Brian Felsen

REVIEWS OF VIEW FROM THE STRANGERS’ GALLERY

“Bravo! I like your piece. It is fresh and different. You have your own voice…you employ a very original use of jazz, of dissonance. The work is very convincing and humorous. Looking forward to hearing it live…and more great music from both of us!” – Lukas Foss, legendary composer; Principal Conductor, Brooklyn Philharmonic, 1971-90; Music Director, Milwaukee Symphony, 1981-86; Conductor-Laureate, Milwaukee Symphony, 1986- present; guest conductor with many of the world’s leading orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, and the Leningrad Symphony; Professor of Composition at Tanglewood; composer-in-residence at Harvard, the Manhattan School of Music, Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, and presently, Boston University; currently Vice Chancellor of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters

“Brian Felsen’s ‘View From The Strangers Gallery’ is a most remarkable piece of art in progress — I say only ‘art’ because I’m reluctant to pin or reduce it to any given genre or medium, so far-reaching and flexible is its idiom. It is a stellar work and I’m very taken with it, both in its implicit aspirations and what’s already accomplished. Much like James Joyce instinctively reaching through linguistic art toward music and graphic art in his pursuit of a less exclusive portrayal of human consciousness, Felsen’s work has that omnivorous, inclusive, polyphonic texture which allies it with the modernist highway, still glimpsed now and again through the forest of postmodernist static. For me, a writer engaged with neurology as a metaphor for consciousness in fiction, this is vital and inspiring stuff.” – Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 1999

“It is a most impressive work and your orchestration is especially fine. There are many terrific musical ideas here – I wish you much success with this work!” – Samuel Adler, author of The Study of Orchestration; composer of over 400 published works; conductor; Professor of Composition at the Juilliard School of Music

“Well, I’ve listened to your CD twice…And it delighted me. I especially liked it on second hearing, picking up things I missed the first time. As a musical setting of the Multiple Drafts Model, it is insightful, amusing, full of deft touches, and more musical than I had expected. And the precision with which it was both conceived and executed was more than impressive…But seriously, you didn’t sing the soprano doing the delicious BEETHOVEN bit at the end, did you? (Your letter says you did, but that ain’t no falsetto)…Thanks for sending me your View from the Stranger’s Gallery. May it soon be given the performance it deserves!” – Daniel C. Dennett, author, Consciousness Explained, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University

“I am very excited about the piece: it has an immediate impact on a musical and human level. It is uncanny to have such an accurate, sympathetic and musical representation of what it is to be conscious! I am sure the piece will speak to people with such clarity and humanity that it will become an important part of the repertoire. I wish the piece every success, and would be delighted to have the opportunity to conduct it myself some time!” – David Murphy, Conductor, Sinfonia Verdi

“What a feast of insight and creativity! Rich and fascinating…Congratulations on the good news about the reception to your piece – I’m delighted to hear it.” – Steven Pinker, author, How the Mind Works; Peter de Florez Professor, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

“Your piece is fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was amazed by your ability to perform it all…it is such a wild tapestry of small bits that still manage to cohere somehow (in a way that I can only sense, but not understand) and create a large-scale form, almost like a huge pile of legos that should topple over, one would think, but doesn’t. But I thoroughly enjoyed it all…I did particularly welcome the bits of extended lyricism and relief from extreme polyphony and diversity of materials when they occurred, and wondered if perhaps the very parts that came most easily to the composer were not some of my favorites. (A comment that gets sent my way all the time, much to my irritation!) All of the popular references are a delight. The piece, with all of its many voices, reminds me textually of the party scene in Les Noces…Congratulations on creating a fascinating piece of work!” – Allen Shawn, film, orchestra, ballet and opera composer; recipient of the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship for composers from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Professor of Composition, Bennington College

“Your piece is really interesting and I can’t wait to hear it performed! You explore a lot of different styles in the various sections and they all flow nicely from one section to the next, and at the same time, you managed to achieve a musical cohesiveness throughout the entire piece. Not an easy thing to do! There’s also a nice sense of balance on a number of levels from individual motives to larger structures (i.e. balance in the sense of the relationship between sections of music, not instrument volume). Frank Zappa said that one of the most difficult things to do in a composition was to achieve such balance. He equated it with the way Calder constructed his hanging mobiles–asymmetrical constructions which still maintain consistency and balance all the way from the individual elements to the entire sculpture as a whole. You did this nicely in ‘View…’” – Charles B. Kim, official composer for the Times Square 2000 New Year’s Eve Celebration (broadcast internationally on all TV networks); winner of the Otto Ortman, Frank D. Willis, and Randolph Rothschild Prizes in Composition

