 |
| Photo courtesy of Daniel Jackson |
Samuel Jay Keyser is the author of the new book Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts. His other books include The Mental Life of Modernism. He is Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor of the Linguistics and Philosophy faculty at MIT.
Q: What inspired you to write Play It Again, Sam?
A: A combination of things. My first book, The Mental Life of Modernism, talked about the way the sister arts at the turn of the century abandoned art forms attuned to what our brains do naturally; for example, tonal music as opposed to atonal music. Or paintings that look like someone, The Mona Lisa, say.
So, when a friend told me about a remarkable experiment that showed that the mere brute force addition of repetition to a piece of atonal music enhanced its aesthetic effect, the other shoe dropped. I remembered Leonard Bernstein’s comment in his Harvard Norton Lecture Series that
“…the main reason a serious theory of musical syntax has been so slow to develop is the refusal of musical theorists to recognize repetition as the key factor…”
I was off and running.
Q: The psychologist Steven Pinker called the book a “brilliant analysis of a major part of the pathos and pleasure in art, rhetoric, and music.” What do you think of that description?
A: I’ve known Steve for over 40 years. He is a much-admired public intellectual. When he offered to endorse the book, I was very grateful. As far as the endorsement itself goes, it’s a very nice way of saying that he liked what he read. I’m grateful for that. He is a tough critic.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: I have been a fan of the arts all my life. At Oxford I was a student of Old and Middle English language and literature. I attended lectures by J.R.R. Tolkien. I marveled at his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem, Exodus. I read Beowulf, Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer in the original.
I drew upon that experience as well as my experience as a musician and a poet as I studied how the great artists of poetry, painting, and music used repetition in their masterworks.
What surprised me was how ubiquitous repetition was. It was always there. How could I have missed it?
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I liked the idea of using as a title a line that everyone recognizes but that anyone who ever saw Casablanca knows Ingrid Bergman never delivered. What she actually said was “Play it, Sam.”
The title was a way of me reminding myself that scholarship never gets it right. At its very best it gets us closer to the truth than we were before.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Currently, I am reading about the impact that non-Euclidean geometry had on painting after it abandoned representation as its goal. I am also reading about the origins and evolution of religions. You might wonder what they have to do with one another.
In the back of my mind is the idea that religion was the first attempt at a scientific understanding of the world. And that monotheism and, say, quantum mechanics, are both examples of the mental impulse to understand the world through abstraction.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Maybe a couple of things. This past month a CD of 22 poems set to music by Peter Vukmirovic Stevens, a Paris-based composer, performing pianist, and fine artist, was published. The poems were written and read by me.
The title of the collaboration is The World Is Filled with Empty Places. It can be streamed from Spotify and Apple Music and it can be found on Amazon.
I am also a jazz trombone player. I play in a small Dixieland group called The Dixie Sticklers. I also play in the oldest continuous jazz ensemble in the United States and probably the world. Led by Mark Harvey, it is called Aardvark. Mark started it 54 years ago.
Last June we did a concert celebrating Duke Ellington’s 125 birthday. Public television taped it and it has been shown around the world.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment