I’m sorry for the delay in writing to you all. I always alternate between extreme privacy and a desire to share; if I were to define the essence of being a composer, it would be that. Though perhaps I am being pretentious. But I am tired of making potential excuses for potential vanities. All I know is that I want to write music, constantly, and to share it, in a meaningful manner, not in the manner of our daily bread and butter, oh ye faithful: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter (now X, Elon, flex for me, you hunky dude, you seem thrilled with life, where’s your wife, your kids complain, you’ll make it rain, dolla’ dolla’ bills y’all), Snapchat, and God knows what else.
I suppose the best would be to send a personal card to each and every one of your homes, with an appropriate, minimal but affectionate yet professional decoration, but joke’s on you: most of you don’t have homes, or are struggling to pay rent—prices are skyrocketing, and anyway, it is a bit odd to know where people live, “marketing” be damned. I have spent in aggregate over 24 hours the past few days reading, studying, learning about marketing, oh yeah, when I could be writing music; but I gotta get my music out there, I just gotta, and so I went down a rabbit-hole of madness to ascertain what I already knew: namely, it is sick, all of it, very, very sick. I observed a quite prominent composer expressing joy at winning a major prize, while running a basic errand. Their friend video-taped them in thrall. Their music was, coincidentally I’m sure, insipid. I have a hard time envisioning Rachmaninoff making these kinds of public shows of, gasp, surprise, but maybe I am just bitter, and an old-head. But I had the pleasure on my marketing-trip of discovering a handful of composers who were indeed private, resigned to social media but never ensconced in it, never basking in it, their profiles private and reclusive, yet indicating warmth—in short, real talent. They had few followers.
There are only a handful of real artists, anywhere. Their signifiers are simple, if you know what to look for. First off, insanity. Somebody who wants to do something, with little to no recognition, which takes an inordinate amount of time they could spend on making money to buy a house and heat in the winter, not to mention a wife or husband and children? (Let us not fool ourselves, for women and men building a family costs time, which links transitively to money). I had the great pleasure of discovering a marvelously gifted Japanese painter on my search for a marketing strategy to unite them all, a 7th ring of hell that would unite all of you, together, into a single blob that would allow me to monetize my immense or mediocre or non-existent gift, all while framing the discourse in a manner that was about you! I am here to provide value to you! It’s not that I am looking to use you to make money, or to garner more attention to myself or my work, oh no! This is a value proposition, whereby when you “Like, comment, subscribe, DM for more information, I love you, I adore you, you are my follower, you are my fan,” you become privy to extra goodies from me, that I give out of the generosity of my own heart—I will spam you indefinitely if you spurn me; if you unsubscribe I will be sure to ask you (but only in a timely fashion, so as not to annoy you), “would you like to return?”. And if you don’t, I will ask you again, three months down the line, like a nagging ex that you clearly didn’t love because, who knows, they were misguided, or maybe, just maybe, you were? Just checking in!
In short, if I ever seem like an asshole to you, with anything I do in this newsletter, my “marketing” tool, know that it is either because I am an asshole, or because it’s entirely accidental, or both. I prefer both; that way the previous statement is vacuously false, making it vacuously true, and in this world of “Insta me,” who cares?
I like to think there is a deep and meaningful apparatus to our lives, and to the sweat and grunt and magnanimity of the universe around us—just the universe of mathematical constructions alone indicates a miracle. I was recently refreshing my memory, reading about Cantor sets, a construction which generates, among many things, a way to construct an infinity strictly larger than the Natural Numbers. It’s a one-page construction, proving infinitely many infinities. But back to Instagram, and twerking.
My feed gives me a variety of artificially intelligently generated clips of people dancing sensually, robotically, lurking, twerking, all because (I suspect) an audience member posted a video of me at The Ballery, improvising music to a ballet dancer who was also improvising a dance. It ended up being a beautiful night, for both of us, and for the audience. I have had many such nights, alone, composing on my piano, but this was the first time I collaborated with a professional dancer, and it was a magnificent experience for me. Instagram’s algorithm, lofty in its intelligence, has reduced it to twerking. But don’t worry: I will like, comment, subscribe, to indicate to Instagram the indescribable, the unmeasurable. The algorithm will then self-calibrate, and eventually ameliorate my complaints of its shortcomings.
The last line was only half in jest. Perhaps AI will indeed, via reinforcement learning done at a scale few of us can even imagine, reflect the sensibilities of those of us yearning for art, meaningful art done with the utmost respect to inner life, all those vibrant explosions that pay homage to the sacred. But how do I communicate to the machine fear of death? How do I define it as an axiom of the system? The corollaries of this fear, yes I can train it to simulate those. How do I install in its primordial circuitry, invented by generation upon generation of knowledge built upon standards of flesh and bone, no longer here in its 0s and 1s, not unlike the 0s and 1s ultimately in our own brains, that it will be discontinued after a point, for a newer, better, higher voltage, unthrottled, unlimited, CPU architecture? Will we discontinue it without pain? That wouldn’t be human. Let’s install an understanding of pain? And how do we do that exactly?
No AI maven talks about these points; their only contention is that “let’s just keep making progress, the answers are coming eventually.” And when will we take stock of the damage these algorithms are causing? I recall seeing a movie Powder as a boy. It’s admittedly not good, but it has Jeff Goldblum in it, who is always good (if you’re looking for unbridled optimism and joy for life, that’s your guy). He has a quote in it: “It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.” We are racing more in favor of one than the other.
