Meet Me in Strasbourg: A Romance Novel from Which You Can Learn a Lot about Music

I gave the background of this novel in an earlier blog post.

To many people, music is just a pleasant background noise. Occasionally a good tune will stick in a person’s mind. But in this novel, Meet Me in Strasbourg, Tony’s experiences will show you how the more you know about music, the more meaningful it becomes, until it encapsulates your life. Examples include:

• The novel is centered around Die Winterreise, a song cycle by Franz Schubert which, like other Schubert song cycles, is about a lovelorn wanderer mourning the rejection of his love. Die Winterreise begins with the wanderer going to his love’s house to bid farewell to it. Then he sings about one thing after another that reminds him of how miserable he is. At the end, he gives up and joins with a penniless organ-grinder (Der Leiermann) on the street. Only Schubert’s astonishing music can rescue this poetry from utter depression. As the principal characters Tony and Aimée develop their friendship and love, their direction is certainly not that of Schubert’s wanderer. They swear that there will be no Leiermann for them! Then circumstances beyond their control intervene and crash their comfortable love.
• Tony composes band music, just good enough to perform. Having composed wind ensemble music myself, rather indifferently, I can testify that it is a very difficult task.
• Tony plays the recorder, and this music plays an essential role in bringing him and Aimée together.
• In a concert, the band plays an arrangement of the medieval hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, which has (as many of you can attest) an almost magical effect upon the mind. Its climax verse is “And the powers of Hell shall vanish as the darkness fades away.” Is this really true? The stirring music forces the question upon the minds of Tony and Aimée. I will write about this in my other blog, the one devoted to religion.

One could almost believe that, in Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice, music is not a background but a character.

Meet Me in Strasbourg, an Intellectual Romance Novel

Normally, to call a novel, especially a romance novel, intellectual is the kiss of death. But if you dislike intellectual novels, you wouldn’t be reading this blog. I want to tell you about a romance novel that is anything but formulaic: Meet Me in Strasbourg, a novel by Stan Rice. The readers of this blog are interested in science and the life of the mind, things that do not usually show up in romances. Romances often have gorgeous or strikingly handsome protagonists; not this one. These characters are appealing because of their minds.

 

Here is the author’s summary, taken from the Amazon site:

“When the university-bound Native American science student Tony encounters the brilliant and painfully shy French humanities student Aimée in California, he has no idea that their love would drag him halfway around the world.

Tony and Aimée discover their shared passion for music, particularly the love-lieder of Schubert, and then for one another. Tony quickly leaves the social circle that scorned Aimée for her plainness and quietness and becomes her defender and protector. And does she need protection—from the poverty and malnutrition of living alone with her unlucky father, and from her father’s unscrupulous associates in the shadowy world of smuggling. Aimée (French for beloved) finally discovers what it is like to be loved. Just when her joy seems inevitable, she and her father disappear. Tony alters the entire course of his life to go look for her in France.”

Both Tony and Aimée are happy intellectuals. At first, their different kinds of intelligence begins to drive them apart. Every novel has to have some tension that drives the main characters apart before bringing them back together. Tony criticized Aimée’s stories in a creative writing class, and found himself having to apologize to her. A thoughtless joke also made her run from him. But even after they had become engaged, Tony continued to make mistakes that were well intentioned but created stress, such as when he wrote a solo for the painfully shy Aimée in a band piece. He meant it as a tribute to her—the piece was based upon the world’s oldest love song, from Babylonia—but ended up making her into a spectacle, which she hated more than anything else.

It is not intensely intellectual. If intensely intellectual is what you want, you should read the novels of Richard Powers. They are so intellectual that I can hardly understand them, even with a Ph.D. But they are good, especially Overstory, which might well be the best novel ever written. Back in the day, I tried to read Gold Bug Variations and gave up.

Many of the characters are very intelligent and do not attempt to hide it. The author is not afraid to follow them into significant intellectual discussions. Even the janitor/groundskeeper is intellectual. In later essays, I will give examples of science and math, and of music, that are central to the plot, not just thrown into the novel. May I recommend this novel if you, like me, believe that there are a lot more intelligent people in the world than usually show up in fiction?

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's Story

 

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Alma Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

Darwin Meets Albert Schweitzer

It is likely that few of you in the newer generation have heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was famous in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived a long time in the city I now call home, Strasbourg, France. I just posted a video about him.

Schweitzer was most famous for doing what almost nobody does anymore. He was a polymath, that is, a genius expert in what seems to most of us like unrelated fields. His fields were:

• Music: He was an expert at playing and building organs.
• Philosophy.
• Theology: He wrote about the historical Jesus and the mystical Paul.
• Medicine.

Unlike many of us, who are certified in one field (mine is plant ecology) but who know a lot about other fields because we have read a lot about them, Schweitzer actually had degrees in music, philosophy, theology, and medicine. Some examples of people who have thought broadly about more than one area of inquiry are:

• Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who wrote about science in general and even about theology; he even had a joke book;
• René Dubos, the microbiologist who wrote about human nature;
• Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who wrote about everything, even baseball;
• John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest.

Schweitzer felt called to be a medical missionary in Africa. He was criticized because his field hospital in what is now Gabon was not up to the medical standards even of the time. But in its first nine months the clinic had 2000 patients; some of them traveled for days and hundreds of kilometers to go there. Could somebody else have done a better job? Probably, but there was no one else.

He won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize not just for these things but also for his activism against colonialism and nuclear proliferation.

Was there a theme that tied all of these things together? I think it was reverence for life. The aspects of music, philosophy, theology, and medicine that he emphasized were those that made life better for humanity, which he loved.

