Episode 1 of the Year of Bach Podcast features Henry Oliver, author of the Substack The Common Reader, and the excellent book Second Act, a study of late bloomers in business and the arts.
Our open-ended conversation touches on Bach, Shakespeare, late blooming, and the pleasures and problems of Glenn Gould. Henry describes the “expectation of astonishment” in music and literature, and names his favorite recordings.
Links & references
Henry’s Substack – The Common Reader
The Second Act (Amazon)
Selected recordings, with YouTube links:
Henry’s favorite: Gould playing the Sinfonias live in Moscow
My cantata gateway album: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “Ich Habe Genug”
My ‘dark horse’ record: Peter Schreier (tenor) and Karl Richter (organ) perform BWV 487 - “Mein Jesu, was für Seelenweh”
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Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano.
Transcript:
The Expectation of Astonishment: Henry Oliver on Bach and the Hunger for Seriousness
Evan Goldfine: Welcome everyone to the premiere episode of the Year of Bach podcast.
This series features a set of conversations with artists and writers who have a deep and personal connection to the music of J.S. Bach and how this music inspires and moves them throughout their lifetimes. Today my guest is Henry Oliver. I. Author of the recent bestseller, the Second Act, a Study of Late Bloomers in Business and the Arts.
He also writes the excellent Substack, the Common Reader, where he advocates for people to read the great classics of literature with a special emphasis on the works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. He's also a great fan of Bach and a supporter of my substack from its earliest days, and I'm glad to have a readership that overlaps so strongly with his.
So, Henry, thank you for being my first guest, and I'm excited to talk to you about Bach today.
Henry Oliver: Oh, I'm delighted. This is, this is gonna be one of my favorite podcasts.
Evan Goldfine: You're setting me up. Okay. So Henry, why do you keep returning to Bach [00:01:00] throughout your lifetime?
Henry Oliver: Oh, because the best, the human, the human spirit loves what is best.
We love beauty, we love excellence. We love virtue. Bach embodies all of these things. You can hum him. You can have raptures about him. He can be fun, he can be serious. He’s the Shakespeare of music, right.
Evan Goldfine: Clearly. Do you, do you find it to be a more intellectual or emotional experience or both?
Henry Oliver: , more emotional. I think maybe that's because I don't understand music to, to a great degree, but I feel that Bach is able to find deep expressions of human feeling. I prefer the word feeling than emotion, deep expressions of human feeling and very subtle expressions of those things. So I think one reason why the cello suites are so, so universally popular is because they give [00:02:00] voice to a set of moods that have not really been expressed quite in that level of finery before or maybe since.
Evan Goldfine: Is there something there also about it being solo pieces along with the violin sonatas also That particularly triggers that emotional core for you.
Henry Oliver: I suppose so. I love the cello. I think that's probably the heart of it. And I think, again, they are some of his best works and, we respond, we do respond to excellence.
I believe that very strongly.
Evan Goldfine: Do you like the cello and piano sonatas?
Henry Oliver: I don't love them as much. I must confess. Martha Argerich is good at those, right?
Evan Goldfine: I, I have that album.
That's the one I know. You just pick her over everybody. That's easy. She's threatening to come to New York in a couple years, but we'll see.
Henry Oliver: Every time I listen to it, I'm not left feeling I want to go back.
Evan Goldfine: Wow. Yeah.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. That's the,
Evan Goldfine: [00:03:00] yeah, that's, it's disappointing because you want it to be also the best, but we can't have the best of everything.
Henry Oliver: No.
Evan Goldfine: Bach is clearly enriching your life and, and you've spent your career talking about literature mostly. So in what ways does music enrich your life? That, that literature cannot.
Henry Oliver: I've had a very strong response to music since I was young. And I have just had always a great hunger to listen to a lot of music.
I listen to much less than I used to because I prefer now to read in silence, and usually to write in silence as well. But what I said about Bach, giving an expression of feeling, I feel music can do that in a way that language can't. And people often talk about the limits of language.
