Gadfly's Muse

Little Boys and Trains

One of the great benefits of being a grandparent is that one can do the things one always wanted to do as a kid and excuse it as "showing the kids a good time."  Sometimes the kids even enjoy it too.

Trains were made for little boys.  Ranking right up there alongside watching a campfire, the mesmerizing effect of watching a train pass is genetically ingrained in the masculine DNA.  Most of the grand old steam engines were gone when I was a kid.  The really big ones worked all through World War II but were fazed out starting shortly after that war ended.  By the time I was five or six, just the age for fascination, diesels reigned supreme.  Many times, late at night, though it was about 3 miles away,  I could hear the midnight run pulling on down to the station, running from Meridian through Hattiesburg to points well south.  It was all freight, coal, timber and Masonite products from the plant in Laurel, but that only made for a more full bodied melody.  The passenger run, the Crescent flying down to New Orleans from Washington, D. C. pulled through Hattiesburg at 4:30 pm and the sound was inaudible above the daytime noise.  Passenger trains sing high tenor anyway.  Freight trains, with a 100 cars in tow, are all bass with a nice, steady clackity-clack rhythm keeping every thing honest.

But, as is common with greying memories, I digress.  Being a grand-parent ("paw-paw" in steadfast consistency with my Southern roots), I considered it absolutely essential to a well rounded education that my three grand-girls, two grandsons and their respective fathers, be presented at court at the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road Museum in Baltimore.  I am not entirely sure if they loved it as much as I did... but that is entirely irrelevant.  It was necessary.... 

Anytime I am sandwiched between three big rigs on highway 83 heading North out of Knoxville, my nostalgia for the old days of railroad pre-eminence reaches full blast.  It is a shame that these kids will never really have the opportunity to sit on the river bank, next to a trestle, and simply dream along with the lumbering cars.  Their life is more attuned to the highway: frenetic, chaotic and pulse pounding.  A train is melancholy, wistful and dreamy.  It's the stuff of summer afternoons, warm and lazy, with "nothing to do" as the highest ambition and crowning glory of childhood.  That life seems as far away and alien as Jupiter now.

But at the museum, looking at those marvelous exhibits, touching the grand old beasts, picturing them in their glory, belching smoke and steam, it was almost like being on the old Leaf River again...  I commend the experience and the museum to all of those whose soul is not quite dead yet... for whom romance is forever linked to works of art posing as locomotives, who can hear a song in a whistle.

Schoenberg: An Acquired Taste?....... Naaaah!

Listen to Pierrot Lunaire here! (The occasion for this post)

Entering into the dark domains of musical criticism is a surefire means of arousing contempt no matter what position one takes nor the degree of actual expertise that one possesses in advancing it.  As to the latter, actual expertise, I offer no defense or apology.  In formal academic, specialized knowledge, I have little to none.  My only qualifications consist in a lifetime of varied musical exposure, appreciation and some degree of personal probing.  I am a bit beyond the "I know what I like..." attitude when it comes to art but no one would ever mistake me for an expert... on much of anything.

However I am convinced of one basic premise.  Music is communication beyond words though obviously words may be included.  Something basic goes on in the human animal when music is encountered.  The physical phenomenon of "resonance" seems metaphorically appropriate to describe it in my mind.  Something in our psyche "resonates" in conformity with or in response to sounds ordered in such a way as to be called music.  It is more than rhythm, motifs, melody, cadence, etc.  It is the aroused response, perhaps necessary and inevitable, evoked by those sounds that gains the appropriate emotional framework in the listener.  A hymn works to orient a person's emotional being to that which should correspond to the tone and intent of the lyrics.  One does not lull a baby to sleep with a Sousa march.... but one does sense the surge of patriotic feeling that perhaps inclines us to join the ranks and advance to the Cause.  Music does this far more efficiently than a ranting demagogue.

But from the days of Pythagoras to the present, the question "what is music?" has plagued and confounded virtually everyone who tries to nail the subject down.  Is there a difference between the sounds we call "music" and the sounds we encounter on a busy urban street?  Some would say "No" - I am of the opinion "Yes".

To me, as I previously stated, music is communication... it is emotional language conveyed in sound as painting is emotional language conveyed in the visible.  If so, there has to be some controls on the sound such that actual communication is achieved.  And here is where the arrows start flying.  To me, communication cannot happen if a mutual structure for intelligibility is not granted.  I and the speaker have to understand English before communication between us occurs in that language.  There is a fundamental parallel in music.

But music does not directly impinge on the intellect as spoken languages do.  Spoken languages employ symbols, called words, which correspond to intellectually granted concepts (Wittgenstein beware).  Music appeals to the emotional responses and seeks resonance with them.  Hence, one might say, that any sound which achieves such resonance may therefore be properly called "music."  I would reply "Sometimes, perhaps, but not necessarily."  It is here that another observation is warranted.

Immanuel Kant saw, and I agree, that a basic distinguishing element in the human condition, that which separates us from animals, is that we must see patterns, we must discover order, in the impinging sensations that come at us from the world.  Humans see things in terms of "cause/effect", "physical laws", "moral imperatives."  He observed that life consists of being impacted daily by all kinds of sensations and that automatically humans sort those sensations, categorize them, and discover some kind of order in them.  In short, human kind cannot tolerate chaos even as nature abhors a vacuum.

Here is where I think we begin to see the outlines of how "music" may be used to describe a particular set of impinging sounds.  "Music" requires that the sounds be "ordered" in some intelligible manner such that it will correspond to (hence "resonate" with) the essential human characteristic of requiring order so that we may "understand."  In the chaos of a street, the human mind will automatically reject the majority of sounds such that we "hear" the cry of our child.  We filter out "noise" and seek "meaning". If we are awaiting a trolley we "hear" the distinctive bell as it approaches... otherwise it is rejected. 

We hear "music" when some kind of "order" (which may or may not be to our "taste") is present.  By definition "chaos" is not "order" and hence it cannot function as "music."

Arnold Schoenberg: were his pivotal contributions to the 20th century world of art music?  For that which he is most famous... I would say "no" in the same manner that I would not say that ingesting sand in a sandstorm is the same as tasting a fine single malt scotch.  Just because it impinges the palette does not mean that it is good whiskey, or even whiskey at all.  Schoenberg's atonality is chaos.  Chaos is not music.  It is not an acquired taste... it is, after all, a failure to communicate.