The mystery of Brahms

Yes, I think I agree that some degree of novelty is required. (Reductio ad absurdum: A robot that generates copies of Beethoven's symphonies -- by some fancy process that doesn't explicitly involve copying them, but is none the less guaranteed never to generate anything Beethoven didn't already write -- is generating first-rate music but is also absolutely useless and would not be regarded as any kind of artist.)

But I suggest that the degree of novelty required is fairly small. How valuable would it be to the world if someone were able to write another nine symphonies just as good as Beethoven's but that don't enlarge our understanding of music any more than if, say, Beethoven had been able to work twice as fast and lived slightly longer, and had written them as his numbers 1.5, 2.5, ..., 9.5? Pretty damn valuable, I think. If someone found the manuscripts of nine other symphonies Beethoven actually did write but for some reason never released to the world, it would be very exciting and I bet there'd be no shortage of performances and audiences. Or: Pick one of Haydn's 104 symphonies. It probably doesn't really enlarge the world of music much beyond the other 103, but the world would definitely be poorer for its absence.

I think art succeeds when it manages to enrich its audience in some new way.

I think this is right. There is some novelty in the music of J.S. Bach, Mozart or Brahms, but it's not the great originality that, say, Beethoven was known for. Mozart's style wasn't even about finding something old and making it cool again; much of his production was about engaging with the common styles and idioms of the day and adding just enough compelling subtleties to keep his audience interested. Much of modern music works pretty much the same way: top 40 tracks are often dismissed as rehashed and unoriginal, but they all have something interesting about them which helps explain their popularity.

It seems that the pace of change in music waxes and wanes, and does not seem to be accelerating. The twenty year gap from 1955 to 1975 is enormous. From 1995 to 2015, not so much.

Oh, I agree; Brahms was quite old-fashioned. But Phil specifically said that Brahms's was writing music in a style that "had gone out of fashion before he was born", which I think is clearly not true.

I don't know that anybody gets better over time in literature, at least technically.

Terry Pratchett.

Galenson's example is Twain.

What do you mean by "better technically"? Joyce's work became more complicated and difficult to read. Does that count as getting better technically? I think most authors improve technically, but decline in inspiration.

Can you remember instances of people he put in each cluster? I'd think Mozart would be a young master, and Beethoven an old genius.

I finally remembered this comment while at home and able to access the book. His name for the artisan category was "experimental," which makes more sense. Another distinction that I forgot to mention is that people tend to talk about the 'body of work' of experimentalists as important, but single works by conceptual artists stand out. If the same paintings show up in art books, then the artist is more likely to be conceptual; if every art book includes a piece by someone but they all pick different pieces, then the artist is more likely to be experimental.

Turns out he has a section on poets, and another on novelists. Among the 20th century poets, he lists Frost, Williams, Stevens, and Lowell as experimental, and Pound, Cummings, Plath, and Eliot as conceptual. For novelists, he lists Dickens, Henry James, Twain, and Woolf as experimental, and Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, and Melville as conceptual.

(He ranks Ulysses as more important as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is itself more important than Finnegan's Wake.)

I don't know that anybody gets better over time in literature, at least technically.

Dubliners → Portrait of the Artist → Ulysses → Finnegans Wake?

Edit: haha, and only now do I see Douglas_Knight had the same thought.

I don't know that anybody gets better over time in literature

Maybe Thomas Hardy, though assessing that is complicated by the fact that he basically switched completely from novels to poems partway through his career and it's not clear how you compare the quality of such different forms.

Maybe Shakespeare; looking at a chronological list of his plays I certainly see a higher density of ones I know to be good later on. (But Shakespearean chronology is uncertain and I'm not familiar with all his plays.)

Jane Austen, kinda; the novels for which she's famous were written in the last six years of her life. (But, tragically, all Austen's works are early works; she died at 41.)

Dostoyevsky's first published work was in 1846 (when he was 25). The earliest "big name" one would be "Notes from Underground", 1864, age 43, more than half-way through his writing career (his last novel was "The Brothers Karamazov" from 1879).

Goethe was already something of a big name at 25, but his best novel is probably Wilhelm Meister (age 46) and his best play Faust part 1 (age 59).

