What is "psychological time"?
Jack Ross
There he writes of two types of time: "ontological" and
"psychological." I think I understand the former: it's
simply "clock time," right? But what his description of
psychological time makes no sense to me. Can someone
explain this for me? And what does it have to with
Wagner?
Jack
rkhalona
"Psychological" time is how a person, or groups of persons, perceive
time. Have you noticed how as you get older a year seems to go
faster? This is partly because as you get older a year becomes an
ever smaller portion of your lifetime (perceived time). When it comes
to music, have you ever listened to a recording that seemed slower (or
faster) than it actually is? This is a good example of psychological
or perceived time.
RK
P.S. "Wagner has wonderful moments, but awful quarters of an hour."
-- Rossini
jrs...@aol.com
I thought psychological time was anything at $100 an hour or
greater...or is that _psychiatric_ time?
--Jeff
Bob Lombard
"Jack Ross" <jr...@finkleberg-porter.com> wrote in message
news:eqinpe$4bh$1...@aioe.org...
It's just clock time and perceived time. No '-logicals', or convoluted
explanations, are necessary.
bl
Bob Lombard
I forgot to mention that when I listen to Wagner the clock moves slowly.
bl
TareeDawg
news:1171056154.3...@v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
It is not only, in my belief, our perception of time (as you described), but
the more specific perception of time as applied to our psychological make-up
wrt to particular types of music. Music that doesn't interest us, is going
to seem a lot longer than music that does.
Bruckner, for instance, doesn't seem long to me, but it does, I am sure, for
some others.
Your quote above, applies to me, multiplied ten times over.
Ray H
Taree, NSW
TareeDawg
news:12spq2q...@corp.supernews.com...
One way to live longer, and draw out the agony.
<g>
Ray H
Taree, NSW
david...@aol.com
Stravinsky's Poetics of Music. There he writes of two types of time:
"ontological" and "psychological." I think I understand the former:
it's simply "clock time," right? But what his description of
psychological time makes no sense to me. Can someone explain this for
me?
You have no idea how much influence Stravinsky's distinction between
"ontological" time and "psychological" time has had on the subsequent
history of music. Like everybody else in France during the period
(e.g., Marcel Proust, who went in search of lost time), Stravinsky and
his secret French collaborators, including one Pierre Souvtchinsky,
was writing under the influence of Henri Bergson's ideas about time
and the experience of time and memory. Stravinsky's distinction
between ontological and psychological time is nothing but the
distinction between time as measured by the clock and time as we
experience it: moving slowly when we're bored, rapidly when we're
having a good time, etc. When we listen to music, our experience of
time is colored by the character of the music. We experience time
differently depending on whether we're listening to a jolly allegro in
a major key or a slow pathetic movement in a minor key. ("Form is the
articulation of time by music." - Robert P. Morgan)
> And what does it have to with Wagner?
In a nutshell, Wagner, according to Stravinsky, exploited
psychological time, while Stravinsky advocated the exploitation of
ontological time.
There was a sea change in European culture after World War I, a
profound reaction against the more unbridled, freewheeling, and
radical developments in music, painting, and poetry characteristic of
the period before the War on the part of the very painters, poets, and
composers who had been responsible for them. Jean Cocteau issued a
famous "rappel à l'ordre," and his call to order was answered across
the continent. In France, Les six reacted against the amorphous
"invertebrate" forms of Debussy in the interests of a new "clarté,"
and, with the late chamber sonatas, even Debussy backed off from the
extreme principles embodied in the amorphous continuity of Jeux (which
is no classicizing "sonata"). Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and
Strauss all became more self-consciously conservative composers,
Strauss distancing himself from the style of Salome and Elektra with
the self-consciously neoclassical style of Ariadne auf Naxos,
Stravinsky turning his back on Le sacre and Les noces for his own
brand of neo-classicism, Schoenberg recoiling from the terrifying
fantasmagoria of Erwartung and (a) developing serialism in an attempt
to impose order on the freely associating chromaticism of his
expressionist period, (b) abandoning the amorphous stream-of
consciousness-forms of his most radical expressionist pieces for a
Brahmsian neo-classicism. (A similar development took place in
painting, Picasso's sustained exploration of "cubism" giving way to a
monumental neoclassical style inspired by Greco-Roman art, Kandinsky
attempting to impose order in the wake of his visionary and free
wheeling improvisatory abstractions with a geometric abstraction,
which was paralleled by Mondrian's move toward an extraordinarily
reduced and spare flat and rectilinear abstraction.)
