Musical Instruments Are Not about Music

To get a rough estimate of how many musical instruments (like the piano) are we can look through Wikipedia’s Category:Musical instruments. Lots of non-instruments and notable examples of a kind of instrument, but it makes the numbers pretty clear - there are hundreds of instruments if not thousands, from most cultures, even if we compress the variations.

Suppose one had a well-defined aesthetic preference - a total ordering (or at least a partially ordered set with a greatest element) - so we can speak of an ‘ideal instrument’ for that person, an instrument which gives them the greatest aesthetic gratification of all known instruments.

If we picked a random instrument for them from our set of thousands of instruments, the odds aren’t good we’ll pick the ideal one. Thousands to one, after all. If a parent inflicted such a choice on their kid, the kid ought to believe the choice is suboptimal from his aesthetic point of view (with a confidence of >99%). if he cares about the matter, then he should probably go looking as an adult for a better choice.

Depending on how much he cares and how easy it is to ‘search’ through thousands of instruments, he might search quite a bit.

Strangely, you don’t see much of this. Most people seem pretty happy with their current instrument and even music nerds don’t spend as much time as one might expect sampling instruments and pondering their merits. How to explain this? Sunk cost into learning the inferior instrument? Maybe the aesthetic difference between an average and the ideal isn’t that great (despite a theremin sounding very different from a synthesizer or a keyboard or a piano, or even violas and violins sounding quite different, and the revealed preference of antique highly-regarded individual instruments going for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to performers)? Or maybe it’s…. status.

Maybe people don’t search through all manner of rare instruments because musical instruments aren’t about aesthetics as much as they are about social signals and status and prestige. There can only be a few prestigious instruments (perhaps less than 10; surely not as high as 20), after all, and we all hear them quite a bit. By the time a kid hits middle school, he’s spent many years watching movies and TV where there’s a lot of instrumental background music and he’s learned whether he likes piano better than violin or cello.

There’s just not many options to think about. If you aspire to WASPy high society, you learn piano; if you aspire to prestige among young people, the guitar or drums. And so on. This is so ingrained it can be difficult to see; Western society does not, that I know of, have any standard expression like the Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar (which mandates a scholar know the guqin and such rules of etiquette as the Seven Should-not-plays or Six Avoidances). But nevertheless, the bongo drums are not prestigious and similarly one can point out the middling status of the harmonica (which only avoids being low by its use in the blues and jazz). Note that in the stereotype of Asian parents in America forcing their kids to learn instruments, the parents are not choosing oddball instruments you’ve never heard of (you know, one of the thousands of instruments not included in your standard Western-style orchestra), they’re choosing ones as familiar as dirt:

Let’s go back to her crazy list of why her parenting is better. #9: violin or piano, no other instruments. If Chua is so Chinese, and has full executive control over her kids, why does she–and the real Chinese parents out there–make their kids play violin, play Bach and not Chinese music? They’d be happy to educate you on the beauty of Chinese music, I’m sure, but they don’t make their kids learn that. Why not?

She wants them learning this because the Western culture deems classical music as high culture, and therefore anyone who can play it is cultured. Someone said Beethoven is great music so they learn that. There is no sense of understanding, it is purely a technical accomplishment. Why Beethoven and not Beethoven’s contemporaries? The parents have no idea. Can her kids write new music? Do they want to write music? It’s all mechanics. This isn’t a slander on Asian musicianship, it is an observation that the parents who push their kids into these instruments are doing it for its significance to other people (eg. colleges) and not for itself. Why not guitar? Why not painting? Because it doesn’t impress admissions counselors. What if the kid shows some interest in drama? Well, then kid can go live with his white friends and see how far he gets in life. That’s why it’s in the WSJ. The Journal has no place for, “How a Fender Strat Changed My Life.” It wants piano and violin, it wants Chua’s college-resume worldview. –“Are Chinese Mothers Superior To American Mothers?”, The Last Psychiatrist

William Weir in The Atlantic, “Why Is It So Hard for New Musical Instruments to Catch On?”:

As composer Edgard Varese put it in 1936_90ya, “It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony.” So what happened? Why has there been such a drought of new instruments-especially in rock and pop, which thrive on novelty?

Inventor Aaron Andrew Hunt blames it in part on the “music industrial complex.” He created the Tonal Plexus in 1996_30ya and has since sold, by his count, “not many.” With 1,266 keys, the instrument is designed especially for microtonal composition, so it would be a tough sell at just about any time. But Hunt said the deck is particularly stacked against new instruments now that a standard repertoire has been locked in, as has the popular idea of what a proper instrument is. “The biggest barrier is the institutionalization of Western music and the mass marketing of all the instruments,” he says. “The problem is that no one can break though this marketing barrier and this education barrier because it’s become this machine.” In the past, support from the establishment has made a difference in whether new instruments find a market. The research and backing of universities and corporations like RCA helped make the synthesizer happen. In Hector Berlioz, the saxophone got a major boost from a major composer. But many instruments have risen from very humble origins. The steel drum evolved from frying pans and oil cans after the Trinidadian government banned other musical instruments. Folks of limited means also turned household objects into music makers with washboards and turntables.

