Mind Models

Roger Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415974295
• eBook ISBN: 9781136091865
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This new edition of Mind Models reintroduces and renews a classic work on 20th century composition, one that has remained relevant for over a quarter century -- and should remain a central reading for decades to come.

PART I
Rates of Change

Permanence

“The beauty of the rose is in its passing,” wrote a Japanese master of N drama, Zeami. He was fascinated by transience as a dimension of scarcity, hence value. We now see that the acceptance of this pairing is culturally variable. Age is in one context positive, in another negative. Our own growing concern with recycling materials is based on an emergent understanding that new forms and functions can be imposed upon the same basic materials, as need decrees. Permanence is, in other words, a relative condition whose value depends on one's perspective.

As the pace of urban, technological life increases, the impact of individual objects and events decreases. Objects and momentary conditions, however striking, are not as solid as they once were. Some artists and industrialists pay tribute to this transience. They contribute to its effect by formalizing it and attempting to imbue it with value of its own. Such calculated rationalization of what one sees can provide a convenient excuse for drifting with and capitalizing on the social course. This is an understanding of convenience.

It is not necessary to abandon the idea of continuing relevance but, rather, to shift attention from the individual items of experience to the processes they populate and define. The event itself, whether earthquake, invasion, or court decision, is now quickly dissolved in the current of explanation and documentation that follows (demonstrating both the confluence of trends that produced the event and the radial implications it holds for the future). An occasional occurrence—a moon landing or fate's meddling with a figure of international importance—rises above the processes that contrived it, but these are increasingly rare. In the main, we are attuned to tides, to streams of events, and not to the individual item, whatever its magnitude.

Some more innovative artists have been taken to task for losing interest in the creation of “permanent” products and, by implication, of lasting values. But the physical object can be de-emphasized without sacrificing the peculiar insight possible through fresh conceptual perspectives on the forms of reality provided by a given context. For example, the sculptor Jir Takamatsu employs minimal materials—a sheet of canvas, a length of rope, to probe the flux of change within identity. Large quadrilateral sections of canvas are sewn together so that the outer perimeter of the whole remains square while excess material collects in the center. (The inside seams are longer than the outside edges.) Each time the entire mass is tossed, it falls into new patterns of prominence and shadow, an endlessly variable topography generated from unchanging substance and an eloquent commentary on the nature of permanence. Takamatsu's work generates implications with longrange value: a flexible surface, the skin of a potential dome, is made to accommodate a flat support—a phenomenon natural to one set of dimensions is thrust into another environment and transformed.

Critics of innovative artists should recognize that these artists are often groping toward the comprehension of process. They should realize that this is a reorientation rather than an abrogation of concern. Basic reorientation cannot be accomplished easily; especially since the focus on processes, on extended activities or evolving commentaries which abjure the particular object, is unprecedented and difficult for the inexperienced collector, critic, or museum-goer to comprehend. Processes are beyond possession; they separate the artist from his profitable involvement with prospective owners, the buyer from the satisfaction of possession.

Good art demands as one of its components an architectonic and allusive scope. This normally arises only out of the maker's confidence in the presence of his materials. Any major reorientation necessitates, then, a period of absorption and acclimatization by the artist. The public and the connoisseur must also adjust their attitudes.

Music in the West has occupied an unenviable economic position ever since the individual composer stepped from the servant's quarters into the metaphoric marketplace by attempting to replace services with salable goods (original scores). Though collectors may find the purchase of an historically valued musical manuscript a worthy investment, its value derives from the sonic worlds it has stimulated and from the current renown of its creator, not from its graphic substance. The manuscript defines a similar yet differentiated class of musical experiences that are implied but require the intelligent collaboration of performer and listener for realization. Unlike a painting or a piece of sculpture, a manuscript is not suited for direct public appreciation.

Collaboration presupposes a common set of terms, a context that is not in need of constant definition or fresh delimitation. Traditional painting and music continue to be appealing because of their sensuous uniqueness and structural generality. Their surfaces remain invitations and are organized in such a way that their inner patterns of relationships can be rediscovered as the context and emphasis in presentation change. Theatrical art has always depended on the willing suspension of disbelief. The spectator collaborates tacitly by agreeing to set aside the ordinary prerogatives of judgment, to accept events and consequences that might be patently absurd within the normal concourse of life. Hence, the play lends itself to abstract, general applicability as does, for a variety of reasons, the best of visual, plastic, and aural art.

This was possible because there was always an original context of some sort and it was a sufficiently long-lived and widespread shaping force to have been accessible to an individual through act of will, or inadvertence. What has happened to the assumption of firmly understood and accessible cultural contexts? Historically, creative artists have only on the rarest occasions broken with their own intellectual and social milieus; today the contemporary composer struggles to settle on a manageable selection of materials and to gain the attention of a small slice of an unprecedentedly massive public. Only then may he be tellingly productive.

