of musical
and cultural history that the author feels is still not taken seriously by educators, an era “currently
under threat of revision by postmodern critics,” not to mention composers now in open denial of
theoretical positions they once maintained with youthful and righteous fervor. For readers outside
continental Europe, the author’s distinctive features, priorities, and attitudes convey not just a
specifically European cultural perspective (one acknowledging the initially defining role of the
United States), but also the emotional flavor of a unique period of cooperation between the United
States acting as peacemaker, and the lately divided and warring principalities of central Europe.
The history begins in the aftermath of war with a morale-boosting joint initiative directed by
composer Everett Helm for the US interim occupying forces, and Wolfgang Steinecke, mayor of
Darmstadt, a small town in central Germany. Their collaboration ushered in an era in which
abstraction in music, as in art, is advanced to symbolize a new sense of artistic and intellectual
liberation from the sinister ideologies of National Socialism and Stalinist communism, as expressed
in official and deadly sanctions against so-called “degenerate art.” In December 1949 Leonard
Bernstein conducted the Boston Philharmonic in the US premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla
Symphony, a vast, ecstatic celebration of life, love, and freedom composed in a strange new musical
language and featuring the ondes Martenot as a pungent otherworldly sonority combining the squeals
of sexual ecstasy with the terrors of science fiction. In Paris at about this time Boulez introduced John
Cage and his prepared piano to elegant Paris society, causing a frisson of excitement among the well
to do.
The creative US-European dialogue initiated by world events, and maintained in the Cage-Boulez
correspondence, would lead to the publication in the late 1950s, first in German, then in English
translation, of the advanced and forbiddingly cerebral new music periodical Die Reihe. A sell-out
lecture tour by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1958 was soon followed by visiting appointments of leading
European younger generation modernist composers Luciano Berio and Iannis Xenakis to teaching
positions at Mills College and Indiana University. In the 1970s Boulez became chief conductor of the
New York Philharmonic and a mainstay CBS (now Sony) recording artist. The culmination of this
extraordinary period of US-European cooperation was IRCAM, inspired by Boulez, funded by the
Georges Pompidou government, located in Paris, and showcasing US expertise in digital sound and
music synthesis. That era of cooperation, within Europe and between Europe and the United States,
marks the music of this period as a social enterprise in the spirit of UNESCO and the United Nations.
It is a history and spirit of internationalism, embodied in the concept of serialism, that is now being
discarded and forgotten as subsequent generations of musicologists and composers lose touch with
history and pursue alternative personal and political agendas.
Indeed, serialism’s decline as a guiding principle of modern music is the somewhat lugubrious
subordinate theme of this impressively large and useful survey covering more than fifty years of
sometimes intense speculation, theory, and debate. For such a protracted group effort at elucidating
the fundamental building blocks of music to have appeared to achieve so little over so long a time is a
matter for earnest reflection, analogous researches in particle physics and the human genome having
not only transformed public understanding of life and the universe, but opened up the possibility of
creating new forms of life and matter. In music, one might have hoped for more. But that serialism did
in fact last so long is testimony to its latent power and influence; that it led to the establishment of
IRCAM can be read as further proof of its enduring intellectual appeal.
Part of the reason for serialism’s gradual decline is a sense that the cooperation exercise has
ultimately failed. Not a failure musically, since in addition to producing works as stunning as
Boulez’s Le marteau, Ligeti’s Atmosphères, Stockhausen’s Hymnen, and Berio’s Sinfonie, the period
also led to the revival and renewed appreciation of the orchestral works of Ives and Webern. It
speaks rather of an intellectual failure, on the part of the music teaching profession, and upper echelon
music critics in positions of authority such as Theodor Adorno and Hans Keller, to reconcile the
competing claims of serialism, aleatory, minimalism, and other outwardly aesthetic positions, into a
coherent system and historical process. If astute, experienced, and sympathetic commentators of the
generation of Professor Deliège find it difficult after fifty years to adjudicate on the respective merits
of European and US versions of serial theory, it cannot be altogether surprising if younger and more
cynical generations of post-structuralists are now pretending there was nothing there in the first place.
The spread of an unhealthy rhetoric of denial has certainly not been helped, in the last decades of the
twentieth century, by a concerted retreat from intellectual engagement by leading composers
themselves, the very same Boulez, Cage, and Stockhausen. If the premier composers of the age stop
communicating and are reduced to making cryptic and enigmatic remarks, the life of music, and the
intellectual gains of the postwar era, are suddenly at risk.
Recently the Darmstadt era and serialism have begun to emerge from the shadows as subjects of
historiographical research, a good example being Morag Grant’s concise and illuminating Serial
Music, Serial Aesthetics in 2001, an examination of the shortlived but influential European music
publication Die Reihe, edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Grant makes the
eminently sensible point that to understand modernism one needs to acquire a sense of what life was
like at the time.2
Célestin Deliège may be known to English and US readers as the interviewer in Conversations
with Pierre Boulez (London: Eulenberg, 1977), and as a contributor to William Glock’s Boulez: A
Symposium published a decade later (Eulenberg: 1986). Though a loyal follower of Theodor Adorno,
Dr Deliège is only too conscious of the latter’s failure to bring order and discipline to the study of
modern music in general, and serial music in particular, expressing dismay at what he interprets as a
loss of faith among composers; later in the book, with Adorno as his witness, even giving vent to
impatience toward the musical public for lack of cultural awareness—so in the long run, it appears,
everyone is to blame.
The book is conceived as a documentary report of a history that I feel is now critically at risk in an era of postmodernism, and
under attack by composers in denial of theories they once explicitly defended.... For us, the interest is in reliving history at the level
of actual discourse that constitutes the most vivid record of the times.

As a young music student in 1946, caught up in the turbulent upheavals in European musical culture
that followed the 1939–45 war, Deliège’s account of those early days, through a long professional
career as a modern music specialist for Belgian Radio, and thereafter as a writer and professor of
music, is designed to be read as material for classroom discussion of ideas and concepts that
composers labored for half a century to put into words. There is a further message in the author’s
time-frame, a moment of history defined not by individuals but by institutions of international
cooperation, a Darmstadt from the alliance of German and US musical interests, to the monument to
European culture and US expertise represented by IRCAM. Serialism made its appearance as a
musical creed in the midst of the postwar uproar as the seemingly spontaneous manifestation of a
Zeitgeist evoked in the joint image of a Cage, a Boulez, and a Babbitt “plongés, à leur insu, de part et
d’autre de l’ Atlantique, dans un type de recherche proche, et qui pourtant ne se rejoindrent jamais”
(Jettisoned, without knowing how or why, on both sides of the Atlantic, into the same kind of
research, but never able to be reconciled). The notion of a serial spirit manifesting itself in human
actions is central to the author’s thesis and a token of his attachment to the critical tradition of
Adorno.
The defenders of tonality were always able to claim that their way of thinking was coherent and
easily verified, deriving as it did from real and familiar music. For serialism, an artificial theory, to
have appeared seemingly out of nowhere to dominate western musical thought for so long without
reference to a coherent body of literature—given that the Webern Concerto and Variations,
Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs, Boulez’s Structures I and the Gesang der Jünglinge of Stockhausen
hardly amount to a repertoire, and indeed are more remarkable for their theoretical differences than
their alleged similarities—seems paradoxical in the extreme. And yet the sheer weight of evidence
presented by Dr Deliège, along with the energy and brilliance of the music in question, speak of a
common purpose that, however ill-defined in practice, was palpably real and consciously motivated.
As he shrewdly observes, “Only after 1946, Schoenberg excepted, do musicians begin to define
themselves in relation to the evolution of music.”
Indeed, a good deal of his book’s fascination as a resource lies in a marked inconsistency and
unevenness of reported tone and language that, in defiance of scholarly tradition, speak to the reader
as the genuine words of real people. Patient and sympathetic discussions of the theories of René
Leibowitz and Pierre Schaeffer, Henri Pousseur, and Mauricio Kagel, through the anti-theories of the
younger generation of Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough, to the terminal banality of Hugues
Dufourt’s “il n’y a pas de composition sans organisation ni structure” (if it lacks organization or
structure, it can’t be music) are offset, sometimes incongruously, by sudden bons mots of distinctly
Boulezian flair. Of Leibowitz, for example, that “after a few lessons at his Quai Voltaire address, a
reasonably gifted musician had learned all there was to know.” Or of Jean Barraqué, the charming but
backhanded compliment that “he wrote nothing to be ashamed of.” Or this, about Cage’s silent 4’33”,
Cage’s tribute to degré zero: “His saving grace is in having contained a time in which anything can
happen within a chronologically measured duration.”
Kagel is cited: “Je compose rigoureusement avec la merde,” a quip worthy of Père Ubu, and
Lutolawski excoriated: “In Poland, what passes for radical literature, in France is seen as poésie du
divertissement noir,” a dismissive allusion to the Polish composer’s “low art” appropriation (for
Trois Poèmes) of Henri Michaux, a poet Boulez had reserved for his exclusive use in Poésie pour
Pouvoir. American composer Earle Brown’s claimed influence on European serialism (via Gertrude
Stein, no less), and mobile form (via Alexander Calder and Brown himself, in Available Forms) is
declared to be “unhelpfully chauvinistic” and “ignores the pervasive influence of Mallarmé on
European culture.”
As one might expect, Boulez’s writings and pronouncements are discussed at considerable length.
To read these anecdotes in isolation and in English is one thing, but to read them in French, en masse,
and in context, is occasionally poignant. It is sobering, even a little tragic, to observe the energy and
daring of Boulez’s youthful pronouncements wearing away to a position where, apparently without
irony, the leading French composer can refer to his own apocalyptic rejection of history as no more
than “a necessary historical denial.”
There are huge gaps. No Hindemith, whose theory of harmony was at least grounded on
Helmholtz; no Harry Partch (ditto), no Gerhard, no Krenek, no Scherchen—whose published writings
and research interests at Gravesano are at least as interesting as his conducting, not forgetting Ars
Viva Verlag and the Gravesano Review, a periodical arguably as consequential as Die Reihe and
certainly more grounded technically. Nor any late Stravinsky, a scandalous omission suggesting a
quite deepseated antipathy. And no discography. Such absences and omissions, it has to be said, are
part of the author’s message, reflecting a certain narrowness of focus implicit in serialist doctrine, not
to mention lingering aesthetic and philosophical prejudices of an essentially European bourgeois
mindset.
What does emerge with exceptional clarity is serialism’s involvement with a number of competing
strands of language theory—the dominant literalism of a value system based on l’écriture, versus the
pragmatism of the Abbé Rousselot’s semiotics, based on the recorded sound actions of speech. In
locking out the tradition of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the postwar generation also threw away the
key to serialism and its future; in embracing Adorno and his metaphysics, the culture left itself
unprepared and unable to respond adequately to a vibrant intellectual heritage briefly unleashed in
Bonn and Gravesano, and in the Meyer-Eppler inspired methodologies of Stockhausen. The evidence
of that heritage is scattered throughout Professor Deliège’s vast apologia, not just in a uniquely
twentieth-century proccupation with music as a language, but carried on a flotsam of vague and
apologetic references to Shannon and Weaver’s information theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle, the syllabic matrices of Roman Jakobson, and set theory of Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte,
to name just a few. It is interesting to note that every intellectual obstacle put in the way of a
comprehensive serial theory—whether chance, indeterminacy, graphics, mobile form, group theory,
formant theory, or noise, right up to the authoritarian presence of Adorno, the Great Panjandrum
himself, with the little round button on top—can be unearthed in the philosophy and teachings of
Ferdinand de Saussure.
It is the defining characteristic of Saussurean semiotics to elevate language as a social system over
the individual speech act or item of literature. In elevating l’écriture above speech, linguistics
discards, as invincibly subjective, the implications for meaning of how words and music actually
sound. Since music is an art of sounds, the implications of a linguistic model of serialism are that
considerations of acoustic quality and aesthetic nuance no longer mean anything.
For many composers, however, ideas of musical significance are already abundant in literature:
Mallarmé, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Beckett, cummings. Dr Deliège is especially good on the creative
partnership of fellow Belgian composer Henri Pousseur and poet Michel Butor, along with the
controversy over Votre Faust, an opera with more than one ending, for the period a conceptual
novelty but one that along with Mallarmé’s hypothetical Livre has since become commonplace as
today’s computer game and website. Of particular insight is a summary of Serio’s 1956 essay
“Aspetti di artigianato formale” on the relation of music and text that includes the wonderfully apt
citation from Mallarmé that could almost stand as an epigraph for this entire music and its imaginative
goal: “le vers qui, de plusieurs vocables, refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue” (the verse
which, out of several phonemes, remakes a totally new word, untarnished, previously unknown to
speech). That image of a new language forming spontaneously out of a cloud of letters is a powerful
antidote to the obliterating message of the Bomb, a sudden reminder that Stockhausen’s early works
Kreuzspiel, Kontra-Punkte, and Gesang der Jünglinge are also processes of convergence and
condensation of form out of a primal cloud of exploded particles.

While sympathizing with Professor Deliège’s fastidious concern to preserve the unity of time and
place of this conveniently neat segment of musical history, I cannot help thinking that the continuity
and coherence he is looking for may in fact be discovered elsewhere, outside the barricades. They
are not his barricades, of course, but Boulez’s, and Stockhausen’s, and they represent a European
mindset that from the beginning has vehemently refused to concede any value to aesthetic theories of
earlier times. Boulez’s unequivocal attack on the memory of Schoenberg in his polemic “Schoenberg
is dead” published in 1952 (outwardly a true statement, the composer having died in 1951), was
symptomatic of a need for closure; his equally brusque denunciation of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism,
despite the element of invective, a rejection of an aesthetic emblematic of a discredited tyranny. We
can understand that. What is harder to fathom is Boulez’s venomous attack on poor René Leibowitz,
whose dedication to the music of Schoenberg and his school surely deserved better than the young
man’s lofty disdain. Leibowitz’s devotion to this banned music throughout the years of occupation (he
was mentor to both Boulez and Jacques-Louis Monod) was courageous and made him a very apt role
model for the author of “Schoenberg est mort.” It is surely possible, fifty years on, to maintain a view
of modern music as a coherent historical unity while at the same time acknowledging the earlier
contributions of Schoenberg, Hindemith, Krenek, Milhaud, Varèse, and others such as Koechlin and
Dutilleux. The only exception, it seems, is Messiaen.
Other obstacles that stand in the way of a better understanding of this entire period of theoretical
and musical invention, emerge from practices and conventions of musicology itself, in particular a
mindset that, like the doorstep evangelist whose only source of information is the scriptures, refuses
to look beyond the book for answers that cannot be found within it. It helps to remember that
musicology is a relatively young discipline, a product—according to some recent critics of a
jaundiced disposition—of a nineteenth-century authoritarian culture identified by Gertrude Stein as
blinkered, conservative, pedantic, and proscriptive, combining a middle-class ignorance of musical
arts with a romantic fetishistic attachment to the mysteries of human relationships. Musicology
survives today in US academic life and teaching, as a game in which music is defined as a subset of
language, and the language of music in exclusive terms of classical tonality and the communication of
vague but powerful states of mind. It is musicology, as distinct from ethnomusicology (the latter
claiming at least some degree of scientific rigor), whose addiction to the easy life of unsaid emotion
and supposedly unsayable acoustical relations has propagated a slack and unthinking conservatism in
public education and musical life. The trend is recognizable in the twenty-first century in the twitter
psychology of syndicated college music textbooks, and active promotion by the high street paperback
trade of popular guides to musical ignorance by celebrity philosophers who have no idea what they
are talking about. A rush of titles on music and mental life in which the atonal and serial repertory of
a century of musical creativity continue to be described in the language of Dr Goebbels as depraved
and corrupt, or socially and intellectually incoherent—a disease of ignorance that, as Dr Deliège
notes with regret, is now breaking out in postmodern critiques of serialism in the very citadels of
modernism.
To say that the serialism project has failed is not to criticize the author, whose task by his own
account has been faithfully to report the evidence of a history in which he has played so valiant a part.
There is however a piquancy in Professor Deliège’s reluctance to look beyond crumbs of evidence
that he has faithfully preserved, clues to a broader intellectual agenda of which modern music is only
a part. For example, Luciano Serio’s long association with Umberto Eco, his interest in the wordplay
of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and frequent citations of Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-
Strauss, all speaking of a close intellectual fascination with issues connecting modern music and
contemporary theories of language. The same can be said of Boulez’s lifelong attraction to the poetry
of Mallarmé, Henri Michaux, and e e cummings. Cage’s “mesostics” are the work of another leading
avantgardist whose agenda is an inquiry into the nature of language, sense, and communication,
Stockhausen’s glossolalia likewise. Within a very short space of time Boulez’s Le marteau, Herbert
Eimert’s Zu Ehren von Igor Stravinsky, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, Luigi Nono’s Il Canto
Sospeso, Serio’s Circles, and Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures arrive on the scene. In their
different ways, all of these composers and musical offerings participate in the same collective inquiry
into the sources and structures of language and meaning. For a reader seeking explicit authoritative
evidence, it is there to be had in key writings of Lévi-Strauss, Boulez’s paper “Sound, Word,
Synthesis,” Stockhausen’s Darmstadt address “Music and Speech,” and elsewhere. The real surprise
is not the coincidence of musical and linguistic interests, but the failure of academic musicology to
pick it up.
For a devotee like myself, one of the delights of reading Professor Deliège’s compendium is
precisely the gathering together of a great many important source documents in convenient and
readable form. It becomes possible for the reader suddenly to see connections that were not so
obvious before. Quite early on I was struck by the author’s allusion to Messiaen’s theory of tripartite
rhythm, part of an opening gambit in which the foundation of postwar serialism is traced back to the
French composer’s Technique de mon Langage Musical. That Messiaen’s ideas on rhythm, modes,
and harmony can clearly be seen to have influenced Boulez and Stockhausen is perfectly obvious and
well documented, so the author’s choice of Messiaen’s text as a starting point is logical enough.
For Messiaen the fundamental unit of meter and rhythm is the group or figure, by analogy with the fundamental phrase or period in
prose. He identifies the group anacrouse–accent–desinence as one of the primary elements of classical prosody, or for greater
precision preparation for anacrusis, and decline for termination. In the music itself, however, tripartition remains a relatively
intuitive and approximately defined concept.3

I recognized the triplet anacrusis–accent–decline from my days as an undergraduate music student,

but had never been encouraged to think of a rhythmic unit divided in three as anything special, it was
just a feature of a local and individual composing system. What made the tripartition newly
meaningful all of a sudden was its unexpected resemblance to the tripartite definition of a waveform
in synthesizer music. As a teacher during the 1980s I was required to learn music computing, then at a
fairly rudimentary level. I became irritated against the embedded concept of a synthesized tone as
consisting of an onset, a steady state, and a decay, a one-dimensional description bearing some
relation to the electronic events in Stockhausen’s electronic studies of 1953–54, but no relation to
acoustical real life. For a long time I had been at a loss to understand where the practice came from.
(The fact that I and many others are still obliged to deal with these conventions of wave shaping is an
indication of the persistence of the formula.)
In due course I acquired a 1988 commemorative edition of Raymond H. Stetson’s classic study
Motor Phonetics.4 Having become aware of the contribution of Werner Meyer-Eppler to the theory
and formation of electronic music in Cologne, and appreciating the direct influence of US “visible
speech” technology and expertise on Meyer-Eppler and Herbert Eimert during the 1950s, I was eager
to pursue the history of research into the fundamentals of speech. It was in Stetson’s writings that for
the first time I came across the scientific definition of a unit syllable as a composite of three elements.
Stetson was an interesting and multi-talented individual; a capable musician, he studied zoology at
Oberlin College before going on to Harvard, eventually to gain a doctorate in the new discipline of
psychology. In 1897, while still at Oberlin, he authored a paper titled “Piano Tone-Color from a
Physical and Psychological Standpoint” in which he concluded that expression in terms of the piano
is psychologically meaningless, reducible to factors of weight and timing, a study of obvious
relevance to researches in the United States and Europe at this time into the development of a touch
reproducing piano able to simulate the expression of a virtuoso as well as simply play the notes in a
musical score.
Stetson eschewed the linguistic approaches of his contemporaries that reduced articulatory movements to the logistic symbols of a
phonemic alphabet and then proceeded in a formal fashion.... His whole image of the scientific investigation of speech and language
can be summed up in one eloquent phrase: “Speech is rather a set of movements made audible than a set of sounds produced by
movements.”4

Stetson’s research in motor phonetics was part of a larger phonetics initiative aiming to elucidate the
basic elements of spoken language. He worked with a cylinder recording device called a kymograph,
a version of the Scott-Koenig phonautograph of the 1860s, by means of which the sound of a voice
speaking through a stethoscope-like tube causes a stylus to trace a vibration on a rotating paper
surface coated in lampblack, the greasy deposit of a candle flame. An insensitive recorder, even by
comparison with wax cylinder phonographs of the period, it nevertheless had the virtue of
representing speech graphically as an audible continuum and not as a sequence of discrete syllables.
The task of identifying separate syllables within the continuum of vibration was addressed in terms of
the dynamics of the speech act. According to Stetson:
The characterized factors of the syllable, the vowel and the consonant, constitute the familiar phonemes [with] which the phonemic
systems are concerned.
The fundamental classification of such phonemes has already been indicated:
Vowels which emit the syllable pulse;
Consonants which delimit the syllable pulse.
Consonants have two fundamental functions:
Releasing the syllable pulse;
Arresting the syllable pulse.5

—of which release corresponds to the onset (Messiaen: anacrouse), vowel the steady state (accent),
and arrest the decay (désinence). What made this for me more than just a simple coincidence of
threesomes was the correspondence between Stetson’s dynamic theory, emphasizing the physical
speech act, and the special emphasis on the dynamics of performer action that underlie Messiaen’s
musical theory of rhythm. What Stetson was doing was searching out the basic gestural units of
speech in order to understand how they are recognized as conveying meaning in the ever-varying
combinations of ordinary discourse. What Messiaen is implying by his theory is a reduction of
musical rhythm to a set of basic units that are individually modifiable in reference to a beginning, a
middle, and an ending, to produce an infinite variety of new and meaningful combinations, a
procedure in line with Stetson’s “Speech is rather a set of movements made audible than a set of
sounds produced by movements.” When the two are placed side by side, a picture emerges of a
generative system based on rhythm that, already applying to speech, can be applied equally to music;
not a system of rules to restrict freedom of speech, but procedures that allow for the free articulation
of new thoughts and new meanings.
The tripartite division of a syllable had recently been identified in the orthography of ancient
languages, for example Sumerian, a system of writing the symbols of which represent not complete
words or ideas, but constituent sounds of syllables.
The structure of the Sumerian led to the recognition of the three factors in the syllable, each of which might on occasion be
distinguished in notation: 1. Releasing factor, usually a consonant; 2. Vowel shape giving the syllable a definite quality; 3. Arresting
factor, usually a consonant.6

As former students of music, both Stetson and Messiaen are likely to have known of anacrusis and
accent as essential coordinates in medieval plainchant. Plainchant is a vocal practice, and the
neumata of plainsong are symbolic notations of onset and inflection. Plainchant however has no
rhythmic component, only succession. The missing element of désinence (decay) has to be looked for
elsewhere (in room response, a condition affecting the timing of chant). Messiaen has credited his
introduction to the theory of rhythm as a student in 1929–30 to Maurice Emmanuel and Marcel Dupré,
his teachers at the Conservatoire. Through their influence he was introduced to Greek scansion and
the tripartite formation of Sanskrit poetics.
When I first consulted Stetson I was simply looking for a precedent in science for the standard
depiction of a synthesizer waveform as a three-part formation of onset, steady state, and decay.
Rereading Stetson years later with Messiaen fresh in mind triggered an even more remarkable series
of conjunctions of US and European theory, and linguistic and music theory.
The starting point is the invention by Léon Scott of a sound recording device, the phonautograph,
in Europe in the 1850s. This was intended as laboratory equipment for the realization and analysis of
speech sounds in visual, and potentially machine-readable form. Neither phonautograph recordings
nor the more elaborate kymograph recordings of later date could be played back as sound. They had
to be studied and assessed as wavy lines on paper. A quarter-century after Scott, Thomas Edison
toyed with a device for capturing, storing, and audibly reproducing, on a strip of indented card,
telephone messages transmitted in Morse code. By an accident of fast rewinding Edison discovered
the machine had a potential to record and reproduce human speech. Shortly afterward, Alexander
Graham Bell and colleagues developed an improved wax cylinder recorder, in part as an aid to
communication for the hard of hearing (Bell’s wife being deaf), and also as an instrument of research
into speech sounds and speech articulation. What is now called the music industry originally came
into being in the late nineteenth century not as a natural consequence of recording—the sound quality
of early recording was abysmal—but as a marketing ploy to generate income for scientific research
into the nature of voice communication. Among scientists, the new audio technology was widely
perceived as the key to uncovering not only the roots of language, but also the fundamentals of human
emotion, in much the same way as the capture of moving images on film promised to revolutionize
understanding of dynamic processes in nature, to which speech and music also belong.
No surprise, therefore, that late nineteenth century developments of new technologies for
recording sound and movement should lead to the development of corresponding new fields of
intellectual inquiry, and the rise to prominence of the triumvirate Ferdinand de Saussure, linguist and
pioneer of semiotics, a new science of meaning; Emile Durkheim, an early leader in the social
sciences and the structures of social relationship of which language is a dominant component; and
Sigmund Freud, pioneer of psychoanalysis and explorer of the human subconscious. It is in Saussure’s
General Theory of Linguistics that the primary distinction of la langue and la parole is spelt out for
the first time. During this period of excitement the poet Stéphane Mallarmé composed Un coup de
dés, a poem designed both formally and typographically to allow a variety of alternative orders of
sequence. This intellectual environment, deeply involved in the dynamics of human behavior and the
formation of language and thought, set the tone for musical developments in the early twentieth
century. One such innovation, the introduction of sprechgesang in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot
Lunaire, exposes the musical expressive potential of inflected speech in a totally new way.
The Great War of 1914–18 and its catalogue of destruction served only to intensify the search by
artists and writers for unconventional and indirect techniques for representing states of
consciousness. During the 1920s surrealism and radio emerged as new communications media. In
music, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method makes a first appearance as a structured method, as if
inspired by Freud, to restrict the composer’s freedom of choice at the conscious level and allow the
superconscious free rein. A generation later, Schoenberg’s sometime pupil John Cage’s aesthetic of
chance and random selection would be claiming the same objective.
Now the fun starts. We learn that Stetson perfected his theory of motor phonetics not at Harvard or
Oberlin, but as a consequence of studies in Paris during the year 1922–23 with French semiotics
pioneer the Abbé Rousselot (a name surely begging for recognition in Messiaen’s Catalogue
d’Oiseaux). The French connection makes the composer’s adoption of tripartite rhythms suddenly a
lot more interesting, since it proves motor phonetics to have been just as much an ingredient of
intellectual life in Paris as the semiotic theories of de Saussure. There is more. While still at
Harvard, prior to his studies in Paris, Stetson had come under the influence of William James, the
philosopher and brother of novelist Henry James. It was at Harvard where Stetson completed his PhD
dissertation entitled “A Motor Theory of Rhythm and Discrete Succession” in 1906 under the
supervision of Hugo Münsterberg.
Paris in the 1920s was a refuge for American artists, scholars, and writers, among them Ernest
Hemingway, George Gershwin, poet e e cummings, and George Antheil. The lively American
presence in Paris intellectual life is celebrated in the movie musical An American in Paris, based on
Gershwin’s music. Of all Americans in Paris, perhaps the most celebrated for the longest time was
Gertrude Stein, writer and inventor of a radically new kind of mantric prose. She also studied under
William James and Hugo Münsterberg; in fact her publishing debut as a writer was a paper in the
Psychological Review of September 1896 titled “Normal Motor Automatism,” a study of speech
pattern.
It would be difficult to overrate William James’s influence on Gertrude Stein. The conscious, just before it was superseded through
the influence of Sigmund Freud by the unconscious—though never for Gertrude Stein—was a main concern of thinking people, and
she was a thinker. James’s conception of the “stream of consciousness” awoke an immediate response in her. “Within each
 personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous,” he had already written in The Principles of Psychology. “Consciousness
... is nothing jointed: it flows.” And so-called interruptions “no more break the flow of the thought that links them than they break the
time and space in which they lie.”7

We have to ask if Messiaen, the son of a poetess, composer of Harawî and publisher of a new theory
of rhythm, knew more than he let on. Though he affected an air of simplicity, from personal
observation I have no doubt of a deeper intelligence. What drew him to study rhythms of the far east?
Was it merely a taste for the exotic, or a genuine desire to formulate an alternative musical language?
His father a professor of English literature, Messiaen claimed to have been reading T. S. Eliot at the
age of eight. If that were true, would he not also have been capable of reading Gertrude Stein at the
age of eighteen?
It does not end there. Boulez’s settings of e e cummings, and Berio’s of cummings, James Joyce,
and Beckett, speak to us of a perceived affinity connecting the composers of postwar modern music
with poetic conventions acquired from exiled US and Parisian intellectual life of a previous
generation. This sense of connection is not random but deliberate: both acknowledge similar
objectives, and a desire to create forms that reflect the unconscious patterns and processes of human
thought and meaning. In a final touch of irony, the repetitive mannerism of American Gertrude Stein
also looks ahead to the musical minimalism of Philip Glass, John Adams, and their generation.
So what of Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités? This is the piano piece acknowledged by
everyone, Dr Deliège included, as a seminal work in the history of serialism, prototype of a
“pointillistic” style in which all the parameters: pitch, attack, intensity, and duration, are serially
ordered and permutated. In their haste to acknowledge the work as a quantum leap in musical thought,
experts have failed to notice some even more radical issues: 1. Although widely touted as the work of
a “master rhythmician,” the work is nothing of the kind. It contradicts the composer’s own theory of
rhythm. It is in fact the antithesis of rhythm, a music operating in a modern equivalent of the
unmediated timespace of medieval plainchant. That timelessness is what initially commended the
work to Stockhausen and Boulez.
2. Messiaen’s spelling of each note in the three twelve-note serial layers with unique and invariant
pitch, attack, intensity, and duration values is unprecedented, and corresponds effectively to a
rendering of each note as a “syllabic unit” in the terms of motor phonetics, that is, as particles of a
musical speech in which not only anacrouse–accent–désinence but all other components of the
physical gesture are combined.
3. Cage’s prepared piano intuitively does the same in rendering a keyboard of limited
transposition in which every prepared sound has fixed and unalterable properties.
4. In addition to abolishing time, the piece also abolished form. In their place it proposes a
vocabulary of terms that may be freely varied in order, their characteristics remaining the same, to
create new statements with the potential to convey new ideas. The prepared piano implies the same.
This is a radical conception of music, and its radicalness is inspired by theories of meaning that
were active in the Paris of Messiaen’s youth, both directly in the work of Rousselot and Stetson, and
indirectly, through their influence on the surrealists. Today in the twenty-first century it is possible to
go online and watch Pierre Boulez rehearse and explain the work Sur Incises, a composition of his
maturity. It is a beautiful work for three pianists, three harpists, and three percussionists. The pretext
for composing it, as Boulez himself explains clearly and precisely on film, is a deconstruction of
piano timbre into its component attack, resonance, and liaison components—the very same objective
addressed by R. H. Stetson more than a century earlier in his 1897 paper on piano tone color, and
implicitly by Cage and his prepared piano, and Messiaen in Mode de valeurs.
 Watch Boulez rehearse for five minutes on YouTube. A pianist plays a flourish, then a harmony,
then an exit flourish. Boulez explains: there you have it: anacrouse, accent, désinence.

Notes
1. Célestin Deliège, Cinquante Ans de Modernité Musicale: de Darmstadt à l’IRCAM. Contribition historigraphique à une
musicologie critique. Sprimont: Editions Pierre Mardaga, 2003.
2. Morag Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional theory in post-war Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
3. Deliège, Cinquante Ans de Modernité Musicale, 29.
4. R[aymond] H[erbert] Stetson, R. H. Stetson’s Motor Phonetics. A Retrospective Edition ed. J. A. S. Kelso and K. G.
Munhall. Boston MA: College-Hill, 1988, 58.
5. Stetson, Motor Phonetics, 61.
6. Stetson, Motor Phonetics, 155.
7. Elizabeth Sprigge, in Patricia Meyerowitz ed., Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1911–1945. London: Peter Owen, 1967,
13–14.
 10
The poetics of Milton
Among the letters I get from composers, I notice that more of them sense there is absolutely no reason for doing what they are
doing; and, in order to escape from the possibility of a change in consciousness, they blame Babbitt and me for having created a
musical world in which they have nothing but a dilemma. JOHN CAGE

There is a great deal of misunderstanding when we talk about the computer production of sound. We should not confuse the idea of
the computer with that of the synthesizer. Both are total media. With complete accuracy and definition, they both can produce
anything the composer knows how to specify. MILTON BABBITT

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
ADA LOVELACE
Following Milton Babbitt’s untimely death at the age of 94 (death at any age is
untimely, since it unties the time dimension) in January, 2011, I was interested in fmding out more
about his relationship—personal and music-theoretical—with the US information science community
during and after the Eisenhower years. The musical avant-garde represented in parody by Babbitt and
Cage as two poles of an antithesis sprang into life in the cold war era at the same time as Scientology,
MAD, and Playboy magazine. Today the US doyen of priapism is ready to admit that even the best
formula for a creative life has its natural limits. I wanted to ask Joseph Straus and Jerry Kohl what
they thought of Babbitt’s position in the wider world of cognitive linguistics. In addition to
positioning the veteran composer as a serious influence on the Russian composer’s serial music in the
instructive Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001),1 Straus is also coeditor
(with Stephen Dembski) of Milton Babbitt’s collected Words about Music.2 Jerome Kohl, a good
friend and fellow Stockhausen enthusiast, is also a distinguished former editor of Perspectives of
New Music, a periodical set up in the 1960s to assert a US presence and position in new music theory
by a heavyweight editorial board including Babbitt, and graced by a logo in honor of serial music
devised by Stravinsky himself.
I had wondered for many years about Babbitt’s relationship with Stravinsky in the light of the
Russian composer’s adoption of the serial discipline, epiphany of Webern, and subsequent energetic
development thereafter toward a personal integrated serial method extending to form and
instrumentation on a more or less equal footing with the row. Hints and clues are scattered through the
series of conversation books with Robert Craft, and to me these clues, including notable expressions
of approval for Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré, and Nono’s Il
Canto sospeso, are not only real and genuine, but also indicators of a musical significance
considerably greater than recent academic haggling over their authorship would tend to suggest.
Apart from a rather late acknowledgement by Stravinsky of Babbitt’s music—a mention of
Philomel alongside selected works of Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland, described as examples of a
distinctively American pastoral lyricism, evidence in US musicological literature and on the ground
of the younger composer’s influence on Stravinsky’s late music is scarce to nonexistent. Considering
the high status claimed for Babbitt among his academic peers in the US, along with the limited,
improbable, and to be frank, tawdry slogans circulated about him as “the first American total
serialist,” “the first true twelve-tone American composer in the 1940s,” the epitome of a
“mathematical composer,” and implying that his Three Compositions for Piano (1947) represents the
(the?) US breakthrough that made European serialism possible, actual nitty-gritty evidence to back up
the promotional hype is sadly lacking. If I sense a Babbitt-like academicism in Stravinsky’s Septet,
for example, it is in a fastidious quality of close-microphone dryness and attention to formulae that
has well and truly vanished by the time of Agon, a work in which the appearance of busy drama,
physicality, and humor of Scènes de Ballet is confidently restored. Today, looking back, on the basis
of rare glimpses of the composer’s method exposed to view in George Perle’s pioneering study
Serial Composition and Atonality, I would hazard a guess that elements of Babbitt’s style, notably a
reduction of voices, and a specific kind of cadential tendency, are reflected in the serialism of
Stravinsky’s Movements (1959–60), for example at measures 82–83, 119–21, and 183, and
elsewhere.3 That of course is not much, but it is a start, and fifty years is a long time to have to wait
for more competent analysts (Babbitt himself, Claudio Spies, Joseph Straus) to deliver more detailed
chapter and verse, and I am still waiting.
In retrospect, Stravinsky’s Elegy for J. F. K. (1964) for baritone and three clarinets is also open to
recognition stylistically and instrumentally as a formal exercise in a specifically American twelve-
tone idiom, hence as a tribute, not just to the memory of the late president, but to a typically
monochrome “Men in Black” idiom of the Princeton era. Contrasting with the advanced post-Webern
idiom of the Epitaphium (1959) for flute, clarinet, and harp, and equally remote from the neo-
renaissance canonic idiom of In memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) and Double canon in memoriam
Raoul Dufy (1959), Elegy’s plain declarative manner and American-accented lyric by Auden appear
designed to convey, in condensed form, a tribute to the American sobriety associated with black and
white newsreels, Walter Cronkite, and the plain style of Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait.
The unusual instrumentation for three low-register clarinets can be interpreted in a number of
ways, for example as a ritual sonority linked with the basset-horn of Mozart and Haydn, and as a
dark, hollow timbre appropriate for mourning. However the low register clarinet is also a timbre
consisting of mainly odd harmonics, an instrumental sonority close to square wave electronic sound.
Stravinsky would have picked up this obvious resemblance from his visits to studios at Cologne and
Columbia-Princeton, talking to composers, and listening to examples of electronic music for himself.
I am inclined therefore to interpret the three clarinets of Elegy for J. F. K. as stand-ins for electronic
sounds, and such a choice by extension as a gesture of support, in the circumstances, of the “American
Dream” represented by Milton Babbitt and his Mark II synthesizer. (This in turn would suggest a
performance aesthetic in which the clarinets are required to perform, Babbitt-style, in the spirit and
tone of electronic tone generators, with all that implies: absence of inflection or vibrato, sharply
stratified dynamics, and uniformly mechanical timing. I have yet to hear such an interpretation.)
Information science and Artificial Intelligence were emerging as priority fields of research in the
1950s in academic institutions along the US eastern seaboard. It is disconcerting therefore to have the
most general and least searching of inquiries concerning Babbitt’s relations with the broader science
community promptly and politely returned by my distinguished and expert colleagues with no
comment. For so casual a request for information to be received with the blank incomprehension
normally associated with a government department led me to wonder whether, and how, I could have
misconstrued Babbitt’s position within the US musical intelligence community so totally for so many
years. It had the further effect of widening my field of inquiry to determine how or why it should be
possible for US musicologists even today to be unaware, or to continue to deny, real evidence in the
public domain of a long period of collaboration and partnership of advanced computer intelligence
science and avant-garde music, from the late 1940s up to and including IRCAM.
It is unfair to single out one individual, especially one so gifted and obliging as Professor Straus,
for circulating views manifestly widespread in US academia, aimed at characterizing Stravinsky’s
conversion to Schoenbergian twelve-tone method, and subsequent tendency via Webern toward higher
and higher degrees of serial abstraction, as a religious expediency akin to Mahler’s change of faith,
action cynically undertaken in a bid to preserve his reputation and career prospects.
The plain implication of such a view is that Stravinsky did not really believe in serialism even
though he turned out to be an extremely successful and original exponent of serialism, confirming to
Robert Craft at one point in their conversations that “the new music will be serial.” While scorning
Stravinsky’s motives for adopting serial technique (as an excuse for repudiating his later serial
music), many of his accusers see no contradiction in eagerly claiming credit for Babbitt, the US
serialist, for steering Stravinsky in a serial direction in the first place. Surely you cannot have it both
ways.
If the specific content of Babbitt’s musical thought has no bearing on late Stravinsky, it is possible that Babbitt nonetheless exerted a
more general kind of influence, in that his [that is, Babbitt’s] prestige may have been among the factors that led Stravinsky to write
twelve-tone music. In this view, Stravinsky did what he did, at least in part, ‘to impress his friends at Princeton.’ (Straus 2001: 36)

Prestige? Evidence, please. Elsewhere, on the following page:

Stravinsky’s desire to win the good opinion of Babbitt and other ‘American academic serialists,’ in an effort to mitigate his sense of
inferiority in relation to them and their Viennese forebears may have been a factor sparking his initial interest in serialism. (37)

In a footnote, without quoting him directly, Straus takes Stravinsky to task for appearing to deride
Babbitt’s new age terminology. What Stravinsky actually said was this:
I do not doubt that the computer prose (written by computers for computers) of present musical analysis contains a necessary set of
tools for the exploration of new music.