Today it is difficult or even impossible for a scientist to be an expert in more than one major field of human thought, because every field of thought has grown exponentially; at least, science has. He was not trying to get people to know more scientific facts, but to celebrate how science (in this case medicine) can improve people’s lives (this is my message to the science blog readers). Nor was he trying to get people to believe certain doctrinal points.

The Evolution of Genius

There are geniuses among us. Some of you might be geniuses. But since it is impossible to define what a genius is, few of us can ever know who is or is not a genius. I will just share some insights, from the evolutionary point of view.

First, what genius is not. It is not just intelligence. I am intelligent, as seen from the outside, but when I am being intelligent, as when I am writing, I can see myself from the inside: I am paddling like crazy, like a dog trying to not drown in a flood of stupidity around me.

But for a real genius, everything comes almost without thinking. Mozart would fit anybody’s idea of a genius. He could write the most exquisite music without even having to think about it; in his own words, he wrote music “as the sows piss.” This certainly does not describe anything I do.

Second, genius shows up in the details. I can think of some musical examples. Consider the Nutcracker ballet by Pyotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsy. It is full of delightful melodies, which millions of people know. The ballet is performed hundreds of times around the world at Christmas. I heard that The Nutcracker performance is what keeps a ballet troupe in the black for the season. It may be the most successful ballet in human history.

But that is not what makes it a work of genius. I do not have a score to the Nutcracker, nor can I navigate the online public domain fragments, but I will tell you where to find the music I have in mind. It is in the Danses de Poupées Mecaniques. The magician Drosselmeyer has brought three mechanical dolls for Clara. A lot of skill is required for the three ballet performers since they must all have graceful yet jerky movements that make them seem like robots. The middle one is a woman dancing a waltz, although, this being Tchaikovsky, it is hemiola, with three-quarter time sounding like three-two time. It is not One two three One two three but is One two Three one Two three. It is an exquisite and seldom remembered melody. Right at the end, when the strings repeat the melody one more time, there is a gentle wavering of two flutes. This is the detail that makes it a work of genius. I heard it several times over the years, but never noticed it until my grandkids made me play a video clip of it over and over and over and over.

A similar genius-detail can be found right at the beginning of Hindemith’s Symphony in B flat for band. Few people would rank Hindemith up with Mozart or Tchaikovsky, and I, for one, am not sure. When we rehearsed this piece in band at the University of California in 1977, the director raved on and on about what a genius Hindemith was. Maybe he was right. In the first movement, the trumpets carry a soaring melody (Theme 1). A few minutes later, the oboe introduces Theme 2. But right in the very first measure, just as the trumpets enter with Theme 1, the rest of the band plays just the first five notes of Theme 2. The intervals are correct, but just in the tuba line! Nobody could possibly hear it. Such attention to unseen and unheard detail is something that ordinary composers overlook in their rush to produce something that publishers want.

Third, genius can sometimes work together insights from different realms of thought: music and literature, or literature and science, etc. Leonardo Da Vinci, a genius of both science and art, is everyone’s prime example of this. Isaac Asimov, a biochemist, might have also been an example. He wrote science, fiction, theology, and humor. More often, genius is narrow. Mozart was a genius musician, but who knows if he might have had the rudiments of some other kind of genius. Genius can be narrower yet. John Philip Sousa was a genius in writing band marches; of the best twenty band marches, Sousa probably wrote seventeen of them. He wrote 130 marches, but his operettas, fantasies, overtures, suites, and dances (which add up to 83) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philip_Sousa] have been largely forgotten. According to a 1952 movie, whenever he tried to write something other than a march, it came out sounding like a march. In the movie, he wrote a love song, “My love is a weeping willow down by the streamside fair…” His wife played piano as he sang. Then she started laughing and played the music as a march, the now famous trio of Semper Fidelis.

Fourth, genius can be agony. One thinks of Beethoven struggling with every detail. In fact, most of the great composers seemed to have mental problems, except apparently Bach and Mendelssohn. If this sounds like I have contradicted my first point, about genius being easy, maybe I have, I dunno. But consider Tchaikovsky again. I have heard that Tchaikovsky loathed, despised, hated the Nutcracker. Maybe not his own music, but the plot seemed utterly stupid to him, even though it was written by an author today revered (Alexandre Dumas). It must be admitted Tchaikovsky was under time pressure, having to write an opera Iolanta at the same time. (I’ve never heard it either.) But it is clear that Tchaikovsky jotted down lines of music perhaps with disdain; “There, they’ll love that,” as he scribbled in the little flute murmurs. But he wrote perfect music even for a piece that he hated. I’m sure that I have given more thought to that little bit of music for the mechanical ballerina than he did. The music Tchaikovsky despised has brought pleasure to hundreds of millions of people.

Genius seems like a supernatural gift. But it evolved. The human brain is capable of astounding complexity, more in some people than others, and usually only after a childhood of mental stimulation. The exact form it takes may be a matter of chance. Some people (often autistic) can remember incredibly long strings of numbers. The extreme complexity of the human brain has a very clear evolutionary advantage. Smart people can read the physical and social landscape and use it to their advantage. They can amaze the other people and become revered, and fecund, leaders of the tribe. They could figure out a lot of things, and even if they knew how they did it, they would not have told anybody. They could out-bamboozle everyone else. They were especially good at getting people to believe them. Their intelligence continually contributed to the collective intelligence of their tribes, of related tribes, and eventually of the whole species.

We, all of us, are the evolutionary descendants of at least some geniuses.

