This should be the place to post on Grice and Music. Cited by Chapman, p. 12.
Grice's performance excelled, but Cooper's sucked.
-- Joseph Cooper and "Face the Music" conductor. Back in the day at _alma mater_ Clifton.
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Which Pavane? Ravel's would have been the best known, I guess.
ReplyDeleteYes. Ravel. I don´t have my Chapman to hand -- but I have discussed this elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteGrice kept the piano till the day he died. (Kramer is unconvinced that ´he´is NOT ´Grice´ in sentences like ´till the day GRICE died´).
It was not an upright piano, if that´s the word but a concert, grand thing.
He would treasure his copies of Grove. "I´ll have to check that with the Grove", he would say as he would listen to something on the radio.
He composed his-self, but his compositions were regarded as "pretty avant-garde" for his circle.
Music was ever-present back in Harborne. Herbert Grice, his father, a failed businessman, had become a professional concertist. His mother was the bread winner, as they say, with her prep. They saved money by NOT saving Grice to a regular school but had him and his brother Derek joined his mother´s 'classes´. This may explain Grice´s troubles with Strawson´s account of definite descriptions:
Miss, can I go to the bathroom?
Miss? I´m your mother, Paul.
Paul thought that the dossier, ¨Miss¨, was more apt (or "apter" as he´d say) than "Mother" under the circumstances.
I have followed Grice to the G here. I never call my Mother "Mother", but "Anna Maria". This confuses all my friends. I find it unfair that if she calls me "JL", which is a sense-less expression in Frege´s parlance, I cannot do same.
Herbert and his sons, Herbert Junior and Derek would be heard trioing, with Junior on the piano, Derek the cello, and Herbert Sr. the violin.
Ravel was a good one.
To change the scenarios of Grice WoW:ii slightly:
ReplyDelete"Compare the critical review in "The Musical Times"
i. Grice played Pavane.
ii. Master Grice produced a series of sounds on the pianola that corresponded pretty closely with the score of this masterpiece by Ravel.
Suppose that Brown, the reviewer, has chosen to "utter" (ii) rather than (i).
Gloss:
i. Why has Brown selected that rigmarole in place of the concise and nearly
synonymous ´played´?
ii. Presumably to indicate some striking difference between Master Grice’s
performance and those to which the word ´playing´ is usually applied.
iii. The most obvious supposition is that Grice´s performance suffered from some
hideous defect.
iv. Brown assumes that this supposition is what is likely to spring to mind, so that that is what he is implicating.
(apres Grice 1989: 37)
I´ve always found Grice's example (exaggerated or not, for one who reads the Daily Telegraph!) indigestible in parts.
Suppose he had chosen, instead, to play the more erotic "Bolero".
The review Grice got in the Cliftonian went "stately"
"Its stateliness provided
an effective contrast to
the exuberance of [Master
Cooper's] Rachm[a]ninoff."
(Christmas concert, 1930 -- by courtesy of T. J. Glover, the (Old Cliftonian) Society.
"While we enjoyed Grice's playing of Ravel's "Pavane", Master Cooper's Rachmininoff (sic) left a lot to be desired, even by Rachmininoff, we would be bold enough to suggest"
Gloss:
Why has he, Christian and magnanimous as we are supposed to be at Clifton, especially when parents will be atttended, selected that wicked, infantile rigmarole in place of the concise and nearly synonymous "played"?
An explicaturist may object that "play" is semantically "impovered". That it needs "enrichment".
It´s not playing cricket we are talking here´ñ it´s playing the bolero.
He said: "one was stately, one was exuberant."
Is the contrast conventionally implicated?
Surely it´s not just, one was good, one was bad. While the boleron CAN be played exuberantly, it is less harmonious to think that the Rachmininoff´s concerto can be played "stately", worn out as that piece is.
Cooper _was_ being flamboyant, and he knew it.
His performance, unlike ever-correct Master Grice's, was the one that brought the house down.
But can it be as simple as all that? Surely not.
THE KEY TO THE PUZZLE: The ontology of a work of art.
Anyone familiar with Ravel's "Pavane" knows that in fact it is impossible to 'perform' it.
As Tapper would say -- and he is, like I, an accomplished pianist, one can, at most, and on a clear day, claim to
produce 'sounds that may at most
"correspond CLOSELY" with
the score of "Pavane".
In our slate we HAVE to avoid a "Meinongian" jungle, as Grice has it in "Vacuous Names":
i. Ravel's Pavane does NOT exist.
ii. Only Master Grice's attempt, or in neo-Prichardian parlance, willingness, to produce a series of sounds that correspond CLOSELY to the score of the Spanish piece (all pieces by Ravel have a flamenco spirit to
them, for some reason).
--- The complications ensue when we go to the ¨receiving end¨. In his "Personal Identity" -- "Grice´s early piece of cake," this blog -- Grice considers the utterance,
"My mother heard a noise"
For all the closeness to detail in Grice´s expansion he fails to consider two important points:
1. He is wondering about sense-data. Strictly, it´s Grice´s mother´s _ear_ or pair of them which HEARD a noise. This simplifies by bunches his account of personal identity. Since ears have no "selves".
2. "noise" is NOT the word we´d use to describe any old performance of "Pavane".
Etc.