In the past decade, there has been a geometric increase in the number of distinct subgroups within the world community and within each nation. Context is no longer inherited in the natural and, for all practical purposes, permanent way that formerly held true. To a certain degree, we can now choose our context. How this will affect the idea of style—or idiom-based art—is as yet difficult to fix with certainty. One imagines several possible trends. Human beings share certain anatomical and biological characteristics that are independent of cultural or racial factors. There may be, then, some avenues of direct sensory experience that could transcend the apparent differences. Another possibility is the use of general frames of reference, utilitarian structures such as cities, through which “guides” with special insight could help us experience in aesthetically pleasing ways. Finally, there is the notion of aesthetic experience individually tailored for small groups or for private consumption with materials derived from the participants. Attempts are already being made in each of these categories and we shall discuss them in later chapters.

Within and across the broad categories noted above, an abundance of possibilities is open to the creative artist. If the artist is faced with the dilemma of selecting limits, then each member of the public will have similar if smaller problems. He too will have a wide variety of choices, but even less time and energy to devote to selection. Consequently, he may recoil from the problems and make the simplistic choice: rejection. From a rational point of view it is difficult to see why this should be the case. Large-scale innovation in social and material matters is probably resisted less now than in the past. Moderate, unobtrusive change is embraced with progressive enthusiasm. But unfortunately, in the realm of art, prejudice towards change is indulged imperiously.

As our awareness of the rate at which change is experienced increases, we will pay more attention to trends than to the individual fact, which happens to result from their momentary intersection. We may find it more natural to cope with long-range processes, to surrender to the unfamiliar contexts, which they imply. The question, then, is how will the individual respond to life and the aesthetic experience in the next few decades? If we are less frequently obliged to exercise lifegiving or life-preserving judgments, should we not be more willing to risk the adoption of unfamiliar aesthetic frames of reference? If the security of basic life functions were to be guaranteed, the individual might well be both increasingly free to select from a variety of intellectual allegiances and more willing to adopt, if only temporarily, seemingly remote contexts for sensory and intellectual experience. The artist and his audience should enhance their mobility, range of concerns, and the willingness with which they adopt varied contexts in the interest of redefined benefits. One must expect less resonance from the singular event and privileged relational structures, accepting more readily the rewards of flow and process.

The basic issue is the speed with which experience can be consumed. As the rate of change increases, so must our concept of how we sample and process experience. Adaptability is reaffirmed as the evolutionary imperative.

Acceleration and Pace

A taste for speed is commonplace but an appreciation of acceleration is less often encountered. Let us assume that something is continuously increasing its displacement with respect to a reference point, be it intellectual, cultural, or spatial. Does the amount of displacement remain constant within equivalent intervals of time? If it increases with each interval, acceleration is involved. Acceleration is unrelenting intensification, an accumulative tendency. Acceleration is not necessarily uniform, however, since it can occur at different rates and may be continuous or discontinuous. Failure to recognize the by no means trivial possibility of discontinuous acceleration has subjected us to considerable hysteria and to sundry unfounded prophecies of disaster. Nevertheless, acceleration does involve larger perils than the unchanging nature of speed.

The glutting of the skilled-job market in the 1960's will serve as an example. A disruptive factor in American life then, this manpower surplus could not have been predicted on the basis of college enrollments alone, although they were certainly startling. (Attendance was up from 2.3 million in 1950 to more than 7 million by 1970.) While the bureaucratic mechanism of higher education was expanding, industry streamlined its operations through automation and computer speed. Specialized disciplines whose value had seemed unquestionable were obviated and new ones generated, as industry, oblivious to the content of formal education, forged ahead. Young people found themselves with fully developed sets of values incompatible with those of the business or government concerns which they were expected to join. How did these presumably stable and interdependent processes come to be so badly out of phase?

Part of the answer lies in the distinctive pace with which each increasingly self-contained and self-defined sector of society develops. Can we reasonably expect that the various areas of revolutionary change likely to occur within the coming decades will proceed apace? Is it likely that the rates at which various sectors of society make use of the products of revolutionary trends will correspond naturally? The inertial essence of self-generating and self-maintaining systems of public education and industrial automation, the predictive power of computer-generated models, constantly reforming lines of professional disciplines, and changing value systems of succeeding generations will lead to an increasingly more specialized and fragmented vocabulary of ideas and mores. It is becoming untenable to identify a condition or seek its roots within the confines of any one discipline. But although our awareness of alternate views and structuring of reality is beginning to breed caution, it is almost impossible to find an interdisciplinary language that is general enough to provide genuine perspective. An initial step can be made by passing beneath the surface of descriptive systems to ways in which the subject material comes to us. The notions of acceleration and unsynchronous rates of change in themselves are useful in understanding how theories or visions are offered to societies, and the effectiveness with which they are likely to be absorbed. We are accustomed to think of speed in the adoption process as being at least moderately suspect and, more often than not, indicative of incautious naïveté. In this context, speed equals haste.