But, he adds, such language is out of place in an orchestra rehearsal, where time is of the essence and
musicians are unfamiliar with
such neologisms as ‘dyads’ (the genitalia—i.e., gonads?), ‘simultaneities’ (yclept ‘chords’ in days of yore; imagine asking an
orchestra to ‘play that final simultaneity a little more simultaneously’), and ‘pitch priorities’ (‘and now you will hear the Beethoven in
D-priority’).4

To call such amiable comment derisive is being too sensitive by half, as well as too sensitive by
proxy. Reading between the lines, Stravinsky is actually taking pains to say something more
conciliatory and indeed, more profound. Babbitt’s terminology, he is saying, is part of the man, but the
image of impenetrability does not have to become a cloak of invisibility for the music, or a necessary
requirement of the mission. In the same conversation Stravinsky also observes “I had no idea what the
‘ontological structure’ boys were talking about in the music journals of the thirties, and I do not see
why the young Turks of today fancy such neologisms.”
Babbitt’s habit of abstract terminology is perceived as an affectation inherited from Heinrich
Schenker, a tonal formalist held in awe in academic musicology whose method, according to Babbitt,
is applied in the United States with “true intellectual rigor” and in Europe and elsewhere with “basic
intellectual naiveté.”5 What in effect Stravinsky is saying, to readers brought up on Schenker, Adorno,
and other pundits of modern music theory, is “I have been there before, these are only words, they
prove nothing and are eventually discarded, while the music lives on.” And what further proof does
one need that Stravinsky is right in saying so, given the total decline of the same neologisms from the
common currency of musical discourse today?
One is bound all the same to recognize and give credit to expressions of critical insight even while
discounting accompanying views that appear injudicious as well as unhelpful. The considerable debt
current musicology may owe to Babbitt and his contemporaries is still no excuse for the abusive tone
some acolytes are quick to adopt in defending their own critical agendas. For Straus to align himself
with Richard Taruskin in claiming that
Not only did he take up 12-tone composition himself, Stravinsky also accepted hook, line, and sinker, the historiographical myths that
supported the Schoenbergian claim to musical supremacy. (New York Times June 6, 1999, cited in Straus 2001: 37n)

—is more than empty conjecture, it is gratuitously insulting. The reader is left wondering at the
intensity and purpose of such invective, and at the same time astonished at the tone of scholarship
implied by the unqualified citation of such a remark in an outwardly scholarly study published by a
leading UK university press. As spokesperson for the avant-garde of his generation, Stravinsky was
manifestly more cultured in every sense than critics of my generation and, having endured a
succession of unpleasant political regimes (Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Joe McCarthy), would surely be
the last person to be taken in by fashionable historiographical myths of any sort.
Stravinsky was all the same impressed by Babbitt’s analytical abilities and without doubt his
progress as a serialist composer profited from close acquaintance with the US composer’s
extraordinary aptitude for pitch pattern recognition. But it is equally clear that Stravinsky’s
inspiration in later life drew just as extensively on intimate knowledge and appreciation of European
avant-garde developments—Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono—both in respect of their inalienable
connection with classical tradition, and acknowledging the Europeans’ natural élan and superior
inventiveness as well as their fundamental musicality. In alluding to the symmetries and mirror-forms
of Nono’s Incontri, to take a simple example, Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum (composed in the same
year, 1955) pays tribute to the Venetian tradition of Gabrieli and Monteverdi while implicitly
endorsing the younger composer as keeper of the serial keys and Schoenberg’s successor (by
marriage to Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria as well as by adoption and synthesis of the protocols of
Austrian twelve-tone composition and classical Italian antiphony).
Stravinsky’s musical formal constructions, from Movements through to the Huxley Variations
(1964) and Requiem Canticles (1966) manifest the unmistakable influence of Stockhausen, notably
the wind quintet Zeitmasse (1955), a score seemingly adopted as a resource book of useful
techniques and rhythmic devices. Elsewhere one discovers traits, signatures, instrumentations, and
formal relationships acknowledging other Stockhausen sources and timbral inventions including
Kontra-Punkte, Klavierstücke I–IV, and the Electronic Studies I and II, none of which is generally
acknowledged (or even dreamed of) in current US musicological circles.
Richard Taruskin’s affectations of musicological road rage can be construed as unfortunate but
typical of an increasingly stressed and conservative generation X that, far from succeeding in
enforcing its prejudices on recent musical history, has been comprehensively outwitted from hither,
thither, and beyond the grave by the very composers it sought to banish from the pale of academic
respectability. Such total repudiation would hardly be Babbitt’s intention, as a loyal advocate and
searching if limited commentator on Stravinsky’s serial music and the twelve-tone tradition. But it
must surely have rankled just a little that during his lifetime Babbitt’s superior talents were not
respected as much in his music as for what his line of skills appeared to represent, not only to
Stravinsky and a small but influential coterie of Princeton academics, but among the broader
advanced musical constituency represented by subscribers and contributors to Perspectives.
As an interested onlooker I suspect, given the un-Schoenbergian intransigence of his views—a
sense of natural superiority, ingratitude, and entrenched hostility toward musical confreres and the
general public that comes to a head in the article “Who cares if you listen?”—that the propaganda
sustaining Babbitt’s position of eminence in musicological circles must have some additional, hidden
basis. Boulez attacked this attitude as the mentality of the ghetto and it is hard to disagree.6 To be
sidelined as a composer is by no means dishonorable, and to be sidelined oneself while continuing to
advocate for sidelined composers such as Schoenberg and Webern is totally honorable. But to be
sidelined as a composer while assuming disproportionate authority and status for oneself as abrasive
spokesperson and project leader for a manifestly deteriorating center for research in music
computation is, on the face of it, anomalous. Having staked his professional reputation on the Mark II
synthesizer, and become identified so totally with it over the greater part of an exceedingly long
career, it is perhaps not surprising if Babbitt should come to be viewed from afar as just another
charismatic eccentric railing against public opinion. A musical Noam Chomsky is the image that
springs to mind: by that I mean a scholar whose initial successes are open to the criticism of having
been supported by fiercely defended covert agendas which, despite being clearly at variance with
reality and common sense, not to mention out of kilter with natural principles of art and academic
freedom, have paid the bills.
Until the money dried up. Personally I have no objection in principle to university research being
paid for by military and defense interests. Indeed, I think that prominent academics in musicology or
the cognitive sciences whose careers have benefited from military largesse are behaving implausibly
as well as disrespectfully stridently to turn against their former paymasters once those benefits have
been withdrawn for lack of progress or for any other reason. Especially objectionable is the public
and increasingly vocal refusal of longterm university beneficiaries of direct or indirect military
funding to concede their own failure to make significant progress even after half a century of
government sponsorship.
A public increasingly cynical at the spectacle of former cognitive revolutionaries in disarray—
Ray Kurzweil vanishing up his own circuitry to re-emerge as disembodied software,7 MIT’s Marvin
Minsky lost in synaptic space, and Steven Pinker confined for his own safety in the padded cocoon
evolutionary linguistics has woven out of its own entrails—is now submerged in an avalanche of gee-
whizz science delivering bland nostrums of touching faith in the continuing sufficiency of expert
systems that have long since passed their sell-by date. In similar fashion Babbitt’s compositions are
reinvented as items valued not for their dazzling beauty or intrinsic musical interest, but as historic
artifacts of the system itself.

In his own writing, Babbitt appears to perceive Schoenberg primarily and indifferently as a virtuoso
of twelve-tone set theory rather than as a composer of music of extraordinary emotional complexity
within a centuries-old classical tradition. With knowing high table disdain he writes of Schoenberg’s
unfinished opera as “Moses and Aaron” to show contempt for the superstitious fear the composer
entertained toward the number 13 that led him to reduce its original spelling to the twelve letters of
Moses und Aron.8
Blinkered inability to see beyond the confines of a particular system is a trait peculiar to
mathematics, mathematical logic, and the cognitive sciences. Contrary to reason, the general thrust of
artificial intelligence research since the days of Alan Turing has not been to model how human beings
actually behave and function in the real world, but rather toward the development of hardware-based
rules allowing for the simulation by computers operating in real time of behaviors outwardly capable
of passing for human activity (notably speech, but initially also music). For example, speaking of
(non-twelve-tone) serial ordering in Stravinsky’s 1952 Cantata, Babbitt declares “Every
composition is an instance of a system or systems, just as every language utterance is an instance of a
language system.”9 That’s pretty unequivocal. Later in the same paper he furiously attacks the eighty
year-old composer virtually to his face for speaking of tonal allusions (that is, echoes of classical
tonal progression and resolution) in his own composition Movements:
The tonal system and the twelve-tone system ... are, under no conceivable principle of correspondence, equivalent: they are so
different in structure as to render the possibility of a work being an extended instance of both unthinkable ... [by] reason of
proceeding from the analytically contradictory to the empirically false.10

Oh, come on. This is too much. If Stravinsky hears tonal relations, then that is what he hears, and no
amount of sanctimonious protest from Babbitt (or Adorno, or anyone else) can change it. What
Babbitt’s pique signifies, setting aside lack of diplomacy, is utter refusal to countenance a twelve-
tone system capable of generating tonal relations spontaneously, even though tonal relations are not
only widespread in the late serial works, but indeed are inherent in Stravinsky’s manipulation of
tonally anchored hexachordal relations: to mention only two, the G sharp and F natural “seams” of
Variations, and the cadentially functioning G, F sharp, and F natural combinations of Movements.
On the other hand, Babbitt is eager elsewhere to claim identity relations of a language-like kind
for his own species of twelve-tone composition. To compare serial ordering procedure with a
language is effectively to attribute powers of language comprehension to a system designed to
regulate the frequency of occurrence of the letters of the alphabet. I am not joking. Wartime
codebreaking of the kind headed by John von Neumann during the war is founded on such
considerations that the alien language of an encrypted message may be identified by the frequency and
distribution of simple letter combinations corresponding to the definite and indefinite articles, as well
as the relative frequency of individual letters (in English E, T, A, O, I, N etc.). So when Benjamin
Boretz refers to the language-like properties of Babbitt’s brand of serialism, he is asking for the
same attention and respect toward music research at Columbia-Princeton, as is already accorded to
Media Lab at MIT and cohort research centers elsewhere.
Babbitt, with all the developments of twentieth-century scientific, philosophical, and linguistic study at his disposal, was the first to
recognize the relativistic nature of such constructs as tonal function and twelve-tone relations.11

Not bad for a theorist whose equipment (the Mark II synthesizer) obliges him to exclude from
consideration such unnecessary expressive variables as tessitura, interval, and rhythm. In place of
tessitura, which is relative pitch (low or high), we have pitch class by which all transpositions are
reduced to divisions of a single octave (in large measure because the Mark II has only one octave of
pitch generators to play with). Interval identity is likewise and for largely the same reason redefined
as interval class, with the effect that all transpositions are neutralized, making a minor second
identical to a major seventh, and so on. Rhythm and tempo are subsumed within a strategy of pulse
code modulation, given that the Mark II synthesizer is controlled from antique paper-tape encoded
instructions read at a uniform speed, like a player piano. Fourthly and lastly, the system is
compromised by perpetually unjust tuning, the Mark II being limited in the pitch domain to a set of
twelve fixed frequency tuning forks, in contrast to studios abroad with infinitely adjustable sweep
frequency oscillators and impulse generators.
These (to some observers, crippling) restrictions are compromised even further by an arbitrary
limit to set theory recognizing only “Circular permutations of limited transformation,” a convenient
extrapolation of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition published in 1943,12 along with the
distinctly un-Webernian rejection of instrumental timbre as a compositional variable.
 Boretz has no hesitation in positioning Babbitt’s version of serialism and applications within
well-recognized and high status linguistics and intelligence agendas.
[Tonal and twelve-tone] functions constitute a set of dispositions to perceive acoustical events in certain ways as one would use a
notion of ‘English’ to hear speech sounds in a particular way and ‘French’ to hear such sounds in a different way. The contents of
one such set, then, may be considered to provide a syntax in terms of which musical ideas may be articulated, and hence, one may
designate this level as the syntactical level of musical structure.13

A machine simulating music or human speech is still a machine. That is obvious. The debate on this
issue did not start with Turing; it is more like two centuries old. Von Kempelen’s programmable
speaking automaton unveiled in 1791, a keyboard-operated analogue speech synthesizer anticipating
John Cage’s prepared piano by a century and a half, was deliberately constructed by its inventor over
many years specifically to confound the arrogance of philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder
who believed that the ability to speak was a divine gift and proof of the existence of a soul.
Nonsense, said the Hungarian precursor of John von Neumann, winding a crank handle, speech is
simply the outcome of muscular processes applied to naturally evolved physical structures. Von
Kempelen’s pragmatic view of the physiological basis of speech (and by extension, of sensory
perception in general) would eventually be adopted in the US by scientists R. H. Stetson in
linguistics, and J. J. Gibson in animal psychology. Against the prevailing conventions of European
theory Oberlin speech scientist Stetson defined speech as a byproduct of a repertory of breath-related
actions in research that would lead to the development of the Bell Labs vocoder. Elsewhere
contrarian Gibson asserted that visual perception is primarily dependent on a perception of interval
relations, that is, attention to movement cues in the visual field, and not on prior visual memory of
spatial relations.

Babbitt attracted attention in the 1940s as a precocious codebreaker of twelve-tone music at a time
when European music of the Schoenberg school was widely regarded within music as a morally
perverse and potentially subversive threat.
As early as 1939, when Schoenberg was still the object of intense humiliation—“he was considered more a musical freak than a
celebrity,” Babbitt recalls—and even the cerebral [Roger] Sessions opposed the twelve-tone technique, Babbitt adopted it for his
own use.14

Abstract art attracted similar obloquy. So longstanding a hostility toward European postwar musical
developments testifies even today to a bunker mentality affecting conservative American taste—
sensitivities freely acknowledged by Stravinsky and cheerfully endorsed over the years by visiting
expertise from Mahler to Boulez. In such a conservative climate Babbitt’s success, not only in
identifying and appreciating Schoenberg’s manipulation of hexachordal sets, but in elevating twelve-
tone set theory to a position of authority in higher music education for so many decades, is truly
astonishing, even while encouraging a wider public perception of modern art music as a species of
message creation in reduced letter code.
To speak of music as code is not particularly new. Henry Cowell’s 1952 exposé in The Musical
Quarterly of the “musical dice game” dating from the era of Mozart remains interesting today for a
variety of reasons: as a way of rehabilitating Cowell, whose advocacy of new music had cost him
dearly during the war; as a plant—an item Cowell would not have been likely to know about, leaked
to him as a gesture of friendship by an exiled European such as Stefan Wolpe or Ernst Krenek; as
propaganda designed to characterize European music as historically code-oriented and not to be
trusted; or as a news item designed to draw attention to current developments in US music embracing
random selection (Hiller and Isaacson) and chance operations (Cage) as exciting and cutting-edge,
while at the same time conceding that US musical culture in the mid-twentieth century was only
beginning to catch up with late eighteenth-century practices.15
The codebreaking objective embraced by Babbitt entrenches a perception of the musical score,
rather than the acoustical performance, as the primary resource, and study of the encryption process,
meaning the composer’s choice of note-row and manipulation of hexachordal relationships, as the
major goal, perhaps the only goal, of analysis.
That so reductionist a view of the analyst’s role, and of the art of musical composition as a trivial
expression of the code, was sustained for so many decades can be seen as a tribute to Babbitt’s
dogged influence in academic circles, along with broad acceptance of the social and cognitive
implications of such an approach within the teaching profession. In the cold war era of the “hot line”
when red telephone diplomacy and radio were regarded as international media of first resort, to
position musical research within the broader field of oral communication was a way of making music
relevant to a collective initiative aiming at elucidating a “universal vocabulary” of syllabic particles
and inflections, research of potentially wideranging application including speech recognition (phone
tapping), human-machine interaction (speak your weight machines), real-time translation (United
Nations), and mass mood control (automated background music in elevators, manufacturing and retail
environments, airports etc.).
In order for the principles of twelve-tone music analysis and composition associated with Babbitt,
George Perle, and others to be accepted as relevant to communications research, it is enough to
define the goals of new serialism in terms of current language researches in France, Italy, Germany
and elsewhere. Hence its advocates’ insistence on the theoretical priority of establishing a unifying
code of tonal relations (the language) in relation to which the speech content (or information to be
delivered) is merely demonstrative and of relatively minor importance. Such a goal tends to foster a
special interest in refinements of the code, such as Schoenberg’s use of thirds in his Op. 31
Variations, at the expense of performance (how the music actually works):
In Manhattan [in 1957], Boulez was conducting Barrault performances at the Winter Garden theater.... After a performance,
Babbitt dined with him. They talked about Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Babbitt reports. “Boulez said he was thinking
more as a conductor these days and that he found the hard parts of the work unplayable. I told him why I thought there were minor
third doublings but either he didn’t understand or wasn’t interested.”16

Schoenberg himself protested at the abuse of his musical intentions by theorists such as Adorno
seeking to characterize his art as twelve-tone music rather than twelve-tone music.17 At that time, in
the 1930s, his irritation was directed against acolytes, including Webern, whose private fascination
with numerology he regarded as bordering on the obsessive. For a similar reason we cannot be
certain that Babbitt’s prowess in serial counting was originally deployed in order to win favors with
Schoenberg on the west coast. More likely, it was rolled out in 1950 to impress east coast newcomers
like Jacques-Louis Monod, a refugee and Schoenberg disciple lately arrived at Columbia from Paris
where Schoenberg’s music continued to gamer opposition as a reminder of a decade of censorship of
the arts.
On numerous occasions in the literature Babbitt is cited expressing a weary contempt for the
messy business of musical performance, which he refers to as “theater,” compared to the intellectual
purity of interval relations contemplated in tranquility. Such devotion to a world of ideal relations
resonates with the orthodox Platonic vision fostered in music by Schopenhauer and Schenker, and in
linguistics by de Saussure, all of whom promoted the line that the language (the system, the printed
word) embodies the law, or collective authority, in relation to which individual performance (music,
speech) can only be an imperfect approximation. In Europe, Boulez’s and Berio’s concept of the
“work in progress” would arguably fit in with that attitude.
Babbitt may never publicly have aligned himself with the information science community, nor
consciously have intended to locate his expertise within the broad frame of language related
intelligence studies. All the same, the evidence linking his highly reductionist approach to musical
analysis with the wider objectives of cold war intelligence research is overwhelming, to a point
where it cannot be ignored. And since most of the evidence is freely available in print, an observer
can only assume, from the absence of discussion on the subject over the past thirty, forty, and more
years, that a majority of US musicologists is incurious, unwilling, or actively discouraged from
reading, digesting, or otherwise coming to terms with music-related topics outside certain narrow
limits, including computer music related publications of MIT.
Given the skepticism affected by European analysts toward Babbitt’s exposition of Schoenbergian
method—a disbelief extending to such minority English figures as Score contributors Hans Keller,
Humphrey Searle, Peter Stadlen, and Roberto Gerhard in the 1950s—the high claims made on
Babbitt’s behalf by colleagues and university insiders over the years hint at a weightier agenda at
work than (say) culturally embedded prejudices of the kind associated with Adorno’s and Thomas
Mann’s cynical fantasies of a fictional Leverkühn. The intelligence code agenda emerges most clearly
and devastatingly in Babbitt’s fateful article “Who cares if you listen?” published in 1958, ironically
a good year for US serialism, and for Babbitt personally.18 For the rest of his life Babbitt complained
that the published title was not his responsibility, and by implication that it had not been his intention
to give the impression of a modern music that did not care. But the text of his article has been widely
anthologized and available in open circulation long enough for even the most diffident reader to
conclude that “Who cares?” was exactly the message the author wanted to deliver. In other words, the
visiting Alien Overlord’s view (in Arthur C. Clarke’s metaphor) that the art of music—at least, as
practiced in US universities—consists primarily in the creation of an esoteric language-like system of
notational possibilities of which the musical composition is merely a transient expression.
The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners ... is a result of a half-century of revolution in
musical thought ... whose nature and consequences ... are closely analogous to those of the mid-nineteenth-century revolution in
theoretical physics.19

That is a large claim for Babbitt to advance, and it locates him firmly in the domain of set theory and
information theory.
The music that reflects the full impact of this revolution is ... a truly “new” music. [However] I shall make reference to no specific
works, since I wish to avoid the independent issue of evaluation.

How curious: a revolution in musical thinking that discourages critical evaluation of individual works
and is unconcerned about wider issues of aesthetics. In other words, we are dealing with the terms of
a musical grammar in relation to which specific works are necessarily incomplete and ordinarily
imperfect.
First. This music employs a tonal vocabulary which is more “efficient” than that of the music of the past.... Increase in efficiency
necessarily reduces the “redundancy” of the language, and as a result the intelligible communication of the work demands
increased accuracy from the transmitter [performer] and activity from the receiver [listener].... It is this circumstance, among many
others, that has created the need for purely electronic media of “performance.”20
Inelegantly expressed, and mostly empty rhetoric, but check for yourself: focusing on criteria of
efficiency, accuracy, superior intelligibility, and more effective communication, all straight out of the
1948 Shannon and Weaver wordbook of communication science. In language reminiscent of the
original Turing Test Babbitt continues:
Each “atomic” event [in a score of “new” music] is located in a five-dimensional musical space determined by pitch-class, register,
dynamic, duration, and timbre.... In the course of a work, the successive [meaning: sequentially updated] values of each component
create [are designed to give an impression of] an individually coherent structure [a uniquely characterized musical experience].

Mistakes are a no-no. “An incorrectly performed or perceived dynamic value results in ... a
falsification of the composition’s total structure.”21
Edgar Varèse (whose Poème électronique was an early candidate for an electronic makeover at
the Columbia-Princeton center with Babbitt’s participation) had this to say:
He [Babbitt] wants to exercise maximum control over certain materials, as if he were above them. But I want to be in the material,
part of the acoustical vibration, so to speak. Babbitt composes his materials first and then gives it [sic] to the synthesiser, while I
want to generate something directly by electronic means.22

The history of the Marks I and II synthesizers is unclear and somewhat ambiguous. In functional terms
the Mark I device, described as a programmable synthesizer of light music and musical instruments
for the movie industry, outlines an early equivalent in hardware form of a software package concept
of the kind available today on which it is possible to compose music in a form of notation and realize
it in a layered polyphony of electronic special effects emulating wind and percussion instruments (in
the early days, strings were impossible to synthesize. That was Max Mathews’s great contribution).
There were clearly rich pickings to be made from equipment with the potential to make savings on
background music costs. The industry had previously been cited in the 1930s as end market
justification for investment in optical tone synthesis, stereophony, cable delivery of a full-strength
broadband signal, and an early form of surround-sound.
In reality the cost-saving argument—that the resulting technologies would provide cost-cutting
services to the movie industry without the threat of union disruption and more reliably to a higher
standard—was never credible. The resulting technology prototypes were invariably slower, more
costly, and less reliable in practice than employing live composers and musicians. However the
movie industry could be said to provide a convenient front for research with military implications. In
the inter-war years, optical music synthesis would have applications in high-speed cable, light, and
radio communications; today we have barcoding of retail goods in supermarkets as a consequence.
Most if not all of today’s internet applications, surveillance and translation options, began life as
military research. There is every reason to suppose that the RCA Mark I synthesizer was devised,
funded, and authorized as a teaching and research package with the aim of stimulating expertise and
product development in areas of interest to information storage, encryption, and delivery services.
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center started as an audio equipment pool in 1951,
assembled by composers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. The two composers had tape
machines, but no oscillators for synthesizing sounds, so their early efforts employed piano and flute
sounds, which were treated as basic material.
In 1955, after major premieres in Europe of electronic and concrete music, American interest in
the possibilities of advanced music synthesis was aroused. Ussachevsky and Luening received
funding to travel to Europe and observe work in major studios. On their return they learned of the
newly-completed RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer (the Mark I) constructed for David Sarnoff of
RCA by Harry Olson and Herbert Belar “to investigate the creation and control of electronic sounds.”
RCA’s hopes for the device were rather pedestrian and predictable. They hoped to use the device to imitate traditional instruments
for the creation of pop music.... Discovering that Milton Babbitt, then at Princeton University, was also interested in experimenting
with the device, Luening and Ussachevsky joined with him to lobby for some time on the machine.23

In 1957 a funding request to the Rockefeller Foundation led to a five-year grant to the two universities
to set up a joint Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to be equipped with a modified Mark II
RCA synthesizer based on the Olson-Belar design, but with tape instead of disc recording (the Mark I
incorporated a disc-cutting lathe), along with other improvements including a studio microphone
input. The Mark II became Babbitt’s signature device.
On the Mark II, a sound must be specified before it is heard; there is an intermediate stage of translation (the language of
specification) between the composer and his creation. Unquestionably, the Mark II is not a performance instrument.... The RCA
Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer has been almost the sole province of one man, Milton Babbitt. The use of the Mark II
requires great precision in the specification of sound.... Often, Babbitt’s music requires more than most performers are capable of,
and inexact realizations are the result. In composing for the Mark II, Babbitt can avoid these problems, for the synthesizer allows
him to specify and create exactly what he wants.24

Programmed by a punched paper-roll keyboard input device, the system could play just two notes at a
time. The paper roll control input contained up to thirty-six columns of instructions to apply binary
codes to the formation of any two notes. Babbitt’s modifications of the Mark I design clearly had the
desired effect of making the Mark II more difficult to work with, less susceptible to intuitive
manipulation, and by way of corollary, establishing an aesthetic of precontrol on any music produced.
Given the almost total absence of technical and professional acoustic knowledge among academic art
composers in the United States at the time (the situation has hardly improved since), Babbitt’s
intervention had the effect of promoting an aesthetic of primarily intellectual speculation (and proof
of function) in preference to hands-on experiment (and proof by audition)—the equivalent of
mathematical logic in musical terms.
Technical inexperience and emotional recalcitrance contribute to a situation where theory is
forced to accommodate to the limitations of equipment. These limitations can be summarized as 1.
Restriction of the frequency domain to the tempered scale; 2. Reduction of timing to the mechanical
action of a punched paper tape reader; and 3. A philosophy of musical creation antagonistic to
performance and audience alike. At the same time, Babbitt objects to his music being described as
unfeeling, saying “It is preposterous to call music mathematical because it can be described
accurately by the use of mathematical concepts.”25 But what other words are there to characterize a
music of which “mathematical” is all there is to be said? Accurate for what?
We observe the same restrictive definitions canonized as fundamental criteria of twelve-tone set
theory in analysis applications. Allen Forte’s thesis in The Structure of Atonal Music is outwardly
about setting out terms for pattern (interval group) recognition as a navigational aid for negotiating
non-tonal music, but it requires little insight to recognize an unstated communications related agenda
of developing a programmable automated system for the real-time recognition of orally transmitted
pitch clusters to be identified as keywords in an alien tongue (atonal music to you and me, Russian to
someone else). Fortunately for world peace, Forte’s criteria, adapted directly from Babbitt, do not
work.26 They do not work because the human voice does not speak in discrete musical notes, let alone
notes of the equal-tempered scale. All the same it is interesting to see the emergence of serial
parameters in the analysis code that relate to mechanical specification criteria that are in fact
acoustic.
The specifications for defining a tone event in the Mark I Synthesizer were already given by Harry
Olson in Music, Physics, and Engineering as: frequency, intensity, growth, duration, decay,
portamento, timbre, vibrato, and momentary ornamental deviations. They are crude, but they are a
start, and they build on earlier studies of performer variables in the reproducing piano, which are
necessarily limited to single-key events and do not account for continuous liaisons and transitions in
tone. It is of some interest to compare Olson’s list with an earlier list of event defining characteristics
compiled and published by information scientist Andre (Abraham A.) Moles in 1952, as an appendix
to Schaeffer’s handbook A La Recherche d’une Musique Concrète. Moles’s defining criteria relate to
prerecorded sound materials rather than music notation, and tend to favor speech related variables.
But they are arguably more scientific, listing seven onsets and seven additional characteristics, the
latter approximately defined as periodic, steady state, reverberant, fricative, crescendo (of increasing
growth), decrescendo, and vibrato.
The short-term objective of agreeing on a system of classifications was to arrive at a universal
repertory of speech sounds or sound qualities of equal application to music and speech, as applicable
to the detection of tone of voice and emotional inflection as well as to word recognition, within the
framework of information theory set out by Shannon and Weaver. Such a goal recognized practical
intelligence applications including robotics, speech recognition and synthesis, acoustic pattern
recognition and codebreaking in the acoustic domain.
When obtaining grant aid for such projects is a major motivation it is understandable for
researchers to claim that the limitations of a particular set of resources are all the same sufficient to
the intended purpose. At the dawn of cybernetics it had always been assumed, since human beings are
able to recognize speech intuitively from a young age, that it would be easy to program a machine to
detect keywords in continuous speech. When that turned out to be a mistake, excuses were advanced
to secure continued funding, such as a need for faster computers, better filters, a higher definition
signal, and so on. As time went on, the excuses began to wear thin, and after 1958 US official interest
in the role of music in information theory and speech recognition gradually declined, trailing a small
collection of speech-related compositions in its wake, from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire of 1912
through to Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, Boulez’s Le marteau and Mallarmé improvisations,
Berio’s Omaggio a Joyce, and Babbitt’s Philomel.
Denial seems to be de rigueur in the States, unlike continental Europe where composers are
traditionally more demanding and more likely to blame equipment for underperforming. Perhaps the
cultural distinction to be drawn is that European composers play with, and modify equipment to
achieve a precisely imagined goal, whereas American composers are more disposed to play with
equipment in order to adjust their minds to whatever possibilities are already available.
No less revealing is Olson’s description of the Mark II as a machine capable of producing better
than human results, free of the uncertain and uncontrollable effects associated with imperfect human
performance. In employing a tempered scale of tuning forks as a tone resource, the Mark II is already
linked, historically and procedurally, with the Koenig tuning forks employed by Dayton C. Miller of
the Case School of Applied Science in his Lowell Lectures of 1914,27 the spherical tuned glass
resonators commissioned by Hermann Helmholtz in the 1850s for synthesizing voice formants, the
Robert Willis-Charles Wheatstone voice synthesizer of the 1830s, with mouth harp technology, all the
way back to the musical box and glass armonica of Benjamin Franklin in the late 1700s. What the
Mark II synthesizer is really about is a return to an idealist, Cartesian man-machine concept of
musical automata debated in Mozart’s Vienna two centuries ago. But Olson does not get it.
 The use of an electronic music synthesizer for the production of musical sounds opens up an entirely new field for the production of
recorded music. For example there is the possibility of entirely new tone complexes and combinations which cannot be achieved
with conventional instruments. Furthermore, in the case of conventional instruments, the musician is limited to the use of lips, mouth,
ten fingers, two hands and two feet to perform the difficult operations. This limitation does not exist in the electronic music
synthesizer. Conventional instruments produce various noises such as the rushing of wind in wind instruments, bow scratch in the
viol family, various clatters and rattles in plucked and struck-string instruments, and mechanism rattle in any instrument in which
keys, valves, levers, and shafts are used. These undesirable noises do not exist in the electronic music synthesizer. With the advent
of the electronic method for the production of musical tones, new musical compositions can be written which take advantage of the
superior characteristics of the electronic music synthesizer.28

Olson’s and Babbitt’s views are a perfect match. In rejecting as unwanted normal expressive
variables while importing new intellectual procedural obstacles into the compositional process, the
advocate of composition by synthesizer becomes a willing slave to information theory protocols
already designed into his equipment. By 1964, when Philomel was first performed, the battle was
already lost. Stravinsky’s absorption of serial influences was complete, and the message of Philomel,
of transformation of a human voice into pure electronic sounds, had long since been achieved by
Stockhausen with stunning success in 1955, at a time when Luening and Ussachevsky were still
struggling with flute, piano, and tape.
Babbitt makes a brief but telling appearance in John R. Pierce’s The Science of Musical Sound, a
sympathetic and accessible lay guide to musical acoustics in the post-cybernetic era. While written
from the viewpoint of an acoustician, it remains a useful primer of US computer sound generation
principles and priorities in the era after Columbia-Princeton leading to the formation of IRCAM in
Paris in 1977 under Boulez.
We [the Bell Labs advisory team, including composer and former Schoenberg assistant Gerald Strang, Max Mathews, and Jean-
Claude Risset] carne to know Milton Babbitt, a fme man and talented composer. Unfortunately, Babbitt was wedded to an analog
synthesizer that Harry F. Olson had built at RCA. Compared with the computer, this was a dreadful, limited, ticklish machine that
chewed up the paper tape that controlled it. We also came to know Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, who, with Babbitt,
were associated with the Columbia-Princeton electronic music laboratory. Ussachevsky eventually learned to use the [Max
Mathews] Music V program.29

