Nando Florestan's blog (Posts about culture)

Belle Époque, Esperanto and racism

Nando Florestan — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 10:59:03 GMT

This is a weird post. It tries to connect certain ideas through history, culture and politics. Not sure it manages to convince, but also not aware of the weak points.

The Belle Époque

To deeply understand Esperanto, start from the Belle Époque. It was "a period characterised by optimism, enlightenment, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations. In this era (...) the arts markedly flourished, and numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre and visual art gained extensive recognition".

The conquest of Africa by European nations certainly makes the époque much less belle. But we are not here to say anything is perfect; we are here to compare this period with the absolute disaster that followed: the two world wars.

In classical music (the thing I know and love), the peaceful period is definitely THE time of complex masterpieces and expansion of language. Think Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Rachmaninoff... In my opinion this was the ultimate climax of the art of music.

In technology, that is the time of the invention of the automobile, the metro, the telegraph, steel, the railroad... all products of the Second Industrial Revolution. Esperanto was created early in the Belle Époque, giving it a chance to help feed the optimism.

What Esperanto is

Esperanto is simultaneously:

not only a designed language;
but also a masterpiece of literature, in its design choices that aren't absolutely perfect but still work so well that no improvement proposal, however reasonable, was enough to sway the community;
achieved through a scientific breakthrough: the understanding of what parts of grammar are useful (kept) and which are simply inconsequential rules (dropped);
amounting to...
- a new technology: a language so easy that it can be learned in only 200 hours of study;
- an economic breakthrough: achieving easy, precise communication after much less investment (of hours of language study and therefore money);
- and a cultural innovation: the idea of a language that actually deserves to be everyone's second language.

Esperanto is the only technology from Star Trek already available today (Federation Standard). Learning languages is not a skill or propensity that every human has – it is only one of many intelligences. Tomorrow every child will need to spend 2500 hours learning Mandarin. If the world were coordinated, they could instead spend only 200 hours learning Esperanto.

What Esperanto means

There is no great achievement without optimism. Like Star Trek and the Belle Époque, Esperanto expresses optimism:

optimism about the power of reason
optimism that truth can come to light (be expressed)
optimism that human relations will improve
optimism that peace will be attained and be the default
optimism that racism shall become a thing of the past, a forgotten problem
optimism that humanism will have priority over nationalism

The enemy: nationalism

Weird nationalist content in the Esperanto course of Duolingo

This last item is unfortunately the least well understood. Nationalism continues to be an enormous force in the world and people have not generally recognized it as the enemy it is – a menace to each item in the above list. I have seen more than a few nationalists among Esperantists. In fact, they think of Esperantujo itself as a sort of nation...

What could be more strange, more presumptuous, than saying "Nice to meet you, samideano!" (The word means "fellow with the same ideas".)

Do you see nothing strange in a Youth Congress that has everyone sing a little Esperanto hymn at the beginning? Must we confirm the general suspicion that Esperanto is a cult?

Nationalism is the illusion that some brothers are family and others aren't. Nationalism is manipulation enough to make you join a war that is not in your interest, it is only in the interest of the powerful. Nationalism is to feel more pride and connection in your immediate family than in the accomplishments of distant people, which ultimately is not a wise discrimination, even if considered natural.

I will give you an example. These days I am seeing a stupid idea repeated more and more: That white people never had a single creative moment, that they can only steal the creativity of other nations, present those as their own, profit from them and enslave other groups. Whites are just parasites. This idea loses perspective of all cultural complexity and explains everything based on the absolutely stupid criterium of skin color. It is ethno-nationalist, and therefore, wrong.

Racism is a nationalism

One day I thought to myself, "today I will leave Schumann alone and get way out of my comfort zone. I will learn a bit about the history of hip hop, which I never listen to". So I found a video on that theme.

But suddenly I caught the black historian of rap stating that white people have an inner void of sadness which can only be filled with the happiness of black music. According to him, this is why white people love black music and keep stealing it. This is of course exemplified with well-known facts of the industry of rock and pop music in the 20th century. For instance, Elvis Presley grew among black musicians and delivered black music to a racist establishment that wouldn't allow black musicians to rise.

As a white man who always loved classical music, the fact that the preacher would see me as inferior, uncreative and immoral a priori, based on the color of my skin... is quite offensive, of course. So when I heard that, first I had a stupid reaction of spite: I thought "keep your hip hop, dude; I will keep my Grieg".

