While other people are watching other stuff, I'm addicted to watching YouTubes of low-tech stuff. And of all the many stove videos I've watched Pekka Leskela's are the best, most practical and most most pleasant to watch of all. I will be making this one and am thinking of incorporating a larger version in a summer kitchen in my shed.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
True Confession: I'm a Rocket Stove Porn Addict
While other people are watching other stuff, I'm addicted to watching YouTubes of low-tech stuff. And of all the many stove videos I've watched Pekka Leskela's are the best, most practical and most most pleasant to watch of all. I will be making this one and am thinking of incorporating a larger version in a summer kitchen in my shed.
Monday, January 6, 2014
Oh, Great
Well, I fell down on the ice and broke my arm in two places this evening I could kill my brother for not sanding, though I'll have to wait for about six to eight weeks. I thought my bad year was over. I don't know when I'll be writing again. On the other hand (ha,ha) whatever I manage to write is going to be short. Maybe an exorcism is in order.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Every Model Is A Lie But Some Models Explain More Than Others
So just to clarify, right, one of the grand goals of modern physics is to build a theory of everything at all. Not a very beautiful name. But a theory of everything that would in principle explain all that we can observe in nature in terms of a single force, so to speak. And it's a very beautiful idea. It's very Platonist in its essence, you know, that the essence of nature is mathematical. There is one big symmetry out there and that symmetry is beautiful and beauty is truth. And hence, you know, there has to be that sort of idea in nature as well. And a lot of people, including Einstein — Einstein spent 20 years of his life looking for this theory of everything, this unifying theory, and of course he didn't find it.
In today's program of On Being, with Krista Tippett, Marcelo Gleiser said something that was very interesting to me.
Ms. Tippett: Hmm. So in your recent writing, each of you is driven from different directions by an observation that we have been working, thinking, acting on outdated models of reality, a limited conception of humanity and of the universe and even of science. I mean, Marcelo, you talk about growing up as you became interested in science, fascinated with this idea of unification, which was an idea of Einstein. And you talk about going to grad school, following this intellectual Holy Grail.
Dr. Gleiser: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Tippett: But you don't quite see it that way anymore.
Dr. Gleiser: Right. So just to clarify, right, I went to grad school trying to find it too, right, and after many years doing this and talking to lots of my colleagues I came to the conclusion that that's impossible. That the theory of everything is an impossibility as a matter of principle. And the problem is this: that the way we understand the world — and interrupt me if I go on for too long.
Ms. Tippett: No, no. It's good. We're all — we're with you.
Dr. Gleiser: The way we understand the world is very much based on what we can see of the world, right? Science is based on measurements and observations. And the notion that we can actually come up and have a theory that explains everything assumes that we can know everything, right? That we can go out and measure everything there is to measure about nature and come up with this beautiful theory of everything. And since we cannot measure all there is to measure, since our tools have limitations, we are definitely limited in how much we can know of the world.
So you can even build a theory that would explain everything that we know now. But then two weeks from now, someone else will come and find something new that does not fit in your theory. And that's not a theory of everything anymore because it doesn't include everything that can be included.
Which is about as obvious a series of points as I can imagine, yet it has captured the minds of many scientists as obsessively and the popularization of science so cluelessly as the far more innocently believed in quest to turn base metal into gold that the alchemists were engaged in. They had the excuse that they didn't understand the nature of gold and other metals, that they were, for all human purposes, immutable elements, that people couldn't change one to another, for all their ability to change the forms of other metals through them with other elements by chemical action. I suspect that something Marilynne Robinson and Marcello Gleiser said later in the same conversation points to why those who cleverly and, less often, brilliantly can address very narrow aspects of physical reality are so basically clueless about the futility of this race after the impossible to have. And it is in those engaged in another Cerveantean quest to turn our conscious minds into comprehensible molecular actions that a clue to their cluelessness is found.
Ms. Tippett: Here's a line of Reverend Ames in Gilead [one of M.R.'s novels]: "This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." Just before we finish, let's talk a little bit about mind, which takes us a little bit outside the realm of physics, but very much into your writing, Marilynne.
Ms. Robinson: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Tippett: And somehow, the primacy, the centrality of our minds, the power of them, even in all of this discerning of distant galaxies.
