Machines + Society #20: How to Grow a Musician; Focusing; Lithography
In which Kegan's stages are applied to a musical genius
machines + society
Mako Shen | Mar 31, 2021
Book Review: Words Without Music; Understanding Stages of Development through Philip Glass's Life
“Philip Glass reaching satori”
Source: Craesbeeck, van Joos, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Bucerius Kunst Forum.
"If you could have dinner with anyone alive today, who would it be and why?"
Although I've asked this question several times, I never really had a good answer.
That is, until last week, when I finished reading Philip Glass' Words Without Music: A Memoir.
Here is an overview of his life in bullet points:
Born in Baltimore, 1937 to a working class Lithuanian-Jewish family
Gets into the University of Chicago at the age of 15 and graduates with a degree in math and philosophy at 19
Broke but determined to study music, he works at a steel mill to pay for the fees at the Julliard Extension school, eventually auditions to the president of Julliard who grants him a scholarship— "the only problem was, as always, the material question"
Moves to Pittsburgh and spends two years as a composer-in-residence at the local public schools
Gets a Fulbright scholarship to study in France with the famed composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, who wrings him out like that crazy Jazz teacher in Whiplash
Moves to Northern India where he becomes good friends with Ravi Shankar (you know— the guy who brought northern Indian music to the west and whom the Beatles loved) and, eventually, the Dalai Lama.
Starts writing music like crazy, churning out nine now-famous pieces in the summer of 1967
Writes a trio of Operas (including his most famous: Einstein on the Beach) and manages to sell out the New York Metropolitan Theater and goes on a tour around Europe where people love his work but still ends up in $100k of debt (apparently all Operas lose money).
Tours Greece with Allan Ginsberg (the brilliant author of Howl), who at one point gets atop the stage and begins reciting W.B. Yeats' poetry, "The tourists who were around would sit down in the seats in the amphitheater and listen, because here’s someone with a big head of hair who looked like a professor—I don’t think anyone knew it was Allen Ginsberg—and the guards didn’t stop him."
Through all this time continues working as, variously, a plumber, an art gallery assistant, a cab driver (where he almost gets murdered), and a furniture mover. Because, despite his acclaim in the art world, he still can't make a living as a musician.
Spends five days in the third-class train to Tibet drinking no liquids because of the risk of dysentry: "Fresh oranges or tangerines, which we were able to peel ourselves, were our entire source of liquids. Hard travel to be sure, but, for me, never uninteresting."
Starts scoring the music for movies and eventually composes for Kundun, the Scorsese film about the Dalai Lama. Finally somewhere around the age of 41, he is able to start living off his music.
Gets involved with Foday Musa, the West African equivalent of Ravi Shankar, and once again transforms the way he does music.
Has a bunch of insane experiences with people ranging from Brazilian gold miners to Indian yogis to West African villagers, and attempts to integrate it all into his music.
Etc
Philip Glass is remarkable not just because of his crazy experiences but also his sheer mental fortitude and his abject contrarianism. He travels to India for six months after having a vision triggered by a picture in a book. His music initially is disdained and attacked by many of the pillars of the classical world ("The new head of the Netherlands Opera ... assured the public that Satyagraha would never be played in Holland again"), and even his fans get regularly disappointed when he chooses not to capitalize on previous successes. At one point has to physically fend off someone who tries to sabotage his performance:
“Before I had gotten even halfway through my performance, I noticed someone had joined me on the stage. The next thing I knew he was at the keyboard banging at the keys. Without thinking, acting on pure instinct, I belted him across the jaw and he staggered and fell off the stage. Half the audience cheered and the rest either booed or laughed. Without a pause, I began playing again, having lost the momentum of the music for not much more than five to six seconds."
Philip Glass attributes it to an inherited disposition— "They were going to be mad at me no matter what I did. But luckily I have have a wonderful gene— the I-don't-care-what-you-think gene. I have that big-time"— and I guess I'm partly jealous that I don't have this gene. Though on second consideration I’m not so certain: even after he has a family, he continues to sleep on the floor and keep his clothes in wooden movers’ crates. He also regularly had to work 18-hour days of composing, moving furniture, driving taxis until he was 41.
Another thing I find fascinating is how closely Glass's musical understanding maps onto the psychologist Robert Kegan's stages of adult development.
Aside: On Kegan's Stages
If you haven't heard of Kegan's stages of development, I recommend you take the time to read this introduction by David Chapman. It's changed the way I think about human growth and development in a significant way, and is very difficult to convey without a number of other examples.
Let me try anyway. There are technically five stages of development, but the first two are usually completed by the end of adolescence. The last three stages are what we are most interested in for studying adult development. Stages 3, 4, and 5, are known as the communal, systematic, and fluid modes.
I’ve expanded a bit on Chapman’s table:
In Stage 2, relationships are transactional— a way to get your own needs met. In Stage 3, you become defined by your relationships. According to Kegan, ~60% of the population is in this Stage. In Stage 4, you consolidate a sense of self independent from your relationships using a system of principles. You learn to question feelings and values and derive your own (~35% of the population). In Stage 5, you are no longer identified with a particular role or principle, but deeply accept that you are in flux. Very few (~1%) apparently reach this Stage, and I don’t pretend to really understand Stage 5 myself.
