The composer, mechanical

A recent article in Slate magazine profiles David Cope, a man who has been using computers to write music for a long time. I first came across his work in the documentary Mozartballs, in which Cope’s computer (cutely named “Emmy”) analyzes reams of Mozart’s music and writes a new cello concerto in a Mozartean idiom in one second. It was a long time ago, but I remember the documentary then showed a cellist who played the piece – which likely sounds alright to ears not familiar with Mozart – and commented that, while all the gestures looked like Mozart, there was something about it that was deeply un-Mozart-like. Indeed.

Journalists are often not responsible for their articles’ subheadings, but the one for this piece – “A computer program is writing great, original works of classical music. Will human composers soon be obsolete?” – seems to me to encapsulate the very blunders of reason that draw people to these kinds of stories. Leaving aside the anachronism of the machine writing “classical music” roughly two centuries after human beings stopped writing “classical” music, other questions are begged. Like: what does the article mean by “original”? It seems, in fact, to spend much of its word count arguing just the opposite: that the computer cribs Beethoven who cribs Mozart who cribs pre-Mozart, and humans are much more recycling algorithms, much more mechanical, than we like to think.

The argument is presumably meant to validate the machine’s own cribbing brand of creativity, a “you think Emmy’s just copying existing music? That’s what humans do, too!” kind of thing. What the article – which, after all, is in Slate and therefore has neither the platform nor the space nor the readership to explore this matter to any degree of depth – fails to mention is that the idea of art as “copying” is far from new. In 2007, the American novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote “The Ecstasy of Influence,” a love letter to “plagiarism” in art, in which he quotes the following from John Donne:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . .

A belief in art as inherently genealogical – that is, made from the stuff of the ancestors, rather than created ex nihilo – is not only championed by artists such as Donne or Lethem. Roland Barthes, the literary theorist whose ideas held much sway over the entire body of French literary thinking (and subsequently of the world entire) in the 60s and on, goes so far as to erase the author, so convinced is he that all artists do is rearrange what has come before. This is not a denigration of the value of art or artists, but rather a statement of what Barthes thought was perfectly clear: that we are all born into a system and cannot escape that system. We read, we listen, we breathe in air and release it again in an altered but not fundamentally new form. All art is a conversation with all other art.

The question then remains as to whether a machine can have a meaningful conversation with a person. Or put another way: if the purpose of conversation is to reveal through words our intentions, is it possible for a machine to intend? Or can it only do?

The article in Slate seems to think that Emmy and her inevitable spinoffs are humans in reduced capacity, and that the compositions are not better only because the technology is not yet there. When it is, who knows what could happen? It claims that Emmy is “already a better composer than 99% of the population,” and grants the possibility that a machine might write music of “lasting significance.” So, in twenty years, might we have a program pairing a Beethoven quartet with a song cycle by HAL 9000? Symphony No. 73B by that Honda robot? Will we study computer programmers in music history, count algorithms instead of tone rows in music theory? Or the question I really want to ask: Why do we listen to music, or make time for any art, at all?

In Middlemarch, George Eliot writes: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” The first time I read this I stopped dead in my tracks (I was walking), stunned by how perfect a description this was of what art, in my opinion, tries to do. To listen to the grass grow and record that roar which lies on the other side of silence, silence being death or the magnitude of the universe or the separateness of human existence. There is a roar underneath, a graspable truth that we all feel or hear at some time or another and which artists try to communicate – that is their “intention” – in their respective medium. To hear the roar and to say it.

When I listen to, I dunno, the Cavatina from Beethoven’s Op. 133 String Quartet, the music – as beautiful as it is – falls away and I am left with the impression of effort, Beethoven’s effort to understand and wrestle with something and then give us the traces of his effort, so that we might feel less alone with ours. The Cavatina is imperfect, as all great music is, but it is something said by one person to another, which is also what all great music (or even all human music) tries to do.

The materiality of music – the technicians and paper-printers, the instruments, the notes and even the sounds – this all is just connecting fodder meant to bridge the gap between consciousnesses, which is a process Emmy can never participate in or understand. Regardless of how far this technology develops or how ingeniously or convincingly future Emmys can recombine and repurpose music, if a machine cannot hear the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, then it cannot write music – however perfect – that matters to me.