But that is a dumb thought. It falls into these traps:

Accepting the racial categories – in fact, accepting them as the most important parameter.
Feeding into the racial war proposed by the mistaken historian brother.
Throwing away the baby (hip hop) with the dirty bath water (the ridiculous theory).

But culture is much more complex, isn't it. There are many cultures simultaneously at play, and honestly blackness isn't a legitimate musical parameter, it is quite imaginary. (This point will become clear gradually.)

The intelligent thought is to remember that culture feeds on itself and builds on top of itself, and should be free to do so; that culture is for all people; that Bach is for everyone as much as hip hop is for everyone; so the bro's way of thinking is contrary to the way culture really works, contrary to inclusivity, and just straight racist, inasmuch as it pre-judges a set of people, discriminating by their skin color.

The correct thought is exemplified by Heitor Villa-Lobos, a great Brazilian composer, born in 1887, the same year Esperanto was first published. Villa-Lobos composed a famous series of works titled "Bachianas Brasileiras", in which we find traits of Bach's music miscigenated with things typical of Brazilian folkloric music. In so doing, he is implicitly showing, that the smart thing to do, is yes to import that which is good, and Bach is sooo good, so universally considered the best composer that ever lived, that there's no doubt that Bach should converted into a Brazilian thing. The immortal German should become one of the components of the mestiço country, for sure.

The smart thing to do in culture is import good things and ignore bad things. That is what classical music has always done – building on top of itself and folkloric musics. To be clear, cultural "appropriation" is the wrong diagnostic. The problem was systemic racism that prevented the originals from being as successful and rich as they deserved to be. The problem is racism, not appropriation. Appropriation is the correct, normal, endemic modus operandi of culture.

In other words, Elvis Presley was never wrong to sing in the genre that he loved. It would have been absurd to shout him down: "hey Elvis, stop that, that belongs to others!" Based on skin color!!! You think the music didn't belong to Elvis because of the color of his skin??? Preposterous!!! Can you imagine such a thing??? The racism was wrong – Elvis was right, he wasn't racist! The racism prevented black musicians from having all the success they deserved. Elvis had nothing to do with that! Elvis is guilty of no sin, let the man sing!!!

The thought of the historian is completely ignorant of how culture works. We are all exposed to it. Although I would prefer Ravel, I hear bits of hip hop constantly, because I live in the world. Conversely, he is deluded if he thinks he was never influenced by Tchaikovsky. Everyone has heard Tchaikovsky whether they wanted to or not. We are all exposed to the culture, it influences us, there is no escape.

He talks as if the software used to create hip hop weren't full of the work of European engineers...

His thought tends towards mirroring the identitarian movement. That's nothing to be proud of. This is what happens when minds get contaminated with nationalisms, any kind of them.

Recognize this moment is anti-enlightenment

Notice how much humanity accomplished during the Belle Époque; realize how many great dreams arose in that period; calculate what a waste and what shattering of those dreams the 2 World Wars represented – wars that wouldn't be possible in the absence of the formidable power of nationalism. Think of how much further along civilization might be if the wars somehow hadn't occurred...

"(...) help people get used to the idea that each one of them should see their neighbors only as a human being and a brother."

L. L. Zamenhof, 1912

And then think about the present moment. Think about the polarization, the extremism found in all political sides... When was a Zamenhof more needed?

I'll tell you what I think:

We must seek to be centered, subtle and rational in our expressed views.

Ideologies are good while subtle, well written and well read. Ideologies become bad in the messy behavior of the masses, which ends up directly contradicting the books that propelled them. So reject theories that:

cynically negate rationality;
cynically affirm the relativism and subjectivity of truth(s), declaring objective truth unreachable in principle;
cynically affirm that human "races" are forever in opposition;
manipulate people, striving to consolidate a new nation through the old technique of pointing to a supposed common enemy guilty of all problems, while defending the value of inclusivity.

The Esperanto bus

Nando Florestan — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 10:59:03 GMT

I know that in Warsaw there is ulica Ludwika Zamenhofa and ulica Esperanto. Worthy homages. But I don't think there's much to see in those places.

