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SilasBarta comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
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No; the whole point was that I was "modding out" by levels of "greatness" that I didn't perceive as relevant to the fundamental intent of your question. In other words, I was ignoring the difference between Bach and Brahms. Just as most people who take your point of view do -- they express skepticism that there is anybody at the level of Brahms around today.
Musicians do this too! It's a standard part of one's training as a composer to learn to write imitations of older styles, such as Baroque fugues, Classical minuets, etc, etc.
And, given the situation in other arts, which you acknowledge, why would you expect otherwise in music? What would account for the difference?
I don't say that "we" are better than they are at what they do, and I don't claim that what they do is necessarily easy. But what they do isn't the same thing as what we do. They're optimizing for different criteria.
They don't "dominate the field". They've achieved high cultural status while doing something that looks sort-of similar to "the field".
In the old days (i.e. the 19th century), there wasn't as much difference; you could get lots more status by doing what we do, because at that time you could effectively do both things simultaneously. That just isn't possible nowadays; while e.g. Brahms could write the most advanced music of the day (and yes, it was; see Schoenberg's essay "Brahms the Progressive"), and also achieve high status in contemporary culture, if you try to do the former today, you won't do the latter, and vice-versa.
This is exactly what you would expect if you understand the notion of inferential distance. Frankly, I have hardly ever come across serious arguments for the contrary position, i.e. a detailed theory explaining why no modern composers are "as good" as Brahms. (*) Most people claiming this simply take it for granted that popular reknown is the optimization target.
(*) A huge exception would be e.g. the work of Heinrich Schenker -- an extreme anti-populist whose disdain for Williams and Glass would have easily rivaled his contempt for Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
Is it your contention that modern musicians write Clasical minuets and Baroque fugues which are in some cases better than the best of the older works that are still listened to, but that no-one cares because much of the value of those works is in their role in a canon?
I could easily believe that in those cases, but I simply don't believe it in the case of Opera. The Opera cannon is just not very large. Some people have heard the whole thing and only like a few dozen operas. It doesn't seem likely that there isn't demand among such people for higher quality new material in old styles, so if no new material is becoming popular then the un-met demand makes me think that contemporary music students are failing to produce work that this audience actually values due to now knowing how to replicate the merits of older compositions.
It should really be pretty easy to do a controlled experiment with a naive population to see how common it is for modern artists to be able to impress an audience as much as their 18th and 19th century precursors did.
I'm seriously interested in someone performing some experiments on this subject. It seems to me that it would provide an extremely practically important measurement of the quality of university education in fields inaccessible to outsiders, but I don't expect to be able to attract funding for such research because it sounds impractical at the face of it.
I guess that my major reason for holding the contrary position was largely because modern musicians and composers, more than painters and authors, are the results of university education and I fairly strongly suspect university education of destorying artistic ability and distracting artists with intellectual games that simply lack the merits of the fields that the academic subjects are derived from. I suspect this in math as much as in music, and I think Von Neumann agreed with me, as this quote suggests.
"As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second or third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much ‘abstract’ inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration."
Is the Joshua Bell experiment the kind of thing you had in mind? If so, it pretty conclusively confirms your suspicions.
Fame feeds on fame, status on status. Which is why it's all the more important to constantly check that a field hasn't lost its moorings.
Not really, because Joshua Bell was playing mostly (maybe even exclusively) old music in that experiment, if I recall correctly.
Vassar's suspicion was that people nowadays don't know how to write in old styles well enough to be indistinguishable from old composers.
Edit: but just to go along with it for a minute, do you really think Bell's status is the result of a random process? Maybe with respect to other "great" violinists, yes, but certainly not with respect to the average person, or even the average professional violinist.
Right, it proves the (arguably) stronger result that even the old music, with its canon status, can't appeal to the uninitiated. Impressing the indoctrinated is not impressive. The hard part is to impress the unindoctrinated.
Of course not, just as I can't make my friends laugh by generating random utterances. But that doesn't mean that the average person is somehow deficient for not laughing at our inside jokes -- or that I can go on denying that it's an inside joke.
Here, the analogous situation would be an "average person" denying the joke was funny because they weren't in on it, despite the fact that they saw a bunch of people laughing hysterically at it.
(...a bunch of people who were willing to welcome them into their group if they caught up on the group's history, so they would be able to get the jokes!)
But people don't claim that their inside jokes are the highest form of culture and that others are somehow deficient for not wanting to join in on it.
I understand that if you invest some effort E into appreciating something, you'll appreciate it. The fact that I appreciate it for some (potentially huge) E does not somehow justify the effort -- you can say that about anything.
The appropriate comparison would be "what ways of amusing myself for that level of personal investment are the best"? And given these opportunity cost considerations, it's quite understandable why the utter indifference of the public is a strike against the field.
No, not really. In the concert hall, you would have no problems distinguishing Bell from a random violinist: he's actually much better. The Joshua Bell experiment was an experiment in seeing how someone who was unambiguously a top-class artist held up with inferential distance deliberately hugely increased - not a test of "is status in music a lie?" but "how arrogant is a top-class artist taken out of their depth?" And, y'know, Bell did pretty well and came across as a perfectly reasonable fellow.
That doesn't matter if there are so many more appealing cultural venues than concert hall.
No, he made less than the typical busker and really only attracted those who were trained to identify the signals.
I don't dispute that the music is good, for some people. I just think it's ridiculous how much more money it commands for the wrong reasons. His skill isn't so much better than the mere 95% percentile to justify that -- that's why they have to rely on so much more than musical skill to market him to royalty.
I don't see what difference that makes. But yes, he surprisingly did recognize how much his self-worth collapses when he's not pre-validated (i.e. performing for people who haven't paid lots of money for it).
I meant "did pretty well" in terms of not reacting with arrogance, that being what was actually being tested. The trope in play (what made it a story that you remember) was Fish Out Of Water.
(The way to make money as a busker is to, whatever your instrument, play the Beatles. Over and over. And over and over. And over and over. And over and over.)
I'm actually quite willing to believe that Silas remembered it because (he thought) it proved his theory.
For my part, I viewed it as a test of how well the average person can detect subtly presented costly signals when under distraction. (Answer: not very well.)
The detail I remembered most was how children would stop with interest, only to be dragged away by their hurried parents.
Not really. I remember it because it's fun watching people try to explain it away -- I get a new answer every time for why the highest cultural achievements get utterly ignored, at that must be a problem on the beholder's side.
Is that the standard you really want to go by? What children like?
Point. I suppose I mean "why they bothered to run the story." They weren't running it to expose Bell as a charlatan, they ran it as Fish Out Of Water.
Yeah :-D
Unfortunately, the distractibility of the people with the money is why busking for money involves Beatles. Lots of Beatles. More Beatles.
But what's the water then? And why is the fish's greatness so brittle that you have to define the water so narrowly?
Er, I'm not. The water is the world where people know the sort of music he plays and can form communicable opinions on how well he does it.
Are you really claiming they wrote that story to demonstrate Bell was a fraud, rather than as a fish out of water story?
Okay, and the water for theologians is the community of theologians. Does that mean they're accomplishing something truly great, or that they're a clique?
I have just corrected the systematic downvoting of Silas. His general point seems important.
Your analogy would only be valid if theology was the study of an aesthetic matter. (I might think it was better approached as one, but I doubt we'll find many theologians to agree.)