Art as Memory

On art forms as memory technologies

I’m not much of a concert-goer but yesterday was the third time my wife and I went to see blues guitarist Buddy Guy in 15 years. He’s 89 now, and according to Wikipedia officially retired. We probably caught the last show of what might be one of his last tours.

I first saw Guy play when he opened for B. B. King 15 years ago at a concert in DC, in 2010, when King was younger (85) than Guy is now. I had no idea who Guy was at the time.

King was already in declining health at the time, and it showed. He didn’t play much, but Guy pranced around the stage having a great time like he was 20 (he was 74), exuding more energy than I’ve ever managed to in my own 50 years. When I saw him next, in Seattle in 2018, King had been dead for a few years, and Guy was the headliner. Somewhat more sedate, but still fit, and bursting with top-decile energy for his age.

I also saw B. B. King perform live twice — in 2000 in Ann Arbor and 2010 in DC. Since King was overweight and in poor health, his decline between 75 and 85 was much more noticeable. Both performances were still powerful though. I suspect blues guitar is particularly friendly to long careers since it features both frenetic high-energy/dexterity playing that allows younger musicians to show off, and meditative playing with long, drawn-out notes, which allow the narrative arc of the performer’s life to shine through in a signature voice. High-tempo performances reveal the quality of your talent. Low-tempo performances reveal the quality of your life. This is one reason the latter are more interesting when put on by musicians in the later stages of their careers. Late style and low tempo go together. While younger musicians can often demonstrate technical virtuosity at low tempos, they haven’t lived enough to have much to say at low tempos. Older performers, even if their control shows some signs of shakiness and fragility, have a good deal more to say.

It’s a bit like how tech commentary is more compelling coming from people who’ve lived through a few tech cycles (and since a tech cycle typically lasts about 7-8 years, that means 20-25 years for a “few”). There’s probably a Nyquist frequency joke here.

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Though I know nothing about the blues tradition, beyond being able to recognize the signature chord progressions, I suspect one reason I’ve enjoyed it whenever I’ve listened, (though not with any depth of literacy or connoisseurship), is that I find artistic evolution over a lifetime more interesting than any single performance. And blues is a great canvas for cradle-to-grave performances.

In expressing this sort of life-as-performance quality, blues is closer in spirit to raga, the tradition I am most literate in, than to jazz, to which raga is often compared. What jazz and raga share is a kind of cerebral approach to structured improvisation, and both can fail by getting too cerebral. But what blues and raga share is this quality of being affective-life-canvas performance modes. As with blues, good raga musicians have very long careers, and the late stages of their careers are often the most interesting, their health permitting. At that point their music and their biography merge into one. Younger raga musicians can be… a bit boring.

Guy didn’t play much last night, but he had a bunch of shorter energetic bits. Notwithstanding my comment about low-tempo being better suited to aging performers, Guy established his identity (better informed people correct me if I’m wrong) with something like a high-tempo biographical claim (“Damn Right, I’ve got the blues”).

Even at 89, meditative, the adjective that comes to mind for B. B. King, is not how I’d describe Guy’s playing style. But the low-tempo meditative late style came through in the troubadour storytelling part of the performance. In the previous concerts where I saw him, the storytelling and dialogic banter with the audience had something of a stand-up comedy set feel to it. This time, it felt like reflective storytelling. The spoken word part had what can only be described with that overused word, authenticity, which came through even though I missed probably a third of the actual words and many of the punchlines. The stories were of the sort where even hearing only fragments is enough to convey mood. The impact doesn’t rest on the setup or punchline, but in the manner of telling (Mark Twain once observed that the American humor story, unlike the British comic story, relies on the manner of telling rather than the contents).

Curiously, the storytelling, to my ear, had some similarities with the storytelling in The Canterbury Tales, which I’m reading for our book club this month. There is a similar mix of bawdiness and caper-comedy on the one hand, and philosophical and moral reflection on the other.

But there’s more to the connection between music and history than the obvious one represented in any sort of troubadour tradition, where the music “officially” has a history-chronicling societal purpose. Art doesn’t just occasionally pull duty as historical memory. It is a form of historical memory.

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August is medieval fiction month at the Contraptions Book club, where you get to pick from: Canterbury Tales, Decameron, Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. Pick your edition/translation carefully. I am reading Canterbury Tales. Declare your choice in this chat thread.

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In the case of blues, Buddy Guy is probably among the last musicians who can talk of things like growing up picking cotton without either irony or bad faith (there is a great bit in Ghost World (2001) where Steve Buscemi’s blues-connoisseur character rants about a band of young, white blues singers at a bar singing about picking cotton and mules).

Music theorists and historians probably have a lot to say about how the entire genre is rooted in a history of pain. My own gloss on it is that though the technical innovations of blues live on in newer genres, there is a sense in which the blues is something like a finite chapter, not just of the history of music, but of history period. A record of the subjective pain of that history is a necessary part, perhaps the necessary part, of that chapter. The chapter is currently in the process of ending, as musicians like Buddy Guy retire.

You can’t tease apart a genre of music (or more generally, any kind of art) from the history that produced it. The genre is the musical equivalent of a retired soccer jersey number associated with a famous player during an era.

All closed chapters of music seem to have this quality of being inseparable from the historical eras that produced them. Even the most cerebral sorts of classical music. But some genres seem to have more of this historical entanglement quality than others. In fact, more than the pop vs. classical distinction, it’s perhaps interesting to plot musical traditions on a spectrum stretching from memory music to non-memory music. Increasingly, to the extent I listen to music, I tend to listen to memory music.

This spectrum, I think, shapes which performers are drawn to which genres at a young age. You are either a high-context historian of moods, participating in creating a musical record of the world’s affective evolution, or a low-context historian, programmatically exploring the abstract possibilities of musical design spaces, and systematically tracing out the ways in which they might approach the frontier of pure dissonant noise, starting from some set of formal premises.

To an engineering eye, the latter sort of music looks like formally assessing the information-carrying potential, or expressivity, of a form, while the former looks like actually saying things. It’s the difference between studying thermodynamics and designing car engines.

Individual artistic practice of the high-context memory-embodying sort appears cumulative in two ways. First it is cumulative in the sense of accumulating and differentiating virtuosity that starts out rehearsing, then driving, the evolution of its home tradition, including its historical thematic concerns. Second, it is cumulative in the sense of eventually becoming capable of serving as a living, non-verbal mood record of the history itself. Not all artists graduate to being historians of mood, or seek to. And it isn’t a matter of talent or inclination alone. Your life has to get tangled up with history worth recording. Otherwise, perhaps, abstract explorations are a better use of your talents.

First the art takes your measure, then you take the measure of the art. Then finally, as an embodiment of the art, you take the measure of the world itself, particularly its history.

If I may be forgiven a labored signal-processing metaphor, these are the convolution, deconvolution, and expression stages of an individual artistic career, viewed as a measuring instrument.

This phenomenon, I think, can be found beyond music.

It was both amazing to see Buddy Guy retain so much vigor at his age, and sad to note that he was nevertheless a shadow of his old self, 15 years ago. Watching musicians age and decline is like watching a lifelong performance art piece play out. To some extent, strengthening narrative command of the performance makes up for declining raw virtuosity. And there is of course, also the halo effect of just being a sort of living monument towards the end. To stress the memory metaphor a bit, an old floppy disk with important information on it is more valuable than a blank, modern thumb drive that is faster and more capacious.

Japan designates really old artisans as “living national treasures,” which is an interesting way to acknowledge how certain kinds of history can still only be embodied by humans.

It is interesting to ponder why that is. One possibility is that what we look for in art is a credible record of subjective experiences, not objective truths. Art as history is a verified history of subjectivity. You can’t record it if you can’t access it. And even the best cameras cannot record the trace of an inner life in outer expressions of it unless the experiencer chooses to reveal them.

A rather on-the-nose fictional illustration. In a Futurama episode (S10E4, Forty Percent Leadbelly), Bender the robot, who has folk singer aspirations, copies and 3d prints the guitar of a famous singer, Silicon Red, and uses algorithmic analysis to generate grammatically perfect folk songs. But they flop. Silicon Red tells him that he can’t just sing about pain and troubles. He actually has to experience it.