Notes
1. Joseph Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music. Cambridge: University Press, 2001.
2. Milton Babbitt, Words about Music (Madison Lectures) ed. Joseph Straus and Stephen Dembski. Madison WN: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987.
3. George Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality. London: Faber and Faber, 1962, 88–105.
4. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes. New York: Knopf, 1966, 20–21. “Written by computers for
computers” is a genial riff on the word computer formerly applying to people who compute, now being applied to the machines
that do the computing.
5. Joan Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma. London: Cassell, 1977, 90.
6. Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, 4.
7. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999.
8. Milton Babbitt, “‘Three Essays on Schoenberg.” In Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone eds., Perspectives on Schoenberg
and Stravinsky. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968, 47–60.
9. Milton Babbitt, “Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky” (1962). In Boretz and Cone eds., Perspectives on Schoenberg and
Stravinsky, 1771.
10. Babbitt, “Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky,” 184.
11. Benjamin Boretz, “Milton Babbitt.” In John Vinton ed., Dictionary of 20th-Century Music. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974,
43–48.
12. Allan Forte, The Structure of Aronal Music. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1973, 2–3.
13. Boretz, “Milton Babbitt,” 45.
14. Joan Peyser, The Music of My Time. With a Foreword by Milton Babbitt. New York: Pro/Am Music Resources, Inc., 1995, 167.
15. Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle.” Musical Quarterly Vol. XXXVIII No. 1 (January, 1952).
16. Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, 221.
17. Arnold Schoenberg, “Letter to Rudolf Kölisch; Berlin, 27 July 1932.” Letters ed. Erwin Stein, tr. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser.
London: Faber and Faber, 1964, 164–65.
18. Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” (1958) Repr. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs eds., Contemporary Composers
on Contemporary Music. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1967, 244–50.
19. Babbitt (1958), 244.
20. Babbitt (1958), 245 (emphasis added).
21. Babbitt (1958), 245.
22. Wilfrid Mellers, “Music in the United States.” In Rollo Myers ed., Twentieth Century Music rev. edn. London: Calder and
Soyars, 1968, 244.
23. Thomas B. Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1985, 67–75.
24. Barry Schrader, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982, 122–27.
25. Peyser, The Music of My Time, 173.
26. Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music.
27. Dayton C. Miller, The Science of Musical Sounds. New York: Macmillan, 1915, 33–35.
28. Harry F. Olson, Music, Physics, and Engineering (1952). 2nd rev. edn. New York: Dover, 1967, 408–48.
29. John R. Pierce, The Science of Musical Sounds. Scientific American Library. New York: Freeman, 1983.
 11
An upside down unicycle
It’s a bicycle wheel on a stool. So what. Is it art. First questions first. Either we are looking at an
illustration in an art book, or we are standing in an art gallery; hence what we are looking at is a work
of art. Not quite. An object exhibited in an art gallery is not for use but for contemplation. As an
exhibit in a museum of anthropology one might see it as a specimen of shamanist art, a work of
imitation tribal abstraction with elements of a model oil rig, ferris wheel, or steam engine. As an
exercise in industrial design this particular piece by Marcel Duchamp is far too simple to pass muster
as a working model of perpetual motion, despite the fact that the wheel is allowed to rotate freely—
indeed, tirelessly, since it has no tire, which may be part of the joke. Had this artwork originated on
an island of Papua-New Guinea, the image of a bicycle wheel on a stool might look to western eyes
like just another relic among a collection of tribal cultural artifacts of symbolic meaning. But it is
much too clean and brand new for that. One is left wondering if Duchamp is making the point that
western art should be recognized as shamanistic and symbolic in implication, which is perfectly true
and sensible, whatever the experts might say to the contrary. Clearly a bicycle wheel mounted on a
stool, while suggesting both, is neither an item of personal transport, nor is it a seat, an article of
furniture for sitting, even while yoking together in the mind of the viewer opposing concepts of
movement in space (the wheel) and stasis (the seat, designed to stay in one place). It is therefore a
manifestly useless object in a strictly functional sense, not a model or prototype of something
engineered for everyday use. The object alludes to a surrealist aesthetic in brutally juxtaposing
familiar, anonymous items from the hardware store. One is reminded of a collage by Max Ernst, but
expressed in a sculptural and three-dimensional medium rather than the two dimensions of the merely
pictorial. My guess is that it is a kind of calligraphic sculpture, like a formal Japanese ideogram,
consisting of a vertical juxtaposition of signs to make a thought image. In that case the challenge for
the viewer is to read the thought.
To be sure, Duchamp’s juxtaposition of wheel and stool is oddly compelling, which is part of the
significance of a work of art. Museum trophies of archaeology and anthropology are regarded as
mysteriously iconic objects whose value to western culture appears largely to reside in a
sophisticated acknowledgement of their ultimate unknowability. Yet to me it seems that in creating his
functionless art, the young Duchamp is bound to have intended to make a serious statement about
attitudes and traditions in western art, by way of alluding to the historic impact on modern western
consciousness of items from alien cultures from the sarcophagi of ancient Egypt to tribal masks.
At one level the artist seems to be making the reasonable argument that banal objects of industrial
design—a bicycle wheel despite being inexpensive is a marvel of design and construction—deserve
the same consideration and respect of the connoisseur, as objects of virtue and beauty, handcrafted
household items from exotic cultures, such as a bowl or musical instrument, which the west regards
as primitive art. After all, in their own way a bicycle, a stool, and a urinal are all arguably iconic,
functional, and highly evolved designs incorporating complicated and extended histories of social
cooperation in materials science (clay, ore, wood, and fire) along with social functionality (forms
adapted to regular use) and aesthetics (efficiency and economy of form). The artist’s message then is
that a bottle rack or stoneware urinal are not simply available but indeed merit appreciation as
aesthetic objects embodying a coherent world view, even though to treat domestic objects with such
reverence might seem to be saying that we are all tribal under the veneer of civilization. That being
the case, Duchamp may be characterising western civilization and culture as unfairly oblivious to the
aesthetic value of everyday objects, and in that sense observing that so-called advanced western
civilization is in reality less holistically attuned to the environment than so-called primitive or exotic
societies whose tribal artifacts are exhibited in the west as cultural trophies.
Until, that is, some forty years later when, responding to the mood of relief and celebration now
that the second major war of the twentieth century is finally over, suddenly Picasso reacts to
Duchamp’s makeover of the bicycle by concocting a marvellous image of a bull’s head from the
juxtaposition of a bicycle seat and handlebars, mounted on the wall. The Catalan genius’s virtuoso
exercise in sculptural montage is a truly animistic deconstruction of the essence of a bicycle, showing
a deep intuitive understanding of the power and vitality of African shamanistic art. The configuration
of a bull’s head emerges spontaneously from the artist’s juxtaposition of the two shapes, the leather
seat the head, the metal handlebars the horns, without any decorative additions to divert or condition
the viewer’s gaze. It is a graceful, dignified head showing the polish of age and experience and the
long gaze of traditional African masks. Picasso’s evocation of a bull ready to charge is made
available for contemplation not just as a powerful image in its own right, or even as a token of
respect for the bicycle industry. The artist’s underlying message, right there before us, is of the power
of industrial design to generate manufactured objects for use that all the same resonate with organic
life forms owing their beauty and functionality to millennia of unconscious evolution. Picasso’s bull’s
head is also the twentieth-century artist’s pointedly bravura response to the mock heroism of the
trophy elk head of nineteenth-century romantic taste, proudly mounted over the manor fireplace. His
replacement trophy head, made of discarded metalwork and leather, even though emblematic in its
way of loss of function, of a life lived and a journey over, invites the viewer all the same to meditate
on the unsophisticated primitivism of a hunting and shooting civilization that makes sport in targeting
animal spirits and displaying their stuffed heads and horns as tokens of a subjugated natural
landscape.
No less impressive is Picasso’s genius in infusing his version of a bull’s head with an intense
animal energy lacking in specimens of the taxidermist’s art. That again is the power of shamanistic
art, and one is bound to admit that the instinctual brilliance of an artist for whom handlebars instantly
become the armature of a real bull (or perhaps, to the poet and punster, intending a steer) leaves
Duchamp’s intellectual gesture of a bicycle wheel on a stool, an object by comparison having the gift
of actual movement, but otherwise mute, looking somewhat bereft. With all the vividness of a cave
painting, the Catalan artist’s sense of the sublime evokes a primeval history of contesting with nature
in ritual trials of strength pitting human skill and cunning against superior animal force. Compared to
which, Duchamp’s aesthetic take on the bicycle as a moving force may seem curiously nonchalant,
even patronising.
But Duchamp is a Norman French intellectual and drawing on a different set of cultural
antecedents and priorities. Self-evidently both artists are making statements about the implications of
the bicycle as an emblem of motion. For an artist of Picasso’s culture, movement signifies the life
force, hence the image of the bull’s head unleashes an image of raw animal power. For Duchamp,
however, the wheel as an emblem of movement has other implications. Here we have a category
inversion in the sense advocated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, namely a wheel above and a seat below
forming a stable fixture carrying a moving wheel. For comparison a bicycle is a seat above and a set
of wheels below, a dynamically unsteady device allowing the rider to travel at greater than walking
speed across time and space.
Introduced as a personal vehicle in the late 1810s, after the Battle of Waterloo, the bicycle was
eagerly adopted at Cambridge University in Britain as the preferred mode of transport among the
young male intelligentsia as a show of allegiance to a new machine age of industrial progress and
uncertainty geared to the dynamics of the wheel. The bicycle still rules in Cambridge university life
today, its association with the laws governing a universe in dynamic motion revived in 1946 with the
publication of George Gamow’s Mr Tompkins in Wonderland, a popular introduction to the bizarre
world of relativity as famous in its day as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The American
physicist on furlough in Cambridge adopts the cliché image of a foreshortened British bobby riding a
bicycle to illustrate the concept of relativity in an imaginary world where light travels at the speed of
a moving car. In the aftermath of war the local bobby, a benign authority figure, underlines the nuclear
physics message that relativity amounts to a law of motion.
By contrast the French are intellectually and culturally committed to statics and the logic of
juxtapositions in preference to representations of continuous movement, a position wittily
palindromised by Duchamp as “anemic cinema”—anemic signifying low blood count and lacking in
energy, hence lacking momentum, and cinema standing for a view of the world corresponding to a
silent movie of still frames viewed in rapid succession. French and German wordplay of this kind is
a kind of intellectualism alien to more dynamic cultures of American and South Mediterranean
heritage. Wordplay speaks of a culture of nouns rather than verbs, responding to the instantaneous
rather than the process. So there is something neat and appropriate about a French artist converting a
seat mounted upon wheels, a device for moving the body in space and time, into a wheel mounted
upon a seat, which pursuing the analogy would seem to imply a vehicle for transporting the mind
rather than the body. Nevertheless, the wheel rotates.
The idea behind a wheel on a stand could conceivably allude to time, in the image of a clock
staying in one place while its rotating inner wheels convey the viewer through time (or time through
the viewer). In which case one might then be debating the respective merits of chronometric time
symbolized by the famous Beauvais timepiece, and relative time in the modern era of Poincaré. I
don’t think so, since by comparison with an elegant carriage clock Duchamp’s wheel is so primitive
an affair in a mechanical sense. One is on firmer ground, metaphorically speaking, if the work is
construed as a puzzle or rebus addressing the dynamics of visual motion, expressed in the form, What
stays in one place but is constantly moving? Or more elaborately, what form of wheeled transport can
convey the public to exotic places while remaining in the same place?—the answer to which can be
found in the iconography of the movies. Since Duchamp made his sculpture we have come to
recognise the trade mark of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse as a movie camera in silhouette, the two
round ears aligned front and back like the load and takeup spools of a movie projector. That
interpretation still leaves open the possibility that Duchamp has combined a stool and a bicycle
wheel in order to make the point that the age of the bicycle is over, the power of the wheel having
now been harnessed—by French inventors Pathé Fréres, Georges Meliés, and the Lumiére Brothers,
or hadn’t you noticed—in effect to create an alternative mode of transport to distant realms, both of
the real world, and of the imagination, while staying in one place, by the turning of a wheel.
Since television and the movies are experienced in detachment from reality, the analogy fits.
Watching the screen is an exercise in passive contemplation directed indifferently toward whatever is
in view and wherever the mechanism is programmed to take the viewer. Despite French claims to
ownership of the movie medium as a French invention, Paris audiences in the era of Duchamp’s
readymades—the era of Erik Satie’s Parade and Entr’acte, surrealist movie confections devised by
Cocteau and directed by René Clair—continued to be baffled by US newsreels, brusque, irrational
medleys of inconsequential juxtapositions totally lacking in narrative integrity or continuity.
Inversion, or role reversal, is a discovery tactic encountered in everyday human activities. We
find it in drama, where men play women and vice versa; in poetry, where words and phrases change
places to create richness and ambiguity; in myths of identity change between prince and pauper,
beautiful woman and mermaid, Jekyll and Hyde, shy hero and masterful robot, or real opposed to
mechanical nightingale in Hans Andersen’s fairy tale. Such polarities can be seen to connect ancient
ritual practices, where heaven and earth, and animal and human spirits change places, with the
sophisticated inversions of modern cosmology (myths of time reversible particle interactions,
telescopes that see back to the distant past, etc.). From the hidden taboos of psychoanalysis, and
structural inversions of Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth, to the upside down and
retrograde identity permutations of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, inversion is recognised as a
standard inquisitory tactic among those seeking an underlying order in a context of unfamiliar
relationships, in order to figure out the pressures and patterns arising from those underlying
relationships.
Appealing to the opposite is key to Duchamp’s “Three Standard Stoppages,” straightedges
bandsawed to follow the curves of one-meter lengths of thread allowed to drop to the floor to form
“new images of the unit of length”—seemingly in accordance with the banality that in a relativistic
world, as the artist appears to be saying, length itself is a relative concept. Perhaps not so banal after
all, since Duchamp would be vindicated by Mandelbrot’s discoveries in fractal mathematics after a
mere seventy years of waiting.
Another justification of an art of ideas is that it gives visual cogency and immediacy to difficult
new concepts in science. In the early years of the twentieth century, Picasso and others were avid
readers of published intelligence (not all of it equally intelligent) on the challenge of pictorial
representation of multi-dimensional space. Cubism aims to represent a tactile world of three- or four-
dimensional objects as facets of a complex plane surface of two dimensions. Duchamp’s series of
nudes descending a staircase date from this period of enthusiasm for depicting movement as a
flickering cinematic illusion in the muted colors of a darkened movie house. The artist may equally
have been led to the concept of relative length from reading published accounts of the researches of
Helga von Koch, inventor in 1906 of the Koch curve, a geometrical snowflake of precocious aesthetic
promise whose paradoxical outline is of potentially infinite length.
Inversion is certainly key to Fountain, Duchamp’s controversial metamorphosis of a
commonplace male urinal. The object in question is turned upside down and rotated by ninety degrees
so that the onlooker is seeing the receptacle and its curved surround effectively from above, the point
of view of the overhead tank. I remember encountering this very object in its traditional role as an
office facility and have been grateful for its purity and efficiency of design as a sanitary object. That
is what a urinal is for, and in that capacity it works very well. But seen from an inverted perspective,
which is how Duchamp invites one to view it, the figure in whiteware is transformed in shape into an
object of beauty, and imaginatively converted, as its new title would appear to suggest, from a
receptacle of waste water to a source of fresh water.
Critics of a nervous disposition may be disposed to take offense at the suggestion that a male
urinal taken out of context, transformed in its spatial relation to the viewer, and disfigured only by a
deliberately crude signature “R. Mutt”—an invented name, perhaps a play on the German word
Armut, meaning poverty, or destitution—may be intended to evoke the image of a stylized Madonna.
Personally I find the idea poetic and the symmetry attractively plausible. To my mind it is not nearly
as offensive as the appropriation of the sacred name by a female cabaret artiste as a marketing
device. The aptness of analogy linking an anonymous sanitary receptacle with the Madonna as a
fountain gains from the fact that the opposition works on so many levels: transforming male into
female, converting an object of ridicule and defilement into an image of purity and sacredness, and
reversing a bodily function of excretion as a source of relief into its opposite function of taking in
water as a source of refreshment. Duchamp’s inspired act of inversion—or shall we say, “flush of
recognition”—reinvents a taboo sanitary item associated with the male gender and hidden from
public view, as a stylized image of universal femininity. It could equally be the artist’s way of
attacking the salacious but permitted symbolism of academic art, to take a notorious example, lngres’
La Source, a doe-eyed female nude holding open a capacious and full-frontal spilling urn with wet
fingers.
At the time this work was devised, the female sex was treated with conspicuous indifference by
many of their menfolk. The bad behavior extended to artists. Auguste Rodin, for example, was a
consummate sculptor but a vile misogynist. Italian novelist and correspondent Ugo Ojetti writes of a
meeting in 1900 with the famed sculptor that continued over a splendid lunch, waited on by “a spare,
unkempt, perspiring old woman, all nose.”
After the coffee, Rodin poured out another glass of wine and with a regal gesture, without looking at her, said to the woman: “Rose,
Assieds-toi lá. Tu vas boire un verre avec nous.” Rose sat down timidly, and at every swallow carefully wiped her lips.... As
Rose went off: “Ma femme était préoccupée ce matin. Les ltaliens sont bien gourmands, elle se disait.” He laughs, but we felt
frozen. The good woman who had served us, was she Madame Rodin? Seized by remorse, when she returned, we overwhelmed
her with “Madames” and compliments and bows.1

At the time Fountain was first exhibited, women were still treated with disdain by many artists,
including the surrealists. For that reason I find not only a wry and welcome wit, but a hidden poetic
justice in Duchamp’s reconfiguration of a despised and wretched article, whose only role is to clean
up after the incontinent attentions of the masculine tribe, as a beautiful example of unappreciated
industrial design whose true and worthy function is to alleviate discomfort and protect against
disease. What the message of functional inversion is really asking is not so much how a despised
object could seriously be invested with the sanctity due to a sacred object, but rather how an object of
such formal purity could ever be considered appropriate for so demeaning a service.
The inverted significance of Duchamp’s snow shovel and bottle rack, by comparison, appear
beguilingly simple. If a wine bottle is a female object, a domestic implement on which an
accumulated collection of exhausted bottles is hung out to dry, having been rinsed, is the modern
(early twentieth-century) symbolic equivalent of an Ingres harem, along with the visual metaphor of a
crown. Too obvious even for Freud. The snow shovel however is significant in a less obvious way,
given its new and challenging title In Advance of a Broken Arm. The clue here is that the object
acquires temporal significance through a name that alludes to the future consequence of its
appropriate use and not its present status. A snow shovel is not a firearm that one buys in order to kill
another living creature, nor is it an axe that may be used in anger against another person; but
Duchamp’s point is that even a domestic item of equipment may lead to unexpected and painful
consequences for the user. Once again, the item in question is associated with domestic habits of
tidiness, in this case clearing snow from a slippery pavement (the broken arm is a consequence of
falling, not of being struck by the shovel). But the hazard to which the object refers is the risk and the
reality of movement in time, and the unconscious beauty—in this case, the curved blade—of objects
designed to accommodate time and motion. The official delegated to walk ahead of an automobile
waving a red flag could also be described as acting “in advance of an accident.” Such messages of
caution in view of future eventualities may well have been difficult for a majority of the working
population to grasp in the early days of mechanical transport. For today’s viewers, the ability to
second guess from what an object is at the moment to what it might lead to in the future is easier to
grasp. The snow shovel of a century ago remains a classic functional shape and also a metaphor for
the graceful tempo and rhythm of its actual use.
And today there is no mystery in Duchamp’s Large Glass. When Teilhard de Chardin conceived
the noösphere he was merely thinking ahead. The noösphere is here today and we call it the internet;
it twitters, and twitters bring about social revolution. Twittering may not be quite the result Teilhard
expected, but it is none the less what he could see coming. In similar fashion, Duchamp looked into
the future of moving pictures in black and white on a makeshift screen in a darkened room and saw a
future of widescreen television in high definition color, which is a wholly predictable development of
silent era movies into a pay television medium of domestic entertainment. But unlike Teilhard,
Duchamp was able to predict not only the outward appearance of the technology but the content as
well. The imagery of The Bride Stripped Bare is of a world of entertainment reduced to a two-
dimensional concretion of industrialized sex. A minor difference is that whereas Duchamp’s grinder
is a chocolate grinder, at the time a novelty consumer product and appropriately liquid, warm, and
sweet; today in its place the iconic image of modern television instant gratification since the sixties
has been ground beef in a bun: the hamburger, product of a meat grinder, chemically enhanced, and
glowing of steroids and death by heart attack. For Duchamp’s malic molds, read fries and smoothie,
upstanding sides in the role of optional garnishes. (Logically, the “malic molds” are female in
implication, representing the male element as contained and shaped for penetration, presumably in the
sense of the female love machine dressing her suitors to attention in order that they may in due turn be
ground to paste in the vaginal orifice.) That the Large Glass became cracked (devirginated) in transit
through a happy accident, and has been allowed to remain so violated, is open to be read as a
reminder of the perils of male narcissism, or alternatively as divine reassurance of the fragile
transparency of the female medium.
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp’s biographer, repeats a delicious story of a Woody Allen moment of the
young poet William Carlos Williams attempting to catch the artist’s attention at a private showing at
the New York residence of his patrons the Arensbergs.
He [Duchamp] had been drinking. I was sober. I finally came face to face with him as we walked about the room and I said, “I like
your picture,” pointing to the one I have mentioned.2
He looked at me and said, “Do you?” That was all. He had me beat all right, if that was the objective. I could have sunk through
the floor, ground my teeth, turned my back on him and spat ... I realized then and there that there wasn’t a possibility of my ever
saying anything to anyone in that gang from that moment to eternity.

Here in a mere two words, the author is tempted to add, is the story of American innocent pride and
sense of injured humiliation in the face of European intelligence, tradition, and native hauteur. To
understand the intensity of Williams’ humiliation it is helpful to grasp a sense of what the young poet
was impressed by in Duchamp’s artwork in the first place (one of a series of studies on the theme of
Nude Descending a Staircase), and to understand the impact of his sense of humiliation, an indication
of what the poet may have wished to hear in response and encouragement. The conversation itself is a
mere formality. The emotion created on one side is a response to a perceived indifference on the part
of Duchamp, and a sense that the artist’s indifference was an expression of cultivated disdain. I am
sure both parties were drunk. The absence of response on Duchamp’s part is itself only an
appearance. Perhaps it is a reflection on New York codes of social correctness that one can aspire to
such ecstasies of self-recrimination only in the presence of greatness, and at a certain period of
emotional adolescence.
Which is not to say the emotion was unreal. It was clearly so all-consuming that the poet did not
pause to ask himself whether Duchamp was simply inviting further, more specific comment on what
Williams may have found to his liking. What after all does one say to an artist one admires? That he
or she is admired? What is the point? On the evidence of his later poetry I am prepared to wager that
Williams was attracted to, and fascinated by Duchamp’s technique of addressing the depiction of a
subject in continuous motion and observed from multiple simultaneous viewpoints. Duchamp was one
of a generation of artists to be impressed by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic essays in natural
motion. Compared to Edward Bume-Jones’ multiple imagery (in The Golden Stairs, 1880) of a young
lady descending a spiral staircase, which selfconsciously disguises a daring visual modernity in
medieval costume and visual paradox, preferring to look ahead to the paradoxical visions of Maurits
Escher, and away from the static cubism of Braque and Picasso, Duchamp’s studies in interrupted
motion are focused on the dynamics of occupied space, to which end the surface detail of the moving
subject is deliberately obscured.
For the young American poet (like Gertrude Stein, Williams was trained in biology and eventually
became a physician) the attraction of Duchamp’s artwork can be seen to reside in its statement about
the potential of movie imagery to contain or express actual movement (the pattern emerging from
viewing a sequence of still images) in relation to poetic reality (the ability of static words to embody
dynamic processes of thought in real life, or more particularly, poetic inspiration). So, for example,
when Wordsworth writes: “I wandered lonely as a cloud/ That floats on high o’er vales and hills
/When all at once I saw a crowd,/ A host of golden daffodils”—it is not the image which excites as
much as the poet’s description of the experience of revelation as a real-time, continuous mental and
actual process. It is the description of a mind which drifts in apparent aimlessness, pushed by unseen
external currents, and is suddenly seized and overwhelmed by a dazzling and unexpected field of
golden blooms like a field of upraised golden trumpets silently waiting to play. For the poet in
William Carlos Williams it was important to be able to find words to express that conjunction of
awareness: how to combine a more or less passive continuity of being with openness to such an
epiphany of nature. How may a young poet aspire to that mental balance of openness to nature and
accident, with critical or aesthetic appreciation of the sublime? How does the artist achieve it?
For Duchamp to ask “Do you?” is a return of serve which the unduly sensitive Williams instantly
misconstrues as a rejection. What Duchamp is saying, however, is that mere aesthetic excitement is
not enough. After inspiration, as Edison observed, comes perspiration, meaning that there is no such
thing as innocence in art: for even a poet to be able to preserve that moment of penetrating awareness
a huge mental preparation and workload of design and technique has to be undertaken which,
ironically in the case of some academic artists, ends by overwhelming the original vision, or, equally
ironically for artists after Cézanne, has to be concealed from view by a deliberate attempt at absence
of finish. Absence of finish forces the viewer to reconstruct, not only the image in question, but also a
dynamic of apprehension to stand for the original transport or epiphany of inspiration.
This same lesson is conveyed in Cage’s story of his encounter with Schoenberg. The great teacher
said, you are an inventor of talent. Cage says, thank you. Schoenberg says, I will teach you for no
payment but you must do the necessary training in harmony and counterpoint. Cage says, I am not
interested in harmony and counterpoint, I have no aptitude for traditional skills. Schoenberg says,
well then you will find yourself up against a brick wall. Cage says, I will dedicate myself to banging
my head against the brick wall.
What is the message of such an exchange? Is it just about tradition and the new, about the father
figure attempting to dominate and control the young, or European art and tradition condescending to
the American dream? What such exchanges do tend to convey, I think incorrectly, is an emotional
antagonism that should more temperately be interpreted as a form of negotiation in which the older
tradition responds by asking, what is it you want to know? while the younger is saying, I don’t know
what I want to know, it is for you to tell me what is possible. In this regard the long term relationships
of Boulez and Cage, and Stockhausen and Cage thoughout the fifties and sixties, have a great deal to
tell us about the natural instincts of US artists for the possibilities of technology, and the natural
finesse of European composers in seriously examining and working through the possibilities of
American intuitions. When one compares Boulez’s setting of Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd’
hui with Cage’s of the Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, for example, the Boulez is like a
perfumed old lady, very conscious of her station in society, while the Cage song remains totally young
and fresh—indeed, embarrassingly so. Sometimes the comparison goes the other way. The joke of a
text piece by La Monte Young (Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, 1960) about feeding hay to a piano,
has long since worn away, while the text piece by Stockhausen that begins “Think nothing ...” has lost
none of its spirit of challenge and subversion. In similar fashion the selfconscious aesthetics of
European art percussion (I am thinking of Les structures sonores of Lasry and Baschet, for a brief
period the last word in avant-garde sonorities) have long since vanished into oblivion, while the
awkward handmade keyboards of American Harry Partch survive as authentic sounds of a tradition of
pragmatic realism, far more attractive than any synthesizer patch.
As John Ashbery said of Gertrude Stein, “It is usually not events which interest Miss Stein, rather
it is their ‘way of happening’.” For an American to employ the combination “usually not” is
instructive and, alongside Duchamp’s “Do you?” also illuminating. As for haiku, brevity aims at the
immediacy of a glance of which one is aware at once of its completeness, and only in retrospect—if
at all—of what totality that completeness consists. Of Williams’ Collected Poems (1941) Marianne
Moore observed, with her own brand of portentous awkwardness,
Struggle, like the compression which propels the steam-engine, is a main force in William Carlos Williams.... With an abandon born
of inner security, Dr Williams somewhere nicknames the chain of incontrovertibly logical apparent non-sequiturs, rigmarole.3

It is the same persistent tension between the logic imposed by choice on a natural unrelation of
component parts, identified by Eisenstein as a forcible relationship created by montage, and created
in the juxtaposition of unrelated images, which Williams seems to identify in the found objects of
Duchamp. As the Russian says, “Each montage piece exists no longer as something unrelated, but as a
given particular representation of the general theme that in equal measure penetrates all the shot-
pieces.”4 Another way of saying that what the viewer sees, at the initial moment of awareness, is
already an interpretation: mere juxtaposition creates the appearance of reality when in fact what one
is responding to is only coincidence. The question then is whether thoughts that occur together are
organically related or coincidental. That is a worry for Wittgenstein, and for composers of aleatoric
music like Boulez, for even if elements of a modular composition are organically related, like the
parentheses in Boulez’s Sonate III for piano, which are certainly serial in origin, that may not mean
that a performer’s choice of the order in which to perform the fragments makes particular sense—or
rather, the problem is evaded by saying that the order of events at this level is ultimately trivial,
which is kind of what one has to conclude about some of Cage’s chance pieces.
The artist Amedée Ozenfant, author of Foundations of Modern Art and former colleague of Le
Corbusier, tells another story to illustrate the difference between European and American cultural
attitudes—in this instance, at the expense of the peculiar sense of national honor among the French
challenged by bona fide American pragmatism. The message of the story (a genuine item of news
from the appropriately named journal L’Intransigeant) is that if you have method, and you stick to it,
you will progress in learning, but to those who do not understand or recognize method, what you do
will always seem inexplicable and mysterious.
During a conversation with Bert Acosta after his memorable flight across the Atlantic, a distinguished engineer asked [Charles
Lindbergh] “how were you able to pilot your plane for such long hours, in fog so thick that sometimes portions of your plane were
invisible?” Without the slightest hesitation the American responded “By relying entirely on my instruments.” “Do you think, then,”
asked the engineer, “that it would have been possible for you, under the same conditions, to pilot your plane without such
instruments?” It appears that the expression of consternation, which then appeared on the pilot of America’s face was intensely
funny; he threw his arms up, and, speaking to the interpreter, said “I can’t understand how anyone could ask such a question.” A
French flier once said to another engineer who had specialised in the construction of aeroplane instruments from the very birth of
flying: “Instruments! I should like, when I start off somewhere, to cut circles of black paper and paste them over all the dials in my
cabin, so as to avoid the risk of even looking at them.”5

There is something exquisite in the image of a pioneer French aviator refusing to cheat by flying on
instruments, or refusing to accept technical assistance in navigating for the honor of France, that
chimes rather well with the story of twentieth-century music in France and its diplomatic engagement
with American audio and computing technologies.

Notes
1. “Rodin. Florence, July 9, 1923.” From Ugo Ojetti, As They Seemed to Me tr. Henry Furst. New York: Dutton, 1928, 42–48.
2. “Probably the 1911 Portrait (Dulcinea), which shows a woman in five states of dress and undress.” Calvin Tomkins,
Duchamp: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997, 169.
3. Marianne Moore, “Things Others Never Notice,” a review of William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems 1921–1931, in Poetry
vol. 44 (1934). Reprinted in Charles Tomlinson ed., William Carlos Williams: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1972, 130.
4. “Word and Image.” In Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense tr. ed. Jay Leyda. London: Faber and Faber, 1948, 19.
5. Cited in [Amedée] Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art tr. John Rodker. New York: Dover, 1952, 188–89.
 12
Alfred North Whitehead
Only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each
case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak
are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead.1

Gertrude Stein is writing under the assumed name of her companion, Alice B. Toklas, who did not get
to meet William James, the third of Gertrude’s personal heroes, and would have known of his genius
only through his influence on herself. For Stein, whom I like to think of as the Florence Nightingale of
twentieth-century modernism, it was a matter of pride for her name to be associated with thinkers of
distinction. Trained in biology and medicine, though not long enough to graduate, she brought a
scientist’s methodical, even pedantic curiosity to the study of the language of mental processes, in
particular her own, and the interface between thought and language revealed in great literature of the
past (an interest shared by another pioneer of stream of consciousness, the film​maker Sergei
Eisenstein).
To a discerning specialist the mental processes of great minds are naturally of interest, for the very
good reason that great minds are more readily attracted to the paradoxes of everyday thought, and
more capable of addressing them deliberately and consciously in their work, rather than treating the
business of writing as a matter of habit or convenience, a class of instinctive behavior, as some
British philosophers are inclined to believe. To acquire an intuition of how great minds think to a
point where genuine conversation is possible and even accountable was the goal of Gertrude Stein as
it had been the ambition of William James in psychology and as she discovered in Picasso and
Braque in relation to their art. For Stein the highest proof of understanding did not reside in the
publication of learned papers but in the achievement of friendship and mutual trust tellingly revealed
in the banal confidences of everyday conversation. In this regard Stein is a model for John Cage,
whose preference for indirect citation arises from a parallel concern to avoid the snare of analysis in
favor of spontaneous anecdotal evidence, however tentative, of prior mutual agreement. Cage’s
meaning is in his method, and to understand his method it is necessary to read Gertude Stein . A place
to start is her lecture “Composition as Explanation” paraphrased elsewhere in this collection. At first
sight her observation “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and
what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything” could have been said by Cage, except
that Cage being a composer would be more inclined to say “what is heard” or “what is in the air” a
metaphor for hearing in general rather than “what is seen.”
Her words could just as easily be read as a paraphrase of the aphorism “all thought has to be
about things” coined by Stein’s friend Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher and distinguished
coauthor with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica. The difference between attributing a
thought to Gertrude Stein, or John Cage, and acknowledging the same as the wisdom of Alfred North
Whitehead, is that for readers of Stein or Cage the message of this or any other citation has meaning
primarily or only as part of the author’s signature terms of reference, a decorative addition into which
no further inquiry is necessary, whereas the same insight coming from a Whitehead is imbued with the
gravitas associated with science and perceived as a challenge to be verified or repudiated, or at least
discussed. At present both Stein and Whitehead are virtually ignored in the history of music.
 Given that Gertrude Stein is a person of interest in the history of American cognitive science
whose influence can be inferred in the musical philosophy of John Cage and the repetitive musical
minimalism of John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others, and whose writing arising from the
operation of intuition in real time reflects a culture of freedom of speech as critical to the history of
jazz and rap as to modern developments in machine intelligence, it is of interest to observe that among
the unsung achievements of the equally heavyweight thinker Alfred North Whitehead are concepts of
critical significance in the development of European serialism. The Concept of Nature is a very
difficult read, as a great deal of Gertrude Stein is a difficult read. My copy, a second impression
published in 1926, was bought in the 1990s and until I began to read Gertrude Stein in earnest I found
Whitehead’s thought process impossible to follow. I had bought my second-hand copy because the
author is a great man, and because of its title, which is close to my own The Concept of Music. My
editor at the time had objected to a title containing the word “concept” so naturally I was pleased to
discover a series of lectures by a distinguished writer published by a university press with that title.
Whitehead’s argument is abstract, longwinded, and hard to follow. It was only after reading The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that I realised that the Alfred Whitehead of whom she wrote with
such admiration was the author of The Concept of Nature, and it was only after learning to read
Gertrude Stein, an unfamiliar skill requiring a sense of rhythm and balance, as well as application and
patience, that returning to Whitehead I realized that from a twentieth-century musical perspective they
could be talking about the same subject and in a very similar fashion. At times they appear to
exchange voices.
GS: The composition we live in changes but essentially what happens does not change. We inside us do not change but our
emphasis and the moment in which we live changes. That it is never the same moment it is never the same emphasis at any
successive moment of existing. Then really what is repetition. It is very interesting to ask and it is a very interesting thing to know.
[Portraits and Repetition]

ANW: Unexhaustiveness is an essential character of our knowledge of nature. [Mind] is derivatively in time and in space by reason
of the peculiar alliance of its passage with the passage of nature. (Concept of Nature: 13, 70)

GS: As I said it was like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own
difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was to me. [Portraits and Repetition]

ANW: A moment has no temporal extension, and is in this respect to be contrasted with a duration which has such extension. What
is directly yielded to our knowledge by sense-awareness is a duration. We have to explain how moments are derived from durations.
A moment is a limit to which we approach as we confine attention to durations of minimum extension. (CN: 57–58)