I dunno; it looks to me as if writers get better, get worse, stay about the same, or evolve their style in ways that make comparison difficult, and all of those happen pretty often.

I'm not familiar with Schumann. Googling music theory forums indicates he's respected today mainly for his compositions for piano, while his symphonies are held in low regard. I'm now listening to his piano concerto in A minor, finished in 1845. I'm not very familiar with the 1830s or 1840s, but it doesn't sound anything like music from the 1820s or earlier.

I don't think music like this could have been written before Schumann. The piano necessary to play it didn't exist. Some key moments in the development of the piano:

• 1820: first 7-octave piano
• 1820-1843: various patents on the iron piano frame
• 1820: the vertical escapement, allowing one to play the same note twice in succession
• 1834: steel wire, probably made possible by iron frames, allowing louder playing and hence greater dynamic range
• 1840: stronger steel wire
• 1844: the sustain pedal invented

The music forums say Liszt and Ravel's works required the double escapement, and some say Chopin's did, while one argues Chopin's pianos didn't have it. No word on Schumann.

I was wondering the very same thing as I wrote the post. Kant and Hegel are the two founders of continental philosophy, and both are difficult to read. Pretty much all 20th century continental philosophers are terribly hard to read.

I would speculate that, while people might not be sure they understand Kant & Hegel, they also can't be sure they don't understand them. They require no math; they are analogical enough that reading them is more like reading literature than math. A person reading Kripke either understands it or does not. Reading Heidegger is more like reading Tolstoy; you feel you can always go back to it and discover more.

Perhaps more importantly, they tackle bigger questions. Analytic philosophers start with questions they think they can answer; continental philosophers start with questions they want the answers to.

Also, continental philosophers can never be refuted. The logical positivists made the mistake of stating their claims clearly enough that people could listen to less-precise statements claiming to refute them, and believe they'd been refuted.

Here's a random excerpt from Kant:

It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be taken to be good without limitation, except a GOOD WILL. Understanding, wit, judgement and whatever else the talents of the mind may be called, or confidence, resolve and persistency of intent, as qualities of temperament, are no doubt in many respects good and desirable; but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will that is to make use of these gifts of nature, and whose distinctive constitution is therefore called character, is not good. It is just the same with gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health, and the entire well-being and contentment with one's condition, under the name of happiness, inspire confidence and thereby quite often overconfidence as well, unless a good will is present to correct and make generally purpo­sive their influence on the mind, and with it also the whole principle for acting; not to mention that a rational impartial spectator can never­ more take any delight in the sight of the uninterrupted prosperity of a being adorned with no feature of a pure and good will, and that a good will thus appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of the worthiness to be happy.

Here's a random excerpt from Bertrand Russell, an analytic philosopher:

Traditionally, there are two sorts of data, one physical, derived from the senses, the other mental, derived from introspection. It seems highly questionable whether this distinction can be validly made among data; it seems rather to belong to what is inferred from them. Suppose, for the sake of definiteness, that you are looking at a white triangle drawn on a black- board. You can make the two judgments: "There is a triangle there", and "I see a triangle." These are different propositions, but neither expresses a bare datum; the bare datum seems to be the same in both propositions. To illustrate the difference of the propositions: you might say "There is a triangle there", if you had seen it a moment ago but now had your eyes shut, and in this case you would not say "I see a triangle"; on the other hand, you might see a black dot which you knew to be due to indigestion or fatigue, and in this case you would not say "There is a black dot there." In the first of these cases, you have a clear case of inference, not of a datum.

Kant is talking about good and evil, delight, happiness, character, honor, etc., while Russell is talking about looking at triangles. Which one are people going to want to read?

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I don't know what Power Wording is either, and Google doesn't help. Link?

A lot of art is not made either to reinforce societal truths or to subvert them. If it's made for any purpose, it's just to look pretty. This applies especially to the more "ornamental" and "decorative" arts and crafts. This sort of art is not talked about much, precisely because it does not deal much with "society's traditional and transcendent truths" (whatever that means) so it's harder to say anything worthwhile about it, but it's probably a lot more important and salient to most folks than things like painting or sculpture, which are what first comes to mind when talking about "art".