Ms. Robinson: Well, it's I think one of the things that is fascinating is that we don't know who we are. Human beings in acting out history describe themselves and every new epic is a new description of what human beings are. Every life is a new description of what human beings are. Every work of science, every object of art is new information. And it is inconceivable at this point that we could say anything final about what the human mind is, because it is demonstrating, you know, in beautiful ways and terrifying ways, that it will surprise us over and over and over again. You know?
And if I read something that seems to me — I mean, we have mind in two senses, or of several senses, but one of them is this sort of the individual striving mind: I want to come up to the mark. I want to follow my passion. I want to let myself think about something that seems beautiful to me. There's that mind. And then there is the larger collective mind that somehow or other seems to sort of magnify impulses and so on that occur among us individually.
You know, when you think how even the most brilliant people living, you know, in the first century would see how we know and what we know now and so on, which is basically a pure elaboration of what they'd already started, nevertheless they would be completely astonished, they would say, that human beings could've done such a thing. You know? We know things about our minds because we have seen them reaching and reaching and unfolding in this uncanny way that they do.
And I just think that undervaluing mind, it distorts what we're capable of. You know? I don't know. That's what I think. I think the mind is fantastically competent and beautiful and in a very large degree unexplored.
Ms. Tippett: Marcelo, is this new frontier of mind and consciousness, is it challenging for physics? Or where does it fit into your way of seeing the world?
Dr. Gleiser: It's very challenging, because the way physics traditionally has worked is through this reductionistic method, right? You look at a complicated problem, you break it down into small parts, you understand how these small parts work and then try to make sense of the whole. And this extrapolation works beautifully when you talk about stars and galaxies, but it really fails miserably when you're talking about the mind or the brain. Right?
So as I said earlier on, you can't understand the brain by understanding how a neuron works. And so it poses a tremendous difficulty for physics because we can't model the brain. Right? And physicists, that's what we do for a living. We make models. We test our hypothesis. And we need a different kind of explanatory, descriptive tool.
[Laughter from audience]
Dr. Gleiser: Because the way we have dealt with things just won't work for the brain. So what would that be now, right? So there is this whole new notion that comes from complexity theory that the mind is an emergent phenomenon that we can't quite explain that has to do with the concatenation of many different groups of neurons at the same time. So the interesting thing about that is that, if that is true, then new laws will emerge at different levels of complexity. And you can't go from one level to the other level directly. You really need a completely different kind of explanation. And we're not there yet, but it's just an alternative way of thinking about how the brain works. And to me, given the complexity, even if we go there and we gain some level of understanding above what we know now, it's always going to be incomplete, just like Marilynne said.
Ms. Tippett: But I think that part is exciting for you, the fact that it will be incomplete, the fact that there will always be more to learn.
Dr. Gleiser: Yes. When I was saying this, I was thinking can we ever build a machine that thinks? Right? That's really the question, right? Because if you could build a clock that thinks, right, then you'd really say, yes, we mechanized the brain and we understand exactly how it works and what are the rules that make it all make sense. But I am a skeptic when it comes to that. I really am, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't see how even increasing the power of computers we'll be able to do that.
What we will be able to do is what the Internet is already doing, which is creating an enormous databank of information that will almost look intelligent, but you will always be asking the questions. You know, it's the asking of the question that is the mystery, not so much how you find the ways to answer it.
Needless to say, I'm recommending you listen to the program or the entire recorded conversation and read the transcript.
My point is that it is one of the most commonly found conceits of many phyicists today, Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, ... that they can merely ignore the fact that everything they are creating, everything they have based their ideas on is a peculiarly human idea, that it is bounded and limited by human limits which, much as they must hate the idea, they share with those other benighted human beings who they so often disdain. That physics can't escape its origins and the limits of those origins, their minds, the minds of their brilliant teachers and the most famous men in the history of physics and science.
Their frequent resort, to consult the materialistic priesthoods claiming the even more absurd, that they can come up with the equivalent of physics to dispose of those bounds and limits by coming up with even more clueless claims about the invisible, inaccessible, ineffable minds whose limits are even more relevant to the claims of psychology and its modern sects of neurology and consciousness studies. Perhaps that they grasp onto those pictures that the entirely artificial imaging of brains gives further insight into their refusal to acknowledge the limits and bounds that contains all of human culture. In their faith, consulting their modern day shamans and priests, they continue to ignore that those are the product of very human choices in sampling, what to include, what to leave out, how to analyze the magnetic shadows those produce. And, most telling of all, they refuse to take into account that all of the reports linking the flashy, colorful images to consciousness is utterly and inevitably dependent on the reports of those whose brains were thus imaged. What happens in their experience is entirely inaccessible to would-be science except by their anecdotal reports of entirely subjective experience.
