“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, – and the supreme Savant! – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die of his bound through the unheard-of and countless things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other has succumbed.”

Arnold Schoenberg was the Leader of the Second Viennese School , prominent composer, developer of the Twelve-Tone Atonal Technique, and outstanding musical pedagog. His pupils include among others Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, and John Cage. This excerpt comes almost completely unabridged from his Theory of Harmony, beautifully translated from the original German to English by Roy E. Carter. In it, the subject is broadly determined as Tonality, though if your medium is not music, replace that word with whatever you choose, any genre of Art. The chapter is Diatonic Chords, and he is speaking of how to instruct a pupil. As a reward for reading that much text, at the end is featured a performance by Glenn Gould of his Opus 11, for piano.

It is nevertheless necessary, as I said before, that the pupil learns to manipulate the devices that produce tonality. For music has not yet evolved so far that we can now speak of discarding tonality; moreover, the necessity for explaining its requirements arises also from the need to recognize its functions in the works of the past. Even if the present allows us to envision a future freed from the restrictive demands of this principle, it is still, even today, but much more in the past of our art, one of the most important musical techniques. It is one of the techniques that contribute most to the assurance of order in musical works of that order, consistent with the material, which so greatly facilitates the untroubled enjoyment of the essential beauties in the music. One of the foremost tasks of instruction is to awaken in the pupil a sense of the past and at the same time to open up to him prospects for the future.

Applied to our present concern, that means: Let the pupil learn the laws and effects of tonality just as if they still prevailed, but let him know of the tendencies that are leading toward their annulment. Let him know that the conditions leading to the dissolution of the system are inherent in the conditions upon which it is established. Let him know that every living thing has within it that which changes, develops, and destroys it. Life and death are both equally present in the embryo. What lies between is time. Nothing intrinsic, that is; merely a dimension, which is, however, necessarily consummated. Let the pupil learn by this example to recognize what is eternal: change, and what is temporal: being. Thus he will come to the conclusion that much of what has been considered aesthetically fundamental, that is, necessary to beauty, is by no means always rooted in the nature of things, that the imperfection of our senses drives us to those compromises through which we achieve order. For order is not demanded by the object, but by the subject. The pupil will conclude, moreover, that the many laws that purport to be natural laws actually spring from the struggle of the craftsman to shape the material correctly; and that the adaptation of what the artist really wants to present, its reduction to fit within the boundaries of form, of artistic form, is necessary only because of our inability to grasp the undefined and unordered. The order we call artist form is not an end in itself, but an expedient. As such by all means justified, but to be rejected absolutely wherever it claims to be more, to be aesthetics.

This is not to say that some future work of art may do without order, clarity, and comprehensibility, but that not merely what we conceive as such deserves these names. For nature is also beautiful where we do not understand her and where she seems to us unordered. Once we are cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty, and once we have recognized that only the necessity to produce compels him to bring forth what will perhaps afterwards be designated as beauty, then we will also understand that comprehensibility and clarity are not conditions that the artist is obliged to impose on his work, but conditions that the observer wishes to find fulfilled. Even the untrained observer finds these conditions in the works he has known for some time, for example, in all the older masterworks; here has has had time to adapt. With newer works, at first strange, he must be allowed more time.

But, whereas the distance between the onrushing brilliant insight of the genius and the ordinary insight of his contemporaries is relatively vast, in an absolute sense, that is, viewed within the whole evolution of the human spirit, the advance of his insight is quite small. Consequently the connection that gives access to what was once incomprehensible is always finally made. Whenever one has understood, one looks for reasons, finds order, and what we claim to perceive as laws defining order and clarity may perhaps only be laws governing our perception, without therefore being the laws a work of art must obey. And that we think we see laws, order, in the work of art can be analogous to our thinking we see ourselves in the mirror, although we are of course not there. The work of art is capable of mirroring what we project into it. The conditions of our conceptual power imposes, a mirror image of our own nature, may be observed in the work. This mirror image does not, however, reveal the plan upon which the work itself is oriented, but rather the way we orient ourselves to the work.

The positive gain of a work of art depends upon the conditions other than those expressed by the laws and is not to be reached by the way of the laws. But even what is negative is gain, since through avoiding such particulars as presumably hinder the realization of artistic values the pupil can lay a foundation. Not one that promotes creativity, but one that can regulate it, if it will allow itself to be regulated! Instruction that proceeds this way accomplishes something else, as well.

It leads the pupil through all those errors that the historical struggle for knowledge has brought with it; it leads through, it leads past errors, perhaps past truths as well. Nevertheless, it teaches him to know how the search was carried on the methods of thinking, the kinds of errors, the way little truths of locally limited probability became, by being stretched out into a system, absolutely untrue. In a word, he is taught all that which makes up the way we think. Such instruction can thus bring the pupil to love even the errors, if only they have stimulated thought, turnover and renewal of intellectual stock. And he learns to love the work of his forebears, even if he cannot apply it directly to his own life, even if he has to translate it in order to put it to very different use. He learns to love it, be it truth or error, because he finds in it necessity. And he sees beauty in that everlasting struggle for truth; he recognizes that fulfillment is always the goal one yearns for, but that it could easily be the end of beauty. He understands that harmony – balance – does not mean fixity of inactive factors, but equilibrium of the most intense energies. Into life itself, where there are such energies, such struggles – that is the direction instruction should take. To represent life in art, life, with its flexibility, its possibilities for change, its necessities; to acknowledge as the sole eternal law evolution and change – this way has to be more fruitful than the other, where one assumes an end of evolution because one can thus round off the system.

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
– Bertrand Russell

As the weather slowly winds itself up for winter (and your ears are hurting with raw dawn bike rides), that summer chaos recently gone by(e) is now irritating, those adventures in unknown cities are difficult; holistic simplicity is here to introvert you.

“It is enough to play a single note beautifully.”

Arvo Pärt is a post-modern minimalist composer, but nevermind that — his art is beautiful. Like church bells and numinous silence, this intimate work sends a steady finger through the human voice, uplifting and sedating you with all the purity of refracted lights. The church recording is a quiet one, so turn up the volume and listen for the scratch and hiss, the pigment overdraping.

Enjoy.

( album )

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

“And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created. “

“Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare… always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”

“interpretation demands something of the creative instinct. If you are a composer, you have an affinity with other composers. You can make contact with their imaginations, knowing something of their problems and their ideals. You can give their works color. That is the most important thing for me in my interpretations, color. So you make music live. Without color it is dead.”

“The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music.”

“The only film that I want to make, I will never make because it is impossible. It is a film on love, or of love, or with love. To speak in the mouth, to touch the breast, for women to imagine and to see the body, the sex of the man, a caress a shoulder, things as difficult to show and to intend as horror, and war, and sickness are. I do not understand why, and I suffer from it. What to do then, since I cannot make films simple and logical like Roberto’s humble and cynical like Bresson’s, austere and comic like Jerry Lewis’, lucid and calm like Hawks’, rigorous and tender like François’, hard and plaintive like the two Jacques’, courageous and sincere like Resnais’, pessimistic and American like Fuller’s romantic and Italian like Bertolucci’s, Polish and despairing like Skolimowski’s communist and crazy like Mme. Dovzhenko’s. Yes, what to do?”