There is a conundrum here. How, outside of the proof of history, would you even know whether somebody has logged the inner experiences that lend value to outer expressions?

We can now actually do what the Futurama episode speculated about. You could probably train a deep learning model to produce deepfake blues music that can be passed off as newly discovered lost recordings of B. B. King. I think we’ll soon get to a point where even experts will be unable to tell them apart. But the whole point of blues is that it is entangled with a century of actual Black history, and generating a Turing-test-passing blues music piece is not the same as producing “new” history in the interstices of existing history.

Here, a blockchain analogy is illuminating. The performance archives of an artistic tradition constitute something like a near-immutable record of the history it bears witness to, particular the subjective pain (this is related to the premise of a talk I did called Bloodcoin, in 2018). To “fake” a blues piece, you’d have to do more than fake the music. At the very least, you’d have to fake enough of the historical context too, to supply your Bender-like robotic performer with raw material for banter. Which too may become possible in the future, who knows. Maybe in 50 years, there will be various counterfactual historical worlds (declared or undeclared) of blues you can inhabit, exploring the contingencies of history. Maybe there will be entirely fictional blues musicians who exist only in some of these counterfactual worlds.

A more radical concept. You can even imagine extrapolations of the history of the blues that make it an open and continuing chapter rather than a nearly closed chapter for the musical museum. These would be the musical equivalent of science fiction. Or cryopreservation perhaps.

I suspect this sort of speculation deeply offends music lovers attached to the real history of a musical tradition because the one thing you can’t do, at least not with AI (it is categorically the wrong sort of technology for it), is produce new pain that goes along with the new virtual history, whether interstitial or extrapolated.

It is perhaps a slightly monstrous thought to even contemplate the idea of producing “new pain” to back up generated artworks, but the thought experiment feels worthwhile. One can imagine psychotic serial-killer musicians who produce music using an AI trained on suffering they cause (there’s a plot element something like this in the Daredevil: Born Again).

When the subjectivity being attested to by a historical chapter of an art form primarily has to do with pain rather than other emotional qualities, such speculation can sound particularly offensive.

I don’t yet know what to think about that. But while they are not trivially addressable with shallow technological thought experiments, as the tech-hostile correctly assume, neither can the question of technology as a mode of original artistic production be trivially dismissed.

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Another musician I watched evolve over a much long period was Zakir Hussain (who died last year). I first saw him in the mid-90s, and then several more times over the decades (I think at least once with his father, Alla Rakha, who was Ravishankar’s accompanist). The last time was a few years ago. The tabla is the only instrument I have some personal appreciation for, since I took lessons for several years before realizing I didn’t really have enough aptitude for it to continue. But my modest training has left me somewhat better equipped to appreciate the nuances of percussion music than other kinds.

With Hussain, the decline was more visible the last couple of times I saw him. The tabla, though it can be tuned to carry a limited melodic line,¹ is not particularly capable of sustaining very slow tempo performances the way the guitar is. Or the sorts of long, drawn-out shaped microtonal stylings characteristic of raga (and similar to blues).

That he managed to elevate the tabla to the stature of a classical solo performance instrument was Hussain’s lifetime achievement, kinda like Yo Yo Ma with the cello.

But the tabla is arguably not a good medium for telling life-stories. At least not with an expressivity that says things about the history of the world that life played out in. Hussain pushed the tabla to its technical limits (and through expressive rather than programmatic explorations, such as in his fusion albums as part of the Shakti band) but did not manage to make it a medium of history.

Still, listening to Hussain’s performances over the years, you do get a sense of his personal life-arc, and at least some sense of the evolution of Indian music traditions over the years. It doesn’t quite embody the history of India through his lifetime though, the way blues music embodies Black history, but it conveys something about the shapes and patterns of history, especially if you situate it in the larger context of other subcontinental percussion instruments, like the mridangam and pakhawaj (which have notably different timbres), as well as humbler folk drums like the nagara, dhol, and ghatam (which is essentially just a superior clay pot, the Indian equivalent of the plastic bucket favored by the American street drummer; it has been elevated to classical status over the last century, in part through the career of Hussain’s collaborator T. H. Vinayakam).