Materialism, or its modern labels, naturalism, physicalism,.... are all models of reality and they are all based in a sort of meta-lie, a refusal by these people to face the inescapable fact of all of human culture, all of human thought, that it is not the direct reproduction of anything but a peculiarly human product that carries all of the collective limits of our thinking, it's that no matter how much of the individual peculiarities of thought can be wrung out by the common consensus of scientists, none of whom can escape the limits of their own minds and thoughts and their own experience. Just as there isn't a single object in the universe that science has described comprehensively and exhaustively, there is no mind that has exceeded the limits it exists in. Collective agreement, which is what science is, might help to some extent, and that is the faith that democracy is based in, but it can't do what it can't do.
In today's program of On Being, with Krista Tippett, Marcelo Gleiser said something that was very interesting to me.
Ms. Tippett: Hmm. So in your recent writing, each of you is driven from different directions by an observation that we have been working, thinking, acting on outdated models of reality, a limited conception of humanity and of the universe and even of science. I mean, Marcelo, you talk about growing up as you became interested in science, fascinated with this idea of unification, which was an idea of Einstein. And you talk about going to grad school, following this intellectual Holy Grail.
Dr. Gleiser: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Tippett: But you don't quite see it that way anymore.
Dr. Gleiser: Right. So just to clarify, right, I went to grad school trying to find it too, right, and after many years doing this and talking to lots of my colleagues I came to the conclusion that that's impossible. That the theory of everything is an impossibility as a matter of principle. And the problem is this: that the way we understand the world — and interrupt me if I go on for too long.
Ms. Tippett: No, no. It's good. We're all — we're with you.
Dr. Gleiser: The way we understand the world is very much based on what we can see of the world, right? Science is based on measurements and observations. And the notion that we can actually come up and have a theory that explains everything assumes that we can know everything, right? That we can go out and measure everything there is to measure about nature and come up with this beautiful theory of everything. And since we cannot measure all there is to measure, since our tools have limitations, we are definitely limited in how much we can know of the world.
So you can even build a theory that would explain everything that we know now. But then two weeks from now, someone else will come and find something new that does not fit in your theory. And that's not a theory of everything anymore because it doesn't include everything that can be included.
Which is about as obvious a series of points as I can imagine, yet it has captured the minds of many scientists as obsessively and the popularization of science so cluelessly as the far more innocently believed in quest to turn base metal into gold that the alchemists were engaged in. They had the excuse that they didn't understand the nature of gold and other metals, that they were, for all human purposes, immutable elements, that people couldn't change one to another, for all their ability to change the forms of other metals through them with other elements by chemical action. I suspect that something Marilynne Robinson and Marcello Gleiser said later in the same conversation points to why those who cleverly and, less often, brilliantly can address very narrow aspects of physical reality are so basically clueless about the futility of this race after the impossible to have. And it is in those engaged in another Cerveantean quest to turn our conscious minds into comprehensible molecular actions that a clue to their cluelessness is found.
Ms. Tippett: Here's a line of Reverend Ames in Gilead [one of M.R.'s novels]: "This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." Just before we finish, let's talk a little bit about mind, which takes us a little bit outside the realm of physics, but very much into your writing, Marilynne.
Ms. Robinson: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Tippett: And somehow, the primacy, the centrality of our minds, the power of them, even in all of this discerning of distant galaxies.
Ms. Robinson: Well, it's I think one of the things that is fascinating is that we don't know who we are. Human beings in acting out history describe themselves and every new epic is a new description of what human beings are. Every life is a new description of what human beings are. Every work of science, every object of art is new information. And it is inconceivable at this point that we could say anything final about what the human mind is, because it is demonstrating, you know, in beautiful ways and terrifying ways, that it will surprise us over and over and over again. You know?
And if I read something that seems to me — I mean, we have mind in two senses, or of several senses, but one of them is this sort of the individual striving mind: I want to come up to the mark. I want to follow my passion. I want to let myself think about something that seems beautiful to me. There's that mind. And then there is the larger collective mind that somehow or other seems to sort of magnify impulses and so on that occur among us individually.