Or Amy Chua herself:

That’s one of the reasons I insisted [her two daughters] do classical music. I knew that I couldn’t artificially make them feel like poor immigrant kids. … But I could make sure that [daughter #1] and [daughter #2] were deeper and more cultivated than my parents and I were. Classical music was the opposite of decline, the opposite of laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness. It was a way for my children to achieve something I hadn’t. But it was also a tie-in to the high cultural tradition of my ancestors.

It’s simple logic that the less popular an instrument, the easier it is to become world-class in it - because the “world” is smaller. I was shocked to one day download an album of Studio Ghibli music as played on a nose-flute (Sound Of Noseflute 4 (Song Works Of Studio Ghibli)), and even more shocked that the title implied there was a whole series of nose-flute albums; but in retrospect, it makes sense: is it easier to make a career as a nose-flute performer where you are competing against perhaps a few thousand people at most, or as a concert pianist where one’s competition is measurable (if at all) in the millions?

Standardizing on just a few instrument and turning them into positional goods also tragically turns them into an arms race (and anecdotally, admissions officers have begun to disregard them because of their popularity⁷²):

On the whole, discipline makes life easier and better. On the other hand, who the fuck cares about the piano and violin? If all tiger mothers push the piano, say, the winner-take-all race for piano becomes utterly brutal, and the tiger-mothered pianist will likely get less far in the piano race than a bunny-mothered bassoonist. That just seems dumb! Gamble on the flugelhorn! The Western ethos of hyper-individuation produces less of the sort of hugely inefficient positional pileup (not that there aren’t too many guitarists) that comes from herding everybody onto the same rutted status tracks. It also produces less discipline and thus less virtuosity, but a greater variety of excellence by generating the cultural innovation that opens up new fields of endeavor and new status games. It’s just way better to be the world’s best acrobatic kite-surfer than the third best pianist in Cleveland. –“Amy Chua”, Will Wilkinson

The defense for these practices?

There are definitely aspects of my upbringing that I’d like to replicate. I’m never going to be a professional pianist, but the piano has given me confidence that totally shapes my life. I feel that if I work hard enough, I can do anything. I know I can focus on a given task for hours at a time. And on horrible days when I’m lost and a mess, I can say to myself, “I’m good at something that I really, really love.” –“Q&A: elves, dirt, and college decisions”, Sophia Rubenfeld-Chua

The point of learning the piano is NOT about acquiring the skill of playing the piano so that the student can earn a living as a pianist. It is about building the character of the person. Here is the thing about character – you can’t build it by explicitly setting out to build it. Character is not a skill like tying your shoelaces. If it must be put in terms of “skill”, character is a “meta-skill” – a foundational human skill that is necessary to perfect any number of mechanical skills. And the only way to develop this meta-skill is to develop at least one highly sophisticated mechanical skill, such that the student may acquire the meta-skill in the course of building the mechanical skill.

So, once again: the point of learning the piano is NOT about acquiring the skill of playing the piano. As Rubenfeld-Chua put it, it is about acquiring genuine confidence and iron discipline. With such confidence and discipline, she can move on and do anything she wants in her life because there is no task in life in which confidence and discipline hinder success. THIS is the whole point of Tiger Parenting, and the reason why Tiger Parenting is so successful. –“Confucianism and Korea - Part V: What Can Confucianism Do For America?”, The Korean

The cynical questions almost ask themselves. Would Sophia love piano so much if she hadn’t had to practice for hundreds of hours? How unlikely is it that piano would just happen to be the perfect instrument for her? And like the old argument that learning Latin was worthwhile because it sped up subsequent language learning, are even the basic facts correct - does the building-character practice actually build character? Juvenile boot camps have generally failed to show any noticeable improvement in their inmates, and soldiers frequently discuss the difficulty of adapting to civilian life (despite decades of self-discipline)⁷³. Were we to grant the character-building nature of piano, that raises a further question - don’t other instruments build character as well, and so why not learn the flugelhorn and gain both benefits - character and useful skill building? Why must we all pile into the same high-prestige occupations like being a rock star or actor⁷⁴? This may be good for the tiny subset of “insiders: pianists, concert presenters and pianophiles” who are actually able to notice the differences and value highly small improvements, though even they seem to be a bit jaded and no longer very interested in technical proficiency⁷⁵ - but everyone else?

