On Doing

I’ve been out for a little while, with a lot to do (Preparing things to apply to Stanford, lots of work, preparing my toefl), so sorry if you use to follow my vertiginous rhythm of posting. And twice sorry if you are a native speaking english…now that I am preparing the TOEFL test I can see how difficult it must be to read this… :-s.

Let’s stop the apologies. In the last weeks, together with the work described, I have been listening, at least 8 hours a day (not exclusively); my newly found favourite composer: Wagner. Needless to say, I’ve spended some money on cd’s and dvd’s, some old (Knapperbutsch, Furtwangler) some new (Barenboim, Levine).

image link : http://www.southalabama.edu/univlib/sauer/clayarmy.jpg

My first feeling about the old ones was “this sounds like s…”. You can hear people coughin, scratching, and the singers are heard like if they were inside an aquarium. If you do some research on the internet, you will see that lots of “wagnerians” recommend these recordings (well, I must admit that the only thing I dislike about Wagner music is the perspective of turning into a wagnerian), and yes, they are very beautifully directed, but they so ostensibly lack in sound purity.

While behaving like a child, finding not what he was looking for, I had to teach my students about the way stones were cut in the XII century. Some argued that their methods were inexact, laboriously enough to mean 200 years per building, etc. And I replied that we cannot judge their work with our standards; the XII century stone work is important since it was the best that could be done at the moment, with what was available. We cannot say that the Clay Army of China is irrelevant since we can make it “better”, more realistic today with our casting technology. There is no learning in thinking that way.

When I got into the car after classes, and heard my Knappertbusch Parsifal, I felt a little ashamed. This record was nothing more or less than the best that could be done at the moment, in terms of recording technology. And I was judging it by today standards. Now I am enjoying my old records as if they were as pristine as the water in Baker river.

There is a kind of contradiction about old technology. We tend to understand, by technology, the newest discovery, the latest advance. But that is when we focus in technology as a product, and not as concept or a problem. Technology is as eternal as the need of warmth, and is nothing more than solving a problem as better as possible with whatever we are morally allowed to use.

It is natural to feel tenderness for what some day our ancestors felt as the state-of-the-art and we can easily see or hear as a primitive effort. But we should always accompany that feeling with a sharpen eye to learn from their effort, since may times we are trying to solve, roughly; the same problem they were into.