If anyone is curious about Beethoven's life, I can recommend and excellent and relatively recently published biography: 'Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph', by Jan Swafford.
We see figures like Beethoven and Goethe as geniuses themselves, but the 18th century conception of 'genius' was not of a person, but of a sort of holy spirit that blessed an individual with great abilities, while remaining separate from that person.
So prior to Romantics of the 19th century taking hold of the concept of genius and re-purposing it into the one we're familiar with today, one would not speak of someone being a genius, but being graced with genius. Genius was not who they were, but something external to them that they possessed.
Another Beethoven biography for the beginner that I can recommend is 'Beethoven: The Music and the Life' by Lewis Lockwood. This one does a good treatment on his life while also weaving in relevant analysis of his music for the layperson with some musical background. It's a great introduction to both aspects of his life for the non-serious musician and will give you a much greater appreciation for his work.
Yes, also different cultures would apply it to different roles. In Germany I believe, only artists, could have genius, whereas in France and England this could apply to politicians and other groups as well. Goethe was a actually part of the early "Geniekult".
The greeks had the same notion: one wasn't "a" genius, one "had" a genius - a spirit (the logos?) which was the inspiration and source of creativity and brilliance.
The whole idea was around invoking the logos to garner this brilliance.
The word 'spirit' is vague but the older idea is more accurate than the modern assumption that geniuses are merely 'smart' above a certain threshold. In reality creative genius expresses itself through those who love truth to their core and who follow only their inner motivations. These qualities are sometimes abandoned which results in a fall and a loss of former abilities.
This was arguably the golden age of German culture. Even if Kant just passed away, you had philosophers such as Hegel in Berlin, Fichte, Schelling living at the same time and the younger Schopenhauer actually meeting with Goethe, although that did not turn out well. At that time, Romanticism was taking off in Germany, after the Weimarer Klassik around Goethe, Schiller and people such as Herder and Wieland was coming to an end. Goethe had a reputation of protecting his status and suppressing other talented artists. It should also be said that Beethoven's ninth uses text from the Ode to Joy, from Schiller, who was a friend of Goethe and one of the few he might have seen as equals. Overall, a giant, intricate network of historical figures.
German culture was going strong until the purges under Fascism began - in philosophy, art, mathematics, physics & other sciences. One of the shocking aspects of the rising of Fascism was that it happened in an intellectually fertile environment with many reasonable people. It is tempting to try to spot a gradual decline in German culture, but that was not the case. It was on the rise until Hitler physically liquidated the intelligentsia.
There were too few intelligent people to make a difference and standing out would only mean personal sacrifice without much overall impact. Smart people usually know when it's better to stay silent.. Dangerous parallels can be drawn to today's situation in many leading countries.
It isn't entirely shocking. Intellectually fertile doesn't equal morally or ethically predictable. Well, maybe there are studies which link politics and IQ, but political leanings aren't always great predictors of ethics/morals in action.
Edit: And perhaps I'm misconstruing your statement, which seems to have more to do with the decline in German culture after the purges rather than what led to the purges.
I wouldn't call it a decline at all, I only highlighted this area because it was particular strong in terms of significance and cultural output. You could argue that a golden age was followed by a silver age until 1933, as you mentioned.
Quite a few people argued since then that the rise of fascism was surprising because of the intellectual environment, but that it was a actually a pre-requisite for it to happen that way. If that is accurate or not, is a different matter but one could make a point that the "German question" combined with the propensity for total, systemic philosophical systems in German culture contributed to the uniqueness of what happened during 1933-45.
> It was on the rise until Hitler physically liquidated the intelligentsia.
That's not true. Hitler didn't liquidate the intelligentsia. The first programmable computer ( by konrad zuse ) was created during that time. The first rockets were developed during that time. Hitler didn't wipe out all the nobel prize winners in germany.
Germany was still a major intellectual center before, during and AFTER ww2.
Germany is still the 3rd largest producer of nobel prize winners with 106.