One useful example to distinguish Stages 2, 3, and 4, is to consider Mary, a doctor at a retirement home. A Stage 2 Mary works because she worries about how personally inconvenient it would be to find another job and to not have steady income for a while. A Stage 3 Mary works because she values the relationships with her fellow doctors, and the money she makes directly makes her and her family more comfortable. A Stage 4 Mary works because helping people who are old or otherwise struggle to live on their own is a good and important thing to do. Satisfying her family and coworkers is of course a great upside, but ultimately something that she can detach herself from in pursuit of her ethical principles.
I might point out that Kegan’s Stages extend far beyond how you conceive of yourself, and in fact can be understood as also domain-specific. College math students, for instance, move more and more into Stage 4 by rigorously understanding the consequences of different axioms (i.e. real and complex analysis), while the mathematicians that break paradigms demonstrate Stage 5 understanding (think Alan Turing and Alonzo Church on computability theory).
Philip Glass’ Stages
Certain passages from Words Without Music are striking in how closely they correspond to the systematic stage 4 to the fluid stage 5 transition.
In the context of music, Stage 3 corresponds to the kinds of nonserious practice that amateurs like myself do 'for fun'. We are principally concerned with what immediately feels good. There might be some attempt to try and understand music theory (chord progressions, major/minor scales) but typically it is done without significant commitment, and always as a direct means to make good sounds.
It's clear from a very early stage that Glass was steeped in a formal system of Western music: "I started playing the violin at six, the flute and piano at eight, begun composing at fifteen." He was also admitted to the preparatory school of the Peabody Institute, a pretty famous music conservatory, before he was ten years old. I see this as him peeking over from Stage 3 to Stage 4.
His education intensifies after he gets into Julliard and begins composing many hours a day. "It was impossible for me to flunk out— I had written too much music. I had the naïve but probably correct idea that if I wrote enough music, I would start to get better."
Glass' focus on music reaches fever pitch when he travels to France to study under the brilliant Mademoiselle Boullanger. Here’s a revealing anecdote:
"One afternoon I arrived with my usual stack of counterpoint—at least twenty very dense pages. She put them on the music rack of the piano and began to speed read her way through them.
At one point she stopped and caught her breath.
She looked at me steadily and calmly asked me how I was feeling.
“Fine,” I replied.
“Not sick, no headache, no problems at home?” she continued.
“No, Mlle. Boulanger, I am really fine.”
But now I was getting worried.
“Would you like to see a physician or a psychiatrist? It can be arranged very confidentially.”
“No, Mlle. Boulanger.”
She paused for only a moment, then, wheeling around in her chair, she practically screamed at me, while pointing to a passage in my counterpoint, “Then how do you explain this?!”
And there they were—hidden fifths between an alto and bass part.
I was deeply shocked by this whole maneuver. It was then quickly upgraded to a complete denunciation of my character, with special reference to my lack of attention, general distraction, and even my commitment to music. That was the end of my lesson for that day."
But it worked!
As Philip Glass himself acknowledges,
"Slowly, over those two years, her teaching began to take root in me and I began to notice a marked difference in the way I could “hear” music. My attention and focus became heightened and I began to hear music in my “inner” ear with a clarity I had never had until then, or even suspected was possible."
He was now at the apotheosis of stage 4. He lived and breathed harmony and counterpoint, and felt in rich detail all the rules of Western music composition.
He then spends much of his music career exploring the boundaries of Western music composition, experimenting heavily with other genres, electronic amplification, and deconstruction of form. He is reaching out, testing the edges of the stage 4 systematicity, and gesturing towards an inter-system stage 5.
Yet it's only in an encounter with the West African musician Foday Musa that he has satori — or what might be called the shock of awakening.
"Foday, play your lowest note.”
He played the A below middle C.
I played the A on the piano and he tuned his kora to the piano A.
“What’s the name of that note?” I asked.
“The first note.”
“Oh. Okay, play the next note.”
He played the B above the A.
I played the B and he again tuned his string.
“Foday, what’s the name of that note?”
“The next note.”
“Oh.”
I was getting a little nervous, but I pushed on.
“Okay, play the note after that.” He played the C.
I played it, and he tuned his third string to the C.
I hesitated to ask, but I did anyway. “And what is the name of that note? “It’s the note after that.”
I almost fainted. I suddenly understood that, for Foday Musa, the notes did not have names. I was feeling a strange vertigo and I hung on to my chair. In my very first flute lesson, fifty-four years before at the Peabody Conservatory, Britton Johnson had placed my index finger and the thumb of my left hand on two keys of my flute, pressed the keys down with my fingers, and said, “Blow across the hole.”
I managed, after a few tries to get a sound out. Mr. Johnson then said, “That is a B.”