“This piece rides the blurry line between pop and classical music perfectly. The polyphony is profound and deep. It has heart, soul, emotion, innocence, humor…A crazy collage of everything from Schoenberg to the Beatles – I’d love to hear it with Bobby McFerrin and Renee Fleming on vocals!…Above all it sounds like what consciousness feels like – it rings true.” – Martin Hennessy, composer, pianist, vocal coach; fmr. faculty member, Juilliard American Opera Center, Carlo Bergonzi’s Bel Canto Seminar and Joan Dornemann’s Opera Training Institute in North Carolina

“I just finished listening to your CD with enjoyment, as well as awe for the many hours of work which it represents. I found your rhythms to be continually fascinating…the writing appeared to be natural and idiomatic for both voices and instruments. I was really taken with your idea of presenting a kind of realistic timeslice of consciousness…stunningly perceptive…a fascinating and impressive work, full of conviction and passion.” – Roy Whelden, writer, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Indiana Music Theory Review, and the Charles S. Peirce Society Transactions; Composer- in-Residence with American Baroque

“I think that Strangers’ Gallery goes very far in expressing a theory of the self and consciousness. The poetic elements rise to the immediate surface…the text has its own form, and that’s somewhat in the style of an epic poem, which has intimacy, because it’s dialogical between the reader and the author and between the authors and his characterizations. Hence, at one and the same time it reminds me of poetry in the patrimony of Plato–since it moves in the direction of a philosophical dialogue–and poetry in a mix of American traditions, namely the objective, yet intimate, reporting of Sandburg and the subjective experiences of internal and external events that Whitman offers…It’s as if the music sounds like the way William Calvin conceives the writing of consciousness as a construction paralleling evolutionary processions. Yet, there are structure/self dialectics in the text that reveal the internal as well as the external sources of the final causes of the self…” – Harwood Fisher, Professor Emeritus, City College of the City University of New York.

“Captivating music, fabulous text, and original sonorities reminiscent of Henze…an extremely ambitious debut work that reminds me of Messaien’s Turangalila!” – Rudolph Palmer, Professor of Composition, Mannes School of Music

“This work is musically very powerful and exciting. The structure is captivating – I’ve had an operetta based on my anti-nuclear writings years ago, but this is in a different league…extremely impressive!” – Nicholas Humphrey, professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics; author, A History of the Mind and How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem

“Felsen evokes Erik Satie, Kurt Weill, Frank Zappa and surrealist film director Luis Bunuel…and it works.” – Alternative Press magazine

“I will definitely air this work if it is performed...it musically grabs me and is thematically very out-of-the-ordinary – fascinating stuff!” – Larry Nuckolls, Brave New Music, WMHT-FM, NY

“Your oratorio impresses me as very creative and intriguing, musically as well as conceptually.” – George Graham, author, Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction; Professor of Philosophy & Professor of Psychology; Chair, Department of Philosophy; Associate Director Doctoral Program in Cognitive Science, University of Alabama at Birmingham

“I like the way you use contrapuntal forms in “Strangers’ Gallery“…most modern fugal composers make works that are dry, academic, and boring.” - Eric Altschuler, author (with Stephen Jay Gould), Bachanalia: The Essential Listener’s Guide to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier

“I must congratulate you on your very interesting musical ideas. It is certainly novel to try and capture the conflicting elements in consciousness (and behind them the different views of personal identity) in music…you have produced something distinctly novel.” – Richard Swinburne, author, The Evolution of the Soul; co-author (with Sydney Shoemaker), Personal Identity; professor, Oxford University

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This is a rare and precious document of the opera singer Elif Savas rehearsing an aria for an upcoming concert. By employing unobtrusive photography techniques and sympathetic lighting, I create an image which is far more natural, and less “staged,” than those commonly seen of Dmitri Shostakovich “composing” or Vladamir Nabokov standing at his writing desk.

At the moment the picture was taken, Elif was intently focused on the type of deliberate, error-focused practice which affords every musician the greatest gains. So concentrated is she on the score that appears completely oblivious to the presence of the photographer. The many distractions in her practice room hold no sway over her, as she works out the phrases which naturally present the greatest difficulties.

