Truth and ideology, often at odds with one another in the best of times, now find themselves arrayed for battle during this period of global economic recession when artists of every persuasion vie desperately for attention and support in a shrinking cultural marketplace. The "Style Wars" of the twentieth century, in which the defenders of tonal tradition seemed to buckle under the advancing forces of the atonal avant-garde, amounted to little more than a smoldering stalemate, but barely a decade into the new millennium, the survival of "serious" music of any kind has never seemed more in doubt as arts budgets and programs contract or are eliminated and the world is overrun by the mercenary forces of commercialism.
Whether beset by a barrage of critics' barbs or hoist by their own petards, and daunted by the challenge of simply bringing home the bacon, few composers today are likely to seek either solace or food for thought in the pages of an obscure Elizabethan essay. However, for those not averse to the mental nourishment and consolation artists have sometimes found through communion with the great minds of the past, the meaty incipit of Sir Francis Bacon's "Of Vicissitude of Things," digested with fair portions of philosophy and science on the side may prove to be unexpectedly fortifying:
SALOMON saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination; That all knowledge was but Remembrance: So Salomon giveth his sentence; That all noveltie is but Oblivion.
Bacon's incipit itself draws upon the ancient wisdom of Ecclesiastes, a book "less ecclesial than sapiential" that bears the stamp of Solomon or someone "adopting the mantle of Solomon." (Dermont Cox, s.v. "Ecclesiastes, The Book of," in The Oxford Companion to the Bible). In Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, we read the following:
_9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
Bacon's reference to Plato seems to have come almost directly from the lips of Socrates, who states in Meno that "all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."
The same thought, however, is elaborated in other sources, including Phaedrus, in which Socrates affirms that knowledge—the written word of which is no more than an image—is "graven in the soul" before birth only to be forgotten by all but a fortunate few when the soul incarnates:
"Every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world... Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them ... because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty."
Although skeptical readers today will probably find both the biblical and Platonic references in Bacon's incipit too "metaphysical" to be credible, his basic premise can be amplified and recast in a manner that is entirely consistent with modern scientific and philosophical thought, as shown and explained below:
SALOMON saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination; That all knowledge was but Remembrance: So Salomon giveth his sentence; That all noveltie is but Oblivion.
There is nothing fundamentally new in the universe. Knowledge depends on remembrance, and things seem to be new only because we have forgotten their actual origin in the past.
Indeed, everything in the physical universe, though it may change form, remains fundamentally the same. There actually is "no new thing under the sun" because the material reality of the present is essentially a different configuration of the material reality of the past. Physical science has revealed that "energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another" (the first law of thermodynamics). Einstein's most famous equation, E = mc2, states that energy (E) is equivalent to matter (mass m), so we can also say that "matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another."
Fig. 1: Phase Changes.
As a physical phenomenon, music, too, conforms to the laws of science and is never fundamentally new. For composers, however, it is the remainder of Bacon's statement, as recast above, that is likely to hold the greatest interest. It can probably be best be understood from a contemporary philosophical perspective:
"That most of our knowledge is in memory at any particular time is a given. What is perhaps surprising, however, is the degree to which even our current conscious knowledge typically depends on memory."
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Epistemological Problems of Memory"
Musical composition requires knowledge of everything from theory, form, instrumentation, and orchestration to computer hardware and software, and all of this knowledge, in turn, "depends on memory." The faculty of memory is "a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which humans and perhaps other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes" [italics are mine].
Combining and summarizing these ideas, it is fair to say that musical composition depends on the application of knowledge residing in memory, a faculty which retains and reconstructs past experiences in the present. This clearly resonates with Bacon's Platonic premise that all knowledge is remembrance. Though they may have forgotten or be only vaguely aware of the past origins of their musical knowledge and ideas, composers are profoundly indebted to memory.
Fig. 2: Dante Gabriel Rosseetti. Mnemosyne. (c. 1881). Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum.
For the Greeks Memory (Mnemosyne) was "Mother of the Muses," and it is to these very goddesses presiding over the arts and sciences that Socrates himself appeals for inspiration in Phaedrus:
"Come, O ye Muses, melodious, as ye are called, whether you have received this name from the character of your strains, or because the Melians are a musical race, help, O help me in the tale which my good friend here desires me to rehearse, in order that his friend whom he always deemed wise may seem to him to be wiser than ever."
To the Muses Socrates attributes a "divine madness" that gives rise to poetic inspiration and quickens awareness of "lyrical and all other numbers." He further avers that, according to the law of Destiny, "the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to ... birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature." The divine daughters of Memory, in response to the true artist's prayers, illuminate the presence of the past and thus enable the creative process.
Fig. 3: Raffaello Sanzio. Parnassus. (1510–11). Vatican: Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici.
Modern composers, who may be as ambivalent about biblical lore as they are about classical epistemological theory, have themselves sometimes resorted to convoluted if not overtly metaphysical arguments to bolster their claims to originality (e.g., the late Karlheinz Stockhausen's much publicized and highly theologized notions of creativity). Others have preferred to avoid the vexing question of originality altogether or have been extremely loath to acknowledge the generative power of memory, given the pandemic "anxiety of influence" that still grips the world of art music. Wielding Occam's Razor, however, we can with some confidence make the following conclusions:
1. The notion of absolute novelty in musical composition is not supported by physical law. There fundamentally is "no new thing under the sun," only changing configurations of "original" matter.
Fig. 4: Primate Skull Series
Fig. 5a: The Great Pyramid at Giza (c. 2560 BCE); Fig. 5b: The Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan (c. 200 AD) ); Fig. 5c: I. M. Pei. The Louvre Pyramids (1989)
2. The creative process is dependent on a composer's ability to retain and reconstruct past experiences in the present through the application of recollected knowledge. What seems to be "new" in music is not the product of creation in any fundamental physical sense but a cognitive reconfiguration of information stored in memory.
It is possible to make further inferences based on these conclusions:
In fine, one cannot fully sound one's "voice" as a composer by thus rejecting or constraining those contents of memory that do not comply with fleeting and specious standards of contemporaneity. The Mother of the Muses is ageless, and her daughters speak to and through us in a chorus as powerfully vibrant as it is infinitely and richly various.
Fig. 6: Nicolas Poussin. Dance to the Music of Time. (1637–38). London: Wallace Collection.
dillonford@newmusicclassics.com
Public-Domain and Permitted Image sources:
Banner left: Portrait of Francis Bacon (Anon.)
Banner center: Portrait of Socrates (Jacques-Louis David)
Banner right: Portrait of Solomon (Pedro Berruguete)
Fig. 2: Mnemosyne (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
Fig. 5a: Great Pyramid at Giza
Fig. 5b: Pyramid of the Sun (Teotihuacan)
Fig. 5c: Louvre Pyramids (Paris)
Fig. 6: Dance to the Music of Time (Nicolas Poussin)
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