You know, when you think how even the most brilliant people living, you know, in the first century would see how we know and what we know now and so on, which is basically a pure elaboration of what they'd already started, nevertheless they would be completely astonished, they would say, that human beings could've done such a thing. You know? We know things about our minds because we have seen them reaching and reaching and unfolding in this uncanny way that they do.
And I just think that undervaluing mind, it distorts what we're capable of. You know? I don't know. That's what I think. I think the mind is fantastically competent and beautiful and in a very large degree unexplored.
Ms. Tippett: Marcelo, is this new frontier of mind and consciousness, is it challenging for physics? Or where does it fit into your way of seeing the world?
Dr. Gleiser: It's very challenging, because the way physics traditionally has worked is through this reductionistic method, right? You look at a complicated problem, you break it down into small parts, you understand how these small parts work and then try to make sense of the whole. And this extrapolation works beautifully when you talk about stars and galaxies, but it really fails miserably when you're talking about the mind or the brain. Right?
So as I said earlier on, you can't understand the brain by understanding how a neuron works. And so it poses a tremendous difficulty for physics because we can't model the brain. Right? And physicists, that's what we do for a living. We make models. We test our hypothesis. And we need a different kind of explanatory, descriptive tool.
[Laughter from audience]
Dr. Gleiser: Because the way we have dealt with things just won't work for the brain. So what would that be now, right? So there is this whole new notion that comes from complexity theory that the mind is an emergent phenomenon that we can't quite explain that has to do with the concatenation of many different groups of neurons at the same time. So the interesting thing about that is that, if that is true, then new laws will emerge at different levels of complexity. And you can't go from one level to the other level directly. You really need a completely different kind of explanation. And we're not there yet, but it's just an alternative way of thinking about how the brain works. And to me, given the complexity, even if we go there and we gain some level of understanding above what we know now, it's always going to be incomplete, just like Marilynne said.
Ms. Tippett: But I think that part is exciting for you, the fact that it will be incomplete, the fact that there will always be more to learn.
Dr. Gleiser: Yes. When I was saying this, I was thinking can we ever build a machine that thinks? Right? That's really the question, right? Because if you could build a clock that thinks, right, then you'd really say, yes, we mechanized the brain and we understand exactly how it works and what are the rules that make it all make sense. But I am a skeptic when it comes to that. I really am, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't see how even increasing the power of computers we'll be able to do that.
What we will be able to do is what the Internet is already doing, which is creating an enormous databank of information that will almost look intelligent, but you will always be asking the questions. You know, it's the asking of the question that is the mystery, not so much how you find the ways to answer it.
Needless to say, I'm recommending you listen to the program or the entire recorded conversation and read the transcript.
My point is that it is one of the most commonly found conceits of many phyicists today, Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, ... that they can merely ignore the fact that everything they are creating, everything they have based their ideas on is a peculiarly human idea, that it is bounded and limited by human limits which, much as they must hate the idea, they share with those other benighted human beings who they so often disdain. That physics can't escape its origins and the limits of those origins, their minds, the minds of their brilliant teachers and the most famous men in the history of physics and science.
Their frequent resort, to consult the materialistic priesthoods claiming the even more absurd, that they can come up with the equivalent of physics to dispose of those bounds and limits by coming up with even more clueless claims about the invisible, inaccessible, ineffable minds whose limits are even more relevant to the claims of psychology and its modern sects of neurology and consciousness studies. Perhaps that they grasp onto those pictures that the entirely artificial imaging of brains gives further insight into their refusal to acknowledge the limits and bounds that contains all of human culture. In their faith, consulting their modern day shamans and priests, they continue to ignore that those are the product of very human choices in sampling, what to include, what to leave out, how to analyze the magnetic shadows those produce. And, most telling of all, they refuse to take into account that all of the reports linking the flashy, colorful images to consciousness is utterly and inevitably dependent on the reports of those whose brains were thus imaged. What happens in their experience is entirely inaccessible to would-be science except by their anecdotal reports of entirely subjective experience.