From the series: “Subjunctive Moods”

This series illustrates how our memories, planned futures, fantasies and desires compete for attention with the “real world.” Holmes stereoscope viewers, View-Masters, and 3-D images show how subjunctives and counterfactuals occupy our thoughts and actions – from generation to generation, from childhood through adulthood.

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The Court Gossip is a song cycle scored for two pop singers, string quartet, trombone, trumpet, flute, and piano.  Selections from the work were first presented at the ArtSci festival in NYC in 2001.

The fascinating history of the work:

In composing my “rock opera for orchestra” View From the Strangers’ Gallery, I collaborated with some of my favorite writers and philosophers, becoming close with two of them, Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett.  Dennett and Humphrey had worked together on a wonderful paper, “Speaking For Our Selves,” in 1989. This paper inspired many ideas important to cognitive science, including Dennett’s “Multiple Drafts Model” of consciousness; it explains how different parts of the brain assert more or less control at different times to work together on larger projects.  Although our impulses, routines, and personality traits combine to give the appearance that we have a coherent self, what we call our “self” is more of a “center of narrative gravity” than an actual physical part of the brain to which we make representations.

I found this paper to be the perfect springboard to compare collaboration among parts of ourselves with collaboration between friends and co-writers. Despite their differing ideas and writing styles, Dennett and Humphrey had written a delightful paper together. And – just like our own desires and neural functions usually help but occasionally subvert other related processes – as friends, the three of us were all talking about each other in generally very helpful and warm, but occasionally gossipy, ways.

I thought: Wouldn’t it be just smashing to write a piece of music comparing how these writers collaborate and gossip with their own paper about how our own brains do the same thing internally? And wouldn’t it be brilliant to add another dimension to the conversation by imposing myself in this manner, even perhaps including an idea of the philosopher David Chalmers (whose ideas are quite opposed to theirs) about the problem of giving a “first-person perspective” report on mental states? It seemed the perfect hall of mirrors.

So I went to Turkey once again to write a piece of music about the inner workings of the mind. This time, unlike with View From The Strangers’ Gallery, I scaled back my production requirements so it would be easier to perform. In this piece, I applied the musical language of popular song to fugal composition, which would make it more accessible than my Finnegan’s Wake-ish debut. I was extremely pleased with the results, and I was excited to fly back to America to triumphantly present Dennett and Humphrey with the piece.

There was just one problem.

Their paper had used the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD; now called Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID) to buttress their argument.  And while the pieces’ composition was well under way, I discovered that MPD/DID largely had been discredited in the years since.  Some of the most celebrated case studies of MPD later had been proven to be “iatrogenic” – “illnesses” caused or invented by the doctor or treatment itself.  And the last thing Dennett and Humphrey wanted to do was to promote a musical work celebrating a paper which had referred in any way to MPD.

And so: I was left on my to promote it. It got accepted to the ArtSci festival in NYC, where we performed two of the work’s five sections, and it was warmly received. (One of my favorite writers, David Rosenthal, was there with his class and said to his students, “Now that, boys, is how it’s done!”) But that was it. And, after the conference, the work got filed with a K. Number and went on my shelf.

Musical techniques:

Like in my View From the Strangers’ Gallery, I used polyphony in new ways to illustrate the multi-layered complexity of the brain’s processing systems and recursive structures. The musical lines were shaped to illustrate Dennett’s “Cerebral Celebrity” amplification of his “Multiple Drafts Model” of consciousness, by altering which voices would “win out” in fugal competition to leave an effect on the musical development of the rest of the piece.

I also used some radical pointillistic orchestral techniques to convey the simultaneous and veiled competitions of parallel processing in conscious experience, and to make a brash analogy to the competitions of ideas, writing style, and fame which these two famous philosophers have with each other.

Whether mounted on a wall or placed lovingly in a neat plastic notebook on the counter, the dread Artist Statement is always easily found, polluting every art gallery near you.  Read one, and any desire you might have had to meet the artist will immediately melt away.  In merely a few obtuse paragraphs, the artist will tell you what you already know, expound inarticulately upon philosophies which they know less about than a standard Wikipedia entry, and allude to art trends or influences which have nothing whatsoever to do with their work.  (One glorious exception: Bill Viola, whose notebooks are as enlightening as some of his best video art.)  I know, for I have been guilty of this.  The artist would do best to heed the sage advice of Frank Zappa: “Shut up and play yer guitar.”  Still, art gallery owners have required me to write one, and, depending on which artworks of mine they exhibit, my Artist’s Statement usually goes something like the below:

My photography explores the link between the way thoughts jostle for attention in one’s own consciousness and the way people compete to control each other’s behavior.  As many of these procedures and behaviors (even among lovers) stem from childhood experiences, I create entertaining and theatrical compositions, stereo photography (View Master Reels and Holmes stereo viewers), and digitally manipulating children’s objects.  My hope is that the work’s psychological concerns and modernist attention to detail give the work a depth which rewards extended viewing

One of my obsessions is in exploring the theatricality of daily life: “performances” we play for ourselves in conscious experience, and the games couples perform with each other.  Rather than photograph with strobe lighting, I use the hotlights of film, manipulating and positioning my subjects like department-store mannequins. I typically create unusual juxtapositions in common living spaces: a pregnant woman in a cage in a snow-covered suburban backyard; a wife spoon-feeding her husband in a crib, both serving and infantilizing him.

Another theme running through my photography is how our memories, future plans, fantasies and desires compete for attention with the “real world – so that we live our lives both in the present and in a halo of counterfactual states. My fine art is a visual depiction of this simultaneity.  To illustrate the way memory acts as a scrim on our daily experience and relationships, I transform toys and children’s books and shoot in abandoned swimming pools and playgrounds.  I combine dreams with reality through digital manipulation: an opera singer practices in a room full of distractions and alternate selves acting on them; a husband fantasizes murdering a sleeping spouse in a bedroom filled with dry ice.

TSC 2006 - Towards A Science of Consciousness

Of all of the mysteries of the universe, none is crazier, nor more amazing to me, than the mystery of consciousness.  I’ve always been interested in how people think – not just in the psychology of others, but in how a lump of grey matter can process incredible amounts of information; how the brain serves our volitions and instinctual needs automatically; how it generates the sense of personal identity (a self) and the feeling that we have a “soul” – and, above all, why the heck it feel like something to be the subject of experience!

Ever since college, I’ve read the works of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, starting with Douglas Hofstadter‘s Godel, Escher, Bach and moving on to the works of Dennett, Humphrey, Chalmers, Rosenthal, and too many others to mention.   Every other year, many of the greatest minds in the field gather in Tucson, Arizona for the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference (TSC).  Elif and I go whenever we can, and we’ve twice exhibited our art there with some of our favorite writers.

Here are some pictures from the 2006 TSC.

Related articles

• The Hard Problem (theosophywatch.com)
• A crab canon for Douglas Hofstadter (3quarksdaily.com)
• Finally, a Scientific Explanation for the Emergence of Mattering from Matter (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)

“The effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth’, to the intended meaning of its presumed author.” (Derrida, Otobiographies, quoted in Thiselton, New Horizons, p.111)

J’adore Jacques Derrida.  Not only do I find him enormously entertaining, I even occasionally find him enlightening.  Elif had cooked Derrida dinner one night in 1992, and found him to be delightfully preening.  Admit it: of all of the Pieds-Noir philosphers, he’s just about your favorite, non?

Kirby Dick‘s wonderful documentary on Derrida offers an excellent opportunity to revel in the great man’s absolute engagement in his own role as celebrity subject. Derrida’s response to every interview question was exquisitely crafted for maximum comedic value. To formulate these responses, he took his sweet time – at one point, it seemed like he waited over 30 seconds to answer a question about his mother!

I’ve always found it amusing that many of the particulars our own internal lives often not – our microthoughts, our motivations, our desires – only are closed to others, but also to ourselves. So how could I find out what Derrida was thinking during these great gaps in the dialogue?

As Elif and I watched the film together, we came to the stunning realization that rather than spending an eternity thinking about his responses to Kirby’s questions, Derrida was in fact writing the sequel to his chef-d’œuvre Of Grammatology. To test our theory, we carefully extracted the video from the film, applied a traducer filter, applied deconstruction analysis and specific Derridean techniques to the soundtrack, and were able to clearly make out his signature brainwave sounds.  After transcoding the signals, and with full realization that the rhetoric was inevitably being subverted by the grammar, we meticulously transcribed his internal dialogue, which ended up being printed inorganically over the film in a crawl from one of his favorite works of pop art, Star Wars.

The result is ground-breaking, revolutionary, and even NSFW: now, years after his shedding his mortal coil, you can visualize and hear his genius the full flowering of his genius like never before – and be privy to participating in the gestation of a great new, still-lost masterwork, Of Grammatology 2: Revenge of the Post-Structuralists.

Without further ado, our brilliant art film from 2003: Derrida Thinks!