But hey, there is one benefit to all this human capital poured into narrow status signaling. We get a ton of anime operas⁷⁶ and music played with classical instruments on YouTube!⁷⁷

Good and Plenty

Extracts from Good and Plenty: the creative successes of American arts funding, by Tyler Cowen2006, ISBN 978-0-691-12042-3. See also Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (originally titled Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War) and the CIA involvement in Dr. Zhivago, discussed in The Zhivago Affair (excerpts).

“Pericalypsis”, Stanislaw Lem

pg157–168, A Perfect Vacuum, Stanisław Lem (translated by Michael Kandel, 1979_47ya)

Joachim Fersengeld

(Editions de Minuit, Paris)

Joachim Fersengeld, a German, wrote his Pericalypse in Dutch (he hardly knows the language, which he himself admits in the Introduction) and published it in France, a country notorious for its dreadful proofreading. The writer of these words also does not, strictly speaking, know Dutch, but going by the title of the book, the English Introduction, and a few understandable expressions here and there in the text, he has concluded that he can pass muster as a reviewer after all.

Joachim Fersengeld does not wish to be an intellectual in an age when anyone can be one. Nor has he any desire to pass for a man of letters. Creative work of value is possible when there is resistance, either of the medium or of the people at whom the work is aimed; but since, after the collapse of the prohibitions of religion and the censor, one can say everything, or anything whatever, and since, with the disappearance of those attentive listeners who hung on every word, one can howl anything at anyone, literature and all its humanistic affinity is a corpse, whose advancing decay is stubbornly concealed by the next of kin. Therefore, one should seek out new terrains for creativity, those in which can be found a resistance that will lend an element of menace and risk - and therewith importance and responsibility - to the situation.

Such a field, such an activity, can today be only prophecy. Because he is without hope - that is, because he knows in advance that he will be neither heard out nor recognized nor accepted - the prophet ought to reconcile himself a priori to a position of muteness. And he who, being a German, addresses Frenchmen in Dutch with English introductions is as mute as he who keeps silent. Thus Fersengeld acts in accordance with his own assumptions. Our mighty civilization, he says, strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible. The impermanent product must soon be replaced by a new one, and this is good for the economy; the permanence of the packaging, on the other hand, makes its disposal difficult, and this promotes the further development of technology and organization. Thus the consumer copes with each consecutive article of junk on an individual basis, whereas for the removal of the packagings special antipollution programs are required, sanitary engineering, the coordination of efforts, planning, purification and decontamination plants, and so on. Formerly, one could depend on it that the accumulation of garbage would be kept at a reasonable level by the forces of nature, such as the rains, the winds, rivers, and earthquakes. But at the present time what once washed and flushed away the garbage has itself become the excrement of civilization: the rivers poison us, the atmosphere burns our lungs and eyes, the winds strew industrial ashes on our heads, and as for plastic containers, since they are elastic, even earthquakes cannot deal with them. Thus the normal scenery today is civilizational droppings, and the natural reserves are a momentary exception to the rule. Against this landscape of packagings that have been sloughed off by their products, crowds bustle about, absorbed in the business of opening and consuming, and also in that last natural product, sex. Yet sex, too, has been given a multitude of packagings, for this and nothing else is what clothes are, displays, roses, lipsticks, and sundry other advertising wrappings. Thus civilization is worthy of admiration only in its separate fragments, much as the precision of the heart is worthy of admiration, the liver, the kidneys, or the lungs of an organism, since the rapid work of those organs makes good sense, though there is no sense whatever in the activity of the body that comprises these perfect parts - if it is the body of a lunatic.

The same process, declares the prophet, is taking place in the area of spiritual goods as well, since the monstrous machine of civilization, its screws having worked loose, has turned into a mechanical milker of the Muses. Thus it fills the libraries to bursting, inundates the bookstores and magazine stands, numbs the television screens, piling itself high with a superabundance of which the numerical magnitude alone is a deathblow. If finding forty grains of sand in the Sahara meant saving the world, they would not be found, any more than would the forty messianic books that have already long since been written but were lost beneath strata of trash. And these books have unquestionably been written; the statistics of intellectual labor guarantees it, as is explained - in Dutch - mathematically - by Joachim Fersengeld, which this reviewer must repeat on faith, conversant with neither the Dutch language nor the mathematical. And so, ere we can steep our souls in those revelations, we bury them in garbage, for there is four billion times more of the latter. But then, they are buried already. Already has come to pass what the prophecy proclaimed, only it went unnoticed in the general haste. The prophecy, then, is a retrophecy, and for this reason is entitled Pericalypse, and not Apocalypse. Its progress (retrogress) we detect by Signs: by languidity, insipidity, and insensitivity, and in addition by acceleration, inflation, and masturbation. Intellectual masturbation is the contenting of oneself with the promise in place of the delivery. first we were onanized thoroughly by advertising (that degenerate form of revelation which is the measure of the Commercial Idea, as opposed to the Personal), and then self-abuse took over as a method for the rest of the arts. And this, because to believe in the saving power of Merchandise yields greater results than to believe in the efficacy of the Lord God.