Materialism, or its modern labels, naturalism, physicalism,.... are all models of reality and they are all based in a sort of meta-lie, a refusal by these people to face the inescapable fact of all of human culture, all of human thought, that it is not the direct reproduction of anything but a peculiarly human product that carries all of the collective limits of our thinking, it's that no matter how much of the individual peculiarities of thought can be wrung out by the common consensus of scientists, none of whom can escape the limits of their own minds and thoughts and their own experience. Just as there isn't a single object in the universe that science has described comprehensively and exhaustively, there is no mind that has exceeded the limits it exists in. Collective agreement, which is what science is, might help to some extent, and that is the faith that democracy is based in, but it can't do what it can't do.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
The Muddle of Materialist Morality A rerun on a day when I'm feeling rundown.
The physicist Steven Weinberg is probably most famous for saying
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I've pointed out that the utter cluelessness of that statement coming from someone from the branch of science that has done as much as any to give the world nuclear and other weapons, Many of those physicists avowed atheists working in an area of human scholarship, science, which has enabled us to do massively more evil through its real efficacy to multiply our potency while it undermines moral restraint.
Weinberg was one of the participants in a gathering of elite atheists in October of last year under the headline "Moving Naturalism Forward". The participants were a number of elite scientists and scholars, including a number of the big names in atheism, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, Sean Carroll.... Some of the big thinkers of atheism. If any group was capable of "moving 'naturalism' - you can safely read 'atheism' - forward, it would seem to be these folks.
Apropos of Weinberg's most famous saying, something that anyone arguing with atheists will certainly encounter, one of the sessions of discussions dealt with "Morality". It begins with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein asserting an evo-psy basis for morality, pretty much the one that has been fashionable among atheists for some time now. It's an attempt to make science do what science can't do, to come up with a scientific reason that we should behave morally, generously, kindly, through natural selection. Something which I hold is an obviously impossible task due to natural selection being based in self-interest and which has required that generosity, kindness and any other expression of moral behavior be tortuously redefined to make them into a covert form of selfishness. The absurdity reaches a basic level in Dawkins' "gene selfishness" which turns "altruism" into a pantomime of morality in service to selfish molecules.
As an aside, it's remarkable how in rejecting the alleged tyranny of the idea of an almighty God, an idea atheists often assert to be degrading to human dignity, end up asserting an absolute totalitarian rule by molecules and atoms, demoting human beings to being their unconscious, robotic servants.
In the past I've pointed out that materialism isn't capable of generating or sustaining morality that isn't vulnerable to even the most unsophisticated level of debunkery that atheism generally practices. As an example of that, Goldstein's up to date, evo-psy based, fortress of materially based morality doesn't last more than ten minutes as the second speaker demolishes it. That second speaker is Mr. "Bad Religion" himself, Steven Weinberg. Weinberg does exactly what I said any atheist could do if they chose, assert that there is nothing real about any moral concept that is presented to them. Their materialism has freed them to be as selfish as they want to be. Weinberg asserts that his "moral preference" prefers the comfort of his family to the happiness of starving people elsewhere. His response to Goldstein is most interesting because he points out that his thinking not only dispelled traditional morality but also the utilitarianism that he'd previously adopted. As utilitarianism has been one of the most popular atheist-materialist imitations of morality, it is telling how that enormous intellectual effort is susceptible to the most unsophisticated rejection.
I don't think you'll find much else of use in the chatter, which I will address more of later, but you can see how this group of great atheist thinkers is unlikely to do much to lessen the depravity of human societies and governments. Atheism can't generate a morality that it doesn't wash away in its basic methods and practices. In the end, an atheist "morality" will always be no more reliable than doing what people figure they can get away with doing, most often, what they want to do, at most. There is nothing in atheism that will compel most people to act generously, in a kindly way, ... against their selfish interest. In order to have a decent society many, probably a large majority of people have to be far less selfish than can be effected through any of these materialistic cover jobs.
To listen, click on the link below
Moving Naturalism Forward: Day 2, Morning, 1st Session
Note: I'm finding that dealing with my mother's death far, far harder than I would have expected. I don't feel up to writing something new just now.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I've pointed out that the utter cluelessness of that statement coming from someone from the branch of science that has done as much as any to give the world nuclear and other weapons, Many of those physicists avowed atheists working in an area of human scholarship, science, which has enabled us to do massively more evil through its real efficacy to multiply our potency while it undermines moral restraint.
