The Reality of Charles Ives

Charles Ives famously joked once "Are my ears on wrong?" His music has always confirmed to me that if his ears were on wrong, so were mine. I was introduced to Ives by my dad who once led a production of Waiting for Godot, and had found the perfect music to accompany it - The Unanswered Question. Curiously a few days after my dad died (many years ago now), I went to a concert (trying to clear my head), and there was a remarkable performance of the unanswered question in Manchester. Strange how those things happen - it was a very meaningful experience - we imagine some kind of divine blessing at these moments.

Great artists tune-in to some fundamental principle of the universe. They often struggle to articulate exactly what that is, but it is clearly evident in their work. Academics are often arrogant enough to believe that they can unpick these fundamental principles - and make themselves look foolish in the process. In between the artistic expression and the academic "sense-making" is a process of loss of information. This is more pronounced in academic work which is "easier" to digest in the academy - that which divides things up into structural and formal relations, or carves it up on a spreadsheet. Its like how dissecting a frog destroys the living essence of frogness.

So if we have to academicise great art, there should be something as impenetrable in our scholarship as there is in the art. For me, the best theoretical work is like this, where theory has a similar structure to the thing it theorises. We tend not to think like this. We look to theory to "explain", where it can be something that accompanies us on a journey. It is a bit like how I described Gordon Pask's thinking about information the other day: not as a calculation, but a physical process. 

Music is a physical process. It is a process of physiological adaptation to perturbation driven by nature's tendency towards homeostasis. What drives that process we don't know, although there are emerging theories as to how it might happen. Much more difficult is to think how we might measure a process, or even to think what measurement actually means. 

Today we are used to using computers to measure things - often with statistical formulae. But what is a computer? What is a machine? So, here is Gordon Pask again on that with a statement I find very profound:

"The word 'machine' means a piece of hardware constrained, algebraically, to act as a computer"