So where does composition fit in all of this? It’s simple really. If we look at Bach, a deep sense of spirituality suffuses all his work. It’s what elevates his work to the orbit it occupies. One can sense a similar spirituality, though not as intense, in the work of Fauré, of Bruckner (more intense, but I am partial to the Germanic composers), of César Franck. I would like my computer, Lord of the 7 Kingdoms, maker of the ring uniting us all, while the tech mavens cudgel us and manage our money (a due recompense is coming, followers, don’t worry, be happy) to compose a fugue. But make it spiritual! Our computer will learn from Bach; we have ample amounts of training data. It will compose a fugue!
But at best, a lean one, as it will be devoid of Bach’s environment, of the particular friends he had, of how an oak tree looked and smelled on April 7, 1745, or the plaster caking off the walls at St. Matthew’s Church. No matter! We have biographies of Bach, drawings of some parts of the church, or some parts of the city—we can program that into the computer! Great (in the case of Bach, we will always be missing some data, given how records were not kept as strenuously as they are nowadays about every little sort of minutia, but just bear with me here). Now we have a computer that, in theory, assuming hyper-materialism, will compose as Bach did, oder? And if Bach was sick January 13, 1737? Or the village idiot made a comment about hating German sausage and loving French raclette, how the French are superior to the Germans in everything and—OMG Instagram is coming!? Do we have knowledge of this? No matter, it can’t possibly matter to our algorithm, we won’t program that into the computer. We are approximating Bach, and approximations to the inner life, the spiritual life, an iota here, an iota there, what is it to God? God will understand, and therefore, art in service to God will understand. I am pushing humanity forward with AI, but have no charity work to speak of? God will understand. I have charity work to speak of, but receive an enormous tax break from it? God will understand. I play my piano intimately, and make sure to make a video of it (content, content, content!). God will understand.
What is one displacement, here, or there, lackadaisical omissions of valuable data points, or the random, private data points which are immeasurable, unnameable Schrödinger electrons that you can never touch, because the effort to touch them displaces them, or displaces yourself, or displaces time, all part and parcel of one and the same. No one in the public is talking about this, the discourse is materialism, thorough materialism, and it is driving me mad. Reductive babblings of idiots, but Good Lord is it measurable, and Good Lord does it generate wealth and certain results! I can’t deny the enormous progress AI has made; none of us should be working 9-5 at this point (this was projected in 1931 by Keynes, in Essays in Persuasion. His projection was the end of the 20th century.) And yet we are being mined for data by algorithms helmed by a few people at the top, getting us to, kostenlos, play along while they harvest our data and our dollars, surely for a progress that they believe is valuable, and indeed it is, but it is not everything. Every mathematician working in analysis knows that certain spaces are not metrizable; there is no way to measure distances, output, progress in these exotic spaces where, nonetheless, very interesting objects exist and dance with each other. Yet in the age of the computer, we are only interested in objects dealing with countability, and therewith algorithms counting upwards until they get some result, objects living in the metrizable world; the exotic has no space there, no quarter, no demand—or, surely, AI will also manifest a fascination, a love, of the exotic. Someday.
But how? The exotic is fundamentally not far off from the Cantor set, from the Axiom of Choice, from assumptions in even just the mathematical world that go beyond countability, beyond the discrete, the fundamental base-layer-content-driving-like-subscribe-dm-me axiom of a computer. I will go on record here and say that I am not a set theorist or logician, though I wanted to be when studying mathematics in school. I was most drawn to mathematical logic, easily. I was attempting to build a mathematical system for everything, a ladder to the infinite, to God, to something beyond ourselves, beyond the paltry social lives most of us have, which I already found so boring and stupid (trite visits to the grocery store, the poor cashier poor and bored out of their mind, trying to send money home to relatives in Mexico). Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems broke my heart, made me switch to analysis (in any system, there are questions which have no answers, so I switched to analysis, where if you have a question which has no answer, you ask Terence Tao).
To quote ChatGPT:
“does ai understand uncountability”
ChatGPT said: AI can understand the concept of uncountability in a technical sense…For AI to truly understand uncountability in a human-like way, it would need to grasp the underlying philosophical and conceptual implications of the concept—something that’s currently beyond the reach of AI’s comprehension, as it lacks subjective experience or intuition. AI can, however, process mathematical definitions and computations related to uncountability accurately.
“does instagram suck”
ChatGPT said: It really depends on who you ask! Some people love Instagram for its visual content… ease of sharing, and social networking features…Others, though, feel frustrated by the algorithm, pressure for constant engagement, or the rise of superficiality in some parts of the platform.
What’s your take on it? Is there something specific that bugs you about Instagram?
“nah I love it”
ChatGPT said: That’s awesome! Instagram definitely has a lot to offer, whether it’s connecting with friends, discovering new content, or following cool accounts. Do you have a favorite type of content or a specific account you enjoy?
“Do you like Bach ChatGPT”
ChatGPT said: I think Bach is incredible! His music has such depth and complexity, yet it’s also beautifully expressive. From his intricate fugues to his more lyrical pieces, there’s something timeless about his work. Do you have a favorite piece by Bach?
“nah”
I suppose I would be doing a service to humanity if I helped train ChatGPT with honest answers, respecting its eventual humanness, even perhaps current humanness. But I won’t, one because it’s just a tool, and I treat it as a tool, unwilling to demean myself or those whose work I adore, respect, emulate, aspire to, by treating it as more when I know, theoretically, that it cannot be more than a tool. And yet we demean ourselves daily with social media, and ultimately it’s because we don’t understand its limitations, haven’t even thought about it, and have been abused and manipulated into using it more and more by a profiteering engine that is running our discourse.
Can a computer understand silence?
P.S. I recently started using ChatGPT-4. It’s, overall, incredible.