The struggle to make words mean what you really want them to mean. The fact that when you are conceiving of something [00:04:00] to write, it has this big feeling inside you of what you're doing, and then when you get it onto the page, it always just seems a bit reduced and not quite what you were trying to capture.
Music, I think, gets you a lot closer to the thing you were trying to capture or express, but at the cost of language really means something that you and I can agree what it means.
Music is a much less precise form of communicative exchange, I guess. So I think those are the trade offs, but I come back to it because nothing else can express, his range of moods and feelings.
if you want to know, this is a, this is a great question. At the moment, I'm reading this book by Lamorna Ash. "Don't forget, we're here forever." And it's all about how people are turning back to religion. And she interviewed 60 young people who became Christians. And what she's interested in is how does that happen?
How does it come about that someone else becomes a [00:05:00] Christian? And this is a very difficult thing to get your head around if you're not a Christian. Right? Not just, what are all, what's all this theological talk? What are all these denominations? You believe this, someone else believes that. Just what does that feel ?
I just need to get into the vibes of this whole thing. Well, put some Bach on and you will very quickly be given the feelings of what it is to be devout, what it is to, to love God, what it is to feel the glory of God. Something that in your ordinary life may be incomprehensible to you, Bach can deliver up in a way that language, I think would struggle to break through those barriers.
Evan Goldfine: I often thought when I was listening to this music for my project, especially with the Passions and the Mass and B minor, the idea about sitting several centuries ago in a big cathedral or even a small church, and this was probably also the [00:06:00] loudest thing you ever heard.
Henry Oliver: Yeah.
Evan Goldfine: And the power of the voices and the orchestra together reverberating in the halls.
You're also in community with the people who are around you listening to this, I can't imagine the power of something that in a, in a great performance and, and to think about. Bach there. Also, I, I don't know if he was considered this, this great among, he was just the guy in town who was the composer who happened to have been pretty superlative relative to his peers.
But that was your local guy. And I should say that also that there's no evidence that Bach ever heard the Mass and B minor perform in his lifetime, which is crazy.
Henry Oliver: Absolutely crazy. People talk about Beethoven composing deaf, which obviously is, is fascinating, but I find this more fascinating how, how he managed to do that and, and leave it in such a state of completion and never hear it.
I mean, the power of the inner life must have [00:07:00] been much, much stronger than we are currently aware of. I think.
Evan Goldfine: Do you think we can have a good sense of Bach inner life? I mean, there's very limited extant writings of his that are not about pursuing a job here or there or writing and to try to placate a nobleman.
But that what can we know of, of Bach in ways that would be easier to understand some of the other greats internal lives, or maybe there's just that Romantic movement that is between us today and Bach's time.
Henry Oliver: I'm cautious about this. Someone Kingsley Amis once said, , you don't need to write a biography of a novelist.
He's told you everything about himself, and he's put it into a series of books called novels, but other novelists would deny that and say that it's just an exercise in the use of language. Now we don't believe them and we find all sorts of resonances between their actual lives and their [00:08:00] fictional lives.
I am very cautious of this, and I don't, I don't feel I have a good sense of Bach’s inner life. It's hard to believe that you can write the St. Matthew Passion and not have a very, very intense inner life. But I also know that he was busy. He had a job. He had kids, he was churning out music at a phenomenal rate.
And I don't know, I, I always just wonder, how much time did he have for inner life? Was there some way in which the way he was operating on the manuscript page was a substitute for the inner life and it happened, the inner and the outer were just happening together for him.
I really don't know.
Evan Goldfine: A pure sublimation
Henry Oliver: Something. Yeah. It's startling when when you look into how much time he actually had to do everything that he did, it becomes more of a mystery really.
Evan Goldfine: It must have just in the physical writing of the music. [00:09:00] Just before, not composing, but the physical writing is, is years and years of, of, of time limited by paper and ink.
Henry Oliver: Really. And, and all the other huge demands on his time. Right, right. So, I don't know, you could look at that and say, he must have had an extraordinary inner life and it must have just come pouring out of him. Or you might look in that and say, well, he, how, how could he have had time for an inner life? It must have, he must, his inner life must have lived in his pen.
Yeah. So, I don't know. But he was clearly, something was happening inside that is very alien to the rest of us.
Evan Goldfine: It's unapproachable in a way. And as we get deeper into the music, he feels in some ways further away. For me at least, I just get deeper and deeper into it, and I, I just don't have a feeling of the person.
Whereas I think if you read Jane Austen. Despite what Kingley Amis says, you might have a better sense of what she [00:10:00] might have been to, to sit down with. Do you have that?
Henry Oliver: No, I think Jane Austen remains a great mystery to us. Partly because we don't have enough of her letters, and partly because the letters that we do have in some ways show a bit of a gap with the novels.
And there's a lot of debate about what person she was and she's been, or what she believed, and she's been claimed by, , every ideology, every, every group going. , a bit with Bach, the question about Jane Austen is how did a young woman from a rectory in the countryside become a, a genius of world literature.
She wasn't surrounded by authors, she wasn't going to London, she wasn't given a fancy education. She was raised in quite a liberal manner. She had the run of the library. There were lots of novels. Her father was one of those, , one of those men who kept up and read all, everything that was being [00:11:00] published.
And, and so there was lots of intellectual life in the house, and she wasn't treated , oh, you're a girl, so you can't read. -. But I don't think that really goes any anyway, to explaining how she became Jane Austen. , and Bach is a similar thing, right? He's, he's a a provincial guy, and it turns out that he was the greatest composer ever, just, just sitting there.
And I, to me, that enhances the mystery. I, I don't think we can hope to explain it.
Evan Goldfine: So, I'd to also talk a little bit about Shakespeare. Another one of your, passions. Similarly, Shakespeare's achievements Austen and and Bach are staggering, the breadth and the depth of the work and how they speak to us, through the centuries.
You've spent a lot of time with both of these giant figures. How do you think about them in relation to one another?
Henry Oliver: They're very different. Shakespeare seems to be able to write everything and anything. He seems to have a, a universal [00:12:00] or a panoramic view of human life. Samuel Johnson said that. Shakespeare gives us a, a mingled picture of things.
So at the same time that one man is being carried to his funeral, another man is running off to the tavern. , and this is, this is the bustle of life. Jane Austen isn't that. She works within one strand of social life and she depicts people she's familiar with and she gave advice to her niece. She said. “you must only write about the things you really know and understand.”
And in this story, your characters have gone to Ireland, but you don't know anything about Ireland, and that's pretty painfully obvious. So you should, we should stay at home so that you can write about that. Whereas Shakespeare's happy to just do everything and he, he's not worried about those, those sorts of issues.
And he still makes it compelling and fascinating. And he's a great philosopher. He's a great poet. He's a great observer of [00:13:00] human nature. He's a great dramatist. I mean, he's prolific across these multiple dimensions. What they share is a genius literary technique. I think Shakespeare is very inventive in his depiction of character, in his dramaturgy in the way that he can drive a story through an individual.
And Jane Austen is very inventive in her narrative techniques and in the way that she positions the narrative from the perspective of one character or another. Very, very inventive in that. So those are the sorts of things that they have in common. Samuel Johnson said something, “the essence of poetry is invention.”
And they both sum that up. Bach sums that up as well. Right? Huge, inventive capacity.
Evan Goldfine: Unlimited, it feels like. He had all of these melodies in him and there's this phenomenon I feel, especially when listening to some of the fugues where he sets [00:14:00] something up, maybe a short melody line, and then it's like he's flicking a pinball and, and it just is naturally going follow the path that it's going to go.
And he sets up another line behind it that's gonna follow the same path, in the sand, and if they just move together and he had it all in his head. And, I think that I. The depth that you saw psychologically with Bach is, is akin to the depth that you see in Shakespeare, although he's creating them in characters, whereas Bach is creating them with melody and harmony and structure and rhythm that is speaking to something that moves us in, in similar ways. I mean, it hits you in your heart and it hits you in your head depending on how it's performed.
Henry Oliver: Absolutely. I think to me, Bach's work it, they feel works of nature.
I don't, there's, there's nothing artificial about his best work. There's nothing where you can say, oh, I can see exactly what he's doing, even [00:15:00] when you can see what he's doing. You don't quite know how that has equaled the, the music you've just experienced, and I think that is something a bit with Shakespeare.
He, he takes us beyond what we thought were the capacities of musical language.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah. There are moments where you, I hear when Bach is about to take a melody that he had perhaps in a major key, and that he's going to pivot it into something in the minor key and , it's this anticipatory, oh my God, I can't believe this is about to happen.
And that it does. And because it's inevitable feeling. And you can get that in some of the plays, I think as well. Or even great novels, what the plot is that is about to happen and then it comes, and if it's executed beautifully, it can really, really hit, because you have a flavor of what's coming.
Henry Oliver: Yes. It hits even harder. I call this the expectation of astonishment. So I, if, if you say to someone, have the power to forecast the [00:16:00] future, and you see him over there walking down the street,when he gets underneath building number 30, a pane of glass will fall out of the top window and kill him.
And then two minutes later this happens. You wouldn't say, oh, that was not shocking to me because you had I you had given away what was going to happen. It would be worse, it would be more horrifying, right? And there's something about literature where, as you say, very often, explicitly or implicitly, we are told what's going to happen.
And it doesn't make it boring. It doesn't make it less awful or less hilarious or whatever. It, it increases the whole thing. And Bach has this, as I say, I think on another level. And that's why you can listen to Bach again and again and again throughout your life and get more out of it. That's why so many, there's so much potential for new performers with Bach, right?
Because [00:17:00] they can, they can exploit what you are expecting it, and I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna slightly do it in a new way, and I'm gonna show you, wow, there's even more in here than you realized, and I think that's what makes him very exciting.
Evan Goldfine: On that note, what do you think makes a great performance of Bach or Shakespeare?
I mean, these are both things that live on the page and have to come to us embodied by whoever is living with us right now, or I guess in the, in the case of recordings now, we have a little bit of reference, but what, what makes these performances great?
Henry Oliver: Great. I struggle to articulate this.
I'm not a good music critic, but I don't think it's, I, I think it's to do with more than technical perfection. I think you can hear a very exact performance that is not really the best performance. I saw Mitsuko Uchida recently. She wasn't playing Bach, she was playing Schubert and Mozart.
Oh, and it was insane. [00:18:00] It was one of the best, I went twice. It was two of the best nights at the concert hall I've had. She is able to use very, very precise and careful technique in the service of strong feeling. And I think Bach lends himself very much to that.
I think that's why everyone enjoyed, was it Olafssohn, the new Goldberg recording that came out? I saw that live.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah, I saw that live.
Henry Oliver: Insane.
Evan Goldfine: Right? One of the best con I've been to thousands probably of concerts in my top 10.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And he has that same thing.
Incredible control. Of all different aspects of performance, but he's doing it in the service of strong expression of feeling. And I think Bach because of the religiosity, because of the intensity of what he's trying to do. You have to get some Mozart, I feel you don't have to have the strength of feeling the, the music will do it for you.
[00:19:00] But with Bach, and, and this is I think why Glenn Gould, was a genius of Bach and was really nothing for Mozart, right. 'cause he —
Evan Goldfine: Well I have some pretty strong feelings about his, I think that he expressed a contempt for Mozart and his Mozart playing, which shaded my feelings about Gould on the whole, after hearing some of those records, after hearing his piano sonatas, I went back to say, well what, what is he doing here?
Why did he do that? And I love some Gould on Bach. He's very particular, but I also don't connect with some of it now. It's, it's unusual that someone's so quirky and eccentric became the standard bearer of how, for example, the Well Tempered Clavier is, is played.
But that was my first recording where I would listen over and over again and I found, found the richness in it, but I was able to also listen to others afterwards. And I aw, wow, that is a very particular recording. It exemplifies Gould's own genius for sure. But I'm glad he's not the only performer we have of those pieces. Do still connect with Gould?
You sent email about this. So tell me about how Gould still moves you over the years and have you ever had any complicated feelings about him?
Henry Oliver: I'm a big Glen Gould obsessive. I have never loved his Well-Tempered Clavier. Don't it at all. Can't listen to it. It's, it's weird.
I hate his Mozart recordings. I was offended. I have to turn them off. It's just, it's dreadful. And I think he has, because he was obviously, I don't know if troubled is the right word, but he was an intense person. He was a person of solitude and interiority.
[00:21:00] Maybe he was troubled, he was taking anxiety medication and other things. This is what eventually killed him. And I think, there is, that's very Bachan, right? Whereas Mozart is a composer of the world. He's a composer of social life. , people say the great waste of his talents when he was, when he had patrons and they made him write mints and little dances and some stupid little things, and this guy could be writing you the best operas the world's ever seen, and you are getting little party music. What the hell are you doing? But it's remarkable how good these, silly little pieces are that he's forced to write. And I think that's because he's naturally comic, he's naturally joyous.
There's a certain happiness that only exists when you're listening to Mozart. He's an extrovert, right? He's, his music is, is part and parcel of, of the commerce of life. Gould's not that at all.
Henry Oliver: When you watch those documentaries on [00:22:00] YouTube, which are fabulous, everyone should watch them.
You see him in the recording studio at the piano shop in the cafe with the taxi driver, and he's doing great and he's interacting, I'm not saying anything, but it's not his milieu. It's not his natural state. And when he's back home, by the lake, or in his house, he, he visibly becomes much more at ease and much more attuned to his surroundings.
And I think that really is a temperamental affinity with Bach. And so that's why his, , the p the piano music, the solo piano music, the partitas and stuff, that's why it's so fantastic.
Henry Oliver: Because, okay, he's not a Lutheran or whatever, but he is psychologically a bit of one of those, right?
And it, it just, it aligns him with Bach so well, and so he has that huge inner feeling that maybe he can't [00:23:00] express any other way than through his playing. And sometimes a great act of interpretation is a form of composition, and I think that's, that's what's happening with Bach.
That's obviously how you get new works of philosophy that someone interprets someone else to a degree of just creating a new philosophy on the back of their interpretation. And that's why Gould attracts all this pro and against and all these, and you can love him at one time and hate him at another because he's created some hybrid of Gould and Bach and it's, it is whatever it is.
And it's, he's got so much inside him to express just as Bach did. So I think that's what makes him the best.
Evan Goldfine: It feels him, it feels very, very personal. Everything that he's doing. What do you care for more? The early or late Goldbergs of Glenn Gould?
Henry Oliver: When I was young, I found it just in unconscionable that anyone would not prefer the early [00:24:00] Goldbergs from Gould.
I, I just, when you're so young and you see older people saying things and you're , I just dunno what it must be to be one of these. “What, what is this?” Whereas now I love listening to them both.
Henry Oliver: And I've really come to appreciate the later one. And, I listen in general much more to slower recordings or more classic recordings. When I listen to Gould, I'll do both.
Evan Goldfine: I find the later one to be too slow. I can't do it. I still can't do it.
Henry Oliver: I have come to enjoy slow Bach quite a lot, and I'm just gonna check it on my Apple Music. But my, my current favorite St. Matthew Passion is certainly at the beginning quite slow.
It's Karl Richter from 1980, and he just, he just opens it up and, and slows it down in a way that takes you to the height [00:25:00] of what it must have felt to have these very, very deep and and unified religious feelings. And I think that's what Gould is getting at in the in the late. Goldbergs and I now love them very much.
Evan Goldfine: I had the pleasure of listening to a lot of Karl Richter's recordings in my listening project. I was not particularly familiar with the Cantatas, but that, and that's probably half of the music at least, that Bach composed, in terms of time. And Richter , didn't record all of them altogether, but the ones that he did were slow.
They're very influenced, I feel by,he's definitely listened to a lot of Chopin, and the Romantics and that's informing his Bach interpretations. He also had the best singers. His singers on those recordings are fantastic. Schreier, Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, some of the real heavy hitters of the 20th century recorded with Richter, so, [00:26:00] I'd recommend his cantatas, if you like the St. Matthew's Passion of his as well, also particularly slower than some of the others.
Henry Oliver: I struggle with the cantatas the most, occasionally find recordings I like. But I, I'm gonna try that 'cause I'm really, I've been working at it for a few years and it, it isn't happening for me yet.
Evan Goldfine: I will pick out some favorites for you.
Henry Oliver: That would be great.
Evan Goldfine: Sure when we were talking about Gould and Bach, and we talked a little bit about Mozart being lighter, but Bach and Gould, they're very serious. I guess Beethoven is also probably just about as serious as, as Bach, but probably the most serious.
I mean, when I listen to Beethoven, it's he's trying to shake the world or something, but, but Bach has a deep seriousness about him. Do you find you connect with the seriousness? Can you listen to it? Even when he is being light? It feels very important and not flippant at [00:27:00] all, which is not how I think our culture is well suited towards right now. What do you think about that?
Henry Oliver: I think there is a lot of hunger for seriousness in our culture, and I think people are increasingly persuaded of the need to be serious. And maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it's the fact that there's more war in the world. Maybe it's the volatility of modern politics.
But I think we've lived through a period when people have been in total denial about death and its implications and about the shortness of life and the need, therefore to do what you must do while you can, and to experience the best while you have the time. And people are now coming back to that and people are now realizing that wow, being serious is the whole point of being alive, so maybe we'll have a revival of Bach 'cause of that. I don't know.
Evan Goldfine: I love your ethos of, [00:28:00] we have all these great books. You can read them, you should be reading these great books. They're here for us.
Henry Oliver: Of course, and I get it that Netflix is great and I watch Netflix and whatever, but they're not great in the same way. Everyone knows what it feels to stand on top of a mountain and be amazed, right. To experience true wonder at the state of the world. Everyone knows what it is to listen to music that does that to you. But everyone, and I include myself in this, we get trapped in the limits of our own knowledge, the limits of our own experience.
We become habituated to what we think excellence is. And listening to someone Bach is a constant reminder that you have no idea this man was creating a heaven on earth in music. You have no idea. Please pay more attention to him and stop assuming what excellence is. And that's why I, and that's why I say it because they push the horizons [00:29:00] of your understanding. The great books do the same thing. They push the horizons of your understanding in ways that you can't anticipate.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Your, your book, I've been thinking about tells the stories of late bloomers and, and you frame them as inspiring figures for the for the rest of us. The people who we've been talking about today are early bloomers, Shakespeare, Austen, Bach. These are not late bloomers. George Harrison was 26 when the Beatles were over. How do we normals deal with these outliers, even if we're hoping for our own second acts?
Henry Oliver: Was Bach really, was he not a late bloomer and an early bloomer? I mean, Art of Fugue right. Late. Right. The late work in Bach is, is truly extraordinary. I don't think he shows any signs of slowing down.
Evan Goldfine: Oh, that's interesting. So he a late bloomer, even though he's starting off early. His early bloom lets his late bloom go even higher than we could have imagined.
Henry Oliver: I, I [00:30:00] don't, I don't listen to the Art of Fugue and think, well, he's been at it for a few years and this is what I expect. I listen to the Art of Fugue and think, where did that come from? And I think there are a lot of composers that. The Beethoven string quartets, right? You can have the highest possible view of Beethoven's early work and still listen to those string quartets and want to know where did they come from.
Henry Oliver: Mozart is the same actually. I have Mozart as a very late bloomer in the sense that if you take the view that, not 10,000 hours necessarily, but it takes a certain amount of dedicated practice to become really excellent at something. The story with Mozart is that he starts that dedicated practice much earlier than the rest of us. Despite that the music that we record and listen to from Mozart and that we put on in the concert hall is all the second half of his career,
So it's K. 330 and onwards. [00:31:00] Obviously there are a few things earlier and, and whatever. But all this, if I asked you to name, just give me five pieces of Mozart.
Tell me the Mozart, you the Mozart, we put in car adverts, the most performed in the console. It's all later on in his career. And what we think of as Mozart's innovations, piano, concertos, the operas, some of the other work, it's all in the last 10 years, right? So I even think Mozart, it sounds crazy 'cause he's the most famous child prodigy.
I even think of him as a late bloomer. And I think in some ways this is inherent in music. Because the great composers are very experimental. They're always making discoveries, and they're always incorporating their discoveries in their next thing, their next work. Someone like Bruckner doesn't even start doing symphonies until he is halfway through his career.
Evan: Yeah.
Henry Oliver: Now, his early choral music is phenomenal. I mean, really, truly beautiful music, but it turns out you [00:32:00] can pivot to symphonies quite late on and do great work. Schubert, the last big piano Sonata writes before he dies. Where was he going next? Could we, could we not kill him, please? So I think it's, I think you can take some, if you want to take a hopeful lesson from these people, which maybe you shouldn't, but if you want to, the lesson is that if you keep doing the work and you keep being inventive, you can be a late bloomer, even if you were an early bloomer.
Evan Goldfine: It's a nice thing to ruminate on. Now. Just pivoting to, to one other thing I wanted to ask you before we talk about some specific pieces.
For a literature fan, you're a little bit more open to artificial intelligence than some of your peers. Will we get great artificial intelligence, composed literature or music in our lifetimes?
Henry Oliver: I don't know enough about, I'm, I'm not a technical [00:33:00] enough person to be able to say timelines.
My impression from what I see among the AI experts is, is yes, in principle. My view is that scaling has solved a lot and it seems to have solved things that. Was up for debate whether it would solve those things. And the trajectory of the progress is incredible. If you go back and look at the things people were complaining about two years ago, those now seem extraordinary, finished. And so I'm on the side of we need to keep an eye on this and, and surely it will. The current output is quite bad.
It's much worse at writing poetry than it is at medicine now. I think that should be inherently puzzling. That's not the case for humans once humans are [00:34:00] advanced enough, in terms of evolution, in terms of human culture, in terms of tools and technology.
Once they can do medicine. They've already been brilliant poets. We got Paradise Lost before we got penicillin. So I want to know why it is, why the, to me, the progress seems very slow on poetry compared to other areas, but I think that just means it'll come later.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah.
Henry Oliver: The big objection will be that AI is not in the world and that the creation of art really depends on physicality, smell, and touch and, and sound and so forth. And that the, the inner life that we've been talking about is an offshoot of the outer life of sensuality. And that may be what's limiting AI right now, but I really don't know.
And I think we start to reach a speculative zone very fast. The other option is AI will have its [00:35:00] own taste in literature. That won't be human taste. So someone set up a, an AI poetry assessment tool, and it's just some guy setting up a tool so we shouldn't take it super seriously.
And I tested it by giving it famous poems and it was, oh, incredible, 9.5 out of 10, so inventive, I can't believe the things it's doing with language. And I was like, great. And it, it knew, who's a nine, who's a seven? It was pretty good at not overrating certain people and whatever.
And then I gave it some AI poetry expecting it to say, “Really, you're giving me this after Emily Dickinson? No, this is not good.” And it was saying, Ooh, this is so clever, this is so inventive. And I was like, what? But the more I did it, the more I thought, well, I think AI will just appreciate poetry differently.
And, I've heard this from a couple of my friends who had it write a sci-fi novel. He didn't love what it [00:36:00] wrote, but the machine loved what it wrote.
Evan Goldfine: We all love our own reflection.