Jacob Bronowski observed “a man who has not thought about science or poetry does not understand a
new sentence in them, although it is made up of terms and words that he knows.”2 It is a cliché of
computer science and cognitive linguistics that there are no new facts, only rearrangements of existing
facts, a way of thinking that the world of words corresponds to the world of facts on a one to one
basis and that relationships between words are therefore bound to correspond to the way things
interact in the real world. It is certainly true that readers of Gertrude Stein who are unaware of her
background in science—who are neither scientists nor philosophers, or whose literary interests do
not extend to general interest nonfiction writing in science and philosophy—may find it hard to
reconcile the eccentric friendship of an American writer of imperturbable rumination and a leading
British philosopher and mathematician. Stein’s mentor, the Harvard philosopher William James,
understood what she was doing and approved of his protegée as an exponent of consciousness theory,
and his commendation would carry weight among the English intellectual community at a time of
heightened interest in the impact of language on the consciousness of a culture and its capacity to
reason, newly galvanized in English academic life by the presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Criticism
of the Principia had led Whitehead to doubt the utility of explaining a relativistic world in the
orthodox values and terms of Greek science, which he argued were no longer appropriate. In their
different ways Stein and Whitehead, along with contemporaries Hugo Münsterberg, Mallarmé and
Sigmund Freud, were attempting to reconcile a conventional rationality founded in the classical
world views of Plato and Aristotle with radical extensions and limitations of perceived reality
entailed by new media of communication and recording.
For centuries philosophy and literature have struggled to reconcile the world of received
impressions with the written word: the ancient and fundamental conundrum that words can and do
stand for things and may therefore be trusted to stand for relations in the sensational world. Today
academic disciples of The Text vie with religious cults of olden times in pursuing the myth of The
Book as a token of all that is worth believing or capable of being believed. That the medium is the
message and the book is a medium, as McLuhan proclaimed in the mid-twentieth century, is a
consideration out of reach to many. For Gertrude Stein, Alfred Whitehead and others at the beginning
of the twentieth century the challenge was of making a transition from a view of the world grounded
in the alphabet and the book, to the world of new media of photography and sound recording. Their
concerns are focused on new visualizations of time and being captured on flat sheets of sensitized
paper by camera and primitive voice recorders, to be succeeded within a generation by moving
images transmitted by film and telephone, and eventually radio, in many respects the greatest of all
challenges. The new media brought new possibilities of representing reality entailing new ways of
thinking about how they could be said (because they worked) to mirror processes of mind and thought
that had previously been taken for granted or been simply ignored. In place of regimes based on
sequential logic and causality the public was invited to come to terms with radically new image
processing protocols in literature, the movies, and science, sanctioning a reality composed of images
presented out of time, place, and normal sequence.
Caught up in the midst of technical revelations a few leading artists and intellectuals were asking,
if the images we see and hear by means of these new media resemble things as they are in the real
world, how then might the technical processes creating these resemblances be said to correspond
either to reality itself or to human perceptual processes for engaging with reality? For example, if the
image of a Pathé color positive under a magnifying glass reduces to apparently randomly scattered
grains of color in a photographic emulsion, does that signify a new starting​point in how we in fact
visualize the world, as a mosaic of isolated points of light? Or, if the appearance of movement
reproduced in Muybridge’s photographic sequences resides in a succession of still photographs, what
does that say about the world as we see and understand it in real life? Classical terms adequate to
express these new depictions of reality do not exist. Can such a thing as a quantum of thought or
fundamental datum of being exist or would such a thing be totally imaginary? Does the fact that
moving or animated images at the movies are seen to correspond to a reality of moving things allow
for human consciousness itself to be expressed in terms of a succession of momentary impressions or
particles stored in memory and only afterward reconstituted as thought? As Whitehead himself says,
“we live in snippets too quick for thought.”
To inquire into the mechanism of language is to ask what language is capable of expressing, which
to many people including musicians is a strange sort of question to ask. Language embraces writing as
well as speech and the limitations of language as a medium are technical and grammatical as well as
physical and physiological. The first science movies of enlarged microscopic life and greatly
accelerated plant life were quick to take advantage of the extended powers of photographic image
expansion and compression in scale and time. Revealing growth patterns suggesting consciousness
and motivation among plant life forms and diatoms hitherto regarded as incapable of thought, the
movie medium brought everyday life actions and processes in nature to public attention and review as
a flickering pageant of two-dimensional slices of time, “a momentary series of instantaneous spaces”
passing by the viewer’s gaze at a frequency too rapid to notice.
Since biology is a science of living things the input of a trained biologist to a discussion of the
nature and representation of a continuous reality would be of interest to a mathematician in extending
the field of inquiry beyond sterile discussion of selection protocols from a database of grammatical
qualia and the alphabet to consideration of evidence of how language processes conform and
contribute to the sensory behavior of animal life in general, in other words leading beyond the scope
of the early Wittgenstein to consider language development as part of a larger evolutionary process.
Whitehead approaches the fundamentals of language in The Concept of Nature from an initially
mathematical perspective, and his interest in Stein can be read in part as a gesture of rejection of
Wittgenstein and Russell. The question is no longer whether statements about the world can be
reduced to the symbols of set theory, or whether the formulae of mathematical logic can in any way be
said to correspond to statements about the real world. At a time when her Harvard colleague and
fellow​student of Hugo Münsterberg, Raymond H. Stetson, is inquiring into the biometrics of the
speech act in Paris under the supervision of the Abbé Rousselot, Stein is defending an approach to
language and thought that is similarly focused on the physical dynamics of the speech act. For Stetson
and Rousselot (as eventually for Messiaen and Boulez) the fundamental quantum of speech or music
is the tripartite syllable, consisting of an onset transient (typically a consonant), a central accent tone
(vowel), and a termination (usually a consonant). In place of a theory of words as objects and
cognition as grammar, the new semiology of Stetson and Rousselot sought to assert a meaning for
language as a physical process and its constituent elements as gestural units.
Whitehead objects with Henri Bergson that the slice of instantaneous time represented by a still
photograph is an artifact of the photographic process and does not correspond to reality in experience
because sense​data are time-dependent: “Sense-awareness posits ... a certain ‘duration’ for
simultaneity”—in other words, simultaneity (at-the-same-timeness) does not signify instantaneity:
tree-rings are not the tree. Awareness of nature is a process involving the passage of time even though
it appears to take place all at once. (CN: 53–54)
Not only is the passage or transience of nature an essential character of nature in its role of the
terminus of sense-awareness, it is also essential for sense-awareness in itself. (In music it is not
enough to be aware of notes, one has to be aware of a process in motion.) One reason is the
commonplace of early photography that while fixtures such as streets and buildings are clearly
visible, living things and moving components either do not appear or are reproduced as blurred and
indistinct shapes. Hence a photograph cannot depict an instant of reality because an exposure time is
required, no matter how short, and the same is true of human vision: a single photograph image
flashed on the screen for the duration of a single frame of a movie, while registering on the sense of
sight is not comprehended in its entirety in that fraction of a second of exposure. From which neither
the timing nor the dynamic of events in a movie can be shown to correspond to the information
contained in a simple succession of frames in a movie, nor in the frames themselves considered in
isolation. Rather it suggests that what a viewer perceives as reality in motion in a movie is, as
Gertrude Stein proposes, a process of constant refreshment in which new information is overlaid on
data that is already in memory. A further complication as Whitehead sees it is that by analogy with the
photographic image of a busy street some of the information already in mind will be unchanging, and
some changing only slowly, while other elements are changing all the time and very quickly, in many
instances too fast or too slow to be detected at the limits of awareness. How, he asks, do we
reconcile a process of seeing reality in which different elements of the same reality emerge into
consciousness at different speeds over different durations, and how can that multiplicity of time
relations be reconciled with a process of succession of instantaneous slices of time. It does not make
sense. This is where the training of a biologist becomes useful, since a biologist asks the same
questions of living creatures who manage to exist and thrive in the same condition of uncertainty
without complaining.
Mathematical logic asks how we define quanta of perception, the smallest constituent particles of
thought, and is relatively unconcerned whether such particles are capable of existing in isolation, or
even real. It is enough to postulate their existence, whether as numbers, bricks, or apples. In contrast
the marine biologist is focused on the basic cells of thought, meaning the smallest living organisms
corresponding to building blocks of thought. In a quest for the greatest precision at the most
fundamental level, the mathematician envisages life originating as an accidental conjunction of
quantity and relationship. As a marine biologist Stein is bound to consider life as a precondition for
the growth of complexity, and survival in a changing environment as a fundamental consideration for
developing codes of behavior and communication. Stein’s seemingly oblique interest in the history of
English literature, in the elaboration of which famous names and great works are hardly discussed, is
based on an approach to language as an adaptive system and literature as simply the residue of
evolutionary changes in the cultural environment. This is the line pursued a generation later and from
a slightly different angle by media specialist Marshall McLuhan, who in addition to coining “the
medium is the message” relentlessly promoted a broader understanding of media and languages as
environments.

Music teachers and scholars of a certain age will have grown up like me with a perception of
classical music owing much to the lectures and writings of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein
published in the second half of the twentieth century. Both Copland and Bernstein were composers
themselves, prodigious talents who saw it as part of their public mission to inspire confidence in
music as a vital ingredient of a happy and culturally enriching life. Their advocacy of classical music
as an expression of peacetime values, a form of cultural diplomacy pursued in recent times by the
philosopher Edward Said and conductor Daniel Barenboim, derives some of its urgency as a moral
response to past histories of the manipulation of classical music by state oligarchies for propaganda
purposes and the suppression of freedom of expression.
Both Copland and Bernstein were ambivalent toward, or preferred to ignore, tendencies in
contemporary music they did not like or could not understand. They were supported in this by the
realities of patronage and public taste along with inherited conservative philosophies encountered in
many music schools. One cannot call it dumbing down, because it was never up. As leaders in music
and music education they professed a very safe and partial understanding of the role of music in
human affairs. Not simply as a medium of entertainment, but as a way of expressing, and dealing with,
the trials and stresses of contemporary life in symbolic terms which could be repeatedly tested and
shared.
A particular irony of the reluctance of public figures and institutions to engage with contemporary
musical developments has been the brief surge of interest in music studies among a burgeoning
information and cognitive science community in the early days of Norbert Wiener and computer
intelligence. In music notation information science recognized a proven method of simulating and
formulating dynamic processes in nature, including but not limited to the dynamics of speech and
human emotion. The seventeenth-century astronomer Kepler employed music notation to record the
variations in orbital speed of the planets year on year, treating note values on the stave as relative
frequencies equivalent to velocities. Improvements in reproducing piano technology from the early
1900s, in which Raymond H. Stetson played a part, and surviving piano rolls by Gershwin,
Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Grainger, and others, had shown that in principle a living human
personality could be captured and digitized on punched paper tape—powerful evidence of music
being organized in a fashion corresponding to the way the mind actually works.
Such areas of inquiry into music continue to fall outside the comfort zone of contemporary
musicology, despite being of considerable interest to historians of science. Kepler’s mapping of
orbital speeds in music notation was no random act of kindness. Newton, though not a musician, like
most of his Royal Society colleagues was trained in the physics and acoustics of music to a sufficient
degree to apply the tension ratios of tuning a stringed instrument to account for the gravitational pull
of the earth on the moon, and the sun on the motion of the planets. Einstein’s shattering formula E =
mc2 follows Newton in being ultimately musical in origin, an added extrapolation of Pythagoras’s
discovery of the inverse square law in relation to frequency and tension. Einstein himself was a
skilled violinist and musician.
A culture of social music forced to gaze at a retreating horizon cannot be expected to pay attention
to potholes and obstacles at its feet. It just turned out that the joint interests of Gertrude Stein and
Alfred North Whitehead in the philosophy of language suddenly emerged as priority interests after the
1939–45 war in relation to technologies of speech interception and interpretation by automata.
Gertrude Stein and her elder brother initially trained in natural biology, observing organic growth and
behavior in marine species; Gertrude then altered course to apply a similar rigor to observing the
cognitive implications–how a society perceives the world—of changes in the evolution of the English
language represented in great literature. For her the medium was the message.
In 1914 at the outbreak of war Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were staying the weekend with
the Alfred North Whiteheads at their country home in Lockeridge, near Marlborough in Wiltshire.
Unable to return to Paris, they accepted their hosts’ kind offer to remain as guests in the country until
matters improved, a delay of some ten weeks.
Gertrude Stein and Doctor Whitehead walked endlessly around the country. They talked of philosophy and history, it was during
these days that Gertrude Stein realised how completely it was Doctor Whitehead and not Russell who had had the ideas for their
great book. Doctor Whitehead, the gentlest and most simply generous of human beings never claimed anything for himself and
enormously admired anyone who was brilliant, and Russell undoubtedly was brilliant.3

In her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein lists Alfred Whitehead as a genius equal
to herself and Picasso.
Stein’s admiration for Whitehead has been the subject of intermittent speculation but little
informed discussion. A recent paper by Kate Fullbrook implies that Stein’s proclamation of
Whitehead’s genius is a form of self-advertisement.4 That may be true, but even if it were true it
would not explain why Whitehead took an interest in her. Fullbrook claims that Stein’s intellectual
links with Whitehead “are left unaddressed in her texts.” This is incorrect and can only signify the
author’s inability to read them. Not only are Stein’s writings suffused with Whiteheadian axiom,
Whitehead’s own writing is replete with Steinian paradox. A note of desperation is detectable in her
citation of fellow academic Linda Wagner-Martin ’s conjecture that “since Whitehead’s publications
prior to meeting Stein had been on mathematics or formal logic it is difficult to see how Stein would
have known of his views” on the subject areas in which they shared a common interest5 One would
have thought that having Stein as a guest for ten weeks at the outbreak of the 1914–18 war would be
opportunity enough for the pair to arrive at a fairly high degree of mutual understanding, as if
subsequent publications by both in the 1920s were not sufficiently convincing proof (it is not enough
just to read them, it helps to understand what they are talking about).
At first encounter there seems little in common between Gertrude Stein and Alfred North
Whitehead than a preoccupation with time and an indefatigable prose style. A reader once adjusted to
Stein’s overlapidary prose is likely to find Whitehead easier to read. Both are realists who insist on
immediate and concrete experience, and the punctilious concern of both to appeal always to grounded
reality rather than abstract flights of fancy is one reason why their prose is sometimes arduous.
Whether Stein totally understood why Whitehead was interested in her is a moot point. She may have
been flattered. That she valued his friendship and admired his genius would be, in her view, enough.
For his part, we can be sure that what Whitehead admired in Stein was her tenacity in attachment to
the speech act, a disposition shared with her Harvard colleague Raymond H. Stetson, the speech
scientist who held to the unfashionable analysis of language as primarily a physical process. The
peculiar distinction of American scholarship in the philosophy of language and literature shared by
William James, Stetson, and Stein, is a Founding Fathers concern for the dignity and physical reality
of speech, and equally healthy suspicion of European intellectual wordplay. Whitehead clearly
sympathised with American skepticism of the claims made for abstracted reason by Russell and
Einstein, preferring Stein’s natural, grounded pragmatism and down​to-earth domesticity of focus (as
conveyed in Tender Buttons) as realistic, necessary, and refreshing in a perhaps distinctively
feminine but certainly American way. At a time when Wittgenstein, a non-scientist, was seeking to
establish language as a game in which the goal is scoring points rather than arriving at an
accommodation with reality (with the intention to reinstate Goethe over Newton in the pantheon),
Stein the literary scientist was concerned to inquire into the primal realities of social interaction
based on trust and self-effacement as key frontiers of human relations, and speech as their byproduct.
It is common knowledge that Elliott Carter came under Whitehead’s influence as a student at
Harvard in the twenties, but why and how that influence has shown itself has not attracted the same
attention, even though the relationship makes sense and explains a great deal, from Carter’s invention
of metrical modulation in 1951 to his apparent tribute to Stockhausen’s brand of punktuelle Musik in
the Symphonia of 1998. A more perplexing discovery in The Concept of Nature is Whitehead’s use,
seemingly for the first time, of a terminology previously regarded as Stockhausen’s own: a philosophy
of time in which the terms punct, moment, and rect appear for the first time. Perhaps Stockhausen
studied Whitehead as a philosophy student, or was introduced to him by Cage, or discovered him
through the New York school’s enthusiasm for Gertrude Stein, or (perhaps most likely of all)
Whitehead was discussed in Meyer​Eppler’s classes as a major influence on Information Science.
Possibly all of the above.
As far as I am aware, Elliott Carter has never made an issue of his encounter with Whitehead,
other than the evidence of his later music in defiance of neoclassical convention. Certain remarks of
Whitehead do resonate all the same, for example:
The measureableness of time is derivative from the properties of durations. So also is the serial character of time ... . There are in
nature competing serial time-systems derived from different families of durations. (CN: 56)

There is more to this episode in Carter’s biography (including his later relationship with Stravinsky)
than meets the eye, though it is wonderfully thought-provoking to reflect on how his introduction to
philosophy might have affected Carter’s relationship with Nadia Boulanger, a very un​Steinian figure
in music. It is enough to reflect that through his early acquaintance with both Ives and Whitehead, and
possessing a breadth of culture rare among composers of any aesthetic persuasion, Carter has finally
brought to fruition the promise of a distinctively American music laid out in the Epilogue of Charles
Ives’s Essays before a Sonata—a statement deservedly recognized as America’s musical Declaration
of Independence, published in 1920 just prior to Carter’s Harvard studies.
The challenge of accounting for Schoenberg, that is, of explaining the need for atonality as a
representation of nature is relatively plain. Since people speak in atonal cadences, atonality is
natural, from which it follows that a preference for tonality is an aesthetic and social preference for
unity and harmony, signifying a dependence on rules and having to follow them. Accounting for the
influence of Whitehead’s philosophy of time on music in the latter half of the twentieth century is a
more difficult challenge, in part because the subject has been ignored within the profession, and
because the thinking is more difficult. For the time being one can express it in simple terms. In nature,
as Ives observed, things happen in different keys and in different tempi all at once, because in the real
world people have freedom of association and freedom to choose what pace to conduct their lives,
individually or in groups. So for music to express the spirit of freedom it has to have the option of
free association and timing. In the real world things happen at different speeds. Carter’s and lves’
music of multiple timescales acknowledges this reality and gives the listener the opportunity to
experience the same complexity of experience from different time perspectives. This is no easy task.
In classical music of the European tradition, viewed from a US perspective, we are dealing with
an evolved system of mechanizing time and coordinating actions among large numbers of participants.
Ironically, the intellectual advances that created the means of coordinating corporate action on a large
scale also enabled society to organize itself, leading to the overthrow of eighteenth-century power
hierarchies perceived by the majority to be unjust and discriminatory. Today a lingering popular
suspicion of classical music in the United States and elsewhere, including leading intellectuals and
cognitive scientists, perpetuates a hallowed tradition of colonial resistance to European
authoritarianism while at the same time envying the tradition’s inherent organizational superiority. For
audiences behind the Iron Curtain in the fifties and sixties, officially banned abstract expressionist art
and Darmstadt serialism in music represented the promise of political and artistic freedom.
Ironically, listeners in the freedom-loving west at this time looked to Copland and Bernstein for
advice on how to make the choice between the apparent anarchy of Cage’s Music of Changes and the
total control of Boulez’s Structures. That the outwardly opposing aesthetics of the New York School
of Cage, Brown, and Feldman on the one hand, and the European Darmstadt collective of Boulez,
Pousseur and Stockhausen on the other hand, may actually find common cause in the philosophy of a
British mathematician and coauthor of as esoteric a title as the Principia Mathematica, had it been
more widely known, might once have appeared highly improbable. Since there is no doubt that
Gertrude Stein influenced US new music, and that Whitehead directly or indirectly influenced the
“European camp” or “intellectual school” of Elliott Carter, Boulez and Stockhausen, it is surely no
longer a matter of controversy or denial but of singular interest to identify how the two schools of
modem music are philosophically related. It is indeed an understanding that has so far eluded the
world of musicology, but of perhaps even greater fascination is the impact of that relationship on the
world of information science.

Since the time of Benjamin Franklin and his contributions to tone and language science—the glass
armonica a contribution to tone synthesis, and invention of a neutral alphabet for the transcription of
alien speech—the United States has played a leading role in the development of machines to simulate
intelligent behavior, high among them being machines capable of storing, transmitting and reproducing
speech, and performing music. In reality, because studies of music technologies from musical boxes to
reproducing pianos, music recording and computer synthesis, have rarely attracted serious inquiry
among musicians and indeed continue to be regarded with suspicion in music schools and by music
professionals as either incidental or a threat to their livelihood, the history and impact of cooperation
between technology and the aesthetics of modernism has been largely overlooked in the academies.
Present and future generations of musicians, more comfortable with technology, may remember the
technophobia of former generations with embarrassment, especially since the musical evidence is
plain that lessons of new technology have been taken on board by avant garde composers from the
time of Debussy and Ravel to the present day and directly expressed in the aesthetics of new music,
just as the music of ars nova, Gabrieli, and Bach also reflected changes in technology and society in
their day.
For William James and the American pragmatists, and Whitehead and Stein as philosophers of
science, the challenge was to reconcile the evidence of new technologies of telephone, phonograph,
radio, and the movies, with classical theories of being and time. Let us keep this simple. When
somebody calls on the phone, the existence in reality of the person calling is no longer an issue, but at
one time it was. Today we take it for granted that the caller is a real person and not a recorded
message—or rather, we have learned to recognize a recorded message and to respond appropriately.
There is no longer any point in arguing whether the voice represents a real person or not—even
though the passport checkout at the airport will continue to go through the ritual of verifying your
existence as a real person by comparing your jetlagged face with a very small unsmiling photograph
in a book. We forget that in the era of Freud and Wittgenstein, sophisticated arguments were passing
back and forth on the subject of the “existence” and “identity” of a disembodied voice, and by
extrapolation, over the authentic personality and identity to be attributed to the speech of a psychiatric
patient.
The common thread underlying such doubts in the early electrical age is uncertainty over
propositions of states of being. Traditional modes of explanation and logic postulate an initial state
and a subsequent state as a means of accounting for the difference representing an undeclared
transition between the two. With the arrival of motion pictures, the discrimination of difference
becomes considerably more refined, with twenty or more intermediate states registered as still frames
within a time interval where the unaided observer might be aware, if at all, of only one.
A question for philosophy and human biology is whether the illusion of movement created by
moving pictures corresponds either to nature or to human vision, or is merely coincidental. What
Whitehead is concerned about, however, is the correspondence of the still frame with an instant of
perception or instant of reality in the sense formulated by Laplace, the eighteenth-century French
philosopher who said if it were possible to know the position of everything at a given instant, it
would be possible to predict the past and the future with total certainty. Whitehead’s counter-
argument, which Gertrude Stein as a biologist would be able to confirm, and which would also have
exercised colleague Hugo Münsterberg, is that a human observer is not aware of time and motion as a
succession of states, but rather as an aggregation or cumulative and continuous review of a single
state subject to constant renewal—the classic Gertrude Stein argument from repetition.
Whitehead is also objecting to a parallel argument of Russell and Einstein (and of others through
Alan Turing and beyond) at the essential unreality of expressing nature in mathematical formulations
requiring the postulate of instantaneous initial conditions. He argues that because moving pictures
appear to move does not mean that reality unfolds as a succession of still frames; because the human
nervous system processes the visual field as a series of saccades or packages of awareness does not
mean that continuity of existence is an illusion or mere consequence of a mental operation. For Stein,
the issue of processing reality focuses on finding a continuous speech that adequately corresponds to
the reality of living in a continuous present; in her case the units or still frames of reality are words
and unit sentences rather than mathematical symbols.
To do Whitehead justice in his own terms is not for the fainthearted. For the musician the point at
issue is not that correspondences appear, though their existence is highly suggestive. What matters is
whether they have explanatory power. As a longterm student of post- 1950s music I am bound to find
these discoveries highly suggestive. That means nothing unless a knowledge of Whitehead can be
shown to make better sense of Stockhausen’s musical realizations of concepts of time and process,
and enhance the interpretation of key works and improve their appreciation generally.
The lesson of sound recording is proof of continuity. A melody line expresses personality, but a
note taken at random out of a melody does not. Likewise a sound recording has no stable state, every
location in the groove is a moment of transition. The practical and emotional meaning of a sound
recording is time-dependent and cumulative. By comparison the lesson of movies is proof of
succession. A single frame of a movie is a totality of information within the limits of a field of vision
at an instant of time. Unlike vision in real life, the movie reality is seen as a focused totality on a flat
plane. The information within a single exposure of a movie, when studied at leisure is verifiable, but
as an instant in the timescale of actual events is not verifiable but merely sensational.
Serialism in music expresses a consciousness of reality as serial and parametric. Stetson’s
inquiries into reproducing piano technology reveal that personality can be quantified, encoded, and
reproduced without recourse to mysterious affects. As a keyboard instrument, the piano is a special
case: its scheme of possibilities is already digitized. Gertrude Stein’s serialism has to do with
plotting degrees of change leading to an appearance of change. Punktuelle Musik is the sensory
equivalent of an explosion of flash photographs at an event, or the sound effects of a battle scene from
Star Wars performed in the studio on an electronic keyboard as a musical composition, each key
triggering a specific event, like Cage’s prepared piano. That viewers do not perceive a Star Wars
space battle as a musical composition is not the fault of the battle: it is a coherent, tightly structured
composition of sounds that just happens to be expressed as the cut and thrust of combat.
A musical simulation of a boxing match would have a similar impact. We picture a boxing match
as ritual maneuvers punctuated by blows. To consider music in terms of a boxing match as a sequence
of unpredictable and potentially violent encounters may be unusual, but the analogy of raw and
dazzling sensation with physical combat–as for a person, say, who has been deaf until now and after
surgical intervention is able to hear for the first time—makes a good deal of sense. The first issue for
novice listeners to punktuel/e Musik as for electronic music is finding a way of listening to it, just as
learning a foreign language begins with a search for pattern in outwardly inchoate sounds.
The goal of finding structure in outwardly chaotic sounds is similar to that faced by decrypters of
wartime coded messages, and applies equally to the problem of accounting for language acquisition
in infancy, to explain how the mind makes the transition from speechlessness and relative
helplessness to exchanging signals, sharing information, and finally picking up and acting upon
information retrieved indirectly or remotely (as from books and maps). Punktuelle Musik is in one
sense pure experiment in sensory organization (like Cage), and as experiment may not succeed the
first time, or any time, as happenings cannot be guaranteed to succeed. The point of experiments in
cognition, like anagrams or word puzzles in the newspaper, is that they are perceived as solvable, that
to solve them is rewarding, and that to refuse to solve them on the grounds that they are meaningless
or unproductive is incorrect.
Despite neither being particularly musical, both Stein and Whitehead went on in their different
ways to influence new directions in music after the second world war. In the thirties Stein formed a
collaborative friendship with the composer Virgil Thomson, leading to two operas of which the better
known is Four Saints in Three Acts. An early admirer of the opera was John Cage, who detected an
attractive American simplicity and plainness of statement in their joint aesthetic which he compared
to the modest purity and wit of the French composer Erik Satie. Years later in an interview with
conductor Richard Dufallo, Cage’s associate Earle Brown, the composer of Available Forms and a
leading avantgardist, insisted that the most important discoveries in an and culture—in poetry,
abstract expressionist an, and music—had originated in the United States, and Genrude Stein had been
a major factor in US cultural supremacy in the early postwar years. This claim, not surprisingly, is
regarded in Europe with disbelief: “from a strictly historical perspective, without further evidence to
back it up, the idea seems unhelpfully chauvinistic” is how Dr Deliège puts it.6
Whitehead’s influence on the avant-garde is authentic but less well documented. When Elliott
Carter grew impatient with the conservatism of university music studies in the early 1920s he decided
to broaden his mind by taking courses in literature and philosophy, and attended lectures by
Whitehead at Harvard. Just how his exposure to philosophy may have impacted on his subsequent
composition studies in Paris with the arch neoclassicist Nadia Boulanger we can only guess, since
Carter is too polite to say. What is certain is that by 1951, living in the Arizona desert, he had
abandoned sterile neoclassicism to discover his own voice in a combination of a lyric atonal
polyphonic style employing a virtuoso manipulation of multiple time relations (“metrical
modulation”) which found unexpected public approval in the First String Quartet. Later in life he
frankly admitted to feeling resentment that his decision to forge a new style in his own American
musical speech had been unfairly hindered by Copland in the latter’s unofficial but powerful role as
CEO of American musical modernism.
Commentators on Carter have noted his exposure to Whitehead as a student but have refrained
from drawing any conclusions, or as far as I can tell, even considering what Whitehead might have
offered to inspire a young intellectual musician who named Charles lves among his earliest mentors.
Since Whitehead is a tough nut to crack even among English philosophers—his early style combines
precision of thought with the cautious pedantry of the best German minds of the day—his neglect by
musicologists is unsurprising. C. E. M. Joad, with Russell for many years the BBC Third
Programme’s resident philosopher and panellist of Any Questions? confessed in the introduction to
his survey Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science, published in 1932, that he had originally
intended to include a chapter on Whitehead but “had been brought up by my inability to state clearly
to myself what Professor Whitehead’s views were.”7
Reading Whitehead’s Tamer Lectures, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge University in
1919, and published the following year under the title The Concept of Nature,8 it is surprising for a
musician to encounter an elaborate thesis of time conjugation in which the terms punct, moment, and
rect appear. The terms Punkte (points) and Momente (moments) have entered the literature of music
as titles of major works of avant-garde music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Punkte composed in 1952,
revised in 1962; and Momente dating from 1961–64, revised 1972. The two compositions enter the
lists with a substantial theoretical apparatus relating to principles of musical organization and
perception, nowhere mentioning the British philosopher. Another dimensional tenn rect (as in
“rectangle”) corresponding to extension in time, appears at the mid-point of Stockhausen’s oeuvre, in
the name and conceptual basis of the text composition Right Durations. One instance of a similarity
of tenns might be an accident, and two a coincidence. But to find three examples of Whitehead
terminology appearing in Stockhausen’s work list, along with a major paper on the implications for
music of analogous theories of temporal accidence, the 1956 essay “ ... how time passes ...”
published in Die Reihe 3 but written during Stockhausen’s years of study with Werner Meyer-Eppler,
is enough to make one begin to suspect something more intimate than the workings of chance. It must
surely be a matter of some astonishment that between them, the two unlikely friends Gertrude Stein
and Alfred North Whitehead have succeeded in influencing the development and focus of postwar
avant garde music on both sides of the Atlantic as well as on both sides of the aesthetic divide: the
freethinkers and method actors of Cage’s New York school as well as the Darmstadt intellectuals of
high serialism and electronic music. A further aspect, also neglected, is the still tangible influence of
both Stein and Whitehead on cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence research in the Boston
area university beltway since the 1950s, a time when music was regarded as a key source of
information on underlying language and communication structures and protocols.
That such connections clearly exist is unexpected. That they have explanatory power is the
question, one that can only be decided through informed investigation. I have no doubt that a better
understanding of the implications of Stein’s and Whitehead’s contributions has the potential to
revitalize music studies in general after a period of stagnation and disbelieving cynicism toward
serialism and serial thinking exposed to view in the strident and cognitively embarrassing anti-music
strictures of Steven Pinker and (alas) Oliver Sacks. Greater cooperation and skills training among
musicologists and composers may eventually make a difference, but that will only happen as music
schools develop a more positive appreciation of the contributions science and technology can bring to
musical aesthetics, interpretation, and the philosophy of mind. To achieve better understanding in the
future there will clearly have to be changes in the traditional music curriculum and in the training of
music faculty.
Gertrude Stein came to the attention of British intellectuals at a time of considerable upheaval in
western science, a moment in history dominated by Einstein and a sense that the world had been
plunged into a new age of uncertainty. Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was
welcomed as an act of heroism, a measured Newtonian response to a tide of German metaphysics
which threatened to destabilize classical philosophy by attacking the very bases of rational discourse:
number, measure, location, and time, through a strategy of rapid deployment of systems and
procedures of logic based on concepts of negative number, infinity, uncertainty, and relativity. By
rewriting the insurance policy, so to speak, Russell and Whitehead appear to have been hoping to
restore a sense of order and functionality to intellectual life. Russell’s self-confidence was
immediately attacked by Wittgenstein’s punctilious critique of fundamental terms. Meanwhile the
Europeans, including Freud and the surrealists, took a sophisticated delight in undermining the
primitive certainties of working-class existence, which they regarded as pathetic illusion. The
Americans said, this is silly, you cannot argue away reality on a whim.
In musical terms we can read this as an argument over the meaning of music. On the one hand, the
intellectuals said the musical score is the ultimate reality and the performance is merely aspirational
and local. To entertain such an idealistic view, in essence a literary view, you need to be comfortable
in a world of writing, and notation, and books, which in relation to music and poetry have not always
been the case. By framing their argument around hitherto dominant technologies of language and
number relations, the metaphysicians were able to disguise logical flaws in the description of reality
as flaws in the fabric of reality itself. Whitehead had come to see the logical weakness in attempting
to patch up a derelict system by hedging it about with escape clauses when the problem lay with
fundamental definitions and associated concepts of time, space, and identity.
Whitehead saw Gertrude Stein as a valuable contact and American pragmatism as an ally in
opposition to the false precision of mathematical abstraction. William James was a realist who
contended that language is about mutual agreement not about historical accuracy or terminological
precision. Hugo Munsterberg claimed controversially that the movies did not represent reality even
though they appeared to capture and reproduce real movement. His objections, coming from a
European, are subtle, and they still carry weight in the dark zone of cognitive linguistics. What he is
saying is that the mechanism of representation, the movies, does not have to correspond to the
mechanism of mind. (The same objection still applies to language, and to the Turing Test.) Whitehead
was not saying that the mechanisms did not work, or that they lacked predictive power, since in their
own terms the movies do simulate motion and the mathematics did make sense. His objection was
that, like the successive frames of the movies and like the perforations in a Duo-Art reproducing
piano roll, the technology did not satisfactorily account for the way human beings actually reason and
interact with nature. And he saw this as a problem that had consumed and misled western philosophy
from the time of Plato and Aristotle. He expresses this fundamental dissatisfaction early in his
lectures.
For Plato and Aristotle the underlying question was: “What is Nature made of?” ... The terms in which they framed their answers
... have determined the unquestioned presuppositions as to time, space, and matter which have reigned in science. (Concept of
Nature, 17)
Substance [the reality inferred from sense data] represents the final philosophic concept of the substratum which underlies any
attribute. Matter [the original stimulus of sense data] is already in space and time. Thus [to speak of] matter represents the refusal
to think away spatial and temporal characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an individual entity. (CN, 20)

John Cage makes a related point in saying “Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, and
listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?”9 Whitehead and Cage are making the
same point that it is necessary to disconnect the nature of what is observed and the nature of
observation on a human scale, from the translation mechanism which is the language of symbols in
which the observation is set down. Both have difficulty in clearly formulating the disconnection,
being conscious of having to do so in the very tenns they are criticizing. Postmodernist philosophers
who are already cynical about language do not treat the situation with as much respect.
When the Canadian Colin McPhee published his transcriptions of field recordings of Balinese
gamelan music for two pianos, he was in effect translating a nonwestern music tradition of
spontaneous music making within oral terms of practice, into terms of study from a western
perspective in which ethnic scales are translated into the tempered scale, the sounds and actions of
group music making are assimilated into the actions of one or two musicians operating keyboard
instruments of uniform timbre, and transforming the perception and function of a musical event from a
local and transitory celebration of the moment into an artifact dislocated in culture, time, and space.
In reverse fashion, John Cage’s music for prepared piano modifies the tenns of reference of the
western classical tradition to make it possible for western musicians to become better acquainted
with the locality and immediacy of the broken textures of nonwestern music of Indonesian tradition. It
is not adequate, but it is a start.
Any exercise in transcription, including the romanization of Chinese and Japanese names, and
Schoenberg’s notation of Viennese dialect speech, involves a conscious accommodation of sounds
specific to a foreign language to the limitations of a host western alphabet that was not designed with
these sounds in mind. In that sense Schoenberg’s atonal and twelve-tone music represent dynamic
compromises with the false precision of classical tonality in the interests of conveying with greater
immediacy the conditional or compromise nature of real activity in a world of sounds in constant
evolution. Similarly, avant garde trends such as serialism make more sense if instead of trying to
relate such music to classical or romantic traditions and registering only an absence of fit, we
consider such music as a prototype puzzle or computer game where the objective is for the user to
construct a coherent scheme of relationships out of a stream or cloud of musical data that appears to
be chaotic or random on the surface, as a succession of instants, but gains in structure and coherence
when considered in series.
Gertrude Stein’s celebrated approach to representing the continuum of everyday thought employs a
combination of relentless repetition and serial modification in a kind of verbal scanning that
audiences have since come to understand and appreciate in the immersive terms of musical
minimalism, and with added words in rap and hip hop idioms. These idioms ask for a different mode
of listening from the one-dimensional linear text processing of classical music and song, and the
popularity of these idioms is good reason for thinking that such modes of awareness are equally
grounded in human nature. Alfred North Whitehead’s stance against classic concepts of instantaneous
definition and transition has more in common with the phenomenology of serialism and cognitive
linguistics. Although he concedes that human perception of the world is expressed in fits and starts
—“we live in snippets too quick for thought”—it is all the same a condition of living suited to
communicating knowledge in numbers and data packages we call words and sentences, and notes and
chords of music. Whitehead agrees with Wittgenstein in saying it is a mistake to imagine that the
world is structured that way simply because it is the way human beings work.
The idea that the world is humanly perceived as a succession of instantaneous states is a gift of
photography and moving pictures. Instead of following Wittgenstein and criticizing the terms and
conclusions of a movie based hypothesis of human experience, Whitehead aims to address logical
inconsistencies of the process of reducing motion in time and space to a succession of stable states.
Much of his argument is grounded in set theory (infinities of infinities) and is difficult to follow. It
involves finding exact formulae for calculating the probabilities of motion from one frame to the next,
when objects within the frame are moving at different speeds and in different directions or not at all,
and even the field of view may be subject to unpredictable change. A key ingredient of Whitehead’s
criticism is of the concept of an instant of time, or an instant of awareness. He says bluntly that there
is no such thing as an instant, because even a still photograph requires a time of exposure, and for
human observers a sudden flash of awareness, or glimpse of the visual field, can be shown to depend
on the presence of trace elements of varying duration in memory. In music for example, a single note
in a melody has no meaning outside of its place in an evolutionary context that has extension back in
time.
In online searching today we understand the relatively new concept of a cloud as a collection of
possible connections related to a common subject and not necessarily to one another. A cloud is
characteristically expressed as words in a group with no particular order some of which happen to be
larger in type size or different in typeface according to how they are used or potentially related. To
say that the early punctualist music of Messiaen, Boulez, or Stockhausen, or even the accidental
conjunctions of Cage’s Music of Changes resembles a cloud may make it easier for present-day
readers to reconcile the outwardly fractured and exploded textures of early 1950s music—the “plink
plonk” music to which an uncomprehending Steven Pinker so derisively refers in his aptly titled
masterwork How the Mind Works—with a contemporary perception of the cloud as a data resource
nonsequential in nature and conditional in meaning, but conveying a promise of conditional truth.
Acting on cloud information becomes an issue of personal interpretation with an end result that is true
or sufficient in a personal sense. From that perspective the antagonism of a Pinker is understandable
as defending the privileged view of an authority figure refusing to allow the reader the satisfaction of
deciding if that view is personally valid, acceptable, or even appropriate.
Whitehead and Stein are not the only names of interest from a critical time in early twentieth-
century history to address issues of time and human experience in terms congruent with new musical
developments. The influence of Stein’s writing on Cage and others is undisputed and on the record.
Documentary evidence of Whitehead’s direct influence on musical developments, on the other hand,
is all but nonexistent. In the recent history of philosophy Whitehead is a relatively marginal figure
within a much larger tradition embracing Newton and Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Bergson,
Poincaré, Russell, and Franz Brentano. His claim on our attention is that, as an associate of Russell
and as a mathematician, his criticisms of false precision, the reductionism of mathematical logic, and
the limits of abstraction carry greater than usual weight. But for the unsophisticated nonspecialist
reader and musician what gives Whitehead added value is the way in which statements and aphorisms
from The Concept of Nature seem to reappear, without acknowledgement, but often in virtually the
same words, in the writings of Cage and Stockhausen. There is no other source than Whitehead for
terms Punkte and Momente as titles and figures of speech. It is not a question of adjudicating the
concepts themselves as recognizing their equivalence in post-Principia philosophy in the 1920s, and
then again in music of high serialism of the 1950s and 1960s. Since Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen
were close associates from 1954 to 1968, it is natural to suppose that they shared ideas among
themselves and with associates in the information science community represented by Meyer-Eppler
during this time. Cage acknowledges Milton Babbitt and collaborated with Lejaren A. Hiller in
HPSCHD. The same exchange of musical and technical information can be found in the pages of
Hermann Scherchen’s Gravesano Review, a rival journal to Die Reihe published between 1955 and
1966. Elliott Carter has little to say in direct reference to Whitehead’s philosophy; his music however
says a great deal. In a rare piece of academic writing, the 1976 essay “Music and the Time Screen,”10
Carter writes of his indebtedness to the phenomenology of Husser1 and singles out the 1953 study
Feeling and Form by Susanne Langer, a Whitehead pupil and music specialist.11
That Whitehead’s words correspond to the views of Cage and Stockhausen may be judged from
the following specimens. Whitehead citations are all from The Concept of Nature (CN),
Stockhausen’s unless otherwise specified from Stockhausen on Music (SoM),12 and Cage citations
unless otherwise specified are from the interview with Roger Reynolds (RR):
ANW: In the first place there is posited for us a general fact: namely, something is going on; there is an occurrence for definition.
(CN: 49)
KS: When certain characteristics remain constant for a while—in musical terms, when sounds occupy a certain region, a certain
register, or stay within a particular dynamic, or maintain a certain average speed—then a moment is going on ... . And when these
characteristics all of a sudden change, a new moment begins. (SoM: 63)

