Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the 2nd half of Humor: Music by Eli Siegel. This surprising lecture of 1948—definitive, down-to-earth, scholarly, passionate, logical, often funny, and so new—is important for us now. As I described in the last issue: we have no audio recording of it, but I’m grateful to have reconstructed much of it through notes taken by two people present at that class: Martha Baird and Irene Reiss, my mother.

In Humor: Music Mr. Siegel is showing, with respect and love, that music as such is humor. In the talk there comes to us, vibrant across the decades, this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The comic and serious are opposites that war in people. Millions of men and women feel that the self they have who laughs, tells a joke, takes things lightly, is a different person than the self who is swept with large feeling, who sees something as deep and mighty. That division is something people seemingly take for granted, yet it makes them ashamed. The division makes one feel that neither reality nor oneself is an integrity; it makes for a feeling of mess and emptiness.

Through what Mr. Siegel explains in this talk of 7 decades ago, the rift people feel between the comic and the serious need be no longer. If music shows that the sublime and laughable are one, then seriousness and jest, reverence and the jocular can go together in us too!

What Humor Is—& a Poem

In the last issue I quoted the definition of humor that Mr. Siegel gives in his Definitions, and Comment: “Humor is the feeling that the ugly is beautiful, while it is still seen as ugly first.” In a good comic film or novel, or a really funny joke, or a well done cartoon, we feel that askewness is at one with structure; that incorrectness has been presented so correctly; that the amiss and the just-right are inseparable. Real humor, then, Aesthetic Realism shows, is beauty itself.

At the end of this lecture on humor and music, Mr. Siegel reads a poem of his own, “Noise Is of All, The World.” It would be published twenty years later, in 1968, in his collection Hail, American Development. In the lecture, he does not say much about it; but I want to add a little here, because I consider “Noise Is of All, The World” a large, immensely meaningful, lovable thing in American literature.

First, three sentences from his note about it in Hail, American Development. In keeping with the lecture—sound itself, these sentences tell us, is that oneness of ugliness and beauty, evil and good, which is humor:

Reality is divided by persons into good and evil, and reality as heard is divided by persons into sound and noise. All sound is noise, for all sound can be seen or heard disrespectfully. Music is the most discriminating, well-arranged noise—so well-arranged the noise is not noticed.

Soon you’ll read the whole poem, but I’ll comment on its first two lines:

Along with the music of instruments and voices, there exists another music: the music which Eli Siegel showed to be the decisive thing in poetry—the music of vowels, consonants, syllables, words, meeting truly in a poetic line. This poem has that music, richly.

The first line is very short—four syllables; two beats: “It all is noise.” We feel in that line the ungainliness of noise. Yet we feel simultaneously a wide mysteriousness, through the slow, full, accented sounds of all and noise.

And Then—

Then, the second line is so different. It is much longer. And it tells about, and makes us feel, specific sounds. Through the music of words brought greatly together, we feel, we hear, the delicate falling of leaves and then those sounds which come so deeply, achingly, from the depths of a person. And with it all, we hear the firmness of a logical statement.

There is much more to say about the poem—and the lecture Humor: Music. Eli Siegel was, grandly, fair to sound, and to human beings who hear it and make it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

A World of Sound

By Eli Siegel

There is an important passage in Thomas De Quincey’s “Essay on Style” showing opposites present in music. I’ve talked of how the expected and the surprising become one in music—as they should become one in life itself. These opposites are in relation to what is funny; because when the expected is the surprising and the surprising is the expected, there is the basis of fun. In this passage, De Quincey complains about Englishmen who say they prefer little songs to the richness of Mozart:

A man will write an essay deliberately for the purpose of putting on record his own preference of a song to the most elaborate music of Mozart…. A song, an air, a tune,—that is, a short succession of notes revolving rapidly upon itself,—how could that, by possibility, offer a field of compass sufficient for the development of great musical effects? The preparation pregnant with the future; the remote correspondence; the questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense are asked in one passage and answered in another; the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving through subtle variations that sometimes disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it out tumultuously to the blaze of daylight: these and ten thousand forms of self-conflicting musical passion,—what room could they find…in so limited a field as an air or song?

As I said, one reason music is humorous is that it can be tinkling but it tries to solve the problem of the universe. And the universe itself is funny. The universe is cruel, but funny. The war going on with the finite and infinite is the greatest joke of all time. Music deals with that.

De Quincey writes that music tries to say something and also tries to hide it. Desire is fulfilled and also desire is tantalized. That relation of fulfillment to tantalization is funny. Music is like a kitten: it begins with a theme; it says something and then tries to hide it—acts as if it were something else while it’s really the same. In great music, satisfaction and tantalization are both at their height. The playing De Quincey describes, between preparation and accomplishment, is humorous. It’s like the actions of a cosmological kitten, a mighty kitten representing the universe. A symphony is a drama of how things can change and be the same.