The moderate growth of talent, its innately slow maturation, its careful weeding out, its natural selection in the purview of solicitous and discerning tastes - these are phenomena of a bygone age that died heirless. The last stimulus that still works is a mighty howl; but when more and more people howl, employing more and more powerful amplifiers, one’s eardrums will burst before the soul learns anything. The names of the geniuses of old, more and more vainly invoked, already are an empty sound; and so it is mene mene tekel upharsin, unless what Joachim Fersengeld recommends is done. There should be set up a Save the Human Race Foundation, as a sixteen-billion reserve on a gold standard, yielding an interest of four percent per annum. Out of this fund moneys should be dispensed to all creators - to inventors, scholars, engineers, painters, writers, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and designers - in the following way. He who writes nothing, designs nothing, paints nothing, neither patents nor proposes, is paid a stipend, for life, to the tune of thirty-six thousand dollars a year. He who does any of the aforementioned receives correspondingly less.

Pericalypse contains a full set of tabulations of what is to be deducted for each form of creativity. For one invention or two published books a year, you receive not a cent; by three titles, what you create comes out of your own pocket. With this, only a true altruist, only an ascetic of the spirit, who loves his neighbor but not himself one bit, will create anything, and the production of mercenary rubbish will cease. Joachim Fersengeld speaks from personal experience, for it was at his own expense - at a loss! - that he published his Pericalypse. He knows, then, that total unprofitability does not at all mean the total elimination of creativity.

Egoism manifests itself as a hunger for mammon combined with a hunger for glory: in order to scotch the latter as well, the Salvation Program introduces the complete anonymity of the creators. To forestall the submission of stipend applications from untalented persons, the Foundation will, through the appropriate organs, examine the qualifications of the candidates. The actual merit of the idea with which a candidate comes forward is of no consequence. The only important thing is whether the project possesses commercial value, that is, whether it can be sold. If so, the stipend is awarded immediately. For underground creative activity, there is set up a system of penalties and repressive measures within the framework of legal prosecution by the apparatus of the Safety Control; also introduced is a new form of police, namely, the Anvil (Anticreative Vigilance League). According to the penal code, whosoever clandestinely writes, disseminates, harbors, or even if only in silence publicly communicates any fruit of creative endeavor, with the purpose of deriving from said action either gain or glory, shall be punished by confinement, forced labor, and, in the case of recidivism, by imprisonment in a dark cell with a hard bed, and a caning on each anniversary of the offense. For the smuggling into the bosom of society of such ideas, whose tragic effect on life is comparable to the bane of the automobile, the scourge of cinematography, the curse of television, etc., the law provides capital punishment as the maximum and includes the pillory and a life sentence of the compulsory use of one’s own invention. Punishable also are attempted crimes, and premeditation carries with it badges of shame, in the form of the stamping of the forehead with indelible letters arranged to spell out “Enemy of Man.” However, graphomania, which does not look for gain, is called a Disorder of the Mind and is not punishable, though persons so afflicted are removed from society, as constituting a threat to the peace, and placed in special institutions, where they are humanely supplied with great quantities of ink and paper.

Obviously world culture will not at all suffer from such state regulation, but will only then begin to flourish. Humanity will return to the magnificent works of its own history; for the number of sculptures, paintings, plays, novels, gadgets, and machines is great enough already to meet the needs of many centuries. Nor will anyone be forbidden to make so-called epochal discoveries, on the condition that he keep them to himself.

Having in this way set the situation to rights - that is, having saved humanity - Joachim Fersengeld proceeds to the final problem: what is to be done with that monstrous glut which has already come about? As a man of uncommon civil fortitude, Fersengeld says that what has so far been created in the twentieth century, though it may contain great pearls of wisdom, is worth nothing when tallied up in its entirety, because you will not find those pearls in the ocean of garbage. Therefore he calls for the destruction of everything in one lump, all that has arisen in the form of films, illustrated magazines, postage stamps, musical scores, books, scientific articles, newspapers, for this act will be a true cleaning out of the Augean stables - with a full balancing of the historical credits and debits in the human ledger. (Among other things, the destruction will claim the facts about atomic energy, which will eliminate the current threat to the world.) Joachim Fersengeld points out that he is perfectly aware of the infamy of burning books, or even whole libraries. But the autos-da-fé enacted in history - such as in the Third Reich - were infamous because they were reactionary. It all depends on the grounds on which one does the burning. He proposes, then, a life-saving auto-da-fé, progressive, redemptive; and because Joachim Fersengeld is a prophet consistent to the end, in his closing word he bids the reader first tear up and set fire to this very prophecy!