At the same time he pointed to a note on the middle line on a page of music paper with a G clef written at the left side. In far less time than it takes to tell, he had locked together a sound, my finger position, and a written note on the page.
Now, fifty-four years later, Foday Musa had unlocked them. In a flash I finally understood that the whole system of music I had learned, starting with Mr. Johnson and going right through to Mlle. Boulanger, had been just that—a system, consensual in its very language and no more eternal than the human beings that contrived it. It didn’t make it less beautiful. Perhaps it was now even more beautiful."
[italics mine]
At this moment, Glass deeply grasps the fluidity between different musical systems. He uses the language so precisely that it's hard to miss the analogy between Kegan's stages and Glass' descriptions of his understanding.
As someone who cares quite a bit about self-and-other improvement, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what fuzzy/nebulous concepts like growth and development means to me. The Kegan model was one of the bigger leaps in my thinking, so it was really exciting to see someone I admire talk about his experiences in a way that was analogous to the Stages of growth. I don’t know that explicitly aiming for the next Stage is helpful in growth and development, but I do feel that I can use this logic to evaluate where you are right now (e.g. romantic Stage 4, music Stage 2) and direct my attention towards the most useful areas.
If I got to sit down with Mr Glass, I honestly don’t really know what I would ask him. I think I’d ask him to show me how to listen. By taking a piece of music that I like right now, whether it be a Davis trumpet solo or some Bach Fugue, I’d ask him to describe what he hears. Then I’d hope that I could feel, if but for a flicker, how it is for Philip Glass to listen to music.
Questions:
What are the last four Kegan stages of development? Can you provide an example from your own experience?
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📰 Assorted Links 📰
This month has been one of a lot of psycho-technology discovery. Each of the following deserves multiple blog posts on their own. But since I don't know if I will ever get around to it, here they are:
Healing Back Pain by Dr John Sarno. A little while ago, I developed a repetitive strain injury in my wrists that was painful enough to prevent me from opening doornobs or even brushing my teeth. A physiotherapist, acupuncturist, and a doctor did little to alleviate the pain. Only this book helped. It is not just for back pain, but chronic pain of all types. I first heard about it through this video. This of course does not constitute medical advice.
Self Therapy- A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS. This sounds cheesy, but make no mistake— the underlying techniques are incredibly powerful. See Kaj Sotala on internal multiagent models for a more rigorous case for the Internal Family Systems framework.
You are the One You've Been Waiting For, Richard Schwartz. See this thread for some hard-hitting truths about the many deep problems that the West (especially North America) has heaped onto the romantic relationship. "The American marriage ... is one of the most difficult marriage forms that the human race has ever attempted"
Focusing by Eugene Gendlin. As hard to describe as it is useful. Gendlin provides a really useful framework for more accurate introspection by tuning into your body’s felt senses. See here if you need more convincing.
After the Orgy: We're All Sex Addicts. The most interesting point in this podcast was the regional differences in the sex economy across the US (the Bay area being much more inclined towards women than New York).
The Cooperative Principle. An explanatory model of how people achieve effective conversational communication in social situations. The maxim of quality states that you try to make a true contribution. The maxim of quantity states you make a contribution as long as is required and no more. Irony or sarcasm is often the result of deliberately flouting a maxim.
Fashion cycles work by individuals randomly copying other individual preferences, in addition to their ornaments. (h/t Gwern)
A deep dive into Lithography and ASML. Despite having completed a pretty rigorous computer science curriculum and having worked at a hardware company, I had close to zero idea how semiconductors are made. Turns out it's kind of like stenciling. You get a silicon wafer (this is the canvas), you then etch and dope the wafer using a template (this is the stencil) through which a certain type of light (this is the paint) is shone.
Buy a ~1 acre plot of land on Earth 2 (a virtual 1:1 scale of earth) for $2,000 dollars.
What is Applied Category Theory? Related: What is Category Theory, Anyway? "A category, then, is any collection of objects that can relate to each other via morphisms in sensible ways, like composition and associativity. As Barry Mazur once remarked, this is a "template" for all of mathematics: depending on what you feed into the template, you'll recover one of the mathematical realms"
Poem of the Month
Cento
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort of being strangers.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls.
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
My candle burns at both ends—
Too long a sacrifice can turn a heart into stone.
*The morning aire is awashe with dede-angels,
For greate fear my soul do shrink:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
It semes white and is red;
It is quike and semes dede;
It is fleshe and semes bred;
It is on and semes too;
It is God body and no mo.
Why even now do we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing--
A terrible beauty is born.
— Mako Shen
🎧 Music 🎧
Nils Frahm - My Friend the Forest. Glass-esque
Charles Mingus - Myself When I Am Real. Scattered, impassioned. My favorite Mingus perhaps.
This section would of course be remiss without Philip Glass this month.
Witness his command of the Chaconne in his Partita for Solo Violin. I always hear inflections of Bach in Glass' compositions. See, for instance, how certain moments of the Bach Prelude 1 line up with Glass' Etude No. 2. To hear the song that Philip Glass punched the roudy listener over, go here.