The End of Creativity

Aldous Huxley wrote a short novel in which he saw a pickup truck speeding out of a Hollywood movie studio, overloaded with unsolicited screenplay manuscripts. The truck veered, and one of the manuscripts fell off. This didn’t really happen, of course. But, almost a hundred years ago, one of history’s great writers complained about how people in power (in this case, movie producers, but this would also include editors and literary agents) would barely if ever look at what they derisively called their “slush pile” of submissions.

Today, little has changed. The term “slush pile” is still standard. I have written a lot, and published very little, fiction. One of my stories ended up in a magazine that was printed and spiral bound at a copy shop. You cannot submit fiction directly to an editor; and very few literary agents, I suspect, even look at the submissions they receive. Out of hundreds of agents to whom I have submitted samples, only about three have responded personally. The others, I suspect, just have unpaid assistants write rejections or, if the submission is online, the software automatically sends out a rejection. I suspect that few of my submissions have even been looked at.

I could say all kinds of bad things about fiction agents. But the purpose of this essay is to defend just one aspect of their refusal to look at submissions. And that is, AI software can write fiction and submit it. How is an agent to know whether a real person wrote the novel? A robot can click on the “I am not a robot” button, I assume.

And they can write them really, really fast. Amazon self-publishing recently had to set a limit on the number of submissions a single source, such as an email, can make: three per hour. One can easily see that an AI program could write ten times that many novels, and keep doing it all night without coffee and without amphetamines. A single computer could write more novels than the whole world’s collection of novels before, say, 1990.

By definition, these novels are formulaic. They follow formulas. That’s what computers do. The resulting novels are very unlikely to have any deep thoughts, and the plot lines will almost certainly be lame. No agent or editor would call them good. By slightly altering the parameters, the AI programmer can produce a great number of very different novels, all bad.

But that doesn’t matter. Most readers cannot tell the difference between good fiction and bad. Maybe a hundred years ago a reader could distinguish them. And today, some readers still can. This probably includes you, intelligent reader. But people who can tell good novels from bad are not as big of a market as those who just want something to distract them. A publisher can pay almost nothing for an AI generated manuscript, and sell a lot of copies. Each such title would be immensely profitable. If good writers complained that a certain major publisher sold books that a computer may have written, a lot of readers would just tell us to stop griping and get with the modern world.

An important reason for this is that, during the twentieth century, the rules of good literature were jettisoned. Plots no longer had to make any sense, especially if they included dream sequences. Fantasy literature is particularly vulnerable to having plots that make no sense; the writer could just change the laws of nature when he or she wanted to. There needs to be no character development or beautiful description. Certainly no meaning-of-life stuff. Poetry is even worse, which is why most poets only read poems by other poets whom they know. Real human writers turned fiction into something that a computer would eventually be able to write. That time has come.

I have spent many hours sending things to fiction agents. Each one has a slightly different set of rules, and they will not read any submission that does not follow these rules. Should you include a summary, or not? A sample of the writing, or not, and if so how much? I’m not sure that it matters, because the submission will almost certainly not be read. Some agents include a list of rules, the last of which is always, I will look at the submission if it looks like something I would like. I doubt that, in the contentment of retirement, I will ever do this again. And the main reason is that neither agents nor publishers could possibly find a good, human novel in the mass of fake AI manuscripts.

I have been moderately successful at publishing nonfiction in those subjects about which I am an expert, even if not the top expert in the world: botany, evolution, ecology, scientific thinking. Check out my books at stanleyrice.com. A computer could write nonfiction, but it would quickly get recognized as fake, because of the unlimited number of errors it would contain. Publishers might even have legal liability if readers followed stupid advice from a random manuscript. For nonfiction, agents and editors want not just a good book but evidence of expertise. This doesn’t prevent fake nonfiction from being published. There are whole “scientific” journals that will publish anything even if it makes no sense at all and since the “journals” are online it costs almost nothing to publish them. Professors have lost their jobs from claiming fake papers as their publications. But it is harder to write fake nonfiction than fake fiction.

Writers in the movie industry have gone on strike over AI taking over their jobs. Most moviegoers would not know the difference between a human writer and a computer. But the stakes are higher, since in a movie you have immense production costs aside from the writing. If moviegoers recognized a movie as “a real stinker,” the producer would quickly be out of business. Maybe.

So my plan is to stop submitting any fiction or poetry. Each submission would go into a pile of mostly computer-generated submissions, potentially numbering in the billions of billions. A needle in a haystack, or a snowflake in hell, would stand a better chance. I will have them printed up for future generations of my family. Someday, in an underground vault, they might get found. And my poems, too. Sorry, Randy, I know you are a good poet but who else can know it? I notice that neither one of us lives off of our fiction or poetry income.

A similar thing is happening in music. A good composer can still outdo a computer. Even when a Huawei program finished Schubert’s unfinished symphony, it required a little human help from composer Lucas Cantor. I listened to it. It simply did not sound like Schubert. But it was competently written and scored. Computers can provide all kinds of sounds that no musical instrument can produce, but composers still need to tell the computers what to do.

But maybe not for long. During much of the twentieth century, composers on university faculties prided themselves on writing music that was distinctly unpleasant to listen to. Their philosophy seemed to be that you are not supposed to actually enjoy music; it is supposed to be a psychological experience, and if you do not connect with the composer’s music, there is something wrong with you. This was the dominant philosophy during the years I took music courses at the university. I heard from two music graduate students about this. I was considering sitting in on a composer’s forum. A graduate student asked me, Do you use notes? I said of course I used notes. Then don’t bother with the forum, she said. Another graduate student told me that the “new music” of the twentieth century created only one emotion in her: terror.

