The poverty of musical historicism

John Quiggin8 Comments

In the April edition of Prospect (subscription required), Roderick Swanston has an interesting review of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. Swanston attributes to Taruskin an agenda that

is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music’s progression.

I haven’t read the book, and at 280stg, I’m not likely to, but the raw numbers are pretty convincing. Of five volumes covering the last 1500 years, Taruskin devotes two to the 20th century, and, according to Swanston, his focus is almost exclusively confined to art music derived from the classical tradition.

This allocation of attention states a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting. The 20th century was saturated in music, as is the early 21st, but 20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole. If you covered the entire field, from ABBA to zydeco, on any of these criteria, contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock (another sub-genre inspired by historicism). Speaking personally, I couldn’t name more than a handful of living writers of art music, and even if I stretched it to include people who’d been active during my lifetime, I doubt that I could name ten. No doubt there are readers here who could do better, but we’re still talking about a marginal phenomenon, unless you assume that cultural significance is heritable property, passed on by classical art music to its institutional successors.

Nor could it be said that art music has handed on the baton of progress to other forms of music. The 20th century saw a profusion of musical forms and styles, and these have developed over time, crossed over and intermingled, but not obviously for the better (or, for that matter, for the worse).

If you want a grand-historical theory for music, Giovanni Battista Vico is your only man. The wheel turns.

fn1. As always, the term “20th century” can’t be used in a strictly chronological sense. For most purposes, as Hobsbawm says, the 20th century began in 1914, and composers with an essentially 19th century approach were still writing well after that. On the other hand, the view that progress manifested itself through formal innovation was around much earlier. A reasonable starting point for the 20th century proper would be Schoenberg’s atonalism.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin14 Comments

I’ve been badly overstretched for the last few months, with an excessive amount of travel, and one symptom has been a failure to keep up with regular features like this one. I’m gradually getting my life under some control, so I thought I’d try to restart some conversations about books and writing. I have a huge pile of books on my desk, some of which I’ve promised to review. In this category, theres“Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner), “In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati), and Diversity in Development: Reconsidering the Washington Consensus.

I’ve also become interested in philosophical issues relating to causality, which are closely linked to my concerns about uncertainty (in a world with no uncertainty, causality is essentially trivial). Books I’ve found helpful include“Reasoning about Uncertainty” (Joseph Y. Halpern)“Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World” (Nuel D. Belnap, Michael Perloff, Ming Xu, Nuel Belnap)“Causation and Counterfactuals (Representation and Mind)” (The MIT Press) and“Causality : Models, Reasoning, and Inference” (Judea Pearl)

On the leisure front, I’ve been enjoying Iain Banks series of novels about The Culture, most recently Excession

I hope to extend this post during the week, adding a range of comments on these books over the fold. But feel free to jump in first with your thoughts, recommendations for further reading etc.

One billion links

John Quiggin

I wasn’t watching it tick over, but Technorati just passed 1 billion links, of which this blog accounts for 311. Here’s the Technorati Top 100, including Crooked Timber at #59.

I don’t know exactly what to make of this number. A link can be anything from part of an extended debate to a cut-and-pasted item on a blogroll. Still, its obvious that the blogosphere is still growing rapidly and in all dimensions. There’s some more data, here , herehere

Tens of thousands

John Quiggin7 Comments

Responding to the latest inquiry into bogus intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, Bush says

“Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives,” Bush said.

But in the real world, the threat was overestimated and tens of thousands of innocent lives were lost[1].

fn1. If anyone wants to argue about numbers, they’re probably better off doing so over at Tim Lambert’s blog, but I’ll add just a few. The Iraq body count aggregates media reports of at least 17 000 civilian (including in this context, Iraqi police and troops killed in insurgent attacks) deaths arising from either US military action or insurgent attacks. These are lower-bound estimates, since many deaths have undoubtedly gone unreported. And the ordinary soldiers on both sides who died were also innocent of anything other than obeying the orders of a president who told them they were defending their country against a deadly threat.

Real and virtual weapons

John Quiggin21 Comments

I’ve been interested for a while in the extra-game markets for items like weapons, spells and so on created in online games. This story involves two Chinese gameplayers who acquired a highly valuable virtual sword. One of them borrowed it and sold it for about $1000. The other player went to the police without result, and eventually confronted his partner, and in the ensuing argument, pulled a knife and stabbed him to death. It’s sad that this happened, but the most interesting aspect for those not directly involved is the question of whether the seller had committed a crime, and if so what. The following discussion is based on very limited knowledge, so feel free to correct me.