Weinberg was one of the participants in a gathering of elite atheists in October of last year under the headline "Moving Naturalism Forward". The participants were a number of elite scientists and scholars, including a number of the big names in atheism, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, Sean Carroll.... Some of the big thinkers of atheism. If any group was capable of "moving 'naturalism' - you can safely read 'atheism' - forward, it would seem to be these folks.
Apropos of Weinberg's most famous saying, something that anyone arguing with atheists will certainly encounter, one of the sessions of discussions dealt with "Morality". It begins with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein asserting an evo-psy basis for morality, pretty much the one that has been fashionable among atheists for some time now. It's an attempt to make science do what science can't do, to come up with a scientific reason that we should behave morally, generously, kindly, through natural selection. Something which I hold is an obviously impossible task due to natural selection being based in self-interest and which has required that generosity, kindness and any other expression of moral behavior be tortuously redefined to make them into a covert form of selfishness. The absurdity reaches a basic level in Dawkins' "gene selfishness" which turns "altruism" into a pantomime of morality in service to selfish molecules.
As an aside, it's remarkable how in rejecting the alleged tyranny of the idea of an almighty God, an idea atheists often assert to be degrading to human dignity, end up asserting an absolute totalitarian rule by molecules and atoms, demoting human beings to being their unconscious, robotic servants.
In the past I've pointed out that materialism isn't capable of generating or sustaining morality that isn't vulnerable to even the most unsophisticated level of debunkery that atheism generally practices. As an example of that, Goldstein's up to date, evo-psy based, fortress of materially based morality doesn't last more than ten minutes as the second speaker demolishes it. That second speaker is Mr. "Bad Religion" himself, Steven Weinberg. Weinberg does exactly what I said any atheist could do if they chose, assert that there is nothing real about any moral concept that is presented to them. Their materialism has freed them to be as selfish as they want to be. Weinberg asserts that his "moral preference" prefers the comfort of his family to the happiness of starving people elsewhere. His response to Goldstein is most interesting because he points out that his thinking not only dispelled traditional morality but also the utilitarianism that he'd previously adopted. As utilitarianism has been one of the most popular atheist-materialist imitations of morality, it is telling how that enormous intellectual effort is susceptible to the most unsophisticated rejection.
I don't think you'll find much else of use in the chatter, which I will address more of later, but you can see how this group of great atheist thinkers is unlikely to do much to lessen the depravity of human societies and governments. Atheism can't generate a morality that it doesn't wash away in its basic methods and practices. In the end, an atheist "morality" will always be no more reliable than doing what people figure they can get away with doing, most often, what they want to do, at most. There is nothing in atheism that will compel most people to act generously, in a kindly way, ... against their selfish interest. In order to have a decent society many, probably a large majority of people have to be far less selfish than can be effected through any of these materialistic cover jobs.
To listen, click on the link below
Moving Naturalism Forward: Day 2, Morning, 1st Session
Note: I'm finding that dealing with my mother's death far, far harder than I would have expected. I don't feel up to writing something new just now.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Sheila Jordan and Gildas Boclé
I listen and watch him playing the bass and think, Ah! to be 45 again!
I listen and watch him playing the bass and think, Ah! to be 45 again!
What I Will Be Handing Out To My Students From Now On
I've been looking at The Art of Improvisation by T. Carl Whitmer to get ideas for putting some zing into my playing. It's been pretty lifeless since the involuntary pause caused by a problem with one of my fingers, the result of an accident, not a repetitive stress problem. The finger is fine but the pause has left me reflecting on whether or not late middle age is time to finally do something about my lack of improvisatory inspiration. I'm finding the book is full of excellent advice, most of it, fittingly, spun out of the aphorisms contained in the first chapter. Here is that, in full.
Every thematic bit of improvisation must be conceived of as a short musical idea which must be adhered to and extended until it has run its course. An unfolding structure first and last will be the ideal.
The harmonic aspects must be disregarded until all other generating of effects has been accomplished. In other words, a short rhythmic-melodic entity must become a longer entity by expansion. This is your problem.
Invariably think of this basic melody as put together with other melodies in very definite and clear voice parts. This is the beginning of wisdom.
Always consider that the basic theme - normal and inverted - has hundreds of facets, if one but turn them to varying lights and effects.
Never consider the given tonality of the theme as final, i.e. as a settled thing. Rather, consider it as possibly existing in six or seven keys.