ANW: Knowledge is intimate. There can be no explanation of the “why” of knowledge; we can only describe the “what” of
knowledge. Causal knowledge is a metaphysical chimera ... . What we need is not to explain knowledge, but exhibit in its utmost
completion our concept of reality. (CN: 32)
JC: Everything is expressive. But what it expresses grows up in each person who has the experience. If the person performs in
such a way that the events he brings into existence are free, completely around them, to be viewed in any way, then the optimum of
a desirable situation seems to me to have arisen. (RR: 48–49)

ANW: Error is merely a conventional term to express the fact that the character of experience does not accord with the ideal of
thought. (CN: 68)
 JC: An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality. (RR: 48)13

ANW: We have ... to make up our minds whether time is to be found in nature, or nature is to be found in time. The difficulty of the
latter alternative [is that] time becomes a metaphysical enigma. (CN: 65–66)
KS: According to Viktor von Weizslicker, a German medical specialist and biologist, things are not in time, but time is in things.
(SoM: 37)

ANW: There is time because there are happenings, and apart from happenings there is nothing. (CN: 66) An object is in a sense out
of time. It is only derivatively in time by having the relation to events, which I term “situation.” (CN: 78)
JC: If music is conceived as an object, then it has a beginning, middle, and end, and one can feel rather confident when he makes
measurements of the time. But when it is process, those measurements become less meaningful, and the process itself, involving, if
it happened to, the idea of Zero Time (that is to say no time at all), becomes mysterious and therefore eminently useful. (RR: 48)

ANW: Motion presupposes rest. A theory of motion and a theory of rest are the same thing viewed from different aspects with
altered emphasis. (CN: 105)
JC: If you take what the Europeans call the various parameters of sound, you find that only one of them exists in what we call
silence, and that is time. (RR: 47)
KS: Moments based primarily on principles of measured durations, of different lengths, give rise to two important characteristics of
any musical construction. One is silence, the other is polyphony... . Silence is the result of the concept of duration: to deal with
duration means to break the flow of time, and that produces silence. (SoM: 66)

ANW: The absolute theory of time requires that we are aware of two fundamental relations, the time-ordering relation between
instants, and the time-occupation relation between instants of time and states of nature which happen at those instants. (CN: 34)
KS: Music consists of order-relationships in time; this presupposes that one has a conception of such time... . Our sense-perception
divides acoustically-perceptible phases into two groups: we speak of durations and pitches. (Die Reihe 3: 10)14
ANW: The measureableness of time is derivative from the properties of durations. So too is the serial character of time... . There
are in nature competing serial time-systems derived from different families of durations. (CN: 55) Can alternative temporal series be
found in nature? (CN: 70)
KS: This enquiry started by developing the idea of a new morphology of time... . We came up against a contradiction between pitch​-
and duration-composition... . The result was the idea of manifold simultaneity, whose tempo-strata could in practice be represented
by different orchestras under separate conductors. (Die Reihe 3, 29)

The key ingredient in Whitehead and Stein is the nature of time. For Stein time is represented by
means of a process of scanning or constant revision to be recognized (albeit distantly) in Pierre
Schaeffer’s turntable aesthetic of musique concrète, removed to the United States by Darius Milhaud,
launched as a US discovery using tape technology by Milhaud’s pupils Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier,
and reverted to live performance as minimalism by Reich, Philip Glass, and a host of imitators. New
technologies of motion capture: sound recording, the action photograph, moving pictures, and now the
cellphone, call into question classical assumptions about the world as a stable framework for
experience, and classical strategies of representing a world in motion.
When nothing is stable, a music of stable harmonies no longer makes sense. A worldview
represented by the orthodox harmonization of God Save the Queen (in the United States, “My
Country, ’Tis of Thee”) is as static and immobile as a Greek or Roman colonnade. When J. S. Bach
sought to join Mizler’s Society for Musical Sciences he submitted a set of instrumental variations on
the Chorale “Yom Himmel Hoch” to be orchestrated with a touch of genius by Stravinsky in 1955–56.
In this composition the theme is announced as a parade of static chords one after another, upright and
inert, and over the course of increasingly complex canonic variations Bach gradually transforms that
impression of classic immovability into a weblike counterpoint in which the overwhelming
impression is of a world in constant motion. The genius of baroque music in general, and Bach above
all, was a perception of clock time as a universal measure, and fluid time as an expression of nature
in flux. To describe the discoveries of the twentieth century as new is a primitive error. What Stein
already identified from her discoveries in English literature, and Whitehead was criticizing in the
metaphysics of nineteenth-century mathematics, was a literalist approach that came out of the
industrial revolution to elevate text and textual commentary over personal experience.
In a recent essay “Atoms of Thought” aimed at the general reader Neal Stephenson reviews the
dispute between Leibniz and Newton concerning the existence of matter, and given Bertrand Russell’s
attraction to Leibniz it is tempting to interpret Whitehead’s difference with Russell post-Principia as
a revival of the seventeenth-century debate.15 What such revivals of formerly discredited ideas tell us
however is that we value ideas for their explanatory power not for their truth, and from time to time
people are bound to become aware of the limitations of particular modes of thought and are drawn to
reexamine alternative views.
Mere tracking back through history to account for the origins of particular modes of thinking is a
kind of mental cardfiling that may miss the point that a particular line of thought comes back into the
frame because it is needed at a particular time, and the need arises from changes in forms of
knowledge available to us which render former explanations inadequate. Newtonian determinism
came into question after Einstein, and Einstein admired Leibniz, so Leibniz’s monadology is suddenly
of interest. But this is to treat science as accountancy or prophecy, not as mind.
What new technologies of photography, sound recording, radio, and the movies proposed were
different and in many respects contradictory accounts of time and motion as they appear and as they
are construed by the senses. These technologies did not exist in Leibniz’s day, but they did exist in
Whitehead’s and Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s time, and they brought into question ways of thinking
and problem solving that had been previously taken for granted as unassailable truth.
An early lesson of photography was that portraits do not reveal the person in the way that an
artist’s portrait reveals the person. The face in a nineteenth-century portrait photograph is typically a
mask. The meaning of that is not that people have to learn to smile but that personality is not captured
in an instant but revealed in a quality of animation, which implies duration.
When Edison discovered that a notched cardboard disk containing a message in Morse code when
rotated at high speed generated speechlike noise he used that observation to mean that if complex
speechlike noises could be recorded and reproduced as a pattern of notches on card, it should be
possible to record and reproduce speech as an undulating groove in a suitable medium. Notice that
there is no logical reason for assuming so. Edison’s insight succeeds because his logic is of a
different kind, a logic of effects rather than causes. It is a specifically American kind of pragmatism
that does not care for British or European “false precision.” Whitehead’s objections to Russell— and
to the Wittgenstein of Tractatus, one suspects—appear to align with James’s impatience toward Old
World pedantry. We deal in resemblances not in certainties. In Wallace Stevens’s words:
The man replied, ’Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

While not the only philosopher to engage with time and motion, memory and existence, Whitehead’s
criticism remains useful in seeking to define cognition in tenns appropriate for machine intelligence.
In criticizing the iterative basis of movie and reproductive technologies, in which he also managed to
lead Gertrude Stein toward a new system of mental geometry, he helped to lay the foundations of a
description of conscious activity that avoids discredited deus ex machina solutions such as imagining
language to be hard wired in the newborn brain. Unlike the awkward and aesthetically inadequate
tenns of the classic Turing Test of human-machine interaction, Whitehead proposes a description of
human perception as a process of punctuated equilibrium allowing for a layered hierarchy of moment
to moment relationships representing intervals of change and implication. There is some evidence that
Marvin Minsky’s recent title The Emotion Machine draws more extensively on Whitehead than he
would like to admit.16 At least Minsky is prepared to concede the realities (plural) of human emotion
as legitimate, if suboptimal, states of being. That puts him in the position of a latter-day English
virginalist and composer of dance suites representing the same theme in different moods, rhythms, and
tenses.
More to the point, a description of the world in mechanical tenns cannot make aesthetic or
qualitative assumptions about the world in which a machine exists—that is, as long as the machine is
programmed not to feel pain, which would make all the difference. Self-awareness and orientation in
the environment are necessarily embedded in the tenns and procedures of social interaction. This is
not the sort of design issue a composer today is expected to undertake, but it is a distinguishing mark
of modern school composers of the quality of Cage and Carter that they should both in their different
ways undertake to redefine the way music “thinks itself” in contemporary tenns. From their example,
however tentative and frustrating some outcomes may appear, it is possible to gain a better
appreciation of the efforts of music from medieval times through to the present day to come to tenns
with at least some of the parameters of machine intelligence, from clear evidence in surviving
compositions from Perotin and Josquin to Gabrieli, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert,
Chopin, Wagner and Debussy as well as Schoenberg, Boulez and others in our own times. What
evidence? Stereophony in Gabrieli, time and motion in Bach, continuity and transition in Mozart and
Haydn, real-time development in Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, time​layering in Chopin, and
statistics in the orchestral textures of Debussy and Ravel. It is all there: you only have to listen.

Notes
1. “Before I came to Paris.” Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). London: Penguin Classics, 2001, 9.
2. “When language is internalized, it ceases to be only a means of social communication, and is thereby removed from the family of
animal 1anguages.” Jacob Bronowski, “Human and Animal Languages” (1967). In A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural
Philosophy ed. Piero E. Ariotti. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1977, 118.
3. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 161–62.
4. Kate Fulbrook, “Encounters with genius: Stein and Whitehead.” In Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett eds., Special Relationships:
Anglo​American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
5. Linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1995.
6. “D’un point de vue strictement historique, sans apporter d’élément nouveau, la thèse paraissait inutilement chauvine.” Célestin
Deliège, Cinquante Ans de Ia Modernité Musicale: De Darmstadt à JRCAM. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2003, 628.
7. C. E. M. Joad, Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932, 17.
8. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: Tamer Lectures delivered in Trinity College November 1919. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1920.
9. John Cage, Lecture “Experimental Music” in Silence. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 15. Cited in “Interview
with Roger Reynolds” [RR] reprinted in John Cage. Catalog booklet. Frankfurt, London, and New York: C. F. Peters, 1962, 45–
52.
10. Elliott Carter, “Music and the Time Screen.” In John W. Grubbs ed., Current Thoughts in Musicology. Austin TX: University
of Texas Press, 1976; repr. in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The Writings of Elliott Carter. Bloomington IN: Indiana University
Press, 1977, 343–65.
11. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (1953). Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
12. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Robin Maconie, Stockhausen on Music. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989.
13. Cited from the lecture “45′ For a Speaker” reprinted in Silence, 170–71.
14. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “... how time passes ...” tr. Cornelius Cardew. In Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen eds., Die
Reihe 3. Bryn Mawr PA: Theodore Presser, 1959.
15. Neal Stephenson, “Atoms of Cognition: Metaphysics in the Royal Society, 1715–2010. In Bill Bryson ed., Seeing Further: The
Story of Science and the Royal Society. London : HarperCollins, 2010, 83–105.
16. Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
 13
Speaking in tongues
Creativity has been a buzzword in music education and the psychology of music for many years.
Fostering creativity in the child through musical activity is a goal of music education, and
understanding creativity as a development process has been an ongoing source of funding for research
in the psychology of music. Both are entirely bogus. Real music is taught by private teachers, who are
musicians themselves, to young citizens who wish to learn and are prepared to study. Music education
is not about learning music, but about social engineering in the mass, administered through state
services who licence schoolteachers and have an interest in the social implications of education
content. Music psychology is fake science pursued in higher education by vested interests wary of the
social implications of unconstrained self-expression.
One would expect academic disciplines running university diploma courses in music and music
administration to have musical credibility, and to enjoy the confidence of the real music profession of
art music composers and players, and music historians. But that confidence is not to be found. It is as
though these interest groups live in a vacuum, which would be fine, except that they occupy space,
sequester funds, and divert attention from real progress, real issues, and real understanding of music
and its place in civilization.
Major symptoms of the plague of ignorance affecting music in higher education and cultural policy
are first, institutional fear of creativity as an unknown that has to be controlled for the sake of a
healthy and orderly society, concerted opposition to musical modernism as deviant and a threat to
public morality, and ideological commitment to meaningless play as therapeutic activity through
which antisocial impulses can be safely discharged. The Kafkaesque implications of such a scenario
might appear ludicrously exaggerated but the joke is on society, they are firmly embedded as a
cultural fifth column that has had to be reckoned with for many generations.
Music education and music psychology are fully-fledged professions and have their own rules of
association. My objection to the professions is not that they exist but that they profess to understand
and teach music when all the evidence indicates that their interest is sociological rather than musical,
and that they are not even very good on the sociology either. My position is quite simple: if a
university department with music in its title, and offering degree courses or diplomas in music, cannot
teach an appreciation of the last century of contemporary music, and indeed is ideologically opposed
to the methodologies of contemporary music from Schoenberg to Boulez, then its views cannot be
trusted on any aspect of music of any culture or period. A theory of music that cannot explain Cage
and Stockhausen has no explanatory power whatsoever.
Most academic music specialists I know tend to avoid contact with colleagues in music
psychology and music education, which are pursued under separate university regimes. These
parasitic disciplines speak their own jargon, follow their own cold war agendas, and compete
fiercely for the same funds, but more to the point, they have no contribution of any value to offer, and
are in many cases militantly opposed to real music and the music teaching profession. But since it is
almost impossible to gain a recognized qualification to become a schoolteacher in the state system
without receiving some training in music education or music psychology, the influence of these two
disciplines on society and culture is in fact ongoing and immense, and cannot be ignored. That
influence emerges even more clearly in a steady stream of high street nonfiction titles on the
philosophy of mind in which the contribution of music is either ignored or passed over as a cocktail
of meaningless noise.
In 2007 I was asked by a friend of a friend to review a symposium of recent researches in music
psychology. Like a majority of publications in musicology nowadays, such titles seldom reach the
attention of the wider music press, if they are read at all. I think it is only fair that the agendas, views,
and cognitive abilities of so influential a group should from time to time be more widely discussed.
Their message speaks for itself.

Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice is the title of a collection of
papers addressing musical creativity from a variety of disciplines presented at a conference held at
the University of Liège in 2002 in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of ESCOM, the
European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.1 In their Preface Irène Deliège and Geraint A.
Wiggins identify creativity as “one of the most difficult issues facing scientific psychology,” claim
that its study is “relatively rare in the cognitive sciences, especially in artificial intelligence,” and
declare the aim of the present anthology “to help initiate a research dynamic” in the subject. These
tentative, even overstated objectives arise in part from the nature of the discipline and more
particularly as positions defended in the papers themselves and the methodologies they represent. A
reviewer is bound to acknowledge the importance of research into creativity while reserving
judgement on ownership of the topic and the relative success of different approaches.
We may start by critiquing declarations of fact that are in reality doctrinal positions. The first is
the position that musical creativity can be studied without reference to actual works of music.
Contributions to the present volume by musicologist Nicholas Cook and composer Jonathan Harvey
may intend to suggest otherwise, that is until one has actually read what they have to say. A second,
more sinister reason for alarm is the profession’s ideological exclusion of twentieth-century music
and composers from consideration: a major reason why, fifty years down the track, basic issues are
still being tinkered with, fundamental attitudes have not shifted, basic definitions of creativity and
music are still being debated, and solutions applying to music as it is actually practiced have yet to be
discovered.
A third point of contention is the claim that psychologists were not interested in creativity prior to
the 1950 APA presidential address by J. P. Guilford. This may be true of some branches of
psychology but is a thousand years late in respect of scholarly attention to codifying voice inflection
as the expression of individual personality or authorized meaning. Universal music notation is a
discovery unique to western Europe, a development that, while driven by a desire for the accurate
preservation and reproduction of speech inflection, thus preserving the meaning of texts of high
cultural significance, also provided a procedural model for plotting dynamic processes in any field of
study, from Kepler’s notation of variation in the motion of the planets, to the movement of share
prices.2 The original function of medieval notation as a guide to inflection survives as present-day
punctuation marks.3
The date 1950 does however coincide with the onset of a period of greatly increased US
investment in research into language codes and related fields including software design, speech
recognition, electronic music, voice analysis by vocoder, probabilistic compositional theory (Hiller
and Isaacson), generative grammar, and artificial intelligence. The sudden burst of interest in a
mechanistic definition of creativity is due less to the spontaneous initiative of one farsighted
individual than to a sudden and irresistible influx of research funding targeting a small but essential
part of a cross-disciplinary research strategy generated by cold war imperatives and aimed at
developing online speech detection and recognition protocols with useful counter-intelligence
applications.
Of necessity Guilford’s “creativity” initiative, along with the various categories devised to isolate
it from mainstream musicological attention, tended to emphasize criteria for the continuous passive
monitoring and detection of language and keyword combinations classified as deviations from
standard norms of legitimate discourse. The visibly McCarthyite tendency to conflate creativity or
new intelligence with hostile intention is not just a remnant of wartime codebreaking and cold war
culture, but also a residue of educational theory dating back to the eighteenth century of J. J.
Rousseau, when music in schools was officially sanctioned as a means of civilizing the young and
suppressing antisocial tendencies among the lower orders—an attitude surviving even today. The bias
has inevitably contaminated definitions of creativity elsewhere, in education and music therapy to
especially disastrous effect.
The alternative, equally fanciful “evolutionary” hypothesis at least has the merit of redirecting
attention toward the romantic origins of creativity discourse in nineteenth-century science. According
to the evolutionary paradigm, creativity is both a distinguishing feature of artistic genius and a
manifestation of adaptation to global change in the cultural environment—in the present case, arising
from the overthrow of the classical social order. The relevant ideological subtext of the psychology
agenda toward the creative arts has to do with control by the state of individual freedom of
expression: a tendency plainly visible in the explicitly antimodernist dogmas of Schenker, Adorno,
Leonard Meyer, and others, and reflected in the fastidious evasion of real music, and legislative tone,
of many contributions to the present title.
A collective fear of new ideas, resistance to change and continuity as necessary ingredients of
contemporary life, is only one aspect of a wideranging, essentially middle-class anxiety toward
disease, the emotions, and irrational impulses in nature, including the creative arts. We note the
residue of such superstitions in a number of papers in which creativity is linked to mental disorder or
antisocial attitudes. The equivalent prejudice—that language (la langue) is static and lawful, whereas
ordinary speech (la parole) is dynamic and unlawful—is embedded in de Saussure’s theory of
linguistics and its literary aftermath, the “newspeak” of George Orwell’s 1984. It finds expression in
a general reluctance within the discipline to engage with genuine art or contemporary trends in music
over the past century. This is particularly surprising given the direct relevance to creativity research
of contemporary developments in music around 1950, in the compositions of Cage, Feldman,
Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, and others.
In music philosophy the British tend to acknowledge the lead of their European counterparts,
finding explication more to their taste than intellectual creativity. Nicholas Cook’s portentously titled
Introduction, “Playing God: Creativity, analysis, and aesthetic inclusion,” puts one in mind of William
Pole’s remarks on the late Moritz Hauptmann, author of the first serious attempt to publish a
philosophical theory of music:
It was a work involving great thought; but unfortunately the author, who had deeply studied German philosophy, built his theory on
transcendental metaphysics, borrowed chiefly from the system of Hegel.4

Pole preferred to rely on Hermann Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, noting however that
the musical part of Helmholtz’s work is very difficult. His researches embrace topics which are, generally speaking, abstruse and
unfamiliar, [requiring] not only much industry and perseverance, but a somewhat rare combination of high scientific and technical
knowledge.5
The same cultural inclination to manage other people’s ideas than to learn or invent any for oneself is
no doubt one reason why British musical scholarship in this area has produced nobody, at the time of
writing, to rival the depth and originality of Helmholtz’s original study, while at the same time
enabling the standard Dover English language edition of Helmholtz to be amplified by some 136
double column pages of 6pt annotation by translator Alexander J. Ellis.6
The comparison is apt because Professor Cook, as spokesperson for academic music analysis
(and heir to the more recent and relevant scholarly tradition of homonym Mahler scholar Deryck
Cooke), might have been expected to offer a few words of encouragement to ESCOM contributors.
He does nothing of the kind. Dr Cook’s prose is vacuous and inebriated. He is temperamentally
inclined to the mystical exegeses of Schenker, Hans Keller, and Adorno, not because the latter are
more interesting and insightful, but because their style of writing is ubiquitous and “spiritual”—a
common discourse the author has the cheek to pretend “is pervaded by the language of compositional
creation.” Toward his scientifically inclined colleagues Professor Cook affects a patrician and
withering contempt.
The increasingly professionalized theory of the second half of the twentieth century may look like a theory of music, but is largely a
theory of music in drag.

I am not quite sure what he means by that, but it does not read like a compliment.
What is the point of studying creativity if it does not result in a better piece of music, asks Björn
H. Merker, adding “Musical creativity cannot be equated with the production of novelty any more
than it can dispense with it altogether.” This is the classic hamburger marketing paradox, a reminder
of David Ogilvy’s remark on creativity, cited by McLuhan, that the issue in good advertising “is not
how to attract the viewer. The viewer is already watching. The problem is how to make him not
switch off.”
It is symptomatic that creativity in musical performance in this context should be discussed almost
exclusively in instrumental terms. Vocal music, voice expression, word-setting, and the expressive
tension that obtains between melody, pronunciation, and inflection are major influences on the
acquisition and management of expressive gestures in instrumental music (a recent indication of
which is Kathryn Puffett’s interesting paper7 on the relation of instrumental motifs and notated speech
inflections in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire).
Music is music by virtue of the discretising constraints that provide it with limitless scope for creating novelty by self-diversification
through the operation of the particulate principle.

It is, all the same, an approach strikingly aligned to serialism of the Die Reihe era, though one that has
failed to generate creative musical results of the cultural value or interest (say) of Messiaen’s Etudes
de rythme, Boulez’s Structures, or Stockhausen’s Piano Piece III.
Merker’s doctrinaire exclusion of continuity dynamics in speech, to focus on the arbitrary
sequencing of unit phonemes or tones as sense​data, follows a tradition of Saussurean linguistics
ideologically opposed to the arguably more relevant studies of speech formation, such as Raymond
Stetson’s in motor phonetics,8 and vocoder “visible speech” analysis, by Potter, Kopp, and Kopp,9
that address acoustic performance as a physical process, and have led to demonstrably practical
improvements in music and speech synthesizer design. Merker is all the same right to conclude,
however awkwardly, that “this same finitude of elements [is essential) for the discriminability,
learnability, memorability, and reproducibility of music patterns.”
 The original criterion for machine intelligence in the l950s,10 and computer composition
immediately thereafter,11 was that the machine produce sentences (in speech or music)
indistinguishable in essential respects from those of a human being. Since when, to date, Boulez’s
Répons (1983-85) has been the most accomplished example of music incorporating the appearance
of spontaneous dialogue between live performers and machine (IRCAM 4C computer). Mark M.
Reybrouck’s approach to musical creativity asks the right questions, summed up as “how do we deal
with music?” which in machine terms asks “to what human sensory needs does music conform and
how may those needs be simulated to produce a musical response?” The difference between this and
serialist or dialogue approaches is that the sensory modality implies motivation on the part of the
computer model rather than a passive tendency to respond only when provoked. This is significant in
two ways: 1. in corresponding to human behavior in the real world, and 2. in conforming to the way
music (both as sounds and as composition) is normally produced. Patterns of change in music and
speech are humanly necessary to sustain consciousness and avoid fatigue, and acoustically necessary
to maintain a sense of location in space. Human beings being inquisitive and mobile by nature,
structured acoustic behaviors are part of daily routine not only for action feedback, and in order to
keep the immediate environment acoustically illuminated, as it were, but as having the potential as
signals to influence and control the actions of others in the environment, which is the same reason
why cars are fitted with horns as well as airbags.
How adaptive theory works in a musical sense, in melody generation at least, is outlined in Martin
Gardner’s commentary on the fractal music of Benoît Mandelbrot and Richard Voss,12 and applied
more specifically to conventional music in Chris Cunningham’s and my paper “Computers Unveil the
Shape of Melody,” in which the limiting parameters of Voss’s original melody generating program are
discussed in direct relation to recognizable musical types ranging from medieval plainsong, through
folksong and baroque inflections to atonal (Schoenberg) and stochastic (Xenakis).13 Having
determined for myself the numerical constraints of fractal melody generation, involving the derivation
of a compositional formula from actual atonal melodies by Schoenberg (soprano melodies at
rehearsal numbers [59] and [74] of the Op. 10 Second String Quartet, fourth movement), I have no
hesitation in dismissing the entire cognitive basis of the Lerdahl and Jackendoff hypothesis as a total
and utter waste of time, since it is a theory without predictive or explanatory power in relation to
genuinely new music, and is dedicated to the intimidation of anyone who thinks otherwise. The utter
fallacy of the Lerdahl-Jackendoff commitment to tonality as somehow embedded in human nature is
exposed in the simple activity of natural speech. People in normal conversation speak in atonal
cadences because to do otherwise would be personally tiresome as well as expose them to ridicule.
Angular melodies of Schoenberg, Webern, or indeed Mozart, are more naturalistic than conventional
song. Formal speech is explicitly atonal. Undergraduates auditing a piano transcription of Florence
Nightingale’s 1890 speech to future generations, reproduced in my book The Second Sense, readily
identify it as a melody in the style of Schoenberg.14
Reybrouck follows Guilford and Dewey (both American, and both non-musicians) in interpreting
adaptive behaviors as problem-solving in orientation. I think this view is wrong as well as outdated
(though the view continues to be stoutly maintained in the literature by Oliver Sacks and Marvin
Minsky). Rather, routine patterns expressed in music can be interpreted as tactical strategies to
manage an ongoing potential for disorder in sensory life. From this perspective the rigid behavior
patterns of autism are intelligent behavior albeit in exaggerated form, brought on by enhanced
acoustic sensitivity to stress caused by a deficiency or absence of sensory mechanisms, notably the
superior olive, a waystation for auditory processing.15
That creativity operates by analogy can be regarded in one sense as a restatement of the Platonic
doctrine of essences, and in a related sense as Popperian falsifiability in disguise (words stand for
but are not equivalent to things; things stand for but are not equivalent to types). However analogy in
the preferred sense of Irène Deliège’s model of creative listening is also another word for myth, the
cultural expression of essential relations “in images that are not, at first sight, related.” Deliège
proffers the slightly disconcerting, if anthropologically suggestive, example “the men of this tribe
resemble string beans” as an expression of “the attitude of thinness.” Of the attenuated figures of
Giacometti’s sculptures, to take a more familiar example, one can argue on the other hand that their
needle-like thinness is a statement not only (and perhaps not at all) about physical emaciation, but
also (or rather) a statement about human location in space and time: the body reduced to a gnomon,
feet firmly attached to the ground.
More to her point, perhaps, is the interpretation of dance forms as studies in time and motion, or
ballet as the humanization of abstract time and space relations, which is coming at it from the
opposite direction. Again, if canon in music is the idealization of natural echo, then one asks what
fugue resembles in nature, since the object transformations of fugue and counterpoint (not to mention
twelve-tone music) involve a perception of identity relations, in pitch, timescale, and inversion and
retrograde forms, that have no direct correspondence in natural acoustics (one reason, I am inclined
to think, why inverted and retrograde forms play so inconspicuous a role in the serial identity
relations of Stockhausen’s opera cycle UGHD.
Creativity theory in music arose at a time when recordings of classical music were in relatively
short supply and formal analysis was based on reading the printed score rather than listening to actual
works. That cognitive theory remains locked in the grammatical prejudices of the nineteenth century
after more than a century of music dissemination in recorded form—and is still unable to recognize,
let alone account for, the music of Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, or Stockhausen—offers scant reason
for confidence that its proponents are on the right track. M. Hickey and Scott D. Lipscomb have
thoughts on creativity evaluation in school leading with an imaginary fifth-grade assignment in melody
composition from an electronic keyboard (the word song, for the benefit of non-US readers, means an
instrumental composition, or in this case a simple melody):
[to be composed] in 3/4 time and in the key of B flat... . But when you get to Nora’s song you are startled. Though she did write it
in 3/4 time and used the B flat as asked, she clearly experimented with several different timbres and composed a jagged atonal
melody full of wide leaps, accompanied by alternating loud/soft tone clusters using an electronic sounding timbre. It didn’t sound
very “good” to you, yet it was somehow interesting. Was it a random mess? Or did Nora compose this song deliberately? How
should it be graded? How do you respond to Nora? etc.

The authors’ conflation of a problem of musical intelligence with one of assessment sends the
alarming message that a successful educator must learn to be creative in assessment in order to
satisfy the terms of employment of an educational policy designed by people by implication ignorant
of, and opposed to, musical intelligence. Hence the view of psychologist, music educator, and
business consultant Teresa Amabile that “it is not possible to articulate objective criteria for a
creative product” (I am not making this up). In this field, however, children’s composition is
encouraged with the ulterior motive of facilitating understanding of their social development, and to
that extent has nothing to do with music at all. Trailing a five-page citation of studies in compositional
development that conjures up a vision of an endless procession of leaf-cutter ants, Pamela Barnard
observes
 composing in classrooms occurs within communities in which “the practice” of composing evolves through mediated actions in a
compositional process and in the way they interrelate with contextual elements.

As Spock would say, not music as we understand it, Captain.

Despite involvement with a truly hideous test inflicted on 132 primary school children and
involving “a soprano glockenspiel with a range C3–F4 with two beaters and a tambourine,” one feels
an instinctive sympathy for a disgruntled Johannella Tafuri of Bologna Conservatoire when she
complains “Why do I have to teach children to compose? What is it for?” The author wrestles with
the question whether to say that a composition is produced “intentionally” means that it cannot have
been created by chance, even though it may have been created spontaneously. G. F. Welch’s 1998
model of the ontogenesis of musical behavior represents the interaction between culture and creative
ability by means of a plaintively minimalist diagram consisting of empty cross-hairs with no target in
view, in support of a raft of submissions culminating in the frankly preposterous statement that the
creative ability of a newborn is zero.
By contrast, a witty and diplomatic paper by a quartet from the London Royal College of Music
(Williamon, Thompson, Lisboa, and Waffen) attempts with some success to shift focus away from
theory and back to real music. One appreciates their endorsement of Paganini and Liszt as
embodiments of creativity, first because the statement is the sort of cliché associated with cognitive
psychology but generally spumed by musicians, and secondly because public adulation of the
performance and creative attributes of Paganini, Liszt, Chopin, and other male virtuosi originated
among a largely female leisure class that first began to influence public taste in the industrial age.
There is a nice skeptical edge to citations of expert opinion: John Hospers’ distinction between
“highly original” and “slightly original” for example, and arbitrating between Beardsley and Sibley
on “notable difference” and “relevant difference.” At times their conversation is conducted on a
number of levels at the same time:
A thing can only be original relative to other instances of the same type of thing within a given culture. We would not say, for
example, that a piece of Indian music is original by virtue of being different from music of the Western classical period, although it
might well be original when considered against other works from the Indian classical repertoire.

The sting in the tail is that to identify a performance of Indian music as “original” in comparison with
music of the western classical tradition is the giveaway mark of a culture—by implication, the culture
of cognitive psychology—that does not recognize the difference between a western music, which is
predicated on the exact execution of specified tasks, and Indian classical music, which is predicated
on spontaneous improvisation within the rules. One looks forward to what the joint authors might
have to say about cognitive issues embedded in actual works, for example of concepts of
“originality” and “difference” in relation to Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies; of Berio’s montage of
themes over a Mahler ground in Sinfonia as a “stream of consciousness” exercise after Samuel
Beckett or James Joyce, and of the cognitive implications of Stockhausen’s intuitive text scores.
Davidson and Coulam’s comparative study looked at video recorded classical and jazz
approaches to interpretation of the aria “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin.
The objection that something interpreted is ipso facto not created, since only a thing of which a
preconception is entertained can be interpreted (which is not the case in a spontaneous
improvisation), is posed and then answered (up to a point) by a confused citation from Nicholas Cook
to the effect that performance skills are creative by virtue of being applied to the interpretation of a
musical syntax within a framework of personal invention—another way of saying that an artist’s life
is an ongoing work of art. Outstanding among a number of claims adduced in support of this thesis of
masterly inutility is Maria Callas’s reputed inventiveness in covering up a lack of control in her upper
register by carefully managed histrionics, which is quite a stretch.
Chaffin, Lemieux, and Chen address the paradox of a classically scripted and memorized
performance exhibiting traits of spontaneity that in other circumstances are open to interpretation as
creative in nature. Their paper begins with a perhaps ill-advised quotation (“It’s different every time
I play”) from Emil Gilels, a great pianist but a spectacularly messy and inaccurate performer. It
focuses on the mental and physical preparation of a recording of the third movement of the Italian
Concerto by J. S. Bach by a colleague who is a competent pianist. The study asks if the key to
spontaneity in a memorized performance may be revealed in what the performer is thinking about
while the performance is taking place.
This appears sophisticated. A fluent performance requires a Zen-like state of “no-mindedness” or
mental detachment from the physical act (much like typing at a computer). The work in question,
however, is a familiar baroque composition in moto perpetuo style, intended to be performed as
though by clockwork, with minimal or no expression, a study in perpetual motion. The issue of
expression in such a context has either to do with making mistakes, involuntary deviations from ideal
regularity, or creativity as the deliberate introduction of expressive cues into an otherwise neutral
execution. It cannot be both. Different versions on record of the familiar Bach Prelude No. 1 in C
major show that the challenge of interpreting such “expressionless” music is both real and
unresolved.16 In addition, Bach’s Italian Concerto has been composed for a very different style of
keyboard from the modern grand piano, an instrument designed to ensure evenness of touch, hence to
eliminate spontaneous inequalities of emphasis. The entire exercise seems like too little, too late,
since exactly the same gound was covered a century ago with considerably more thoroughness by US
and European makers of Duo-An, Welt-Mignon, Aeolian, and other reproducing pianos, a project in
which Raymond Stetson’s PhD paper of 1897 played a part, indicating that the seemingly infinite
variety of tone and touch combinations available to a concert pianist could be reduced to just two
measurable quantities, velocity and timing.17
To some observers, music therapy is a quasi-discipline masquerading within a pseudoscience.
Since we cannot ban music therapy, we can at least inquire into the methods of those who practice it
and their musical aptitudes. Given that for over two centuries musical activities and rituals have
played, and continue to play, a major role in early childhood education, one is entitled to question the
judgement and the morality, as well as the utility, of subjecting allegedly dysfunctional children, in the
name of freedom of expression, to therapies of improvisation completely opposite to the
acknowledged therapeutic value of supervised instruction by a competent professional. The practice
of music therapy outlined in Tony Wigram’s paper “Musical creativity in children with cognitive and
social impairment” is surely a suitable case for inquiry in its own right as its symptoms (procedural
rigidity, inability to relate to normal music, creative and intellectual infertility, authoritarianism, etc.)
constitute a mirror-image of the pathology itself. The “free improvisation” spuriously endorsed by
Juliette Alvin as sanctioned by modern musical practice (Cage and his school, and jazz) is an ignorant
sham. Stravinsky is also cited (incorrectly) in its defense, but what we are dealing with here is not an
issue of semantics but a sociopathic aversion to new music in any form, from atonality in Schoenberg
to chance music by Cage. That so dangerous a misapprehension of what contemporary music is
actually about remains unchallenged as an expression of musical intelligence and is even now
advanced as a pretext for aversion training of the young and vulnerable is as shameful in principle as
it is grotesque in practice.
And all the more irrelevant, given the wide availability of musics, both western and nonwestern,
of exact and demonstrable therapeutic value, from the monotone chant of a Shinto priest, by way of
the vastly distended syllables of Perotin, the gestural invention of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and the
timeless harmonies of Stockhausen’s Stimmung, to the obsessive iterations of Steve Reich and Philip
Glass. With such a variety of musical behaviors to choose from, who needs improvisation? In the
world of music therapy, improvisation is the art of failure. If listening to Mozrut on a regular basis
can improve the performance of the already intelligent, denying exposure to Mozart to the suffering is
compounding their neglect.
Nor am I sure that the clinical improvisation of Colin Lee’s Aesthetic Music Theory is the answer.
The author’s goal of “understanding musical creativity as a non-verbal means of communication”
appears admirable in principle until one realizes just a few sentences later that his operative
definition of music is just the same old methodology dressed up in new and ill-fining body armor. It is
one thing for the profession to aspire to a condition of methodological sanctity closer to Oliver Sacks
than Josef Mengele, and quite another matter to know how to get there. Drifting in a sea of
professional uncertainty and clinging to improvisation as to an upturned lifeboat, he can only dream of
the lifesaving possibilities real music has to offer:
Many great composers including J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt were known to be accomplished improvisers. Schubert’s
style of composition can be seen to be similar to the creative process of improvisation... . It is interesting to think of Schubert as a
composer influenced by improvisation, and this raises the question of whether, if music therapy had been a profession in his day, he
might also have been a clinician.

