More on JI, temperament, and the swamps of Goethe and Hermann Broch

“It follows from the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void, and which tears off at the bandage of its wounds as a bond, that this age must speak scornfully of the imitation and study of nature.”

That’s the opening of the Poetic Nihilists section of Jean Paul’s Horn of Oberon (Vorschule der Ästhetik), in Margaret Hale’s translation.

Equal temperament looks, to its critics, like anti-naturalism gone amok. Perhaps it almost looks like free play in the void — a system imposed on pitch by force, flattening the pure intervals nature actually gives us, replacing the given with the artificial by decree. That’s the JI position at its strongest, and it has the right shape for a real grievance: something natural was compromised for the sake of something convenient.

But Goethe and Broch’s argument says the shape is wrong. Temperament isn’t a swamp drained and built over on purpose, in the way a decree is issued on purpose. It’s what a culture builds into a swamp over centuries, mostly without noticing it was building anything at all — post after post driven in by working musicians tuning working instruments, solving the problem in front of them, none of them drafting a system. The comma got absorbed the way Venice’s foundations got laid: not by an act of will asserting artifice over nature, but by pile after pile driven wherever the ground gave out, until one day the city was complete and habitable and nobody could say anymore which part was firm ground and which part was fill.

Which means the doings came first, exactly as Vogler’s exhaustive catalogue of modulations came before anyone had a word for what he’d found. Keyboard tuners needed a third that would serve in more than one key; string and wind players adjusted by ear against whatever they were playing with; the system that resulted wasn’t proposed and ratified, it accreted, the way Broch’s Habsburg Empire accreted out of wars and administrative acts until it looked, centuries later, like something that had simply grown from the soil. Temperament is Venice. It was built, by real people solving real problems, into ground that was never solid to begin with — and once it was finished and everyone was living in it, the question of what was natural and what was artificial stopped having an answer, exactly as Goethe said it would.

So the JI critique and the “anti-naturalism gone amok” charge both assume a villain — a decision, a decree, an ideology imposing itself on a prior nature. What Goethe and Broch both suggest is that there was no such moment. There was only the slow, uncredited accumulation of doings, each one solving its own local problem, until the ground they were all standing on could no longer be distinguished from the thing they’d built on top of it.

Here are the sources of the swamp metaphor:

Two versions of the same argument, made a century and a half apart.

Goethe to Zelter, 1808. Zelter had claimed the major third a direct gift of nature, the minor third a product of modern artistry. Goethe’s answer: all the arts, built up through practice and theory over time, come to look like cities standing on ground that can no longer be read. Where the firm ground gave out, they dug anyway, drove posts into whatever swamp they found beside the cornerstone. Once the city is complete and habitable, nothing distinguishes the natural from the artificial, the substance from the form — the ground is gone, only the city remains.

Broch on the Habsburg Empire and Venice, in his introduction to Hofmannsthal. An empire that was, in fact, the outcome of wars and acts of state nonetheless seems to have grown from a pre-existence rooted in its own soil, so as to go on living an everlasting post-existential life. And it seems equally hard to credit that Venice was actually built by pile-sinkers, masons, and roofers driving posts into a lagoon. The artificial flows into the natural, and that in turn back into the artificial, and no one can draw the line between them.

The same move, twice. Goethe’s swamp is Broch’s lagoon. Goethe’s post driven beside the cornerstone is Broch’s pile-sinker driving into the mud so Venice can stand. Both start from something built by evident, dateable human labor — a tuning system, a city — and arrive at the same impasse: once the thing is finished and lived in, the built and the given can no longer be told apart, and asking which is which is like asking where a swamp ends and a city begins once the pilings have been driven for four hundred years.

Broch’s version has the advantage of being literal where Goethe’s is only figurative. Goethe reaches for a swamp as an image for the epistemological problem. Broch’s swamp is an actual lagoon, and the pile-sinkers are a documented historical fact. Which means Venice is the case where Goethe’s metaphor stopped being a metaphor — a city that really was built into a swamp, and really is now mistaken, by everyone who lives in or loves it, for something that simply grew there.

See Bach BWV996 and the Haydn sonata in Ab – Ab - - - | F Eb - - Db | Db - C - Db | C - Bb - C | Bb - Ab G Ab Bb Ab……..

Each builds a third *structural* key. BWV996 lands G major at the end of the Bouree, while the dominant minor is clearly the *donum* (Zelter’s word –the gift) of nature. In the Haydn – F minor is the third structual key and it first appears as a grace note.

Both examples show (me, convincingly) the integration of the artist’s choice with the nature-given.

At the moment, composers are hard at work integrating the pitch-noise continuum and it’s too early to know if it will succeed. Let’s look for examples of the pitch-noise composers touching ground, *stringing the bow* – or making a good story out of bringing nothing home. That still brings something home. I think it happens sometimes in surprising ways, out of the blue, but it’s tangential to my project of integrating the Urmehrdeutige. (I’m trying to cut in two ways–salvage the stranded assets and avoid the overreach that helped strand them. Integrating the Urmehrdeutige addresses the latter.)

Likely: our conversation has completely forgotten Jean Paul’s disdain for “free play in the void”. That kind of romanticism is now our way. I’m dating myself by heeding Jean Paul. The romanticism that Hulme warned us of, with its spilt religion, is now firmly ensconced, largely unexamined. It’s our way now. I see some zeros in denominators.

There’s always overreach. We have many examples of overreach in the last modernist wave. Overreach precipitated the Rockwell Coup and the adoption of Philip Glass as the figurehead of a socially engineered retrenchement. The establish got impatiet with overreach and said, enough!

What’s strong in the modernisms will survive. I’ve sleeping just fine.

Note: I have to give examples of free play in the void, and what do we mean by “nature” – the Bach & Haydn examples are limpid. It’s *not Plato’s mimesis*, which treats reality as an imperfect echo of the ideal.

Free Play in the Void

–Fichte’s positing ego, clearing the world to make room for itself.

–Sorel’s myth of the general strike, deriving its force from being unrealizable.

–The culture-industry circle — attention creating the value that justifies the attention.

–The sunk-cost storyteller, narrating a payoff that was never found.

–Axël’s contempt for the given outright — life? our servants can do that.

–And perhaps the cleanest available demonstration that free play is a real danger and not a straw man: the manufactured caustic, Riefenstahl’s camera as the bent mirror, a convergence staged rather than observed.