The reason Germany, England, and France (Spain didn't catch up because they had no reason to as a negative consequence of their enormous wealth at the time) excelled to such extent that this particular period appears like a very special and wonderful intellectual age, is that the rest of the world was for the most part severely under-developed. Germany didn't become less "wise".
Today the contrast is much smaller, but Germany continues to be a scientific powerhouse even if it isn't as evident.
Did these guys have any actual impact on society? Besides Hegel's mysticism that later served as a foundation for Marx (and we all know that didn't turn out well), what exactly did we gain from the philosophy of that era?
It appears to me that the "greatness" of these men is an unquestionable truth in our society, while scientists of the same era with more evident influence go largely unnoticed.
Wasn't Austrian culture (it mentioned that Beethoven lived in Vienna) distinguishable from 'German' culture? I think I read about that in Nassim Taleb's Antifragile when talking about Gödel having to leave during the Nazi occupation and the negative affect Viennese culture incurred from being absorbed into Germany.
Hitler was from Upper-Austria. Before moving into politics and moving to Munich, as a wanna-be art student in Vienna he was poor and rejected from academia. My personal opinion from reading about him is that he did not really like the cultural thrivings of Vienna. So after annexation of Austria, he ordered to prepare plans to transfer his Upper-Austrian hometown of Linz into a "cultural capital". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrermuseum
"No doubt Beethoven chided Goethe along these lines, and the most revered writer in the land would not have taken kindly to any sort of dressing down, friendly or otherwise."
Still, culture operates on a "hubs and authorities" basis -- there are people whose job it is to be hubs (curators, publishers, music programmers and promoters) and people who become known for their genius ("authorities").
The interdisciplinary issue is interesting. There's probably enough of it happening to offset fragmentation of culture into specialisations.
You could argue about the dialectics of modern technology - did earlier geniuses appear because of the lack of it? What would Einstein have achieved with access to computers? Maybe he would have never relied on his all-important thought experiments...
I love the description Goethe provides of Beethoven's personality. We've all met that guy, extremely talented, contempt for the world which you kind of admire but seriously dude could you give it a rest? I'm trying to enjoy myself...people are always the same. only the technology changes
Why? Given that making techno, or modern pop music in general, is basically trivial. Just spin up Ableton, press a few buttons ... boom, 10 minutes later you've got a competitive techno-track that doesn't sound all that different (apart from mastering maybe) from what's being played in the clubs. There is no art left in pop-music -- trivial and generic.
A genius would be horrified by the trivial repitition of the same that is modern pop-music.
Beethoven and Goethe worked in a specific artistic context which is
radically incompatible with industrial production that is
characteristic of modern pop-music and marketing. Hence a facile quip
like "Beethoven would be making techno in Rotterdam" is misleading and does not really engage with the subject
matter. Yet, pointing this out and triggering an interesting debate
gets reprimanded as "curmudgeonly" when the discussion was
specifically about pop-music.
I've heard the criticism that modern electronic music is repetitive from so many music snobs, but I still don't understand what it is they have against repetition. Why is repetition so bad? Also, why is lack of repetition considered to be superior?
Further, have these critics never heard of trance (as in the state of consciousness, not the music genre)? Or of altered states of consciousness brought on by drugs, (repetitive) music, and other means, to which the repetition in music can be so sympathetic? There is also the simple visceral response that people have to music -- a response that defies analysis, is not intellectual.
Many people clearly enjoy being in the space that relatively simple, repetitive music brings them to, and I'm still puzzled why that's seen as being so wrong.
Would you come to HN every day if the linked articles never
changed?
I'm quite enamoured with Schmidthuber's theory of creativity [1, 2]
Schmidhuber develops a theory of
artificial curiosity and creativity for an autonomous agent. The
agent is equipped with an adaptive predictor trying to predict
future events from the history of previous events and actions. A
reward-maximising, reinforcement learning, adaptive controller is
steering the controller and gets curiosity reward for executing
action sequences that improve the predictor. (I term this "Pattern
Recognition as Pleasure".) This discourages the agent from
executing actions leading to boring outcomes that are either
predictable or totally unpredictable. Instead the controller
is motivated to learn actions that help the predictor to learn
new, previously unknown regularities in its environment, thus
improving its model of the world, which in turn can greatly help
to solve externally given tasks. Schmidhuber claims that his
corresponding formal theory of creativity explains essential
aspects of art, science, music, and humor.
