Contrapuntal video, fugal braiding
[ by Charles Cameron — from Trumpery to Altman’s Nashville ]
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Tufte’s illustration of the Kathasaritsagara or Ocean of the Streams of Story
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Wired had a piece titled Never Mind Trump. The Internet Wants to Watch What’s Behind Him a couple of days ago, and it contained a sentence that caught my attention:
Like a Bach fugue, the counterpoint rivaled, and then overtook, the original melody.
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I’m always interested in non-musical forms of counterpoint, whether we’re talking Glenn Gould‘s radio dramas, Claude Levi-Strauss‘s structure for his Mytholoogiques, Tufte‘s Rushdie‘s Kathasaritsagara, or the various attempts to make Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game playable. Hesse himself invokes both fugue and counterpoint in the passage in which he describes actual moves in his game about as clearly as anywhere:
A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations. For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating ide by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously ombining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to
evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis.
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I was accordingly interested to read this paragraph, ending as it does with the sentence I quoted above:
The Christie videos were just the latest installment in what might be the defining video format of this election. Call it marginal media, in which background activity overwhelms the intended subject. Most candidates have found themselves inadvertently sidelined at some point. Hillary Clinton was overshadowed by the surreal stylings of “Sticker Kid,” who mugged, jerked, and danced throughout her stump speech. Another short video treated Bernie Sanders’ endorsement of marijuana decriminalization as a preamble to an audience member’s startled reaction. Another Trump rally was undercut when a member of the crowd behind the lectern began reading a copy of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. The drama unfolded over the course of Trump’s speech, as the reader’s neighbors began to argue with her, then brought their neighbors into the fray. Soon, the tension made it impossible to pay attention to Trump at all. Like a Bach fugue, the counterpoint rivaled, and then overtook, the original melody.
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We need, it seems to me, to get used to thinking contrapuntally — and accordingly it is instructive to see just how many of the great artists of recent times have employed some measure of contrapuntal thinking in their work. From the same Wired piece:
The frames of Robert Altman’s Nashville are packed with overlapping dialogue and activity—it’s often hard to determine which storyline should dominate—granting his aspiring losers the same weight as the country-music superstars they idolize. Tom Stoppard applied the same lens to Hamlet when he made two lackeys — whose off-stage death was barely remarked upon in Shakespeare’s play — the heroes of his fan-fic spin-off, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Okay, I’m off to see Nashville if I can find it..
March 12th, 2016 at 3:19 am
“Soon, the tension made it impossible to pay attention to Trump at all.”
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Which may be Trump’s downfall. After all, a Trump rally is about Trump and not about any old fugue.
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So my guess is that Trump will have to get into the background that is attempting to overshadow him, as he has done in his effort to support and become an apologist for those at his rallies that do violence.
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Most likely there isn’t a fugue that Trump will not bring into his brand, and his pride will create such a musical of violence and strife that every voter in the USA will end up with a purple finger, much like those who voted in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Just saying…it might be true that he who lives by violence dies by violence. George W. isolated himself from violence. I am not sure, in the context of how much Trump loves Trump that isolation is an option.
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After all, as Trump has said, he is not a politician, but it may be in his interest to become one, as things become real, instead of a reality show.
March 13th, 2016 at 2:16 pm
We had conversed about the Ainulindalë before, with its weavings of counterpoint. However, there Melkor was the greatest of the Valar, and most mythologies have a grand antagonistic relationship, which is then reflected again at lower echelons. Sauron becomes the great dark one, though but a lackey of Melkor.
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This is different from what you’re showing here, where minor parts of the gestalt suddenly leap into focus and ‘make it impossible to pay attention’ to the protagonist. I’ve played Rosenkrantz in the Stoppard play (or was it Guildenstern, can’t remember), and there is an airy absurdity to it, self-interest as opposed to desire for greatness. The most interesting people who become internet famous in the background of the videos are not trying to be famous, they are caught in the moment, their emotions are exposed, and that is the counterpoint.
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Search ‘Battle at Kruger’ for an incredible visual story, without the actors trying to create a story.
March 13th, 2016 at 5:53 pm
Oh indeed, I’ve had Battle at Kruger on my hard drive for two years now, it’s an extraordinary video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM
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And yes, the Trump / background counterpoint is only one form of counterpoint, that in the Music of th Ainur another, and Altman’s Nashville presumably a third. I’m after all such “non-musical forms of counterpoint” though, at the moment,m to begin to get a fix on what the precursors might be for a mode of teaching the “virtual music of ideas” as a mod of thinking.
March 13th, 2016 at 10:15 pm
This quote came up recently:
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“Yet, while it may well be true that chimpanzees do not conceptualize, this could indicate human biases as to what conceptualization should resemble in another species rather than an actual lack of continuity.”
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C.J. Cherryh Tc’a species sent messages encoded as a seven-part matrix that could be read in any direction. The difficulty with a virtual music of ideas is whether there are ideas that other species could understand. Platonic ideas seem essentialist, but everyone understands ‘rock’ somehow.
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There may be more to finding precursors in the modes than in the ideas. You distinguished modes of teaching from modes of thinking. Alexander’s appendix in ‘The Nature of Order’ indicates that centers are defined by the relation of the units to each other.
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To go fully metaphorical, if ‘justice’ in one system is 110 Hz, but 112 in another, there isn’t full coherence between the two, but their relation to ‘law’ and ‘fair’ may reveal chords of ideas that lead to modes.
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But I got no clue on methodology. How do you distinguish what’s important in ‘Nashville’ at a given moment? Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ has instruments that have been blending as part of the whole and then have one moment, a couple of notes in the spotlight. They don’t repeat the moment, but it alters the experience of the whole.
March 14th, 2016 at 4:10 pm
This may not bve a terribly interesting example from the POV of contrapuntal thought, perhaps, but it turned up in an interesting piece I was reading today, Hari Balasubramanian’s Where probability meets ;iterature and language: Markov models for text analysis. The two paragraphs I quote here were in regard to a 2009 Science paper titled Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script:
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This is pretty much B argues against A, regardless of whether A and B are persons or propositions — which is itself a fascinating business to me, since Hesse in a poem claims to have “played” the Glass Bead Game by imagining discussions between people:
whereas the game in the book is entirely a matter of ideas interacting, albeit on a vast scale, with ideas:
March 18th, 2016 at 4:40 pm
Here’s another quote with peripheral relevance to the idea of countrapuntal ideation: