Writer, historian, educator, and public intellectual Ted Gioia has been a critical voice in the American cultural conversation for nearly forty years. From the history of song to neuroscience to ornithology to Renaissance studies to algorithms and AI, his wide-ranging insights are poignant, humorous, matter-of-fact, and consistently wise. His twelve books have been translated into eleven languages, and he has contributed pieces to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Bookforum, Salon, Smithsonian, and The American Scholar. His current project, The Honest Broker, is rated by Substack as the mostly widely read music newsletter on its platform. He taught at Stanford University’s Department of Music and helped to create a formal jazz studies program there alongside then artist-in-residence Stan Getz. He is also a jazz musician with three albums to his name, featuring Eddie Moore and Larry Grenadier, among others. He holds degrees from Stanford and Oxford and has served as an adviser and consultant to Fortune 500 corporations and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, negotiating multimillion dollar projects around the world. To read, learn, and listen, visit www.tedgioia.com. He was interviewed by Joshua Stamper.

 

Image: What were the spiritual or religious contours of your childhood? How did they shape your thinking and imagination?

Ted Gioia: I attended a Catholic school in a working-class LA neighborhood from grades one through eight. Here I was educated by nuns from the Sisters of Providence order, and they imposed a strict, disciplined regimen on the youngsters in their charge. Sometimes it felt like their pedagogy hadn’t changed since the papacy of Leo the Great.

If the nuns thought your hair was too long, they would take a pair of scissors from their desk drawer and provide you with a spontaneous hairstyle—free of charge. They also imposed their own seat-of-the-pants censorship rules. One day, my buddy and I made the mistake of bringing forbidden books to school—James Bond novels by Ian Fleming. I managed to hide my copy in the nick of time, but my friend had his confiscated. We lamented the loss, but I like to think the nuns passed around that copy of Live and Let Die for their private delectation.

Even so, I need to give credit to the Sisters of Providence. They were both devoted and devout and gave far more than they ever received. They taught me something about embracing personal sacrifice as a daily regimen, and how a vocation could be a lifelong mission. I’ve fortunately retained a little of what I learned from them.

I also benefited from the firm sense of tradition and compassionate behavior they passed on to us. I don’t think I could have found that deeply rooted history on my own, especially given my situation in LA, where everything had been built in the last few decades. This aura of tradition was amplified by the Latin liturgy, which surrounded me during my childhood.

Years later, when I found myself in other traditional environments—for example, as a student at Oxford—I drew on this early training. It prepared me to deal with situations when my individualism confronted hundreds of years of established ritual and formalities. This happens a lot in life, and my early upbringing provided me with skills to deal with it.

Image: William James said, “Aesthetics is the study of the useless.” True or false, and why?

TG: I’ve devoted most of my career to disproving this claim. For a start, I’ve written three books on how music is integrated into the needs of everyday life—Work Songs (2006), Healing Songs (2006), and Love Songs (2015). The titles alone tell you some of the ways music can change the world.

My dedication to this vision of transformative aesthetics has reached a culmination in my latest project, an online book I’m publishing in installments called Music to Raise the Dead. Here again, the title tells you how deeply I believe in the power of music.

The reality is that art has always been a source of enchantment and a change agent in human life. It has a catalytic impact on both the artist and the audience. We ignore this power at our own peril.

I know that many people in the arts community have forgotten this. And praising “art for art’s sake” conveys an attractive attitude of independence that even I can feel. But art for our sake is much better.

Image: In 1966 Marshall McLuhan said, “The price we pay for our own technology is obedience to our own technology.” He goes on to say that we become “the servile mechanisms” of our technologies: We find ourselves the servants of what was designed to serve us. You’ve written extensively about the ways our technologies shape our lives and our lives together. What does freedom look like in an age of tech saturation?

TG: For a long time, I was an ardent fan of new technology. I lived in Silicon Valley for twenty-five years and spent a lot of time with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other techies. Back then, I believed in their mission. That didn’t change until a few years ago, when I started to notice how the dominant technologies of the twenty-first century have become more manipulative and destructive.

You can see it everywhere now. For example, parents are increasingly aware of the dangers of social media—the rise of smartphone use among youngsters has been accompanied by rising rates of depression, violence, self-harm, and suicidal tendencies. I now see a similar threat from AI, which has empowered scamming, shamming, and spamming at unprecedented levels. Public awareness is rising, but we’re still too complacent. I hear often from AI apologists who believe that we need this tech, despite all the cheating, plagiarism, robbery of intellectual property, deepfakes, AI hallucinations, extortion scams, and potential job losses. But I will stand by this prediction: Within a few years, almost everybody will recognize how destructive this technology really is. But I fear it might be too late by then to put the genie back in the bottle.

Art, the humanities, and spirituality will be our last lines of defense. I see it as part of my life’s mission to support their restorative powers.

Image: In 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to Alfred Stieglitz, who had recently curated an exhibition of her drawings, “I seem to feel that they are as much yours as mine—They were only mine alone till the first person saw them—” The plainspoken generosity of this statement is striking, even alarming. You’ve written powerfully on why music ownership matters (buying albums, as opposed to streaming and other forms of unfettered virtual access). What is the ownership O’Keeffe was talking about, and how do we understand it in our context today?

TG: There are different ways of owning art, and not all of them involve the actual purchase or control of intellectual property. When Georgia O’Keeffe says that her art belongs to others, she’s talking about creative inspiration in its most transcendent form.

I’ve often described this as artists choosing their lineage. In actual families, you don’t get to choose your parents, but artists do get to select their influences—and these are like their spiritual parents. And we have total freedom in doing this. I can choose someone from another century or continent as my creative ancestor. I can imagine myself as an heir to Dante or Miles Davis or Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf or Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Some people will tell you that this is cultural appropriation. But I don’t think they grasp how indebted we all are to the great creators of the past. If we tried to cut ourselves off from them, we would lose all vitality and purpose in our lives. This is the most fruitful way of owning a work of art. All other ways fall far short of it.

Image: From our earliest histories, the gift has been a powerful and complex transmitter of value. The act of giving imbues the gift with value, and value is conferred on both the person receiving the gift and on the relationship between recipient and giver. At its best, gift exchange is the declaration of mutual belonging and the reinforcement of relationship, and all parties are honored.

In your incisive 2020 piece for Image, “Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free,” you warn that these established principles of gift exchange are being hijacked and redefined by economic structures increasingly in thrall to the tech titans that colonize our attention and mediate commerce at colossal scales. With this in view, how to course correct?

TG: There’s a hidden economy in the creative world that doesn’t involve money. It’s all built on gifts and giving. That’s why we say artists are gifted. If you ask them about the sources of their creativity, they will admit that they are mysterious and outside their control. They understand that they cannot purchase moments of inspiration with money—it’s a transaction without price tags.

For this same reason, artists are often happiest when they give back to their audiences. I know so many musicians who will perform for free, just because they want this experience of giving their music to others.

Even more, they understand that music is a gift that increases in value the more it is given. A song is not exhausted when it is played for a thousand—or a million—people. It gets stronger each time. We don’t have the right words to describe these things. Even worse, we try to explain them in the language of economics, when creativity resists such ways of thinking.

The sad result is that artists are often exploited, sometimes by their own managers or record labels or some other intermediary they have trusted too much. I get upset when I see companies play dirty tricks on artists. Often it’s not much different from tricking children. I don’t think there are easy solutions. Artists will always be easy to exploit. But I will issue a warning to anybody who works in businesses that depend on creativity. They have a moral obligation to deal fairly with the people who do the creating. If they fail to do so, they should earn our distrust and scorn.

Perhaps our best hope is that new web platforms will emerge that operate honestly and transparently with creators. I already see some signs of this at Bandcamp and Substack and Patreon. Maybe in another ten years these alternative platforms will be large enough and strong enough to prevent much of the exploitation that goes on today.

Image: On silence, Claude Debussy: “Music is the silence between the notes.” Guitarist Robert Fripp describes music as “the cup which holds the wine of silence.” Percussionist Evelyn Glennie says, “Silence is the heaviest sound, the loudest sound. How do you understand the role silence plays in music—as a composer, an improvisor, and a music critic?

TG: Miles Davis allegedly said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” That sounds like a paradox, but I’ve lived that paradox myself. During my twenties, I found that the only way I could reach the next level as a jazz musician was by removing all sorts of extraneous stuff from my playing.

This was a painful process. There were so many rote, clichéd things I didn’t want to give up. Many of them usually got a positive response from audiences. I knew all the stale blues and funk licks that got people clapping and cheering, but it was all built on posturing. The phrases sounded spontaneous and happening, but the reality was the exact opposite, and anybody who heard the band night after night would eventually recognize that.

So I began the process of cutting away. I was determined to throw overboard anything fake or vapid or contrived. Sometimes I feared there would be nothing left at the end—that all I’d have would be total silence. I had to learn to stop fearing that. Silence is always part of music, and great musicians respect it. It’s better to play nothing at all than to deal in stale theatrics.

It took more than five years, but I finally got to the other side. I eventually found a whole new set of musical tools and attitudes, so I didn’t have to fall completely silent. But there’s nothing wrong with a creative silence. I’ve lived that too.

In my thirties I developed arthritis, and this eventually put a halt to my performing career. So you might say that I did finally succumb to total silence. But I am at peace with that. I probably grew as a writer—and in other ways—because of it.

Image: Where do we find silence? In an era of twenty-four-hour news cycles, doom-scrolling, predictive text, and entire industries built on a business model of distraction and noise, how do we protect it?

TG: I have a musician friend who wrote a song called “Hermitage.” I heard him introduce it on the bandstand one night, and he felt obliged to explain what a hermitage was. After all, it’s not a word you hear often nowadays. He told the audience: “I should tell you what a hermitage is. It’s a place where people go to chill out.”

I laughed at that, but I like his definition. We need places to chill out nowadays more than ever before. I’d even speculate that there’s a business opportunity here. Somebody should start a chain of hermitages—call them chillout centers or retreats or whatever. Demand will soon be off the charts. It’s already happening. I hear from people every day who are fed up with their digitally driven lives. Just yesterday I was told that 40 percent of the public now tries to avoid hearing the news. Social media is no better. I’ve cut back sharply, and judging by the metrics many others have done the same. This movement will spread.

That is how silence will get reclaimed in our society. It will happen at the grass-roots level. People like you and me will find our own ways of chilling out. We don’t need to wait for permission from Silicon Valley.

Image: The breadth and depth of your reading and research—to say nothing of your output as a writer and a musician—would suggest that there’s not much room for silence in your life. But you consistently provide insights on a range of topics that would be difficult to arrive at without at least some measure of rest. How do you manage the demands of your work while also creating space for reflection and contemplation?

TG: I often talk about my rule of the six spheres—the six things we need to have a healthy, holistic life. It seems very simple. If there are really only six things, surely we can find time for all of them over the course of a lifetime. But the reality is that few people embrace all six with genuine success. They usually focus on two or three and neglect the rest. Here they are:

1. Your vocation: Make a living in a way that helps others live too.

2. Your community: Be a giver, not a taker.

3. Your family: Love them unconditionally and help them on their paths.

4. Your mind: Fill your head and heart with good things.

5. Your body: Help your body last a lifetime.

6. Your soul: Listen to what it tells you, and give it what it asks.

I try to find time for all of these—and this affects how I organize each day, each week, and each year. But I often fail to achieve the right balance. My wife Tara is better at it. She’s achieved a better balance among these six priorities than anybody I’ve ever met.

Image: Musicians and composers across time and genre regard the human voice as the most sophisticated and expressive of all musical instruments, the ideal toward which instrumentalists strive. Recently, synthetic voice engineering has become more and more eerily humanlike. On its face, the goal might seem the same as for a clarinetist or cellist—to emulate the human voice—but the effects are radically different. You’ve warned about AI’s implications for how music is made and heard. What do we lose when the human voice is literally and metaphorically altered, replaced, or elided?

TG: The first musical instrument was the human body. The voice is the most obvious example and plays a dominant role in the oldest musical traditions, but the entire body was a percussion instrument—with clapping of hands and stomping of feet.

In these traditional settings, music was almost always accompanied by dance, and this made it even clearer that the performance was embodied. It didn’t exist without the human dimension.

But dance was important for another reason: It made everybody a part of the unfolding ritual. The separation between performer and audience was removed. In traditional dances, all the passivity of modern music consumption disappears. The entire community participates actively.

Now compare this with AI-generated music, which does the exact opposite. No human being is involved in the creative process. Passivity is our only role. This can’t be a healthy future for human creativity.

I’m not naïve. I know that AI is backed by powerful corporations, who are investing trillions of dollars in ensuring its dominance. But I also know that millions of people will reject it. They can already see that AI music is vacuous and dehumanizing. So the technocrats have a battle on their hands. Who will win—machines or human beings? I’m placing my wager on flesh-and-blood creativity. But we are clearly embarking on a turbulent and dangerous stage in cultural history.

Image: Your book Music: A Subversive History is a remarkably comprehensive survey that speaks to the ways music is a technology of subversion, a necessary dissidence. What does dissident music sound like today?

TG: It’s actually getting easier to create subversive music. Just being a human being is a radical move at this moment in history. There are so many things that AI can never do. It can’t fall in love. It can’t feel a family tie or know what it’s like to be a parent or a child—or even a friend or citizen. It can’t sacrifice itself in a higher cause. It can’t even know what it’s like to contemplate the cosmos or mourn the death of a loved one. Just by putting these experiences into songs we make a powerful statement. Of course, I fully expect AI to imitate these true songs with its fakery, but it can only do so through pretending and plagiarizing. I have complete trust that a discerning audience will be able to tell the difference.

Image: You write beautifully and extensively about the multifaceted ways music is a change agent in our lives. What was the first piece of music that changed the way you think, hear, or see, and how?

TG: When I was a teenager, I stumbled into a jazz club almost by chance. When the music started, I had an epiphanic moment. I knew within a few seconds that I had encountered my true vocation. I had played the piano and even made some progress with it, focusing on classical music for my formal studies and playing rock music in my spare time, sometimes with bands—but neither felt right for me. I found rock music emotionally satisfying but also very limiting. It didn’t provide the kind of intellectual stimulation I got from Bach or Chopin. But classical music presented the opposite problem. It was very smart and stirred up my analytical capacities, but it didn’t possess the immediacy and intensity of rock. When I discovered jazz, I found both things. The best jazz music has intensity, drive, and emotional immediacy, but I also could study it, and it satisfied my analytical mind. That’s what I felt that evening long ago in that club: Here was what I’d been seeking all along, and I’d finally found it. My life changed at that moment. It hasn’t been the same since then.

Image: One of the consequences of living in an industrial economy is that our work is justified to the degree that it is “useful” or “productive.” I’ve found myself wondering lately whether this is part of why livelihood and artmaking feel so often at odds—art belongs to a fundamentally different paradigm, where the tenets of productivity or utility are simply irrelevant. Are there ways that relationship might be less antagonistic? Are there models that exist outside the logic of the marketplace?

TG: During my lifetime I’ve seen a huge reduction in economic poverty—especially in places like China and India, and also in parts of the US. But there has been a tremendous increase in isolation, loneliness, despair, depression, and other metrics of a disadvantaged life. That’s a different kind of poverty, and it might be even more damaging in advanced modern societies than economic deprivation.

I don’t think you can solve today’s most pressing problems with more consumer goods. There’s only so much that a pair of running shoes or celebrity-endorsed tequila can do for us. That’s where artmaking can play a major role. I doubt that it will make many people rich. And I would never tell anyone to pursue a creative vocation as a way to increase the gross domestic product. But there are some riches that can’t be measured in dollars and cents—and music, dance, storytelling, and other forms of human expression are precisely these kinds of treasures.

They connect us with others. They also connect us with ourselves, with our untapped potential. We very much need those things right now.

Image: Who are the people and what is the music that gives you hope?

TG: I’ve spent a lot of time studying repeating cycles in culture, and these give me some hope. I’ve learned that karma exists in the universe—or call it natural law or the rule of reflexivity or whatever. The name hardly matters, but the results do. This force ensures that, over the long run, human beings eventually reject abusive behavior and push back against evil.

If you look back at the last century, you can see this process in action. The most malevolent people and parties always failed in the end, despite possessing enormous wealth and power. But this also happens on a small scale in everyday life.

That’s why I remain optimistic about where we will be in twenty or thirty years. Good people will triumph if we give them enough time—and, even better, if we give them enough support.

 

 

 

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Joshua Stamper is a transdisciplinary artist, composer, and essayist whose work explores hiddenness, revelation, ephemera, and archive. His work has been supported by MacDowell, the BAU Institute, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the American Composers Forum, the Lilly Endowment, and the NEA. www.joshuastamper.com

 

 

 

Photo by Getty Images, via Unsplash+.