Coincidentally, one of Buddy Guy’s things is playing the guitar like a percussion instrument with lots of comical stunts. At the performance last night he literally played it with a drumstick and a towel, and engaged in comic stylings that reminded me of Zakir Hussain.

Drummers, I suspect, have historically played foil to vocalists and other sorts of instrumentalists because drumming is simply not sufficiently expressive to be a memory technology. Perhaps drumming is to the rest of music as clocks are to computer memories. Custodians of the tempo rather than the contents of the historical storytelling.

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Speaking of shapes and patterns of history, one way to understand cradle-to-grave musical careers, considered as living artworks built up over decades, is through the lens of wabi sabi.

Any artistic tradition that has a sufficiently long-range horizon must, of course, contend with matters of mortality, decline, and entropy. Whether it is an individual artist being shaped by, and shaping, a tradition over 50-70 years, or the tradition itself shaping the world over say a century or two, birth and death are in the picture. And along the way, a performance personality acquires actual memory content, like a cracked pot acquiring golden seams of information in the kintsugi tradition (which is apparently part of the wabi sabi ethos).

One way to think of this is to treat the entire human career of a musician as a unique n-of-one musical instrument with a unique timbre.

The musician themselves, as much as the music they make, might be considered the historical record. This perhaps explains why the Japanese sacralize the living elderly as national treasures. In some sense they are. The memories they embody cannot easily be transferred to any other medium. They only fully exist while the human carriers are alive. Like DRAM memory, which must be periodically refreshed with jolts of electricity to persist, humans too, constitute a kind of memory that requires jolts of liveness to exist. Only the timescales are different. Decay half-lives of decades instead of nanonseconds.

What about the musical tradition, spanning more than one musician’s life?

In Western classical music, named “periods” like romantic or baroque seem to span a few generations of musicians. So perhaps the cradle-to-grave lifespan of a musical tradition is a long century. For that period, the musical style seems to serve as an affective historical record of events in the world. Baroque music doesn’t just go with baroque architecture, it goes with history itself being baroque in some loose sense.

In Indian classical music, the cultural-historical grain is more vertical than horizontal. Though there are horizontal-period styles (dhrupad for instance, which is something like the Gregorian chants of Indian music, is an example), musical traditions are primarily associated with schools or gharanas (“houses”), which typically trace their origins to some medieval royal court (in the north) or a particular temple town (in the south). Particular schools become identified with particular performance moods (which in turn get associated with favored ragas that convey that mood). The emotional ranges tend to be broader than those demanded by a particular history (the correlations are not as tight as “blues” and “pain” so a particular gharana might be said to have a certain emotional range, like an actor).

The school is an interesting unit, somewhere between a genre like “blues” or a specific scene like “Chicago blues,” and pure, ahistorical, programmatic abstraction. A school can be close enough to history to serve a memory function, but distant enough to define itself formally rather than historically. It’s not particularly surprising that Indian music organizes itself into these in-between units of schools. The raga itself is often defined as living somewhere between a scale and a melody — a formal unit vs. a unit of living performance. Attempts at extreme formalization of Indian music (such as in the melakarta scheme in Carnatic music or the idea that there are 22 microtones/gamakas) are often criticized for being too formalist, at the expense of liveness of performing and composing. The raga and school system, in other words, has a bias towards the middle point of the spectrum between living memory vs. formal and abstract musical space.

For the exploration of shapes and patterns in history, this is perhaps the sweet spot, and I’ve often thought about the ragas of history, though it’s not a particularly accessible metaphor outside of India.

Wabi sabi is one historical mood pattern, focused on mortality. Presumably there are others. In certain Indian traditions, there are explicit taxonomies relating ragas to moods and even times of day. It is a rather overwrought elaboration of compositional heuristics like “minor keys are darker” in the West. I never found this sort of thing compelling, though there is perhaps something to it. The trick, I think is to make the connection to more than just reified moods, temporalities, and affective arcs.