Within a couple of decades, this approach to music was starting to die away. Perhaps they did not know it, but these out-of-touch-with-musical-pleasure composers were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. If a computer could write music that is just as good as the self-proclaimed leaders of musical innovation, then someday they will.

A lot of careers are being replaced by AI. Even some physicians I have consulted stopped to look up my symptoms on WebMD. I got lots of different diagnoses. Some of them would have been funny had they not been intended as serious

Robots have been making cars for decades.

And now they are writing novels. These days, poor Aldous Huxley would have been left mouldering in the dust.

Science as THE way of knowing

It is common among scientists, as among others, to refer to the scientific method as a way of knowing, but there are other ways as well. I wish to briefly explain that science is not just a way of knowing, but the way.

I am not referring, of course, to the subject matter of science. I refer to the scientific method, about which I wrote my most recent book, Scientifically Thinking.

 

I have had positive and exciting responses to this book. One email that I received is typical:

“[I am] an astronomy PhD student in UC Riverside. I read your fantastic book (Scientifically Thinking) and all the way during reading the book I was like: This book is really great! I think this book can be and is a life-changer and savior for many of us, regardless of the field of study and career.

I feel I am a better person after reading this book. That's why I recommend it to everyone I know and even don't know: last time I recommended it to a stranger in a playground who was trying to raise his little son a better person that himself!”

However, one reviewer (who was otherwise rapturous about how much he loved the book) accused me of being a scientific imperialist. How dare I say science is the only way of knowing? He said this was dangerous.

I plead guilty.

Science, as a profession, confines itself to repeatable and measurable data. The scientific method, however, can be applied to other kinds of observations that are not physical. What the scientific method allows you to do is to, as much as possible:

• Avoid bias. Science allows you to recognize your own biases and at least try to compensate for them.
• Have appropriate construct validity. Science allows you to, as much as possible, use a source of information that really tells you what you want to know.

These are characteristics that all kinds of thinking, including philosophical and religious, need to have. (Note that many fields of study outside of science—such as history—do in fact use data that are physical. Music is grounded in the physics of sound and in the psychology of the human mind. Psychology, in turn, is based on physiology and evolution. Literature is also based on psychology and evolution. As I use the term, science may include all of these fields of experience.)

If a religious person makes a claim, there must be something other than his own craziness that can support it. At least, find it in the Bible before blurting it out. While finding a Bible proof-text does not count as scientific thinking, it is better than the kind of craziness that we see around us today. Christian fundamentalists wave their Bibles in the air without reading them.

While I consider science to be the way of knowing, it is clearly not the only way of experiencing. I have had numerous and powerful religious experiences, both when I was a fundamentalist Christian, and now when my views are less defined. When I listen to music, I do not think about music theory; I am swept away by a rapture that is not unlike religious experiences that I have had. Earlier, I reviewed The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell. He studied his little patch of forest floor scientifically, but his experience was strongly influenced by Buddhism (he kept referring to the spot of land as a mandala).

And while I now question the historical reliability of the “stories of Jesus,” I am irresistibly drawn to them; I continue to write about them in my fiction and use Bible quotes even in my science classes. To me, Jesus is real, even though it may all be inside my head. I love this guy. I just don’t claim this to be knowledge; it is experience.

As I close, I must mention a source of bias in my views. I have, on several occasions, been duped by religious cult leaders. One was Garner Ted Armstrong. I was also swept into a Church of Christ cult for many years. My faith was more powerful than any experience I have had before or since. It was strong enough that I ignored contrary evidence, such as the verified news that Garner Ted was having illicit affairs with undergrad women at his college. With a history of such vulnerability to cult-thinking, how can I trust anything that is generated solely within my brain? I’m just speaking for myself, but I’ll bet you have similar vulnerabilities. I need to test my beliefs against evidence.

The distinction between knowledge and experience is particularly crucial today, when millions (not many millions, I hope) of people believe that everything Donald Trump says is as infallible as if God Himself had said them, and that there is a totally secret conspiracy that stole the election from Him. Few of them will go as far as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed that mass shootings were all fake, and that the California wildfires were started by a satellitefinanced by Jewish money, but many of them use their religious delusion to claim that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax and that we should neither wear masks nor get vaccinated. At this point, treating religious experience as if it is knowledge has become a public threat.

That is, I get upset when I see people using religion as a basis for believing and doing terrible things, which is something that I almost did as well. I am reacting in horror to what I might have been, as well as to what they are. That is my bias but, I think, a reasonable one.

Scientific thinking, not necessarily science, is THE way of knowing.

 

Do Non-Human Animals Have Music? A Meditation on Shostakovich

This essay is a personal reflection on my encounter with a specific piece of music, not a general overview of the subject of animals and music, to which other scientists, not I, have devoted their careers. It is clear that many animals (including fruit flies) use sound for communication, especially for territories and mating. The sounds have patterns that scientists cannot resist calling musical. But maybe we are imputing our experiences onto the animal kingdom. We already do this when we call a beehive’s captive egg-laying machine a “queen.”

To me, the defining characteristic of music, rather than just pretty sounds, is the internal, mental effect that it has. In this, the musical experience is closely allied to the religious experience. And this is why the musical experience can be so powerful and so individual.

