Connections

Alfred North Whitehead once said: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight."

What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."

Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover a world that underlies all the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not?

Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter?

Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg -- Red Mountain and Green Mountain -- le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the Fifties and Sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't even seeing the same things.

Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.

What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelettes.

The only things I can make accessible to anyone is what I see, hear and think when I watch a film. 

Useful Things

Camilla Ashforth, Horatio's Bed, Candlewick Press

When I was making films and photographs, I dealt with expropriation and exploitation from both sides.  As a documentary film maker, I did my share of recontexting and deconstructing the work of other artists and even the lives of my subjects, and, now and then, I agreed to let other artists incorporate my work into theirs.

As an outsider to the world of classical music, I have no standing at all to weigh in on whether or not the "Sidereus Flap" is a significant event or, as one writer put it, "a tempest in a teapot."

I suspect Gulijov's defense of his work will be forthcoming.  Any day now, he'll say something that proves that all he did is dig into his Useful Box and pull out a Ward-Bergeman composition to play around with.

To me, it's a matter of timing.  As a non-music person, I'd be curious to know if Golijov acquired the rights to Ward-Bergeman's work before or after he accepted the 35-orchestra commission.  The smart money seems to be betting it was after.  But how long after?

And, as a non-music person, I wonder how you figure out if a composer has "quoted" another work "excessively."

The "Sidereus" Flap

See the two old boys, stopping by the Eugene symphony to take in some horn music the other night.  Imagine them slapping the snow off of their parkas with their stetsons before they settle down in their seats somewhere in the back of the hall where they can put their boots up on the seats in front of them. Since they came for the horns, they might not have paid much attention to the opening piece, which happened to be the Pacific Northwest premiere of “Sidereus,” a new work by Grammy Award-winning composer Osvaldo Golijov.

But, in this particular case, the old boys were veteran insiders of the classical music scene, Tom Manoff, a National Public Radio classical music critic who lives in Eugene, and Brian McWhorter, a trumpet player from New York who teaches music at the University of Oregon. They fell by the symphony to catch F.J. Haydn's trumpet concerto, played by the evening’s featured performer, Andrew Balio, but, when they heard Golijov's nine-minute piece, they immediately realized large parts of the composition were identical to passages in "Barbeich", a 2009 composition by accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman they'd been working on recently. Manoff blogged about the similarity of the pieces at his web site, and Bob Keefer of the Register-Guard picked up the story and gave it legs.

Manoff says at least half of the piece he heard the Eugene Symphony play is known to him as Ward-Bergeman's "Barbeich." I'd make that about 4 1/2 minutes of Ward-Bergeman.

So what's the big deal?  What makes it our business how a couple of friends like Golijov and Ward-Bergeman decide to exploit their material?  Either way, we get the music.  Aren't we short of good stuff to listen to?

And what about the 35 orchestras that commissioned the work? Aren't they a little embarrassed to have bought a recycled composition?  Are they circling the wagons? Are they going to keep performing the piece?

Will we ever know what really happened?   Will we ever learn exactly what caused a top composer to incorporate so much of a collaborator's work into a commission?  Was he running a little late and decided to borrow Ward-Bergeman's homework?

I'm pulling for an inside-outsky version with Golijov lending the work to Ward-Bergeman way back when, then using Ward-Bergeman's improvements in "Sidereus."  Or maybe Golijov is Ward-Bergeman's front.  Golijov looks more like a composer.  And who is going to take the hyperaccordion seriously?  Sounds like something from Desolation Row.

Or maybe Golijov and Ward-Bergeman are doing some kind of send up of the classical music world.  I've heard that Golijov incorporated a fake Kafka quote into the program notes for one of his compositions.  What are 4 1/2 minutes of a buddy's work compared to that?