For instance, you might ask, what might be the raga or key you would use for a performance that aimed to evoke the subjective mood of what I’ve called the Great Weirding, 2015-2020? This is not necessarily a “sad” or “happy” or “morning” or “evening” raga. But the question is well-posed, even if the answer isn’t obvious.

I have no idea what the answer might be though. I don’t have enough musical literacy to even recognize keys, chords, and ragas, so it is not a question for me to answer anyway. But the reason for musicians to ask the question at that level of abstraction, as opposed to say, at the more concrete level of melodies, chords, or lyrics, is that we can think of musical performance as groping towards something like a musical “pattern language” for history. We can imagine an entire world history being composed as a compendium of mood-music pieces. History written entirely in leitmotifs, so to speak.

And in this speculation, I am not talking about something like representing an epoch of history through the particular music of a time and place that’s entangled with it. I’m talking about mapping the specifics of history to elements within a larger historical-musical language designed to capture them in music.

This provides an interesting lens on the question I raised earlier. If the authenticity of the underlying pain is the essence of the blues, and shallow technological deepfakes fail some sort of subjective truth test, what about transposing patterns that pick out “pain” as the defining mood across time and space?

Could modern Bhangra, which in some ways embodies the pain of Partition for modern Punjabis (something that isn’t obvious from casual listening), tell the tale of Black history through the blues period? Conversely, could blues music capture something of the Punjabi story?

Are both instances of a larger universal pattern of “pain music” that we might find elsewhere? Perhaps in the Iranian lament traditions associated with the martyrdom of Ali?

I wonder if musical crossovers and fusion experiments unconsciously seek out such resonances.

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I’m probably already out of my depth trying to use music as a lens on what we’re talking about here, but my own medium, writing, surfaces many of the same tensions.

In particular, blogs and newsletters are a much more continuous “life performance” medium than books (or albums, or concerts).

As with music, there are austerely programmatic ways of writing and thinking about writing, to explore the formal possibilities of a textual design space, and historicist-expressionist ways, which get entangled with the history of the world.

Twenty-odd years and several million words in, I’m still not sure which path I’ve actually chosen. Though the bulk of my writing is in the historicist-expressionist mode, several of the most critical, load-bearing things I’ve written have been in a formalist mode. These are not necessarily my most popular essays, but they bear a disproportionate amount of the load of the entire corpus of words. They say very little about the here-and-now of the world as I’m living through it, between my own cradle and grave, but they do say things about the nature of the space I try to explore.

You’d think, given how words can say things with a lot more precision and dense factuality than music (even lyrical music), that it would be, in some sense, a more historical medium. The memory to non-memory spectrum I proposed earlier for music ought to be shifted to the left when applied to words.

But at least in my experience, the opposite is true. Words create a greater distance between you and historical memory than music does.

One reason for this is obvious. Music has a more direct affective component, and through emotional weighting, picks out the most important things better, at least in a certain subjective sense. It says less, in an information theoretic sense, but the things it chooses to say (and perhaps more importantly, is constrained from saying) feel way more important, at least to the people doing the saying. The sentimental history captured by music is the history of what has been important.

Fictional case in point: In Herman Hesse’s satire, The Glass-Bead Game, the protagonist Joseph Knecht is some sort of verbal-musical-mathematical polymath genius who is on a path towards enlightenment through words, but is ultimately shown to have ended up more removed from reality than if he had chosen music. Arguably, the only non-satirical plot line is the one concerning the music master, who originally recruits Knecht into the mystico-spiritual Hogwarts that is the setting of the story, and also plays a key role towards the partial redemption moment towards the end of Knecht’s life. In some ways, the music-master plot represents the authenticity ground against which the satire is set. That the whole story feels very abstract is the point.

Though it has the formal structure of a Bildungsorman, Glass Bead Game is one of those novels it is best not to read as a teenager. A Horatio Alger tale it is not. It is perhaps best read as a late-life mirror with a certain wry amusement at your own history.

One perhaps simplistic summary thesis of The Glass-Bead Game is: Music more truly taps into the nature of historical reality than words ever can. A theme song for your life, so to speak, might be worth a million words.

I don’t know if this is true. Perhaps it is merely the case that the right medium for life-expression chooses you. You don’t choose it. I don’t have a theme song for my life, but perhaps I’m not among those who are meant to have one.