My first exposure to the Fifth Symphony of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich was when the symphonic band I was in, early in graduate school, played a transcription of the finale. Shortly thereafter, in 1982, I bought the record of the Bernstein performance, and listened to it a lot. That was the same year that I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. For me, and perhaps nobody else, the music and the novels were closely associated. Especially in the first movement of the symphony, I could hear The Lord of the Rings: the quiet dance of Luthien Tinuviel, in elfin mists and waterfalls, during a quiet throbbing of the strings; I also heard marching armies, attacking orcs, and prancing horses.

It was also at that time that I was experiencing, as young people often do, wrenching emotions, the kind that make no sense in retrospect but which are all-consuming when they occur. It was at this time that, to me, the slow climax of the strings in the middle of the finale (manuscript numbers 113-114) encapsulated my life. I felt this so strongly that I copied out the melody and taped it to my door. Certainly, for me, this symphony was a way of giving substance to my own personal and very intense emotions.

Recently I heard a performance of this symphony by the Tulsa Signature Symphony, led by Andrés Franco. It was certainly an intense performance; the maestro was practically dancing on the podium. The entire concert was, first, Franco’s explanation of how the symphony was written and its musical meaning; and, second, the symphony itself. I was surprised how many people besides myself enjoyed the lecture so much. It was from this lecture that I learned that the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony had intense emotional meaning to the Russians under Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship—almost a whole nation experiencing the kind of intensity in 1937 that I felt in 1982. During the first performance in the Soviet Union, many in the audience wept.

I had never thought about this until Maestro Franco explained it. The entire Soviet Union was under the most brutal form of dictatorship—the psychological form. Nobody could trust anyone else, even among friends and family. Any other person might tattle on you to the Soviet authorities, whereupon you would be arrested, imprisoned, and either killed or allowed to die. Millions died during Stalin’s purges and the famine that he directly caused by imposing the totally bogus genetic theories of pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko (see my earlier essay). Under such conditions, not only was it impossible to, without risking your life, to complain about Stalin, but it was impossible to even weep for the agony that he caused. Everyone was supposed to pretend to be happy little Communists. The performance of Shostakovich’s symphony was the only place in the USSR where you could cry in public and get away with it.

Dmitri Shostakovich stayed in the Soviet Union until his death in 1975, writing music that was as daring as he could get away with. After his death, his son Maxim and grandson Dmitri the younger defected to the United States.

The performance of this symphony was, for me, though perhaps less so than for the millions of people suffering under Stalin, a ravishing experience. A couple of parts in Franco’s performance were not what I expected. I have listened to the Leonard Bernstein recording for almost 40 years. The end of the finale, as performed by Bernstein, was like the bird of the spirit of the Russian people flying away into the sky. As Maestro Franco performed it, it sounded like this bird never quite got off the ground, dragged down because a gigantic soviet medallion draped around its neck, and it could barely rise any higher than the missile silos. But the tempo is the conductor’s prerogative.

This is what makes music what it is, as Maestro Franco explained. It unites us, despite the many other things that divide us. “Songs” do not unite birds; it is the means of their competition with one another for territory and for mates. At this time in American history (the performance was right in the middle of Trump’s impeachment trial, though nobody could have predicted this would happen), America needs something to bring us together. It is divided as it has perhaps never been since the Civil War. About half of Americans are perfectly satisfied with Trump declaring himself to be free of any constitutional constraints; to be, as the congressional prosecutors literally said the very day of the concert, a tyrant, a king, a dictator. We desperately need something to unite us. Politics certainly cannot. Even science (which the conservatives openly reject) cannot. Can music unite us? Perhaps it is music that will keep our very souls alive in coming years. It appears that music, especially that of Dmitri Shostakovich, was what kept the Russian soul alive during the dark Stalinist decades.

John Muir's Scientific Experiment with the Animals of the Forest

Almost every hour of every day, John Muir (see previous essay) was busy walking around and looking at everything in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, taking notes, making sketches. But one day he was resting out in the woods, and the animals started coming up to him. What a perfect time to perform an experiment! He had no hypothesis, but he just wanted to see how the animals would respond to different kinds of music. I describe this in my Darwin YouTube video.

First, he whistled and sang Scottish folk songs. (Muir’s parents were immigrants from Scotland.) The squirrels, chipmunks, and birds seemed to love it. One thrush even hopped out on a dead branch to within a few feet of him. “By this time my performance must have lasted nearly half an hour. I sang or whistled Bonnie Doon, Lass o’ Gowrie, O’er the Water to Charlie, Bonnie Woods o’ Cragie Lee, etc., all of which seemed to be listened to with bright interest, my first Douglas [squirrel] sitting patiently through it all, with his telling eyes fixed upon me...”

Then he sang the Old Hundredth, a famous Christian hymn. It begins, All people that on Earth do dwell... One of its middle-verse lines is the incomprehensible For it is seemly so to do. As soon as Muir began to sing this hymn, “he [the squirrel] turned tail and darted with ludicrous haste up the tree out of sight, his voice and actions leaving a somewhat profane impression, as if he had said, I’ll be hanged if you get me to hear anything so solemn and unpiny. This acted as a signal for the general dispersal of the whole hairy tribe...” Muir tested the hypothesis that animals do not like the Old Hundredth. (Muir never hesitated to make up a word, in this case unpiny.)

A scientist might wonder if this was just a singularity, something that happened once and would not happen again. When Muir sang, just one of the animals might have gotten spooked, for any reason or no reason, and started to run, provoking all the others to flee as well. Muir must have wondered the same thing. When he was later resting outside in the Coast Range, about 150 miles away from his original experiment, the animals paid quiet attention to him as he sang folk songs. “I then began to whistle as nearly as I could remember the same airs that had pleased the mountaineers of the Sierra. They at once stopped eating, stood erect, and listened patiently until I came to “Old Hundredth” when with ludicrous haste every one of them rushed to their holes and bolted in, their feet twinkling in the air as they vanished.” Muir had replicated the test of his hypothesis, and done so in a different forest with different species of animals.