I think this writing of De Quincey represents the essence of music in a very notable way.

Counterpoint & the Family

Percy Scholes, in The Oxford Companion to Music, quotes a definition of counterpoint:

The combination of simultaneous voice-parts, each independent, but all conducing to a result of uniform coherent texture.

In this definition we have the way to solve the family problem. It points to how people can be independent and related, even within the family. The idea of counterpoint is a deep thing and can make for true laughter.

Another definition of counterpoint is in the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary:

The art of adding to a melody a part or parts that shall harmonize with it and at the same time be intrinsically melodious.

Let us change melody to child: A child comes to the family. The child adds to the structure, but as the child adds, he or she is an independent being, with a melody of his or her own. So we can have counterpoint in families, and Aesthetic Realism asks for it.

Music vs. Acquisition

Music has been seen as a foe of acquisition. There is a poem by Thomas Campion (1567-1620) about Apollo and Midas. Midas hears the god Apollo sing and play the music of the cosmos, but Midas has no interest in that. He wants to hear music just about himself and possible possessions—like cattle, sheep, and goats. Then, because he’s so foolish, he gets the ears of an ass on his head. Here are the first two stanzas.

We meet something similar in legends. There’s Marsyas, who tried to show he could make better music than Apollo and tried to combat Apollo with a flute, and was punished.

Are There Objective Criteria?

The problem of what is firm and objectively true exists in the field of music, as it does in painting. In A Musical Critic’s Holiday (1925), Ernest Newman writes about that. Newman is an eminent critic; he wrote on Beethoven and is the authority on Wagner. And he says:

Are there any objective criteria? The subjective school of criticism says “No”; criticism is nothing but “the adventures of the soul among masterpieces.” But that famous phrase of Anatole France leaves a great deal to be desired. Why among masterpieces only? Is it not part of the business of the critic to distinguish between the works that are masterpieces and those that are not?…And how can he do this if there are no criteria?…

If I choose to say that the west front of Nôtre Dame is a truly despicable piece of architecture, no one can prevent me. But if I should choose to say this, it would presumably be because I wanted to convince my hearers that it is so….I must give some reason…; and the moment my opponents ask for reasons, and I offer to give them, we both tacitly admit a criterion that is not purely subjective…. There must exist between the many people who regard the west front as beautiful a definite if unconscious uniformity of standard; and it is in virtue of their tacit agreement upon this standard that they would agree to laugh at anyone who should say that the architect of the average Baptist chapel was a greater man in his line than the architect of Nôtre Dame.

There is humor in the idea of subjective criticism: the fact that on the one hand we want to point to the freedom of our opinion—that there are no criteria—and on the other hand, we want people to be convinced our opinion is right. As Newman points out, when a person says he likes a certain composition—say a work by Aaron Copland—he’d like to think his opinion represents more than the state of his own mind, even though he’ll talk about the subjectivity of criticism.

There is also humor in the fact that all kinds of people have expressed admiration of Beethoven: mothers have been interested in Beethoven; football players have been; garbage collectors and generals have been. This makes congruity out of incongruity, a basic situation in humor.

Music: Assertive & Suggestive

Music on the one hand goes for suggestion; on the other it goes for hammers. I’ll read now a poem that is musical in an uproarious way. It is “The Bells,” by Edgar Allan Poe:

This shows off, but it is well done. It is sound; it is noise; it represents the meeting of objects. The bells are dealt with sadly, joyfully. The bell represents an early instrument, and the moods here, though rough, are so fundamental that in variations they can be found in all music.

There is the Debussy aspect of music. In the 1870s and ’80s the world was seen as suggestive. Poe had to do with this—he did seem to be very delicate in French translation. A poem important in the history of music is Paul Verlaine’s “Art Poétique.” As evidence for that, I read from Max Graf’s Modern Music:

Paul Verlaine influenced Debussy’s form more than musicians did, and the verses of Paul Verlaine:

are of greater importance to Debussy’s musical style than all previous music.

When the suggestive and the definite meet, a big thing in rhythm can happen. Verlaine was a symbolist. He felt people were too cruel, and he wanted misty things. This is from a translation of Verlaine’s “Art Poétique”:

The meaning of vagueness, the sense of the delicate process, is more affirmed in music today than ever before. But so far, the delicacy sought hasn’t joined sufficiently with power, and that is why modern music isn’t liked by many people.

Music Begins

Music begins with sound; before there was a musical composition, things met and happened in the world. I deal with this in my poem “Noise Is of All, The World”:

There is a world of sound, because sound comes from motion. Noise is music in preparation, and man is the means of changing noise into music. What man does is take the unseen cause of noise as sound, and change the disorderly world into something orderly, while its freedom still is felt. That is a happy purpose. That is the purpose of music and it is the purpose of all true perception. When we see that purpose entirely, we see it allied to all activity and all being. And then good things can happen—even things to make you smile.