Which of course, in his own way, in the precisely musical way, Schubert actually was.
Amid the general clamor a thoughtful paper on the therapeutic value and consequences of silence
comes as a relief. Silence in music is aptly and invariably associated with John Cage: the book of
writings Silence (1961) and the silent composition 4′33” (1952). It is not intended unkindly to suggest
that author Julie P. Sutton might have made her point even more eloquently by writing nothing at all,
allowing the reader to meditate on twenty blank pages instead of only one. Along with the notion of
passing time and filling the void, the meaning of absence is an ongoing subtext of classical music
discourse. The absence of a voice in John Dowland’s Lachrymae is a case in point.18 Stockhausen’s
use of mime and “colored silence” in Inori are others.
That prolonged music training of the conventional (classical) kind leads to more focused and
efficient use of brain capacity and stimulates cell growth at significant sites is an encouraging
conclusion of Lotze, Scheler, and Birbaumer’s “Mapping cerebral differences in musicians,” in which
an increase in auditory complexity of music is correlated with the prefrontal lobe EEG pattern of the
listener, a correlation much higher for subjects who are used to listening to complex classical music
than those who prefer pop music. In the thirty and more years since Critchley and Henson’s
groundbreaking symposium Music and the Brain,19 some progress has been made in brain imaging,
though that has not noticeably improved clarity of exposition in this particular field. The group
section on musical creativity and brain function in the present volume reads all the same as an
agreeable antidote to the metaphysical speculation passing for science elsewhere. That it is possible
to write lucidly and gracefully about music, art, and mental function in terms accessible to the lay
reader and musician is shown by the number of eminent scientists who succeed in doing so, among
them Oliver Sacks, Harold Klawans, and Gerald Weissmann. Expertise in this field is certainly of
greater relevance to the future understanding of creativity than anything to be found in Schopenhauer,
Schenker, Adorno, Searle, Said, or Boulez, or even (alas) Daniel Barenboim, whose recent stint as
BBC Reith Lecturer proved to be a public relations disaster for the conductor personally, and for the
cause of classical music.20
Poor communication is also the message of Brattico and Terviamini’s paper “Musical creativity
and the human brain” (note the adjective). The fault lies not in our stars, meaning the authors, but their
musical advisers, unable to provide even the most basic definition of creativity, veering from the
fatuous “any musical activity can be considered creative” to the fanciful “all music must reflect the
psychological propensities and capacities of humans as composers, performers, and listeners”
(Sloboda, 1998), by way of the merely unhelpful “a more complete act of musical creation is
accomplished by the performer who improvises” (Clarke, 2002), only to culminate with “there are
always several ways to perceive and enjoy a musical piece,” a literary gem from Besson and Schön
(Besson and Schön 2002, 273).
Studies of the distribution of brain activity involved in pitch discrimination tasks have found
vowel change is processed in the middle and supratemporal gyri of the left auditory cortex, whereas
chord change is processed in the supratemporal gyrus of the right auditory cortex. “Results point to a
hemispheric specialization for phonetic vs. musical processing ... [which suggests] speech and music
functions are highly independent.” An interesting conclusion to which the musician responds, what
process or partnership is implied by jaw harp music, where vowel formants are exploited
melodically? What might be the neurological implications of Messiaen’s mixture stops, an
intermediate stage between timbre and harmony? Or Jean-Claude Risset’s or Pepe di Guigno’s
IRCAM computer generated timbres, which are generated as tone colors but manipulated and
perceived as harmonies?
Elsewhere the authors report researches by Münte et al. (2001), and Nager et al. (2003)
quantifying the superior attention skills of conductors in comparison to pianists and nonmusicians,
measured by responses to sound bursts from a semicircular array of nine loudspeakers. I find this
interesting because the same “technical listening” attention skills are part of the regular training, and
for that reason arguably better developed, among Tonmeisters (balance enginers with classical music
training). My reason for saying so is having suffered the embarrassment, while taking a class in
technical listening for undergraduate Tonmeisters at Surrey University, of not noticing the trumpets
switch channels in the middle of the movement “Gagaku” of Messiaen’s Sept Haī-Kaī for orchestra in
a recording conducted by Boulez.21
According to Olivetti Berlandinelli, non-tonal music, summarized as “the radical change in
compositional rules from Schoenberg onwards,” is deviant and inexplicable, hence normal
definitions of creativity no longer apply. A doctrinaire failure to cope is padded out with blanket
assertions of the kind more usually associated with the witless blather of Dr Scrotum, Chomskyan
musicology, and evolutionary cognitive science (Wright et al., 2000) that “probably all attempts like
Schoenberg’s are rebellious rather than truly creative.” Just how inadequately informed these
supporters can be is shown by Stenberg’s diagnosis of Stravinsky as an “advanced forward
incrementor” on the grounds of rhythmic innovations in Le Sacre du Printemps achieved “without
discarding the tonal system,” the author quite forgetting the much greater rhythmic complexities to be
found in the composer’s works after 1957, when he abandoned tonality for serialism.
It is not all bad. The author readily concedes that Lerdahl and Jackendoff are “unable to account
for music of other cultural traditions or even contemporary atonal music,” which is at least a
beginning. Their conclusion, that musical creativity is “tied to individual modes of reducing the
discrepancy produced by the input information ... to the listener’s [individual] cognitive style”
corresponds ultimately to a definition of creativity as a self-administered therapy: a reflexive
diagnosis which, if it allowed the rest of us to do away with professional therapists, might lead to a
very desirable outcome.
Impatience at the trivialization of creativity among various branches of science emerges in
separate papers by François Pachet of which the first is a trenchant overview of the state of current
inquiry which might usefully have extended to computer poetry and randomization processes in
twentieth-century literature (from T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas to Kurt Schwitters, William
Burroughs, and of course John Cage). Pachet has issues with information theory based simulations of
musical styles by extraction and substitution of body parts, which one might describe as the
Frankenstein method, but has nothing to say about the obvious benefits of computer transcription as a
way of quantifying expression (I mean the straightforward copying of music into music composing
software and tinkering with the result until it sounds like a real performance in timing and
expression). In a second paper on interactive music systems, the Paris based author might have seized
the opportunity to interrogate significant developments taking place on his own doorstep at IRCAM in
musical creations of genuine substance (Boulez, Stockhausen, Harvey), but instead offers a critique of
simplistic machine automated processes of the kind encountered in cheap domestic synthesizers.
Bringing up the rear, Peter Todd and Eduardo Miranda address the application of artificial life
systems (or “Alife,” as in “Get ...“) to create music. Their approach is amusing, which is refreshing,
and revisits the terms of music simulation software from the 1950s, from which the interactive
elements of Boulez and di Guigno’s Répons and Explosante—Fixe are also descended. That the
“musification” of human activities, as a way of creating identifiable musical characters, is culturally
authentic is shown in folk traditions and the blues; but the authors’ attempt to create interactive
amatory relations among different musical character-types, from which new hybrid forms can be
spontaneously generated, is essentially no different from the interpolation method reported by
Mathews and Rosier in the 1960s.22 That the authors appear oblivious to the transformational
implications of classical sonata form, or even the theme and variation form beloved of amateur brass
band competitions, is par for the course, though a mention of Messiaen’s bird imitations (which
express difference, but to be fair, do not truly interact),23 or the voice and instruments of Berio’s
Circles (which do both), might have been welcome. Alas, not even a nod toward Xenakis, whose
Stratégie for two orchestras (1959–62) arguably set this particular train in motion, and compared to
which their own studies appear a shade trivial as well as inconclusive.

Notes
1. Irène Deliège and Geraint A. Wiggins eds., Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice. Hove
and New York: Psychology Press, 2006. Reviewed in Tempo Vol. 61 No. 241 (2007) 67–83.
2. In Harmonicae Mundae (1619): see Owen Gingerich, “Kepler, Galilei, and the harmony of the world” in Victor Coelho ed.,
Music and Science in the Age of Galileo. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992, 45–63.
3. It is a matter of wonder to report that the clearly evident descent of modem music notation from medieval punctuation marks,
and its implications, remain matters of indifference to musicologists. I have consulted Professor Richard Rastall, a leading
authority and author of The Notation of Western Music (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982) on this very point. See Mary
Berry, “Gregorian chant: The restoration of the chant and seventy-five years of recording.” Early Music (1979), 197–217.
4. William Pole, Philosophy of Music: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of
Great Britain, in February and March 1877. 2nd rev. edn. London: Trübner & co., 1877, 5–9.
5. Pole, Philosophy of Music, 9.
6. Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1877). 2nd rev. English
edn. tr. annot. Alexander J. Ellis. New Introduction (1954) by Henry Margenau. New York: Dover, 1954.
7. Kathryn Puffett, “Structural imagery: Pierrot Lunaire revisited” in Tempo Vol. 60 No. 237 (2006), 2–22.
8. R. H. Stetson, R. H. Stetson’s Motor Phonetics: A Retrospective Edition ed. J. A. S. Kelso and K. G. Munhall. Boston MA:
College Hill, 1988.
9. Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp. and Harriet Green Kopp, Visible Speech (1947). Repr. with a new Introduction and Preface.
 New York: Dover, 1966.
10. Alan M. Turing, “Computing machinery and intelligence.” Mind Vol LIX No. 236 (1950). Reprinted in Alan Ross Anderson ed.,
Minds and Machines. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964, 4–30.
11. Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard M. Isaacson, Experimental Music. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.
12. Manin Gardner. “White, brown, and fractal music” in Scientific American Vol. 238 No. 4 (1978) reprinted with additions in The
Night is Large: Collected Essays 1938–1955. New York: St Manin’s, 1996, 375–91.
13. Chris Cunningham and Robin Maconie, “Computers unveil the shape of melody.” New Scientist Vol. 94 No. 1302 (1982), 206–
09.
14. Robin Maconie, The Second Sense: Language, Music, and Hearing. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002, 59–61.
15. Maconie, The Science of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 65–72.
16. Maconie, The Way of Music. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 272–73.
17. Maconie, Other Planets. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005, 77.
18. Maconie, Second Sense, 149–50.
19. Macdonald Critchley and R. A. Henson eds, Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music. With a foreword by
Sir Michael Tippett. London: William Heinemann, 1977.
20. Barenboirn should really stick to conducting, which he does best. His latest book, Music Quickens Time (marketed in the UK
under the title Everything is Connected), is the literary equivalent of botox for the mind.
21. Olivier Messiaen, Sept Haī-Kaī. Yvonne Loriod piano, Strasbourg Percussion Ensemble, Domaine Musical Orchestra cond.
Pierre Boulez (vinyl lp). Everest SDBR 3192.
22. Max V. Mathews and L. Rosier, “Graphical Language for the Scores of computer-generated Sounds.” 84-114 in Heinz von
Foerster and James W. Beauchamp eds., Music by Computers. New York: Wiley, 1969.
23. Not true. A number of studies indicate that fledglings experiment with the songs of their elders, and bird mimics, such as the jay
and mynah, delight in shuffling the figures of speech of other species.
 14
Two studies
Two papers on works of Stockhausen: an interpretation of Mikrophonie I for solo tam-tarn (1964),
unlikely subject of my first published article in Perspectives of New Music, thirty-five years later
revised and republished in The Musical Times in 2010 as a belated memorial; the other offered as a
programme note for Clark Rundell, the gifted American conductor at the Royal Manchester College of
Music who led a student symphonic wind band in British premieres of Stockhausen’s Lucifer’s Dance
(1983) in Manchester and London in November 2008. They are intended to show that outwardly very
challenging and unconventional works have a history, and a meaning, and a value.

Facing the Music: Stockhausen’s Wizard of Oz

Father, what is it?
—Hush, my child, it is the Bogey-Man.
Should I be frightened?
—Of course you should. Now be still.

After the early evening launch party in London for the first edition of my Works of Stockhausen
(1976), a few of us went straight from the publisher’s offices in Conduit Street to a Rolling Stones
concert at Earl’s Court, the centerpiece of which was a giant mockup of the band’s iconic Mick
Jagger lips logo with a poking tongue that actually moved. The same message of impish disobedience
is reflected in Lucifer’s Dance, the German composer’s rather more challenging image of a wind
band as a grimacing face, on the one hand the taunting clown face of a circus hall of mirrors, on the
other a tribute to the machinelike discipline, svelte orchestration, and curious up and down, side to
side gymnastics of American jazz of the big band era of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller.
From surviving newsreel footage of the 1930s, we can see that the conventions of solo and section
standing on cue and swaying left to right, and the stacking of players on a near vertical plane, were
well established when Stockhausen was a child. However contrary they appear to modem audiences,
these conventions had legitimate acoustical implications in a radio era of limited microphone
resources, and were designed to allow the musicians the freedom to vary the balance of solo and
ensemble in the absence of spot microphones, and without having to rely on an offstage balance
engineer, at a time when broadcasts were invariably live on cue, and the musical judgement of
balance engineers could not be totally relied upon. As severe a disciplinarian as Herbert von Karajan
experimented in the 1960s with the steep-raked “wall of sound” staging for a filmed performance of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in black and white, and it is severely tempting to view Lucifer’s Dance
and its unruly ensemble as Stockhausen’s Wilhelm Busch style caricature of the great conductor, along
with the normally po-faced demeanor of a symphony orchestra.
Lucifer’s Dance is the third of four scenes of Saturday from LIGHT, one of the cycle of seven
works of music theater composed under the overall title LIGHT: the Seven Days of the Week. Among
the influences on Saturday are a series of experiments in the movement of sound in space undertaken
by the Canadian-American composer Henry Brant at Bennington College in the 1950s and eagerly
adopted by Stockhausen during his US tour of 1958. Brant’s notes refer to the acoustical benefits of
placing string players in tiers, vertically, with the violins at the top, violas and cellos at lower levels,
and basses at ground level. He observed that the total effect was not only well integrated sonically,
but that a listener’s sense of spatial coherence and movement of sound up and down was also
unusually vivid and pronounced.
Long regarded as bizarre and incomprehensible, the imaginative world of Stockhausen ’s opera
cycle LIGHT can now be seen to be as rich, coherent, and recognizable as Lewis Carroll’s
Wonderland. In its own terms, which for a concert performance are all that we have, Lucifer’s Dance
is an impressively ostentatious exhibition of technical virtuosity in the service of an exhilarating
pandemonium. Variously described as “Gruppen on stilts” or “Ravel’s Bolero on steroids,” the work
was commissioned by the University of Michigan Symphonic Band and has since justified its
reputation as an ultimate showstealer. In the United States the wind band has very particular
associations as an entertainment medium at sporting events, expressing a perception of music as a
vehicle of mass discipline and technical bravura, and as an entertaining diversion in a sporting
contest whose function is to occupy and weave intricate patterns across the field of play while
performing relatively uncomplicated music that is essentially military in function. Stockhausen has
taken on board the underlying messages of corporate discipline, technical fluency, and command of
intricate movement in space, and reinvented the symphonic band as a grotesque face, its freedom of
movement translated from the horizontal to the vertical, and cruelly reduced to a series of facial tics.
For what is nominally a dance, Lucifer’s restriction of movement is intended to suggest a sense of
entrapment within which the music stands out as a show of defiance. At a superficial level, the “light
of knowledge” implied by the Lucifer image caricatures the straightfaced delivery of a television
newscaster, a pretty face whose wordly knowledge and authority consist in empty words delivered
from a script or autocue. During the downward unfolding (or “downfall”) of the panoply of contortion
there are protests from piccolo trumpet (the “Upper Lip Dance”) representing virtue, and later, riding
on the outstretched tongue, from a piccolo flutist (the “Tip of the Tongue Dance”) attired as a witch’s
black cat, both of their voices tiny in proportion to the opposition. The larger significance of Lucifer
embodies a critique of the orthodox world of reason, a western society and culture (including
classical music) devoted to facts rather than values, and addicted to famous names, figures, prices,
limits, and orders—the traditionally organized world of “quantity and definition” in Novalis’s telling
phrase—one following a path that, in eliminating personal morality from the social equation, is
doomed to descend from a vaunted final solution into anarchy and chaos. Behind the work’s raised
eyebrow, flared nostril, and curling lip lurks the shadow of Nuremberg: not only of the rallies before
the war, but of the trials that took place in its aftermath, along with the tragic defense that one was
only following orders.
In Stockhausen’s scheme of things, the representation of a monster face seen in closeup as an
intimidating animated wall is to be interpreted, literally as well as figuratively, in the role of the
condemned prisoner “facing the music” and preaching defiance. Walls, resounding surfaces, and
images of fire and light, are recurrent elements in the composer’s repertory. Among the most
compelling is the movie screen on which unfulfilled dreams are projected in flickering tongues of
light to the compelling voice of an invisible authority figure. The giant tam-tam of Mikrophonie I is at
one and the same time a barrier, a portal, and a grotesque voice emitting primeval snarls and grunts.
In Trans (1971) a wall of string players, bathed in a reddish glow, screens the audience from direct
contact with unseen subterranean wind bands that can be heard bending and writhing in the
background. Here too what emerges from the wall of sound in momentary interruptions are brief notes
and tics of resistance and rebellion.
 One can even read defiance into the title Lucifer’s Dance, since the word Tanz in German also
signifies a quarrel or verbal joust, giving the word a secondary layer of meaning as “Lucifer’s
taunts.” The effect of light dancing off shiny metal as the players move in different directions also
contributes to a cumulative impression of dancing flames, another aspect of Lucifer’s character and a
distant allusion to the composer’s Song of the Youths (Gesang der Jünglinge: 1955–56), a sacred
cantata and electronic masterpiece on the story of the children cast into the fiery furnace by
Nebuchadnezzar—which, to the young composer’s dismay, was initially refused performance in
Cologne Cathedral by the religious authorities.
For English and American audiences, the ambiguous symbolism of a talking wall may seem
paradoxical or even contradictory, but can hardly be adjudged unfamiliar or obscure. It is a measure
of the composer’s complete grasp of mythology and its vocabulary of archetypes that Stockhausen’s
inventions respond so readily to critical attention, and make consistent sense on so many levels, to a
point where a comparison with Lewis Carroll no longer seems fanciful or farfetched. We recognize a
wall as a barrier to love in Shakespeare’s mock romance of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, and to freedom of movement in the Cold War era. In fictional guise the face on a wall
refers equally to the all-seeing Great Leader of George Orwell’s 1984, or Humpty Dumpty before the
fall (of egg or man, it makes no difference) confidently assuring Alice that “words mean what I say
they mean.” We know what a wall means. “Tear down this Wall!” a US president famously declared
in Berlin a generation ago to wild popular acclaim. “Help rebuild this Wall,” pleaded another
president in 2008 in Washington, glumly contemplating an economy in jeopardy in closeup from a
luminous plasma screen. If I incline to Lucifer in the persona of the Wizard of Oz from the Judy
Garland movie, a relatively benign authority simulacrum unmasked as an empty mechanism, it is not
simply because the analogy makes sense and is easy to understand, but because Dorothy’s dream
encounter with the intimidating face in her quest for salvation is preceded, in the movie as well as the
opera, by a scene of a young girl caught up in the midst of a whirlwind (the electronic vortex of
Saturday from LIGHT’s Scene 2, Kathinka’s Song).
It is important to realise that Stockhausen’s Lucifer is not the Devil or Satan in an elaborate tale of
Good versus Evil, even though the leading characters of the opera cycle, Michael, Eva, and Lucifer,
have elements in common, say, with Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor of the Superman
franchise. Named after Saint Michael (the English St George), the courtly knight is the tentative
embodiment of youthful aspiration and moral potential, woman the more assertive and distracting
love interest, while the likeable villain represents the combined power of science and technology, big
business, and Wall Street. Of course both analogies and characterizations are gross simplifications,
but the notion of conflicting forces and loyalties, understood in abstract terms, is just as central to
Stockhausen’s message of LIGHT as it is to comic book fiction. A major difference is that
Stockhausen’s characters are less easily characterized, neither completely black nor completely
white. In accordance with the color theory (almost a theology) of the poet Goethe, a major influence
on the composer, each opera and its dramatic essence is conceived in the partial terms of a particular
medley of colors representing different degrees of interference of sin and virtue, darkness and light.
(In later life Stockhausen became inseparable from a voluminous knitted cardigan of bright orange
hue, a color that by interesting coincidence is rendered invisible in the black and white of photocopy.)
In Stockhausen’s words the ultimate aim of Lucifer, the light-bearer, symbol of the dawn as Eva is
emblematic of the evening, is paradoxically “to stop time,” meaning to stop progress toward true
enlightenment. In real terms, stopping time is equivalent to the parent’s answer to a child’s question
being construed as dealing with a problem in order to make it (and presumably the child) go away
and leave one in peace. Lucifer’s intention to stop time goes beyond the motto from Messiaen’s
Quartet for the End of Time (composed, as the reader may recall, in an internment camp) to echo the
boast of Goethe’s contemporary, Pierre-Simon Laplace (in the Essai philosophique, 1814), that if an
intelligence were to have the measure of all the forces of nature at an instant, science would be able
to see into the future and the past with total certainty “and there would be Time no longer”—in other
words, no hope. This rallying cry, echoed by Schopenhauer and others, can be read as the last gasp of
an eighteenth​century Enlightenment desperate to hold onto power and unable to contemplate a world
in revolution that is destined to leave them behind and move on. Locked into Stockhausen’s
counterclaim that there are no answers but only questions is the medieval ideal of life as a sacred and
inevitably endless quest for virtue. It is a brave view for a child of the Heisenberg era, a time of
relativity theory and the uncertainty principle, to maintain.
Saturday is Saturn’s day and the Saturnalia of Roman times was traditionally a celebration of
unbridled debauchery. The four scenes of Stockhausen’s Saturday are depictions of the elemental
dimensions of an unfolding time and space: in Paul Klee’s words, “dot, line, plane, and space.” Scene
1, Lucifer’s Dream, centered on the piano, is about death in the sense of absence of time and motion;
Scene 2, Kathinka’s song as Lucifer’s Requiem, features a promenading flute solo, characterized in
Klee’s words as “a line going for a walk.” In Scene 3, Lucifer’s Dance, the line is transformed into a
vertical plane; finally in Scene 4, Lucifer’s Farewell, the audience is surrounded by a medieval
turmoil of rotation loosely based on Japanese ritual and ironically identifiable in today’s terms with
science’s ambition of capturing the mystery of creation from a turmoil of spinning particles in the
Large Hadron Collider. Taken together the four scenes progress from a frozen state of suspended
animation to sequentially greater dimensions of freedom of movement and exploration. According to
Stockhausen’s teleology, each new dimension of freedom releases humanity from another aspect of
Lucifer’s stranglehold on time and human progress, while at each stage introducing a farther potential
for uncertainty and error. Since Lucifer’s obsession is the annulment of time and space, the
reemergence of the four dimensions of human experience represents his undoing, delivering a moral
ultimately of the triumph of the human spirit against the forces of suppression (though there are deeper
implications and antitheses at work here as well). Time is money. In the staged opera the dance ends
with a simulated strike by the orchestra, whose contracted time has run out.
The contrived grimaces of the animated face of Lucifer are an image of a subtler disorder than
stand-up comedy, however. In one of the few passages of coherent speech in the full 29 hours of the
entire opera, and speaking in the persona of a master of ceremonies, an offstage bass voice
admonishes the performers and audience of Lucifer’s Dance of the virtues of proper decorum—which
coming from Lucifer is a bit rich. “If you have never learned from the distortions of the face that arise
from a spirit of rebellion and independence, you cannot turn your faces toward the light.” It is the
voice of a schoolmaster enjoining order in an unruly class. The composer’s alter ego appears to be
recommending an expressionless demeanor as we see it in the blank face of a Chaplin, or the
expressionless aesthetic (heaven forfend!) of neoclassicism.
Since uncontrolled facial expressions expose character and inner thoughts to public scrutiny and
laughter, the notion that perfect composure is the ideal represents the Aristotelian doctrine, betrayed
ever so subtly in the faint but revealing smile of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that transforms our perception
of her from a classical stereotype into a living being. In the renaissance art of Giotto and others, the
blessed sit in neat rows, clasp their hands, and wear blank, stereotyped expressions, whereas the
sinful are depicted in disarray, their faces contorted with greed, lust, anger, and pain. In the present
case Stockhausen is doubtless poking fun at Goethe’s friend Johann Kaspar Lavater, a self-styled
expert on facial features and distortions as indicators of moral character and social and intellectual
status. Lavater’s science of character analysis inspired the eighteenth-century low art of caricature,
drawing extensively on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, who famously proclaimed
Since the Brow speaks often true, since Eyes and Noses have Tongues, and the countenance proclaims the heart and inclination, let
observations so far instruct thee in Physiognomical lines

—going on to identify character types in “Provincial Faces, and National Lips and Noses” in terms
not too far removed from the naive racism of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
LIGHT is a monument to serialism in music. Even today, the very idea of serial ordering and
permutation as valid organizing principles is apt to throw respected aesthetes and philosophers into
frissons of moral panic, like ladies of class having the vapors at the merest suggestion of indelicacy.
But in the more robust world of popular literature, serial thinking is the bread and butter of situation
comedy, from Boston Legal to Itchy and Scratchy, and consumers understand the conventions of
permutation of forms perfectly well. Stockhausen began work on his opera heptalogy in 1977, a year
coinciding with the release of the first episode of George Lucas’s Star Wars, another cycle of initially
seven narratives set in futuristic limbo and scripted around an equivalent threesome: the young knight,
the love interest, and a destructive authority figure who turns out to be the long-lost father in disguise.
Urban myths of popular science fiction perpetuate archetypes in human nature that, for Stockhausen at
least, are rooted in Voltaire, Rabelais, William Blake, and other eighteenth-century observers of a
social and moral conflict that divided civilization into two different camps: a mechanistic aristocracy
of science and determinism indifferent to human suffering, and the child of nature and intuition
desiring freedom on the other. In Alban Berg’s opera of the same name, Wozzeck is the conscience of
humanity, the Captain and Doctor represent oppression and science indifferent to suffering, and Marie
temptation and betrayal. We can trace the form right back to Adam, Eve, and the Serpent in the Garden
of Eden.
In a 1981 interview Stockhausen was asked about the sources of his inspiration for LIGHT, and in
the cryptic style which became a hallmark of his public pronouncements in later life he replied:
I wanted to write a cosmological composition that expresses the truth for now and ever; I wanted to distance myself absolutely
(entjliehen) from the temptation of writing a work of history; I wanted nothing to do with what is merely grounded in historical
reality (erdhistorisch); so “mythological” only in the sense of restoring eternal values to the light of day, and not at all in the vulgar
sense of bringing back tales of prophecy from the dim and distant past where they belong, and which do not amount to timeless
truth.

It is clear that he is determined to escape being pigeonholed as a neo​Wagnerian, and steer between
the Scylla of Arthurian legend as well as the Charybdis of futuristic science fiction—while making
due obeisance, an observer is bound to say, to the Goethe of Faust and Elective Affinities on one
level, and the world of Superman and Terminator on another.
What Stockhausen has done is reach back to the preliterate culture of medieval Europe to create an
amalgam of mystery and morality play idioms that expresses the essence of both in archetypes that
speak as directly to non-European as to western cultures. Mystery plays deal with episodes from
biblical history: Adam, Noah, Cain and Abel, and the passion of Christ; morality plays with
Everyman, temptation, fall, and personal salvation. Stockhausen is following the Schoenberg of
Moses und Aron and the Stravinsky of The Flood and Abraham and Isaac in choosing medieval
models as appropriate timeless forms of music theater to address a western world facing the threat of
nuclear annihilation. Stockhausen however avoids the traditional mystery play, seeing close​minded
religion as part of the problem, while paying due regard to the values and proprieties of surviving
ritual and symbolism.
What we are asked to celebrate in Lucifer’s Dance, and the opera Saturday from LIGHT in its
entirety, is the spirit of life and rebirth expressed in student riots and traditional feast days where
authority is challenged with impunity and young people exercise freedom to let off steam. The
traditional midwinter feast of Kalends was regarded by ancient scribes as a rite of passage from
darkness to light, one in which churches were open to invasion by drunken revelers and their
ministers abused and insulted. Such revels are subsumed in the feasts of the Lord of Misrule, a mock
leader appointed from the people who in some traditions was actually sacrificed after thirty days in a
grim parody of the Crucifixion. (In Saturday Lucifer’s death occurs before the Dance, which makes
him the “Lord of the Dance” in reverse.) Something of the essence of Lucifer’s Dance is conveyed in
the sixteenth-century cleric Philip Stubbs’s description of the Lord of Misrule and his appointed
court, who
together with their bawdy pipes and thundering drummers... strike up the devil’s dance withal, then march their heathen company
toward the church, their pipers piping, their drummers drumming, their steps dancing, their handkerchiefs fluttering about their heads
like madmen;... and in this sort they go to church, though the minister be at prayer or preaching, dancing and singing like devils
incarnate, with such a confused noise that no man can hear his own voice.