All improvisation is relatively easy if one has studied the endless possible shapes and migrations of a given melody.
Regard the basic notes as a spider might its web:
a) as spinning - how long
b) as design - how built.
The differences between paying a set printed phrase and expanding one extempore are essentially different psychological processes. The first is reproductive, while the second is generative resulting in budding, flowering, unfolding or expansion.
In the reproductive, the player functions more as a mechanism. In unfolding an idea heis "like unto a god, with the power to create good and evil".
Usually it puzzles the student, who likely has studied Harmony, first of all to learn that harmonizations, as he knows them, are the least important of his efforts. The most important of his efforts are listed under the heads of counterpoint (polyphony) and structure.
Contrapuntal combinations are not only limitless, but the process gives a forward movement, without having the finality or static character of harmonizations.
Harmonies, as devices, are fewer in number and - as stated - more static in tenency. The chord plan has a fixity of purpose that is sure to stop one before one is well started. Also, chord progressions are hedged about by rules that will make the student too conscious of right and wrong, instead of inculcating the necessary feeling of forging ahead.
If the improviser "gets stuck" (his favorite word!) it is because he sees his theme as a finished and complete entity. Harmonizing usually produces or assists in producing this result. The idea, on the contrary must always be kept in a state of flux.
Copy on music paper and place on piano the given melody for improvisation without any harmony attached to it. Later, omit clefs.
The process of extempore playing is synthetic, but a preliminary analysis plays a big role in developing one's spinning power.
One must get on intimate terms little by little with the form and style of all the different sorts of structures such as Two and Three Part Form, Minuet, Sonata Form, etc.
In conclusion of these generalizations I would say that the theme material must be exhausted by mental processes before one's emotions can be set in to action.
Also, in improvisation, when one has made a note mistake, or rhythmic or harmonic error do not correct it. Rather, make use of it, repeating that "error" in the following phrases. In other words, incorporate the error and it becomes part of the pattern or scheme itself. When skill is attained all will merge very naturally with the plan. Any error may be only an intentioned rightness; good, but not what "you meant to do".
Do not get too fussy about how every part of the "thing" sounds. Go ahead. All processes are at first awkward and clumsy and "funy". Polishing is not at all the important thing; instead, strive for a rough go-ahead energy. Do not be afraid of being wrong; just be afraid of being uninteresting.
It always is difficult to remember what one has improvised in order that the part may be repeated in essence, ( as in Song Form, etc.). That, too becomes easy. It is not necesssary to remember all details, but it is necessary to recall plan and method and general character.
In general, there are two ways to improvise. The first is by expansion and the other is by the use of a set form. Whenever in doubt use some set form, but experiment with expansion until you get this one thought deep down: In expansion the form is gnerated. It makes itself, in other words.
Whereas, in the classical sort of mold, the player first decides on a form such as A-B-A and then proceeds more or less mechanically (until he gets his stride) to build each subject; which is perhaps a shorter and less concentrated and therefore easier way to get the sense of achievement. However, there need be very little of too regulating a theory but there is an immense amount of the doing in the most direct of ways.
I am usually asked about technic; i.e. the muscular ability to play. A technic including the third grade is usually presupposed. But, it is not essential to work on IMprovisation to expect one person's muscular agility to be the same as another's.
The way to improvise is to improvise. Use the technic at hand, much or little; slow or fast. If scales are weak, or perchance arpeggios, consult a "method" or a teacher. But, every improviser will practice some technical exercises daily if he expects his playing smoothness and ease to increase. But, pieces of great charm may be written or improvised in the early grades: witness Bach's so-called Anna Magdalena's Clavecin Book.
Rafael Joseffy's Piano Technic* will give excellent training to the fingers. Or, the exhaustive Alberto Jonas'* work can help on any and every matter that can possibly arise in connect with refractory digits.
There is a charming lithography, by Odile Redon, of a "part of a part" of a tree out a window. May we not be happy, also, in fragmentary ideas occasionally in improvisation. Every composer has a few sketches that no one would part with. Surely not everything we build has to be monumental and the last word on the subject. [See illustration]
* Both available in public domain online from the IMSLP.
Thursday, January 2, 2014
No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, whose who have no need even of God — for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God. (December 24, 1978)
St. Oscar Romero
St. Oscar Romero
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