Stravinsky's particular bête noir during this period was Richard
Wagner. As Boulez once put it, "Debussy and Stravinsky inaugurated
the era of skepticism," with respect to Wagnerism (despite Debussy's
overwhelming debt to Wagner), and Wagner is the particular enemy
Stravinsky is gunning for in The Poetics of Music, the most
destructive of the Romantics, the composer of a formless music
characterized by an undisciplined and amorphous continuity, the false
prophet of a bogus art-religion.
Stravinsky explained the formlessness of Romantic music as a direct
consequence of a mistaken Romantic aesthetic that had replaced the
craftsmanship and professionalism characteristic of 18th-century music
with a more unprofessional and quasi-improvisatory "self-expression."
Stravinsky believed that the abstract art of music had been high
jacked by an "expressivity" that had never been the proper role of
music. 18th-century music, Stravinsky claimed -- the music of Bach,
Haydn, and Mozart -- had exploited ontological time, objective time,
time as measured by the clock. The finicky rubato characteristic of
the Wagnerian continuum depended on "psychological" time: it was
"expressive" rather than "objective," attempted a depiction of the
movements of the emotions that was never the function of music rather
than striving for an objective structure. Reacting against Wagner and
the whole Dionysian frenzy characteristic of the most radical European
art during the period just before World War I, Stravinsky wrote music
that ticks along elegantly in clock time, and Stravinsky's
neoclassical music has been described as "Apollonian clockwork."
This was the period when Poulenc, for example, liked to refer to
Mahler as Malheur, and Stravinsky's Franco-Russian neoclassicism had
an overwhelming influence on a whole generation of French or
Francophone and American composers, on Milhaud, Poulenc, et al on the
continent and on all of those American composers including Aaron
Copland who went to Paris to study composition with Stravinsky's great
friend and champion, Nadia Boulanger.
Nevertheless, Stravinsky's distinction between clock time and
psychological time was subject to the law of unintended consequences.
One of Nadia Boulanger's students happened to be a young American
composer and friend of Aaron Copland's named Elliott Carter, who got
it into his head to write a cello sonata (1948), and in the first
movement, the elegant piano part ticks along regularly in a vein akin
to a Stravinskyan neoclassicism while the cello goes its own way
playing a warm expressive rubato in "psychological" time. To Carter
and many other composers who came to maturity just after the second
World War, Stravinsky's distinction between two kinds of time
suggested a world of times, and, in Carter's quartets, each of the
members of the quartet inhabits own expressive world with its own kind
of time: Carter has said that he prefers the scrappiness of democracy
to the clipped regularity of jackboots. (In the third quartet, each
of two duos goes its own way.)
Another champion of Stravinskyan neoclassicism was Pierre
Souvtchinsky, a quasi- or actual collaborator on The Poetics of Music
who became a champion of a young French composer named Pierre Boulez
right after the war. Boulez happened to be a foe of Stravinskyan
neoclassicism and of the neoclassical aesthetic espoused in The
Poetics of Music. Boulez preferred his Stravinsky and Schoenberg un-
neo-classicized, and he also postulated the existence of various kinds
of time: of smooth time, amorphous time, striated time, etc. Suffice
it to say, in much of Boulez's music sections that tick along based on
a regular pulse (although never a regular meter) alternate with
"unmeasured" music, music often characterized by the most extreme
forms of rubato.
-david gable
Matthew B. Tepper
letters to be typed in news:eqinpe$4bh$1...@aioe.org:
Bah on all of these complicated explanations! Albert Einstein said it best:
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But
let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it's longer than any hour.
That's relativity."
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Harrington/Coy is a gay wrestler who won't come out of the closet
Allen
I often refer to "dental time"--when you sit in a dentist's chair with
your mouth propped open for six hours, and find out that the wall clock
shows only 30 minutes have passed by.
Allen
rkhalona
> "When a man sits ....
> ... on a hot stove for a minute - ... it's longer than any hour.