Revisiting Mikrophonie I
Stravinsky embraced the saying “Credo quia absurdum.” It is a musical statement. In a literal sense it
means “I [am bound to] believe because it is inharmonious”—because it does not fit the pattern.
Stravinsky may be saying that harmony is a human construction, and therefore incomplete. Or that life
involves change, which in music is distortion or dissonance. He may also be paraphrasing the
uncertainty principle, that there are truths of which we can never be certain or precise, and can only
take on trust.
What matters is not the object but the principle. Of the story of Noah and the Flood Stravinsky also
remarks “Noah is mere history... less important than the Eternal Catastrophe.”1 He approves of a
philosopher’s quip suggesting that “When Descartes said ‘I think’ he may have had certainty; but by
the time he said ‘therefore I am’ he was relying on memory and may have been deceived.” Why would
a composer choose to agree with such a statement? Today, instead of trying to figure out what he may
have intended by such remarks, their message and the message of The Flood are obscured in a fog of
futile conjecture over whether the composer could have been capable of saying them.
The message of my book The Concept of Music is that we have to learn to talk about music in new
ways.2 New ways means, for example, taking the pronouncements of composers, and their music, at
face value. As a teenager in the early 1960s I was drawn to Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, and Cage,
and astonished to discover that this was a music few people cared to discuss. After university I
traveled to Paris to study with Messiaen, and a year after that to Cologne to take classes with
Pousseur, Stockhausen, Luc-Ferrari, Herbert Schemus, Georg Heike, and Aloys Kontarsky, and across
town with Herbert Eimert and Bemd-Alois Zimmermann. In Europe it was the same. Nobody
appeared to know what this music was about, though some played it extremely well and with a great
deal of care. That was not good enough. Like the unblushing bride in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s
Castle, I was determined to know. I wanted the doors to be unlocked. Paul Klee had unlocked the
doors to modem art, and Le Corbusier to modem architecture. The challenge was to do the same for
modem music.
 The mono “Credo quia absurdum” exactly describes my relationship to Stockhausen’s
Mikrophonie I for solo tam-tam and six players, composed in 1964. And to Descartes, whose
aphorism is not only about the reliability of memory, but also about the reliability of language. What
the philosopher said was “I think, therefore I am.” He does not say “Je parle, done je suis” (I speak,
therefore I am). Nor “Je m’écoute parler, done je me comprends” (I hear what I am saying, therefore I
know what I am talking about). The excluded middle here is language and the act of speech. It is also
a remark about music. When we hear music, what do we say inwardly? “I hear, therefore I am”? Or “I
hear, therefore it is”?
My first encounters with Mikrophonie I took place at open rehearsals in an attic at Cologne
Conservatorium, on the Bachemerstrasse, in 1964. At the time I said to myself, the person who can
explain this music can explain anything. Today I would put it a little differently, and say that the music
itself explains everything. My impressions of Mikrophonie I were later written up in an article
published in an early edition of Perspectives of New Music.3 Though it is embarrassing to read it
now, I was hoping it might at least provoke a reaction. Thirty-six years afterward, the work and my
commentary (the latter amplified by a number of subsequent studies) are still filed away in what we
in New Zealand call “the too-hard basket.” As recently as 2008 a leading Stockhausen expert
admitted that he had been unable to understand why I had been so taken with the work all those years
ago. I accept that.
In Stockhausen on Music the composer describes his excitement at discovering the great variety
of sounds that can be created on a tam-tam using a variety of kitchen implements and captured for tape
with a microphone.4 Mikrophonie I is offered to the listener as a Darwinian exercise in the origin and
classification of acoustic species, and by inference as a vindication of a serialist approach to a new
science of musical relationships. Many of the eighty generic sound names in the score and reproduced
on disc are identifiable with animal species: the roar of a lion, a barking dog, a quacking duck, the
song of a humpbacked whale. Mikrophonie I is to be understood as a musical and philosophical
dissertation linking the Platonic or “pure” theoretical distinctions of serialism in the mid-twentieth
century with the natural science categories of Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. Serialism is routinely
described in the musical literature as a system of arbitrary distinctions subject to random permutation,
for example in Boulez’s Structures for two pianos, based on the modes of Messiaen ’s Mode de
valeurs et d’intensités. It is astonishing to have to reflect some sixty years after the fact that the
broader intellectual basis for serialism has never been seriously discussed in the narrow literature of
music. The twist in the present case is that while the discriminations and typologies of Stockhausen’s
Mikrophonie I may indeed be totally subjective, the various sounds are in reality all drawn from the
same source vibration all the same, and thus can be said to correspond to partial vibrations of a
common, if extremely rich, harmonic spectrum. For a composer of strong religious beliefs such a
message has unavoidable theological as well as ecological overtones.
The linguistic implications are plain. The process of sound generation is a crude but recognizable
model of speech production in human beings. In speech a forced vibration of the vocal folds emits
pressure pulses that pass to resonating chambers in the lungs, throat, mouth, and sinus, to be filtered
and shaped by the tongue, teeth, and lips into an orderly stream of vowels and consonants to emerge
as coherent speech (or not so coherent, as the case may be). To perform Mikrophonie I two teams.
each of three players, operate one on either side of the tam-tam. The first member of each team
excites sounds of a prescribed acoustic quality using freely chosen materials. A second moves a
microphone like a stethoscope over the tam-tam surface to magnify different zones of vibration (the
quality of sound varies, as the pattern of vibration visible on a Chladni plate varies from place to
place). What the microphone picks up passes to a third team member sitting to left or right in the
auditorium, who filters and shapes the sound in accordance with the score. The end product is
supposed to be a complex live vibration at stereo center stage flanked by manipulated versions of the
same sound to left and right. Finally, from the interaction of filtered left and right channels, an
animated pseudo​stereo image in virtual three dimensions is spontaneously created over the heads of
the audience.
We take speech and the communication of emotion for granted, but for Descartes and his
generation these processes were profoundly mysterious. Stockhausen studied phonetics and
information theory at the University of Bonn under Werner Meyer-Eppler, cofounder of the Cologne
Radio electronic music studio. Electronic music was one of a number of subject areas of information
theory targeted for special funding during the Cold War in relation to the development of speech
recognition technologies for covert intelligence applications. Information theory is part of the reason
why classic electronic works by Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Berio, along with non-electronic works
from the same period, such as Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître and Berio’s Circles, are not only
highly serial but also language-orientated. To condemn these works as the politically motivated
residue of postwar superpower confrontation, and a musical and intellectual dead end, is a mistake.
The initiative had the effect of reconnecting avant-garde music with its eighteenth-century roots in a
tradition of inquiry into language and meaning, a history extending back in time from Mikrophonie I to
von Kempelen’s voice synthesizer in Mozart’s Vienna,5 to baroque opera and the doctrine of
Affektenlehre or emotional types and forms of expression, to the medieval origin of music notation as
a system of oral punctuation, and ultimately to theories of temperament, tuning, and intonation that
have come down to us from ancient Greece.
The tam-tam is a nonwestern instrument expressing a nonwestern mindset. A tam-tam is a
universal resonator, unlike western instruments that are limited in the notes they are permitted to
produce. Like a reverberation plate, it responds to every touch and agitation with a sound. A tam-tam
has no preferences. Its European counterpart is the bell, tuned to a fixed hierarchy of inharmonic but
mutually supportive partial tones, an instrument whose tone never varies. For Stockhausen as a child,
the tam-tam had personal meaning as an entry portal to the fantasy world of the movies. We recognize
the latter image in the title logo of British J. Arthur Rank movies, a bronzed art deco Aryan male
athlete of Olympian physique sounding a tam-tam of superhuman dimensions. This work is a narrative
of many layers.
Prior to 1950, right through to the early years of serialism, percussion instruments had been
regarded by composers and audiences as primitive special effects, from the Turkish cymbals of
Mozart to Ionisation by Varèse and the Double Music of John Cage and Lou Harrison featuring a
gamelan of gongs arrayed on a horizontal ladder, and a “water gong” to be plunged in and out of a
bucket of water. Stockhausen was friendly with both Cage and Varèse and had studied their
percussion music; he also consulted with percussionist Christoph Caskel in 1959 at the time of
composing Zyklus for solo percussionist, and Kontakte for electronic sounds, pianist and
percussionist, in both of which the serialization of percussion types plays a defining role. Via Caskel,
the idea of scratching on the tam-tarn with different materials may derive from Stravinsky, at the
exciting trigger moment in Le Sacre du Printemps, rehearsal number 103, where the percussionist is
instructed to sweep a triangle beater across the tarn-tam surface in a circular motion. In Paris in 1952
as a fresh-faced student Stockhausen is likely to have encountered a new and futuristic aesthetic of
metal and plexiglass in the chic sound sculptures of instrument makers Lasry and Baschet. These are
friction instruments after the style of Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica on which, instead of pure
tones, weird squeaks and submarine groans are produced by rubbing an array of projecting glass
rods, their vibrations amplified by rectangular cymbals mounted behind the players like metallic
umbrellas. In January 1964 I too was a fresh-faced student among an excitable Paris audience at the
unveiling of a monster new musical instrument of metal rods and conic resonator, like a giant dunce’s
cap, created by Vincent Gemigniani and titled La Bronté—intended as a reference to the
brontosaurus, I hasten to add, not to the English family of romantic novelists. It was yet another
example of a metal resonator on which a number of performers engaged in a rite of improvisation
using a variety of implements. Stockhausen’s composition for solo tam-tam might easily be
interpreted in such a context as just another fashion statement.
Stockhausen had never treated the tam-tam in such a way before, and he never did again in quite
the same detail. However, the idea of creating a music in 1964 out of sounds derived from a metallic
resonator emerges logically from his electronic studies ten years before, studies in creating voicelike
sonorities and phonemes by additive processes of layering and cut and paste editing, processes both
time-consuming and tending to produce static or “dead” sounds. The contrasting approach to speech
synthesis adopted by von Kempelen in the eighteenth century had been to break down the articulation
of words into mechanical modules that could be linked together in different orders to reproduce
different phonemes. The same classic approach would be parodied in Beethoven’s lifetime by Mary
Shelley, friend of Lord Byron and author of Frankenstein, a story of a doomed attempt to create new
life from an assembly of body parts with the help of a powerful charge of electricity. For the pioneers
of electronic music an alternative in theory to synthesis by adding simple waveforms together, would
be to begin with the noise produced by a white or colored noise generator, and “rub out” unwanted
frequencies by means of filters to leave a tone of the desired quality. The studio equipment to do this
existed and was in fact incorporated in Olson and Belar’s Mark I RCA Synthesizer, though little used
in practice.
The nearest equivalent to a music of colored and filtered noise is the instrumental cluster music of
Ligeti’s Atmosphères for orchestra (1961), now claimed by French interests as the first of a new
aesthetic of spectral music. (Stockhausen duly experimented with wall-to-wall textures and creating
“negative spaces” by erasure in the 1962 tachiste edition of Punkte.) Mikrophonie I may well be the
first serial composition to apply the subtractive or filtering principle in the electronic domain, but
whether or not that is the case, it remains a significant technical and imaginative achievement. That
the method is designed to be executed in real time is an added bonus.
The subtractive process has two great conceptual advantages. Every sound generated in
Mikrophonie I, however different, is derived from the same matrix of possibilities, and is therefore
—just like the voice—in a scalable relationship to every other sound, which in principle means that
one can produce not only the equivalent of vowels, which are steady-state sounds, but also
diphthongs, which are continuous transitions from one spectrum to another (at IRCAM also a major
concern in the mid-1970s). Stockhausen’s matrix of degrees of difference applied to Mikrophonie I
would go on to inspire the later Stimmung for six-voice overtone spectrum, a complex timbre also
modulated in real time. More critical still is the composer’s adoption of a new method of synthesizing
organically, by continuous gesture, in place of his earlier practice of montage, editing fragments of
sound together on tape. By changing the way in which sounds are shaped and modified in time, the
composer is also emphasising the role of gesture in the formation of coherent signs and the
communication of significant meaning, which is Raymond Stetson’s point as well.
The art of conveying meaning through gesture is traditionally known as rhetoric and we make a
distinction between rhetoric as the art of persuasion through tone of voice, and literacy, of conveying
meaning of a specific kind through print, words, and grammar. The study of meaning in performance
rather than content terms has philosophical implications that continue to resonate in our musical and
intellectual life. For Descartes to say “I think, therefore I am” is for the philosopher to conjoin thought
and being without taking account of the speech act. The omission may result from ignorance, or an
intention to imply that speech on its own is inadequate to express thought, or even, since language is a
social construct, as a way of avoiding the objection that anything uttered in a shared terminology
cannot be certain to mean the same thing to anybody else. For an act of thinking to entail with certainty
that the thinker exists, there has to be a corresponding thought. In tum, for such a thought to be
formulated and independently verified, ideally you need words, and the right intonation as well.
Any speechlike process that emphasises gesture over information content is rhetorical in nature.
From this standpoint the meaning of a percussion instrument resides not in what it says, since it can
say very little compared to a piano or violin, but rather in what it is. Stockhausen is asking us to
recognise his music for what it is, as a precondition for understanding what it (and the composer) is
saying. Plato is saying just the same. Music is more than just a medium of entertainment, telling
listeners what they already know or want to hear. Beyond that, it is ultimately a medium of inquiry
into, or at least, acknowledgement of, the mystery of how information is shared at all.
By dismantling the classical uniform pitch space of the keyboard into an ad hoc gamelan of
disconnected metallic timbres, Cage’s prepared piano amounted to a philosophical statement destined
to touch a rational nerve in Boulez and prompt a sharp rejoinder from Stockhausen as well. Like the
later Mantra for two pianos and elecronics, Mikrophonie I and its imagery of unity in diversity can
be read as a calculated rebuke to the charming bricolage of Cage’s prepared piano. For Boulez the
conceptual issues raised by the prepared piano have been profounder and harder to engage. Computer
generated bell-like metallic tones remain invincibly static. The real world is dynamic, flexible, and in
constant transition. What is needed is a synthetic musical language, or procedural language, to create
processes as dynamic, flexible, and meaningful as speech itself. Hence, at the climax of Répons, what
we hear are keyboard exercises in the style of Carl Czemy transformed by 4C computer into space-
age metallic figures of speech. The unsolved issues still remaining in 2011 are how to specify and
model continuity of gesture, and thus integrity of thought, in the electronic domain—the series, the
keyboard, and notation itself all part of one assembly line of data points from which we have still to
find ways of extrapolating the dynamics of space, time, movement, and change in terms more
appropriate than the location, number, and quality constants of Laplacian regular notation.
The search for continuity in timbre modeling has been ongoing since the founding of IRCAM in
1977, and has led to spectacular but limited results. That computer music to the present day has also
failed to progress toward more naturalistic and flexible sounds can be seen as an inevitability for a
technology based on an enlightenment description of timbre attributed to Joseph Fourier from which
both the dynamics of sound generation and the time dimension have been conveniently excluded
(incidentally the same omission of the time dimension is found in discussions of wave-particle
duality).
Fourier’s conception of harmonic spectra as essentially stable states (hence, static rather than
resolving in implication) is an exact fit with contemporary neoclassicist philosophy, defended among
others by Arthur Schopenhauer, of existence as a mosaic of stable states, and movement and change as
the consequence of externally applied forces—defined for Schopenhauer and his cronies as forces of
revolution threatening to overturn the existing social order. Reliance on static harmonic complexes
has since come to define the French aesthetic of Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, Boulez, and their progeny
the spectralists. The alternative rhetorical tradition, with ties to ancient Greece, and to which Bach,
Brahms, Schoenberg, Mahler, Stravinsky, and Stockhausen are attached, perceives music by contrast
as dynamic, harmony as inherently unstable, and dissonance, temperament, and avoidance of tonality
as expressing a fundamental uncertainty in both nature and human affairs.
For the Boulez of Répons, electronic harmony is an inherently stable, even inert, statement of tonal
relations that can only respond passively to externally applied force. For the Stockhausen of
Mikrophonie I, however, harmony is explained as relational tensions in momentary equilibrium and
bound to respond to applied force in very specific ways. Mikrophonie I proposes a way ahead from
the theoretical and aesthetic impasse facing IRCAM and computer music in general. By that I mean a
shift toward deliberately unstable generative procedures capable of conveying the same energy,
personality, and directional traits of this dynamic work. The key issue is not complexity so much as
embracing and managing an aesthetic of instability. We are already familiar in fractal mathematics
with techniques of mathematical modeling of complex natural processes starting from extremely
simple initial terms and conditions.
Like the diaphragm of a microphone, a tam-tam is a membrane exposed to pressures on either side.
In a literal sense Mikrophonie I is a technical statement about microphones and stereo, with
particular reference to experiments undertaken by Alan Blumlein for HMV/EMI in the 1930s, using a
pair of bidirectional or “figure of eight” microphones in X-formation. As the name implies, a figure
of eight microphone is responsive to sounds impinging directly on the front and rear surfaces of the
ribbon diaphragm, but does not respond to sounds striking it edge-on. If the signals from front and
rear surfaces are added together at a mixing desk they will tend to cancel one another out, since they
represent mirror images of the same motion. If however the rear signal is inverted before the two are
added, the two inputs are mutually supportive and the signal is enhanced. When opposite perspectives
of the same vibration are presented in stereo relation, a pseudo-stereo image results. Mikrophonie I
is a case in point because front and rear signals do represent different perspectives of the same
vibrating object and are filtered in different ways (corresponding to different external radiating
surfaces, as on a violin or cello), and are directed to separate left and right channels. From the work
description printed in the composer’s liner notes it is not immediately obvious that the production of a
pseudo-stereo image is intended, even though it is clearly implied in every way in a technical sense.
(Stockhausen is equally vague about the acoustic consequences of ring modulation in Mixtur, from the
same year, a lapse leaving open the possibility either that he does not fully understand the
implications of his own scores, or that the knowledge is secret, or that the scores originated as circuit
diagrams with incomplete captions.) The impression left by these hybrid works of the sixties suggests
a composer inspired by relatively undigested readings of technical literature. All the same, the
principle remains that if one channel representing one side of the tam-tam is allowed to be pushing
while the other side is pulling, the two channels will not interact positively to create a viable pseudo-
stereo image, but if one channel speaker output is phase inverted, the combination in stereo should
appear to twist and turn in three dimensions above the heads of the audience. A remix of the original
masters is I think seriously in order.
To invert the phase of one speaker output is simple to do on a home hifi system by switching over
the red and white leads to one speaker. To me the improvement to Mikrophonie I while not total is
immediate and dramatic. That Stockhausen came to understand phase inversion and its implications
for stereo and surround sound imaging is clear from his decision in 1968, against the advice of DG
technical staff, to phase invert the two rear channels of his four into two stereo mixdown of Kontakte
for electronics alone.6 In the real world we cannot always be sure that composers are trained in audio
engineering, or if balance engineers in charge of production remastering are always fully aware of
what the composer is asking them to do. In Other Planets I have drawn attention to a number of
technical questions relating to Stockhausen recordings, such as the original Wergo stereo mixdown of
Kontakte for electronics, pianist, and percussionist, which is a strangely sideways version of the
piece, and the much later recording of Am Himmel wandre Ich for two singers sitting face to face.7 I
have no doubt that the implications of these and other Stockhausen scores will continue to demand
attention in the years ahead. In the case of Mikrophonie I a listener’s assessment is impeded to some
extent, perhaps deliberately so, by the overwhelming presence of the tam-tam signal in center stage,
even though the tam-tam in performance is supposed to be edge-on to the audience, and therefore
presumably inaudible as a direct signal. It will be up to a new generation of technically astute
musicians to discover whether and how the full potential of Stockhausen’s brilliant invention may be
revealed.

Notes
1. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments. London: Faber and Faber, 1962, 127.
2. Maconie, The Concept of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
3. Maconie, “Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie 1: Perception in Action.” Perspectives of New Music Vol. 10 No. 2 (1972), 92–101.
4. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stockhausen on Music ed. Robin Maconie. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989.
5. Slavomir Ondrejovic, “Wolfgang von Kempelen and his mechanism of human speech.” http://earlabs.org.text/text.asp?text=40
(06/17/2007)
6. Stockhausen on Music, 159–51.
7. Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.
 15
Recent intelligence
As you may remember, the Turing Test was originally devised by Alan Turing as a test of machine
intelligence, a variant of the Decidability Question, in German Entscheidungs problem, aiming to
establish which member of a human-machine dialogue is the human being, and which the programmed
intelligence. Judging by the automated help lines I have to deal with, this is a no-brainer: “If you want
to talk to a real person, press #2; if you have a problem with your connection, please visit our
website” etc. The argumentative thrust of such a test was that if a computer could be programmed to
respond in a manner indistinguishable from a human being, then it could be said to be displaying
intelligence of a human kind; and in creating software that succeeded in attaining a consistent level of
plausibility in conversation with a human subject, software science could in effect be said to emulate
the way human beings are intelligent.
Two generations on, the situation is reversed, and the test for today’s readers is to decide whether
the writer is a real person or a robot. This consideration has become especially relevant after the rise
of the internet as a resource, introducing easier access to research information, and inspiring a
corresponding rise in pretend research based on promiscuous citation rather than rational argument. In
a recent paper, Brian Christian reviewed the record of artificial intelligence research from the Turing
era and the underlying agenda of human-machine interaction, and conceptual basis of what it is to be
human, or to think like a human being.1 A dramatic early success in AI was the ELIZA program written
by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1960s. The program convinced many human participants that
they were having a real conversation with a sympathetic human listener. The medical community was
enthusiastic. Weizenbaum however was horrified to find his simple program passing muster as
intelligent behavior among peer academics whom he had supposed to be intelligent people
themselves. He withdrew from the AI project. What appalled him was discovering the reality that
most casual conversation is ‘stateless,’ that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history
of the conversation required to formulate the reply.

For Lord Monboddo and Herder in the eighteenth century, the equivalent question was whether the
mute orang-utan could be said to share human qualities, and by extension, whether working classes,
and people of color, deserved to be considered as part of the human family on the basis of being able,
or learning, to communicate intelligibly. Two hundred years ago the question was whether teaching
the poor to read and write would make them, not more intelligent, but sufficiently educated to be
more useful as factory workers; and if so, would being able to read and write also make them more
human. The question is stated even more starkly by Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion: if you program a
poor woman off the street to speak like a lady, does that make her the equal to a lady?
The saving grace of Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play (I do hope the character’s name was the
inspiration for Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program, but I cannot be sure) is that on set she is clearly a real
human being. And of course her humanity consists in her resistance to classification and discipline by
Higgins. The relative humanity of a great deal of academic writing, on the other hand, is observable
only in unmediated print, which I suspect may have been Turing’s original and (in retrospect)
mordantly humorous point. An author whose writing consists mainly of citation—for example, Oliver
Sacks on musical disability—runs the risk (or may choose the option) of immersion so complete there
is scarcely anything left of a coherent authorship to respond to, which may of course be his point as
well: to be at one with the crowd, and not to be singled out.
For an old codger like myself who has spent a lifetime trying to bring some clarity to the
conversation, it is amusing, not to say alarming, to note a resurgence in academic discourse of a style
of writing (and also, of reasoning) appearing to owe more to Turing’s emulation criteria for machine
intelligence than the human qualities of intelligence machines were originally intended to emulate.
The academic objective, it seems, is no longer to think clearly for oneself, but to give the appearance
of thinking in such a manner as to satisfy the momentary attention of a speed reader, or a slow reader
on speed, not the same thing. The goal has shifted from a machine writing and thinking like a human
being, to a human being (though in some cases, that would be presuming) thinking and writing like a
machine. Like Weizenbaum, I am dismayed, both at the enthusiasm with which the world of musical
scholarship has taken to giving the appearance of participating in intellectual life, rather than engaging
with the substance. One finds oneself dealing with writers on musical issues who appear to have no
sense of history, no intellectual objectives, little knowledge of anything else, and mild to severe
difficulty in constructing a sentence. This is a shame, because it brings serious study of music into
disrepute. And it solves nothing. I am bound at least to protest.
Among the more historically interesting musical events to be announced in 2008 were the recovery
of the earliest surviving recorded item of British computer music, the resynthesis in California of one
of the earliest known voice recordings from a phonautograph wave trace originally made by Belgian
Léon Scott in 1860, and the premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s Speakings, a BBC Promenade Concert
commission for eleven electronically voice-modulated instruments and orchestra. The most poignant
perhaps is the Scott recording. From a high-resolution scan of the original waveform of a few
seconds’ duration, scratched in white by a trembling hog bristle on wax-coated paper, scientists at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to recover the voice, apparently of a young
female, presumed to be the inventor’s daughter, singing a few words of the second verse of “Au Clair
de la Lune” in a clear, unforced voice:
Au clair de la lune
Pierrot répondit . . .

The sample is posted online for anyone to hear.2 Apart from pleasure at hearing the natural beauty of
so young a voice perfectly reproduced from a century and a half ago—very different in character from
the politically aware message to future generations recorded by Florence Nightingale on an Edison
cylinder in 1890—what is most astonishing is the quality of the sound, a tribute to the recovery
technology, to the excellent design of Scott’s second generation laboratory phonautograph, and not
forgetting the contribution of Rudolf Koenig, Scott’s scientific consultant and codesigner. “We had a
tuning fork side by side with this recording,” remarked Earl Cornell, a scientist involved in the
recovery of the voice signal, following its presentation at an Audio Science event at Stanford
University on 28 March 2008. What that means is that because the Scott recorder was manually
rotated, making the trace recording potentially unstable, it was Koenig’s bright idea to record the
waveform of a tuning fork along with the subject voice in an early form of SMPTE timecoding. By
adjusting the waveform transfer so that the tuning fork waveform was perfectly regular, it was
possible to eliminate speed distortion from the reproduced voice recording.
In retrospect, the inventor’s choice of lyric comes across as a strange and mysterious premonition
of Debussy’s atmospheric Claire de Lune for piano, even hinting at the nocturnal otherworld of
Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, settings of verses by Scott’s contemporary and fellow Belgian,
symbolist poet Albert Giraud, deliberately staged in the oracular style of a cylinder recorded séance.
Performed by a University of Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine—a Ferranti Mark I
computer—to a software program designed by Christopher Strachey, a friend of Alan Turing, and
recovered from an archive acetate disc of a radio programme originally recorded in the autumn of
1951 for the BBC Children’s Hour radio programme, the synthesized melody of God Save the King is
of interest as a symbolic act linking the development of computing and codebreaking devices in
Britain, in the Bletchley era during and after the second world war, with musical emblems of
nationhood and a new age of information theory.3
The longstanding association of computing and electronics with Cold War intelligence initiatives
such as speech recognition and interception is a major reason why institutional electronic music
developed in the piecemeal way it did, why research continued to be funded covertly by the military
when progress was slow and musical results inconclusive, and why it has been so difficult to extract
any coherent history of the period, delivered in sensible English, from surviving veterans of those
early days. I have discussed the interconnectedness of electronic music, speech science, and cognition
theory in relation to Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, and more particularly Hymnen, in my book
Other Planets, and elsewhere online. To find the national anthem among the very first British
computer generated melodies, fifteen years in advance of Hymnen and anticipating by the same
period Max Mathews’s FORTRAN encoded interpolation of the English military marching song melody
The British Grenadiers into the American resistance marching song When Johnny comes Marching
Home, is just another presumably inadvertent reminder of the cult of secrecy and hand-in-glove
relationship of electronic music and the military culminating with the founding of IRCAM in 1977.
Let me repeat, I have no moral objection to this partnership of music research and the military, which
has a long and authentic history. I only wish it had led to a greater number of musically interesting
results.
Potentially the most exciting development in British electronic music that year—who knows?
perhaps ever—was the British premiere on 18 August 2008 of Jonathan Harvey ’s BBC Prom
commission Speakings for electronically modified solo instruments and orchestra. Although he now
speaks with the enigmatic demeanor of a Yoda, but is somewhat taller in stature, Harvey’s lengthy
association with IRCAM, and his willingness (or so it seems) to lend his considerable compositional
gifts in the service of the same intelligence agenda that has taken Boulez and his team of software
designers into new and interesting areas, make him worthy of serious and protracted attention from a
British electronic culture indelibly branded with the theme of Dr Who. To those in the know, the very
idea of imprinting the shapes and resonances of human speech on the sounds of a live orchestra is
open to be read as a Boulezian rejoinder, fifty years late, to the vocoder-synthesized greeting of
Herbert Eimert’s 1957 birthday offering Zu Ehren von I gor Stravinsky, and forty years after the
fabulous cacophony of Stockhausen’s Mixtur. I have yet to hear the piece. But the idea is enough, and
whether Speakings proves to be a finished attempt or just another work in progress, the objectives of
such an initiative remain of mainstream significance.
Events from 2008 cannot be expected to figure in a survey of electronic music published in 2007.4
However, what a reader does have a right to expect from such a survey, particularly one compiled for
use as an undergraduate textbook and published over the imprint of a major university publishing
house, is an overview of sufficient completeness to allow a reader to place such newsworthy events
in context and appreciate their significance, intellectual as well as musical. Electronic music may be
regarded superficially as a minority interest, just one topic in a series dedicated to selected
repertories, composers, and genres. The difference is that whereas a basic understanding of western
music is sufficient to come to terms with the specifics of most individual subject areas in music, in
order for a reader to be safely inducted into the art and history of electronic music, a basic grounding
in a range of disciplines is normally required, including the acoustics of musical instruments and
concert halls, the physiology of speech, the implications of information theory, equal temperament, a
rudimentary theory of hi-fi and surround sound, and the philosophy of language.
One would like to think that a work titled The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music might
also acknowledge Penny Souster, partner of British composer Tim Souster and recently retired music
books editor at Cambridge University Press. As a composer of electronic music, and cofounder in the
sixties, with Roger Smalley and Peter Britton, of the Stockhausen-inspired live electronics trio
Intermodulation, Tim deserves at least a mention on the British portion of the honor roll, given that
coeditor Nick Collins is himself a live electronics specialist. One looks in vain however for any
mention of Tim, or Roger, or Peter. Or the group Intermodulation. Or even intermodulation as a
process in electronic music. Indeed, reading the book and taking note of the uneven, twitterish
qualities of contributions, selection, writing, proofing, bibliography, and indexing, it is hard to
imagine the present volume as in any way a tribute to the professional and musical standards of Penny
Souster’s editorial legacy. The incoherence is in fact so striking, and the level of ignorance so marked
in so many departments—literary, musical, and technical—as to incline an informed reader to view
the book in its present state as the dismembered object of a predatory struggle between the
generations, from which the generation Y representatives of an already out of date laptop aesthetic
have emerged as temporary victors.
I am bound anyway to feel a certain sympathy for members of the original Electronic Music
Association group of 1979 (now Sonic Arts) whom I briefly served as foundation club secretary and
newsletter editor. That buoyant collective included Barry Anderson, inventor of the world’s longest
tape loop (for Stockhausen’s Solo of 1966), and composer of tape music for Harrison Birtwistle’s
Mask of Orpheus; Hugh Davies, the indefatigable chronicler of electronic music and inventor of the
shozyg, a briefcase sound effects machine; Peter Manning at Durham University, and Simon
Emmerson of The City University (London), both of whom have published useful surveys of
electronic and computer music; Richard Orton at York University, who found amazing (and musically
significant) things to do with industrial vibrators, though nothing came of it; Michael Greenhough at
Cardiff, who developed intelligent music software some years ahead of David Cope; Dave Malham,
ambisonics systems expert, also at York; and Lawrence Casserley at the Royal College of Music.
When I last looked, these people were still active. A reader will not see them mentioned in the
present book. British composers at IRCAM, whose experiences might turn out to be of critical
importance, are hardly to be seen. Jonathan Harvey gets four lines. George Benjamin does not rate a
mention. And yet they are the generation that laid the foundation for today’s laptop artists, awarded
them their PhDs, and eased them into their present positions of influence.
As a historian of music technology I am bound to say that the book is an interesting read all the
same. Despite gaping holes—Clément Ader, French telephone engineer, inventor of the steam-
powered airplane, and involuntary originator in 1881 of stereo broadcasting; Roberto Gerhard,
contemporary of Varèse and composer in 1960 of Collages, Britain’s earliest and arguably best
serious composition for symphony orchestra and tape; and even, amazingly, Peter Zinovieff, the
Putney-based voltage control genius of EMS—the book’s sins of omission and commission bear
witness to the impoverished state of electronic musical knowledge at a moment in recent history when
standards of musicology in this domain had sunk to an all-time low. Objections to use of the term
electronic music voiced separately but to identical purpose by Andrew Hugill, Denis Smalley in
reflective mode, and Natasha Barrett, lead one to suspect that its editors may originally have wished
to call their scrappy symposium The Cambridge Companion to Acousmatic Music. But of course that
would never do. The US market does not recognize the term acousmatic. A confection devised by the
Paris Groupe de Recherches musique concrète leadership in Paris (fighting a rearguard action for
equal status with IRCAM), in an attempt I suspect to deodorise what Boulez once famously described
as “a flea-market of purloined sounds with nothing of value to be found in any of them,”
acousmatique grandly alludes to the akousmatikoi of the School of Pythagoras, those behind the
screen and prevented from observing the interval manipulations of the mathematikoi. Says Denis
Smalley innocently, “The whole point of acousmatic music is that there is nothing to watch.” He
doesn’t get it. The underlying message of the akousmatikoi is that, seeing nothing, they understood
nothing of the mathematics of tone relations under inquiry behind the curtain.

To put it as succinctly as possibly, the origins of music in all senses incuding electronic lie in the
description and codification of ritualized speech, and thus incorporate a theory of meaning as
expressed in accent, rhythm, and intonation (melody). The uniquely western development of the
concept of a navigable pitch space, representing a uniform continuum measured in quantifiable steps
in harmonious relation, laid out on a digital keyboard and spelled out in digital notation on a great
stave or graph, has enabled the invention in subsequent centuries of chiming clocks, the metronome,
musical boxes and other programmed automata, in line with the Cartesian doctrine of a music and
speech producible by mechanical means and indistinguishable from human speech and music, all
developments in which Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were involved.5 Stockhausen’s musical boxes
of the Tierkreis era allude directly to the era of Mozart; the dramatic sounds of a weaving shuttle in
Stockhausen’s Trans are yet another reference to past technology, this time the Jacquard weaving
loom of the Napoleonic era, programmed by punched cards adapted from those of the fairground
calliope. Mary Shelley’s celebrated fantasy Frankenstein is a nineteenth-century literary response to
the Cartesian vision of programmable life forms embodied in the barrel organ, von Kempelen’s
speech synthesizer, and Maelzel’s orchestrion, technology revisited by Conlon Nancarrow in the
twentieth century and revived to ghoulish effect in cd recordings from the eighties of Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue starring a Duo-Art paper roll of the long-dead composer as soloist. The
oppressively pure and dulcet tones of American Thaddeus Cahill’s battery powered Dynamophone
correspond to an updated online version of Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica, whose ethereal
timbre adds a sense of paranoia to the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammer moor, is
imitated by the spooky celesta in “Presentiment,” the second of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces
of 1909, and continues to inspire anxiety in the theremin wails of sci-fi movie music in the fifties.6
Even while Boulez’s timbral experiments in Anthèmes (1997) and elsewhere rightly defer to Jean-
Claude Risset’s contribution to FM synthesis and Andrew Gerzso’s virtuosity in systems design and
applications, they are also attached to a much older tradition of organ emulation of instrumental and
voice timbres, exposed in the deliberately defective mixtures of Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte
and Livre d’Orgue, back to medieval times and earlier. The list goes on and on. There is no cutoff
point.
Omitting to mention the electronic organ, or the acoustic organ, as though to suggest that present-
day hard drives and portable software have nothing to do with history, would be bad enough in a
scholarly study. The pity of it, however, is that in neglecting the contribution of electrical engineering
to electronic music, the editors of this Eurocentric pot-pourri have contrived not only to omit a
seriously quantifiable US contribution, but also to allow a fascinating recent history of British audio
design to sink without trace. All electronic music, however generated, makes its appearance on the
world stage as sound recording in one or more channels, and is bound therefore to take conventional
standards of recording excellence into account. For present purposes the golden age of British audio
can be said to have begun with the development of sonar, microphonic echo-location of enemy
submarines, during the 1914–18 war.7 To detect an enemy submarine it is important to know exactly
where it is. The exacting requirements of spatial location of a sounding body underwater fed into the
development of early binaural “surround​sound” music recording and reproduction systems by Alan
Blumlein for HMV/EMI in the mid-thirties. This was the breakthrough from which Britain perfected
essential aerial radar defense technology for the war of 1939–45, much of the documentation of which
remains classified today. Since the success of any digital copy of a waveform characteristic of a
sounding body relies, after conversion to digital at a sufficiently high bit rate, on the performance of
the best analogue equipment (microphone, amplifier, recording medium), the knowledge base of
computer music is necessarily grounded in electrical engineering (equipment design) and balance
engineering (the best equipment allied to music of the highest quality performing in an optimum
acoustic). For that reason a history of electronic music is incomplete that ignores the contributions of
scientists and engineers such as Blumlein, Paul Voigt (inventor of the slack diaphragm microphone),
Arthur Haddy of Decca (developer of ffrr extended range recording and the Decca microphone
“tree”), and more recent geniuses Peter Walker of Quad electrostatics, American Ray Dolby (who as
founder of Dolby Laboratories in London in 1965 deserves the status of honorary Englishman), Peter
Fellgett and Michael Gerzon, the brains behind ambisonics, and not least Ben and Jonathan Finn,
authors of music composing and printing software that has allowed musicians of all ages to come face
to face with the design possibilities as well as the distinctive limitations of computer synthesized
instrumental sound. For an educational title on electronic music to ignore educational music software
is frankly incomprehensible.
Traditional tone synthesis as adopted by electrical engineers and religiously digitized by software
designers thereafter is grounded in the formulae articulated by Fourier and Laplace in the eighteenth
century, which declare that the evolution of a dynamic system (such as a waveform, a melody, or the
weather) can be adequately predicted from sufficient information of an initial state, along with the
proposition that the initial state (represented, for example, by an acoustic waveform) can be exactly
expressed as the sum of a set of sine waves corresponding to partial frequencies of a single
fundamental at appropriate amplitudes. This is the mantra.
Says Alan Douglas
The work of Helmholtz and Fourier has proved that any wave form, no matter how complex, may be resolved into its individual
frequency components by mathematical means. Not only their frequencies but their amplitudes can be calculated.8

What the statement actually means is that a line curve represented as an instantaneous event on the
page—that is, a sample variation in air pressure at a single point, reduced to a line trace on a two-
dimensional surface—can be represented exactly in mathematical terms as the sum of a finite number
of simple oscillations corresponding to harmonics of a common fundamental. What the statement has
been incorrectly assumed hitherto to imply is that the continuous process from which such a sample is
extracted can be extrapolated at will and in either direction. That is arguably true, but it will only
yield valid results for stable tones of infinite duration (meaning no good for predicting the weather).
A widespread misapprehension among scientists that western music consists exclusively of stable
tones, and is notated as a succession of steady states, has been invoked to justify imaginative fictions
of music computing intelligence in recent history (Lejaren A. Hiller, Allen Forte, et al.) in which it is
asserted that the twelve-tone equal-tempered chromatic scale corresponds to a law of nature, and that
classical music aspires to the disembodied perfection of a musical box.
Basing statements of this sort on the evidence of a sample waveform corresponding to a
microphone signal situated at a point location in a three-dimensional sound field, assumes that the
phase and amplitude information obtained at a single location in time and space is sufficient to
determine the totality of information from a source instrument at every point within an associated
sound field. This is like taking an arbitrary “V” cross-section of an analogue microgroove recording
and claiming to deduce an entire symphony from it, or (in the Markov world of predictive linguistics
inhabited by Max Mathews and Stockhausen’s information theory mentor Werner Meyer-Eppler)
claiming to deduce an entire conversation from the evidence of an isolated syllable. From their
inception in the early fifties, how to predict and control the evolution of natural sounds, and speech,
and thought processes, from limited samples has been the overriding challenge of electronic music
and cognitive theory. The butterfly effect of chaos theory is only one of many fatal errors of
extrapolation from incomplete data. The alien quality of much electronic music, whether voltage-
controlled in origin, as in Sirius, or software generated, as in Répons, is another consequence of the
same fundamental error, though both works have redeeming features.
To replicate a sample waveform is one thing. To compute the sound of a living instrument in a
coherent acoustic space is something else. Because computing power and data storage were so
extremely limited in the earliest days of music programming, it was both logical and practical to aim
in the first instance for stable and controllable pitches of the most basic kind—sine, square, ramp
wave—and only after that, as computing power increased, to compile software generators to simulate
agreeable tone qualities, modeled on existing tone wheel and circuit designs of past electronic organ
manufacturers. The fatal consequence of the orthodox approach to creating an electronic musical
instrument is that tone signals generated as finished waveforms are invariably mono, and usually
anechoic, existing in an acoustic void. The challenge of replicating the natural unpredictability (or
phasiness) of sound in space was recognized by Lowrey, Compton, and other electronic organ
manufacturers, who dealt with it by incorporating rotating speakers, or rotating paddles in front of
speakers, Meyer-Eppler however exceptionally recommending the insertion of a filtered-noise
subaudio tone to the mix, interestingly named an “aleatoric,” to avoid a merely mechanical tremulant
effect.9 To predict or compute the evolution and movement of synthesized tones in a coherent virtual
acoustic from a standing start is virtually impossible. The alternative is to synthesize musical sounds
in a manner more closely resembling the behavior of a real musical instrument.
With the arrival of faster programming and vocal tract modeling in the eighties it became possible
to consider an approach to synthetic sound generation in a coincident multichannel format compatible
with A- or B​format ambisonic signal processing.10 The option remains on the table and has stalled
only because of inertia within the industry. What such an approach implies is understanding that the
harmonic complexity and audible spatial orientation of a natural musical instrument arise from the
resistance of a perforated resonator of a particular shape (saxophone, flute, violin) to the introduction
of excess energy from a performer. That energy may be inchoate noise, like blowing through a reed,
or through closed lips acting as a double reed, or may already be structured to some extent, as in
bowing across a string of a fixed length and tension. Either way, purity and variability of tone arise in
consequence of cooperative feedback between the input of random energy, and the physical resistance
of the materials set in vibration. The dynamics of the process involve storing the energy from the
player momentarily, and releasing it in coherent form. Finding that balance is exactly what is
happening when a child is taught how to hold and draw the bow correctly.
Of most of the contributors to the present volume, the less said the better. Exhortations like
“Electronic music is joyfully accessible to anyone with a computer of even limited power” make me
want to gag. They are like saying brain surgery is joyfully available to anybody with a screwdriver.
“There should never be a minority category of ‘creative artist’ from which most people are excluded”
declares Laurie Spiegel. But there is, and you are one, is my reply. References to Francis Bacon and
his fabulous Sound-Houses are old hat; dear Daphne Oram found them first, and is a better candidate
for technical approval and inspection than Percy Grainger and his much vaunted Kangaroo Pouch
machine (a Freudian conception if I ever heard one). Margaret Schedel does not appear to notice the
difference between Scott’s phonautograph and the mechanical model of the same name made by
Alexander Graham Bell. Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of the “sound object,” based on gestalt theory, is
at least intelligent and deserves better than airy dismissal as the precursor of modern sampling
technology (or should I say, sampling technology in 2008).
Schaeffer incidentally was not the first composer to create music with prerecorded media, as is
often alleged. That honor belonged, when I last looked, to Russell Hunting, deviser of the immensely
popular Boer War fundraising 78 rpm disc The Departure of the Troopship, described by coproducer
Fred Gaisberg in 1904 as
A star turn . . . with crowds at the quayside, bands playing the troops up the gangplank, bugles sounding “All ashore,” farewell cries
of “Don’t forget to write,” troops singing “Home, Sweet Home,” which gradually receded in the distance, and the far-away
mournful hoot of the steamer whistle. . . . It brought tears to the eyes of thousands.11

Typical of the dumb Orwellian mentality throughout is Sergi Jordà’s line “an ambitious goal for any
new instrument is the potential to create a new kind of music,” a statement that would be illogical and
ungrammatical if it were not already completely and utterly meaningless.