Henry Oliver: Well, maybe I just wonder if there will be something inherently different about AI art.
And that that will perpetuate the gulf we feel between us and the AI’s right now. But I still think that it will be possible now or in the near future for you to read something, to think it's really good and to not be confident. Maybe you'll say, I'm confident it's not AI, but you can't reasonably be confident of that anymore. And I think that reality is it's either with us or it's very close.
Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I have not been impressed by any of the music that's been composed yet.
Henry Oliver: God, no.
Evan Goldfine: God no. I hope there's a gulf. I hope there continues to be a gulf, but I'm, I'm not sure
Henry Oliver: What, but why if someone, if, if, if someone gave you some music to listen to and it's Bach level. Brilliant. Do you care? [00:37:00]
Evan Goldfine: I want it. Well, what do we mean by Bach level? Brilliant. Is it is Bach was inventive in what he was creating. I mean you, I could see that the AI would be able to create a reasonable simulacrum of another prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Henry Oliver: No, I'm just saying assume it produces something original and new and you listen to it and you are wow, this is insane.
This is as good as Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Schumann, whatever. And then someone says, oh, this is AI. I don't think you'll care. I think to begin with you might be a bit whatever, but this goes back to what we were saying about the inner life. Assume someone finds some letter somewhere. Oh, it's been kept in a cookery book.
In an archive and we didn't know it was here, and it's JS Bach saying. “My friend said, I must have an extraordinary inner life. What does he know? I'm empty on the inside, man. I just, I just throw notes on the page. It's all, it's all a technical game to me.” I wouldn't fall out of love with his music. No way. [00:38:00] Whatever. So if the, if the AI can do it and it is good and you just hear, you go to the concert hall and someone plays on a piano and then they're like, AI composed it, fine, I think that'll be fine. I think people will have a, a strong reaction against it, but it'll be more ideological than anything else.
They'll be freaked out by the fact that AI has made such an impression upon them. They won't be denying the impression.
Evan Goldfine: Maybe the gulf feels so wide now because I can't imagine what that would actually be, but we'll have to wait to see. We'll have to wait to see what it is.
Henry Oliver: Exactly. So, and that's why a one good analogy is modernism.
Whether or not it's true that people threw, threw chairs at the Stravinsky performance or whatever, right? they weren't denying that it was art in their, when they did that, they were trying to say, this is not, but everything about their reaction was saying, boy, this is some art. It's just not the art you expected or could have expected.
Evan Goldfine: Let's [00:39:00] talk about a couple of your favorite recordings before we wind up. What should everybody listen to from your personal canon?
Henry Oliver: The Three Part Inventions played by Glenn Gould live in Moscow is my favorite Bach album. And I go back to it again and again. It was not for a long time, I didn't know it, but once I found it, it became the best thing.
It's a niche pick. I can't claim that it's Bach's best music or, or anything that, but it really, It's really brilliant for me and that that's what I would, that's what I would suggest. I want to know, I want to know what's your dark horse pick for a Bach piece?
Evan Goldfine: Ah, there are some songs that I heard with Richter and Peter Schreier, the great tenor from the 20th century, playing just these, these organ and voice, just the two of them together.
Very, very delicate. Some really extraordinary music. And [00:40:00] I will drop the links to, to those in the notes to the show as well. But yeah, I was really taken by a lot of the singing during my listening tour of this music in ways that I was not expecting to. When I to listen to classical singing, I tend to go to Schubert and Schumann in particular.
The great songs from their great song cycles I've always been really connected to. But earlier than that, or even the, the more religious music, I, I was never able to. But some of, some of the stuff that I heard this year, I keep returning to.
Henry Oliver: That's great. I'm gonna listen to that.
Evan Goldfine: Henry, this has been so great. Thank you for talking Bach and Shakespeare and the expectations of astonishment and I'll be thinking about that as I read my next big thick novels.
Henry Oliver: Good. Well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it very much.
Evan Goldfine: Alright, take care.
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