Muir did not intend this as serious scientific investigation, any more than my video investigation of “Do Cats Like Mahler” here and here. But one thing a scientist should not do is to extend his or her conclusions out too far. Muir did not conclude from his investigation that animals are agnostics. I bet that it was just that Muir was happy when he sang the folk songs, and sanctimonious and grand-voiced when he sang the Old Hundredth.

More than anything else, Muir was probably just playing with the animals because he loved them so much. Scientists, too, play with the natural world because we love it so much.

Earth, We Have a Narrative, Part Four.

Scientific presentations already follow a narrative format: the introduction sets up the problem, the methods and results sections work through it, and the discussion (or conclusions) resolves the problem. Two consequences of the narrative structure in scientific papers are:

• Everyone knows the materials and methods section is the boring part of the story. In many journals, it either appears in smaller print, or as an online supplement.
• Null results—that is, when the hypothesis is not confirmed—seldom get published. Narratives they may be, but not very good ones. But, as Stuart Firestein explains in Failure: Why Science is So Successful, this is very unfortunate, because the null results of one investigator or team can, when read by another team, save them a lot of wasted time and expense. The second team can, by studying the null results, either give up while they have time, or devise a better method. Failures, null results, are as much a part of the narrative as the protagonist’s setbacks are part of the hero’s tale.

This happens a lot in literature. People like stories that have happy endings, or are at least resolved at the end. A story is supposed to make sense, even if the world does not. In this way, a story can help us understand the world, or at least accept it, a little better. Only in rare instances is a happy ending actually required: the four damsels and three swains agreed on the happy-ending rule in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but this is unusual. Even in tragedies, things get resolved: at the end of Hamlet, we find that things really were rotten in the state of Denmark.

(Joke intermission. In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies; in a Russian comedy, everybody dies happy.)

Music also follows a narrative structure. Music definitely follows a narrative arc. In fact, it can be arcs within arcs. Most musical pieces follow the “ABA form” or “sonata form,” as I learned it in music theory class in 1975. Introduction of one or more themes; Development of interacting themes; then Recapitulation (recap) of the triumphant, modified theme or themes. You find this in nearly all classical music that people like to listen to. The theme-and-variations form, and the verses-and-refrains form, are variations of this structure. Frequently, the development is in the relative minor (if the introduction is in major), as in A minor following C major; or the other way round.

In symphonies, each movement usually has an ABA form. The first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony has dramatic themes in the introduction, then a development that builds up tension. That is an understatement. At the end of the development, there is an extremely strident chord repeated thirty-six times. Just before you scream, the recap begins. This symphony has such a powerful narrative structure that a Tulsa audience of hundreds listened to the conductor give an hour-long lecture about it before performing the symphony. The first movement is so exhausting that Mahler wrote in a three-minute relaxation period before the second movement. The conductor duly sat down on his podium as if he had just wrestled a Viking. Now that’s a story.

Many classical symphonies follow a narrative structure in their (usually four) movements, with an ABA form within each movement. The first movement is an introduction. The second movement is often slow and thoughtful. The third movement is often lively and everybody looks forward to it. The fourth movement is a resolution and frequently features the return of the original theme. The fourth movement, or any other movement, can also have a coda, which is a big bang ending that extends past the resolution of the theme. One of the most famous codas is at the end of the famous first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Just when you think you have heard the final notes, along comes this surprising coda. This symphonic movement has such an obvious narrative structure that musical humorist Peter Schickele applied a football-game-style commentary to it.

Mozart was a master of musical narrative structure. Mozart was unrivalled in the way he made the horizontal (tune) and vertical (chord) structures work together perfectly, with seeming effortlessness, as in the Gran Partita.

Sometimes the narrative form in music is completely overt. Each of Antonín Dvořák’s symphonic poems (such as The Water Sprite, The Golden Loom, and The Wild Dove) tells an intricate folk tale, usually grisly. I love them!

The first chapter of Genesis is a song. It has six stanzas for the six days of creation. Each stanza ends with a refrain, “and there was evening, and there was morning, another day.” Creationists, by forcing it into a literal meaning, have killed its beauty. I even rewrote Genesis 1 into a form that fit the tune of Oh What a Beautiful Mornin.’ (“The creation of Earth is like music, the creation of Earth is like music...” and “It’s such a beautiful cosmos, you’d better keep it that way.”)

The middle of the twentieth century was a time of embarrassment for classical music. Composers, usually working on university faculties (hence this music is sometimes called “academic”, suitable only for study and not for enjoyment) and having very few listeners, wrote music that was deliberately formless and void with darkness over the face of the deep, as in Genesis 1:2. In most cases they didn’t even have tunes. Students, including me, were made to pretend to like them. I could list some of the pieces and composers, but you almost certainly have never heard of them. They have become extinct, except when some musicians drag out the fossils and play them for audiences that endure them. Nobody goes around humming them. Today much of that pretense has been abandoned in schools of music. These pieces of “academic” music just leave the listener feeling confused. Music does not have to end with a bang, but it should end at some sensible spot. This is why most people, in thinking about the early twentieth century, can name only composers like Hindemith, Gershwin, and Joplin, who wrote tunes. What’s there not to like about the March at the end of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses? But “academic” composers looked down on Hindemith, especially since he insisted on sending every movement on a nice chord.