An open letter to documentary filmmakers

Dear documentary filmmakers,

You know that thing where you're filming an interview subject and they come to the natural close of a thought, but you keep the camera pointed at them and don't say anything and they're sort of frozen waiting for you to break the scene but you don't, and then they wonder how much longer they're supposed to hold their frozen pose or maybe they should do something, and then eventually they do do something, always something inadequate like an "oh well" gesture which follows a protracted, uncomfortable silence, all of which happens solely because of how uncomfortable and self-conscious you have made them and not at all because the scene is "raw" or "real" as you probably intend it to be?

Or when someone is speaking on an emotional subject and breaks down sobbing, but instead of cutting to something else (we know what's going to happen: more sobbing) you zoom in instead, and just watch them up close as they contort and grunt and moan their private grief, and you keep the camera fixed until the tears subside, the wails cease, and there is nothing more to see?

STOP THAT.

Seriously, stop it! That trick is way played out, and it never helped anybody. What are we supposed to learn, aside from people who have lost loved ones tend to cry about it, and you (the filmmaker) aren't below using your camera to russle up some good cinematic drama, even where none should naturally occur?

We've all seen this dozens of times. Here's an example from Herzog's Grizzly Man, in which we see what should be the natural close of a shot, the signing of a contract. Everyone in the shot - the girl, the man, the cameraperson - knows that this is where it's supposed to cut. But it keeps going. The man looks like he's trying to disappear by remaining absolutely still. Then the camera comes even closer, forcing the poor girl to come up with a final platitude to lend the scene its dramatic rimshot. And then a close up of the watch. We get it.

Do I object to this practice on artistic or moral grounds? Both. It's morally disingenuous because you turn the real people who are your subject into circus performers, expected to offer up tears or saccharine one-liners to your supposedly objective lens. And it's artistically hollow because it ultimately reveals a lack of confidence in the power of your story - or your ability to convey its purpose and meaning without resorting to manufactured "moments."

Look, nobody is going to come out of this well! You could put Mahatma Gandhi on the other end of your camera; hold it long enough and even he'll start to shift his eyes nervously. It's a foolproof way of making someone you don't like look bad, or anybody look goofy and ridiculous. The worst part is that this is so easy to defend in theory: the documentarian is supposed to be unflinching in his gaze, never shying away from pain or reality. No one's going to argue the theory, but you risk farce when you apply it so literally to your practice.

Herzog, who is a natural with documentaries, shouldn't need to resort to such juvenile tricks. So, in fairness to him, my counter-example to the above is also from a Herzog documentary, his Encounters at the End of the World. Here we see Herzog trek to Antarctica and interview all the weirdos and misfits of the world who have, for one reason or another, congregated in that far, cold place.

There is one man who has a backpack that he keeps with him at all times, which contains everything he needs to survive so he can pick up and leave at a moment's notice. This is important for a man who grew up deprived of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. "You escaped," says Herzog, "and how big a drama was that?" The man seems to smile, blinks and begins to respond, but no words form and no stories emerge. He is obviously struggling under the great weight of memory. And I have to say, I thought I knew exactly where this was going: the camera would linger another four, five seconds, and then the sobs would come, and we would watch this poor man cry until he managed to compose himself and we moved to the next subject, our curiosity satisfied - if not resolved - by our act of voyeurism.

But it is Herzog who surprised me by speaking before the man's dignity could fully collapse. "You do not have to talk about it," he says gently. "For me," and here you can hear Herzog improvising, becoming for a brief moment, even though behind the camera, the subject of his own documentary, "the best description of hunger is a description of bread. A poet said that once." The man nods vigorously, gratefully, and Herzog directs him instead to describe the contents of his bag, which he does with the relish of a boy proudly displaying his gifts on his birthday. And, sitting alone in my house, I suddenly found myself sobbing, painfully, wretchedly, sobbing at the unbearable kindness of Herzog and the beauty and humanity of that moment.