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Speaking of words and music, I’ve come across a few clips of Bruce Willis on the social feeds recently, featuring him enjoying music and dancing with his family members. For those who haven’t kept up, Willis has been suffering from a kind of degenerative aphasia for over a decade, and his decline is evident in his last few movies. He increasingly struggled to speak or keep verbal streams of consciousness coherent, and eventually things got too debilitating for him to continue. Sadly, his last few movies were really crappy B-movies that were cynical ventures written around his limitations, and designed to harvest his brand.

Right now, at 70, it appears he has lost all his verbal memory. Including memories of his long career as one of the world’s biggest movie stars. But apparently his affective memory — musical memory, let’s call it — is intact. And he seems happy in the clips I’ve seen, basking in the warmth of the love of family and, I suspect, his own fundamentally musicality-first temperament. He has lost a lot, but apparently not the things that are most important to him.

If you’ve sampled Willis’ work through his career, you will realize how remarkable and surprising his final chapter is turning out to be. His breakthrough role as a comic motormouth detective in Moonlighting was a creature of words. Then he graduated to action star, but still one defined by his verbal style, which was laconic, but still load-bearing. Yipee-ki-yay might be the most memorable verbal-musical utterance in film history. If I were writing his biography, that’s what I’d title it.

And now, we get to witness the final years of Bruce Willis, sans the verbal layer of subjective historical memory. There is a sadness to it, but also curiously, a life-affirming surprising quality to it. Not only is Willis not nothing without his words, it turns out, in the end, that words were not even the most important part of who he has been. He could still be considered a living treasure, Japanese style.

Given that I’ve noticed a decline in verbal acuity and some strange noun-memory problems myself (though it doesn’t seem to be indicative of anything more serious than middle age according to my doctor, with perhaps a long-Covid component), stories like Willis’ tend to grab my attention. I hope I have nothing to worry about, but I do wonder about what my life would amount to if I ended up in something like Bruce Willis’ condition. Unlike in his case, I am not at all sure there’s much left if you take away the words. On the bright side, if I am reducible to words, I am a better candidate for compilation into an LLM than most, and maybe have that LLM translate my yipee-ki-yays into essays for me, even if I can’t.

More generally, I think I’ve increasingly been paying attention to the life-arc stories I see playing out around me, especially the later chapters, when there is actually a story being told, as opposed to potential and prowess being exhibited. A story that is as much about the world as the teller. My own story is passing through that particular phase transition right now I think.

This isn’t about exercises in maudlin reflective nostalgia though. At least not for me. Though I may some day write a memoir for the hell of it, there isn’t much of an actual story to be told about my life. I’ve been too much of a spectator for that, and will likely remain so.

But there is, I think, something like the three-act arc I alluded to earlier — first the art takes your measure, then you take the measure of the art. Then finally, as an embodiment of the art, you take the measure of the world itself. Convolution, deconvolution, expression.

I think I’m well past the point of words taking my measure. To the extent that I can be measured by my words, I suspect I’ll end up with mostly mediocre grades from worthy judges. I’m not going to get much better at any aspect of it, though I will likely get worse at a few.

It feels like I’m also nearing the end of the second act — taking the measure of the art. I have have definite and strong opinions about words, verbal culture, and the interplay between humanity and textuality. I have my opinions on matters like wordcels vs. shape rotators, Pareto foxes vs. lions, and musical vs. verbal history.

Fortunately for my sanity, I’m not particularly attached to a writerly identity, so am not particularly troubled by the mediocre grades I suspect I have earned. And I’m not particularly reverential in my views of verbal culture either, so it does not particularly bother me that the valuation of words and verbal culture in society is at a historic low.

Words are not the essence of my particular three-act story, but perhaps they are a good marker of transitions between acts. I’ve had my measure taken, and taken my own measures.

Perhaps, like a properly formatted disk, I’m now ready to be written to.

1. A mostly dead art is tabla tarang, playing melody on a set of a dozen right-hand tablas (the “treble” drum, the larger left-hand drum being the “bass”). The last living major exponent of that Kamalesh Maitra, died in 2005.