When Beethoven Met Goethe
theamericanscholar.org
theamericanscholar.org
We see figures like Beethoven and Goethe as geniuses themselves, but the 18th century conception of 'genius' was not of a person, but of a sort of holy spirit that blessed an individual with great abilities, while remaining separate from that person.
So prior to Romantics of the 19th century taking hold of the concept of genius and re-purposing it into the one we're familiar with today, one would not speak of someone being a genius, but being graced with genius. Genius was not who they were, but something external to them that they possessed.
It's a subtle but interesting difference.
The greeks had the same notion: one wasn't "a" genius, one "had" a genius - a spirit (the logos?) which was the inspiration and source of creativity and brilliance.
The whole idea was around invoking the logos to garner this brilliance.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-endoge...
Edit: And perhaps I'm misconstruing your statement, which seems to have more to do with the decline in German culture after the purges rather than what led to the purges.
Quite a few people argued since then that the rise of fascism was surprising because of the intellectual environment, but that it was a actually a pre-requisite for it to happen that way. If that is accurate or not, is a different matter but one could make a point that the "German question" combined with the propensity for total, systemic philosophical systems in German culture contributed to the uniqueness of what happened during 1933-45.
That's not true. Hitler didn't liquidate the intelligentsia. The first programmable computer ( by konrad zuse ) was created during that time. The first rockets were developed during that time. Hitler didn't wipe out all the nobel prize winners in germany.
Germany was still a major intellectual center before, during and AFTER ww2.
Germany is still the 3rd largest producer of nobel prize winners with 106.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau...
Germany didn't go anywhere. Hitler isn't germany. Hitler is just a blip in german history.
The reason Germany, England, and France (Spain didn't catch up because they had no reason to as a negative consequence of their enormous wealth at the time) excelled to such extent that this particular period appears like a very special and wonderful intellectual age, is that the rest of the world was for the most part severely under-developed. Germany didn't become less "wise".
Today the contrast is much smaller, but Germany continues to be a scientific powerhouse even if it isn't as evident.
Edit:// just realized you were going by numbers and not by capita
It appears to me that the "greatness" of these men is an unquestionable truth in our society, while scientists of the same era with more evident influence go largely unnoticed.
Edit: typo.
No doubt? I'd say no evidence.
With 7.6 billion people, greater access to education, and more travel, how many meetings of comparable people happen today?
My guess is that there are vastly more geniuses today but that they are spread out more geographically and to many more types of art.
Today, maybe Beethoven would be making techno in Rotterdam. Goethe might be making movies in Hollywood or computer games in Copenhagen. Who knows.
The interdisciplinary issue is interesting. There's probably enough of it happening to offset fragmentation of culture into specialisations.
But I found contemporary piano music good in my taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7maJOI3QMu0
Beethoven would be making techno
A genius would be horrified by the trivial repitition of the same that is modern pop-music.
(It has some excellent comments but the curmudgeonly 'art these days' thing still counts as a generic tangent so it's a borderline call.)
May I ask what is on-topic on HN these days?
Further, have these critics never heard of trance (as in the state of consciousness, not the music genre)? Or of altered states of consciousness brought on by drugs, (repetitive) music, and other means, to which the repetition in music can be so sympathetic? There is also the simple visceral response that people have to music -- a response that defies analysis, is not intellectual.
Many people clearly enjoy being in the space that relatively simple, repetitive music brings them to, and I'm still puzzled why that's seen as being so wrong.
what it is they have against
repetition
Would you come to HN every day if the linked articles never changed?
I'm quite enamoured with Schmidthuber's theory of creativity [1, 2] Schmidhuber develops a theory of artificial curiosity and creativity for an autonomous agent. The agent is equipped with an adaptive predictor trying to predict future events from the history of previous events and actions. A reward-maximising, reinforcement learning, adaptive controller is steering the controller and gets curiosity reward for executing action sequences that improve the predictor. (I term this "Pattern Recognition as Pleasure".) This discourages the agent from executing actions leading to boring outcomes that are either predictable or totally unpredictable. Instead the controller is motivated to learn actions that help the predictor to learn new, previously unknown regularities in its environment, thus improving its model of the world, which in turn can greatly help to solve externally given tasks. Schmidhuber claims that his corresponding formal theory of creativity explains essential aspects of art, science, music, and humor.
If we were to take Schmidhuber's approach seriously, then that that which we enjoy as great art (as creative) would be that which is on the edge of the observer's ability to compress/understand. Note that this is highly observer dependent! What I have been comprehending for a long time and dismiss as boring, might be extremly interesting for somebody else, and vice versa.