Science is stories. Literature is stories. Music is stories. We cannot not think in stories. We cannot not feel in stories.

This is only one reason that the vast story of evolution resonates less with the human spirit than does creationism. Evolution does not have a narrative arc. I tried to give it one in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, but it just didn’t match up to Genesis 1 or to Adam and Eve (Genesis 2). Ursula Goodenough tried it too, with even less success than I.

Science needs as much interesting narrative as it can get, but not at the expense of reality. I am particularly annoyed by the sound bite at the beginning of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, in which a woman says, “We have to believe in impossible things.” No, we don’t, not even (as Lewis Carroll wrote) five impossible things before breakfast. If we let the narrative dominate, then science is as useless to us as religion. This is not, however, likely to happen.

Playful Young Animals and a Playful Young Novelist

Animals are playful when they are young. They try everything out to see what happens. Their time is spent in one long binge of hypothesis-testing. This is how they develop a model of the world and how to live in it, a model that can be updated to the changing world at least once a generation, rather than waiting for generations of natural selection to set things right. Unlike most other animals, humans continue being playful when they grow up.

One of the things that playful young humans experiment with is creative writing. And people who, like me, grow up to be writers have put in hundreds or in my case thousands of hours writing (in sheer bliss) by middle age. Daniel Levitin said that a genius is simply someone who has practiced something for ten thousand hours, I am quite certain that this is an incomplete picture. But there is probably no genius who has not practiced for ten thousand hours.

I have a natural talent for writing. It manifested itself more strongly when I was young than did my talent for music. I believe I will yet become a great writer. But I do not believe that I would ever have become a great musician even if I had practiced ten thousand hours. I might have been the modern equivalent of the baroque composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, competent and forgotten. (Wikipedia says he was also a silvologist, which means a forestry expert. Maybe his best work, like mine, was with plants rather than music.)

But to get to the level of skill that I have today, I had to go through my juvenile experimental period. I worked at it very hard when I was in elementary school, using an old Smith Corona open-sided sturdy typewriter. I also spent a lot of time composing.

One of the novels I worked on was about Russian spies building a rocket out in the desert of Arizona. The hero of the story was pretty sure that this is what they were up to; they drove panel trucks with a hammer and sickle on it, after all. Every chapter of plot was separated by a chapter in which the hero described all of the plants in his parents’ garden. Future botanist here. I do not remember what the climax was; maybe that was because I might not have finished it.

Another novel was about three kids getting lost in the woods: two boys and a girl. I was right on the cusp of puberty, and I wanted to have one of the boys get together with the girl inside a blanket to stay warm during the cold forest night. The other boy wouldn’t have minded; all he did was recite Shakespeare. But I did not have the courage or foolhardiness to pursue that path. The climax was when the kids, who had dug trenches and buried themselves to stay warm, were sniffed out by a bear, which inexplicably left them alone. I don’t remember much about it other than that I described the mountain as if it had loving parental arms that embraced the hikers; I had read a story in which O. Henry used the word philoprogenitiveness, and I wanted to use it too. My idea of good writing back then was to use as many big words as I could.

When I was in college and old enough to know better, I started writing a romance novel set in medieval England, about which I knew nothing. (About either romance or medieval England, as it turned out. I was too meek to have a romantic life at that time.) It had so many plot bloopers in it that when I wrote a (good) novel decades later I used my earlier novel as an example of one that was hilariously inept.

I spent hours and hours on this stuff. I did not realize it was bad. But had I known how bad it was, I might have stopped writing it and never developed my talent. I remain thankful to my teachers, such as Mr. Jim Kliegl, who put up with some of this stuff and even encouraged me. I think he knew I would become a good writer, based not on what I wrote but on the fact that I was writing it.

Okay, so I finally learned how to write. But I still had a few things to learn, things that I still have to carefully avoid. Here’s an example. As I have written previously, we have patriotic Confederates down here in Oklahoma, whose only purpose in life is to sell confederate flags and drive around with confederate flags waving from poles in their truck beds. Based on my conversations with them, I consider them to be among the most hateful people I have met. They are really scary. When I recently started a new novel, I had a female Cherokee heroine and a male Confederate villain. I won’t give away the plot other than to say I based it on the apocryphal book of Judith.

As I wrote, I made the villain as hateful as possible. Every little detail was disgusting. I was ranting. But then I started running an experiment in my mind. If he was really that disgusting, the heroine would have stayed away from him and there would be no plot. This was when I realized that I did not have a character, but a foil. In order to make him a real character, I had to get inside his mind. I had to empathize with him.

I discovered that, to write a good novel, or even a good story, I had to love even the characters that I hated.

I believe that, with this discovery, I have finally reached the plateau of professional competence. I have begun a new round of queries to fiction agents in an attempt to market another novel, one which I have thoroughly rewritten twice. How many times, hundreds perhaps, I have been turned down by fiction agents. But maybe it has been for the best. (This can’t go on forever, of course, or I’ll be dead.) One agent told me that an earlier version of this novel was episodic rather than having a strong plot. It only took me a year to realize she was right. I will send the new one back to her. I am now glad the earlier version was not published. I have published science books, but am ready now for fiction.

I feel like a plant with dozens of unopened flower buds (the novels). The plant keeps developing those buds to be better and better so that when they open, perhaps one after another in quick succession, the result will be spectacular and pollinators will come buzzing and whirring from miles around. In the event that this happens, that the playfulness of my youth and continued playfulness of my middle years pays off in my maturity, I will let you know.