This week I was sightseeing in Warsaw with a friend. Among many conversation topics, I mentioned that this year I learned Esperanto. I explained that I continue to learn it because I like the decisions in the design of the language. I told him that one learns Esperanto through 180 hours of study, English through 900 hours of study, Polish through 2000 hours of study, and Chinese through 2400 hours of study.

Not a minute later, we saw a bus called "Esperanto" on the street. A simple normal daily bus, probably taking passengers towards the Esperanto street. It was going in the direction of the old city center.

Marketing professionals know that it usually takes 3 or more impressions to make a sale. A consumer will buy the thing after he has seen it a few times. In this sense, the passing of the bus certainly helped me not to look like a crazy nerd to my friend, who had never heard of Esperanto before.

Later I told this to my wife, who would not learn Esperanto. She joked:

— And then you signaled for the bus to stop, and when the door opened you sang to the driver: "Buenan diooooon"... and he turned to the other side, muttering "I swear, this bus line is the worst in the country"...

"Buenan diooooon"! I can't make up this sweet! (Correct Esperanto would be "Bonan tagon".)

And she's even right, since I pick my clothes like a 4-year-old who sees a t-shirt with a dinosaur on it and feels it represents him. In Warsaw I bought a Chopin-branded cap and a Chopin-branded t-shirt. I would definitely also wear clothes about Esperanto if I could find them. It's wonderful to live in an exceptional time when one doesn't have to hide one's eccentricities!

⁂

But the story isn't over. My friend and I came upon an urban bicycle scheme and I pointed out:

— You see that word, "Veturilo", the name of the urban bike network?

— Yes.

— That's an Esperanto word. It means "tool to get around".

— Why is the name in Esperanto?

— More than a decade ago, when the urban bicycle network was implemented, the city allowed citizens to suggest names, then vote. The head of the Polish Esperanto Youth suggested "Veturilo". Common Varsovians didn't care (it wasn't important), and he organized for the world Esperanto community on the internet to vote for it, so "Veturilo" won.

And then when we had lunch, I actually wanted a Coke, but ordered a Mirinda instead...

⁂

Anyway, it is not true that the Esperanto bus has passed. We can get on it at any time. As the dollar and the English language step aside for the yen and the Chinese language to pass, the world would do itself a huge favor by agreeing to use Esperanto instead, saving billions of dollars and trillions of hours of study.

In other words, sooner or later, economics guarantee the final victory.

In 1986, China even proposed that Esperanto become the main language in the United Nations.

No, music is not math

Nando Florestan — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:36:17 GMT

Stop saying "music is math".

How much mathematics was needed to develop musical instruments? Too much math, for sure! However, the same thing happened to cooking utensils, but no one says that "cooking is mathematics", or that "driving a vehicle is mathematics"...

Mathematics is the basis of all sciences. There isn't a single subject that doesn't have anything to do with math. Everything needs numbers.

When people think of the information in music, they basically think:

That the music runs through time, and time is measured, and most music uses fractions to specify durations -- a musical score is primarily a function of notes over time, and the duration of all notes is planned.
That at the same time, the melodic lines or musical events (tones) have another dimension: pitch, which is specified by the musical scale (do re mi fa sol la ti) or measured in Herz; for example, the most usual pitch of La is 440 Hz.
That tones simultaneously have intensity, which means that sounds can be accentuated or hidden, and they can be loud or soft. Intensity is also dynamic, meaning that a single sustained note from a brass instrument can, for example, start with an accent, drop quickly to a low volume, and then grow louder again.
That tones at the same time express timbre (sound color), which mainly depends on the musical instrument and the way it is played. Timbre is the most mysterious and difficult parameter to measure, but science does measure it... using mathematics.

In short, musical notes have 4 parameters: duration, pitch, intensity and timbre. As a result, music also has more or less the same 4 parameters. During a piece of music, these parameters change independently and constantly, and great composers establish relationships between all these parts.

But, so far, we have only concluded that the technique of music depends on numbers. Yes, the basic parameters can be expressed in numbers -- you count the beats while you play: 1, 2, 3, 4, repeat. However, the message is always human and often takes place in another dimension.

Hmm, a very mathematical composer... Have you ever heard the music of Iannis Xenakis? He developed a compositional technique called stochastic music, which uses statistics during composition. He was an architect and he wrote computer programs to help him compose. In this case, I agree that music has a deep connection to mathematics. But the computer didn't compose -- Xenakis did.