Even if this was a real sword, I doubt that the police would have become involved in the dispute because it was jointly owned, so only a civil action would have been available.

More generally, if the law does become involved in this kind of dispute, it’s unlikely that ordinary property law is the right place to look. Even if your virtual castle may look like genuine, it isn’t real estate. It’s the product of a contract between you and the game’s operators. In many cases, that contract forbids outside resale of items, so your rights are pretty limited. But even in a game like Entropia which encourages such things, your rights over virtual items are defined within a set of rules created by the game operators. If, for example, they arbitrarily confiscated virtual land for which you had paid, your remedy, if any, would be under contract law or (in particularly outrageous cases) the game operators might be prosecuted for fraud.

Of course, all this could change. There’s nothing to stop governments creating new categories of virtual/intellectual property. But, as with intellectual ‘property’ in general, intuitions based on standard (rival, excludable) private goods aren’t likely to provide a good basis for thinking about such things.

There’s more discussion at TerraNova where this kind of issue has been debated before.

Underfunded

John Quiggin14 Comments

There’s an interesting story in today’s Fin (subscription only) about a study of a remote NT Aboriginal community which found that government spending per person there was substantially less than the average for NT residents in general. I don’t know how general this is, but I’ve seen similar results before. The idea that “we have spent massive sums of money on Aboriginal problems and have nothing to show for it” is based on dubious empirical assumptions. A common source of this thinking, at least when ATSIC was around was to look at the total amount allocated to Aboriginal health, education and so on, without netting out the amount that would otherwise have been spent through the mainstream health and education budgets.

Also in today’s Fin, I have a piece on oil prices. Most of it will be familiar to readers, but I’ve put it over the fold anyway.
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Should we be scared of Uncle Sam ?

John Quiggin65 Comments

This poll showing that 57 per cent of Australians thought US foreign policy to be as great a threat as that of Islamic fundamentalism provokes a variety of thoughts. I happened to read the poll results on the same day as this NYT story about Maher Arar, whose ‘extraordinary rendition’ has been covered in detail at Obsidian Wings.

There are various ways of assessing threats, and most Australians rightly regard terrorism as an overstated danger. But, as far as terrorism is concerned, there can be few instances more horrible and terrifying than the kidnappings and televised beheadings we’ve seen in Iraq. There are, however, equally awful things going on that are not televised, and that are carried out by the United States government.

An unknown number of people have been kidnapped, then shipped to torture chambers in unknown locations. We’ve found out about this from cases like that of Maher Arar, who was eventually released after his captors gave up on the idea that he was a terrorist, but it’s likely that in most cases, the victim simply disappears and is never seen again. Arar was in transit through the US when he was grabbed, but there have been similar kidnappings in Italy, Sweden and Macedonia and of course, countries like Iraq and Pakistan are free-fire zones.

As with quite a few of the worst policies of the Bush administration, the practice of extraordinary rendition apparently began under Clinton, but has been greatly expanded by Bush[1].

As far as I’ve seen so far, all of the victims in this cases have been Muslims. If that comforts you, perhaps you ought to read Martin Niemoller

As long as extraordinary renditions and similar practices continue, Australians are right to regard at least some aspects of US foreign policy as a threat comparable to that of Al Qaeda.

An update In the comments thread at Crooked Timber, Katherine observes, correctly I think, that arguments about moral equivalence are counterproductive. As she says ‘“Are we better or worse than Zarqawi and Bin Ladenâ€? is the debate people like James Inhofe and George W. Bush want us to have. ” So, I shouldn’t have said “equally awful” above. But what is being done is awful, and such things are contributing greatly to the fear of US foreign policy I referred to.

fn1. Supporters of the Clinton Administration might usefully think about this the next time they are tempted to take a small step on the slippery slope of curtailing civil liberties. Supporters of the current Administration might want to give some thought to the likelihood that the practices they are now defending or assiduously ignoring will sooner or later be directed by Hillary Clinton, who might well choose to use them against the vast right-wing conspiracy linked, at its extremities, to Oklahoma City (the apparent starting point of extraordinary rendition) and to terrorist attacks on abortion clinics.