Readers seeking a general overview of electronic music in the mid- to late twentieth century may
make a start with Paul Griffiths’ Guide to Electronic Music (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979);
Peter Manning’s Electronic and Computer Music (revised, New York: Oxford University Press,
2004); and Brian Eno’s updated edition of Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music (London: Studio
Vista, 1974; 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, 1999). Among US starter texts are Elliott
Schwartz, The Evolution of Electronic Music (New York: Schirmer, 1977); Barry Schrader,
Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982); Thomas B.
Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music (New York: Scribner’s, 1985); and John R. Pierce’s
magisterial Science of Musical Sound from the Scientific American Library series (New York: W. H.
Freeman, 1983). For the more technically minded and computer literate, the going is a little more
tough but the material is out there. Helmholtz’s classic On the Sensations of Tone is still in print as a
Dover paperback, along with Fritz Winckel’s more recent Music, Sound, and Sensation, a Modern
Exposition of 1967, covering the Die Reihe era, and Harry Olson’s classic Music, Physics, and
Engineering (1952, rev. 1967), perhaps the clearest exposition available of the crucial first decade
of US electronic and computer music theory in the fifties (also published by Dover). I would list these
in a bibliography but then nobody would read them, and they deserve to be read as historical
documents.
Olson is oldfashioned but informative about the equipment resources and composing philosophies
of pioneer electronic music composers Milton Babbitt (Philomel, Ensembles for Synthesiser) and
Lejaren A. Hiller (composer with John Cage of HPSCHD). The tape improvisations of Otto Luening
and Vladimir Ussachevsky establish a recognizable aesthetic for Louis and Bebe Barron’s bold and
inventive music for the movie Forbidden Planet. The mysterious impact of vocoder-manipulated
sounds and noises, popularized in children’s radio items and including such masterly singles as Jack
Benny Plays “The Bee” on Capitol in the fifties, eventually inspired Xavier Rodet to create his
Chant software at IRCAM that made Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango possible in 1985, and
Speakings conceivable in 2008. The practical joke implied by Berio’s Différences in 1958, in which
the sounds of live performers are gradually invaded and electronically distorted via unseen stereo
speakers, gains added piquancy in the context of contemporary public demonstrations in New York in
which passers-by were invited to spot the difference between anechoic tapes reproduced by a stereo
pair of Edgar Villchur’s groundbreaking Acoustic Research AR-2 air suspension loudspeakers and
the actual sounds of the Fine Arts Quartet and other famous ensembles playing live. There is a
constant interplay between what composers of classic electronic music are doing, and what is going
on in the industry.
After the successful launch of IRCAM, inseparably linked to the 1984 premiere of Boulez’s
Répons, the first real breakthrough of the digital synthesis age, a number of titles appeared from MIT
Press under the editorship of Curtis Roads, bringing together collections of technical essays by
contributors representing joint US and European research initiatives that made IRCAM possible.12 To
a majority of readers this material will remain hard to figure out, and even appear out of date, but it
cannot be ignored. The most striking feature of these contributions as a whole is their retrospective
character. They read as testaments of faith to a lost cause, carefully written, and scrupulously edited:
the end of an era. It is a little touching to revisit James Moorer, codeveloper of IRCAM’s 4C
software, on the tribulations of a reverberation program, only to realise that one of the problems
arising from an oversimplified approach to artificial reverberation is the generation of unwanted
metallic eigentones.13 Elsewhere, a slight two-page summary of the relatively simple technical
transformations of Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango turns out to have been ghosted by Stanley
Haynes, not reproduced from the composer’s notes.14 Among the more telling are conversations in
which veterans of the early years—Risset, Minsky, Rodet—reflect on what they hoped to achieve
then, and are still hoping to achieve now. The sense of reaching the end of an era is vividly conveyed
in an overview by editor Roads, titled “Grammars as Representations for Music,” of a number of
contributory theories of musical generative grammar, triggered by a quotation from Noam Chomsky
and opening out a previously undisclosed (though not entirely unsuspected) working relationship
between early computer music initiatives and the now derelict school of cognitive and artificial
intelligence research from the cold war era that in theorizing twelve-tone, serial, and aleatoric music
as problematic have managed to inflict considerable harm on the teaching and appreciation of modern
classical music in the past sixty years, while at the same time ignoring the practical foundations of
timbre composition and the projection of sounds in space.15
For that reason perhaps the most revealing insights to be found in the Cambridge Companion to
Electronic Music are an older generation’s occasional words of frustration to be winnowed from the
mostly anodyne remarks of survivors from earlier times, gathered together in two groups under the
slightly patronizing rubric of “Artists’ Statements.” Among them, an email from an angry Max
Mathews in which—finally—the old veteran comes clean about Fourier and his legacy, and adding
the bitter rider that
For musical purposes, in the class ANY SOUND, almost all timbres are uninteresting, and many timbres feeble or ugly. . . . It is
VERY HARD to create new timbres we hear as interesting, powerful, and beautiful. . . . New Music is now limited by the limits of
 our understanding of the perception of music by the human ear and brain.16

So much to report, and so much progress, in just sixty years. From Stockhausen, a laconic note
appealing to new generations to work hard in developing timbres, dynamics, and space movements in
electronic music. “These three parameters are still in their childhood.” There you go. And adding,
this time more in sorrow than in anger,
Electronic Art Music will develop very much, after the consequences of the few [sic] compositions of the last fifty-three years are
seriously studied and have become common knowledge.17

Notes
1. Brian Christian, “Mind vs. Machine.” The Atlantic March 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine,archive/2011/03/mind-vs-
machine.8386 (16.03.2011)
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7318180.stm (03.04.2009)
3. Jonathan Fildes, “ ‘Oldest’ computer music unveiled.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7458489.stm (03.04.2009)
4. Nick Collins and Juilo d’Escriván eds., The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. Cambridge University Press, 2007,
reviewed in Tempo.
5. Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Joseph Haydn and the Mechanical Organ. Cardiff: University College of Cardiff Press, 1982.
6. Thomas Bloch, Glass Harmonica. Including works by Reichardt, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor (with Montserrat Sanromà, soprano). Naxos 8.555295.
7. Sir William H. Bragg, “Sound in War.” In The World of Sound: Six Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution. (1920)
London: G. Bell and Sons, 1933, 161–96.
8. Alan Douglas, The Electronic Musical Instrument Manual: A Guide to Theory and Design. (1948) Fifth edition. London: Sir
Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1965, 32.
9. Werner Meyer-Eppler, “Statistical and Psychological Problems of Sound” tr. A. Goehr. In Die Reihe I ed. Herbert Eimert and
Karllieinz Stockhausen. Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1958, 55-6 1 .
10. Robin Maconie, “Periphonic Synthesis: A New Challenge.” Proc. Inst. Acoustics (1985), 7-11.
11. Fred W. Gaisberg, Music on Record. London: Robert Hale, 1946, 45.
12. Curtis Roads ed., The Music Machine: Selected Readings from Computer Music Journall. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989.
13. James A. Moorer, “About this Reverberation Business.” In Curtis Roads and John Strawn eds., Foundations of Computer
Music. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985, 605–39.
14. Jonathan Harvey, “Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco: A Realization at IRCAM.” In Curtis Roads, The Music Machine, 91–93.
15. Curtis Roads, “Grammars as Representations for Music.” Roads and Strawn eds., Foundations of Computer Music, 403–66.
16. Max Mathews, “Artists’ Statements I: The past and future of computer music.” In Collins and d’Escriván, 85–86.
17. Karllieinz Stockhausen, “Artists’ Statements II.” In Collins and d’Escriván, 198.
 16
Art and Realpolitik
Shortly after Stockhausen’s death was announced, I was invited by the New York periodical Artforum
to contribute to a memorial symposium. I was asked to address the controversy over remarks the
composer had made relating to the 9/11 attack toward the end of a press conference in Hamburg
concerning a forthcoming arts and music festival in which a number of premieres were due to take
place. In German culture from the time of Goethe and Beethoven, emphatically so in the long
aftermath of National Socialist repression of modern art in Germany, leading figures in the world of
art have been regarded as the political conscience of the nation, and when asked have been expected
to respond to events of national crisis with a total and absolute clarity of vision, even when the
message is not always comfortable to hear. Stockhausen deserved and expected his interpretation of
so shocking an event to be understood by educated correspondents of leading European news media
in the terms and context of a European history and philosophy of suffering, as a statement of resistance
to the logic of war in the spirit of surrealism, and not least as a haunting reminder of the foundations
of western civilization represented in the emblems and injunctions of Christian morality.

Born in 1928, Karlheinz Stockhausen grew up in rural Germany under Nazism, endured deprivation
and war, flirted with poetry, and studied philosophy, finally deciding in 1950 to devote his life to the
defense of so-called “degenerate art,” and composing a new music of transcendental abstraction.
Inspired by the power of radio, he first came to public attention as a white-coated nuclear age
modernist and composer of the awe-inspiring Song of the Youths, a five-channel tape composition
dedicated to the Catholic faith and grounded in studies of information science and linguistics. In his
electronic and instrumental music Stockhausen pursued a poetic of spatiality and movement
prefigured in the Walt Disney 1940 movie Fantasia but abandoned by Hollywood as impractical.1 To
his musical inventions Stockhausen brought unparalleled fluency in acoustics and freedom from
cliché. The intense frown and piercing gaze of the young man situated in the back row of the Beatles’
Sergeant Pepper album cover adopts a pose straight out of Dürer’s Melencolia I—a pictorial
association extending to the surrounding paraphernalia of hourglass, numerology, astrology, geometry,
even to the symbolism of the carpenter’s nails scattered on the floor. To the performer or listener who
is prepared to work for it, Stockhausen’s music is intelligent, haunting, elusive, intimidating, and
curiously revealing of an inexplicable and profound beauty. Underpinning the invertible Bauhaus
graphics and jazzy exuberance of Zyklus (1959) for solo percussionist, for example, is a delightful
and truly genial dissertation on chance and determinism.
Early in the 1950s Stockhausen forged a close association with Pierre Boulez, whose Le marteau
sans maître (1954–57) has affinities with Kreuzspiel (Cross-play, 1951 revised 1959). Despite
public differences, their professional rivalry continued to the end of Stockhausen’s life and still
awaits serious scholarly inquiry. Another composer to be impressed by the young German genius was
Igor Stravinsky, whose Movements for piano and orchestra (1959–60) owes much of its élan to
Stockhausen’s Kontra–Punkte (1952–53) for similar forces. Stockhausen’s lifelong admiration of
Edgar Varèse, and friendship with New York composers Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, are
chronicled in Rolling Stone correspondent Jonathan Cott’s fascinating Stockhausen: Conversations
with the composer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
Imagine Stockhausen as a quintessentially American composer. Think of Charles Ives, Morton
Feldman, Earle Brown, Henry Brant, or Harry Partch, all of whom are refracted to some degree in his
music. Forget the recordings he is alleged to have made with Miles Davis for Columbia that nobody
has ever heard: this is a composer whose imagery of freedom was forged in the weird hybrid jazz of
Friedrich Hollaender and Kurt Weill in the decadent twenties, nourished by the spread of black music
throughout Europe in the flapper era of Josephine Baker, and reinforced at boarding school during the
war by British Army radio broadcasts of American forces jazz to which the teenager listened
surreptitiously late at night. Energetic and raucous freedom is the message of the sardonic big band
interruptions of the song “Frei” from the Drei Lieder for alto voice and chamber orchestra, a student
work from 1950. Just as some critics already hear Gruppen for three orchestras (1955–57) as a
supersized Stan Kenton set piece with brass choruses swooping to left and right, so the rest of us may
one day learn to hear Piano Piece VI (1954–55, revised 1961) as a massive twenty-minute
unaccompanied break in the spirit of Thelonious Monk, Zeitmasse for wind quintet (1955–56) as pure
dixieland, and the rapturous Piano Piece X (1954, revised 1961), alternating brilliant fingerwork and
fistfuls of glissando clusters, as a zany meld of Jerry Lee Lewis and Oscar Peterson. Stockhausen
grew up in a militarized Germany that had not learned how to “swing” or bend the beat, an intuitive
freedom in expression he persisted in trying to notate with Germanic precision. Of the intricately
interlaced mathematical rhythms of his early works, his pianist friend Aloys Kontarsky said “Oh,
that’s just his way of notating rubato.” Part of him pined for big band jazz: not just the sound, but for a
peculiarly American blend of corporate discipline and pizzazz perhaps best achieved in the over-the-
top “Lucifer’s Dance” (the third scene of Samstag aus LICHT [Saturday from LIGHT], 1981–83),
music for a vertical wall of players styled as an animated Wizard of Oz and interpreted on a 1990 cd
with enormous panache by the University of Michigan Symphonic Band. Jazz was wicked, jazz was
fun, but for an entrenched moralist of the high German tradition, the freedom of jazz was also a
temptation to lose sight of the higher virtues in favor of creature comforts and the easy life.
Stockhausen’s abiding concerns are musical rather than personal, even in his most radical works
such as the Helicopter String Quartet (1992–93), outwardly a ceremony of leave-taking. They are
not his statements, they are the statements he sensed music had to make, and of which he was merely
the messenger. Witness as a youth to the demoralizing consequences of an imposed socialist realism,
and sensitive from early in his career to any suggestion of state censorship of artistic expression,
Stockhausen defended John Cage’s extravagant freedom of invention in a skeptical Europe as a
necessary antidote to neoclassic conservatism, despite the fact that Cage’s performances were often
intellectually as well as artistically inconclusive. He could and did turn the dross of others’
inspirations into gold, for example Mantra (1970), which takes the implications of Cage’s prepared
piano to an entirely new level; or Inori (1973–74), reconstructing the occult gestures of thereminista
Clara Rockmore as a language of prayer translated into a music of unimaginable richness and color.
His habit of invention was fueled as much by technical challenge and scientific goals as by aesthetic
ambition. When Pierre Boulez lost patience with musique concrète, Stockhausen saw a purpose
beyond its invincible clumsiness, realizing that the manipulation of musical objects or “samples”
required a distinctive approach and aesthetic he was able to provide in the graphic scores Prozession
(1967) and Kurzwellen (1968) consisting of plus, minus, and equal signs: transformational recipes of
a powerful and challenging simplicity to be executed onstage and in real time. Every idea to which he
devoted attention, through to Aus den Sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days: 1968), text pieces after
minimalist La Monte Young, emerged purified and rededicated, stripped of any last residue of kitsch
or cliché, and relaunched as a spiritual exercise.
Stockhausen’s moral and intellectual world is difficult for many to access because most of the rest
of us identify morality and intellect with disposing of problems and achieving a state of relative
balance. For the war-scarred generation of Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Nono, Ligeti and others,
however, the only morality lay in maintaining intellectual clarity and personal integrity against a real
and ongoing threat of nuclear destruction. To create art and survive, intact, in defiance of death, is
moral to a point of utter recklessness. For this reason the music of the avant-garde generation stands
out as an art of confrontation, asking difficult questions, and seeking to change minds. We encounter
the same spirit of challenge and resistance in the art of Duchamp, the plays of Beckett, the elliptical
aphorisms of a Cage, the banter of a Groucho Marx, and the melancholy wordplay of Helmut
Heissenbüttel, the German concrete poet whose Simple Grammatical Meditations are woven into the
fabric of Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie II (1965). While it is tempting to characterize the composer as a
tragic victim, after Werner Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser, or the orphaned child of Berg’s opera Wozzeck,
there is also a consciously fantastical, irreverent side to Stockhausen, modeled in the old tradition of
the court jester, Till Eulenspiegel of German folklore, or indeed, the Baron Munchausen of fiction.
Judging by press coverage of his death, which though unexpected, to those acquainted with his
musical symbolism seemed long premeditated, Stockhausen was a once famous but long since
marginalized figure whose main claim to public attention was that he made the cover of the Beatles’
Sergeant Pepper album, was admired by minor celebrities of the pop world, and had become
infamous in recent years for describing the tragedy of 9/11 as a work of art on a cosmic scale. (In an
injudicious comment made off the record to supposedly friendly reporters at a Hamburg Music
Festival news conference five days after the terrorist attack, Stockhausen had said, “That minds
accomplish in one act something that we in music can’t dream of, that people rehearse like mad for
ten years, totally fanatically, for a concert and then die—that’s the greatest work of art there is in the
entire cosmos.”) It was a provocative remark which should have remained private, but the story was
leaked and led to a public outcry. That the composer’s motives for saying what he did remain
unknown to a majority who have never paid any attention to his music is a matter for sober reflection.
What he meant was perfectly clear to his German audience, to the press representative who leaked the
story, to the Festival management who were present at the conference, and to Hamburg Culture
Senator Christina Weiss, whose handling of the ensuing debacle contributed to her defeat at the polls
a few months later. At the heart of this public relations disaster lay the deeply serious issue of how
modern art and music can respond, or if they can respond at all, to the threat of terrorism. That
Stockhausen was challenged on this very issue should not be regarded as a disaster, even though he
took it personally and it cost him a great deal. The peculiar distinction of this episode is that his
opinion was asked at all.2
In a scathing and factually exhaustive account of what transpired at the press conference, his
companion, American clarinetist Suzanne Stephens, defended Stockhausen as a bewildered old man
drawn into a media trap and cynically abandoned by a Festival administration and its political
backers already uneasy at press accusations that Hamburg had provided a safe haven for some of the
terrorists.3 Or one can go a step further and interpret the entire affair as a fatwa deliberately
engineered by the Festival authorities, with the connivance of disaffected members of the press corps,
to counter the massive loss it was already clear the Festival was bound to incur in the wake of the
Twin Towers attack, by removing at a stroke its single most expensive component—a four-day
program of Stockhausen’s works including first performances of scenes from Freitag aus LICHT
(Friday from LIGHT: 1991–94)—with no risk of recrimination or redress. This is to see the affair as
tragic farce worthy of the attentions of a Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard.
At Stockhausen’s level of awareness, however, a level of divination at which things that happen to
him are construed not trivially or personally but as a convergence of “cosmic” forces for which the
composer is simply a lightning rod, what matters is not who is to blame or their individual
motivation, but the absolute reality of 9/11 and the artist’s moral duty to account for it. Stephens was
missing the point. The event had to happen because it did happen. That the composer’s message was
misconstrued is par for the course.
Stockhausen’s response was pure Buñuel. He was asking his audience to understand the attack
from a completely opposite perspective (“now all of you must adjust your brains” he had said by way
of introduction) as an existential act, like the exploding car bomb taking out the main character (a
diplomat) early in That Obscure Object of Desire, an event to be understood in retrospect as a
political act, but one which at the moment of experience, in the movie as well as on CNN, strikes the
unguarded viewer as an act of God, a metaphysical experience and profoundly mysterious and
terrifying aesthetic event, like the thunderbolt that shatters the nervous tension of the final movement
of Haydn’s revolutionary “Drumroll” Symphony and is intended as an intimation of divine retribution.
Tense with excitement, as one can infer from the transcript, Stockhausen went on to say that for such a
feat of imagination to be executed in reality was profoundly immoral. Surely that was enough. The
opinion of a musician both of whose parents were the victims of war, the mother by lethal injection,
the father at the eastern front, a survivor who worked out the final six months of resistance as an
orderly in a field hospital caring for and comforting American war victims of Allied phosphor bombs,
speaking English to them and playing music to ease their suffering, deserves respect as the view of
one who knows what war is about, has suffered and forgiven, and who does not shrink from
confronting the moral ambiguities of international conflict, or from recognizing that actions taken in a
morally defensible cause can still inflict enormous cruelty on the innocent.
For Stockhausen, the issue was not just how art in the modern world can respond to the presence
of evil, but whether or not art deserves to survive. In past centuries the icons of Christianity testified
to a life of suffering and transcendence among peoples for whom suffering was a way of life for
which there existed no other remedy than passive acceptance and the promise of a happier life in the
hereafter. In its own terms Stockhausen’s music is also a testament to suffering—it is both difficult to
learn and hard to listen to—but a suffering that promises relief in the here and now to those who
believe, and are prepared to put in the necessary work. The notion of performance as goal-directed
activity from an incomplete script is routine in Hollywood and on Broadway, but traditionally alien to
art music. It signifies that a Stockhausen score may require the invention of new skills or techniques
in order to be realized effectively. A perfect example is Mixtur (1966) for electronically modulated
instrumental sounds. Problems with the equipment led to a rift with Boulez, who had agreed to
conduct the premiere and was offended that the electronically modified sounds were unacceptably
distorted. In 1970, after encountering cleaner technology in Japan, Stockhausen added a filter stage to
create the magical “altered reality” of Mantra for two pianos and ring modulation. The problem of
distortion was solved, but Boulez was unimpressed and Mixtur did not obtain a retrofit.
The equivalent concept of a “work in progress” in the music of Boulez, Cage, Berio, or
Stockhausen, implies a research ethic that accepts temporary failures and false trails in pursuit of a
higher goal. It rejects the cynical notion, all too frequently employed in attacks on the avant-garde,
that a work of art has no ultimate purpose other than as an assertion of personal freedom and act of
protest against moral and physical enslavement. The latter argument from self-determination has come
down to us as a disturbing legacy of the revolutionary counter​culture of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; it led
inexorably to the moral vacuum of the Marquis de Sade, the despair and madness of Nietzsche, and
ultimately to the desperate nihilism of André Breton who, in the name of total freedom and personal
transcendence, identified the primary geature of surrealism—firing at random into the crowd—in
terms doomed to be taken all too literally by generations of susceptible adolescents harboring visions
of instant glory and enjoying unconstrained access to lethal weaponry.
That Stockhausen identified himself with the surrealist leader and demagogue might have been
expected. Both had experienced the folly and slaughter of war as frontline hospital orderlies. Both
believed in the healing power of a new art dedicated to the irrational and transcendental. Each saw
himself as an autocratic intelligence and revolutionary leader. As a new arrival in Paris in 1952
Stockhausen had been inducted into the politics of art by none other than Boulez, whose commitment
to Antonin Artaud and the theater of frenzy had been aroused in turn by Jean-Louis Barrault and his
circle as an antidote to the Nazi presence in occupied Paris. According to the composer’s version of
events, the seven days of retreat that inspired Stockhausen’s text compositions From the Seven Days
in the fateful year 1968 were prompted by anguish over his separation from his second wife, Mary
Bauermeister, and the texts in turn by readings of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian sage of militant
resistance. Concealed within this account of a crucial period of conversion to a new mode of direct
intuition, however, is a reference to the episode of fasting, dream, and inspiration recorded in
Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, of which the composer’s remarks on the speed of intuition, in the
1971 lecture “Intuitive Music,” are a direct paraphrase.4 Rumors of a youthful allegiance to Breton’s
aesthetic of violence may well have piqued media interest in the response of the old cultural warrior
to the events of 9/11 in the first place.
From the time of Beethoven, Germany had been accustomed to turn to her leading composers for
moral guidance in times of crisis. The people sought answers in Wagner, in Strauss’s paraphrase of
Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, and, after 1945, in Moses
und Aron, Schoenberg’s dramatic oratorio on the subject of leadership to a Promised Land, a work
abandoned unfinished at the composer’s death at the prophet’s heartrending cry “Oh word! Oh word,
that I lack!” The German press covering the Hamburg Festival’s media conference were well aware
that Stockhausen had devoted the previous twenty-four years to composing LICHT, a series of
philosophical operas, or passion plays, named after the seven days of the week, and aiming to
reconcile the contrary impulses of human nature in an abstract panoply of positive and negative
energies patterned after Wagner and Goethe’s Faust. The composer had already ventured skyward
with the Helicopter String Quartet, a rite of passage or farewell with unsettling Futurist undertones
of commitment to the cleansing power of war. These German media correspondents included writers
of considerable sophistication and culture. When the composer spoke of the artist as “a medium,” they
understood the allusion to Beethoven saying “I am only a vessel.” When Stockhausen declared “liking
is remembering” they recognized the voice of Socrates on his deathbed, recorded by Plato in the
Phaedo. They well knew that this was a composer given to making oracular pronouncements drawn
on the prophecies of great and not-so-great literature: William Blake, Goethe, Novalis, Christian
Morgenstern. They also knew that his sources of inspiration could on occasion be elaborately
camouflaged.5
After the evening-long play of voices of Momente (1961–64, revised 1972), a cantata merging
snapshots of love and reconciliation in his personal life with messages of equality and emancipation
of black Americans, expressed in an idiom combining the intimacy of late night cabaret with the
joyfully inspired rhetoric of black gospel music, it had taken a huge leap of faith for Stockhausen to
embark on a project as monumental as LICHT, planned from the outset to take some twenty-five years
to complete. It also took courage to defy convention and make the transition from Momente’s gospel
idiom, a libretto whose narrative remains coherent and intelligible despite the music’s multifaceted
and nonlinear structure, to the starkly revelatory messages of pure, undigested suffering of
Donnerstag (1978–80) and Samstag aus LICHT (Thursday and Saturday from LIGHT), the first two
operas to be composed, in which painful scenes are recreated of his parents’ deaths, and the agonies
of American war casualties. Stockhausen has consistently come under fire for abandoning the literary
conventions of opera in favor of a range of vocalizations varying from purely acoustic tones and
noises—shown to entrancing effect in the tape composition Invisible Choirs (1979)—via planned
degrees of confusion, to fully intelligible (and deliberately banal) dialogue. The acceptance of
unformed, randomized, or fragmented speech had already been embraced intellectually by Cage, as a
necessary consequence of chance operations effected on a range of text materials—including
Wittgenstein—and by the surrealists through techniques designed to eliminate personal preferences.
Cultural historian Ian Rodger has attributed the emergence of an aesthetic of incoherence to postwar
radio, in particular the radio dramas of Beckett and Ionesco, and to the medium of tape recording
which came into regular use in Europe in 1951–52, at precisely the time Stockhausen began his
apprenticeship in electronic music under the auspices of Cologne Radio’s drama division. For poets
like Breton, Beckett, Ionesco, and Heissenbüttel, the tape medium revealed the sufferings of
inarticulate social derelicts and lost souls with searing clarity. Stockhausen’s theater of LIGHT draws
its moral conviction from an art of radio conceived not as literature but rather as an audible poetry of
words, silence, music, and special effects, timed and scripted with meticulous precision, and
rejecting the prevailing classical style of poetic diction in virtually the same terms as Wordsworth,
150 years before, had advocated the unfettered idioms of natural speech in the Preface to his Lyrical
Ballads.6
In the works of a composer as obsessed as Stockhausen with hidden codes, with serialism as a
method of codemaking either to generate new worlds of experience, or as a means of establishing a
logical basis for an otherwise chaotic existence, it is natural to encounter coded signatures in the
musical fabric. The syllable “Hu!” emerges as a sign of life in Ylem (1972), a musical fable depicting
the expansion and contraction of our current universe in a mere 21 minutes, and its renewed
expansion thereafter in an alternate spacetime outside the concert chamber. It alludes to hu-manity and
to hu-bris; in Greek mythology to the cry of the owl, emblem of the goddess Athena and wisdom, but
to German speakers also a covert expression of disgust, the equivalent of “Ugh!” The syllable
reappears in Inori cunningly disguised as a sacred object and the subject of a solemn preconcert talk
titled “Vortrag über HU” (Lecture on HU, 1974), ostensibly a musicological endorsement, but
actually a criticism of a harmonic idiom the composer privately regarded as depraved and corrupt,
delivered tongue in cheek after the manner of philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno, as parodied by
Mauricio Kagel in the theater piece Sur Scène (1960). Whenever the “Hu!” syllable is encountered as
a leitmotif of the human actions on display in LICHT, it carries a cautionary message.
The syllable “Ka” for Karlheinz became his personal sign. Anything with “Ka” in the title was
automatically imbued with private signficance. It became a way of orientating himself in a real world
of chance encounters and recollections: of Karl Kraus, kabarett, Kathakali, Kagel, and above all with
flutist Kathinka Pasveer, his companion and muse in later life. In 1972, at the Shiraz Festival in Iran,
when LIGHT was just an idea in formation, he experienced the epiphany of Robert Wilson’s Ka
Mountain, a ritual of spiritual ascent enacted over seven days and nights on the slopes of the sacred
mountain of Haft Tan, improvised by psychologically impaired members of the Byrd Hoffman school
of art therapy in New York, and culminating on the final night against the simulated backdrop of a
blazing Manhattan.7 Years later, in 2001, with the opera cycle nearing completion, Stockhausen found
himself facing accusations of moral complicity based on the grotesque equation of a benign music
theater of hovering helicopters with the choreographed assault of four hijacked passenger aircraft on
iconic US financial and military strongholds. Nature herself found it hard to forgive, and took a cruel
revenge. After 2005, and the brutal irony of Hurricane Katrina—another disaster for which he would
also be presumed accountable—the composer had had enough.

Notes
1. The outcome of a collaboration between Disney, RCA, and conductor Leopold Stokowski, Fantasound was a high definition
optical (sound on film) recording and sound projection system intended for the movie industry, requiring a second dedicated
35mm apparatus delivering stereo sound to left, center, and right audio channels in front of the viewer, and ambient sound to 44
speakers located to the sides and rear of the auditorium, after passing though a complex system of relays and delays.
Photophone Handbook for Projectionists 2nd edn. Camden NJ: RCA Manufacturing Company Inc., 1941, 32–37.
2. It probably did not help matters that Freitag aus LICHT is a work of theater addressing the negative connotations of Freiheit or
freedom, the moral chaos arising, among other things, from indiscipline, random intercourse, miscegenation, intermodulation,
nuclear science, and AIDS, illustrated by orgies of stuffed toys. Underlying the ensuing discussion may have been the unspoken
question “is this the best art can do in the face of urban jihad?”—a Sphinxlike conundrum to which, perhaps, the composer had
no answer.
Walter Benjamin had argued in 1936 that humanity had become alienated to a point where “it can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” In a posthumous collection of essays Theodor Adorno, a former member
of Benjamin’s circle, surmised “it is conceivable that what we now need are works of art which consume themselves through
the temporality at their heart, offering their own life to the moment of truth’s appearance and then vanishing without a trace
while remaining completely undiminished in the process. The nobility of such an attitude would not be unworthy of art.” I suspect
Adorno is speaking of himself. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory tr. ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis MI: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997. Cited by Larson Powell, “The Technological Subject: Music, Media, and Memory in Stockhausen’s
Hymnen.” In Nora M. Alter and Lutz Peter Koepnick ed., Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture.
Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2004, 229.
3. Suzanne Stephens, “Report from Suzanne Stephens to Jim Stonebraker for the Stockhausen Home Page September 29, 2001.”
http://www.stockhausen.org/eyewitness.html
4. —Breton: “Knut Hamsum ascribes this sort of revelation to which I had been subjected as deriving from Hunger, and he may
not be wrong. (The fact is I did not eat every day during that period of my life). . . . All of a sudden I found, quite by chance,
beautiful phrases, phrases such as I had never written. . . . Thoughts came to me so rapidly and continued to flow so abundantly
that I lost a whole host of delicate details, because my pencil could not keep up with them.” From the 1924 Surrealist
Manifesto: (http://www.screensite.org/courses/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm) (05/01/2008). —
Stockhausen: “I am trying to find a technique for myself as a composer and interpreter, and for other musicians who work with
me, to extend the moment of intuition consciously, so that when I want to, it starts. . . .
And those moments of intuitive working must last as long as I want, but then I will have to find a completely new technique
of making music. I can’t sit at a a table, with a pencil and a rubber, sharpen the pencil and write down what is coming from
intuition, because intuition has a particular kind of speed, which is by no means congruent with the speed of writing.” “Intuitive
Music” in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stockhausen on Music ed. Robin Maconie. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2000,
124–25.
5. In Nazi Cinema (tr. Gertrud Mander and David Wilson. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1974) Erwin Leiser draws attention to the
theme of sacrifice in German movies of the 1930s, and the extent to which the passions of nationalism and self-annihilation—a
will for transcendence to the extent of seeking glory by death at any cost, however pointless—were already embedded in the
German character and available for cooption by the Third Reich as part of its strategy for supremacy. For a rehabilitated
Germany in the twenty-first century, reeling fom the events of 9/11, the moral dilemma would be compounded by a frisson of
recognition of the same themes reemerging in the new age of jihad, along with a realization that for the jihadists, the doctrine of
personal annihilation for the greater good had been elevated beyond abstract transcendence to an effective and rational political
strategy.
One wonders if the doctrine of transcendence were to have arisen not just from a morbid attention to the gruesome and
tortured aspect of Christian sacrifice as depicted (say) in the Isenheim Crucifixion of Matthias Grünewald, but from the literal
interpretation of ancient history. To read the life of Achilles literally is to see it as short, brutish, and meaningless; construed
symbolically, on the other hand, it is a myth about strength and weakness in the abstract. The death of Hector at the hands of
Achilles, and his corpse being dragged through the streets by his heel, is the story not of a real person but of what happens when
 the string, the power source of the bow, is stretched beyond its limits, and snaps, or is severed, to leave a useless thread dangling
and dragging along the ground. See R. W. Livingstone, The Pageant of Greece. Abridged. Oxford and London: Clarendon
Press, 1925, 40–42.
German nationalism in the nineteenth century relied on literacy, obliging the leaders of public education to invent literal
explanations for oral texts the meanings of which had been lost, or were too abstruse, or scientific, or beyond the comprehension
of common people whose enforced allegiance to government​imposed standards of morality was already intended to disconnect
them from local traditions and loyalties. Hence the emphasis on the virtues of total obedience and meaningless sacrifice, along
with its discreditable aftermath, the Nuremberg defense that one was only following orders. Persuaded by German romantic
idealism, the English empire was drawn into the same perversely literal doctrine of individual sacrifice in the service of political
power, and with similarly grievous results. Conflict in the Middle East, and the events of 9/11 as an outcome, could suddenly be
seen as awful continuation of a policy for which the western alliance was ultimately responsible.
6. Ian Rodger, Radio Drama. London: Macmillan, 1982, 97–108.
7. Irving Wardle, “Exclusive lines under the desert stars.” The Times of London, 12 September 1972. In Robin Maconie, Other
Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005, 423–24.
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 About the author
Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1942, Robin Maconie studied piano with Christina Geel and
majored in English literature and contemporary music at Victoria University under Don McKenzie,
Frederick Page and Roger Savage. As a graduate he studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris
Conservatoire during 1963–1964, and the following year in Cologne as a DAAD scholar with
composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Herbert Eimert, Bernd-Alois Zimmermann, the pianist Aloys
Kontarsky, and other distinguished tutors. He has held teaching appointments at the universities of
Auckland, Sussex, Surrey, Oxford, and The City University, London, and over five years developed a
unique course in music appreciation, acoustics, and critical listening as a tutor at Savannah College of
Art and Design.
As a London based music columnist for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Educational Supplement
and Literary Supplement during the 1970s he gained a reputation as a combative spokesperson for
new music while also assisting John Mansfield Thomson editorially in the formative years of the
quarterly Early Music. His wider reputation as a writer and music is as a specialist in the philosophy
and technology of music with special reference to the avant-garde music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, on
whom he has written and assisted in a number of titles, most recently Other Planets, published in
2005 by Scarecrow Press. In other writings including The Second Sense (2002) and The Way of
Music (2006) Maconie takes delight in defending modern art music and aesthetics against the
doctrinaire criticisms of philosophy, music education, linguistics and cognitive science. His books
are praised for their conceptual boldness, clarity, and freedom from jargon. He returned to New
Zealand in 2002 and lives and works in Dannevirke.