It's obvious you've been listening to Berlioz for too long! :-) :-)
RK
david...@aol.com
objective reality of time as measured by the clock and the experience
of time as colored by emotional states and other experiences including
the experience of music, but Stravinsky's claim that his and Bach's
music directly and "objectively" exploit time while Wagner's doesn't
is complete nonsense, and it's a good thing, too. The experience of
Stravinsky's music colors the listener's experience of time every bit
as much as the experience of Wagner's, and it wouldn't be worth any
more than a clock if it didn't. There is a difference between Bach's
or Stravinsky's "motor rhythms" and Wagner's more amorphous rubato,
and Stravinsky is onto something: his pseudo-scientific explanation is
certainly suggestive, not least in the way it illuminates what Wagner
was up to. As a scientific indictment of Wagner's ways it's total
nonsense.
-david gable
Bob Lombard
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1171128911.2...@v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
[snip]
There is a difference between Bach's
> or Stravinsky's "motor rhythms" and Wagner's more amorphous rubato,
> and Stravinsky is onto something: his pseudo-scientific explanation is
> certainly suggestive, not least in the way it illuminates what Wagner
> was up to. As a scientific indictment of Wagner's ways it's total
> nonsense.
>
-----------
Of course it's non-sense. Music is not science, and (contrary to claims
by DG and LR) musicology is not music.
Music is art, bubba.
bl
Andy Evans
Freud, which should correspond more to what people of Stravinsky's
period thought of as "psychological", then one of the principal things
we come across is the unconscious, and in Freud's words "the
unconscious has no sense of time".
In Freud's interpretation of dreams he sees the unconscious as filing
away experiences in a subject-related mental database, not a
chronological one. Then, for instance, "assault" may trigger off
(apart from "a salt" and such punnish associations) assaults at
various ages and in various contexts. In his screen memories one can
hide another further back in the unconscious (I think of the phrase
"un train peut en cacher un autre") and so forth, all linked by some
kind of thematic link.
the idea of a thematic link brings us neatly to Wagner and his
leitmotivs.
david...@aol.com
This is fantastic, Andy.
-david gable
On Feb 10, 2:36 pm, "Andy Evans" <performanceandme...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Paul Ilechko
> No, it's talking about music, although you seem to take offense at my
> talking about it. I apologize for knowing more about the context of
> Stravinsky's distinction than you do.
There's no reason to apologize for knowing, just for making a big deal
about knowing. Your endless self-congratulation gets tiresome.
>> Music is art, bubba.
>
> We knew that, bubba. Does that mean we shouldn't discuss it? What
> are you doing here, then?
He's hopefully here to talk about *recordings*, which is the stated
purpose of this newsgroup. If you just want to babble at random you can
use rec.music.classical for that.
Bob Lombard
"Paul Ilechko" <pile...@patmedia.net> wrote in message
news:536po2F...@mid.individual.net...
I've been reading David's posts for several years now, and have
determined that he is an OK guy. He (along with several other denizens
of this forum) has a problem with seemingly disingenuous posts from this
hillbilly. I'm too old to change now, but I can feel bad about it. Open
frankness combined with an irrepressible (and oblique) sense of humor
can get one into trouble.
Please note, David, that this is technically not a response to your
post. Thanks for the opportunity, Paul.
bl
david...@aol.com
> He's hopefully here to talk about *recordings*, which is the stated
> purpose of this newsgroup.
Then he should confine his comments to recordings, as should you. (I
do love the quaint idea that discussion of "recordings" excludes
discussion of the music on them.)
> If you just want to babble at random you can
> use rec.music.classical for that.
Every one of my posts in this thread was in response to somebody
else's post. Please inform Jack Ross that he should take his question
about Stravinsky elsewhere. I didn't have the heart to break it to
him. That's your department.
-david gable
david...@aol.com
wrote:
> Please note, David, that this is technically not a response to your
> post. Thanks for the opportunity, Paul.
Bob, you have succeeded in making me feel like an idiot. It's happened
to me before. Thanks for the kind words.
-david gable
Paul Ilechko
> I've been reading David's posts for several years now, and have
> determined that he is an OK guy. He (along with several other denizens
> of this forum) has a problem with seemingly disingenuous posts from this
> hillbilly. I'm too old to change now, but I can feel bad about it. Open
> frankness combined with an irrepressible (and oblique) sense of humor
> can get one into trouble.
I think he probably is too in most ways. I'm very impressed by his
breadth and depth of knowledge, but sometimes it comes across that he is
too, which is a little off putting, as is his incessant need to make up
things to attack people who are actually willing to listen to alternate
performance ideas.