Does Science Kill the Spirit?

Just posted: a Darwin video about global warming, soil, with a mole joke at the end.

Some people in the humanities perceive science as a threat. They think that it turns all human creativity into the mere operation of neurons, the product of a complex brain computer. A scientific explanation of creativity, in terms of action potentials and neurotransmitters, may, they fear, kill the spirit.

When I was an undergrad, I took music theory courses. I learned about the overtone series, and how the notes of major chords blended together within that overtone series, whereas the notes of a minor chord created discord because they differed from that series. An overtone series occurs when the vibrations at a certain frequency, say 256 Hertz for middle C, also create resonant harmonies at higher frequencies, first at the octave (512 Hertz, or twice that of middle C), then the fifth above that (G), then another octave (high C, at 1024 Hertz), then the third above that, which is E. C major contains C, E, and G, while C minor contains C, E-flat, and G; the E-flat grates against the natural overtone of E. Major chords make us feel at peace, while minor chords make us feel on edge. This is usually interpreted as happy and sad. This is not quite true; Andean music, for example, consists largely of minor-mode melodies that are happy. Even if you do not know anything about chords, your emotions can be affected by hearing these chords. One could say that the human mind, with all its happiness and sadness, is the plaything of the laws of physics, particularly the overtone series of vibrations.

Furthermore, the overtone series can explain the differences in what musicians call timbre, which can be figuratively described as the color of the sound. A flute and a trumpet playing the same note, for example 512 Hertz, sound very different, because the trumpet has more of the high, piquant overtones than the flute. So also, the overtone series explains why you need to avoid certain compositional mistakes, such as doubling your leading-tones or having parallel fifths.

I learned this, and knew it, yet at the same time I was able to participate in the near-magic of musical experience. I knew that all of music could be explained by the mathematics of vibrations and by the human brain’s response to them. But I still imagined music as magic. At the time, I was a creationist, and believed that music was literally divine. It never occurred to me to worry that my knowledge of the physics of sound might destroy the magic of musical experience. I knew just enough about music to be able to write some mediocre stuff of my own, and just enough to be frustrated when I heard works of true genius, such as those of Mozart. You think Mozart’s music is nice; I understand why it is not only nice but profound. (You’ve never heard my “Emmaus Road” symphony of 1977? Thank God it was never performed or recorded.)

And so it is with all of science. A biological explanation of the working of the human brain in no way destroys the wonder of human creativity. Explaining religion in terms of stimulation of the right temporal lobe does not negate the transcendent experience of religion. Franz Schubert put the poetry of Wilhelm Muller to music in Die Winterreise, proclaiming that all our joys and all our sorrows, “alles eines Irrlichts Spiel,” they are all the playthings of illusion. Everyone who has sung Die Winterreise, including the late great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, could experience the transcendent beauty of this line of music, even while proclaiming that this beauty is a mere illusion of the mind. You see, when we are participating in music, or in the world of nature as explained by science, we are inside of it, and the mathematical and physical explanations do not destroy the evolved capacity to experience them as transcendently inspiring experiences. We can analyze our animal evolution, but we are still animals, exulting inside of those experiences.

Memes Are Everywhere

At the end of 2011, I wrote about the cultural and memetic evolution of the economy. Most of you probably understood what I meant. But I would like to include here a summary of the idea of memetic evolution, which I have extracted from Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published last year.

Humans exist in a sea of memes. For example, music is memes. Somebody invents a new piece of music, and performs it. A successful set of music memes gets performed by others. Because of memetic selection, there are more copies of Dvořák’s New World Symphony on the market than anything written by Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf. The reason that most folk songs are good is that they have endured centuries of memetic selection. Memetic selection appears to have condemned the deliberately atonal academic music of the twentieth century, such as the works of Anton Webern and Witold Lutosławski, to long-term obscurity. (You’ve never heard of them? That is my point.)

To a certain extent, memetic evolution is arbitrary. But memes, like genes, must correspond to underlying reality. In the case of music, harmonic consonance creates more of a feeling of peace and enjoyment than harmonic dissonance. Consonance results when the vibrations of different notes match one another’s overtone series. Humans desire more than just peace and enjoyment from their music, however, and a certain amount of dissonance is necessary to create a flow of musical events; resolution of a dissonance is part of the story of a piece of music. You cannot change the physical basis of consonance and dissonance any more than you can change the law of gravity. Rhythm is also based on the natural world and may be even more primal than harmony. The powerful drum beats of Japanese taiko and Lakota wacipi music bring back fetal memories of your mother’s heartbeat.

Computer programs are memes. Computer programmers commonly use evolutionary algorithms that consciously imitate natural selection. The program begins with a simple set of instructions, then generates slight variations, tries them out, then retains the ones that work the best. The weasel program is a simple example of an evolutionary algorithm. The computer iterates this process over and over, producing complex results that were designed not by the programmer but by memetic evolution within the computer. Old movies with battle scenes required (and boasted of) “a cast of thousands,” but modern movies often have such large-scale scenes generated by computer programs that use evolutionary algorithms.

Literature is memes. The marketplace is an arena of memetic evolution, as people choose some products over others. Science is memes, as scientists try out hypotheses, retaining and propagating the ones that successfully explain the natural world. Everywhere you look, there are memes, memes, and more memes, all of them evolving.

Check out the new YouTube video available soon on my YouTube Channel (StanEvolve). The video may not be available right away. Also remember to submit any comments, especially about topics you would like to discuss for this blog.

For more information about Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, which has now been published in Chinese as well as English, see my website.