By the way, you've probably never heard his music; you probably even dislike such musical modernism; so why do you keep saying that music is math?

Most composers aren't mathematicians, they do little more than counting.

Let's take another example: Frédéric Chopin. The first thing about Chopin is that his music contains a sentimentality that is undeniable. Some Chopin music conveys the sadness of sadness, the misery of misery. To achieve his unique nostalgic effect, he developed a combination of existing techniques (such as pedal tones, chromatic harmonic changes etc.). But even in the happy pieces there is a tenderness that is not found in other composers.

Of the four parameters, the fourth is straightforward in Chopin: he always uses the piano. Timbre is only a consideration in piano solo music inasmuch as the piano is a symphonic instrument, capable of expression comparable to an entire orchestra, under just two hands.

Chopin liked 4 things: the piano, Bach, opera, and Polish music.

Chopin developed the piano technique, but he did not do it alone. He knew pianists and composers of the time, who also demanded more than Beethoven in their scores.
From Bach he learned that grace in the art of music lies in simultaneity -- simultaneous melodies and the relationships between them. The polyphony of the most brilliant composers is often more complex. This is the case in Chopin. But some listeners don't realize that -- they are not aware of the complex polyphony hidden in Chopin's "accompaniment", which is much more than accompaniment. A good pianist will make this polyphony clear and a good listener will know how to hear it.
From opera he loved bel canto melodies. He especially appreciated Vincenzo Bellini. Opera is the most popular genre of classical music. If polyphony is a complex aspect, the melody of the opera is what every music lover does understand. It is what the people take away with their whistles. Melodies on the piano must be played giving the impression of a singer singing. And the listener can help with his imagination...
Chopin was a nationalist and in exile he expressed his love for his country in his polonaises and mazurkas, which actually contain an influence of the Polish music he heard as a child.

The rhythm in Chopin is completely new. If you think that time in music is exact like in mathematics, you are squarely mistaken. The pianist must play romantic music like a human, not like a robot. This means that time is not as written, it is divined by the interpreter, who speeds up the beginnings of phrases and lengthens the ends of phrases, creating a kind of breathing between sentences, about which mathematics has no idea. A rhythmically straightforward rendering would strike anyone as false and quite unbearable.

And that is how playing Chopin can become a national sport. But they play Chopin from memory. Above I said one can count the beats when playing music. Well, maybe pianists counted a bit while learning certain pieces... but not when they finally play it live from memory. In that moment, they make sure they are free. So the notated durations are an instance of Wittgenstein's ladder. You use the ladder to climb the wall, but when you get up there, you throw the ladder away and become free.

In the mazurkas, time is very important. The rhythm of the mazurkas is strange because the second beat often lasts a little longer, creating a feeling of limping. In fact, changes in the rhythm are much more complex than the generalization I just made. And this is not written in the scores. Even Chopin's waltzes need this freedom in the rhythm, which is greater than in other waltzes. If you gave the sheet music to an alien, he wouldn't understand it. Music is part of cultural and human tradition.

How many times did I need numbers to talk about the most basic traits of Chopin's art? Zero. He counted triolets and polyrhythms like any composer, but that's not important. In both Xenakis and Chopin, what we perceive are two very different worldviews. Technique is very important in art and it always depends on mathematics, but worldview is just as important. They had sincere, new, important things to say.

The content of music is certainly not mathematics. The languages of music are many, so they cannot be mathematical either. They are systems developed by entire peoples, each in a different culture.

The art of music is the most profound and powerful art that man has devised. It can tell abstract stories and will move you to tears if you pay attention to it. Chopin and Xenakis are two of the most innovative composers. Chopin's entire second sonata talks about death, without a single word, of course. The fifth Polonaise is a nightmare of war with an idyll in the middle to give you a sense of what the war destroyed. But being an abstract story, maybe it's something analogous to war. The Berceuse is hypnotically tender, with flourishes like fireworks made of petals… I could go on. If an alien asked me what it is like to be human, I would give him Adam Harasiewicz's recordings of Chopin.

When you say that "music is mathematics", I wonder if you have had any contact with its true power. You should listen to composers who create whole worlds, like Mahler...

Music is the most striking testimony to the creative freedom of man; in that city, math is only one of the bricks.