If we were to take Schmidhuber's approach seriously, then that that which we enjoy as great art (as
creative) would be that which is on the edge of the observer's
ability to compress/understand. Note that this is highly observer
dependent! What I have been comprehending for a long time and
dismiss as boring, might be extremly interesting for somebody
else, and vice versa.
In my own life this was born out: I used to enjoy pop-music so
much and didn't worry about repetition -- in fact I didn't notice
it. I loved pop-music so much that I learned how to make it. This
lead to my disenchantment with pop-music: when I was finally able
to produce decent pop-music (I was able to compress it into a few
rules), I lost interest, and sought novelty elsewhere.
never heard of trance
I've certainly read Gilbert Rouget's Music and trance [3]. The upshot of this book is that trance is not really tied to any musical quality, but a social effect where we copy other's behaviours.
Come on, art is not measured by how complex or technically intricate it is. It's a matter of feeling and atmosphere. Techno is a sensibility and a culture, not a celebration of individual masterpieces by "geniuses".
That is a controversial point and depends on your concept of art. There are conceptions of art where novelty is an integral part of the very definition of artwork.
I agree that pop-music is precisely about creating "feeling and atmosphere", but I would extend it by saying: "easily, quicly and widely accessible shared feeling and atmosphere". And it is precisely this requirement of easy/quick access to the shared feeling and atmosphere that makes it important for pop-music to be conventional, to be repetition of previous pop-music. Surprise is anti-thetical to the purpose of pop-music.
Pop-music is acoustic wall-paper that is intended reliably to create a certain atmosphere.
You can gauge the conventional nature of pop-music from the fact that you can reliably determine the genre (e.g. House/Techno, Rap, Metal, Folk etc) by sub-1-second snippets. All successful genres have signature sounds for enabling quick identification. You can think of this as an aural version of branding. This is very well-known by professional producers, musicians and music marketing.
Easy and instant recognition is often a sign of triviality, accepted. But, like in written poetry, a command of the pop idiom is not enough to create a hit: there's got to be something convincing (and generally hard-to-pin-down) about the music or lyrics. There's an art to that which survives in any genre.
Even your demanding "genius" criterion can arguably be met by techno work like Autechre, in the same way that an exceptional architect might be encountered in any style or idiom of building. So I'm back-pedaling a bit on my previous remark (against genius) to suggest that any genre can be elevated by great practitioners. It's even a common mark of greatness to appreciate or at least not to be a snob about "lower" genres. The social conservatism of pop doesn't stop Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" from being culturally important, any more than the avant-garde chin-stroking of The Wire magazine guarantees artistic significance.
I'm not really pushing any specific notion of genius, but was challenging the
claim that B. would be making techno today.
I agree, "there's got to be something convincing", but it's unlikely to
be musical. Most musicians who have a hit at all have but one hit, and
then fade away. Most of the few musicians who persist (eg Rolling
Stones) have a massive and well-capitalised marketing department
behind them. To a pretty good approximation no
musician without major backing (which is expensive) has ever been
widely and/or long-term successful. To understand the nature of hits,
you need to understand the music industry.
Coincidentally, the music
industry follows the SV VC model: fund 100, expect 99 to fail and the
one unicorn who makes it big recoups (more than) the cost of the 99
failures.
I wish you had elaborated this comment into something substantial that readers could learn from.
Here is an interesting comment that a classical composer -- possibly the most influential one in the 20th century through his students -- on Aphex Twin and similar artists:
Influential though he may be, Stockhausen still comes across as a self-aggrandizing asshole:
> I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.
Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.
And course the reply:
> "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to".
For what it's worth, any student of "classical" (highbrow, not limited to Classical period) music will have concepts such as ostinato, fugue, motif, theme/variation, Don't Rush, etc. drilled into them. Periodicity is what differentiates music from noise and a tension between periodicity and aperiodicity is one criterion that separates good music from bad.