Is this necessarily so? Might we now learn to streamline the process by which we familiarize ourselves with new devices or ideas, new friendships or roles? Must we continue to use often archaic criteria to judge behavior in the face of new conditions? Adapting ourselves to the rate at which ideas, objects, and services become available now does not necessarily imply indifference or the abandonment of monitoring values. Cultivation of the ability to form and discard images of reality, comparable to the convenient adoption of contexts for aesthetic reward mentioned in the preceding chapter on permanence, might well result in an expanded sense of scope for mental life, a view wide enough to transform a quantitative dimension into a qualitative enhancement of the species.

On the negative side, consider the introversion implicit in the use of drugs, whether they be the mind-numbing agents of the young or the tranquilizing powders of their parents. The consumption of such isolating depressants effectively removes the users from a productive place in society. Yet, of course, a rapid pace of change cannot be governmentally mandated, customized for each segment of society. The most damaging effects of rapid pace can be moderated on the basis of attitude changes by a focusing on trends instead of events. Relief will not come from old perspectives in which the importance of individual moments remains inappropriately inflated. A redefined sense of what represents optimum participation in life is necessary.

The need for relief from the accelerative paces of the real world suggests a view of art as a refuge. This is a primary factor now operating to inflate the value of the older, socially accepted works of art. Certified by histori-cal selectivity, these are assumed to be understood, thereby releasing the spectator/listener from any obligation to exert effort. But the nature of the perspective that art gives to life as it is lived changes as human contexts change. Beginning as an agent of communal purposes, the artisan later became responsible to an aristocratic elite and in the process became what we call an artist. Egalitarian trends returned him to the service of a mass public but on a far less utilitarian, more esoteric basis. Now, as the capacity for the storage and retrieval of information expands almost limitlessly and subcultures proliferate, the artist is pressured to adjust his output to the variegated needs of a mass of subgroups, to learn to tailor and differentiate his products according to rapidly evolving needs and standards. The work of more than one important composer and filmmaker now clearly indicates the fascination that exploration of unfamiliar pace holds.¹ Where art, magic, and their attendant excitement may have once provided a highly stimulative contrast from dreary routine, we now face a turnabout, where certain types of art may become a refuge.

Diversity

If impermanence is an inevitable result of acceleration, diversity is likely as well. When the basic processes defining a society are in accord, they are integrated with relative ease. The functional interests of the individual and his society are served with maximum economy. When integration between, let us say, business, education, and ecological considerations, national and international priorities, or scientific and humane concerns breaks down or tends to become arbitrary, we lose the certainty of ponderous bureaucracies and the relative flexibility of our local communities. Although the content of formal education and the requirements of business may no longer be congruent, they still fall into some pattern of relationships, however incoherent. Institutions so basic to society as education and business cannot function in true independence.

A confusing diversity is produced as a growing number of intersections between asynchronous processes occurs. The proliferation of technical specialties available at American universities during the second half of the twentieth century exemplifies this process. Programs in civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering have been joined by those in astrophysics, packaging, computer sciences, and so on. The same proliferation of categories can be seen in the humanities. At first, the traditional departments offer specialized degree programs. Faced with increasing demands on limited manpower and equipment, they eventually resort to “interdisciplinary” programs involving the cooperation of several established departments. A further step is already in use: the educational free market where there are no required subjects, only certain fields from which to select, and where students determine their own programs with the inconstant aid of faculty counseling. This is maximum diversity, to be sure, but can the tailoring of available guidance to a student's professed needs substitute adequately for those all-important, unexpected encounters that radically deflect and enliven the individual's education? Should an academic program be merely reactive?

Consumer industries and mass communications have been accurately designated the chief purveyors of homogenized tastes and of depressed standards. This was true while these gargantuan machines were in relative infancy. Now, however, diversity has become a feature of almost any field in which there is a profit to be made. Enlarged automated industry can introduce variations and mutations almost without practical limit. To understand this, one need not visit a major automobile dealer's showroom; it is enough to step into a car-rental office, once one has decided which of the dozen such agencies near any major airport to patronize. The range of models, named after planets, North American or African animals, folk heroes, and the like is literally breathtaking. The actual name of the manufacturer is never spoken, presumably for fear that the range of offerings might shrink to manageable and therefore image-damaging dimensions.

The eventual meaning to the arts of product differentiation will partially depend on the value attached to aesthetic experience by individuals undergoing changing patterns of life. To what extent might near-perfect whim-accommodation lessen one's aesthetic longings?...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Rates of Change
• PART II The States of Art
• PART III The Public and Private Realms
• PART IV Sound
• PART V Time
• PART VI Notation
• PART VII Morphology in Music
• Index