In my own life this was born out: I used to enjoy pop-music so much and didn't worry about repetition -- in fact I didn't notice it. I loved pop-music so much that I learned how to make it. This lead to my disenchantment with pop-music: when I was finally able to produce decent pop-music (I was able to compress it into a few rules), I lost interest, and sought novelty elsewhere.
never heard of trance
[1] J. Schmidhuber, Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
[2] J. Schmidhuber, Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674
[3] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html...
I agree that pop-music is precisely about creating "feeling and atmosphere", but I would extend it by saying: "easily, quicly and widely accessible shared feeling and atmosphere". And it is precisely this requirement of easy/quick access to the shared feeling and atmosphere that makes it important for pop-music to be conventional, to be repetition of previous pop-music. Surprise is anti-thetical to the purpose of pop-music.
Pop-music is acoustic wall-paper that is intended reliably to create a certain atmosphere.
You can gauge the conventional nature of pop-music from the fact that you can reliably determine the genre (e.g. House/Techno, Rap, Metal, Folk etc) by sub-1-second snippets. All successful genres have signature sounds for enabling quick identification. You can think of this as an aural version of branding. This is very well-known by professional producers, musicians and music marketing.
Even your demanding "genius" criterion can arguably be met by techno work like Autechre, in the same way that an exceptional architect might be encountered in any style or idiom of building. So I'm back-pedaling a bit on my previous remark (against genius) to suggest that any genre can be elevated by great practitioners. It's even a common mark of greatness to appreciate or at least not to be a snob about "lower" genres. The social conservatism of pop doesn't stop Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" from being culturally important, any more than the avant-garde chin-stroking of The Wire magazine guarantees artistic significance.
I agree, "there's got to be something convincing", but it's unlikely to be musical. Most musicians who have a hit at all have but one hit, and then fade away. Most of the few musicians who persist (eg Rolling Stones) have a massive and well-capitalised marketing department behind them. To a pretty good approximation no musician without major backing (which is expensive) has ever been widely and/or long-term successful. To understand the nature of hits, you need to understand the music industry.
Coincidentally, the music industry follows the SV VC model: fund 100, expect 99 to fail and the one unicorn who makes it big recoups (more than) the cost of the 99 failures.
Here is an interesting comment that a classical composer -- possibly the most influential one in the 20th century through his students -- on Aphex Twin and similar artists:
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stock...
> I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.
Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.
And course the reply:
> "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to".
For what it's worth, any student of "classical" (highbrow, not limited to Classical period) music will have concepts such as ostinato, fugue, motif, theme/variation, Don't Rush, etc. drilled into them. Periodicity is what differentiates music from noise and a tension between periodicity and aperiodicity is one criterion that separates good music from bad.
And course the reply:
Like a petulant child he essentially negated Stockhausen's points, without engaging with them. It seems to me that Stockhausen was trying to be helpful -- after all he had been a music teacher for nearly 1/2 century with academic offspring like Kraftwerk and Can. Aphex Twin seemingly was unable/unwilling to see that there are other approaches to music than the orthodoxy of 1990s dance music. Aphex Twin's main musical criterion seems to be dancablility:
you can't dance to. Do you
reckon he can dance? You could
dance to Song of the Youth, but
it hasn't got a groove in it,
there's no bassline."
Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.
Periodicity is what ...
IMHO:
Dance(able) music, like all music/noise, is about altered states of awareness.
There's sometimes something wonderful about reggae, house music, chanting, work songs that can change your frame of mind.
But then again all music (genres) do that for me.
Aphex Twin didn't really catch my ear, but Tipper sure did. Listening to his albums, I found myself completely enveloped in his immaculately sculpted aural biomes. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see the grumbling synth rivers, the shimmering vibrato branches, the chirping electric crickets. It was sublime in the classic sense of the word.
I would be disappointed if someone listened to Peripherals[1] or Gulch[2] and still came away thinking that electronic music was repetitive and boring!
(I bring this up because I think Aphex Twin is in a similar orbit of masterful sound design, though his style is too dissonant for my ear.)
melody, harmony, and rhythm [...] timbre
To be fair meaning is extra-musical, and varies between listeners.
Other than that, you are absolutely correct: timber is the focus of modern electronic music. All previous genres simply lacked the instruments to do much of interest in the way of timber.
If it's Saturday night 2am "in the club" everybody's intoxicated the music needs to 'hit' everybody straightaway. Everybody needs to know when to raise their hands ... and that means it must be extremely predicable.
It's hard to deny that modern pop-music is to an extremely good approximation all in the 4/4 time signature for example, so to an extremely good approximation all modern pop-music has less rhythmic variety e.g. many/most single classical pieces.