Like a petulant child he essentially
negated Stockhausen's points, without engaging with them. It seems to
me that Stockhausen was trying to be helpful -- after all he had been
a music teacher for nearly 1/2 century with academic offspring like
Kraftwerk and Can. Aphex Twin seemingly was unable/unwilling to see that there
are other approaches to music than the orthodoxy of 1990s dance music. Aphex Twin's main musical
criterion seems to be dancablility:
you can't dance to. Do you
reckon he can dance? You could
dance to Song of the Youth, but
it hasn't got a groove in it,
there's no bassline."
I would argue to the contrary: dance music -- whatever its merits for
dancing -- cannot be interesting as art music. Why? Because dancing,
specially dancing well, is itself demanding: most brain capacity is
used for moving the body along to the music in the right way, and that
capacity is missing for listening to and analysind the fine points of
the music.
Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.
Of course the
art music tradition of American mimimalism that you refer to, does change tempi and changing rhythms quite a great deal. It does so in novel ways that had not been explored in previous classical traditions. That's the main novelty that American mimimalism gave to the world.
Periodicity is what ...
I agree with that, and add that modern pop-music errs on the side of too much periodicity, which renders it uninteresting as art-music, but useful as aural background and for dancing.
What would be much more interesting is if instead of bickering, Stockhausen and Aphex Twin collaborated to create a new work together, like Beethoven and Goethe might have. What a wasted opportunity.
A few years ago, as a classical music fan, I set out on a mission to find some electronic music that I actually enjoyed listening to. Gradually, I learned that aside from the three usual pillars of composition — melody, harmony, and rhythm — there is a fourth that is underserved by practically every other genre of music: timbre. Electronic musicians are masters of sound sculpting as a musical atom. They can create new worlds from scratch.
Aphex Twin didn't really catch my ear, but Tipper sure did. Listening to his albums, I found myself completely enveloped in his immaculately sculpted aural biomes. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see the grumbling synth rivers, the shimmering vibrato branches, the chirping electric crickets. It was sublime in the classic sense of the word.
I would be disappointed if someone listened to Peripherals[1] or Gulch[2] and still came away thinking that electronic music was repetitive and boring!
(I bring this up because I think Aphex Twin is in a similar orbit of masterful sound design, though his style is too dissonant for my ear.)
You are missing the fifth and most important: meaning!
To be fair meaning is extra-musical, and varies between listeners.
Other than that, you are absolutely correct: timber is the focus of modern electronic music. All previous genres simply lacked the instruments to do much of interest in the way of timber.
There is still plenty of room left in electronic music for new ideas and exciting masterpieces. Popular music is definitely especially vile today, but that does not make the musical form itself dead.
I don't see pop-music as vile. For me it's a social tool. It gets me & friends into a certain shared mood: relax, unwind, get drunk, etc etc. But it's not artistic: pop-music is surprise-free, it's conventional, it doesn't make me think "wow, I've never though of this". Au contraire. And that's why it works for setting shared social moods. It could not serve its social function if it was too original, too intellectually demanding.
If it's Saturday night 2am "in the club" everybody's intoxicated the music needs to 'hit' everybody straightaway. Everybody needs to know when to raise their hands ... and that means it must be extremely predicable.
Why would a "link" be interesting or relevant? My point that modern pop-music is extremely generic stands/falls whether I have "tracks" or not.
It's hard to deny that modern pop-music is to an extremely good approximation all in the 4/4 time signature for example,
so to an extremely good approximation all modern pop-music has less rhythmic variety e.g. many/most single classical pieces.
We see figures like Beethoven and Goethe as geniuses themselves, but the 18th century conception of 'genius' was not of a person, but of a sort of holy spirit that blessed an individual with great abilities, while remaining separate from that person.
So prior to Romantics of the 19th century taking hold of the concept of genius and re-purposing it into the one we're familiar with today, one would not speak of someone being a genius, but being graced with genius. Genius was not who they were, but something external to them that they possessed.
It's a subtle but interesting difference.