Jack Ross
>> purpose of this newsgroup.
> Then he should confine his comments to recordings, as should you. (I
> do love the quaint idea that discussion of "recordings" excludes
> discussion of the music on them.)
>> If you just want to babble at random you can
>> use rec.music.classical for that.
> Every one of my posts in this thread was in response to somebody
> else's post. Please inform Jack Ross that he should take his question
> about Stravinsky elsewhere. I didn't have the heart to break it to
> him. That's your department.
Actually, I deliberately posted to r.m.c.r because, among other
things, I knew that Dr. Gable, who's one of the most articulate
and intelligent posters here, would probably weigh in with his
expertise. And, while I don't always agree with him, he's one of the
few posters to this newsgroup who consistently knows what he's talking
about.
Jack (long time lurker, only a recent poster)
TareeDawg
Fully agree Bob. David has a wealth of knowledge, and always freely and
lucidly dispensed. I don't always agree with certain aspects of his
'mini-tirades', but for me he is one of the most interesting posters in this
group.
Ray H
Taree, NSW
david...@aol.com
> Actually, I deliberately posted to r.m.c.r because, among other
> things, I knew that Dr. Gable, who's one of the most articulate
> and intelligent posters here, would probably weigh in with his
> expertise.
Thank you very much for your extremely kind words. I'm not entirely
stupid, but I am stupid enough to behave badly, as my ridiculous
response to the embarrassingly kind Mr. Lombard shows.
-david gable
rkhalona
> david7ga...@aol.com wrote:
> > No, it's talking about music, although you seem to take offense at my
> > talking about it. I apologize for knowing more about the context of
> > Stravinsky's distinction than you do.
>
> There's no reason to apologize for knowing, just for making a big deal
> about knowing. Your endless self-congratulation gets tiresome.
>
>
> He's hopefully here to talk about *recordings*, which is the stated
> purpose of this newsgroup. If you just want to babble at random you can
> use rec.music.classical for that.
Whatever Emerson said about consistency applies here. I also
sometimes don't have the patience to follow David's arguments because
he wanders a lot, but this group is a lot richer because of him and
people like him.
Take your straitjacket elsewhere.
RK
Paul Ilechko
> Actually, I deliberately posted to r.m.c.r because, among other
> things, I knew that Dr. Gable, who's one of the most articulate
> and intelligent posters here, would probably weigh in with his
> expertise. And, while I don't always agree with him, he's one of the
> few posters to this newsgroup who consistently knows what he's talking
> about.
>
> Jack (long time lurker, only a recent poster)
>
Jack, I don't think anyone had a problem with your question. It's Mr.
Gable's supercilious attitude that I have the occasional problem with,
which needs to be weighed against his superior knowledge at times. IMO,
of course.
Paul Ilechko
I have absolutely no problem with people talking about classical music
in general on this n.g. - it was a specific response to a specific thing
that Dave said. I thought that would have been obvious.
Bob Lombard
Well, I had to look up 'disingenuous a while back, because it was
applied to me and I didn't know what the word means. (I can understand
the misunderstanding readers get.) Now I had to look up 'supercilious'.
Webster's International says (with some formatting and characters lost
in the copy):
<< Main Entry:1supercilious
Pronunciation:|s*p*(r)|sil**s, -ly*s
Function:adjective
Etymology:Latin superciliosus, from supercilium eyebrow, pride,
haughtiness (from super- + -cilium * akin to Latin celare to hide)
+ -osus -ous * more at HELL
1 : arrogantly superior : HAUGHTY, DISDAINFUL *though elated by his
rank, it did not render him supercilious Jane Austen* *translators T
supercilious about the possibility of using Basic English for such
international conferences Mark Starr* *shaggy supercilious camels
L.C.Stevens*
2 : expressive of contempt : SCORNFUL, SNEERING *his lip curls in a
supercilious smile*
synonyms see PROUD >>
That does not describe David's usual posts; a willingness to share
knowledge without 'talking down' is not being supercilious. He is
certainly not the only longtime rmcr poster who occasionally gets pissed
off - at one of my (seemingly) disingenuous posts.
The etymology listed above is pretty amusing; "eyebrow"? My eyebrows get
a workout when I listen to Bruckner, but it ain't disdain. It's sort of
a psychological time thing usually, as in "jeez, that climax wasn't the
end of the movement?"
bl
--------