Ted Gioia on what he didn't do to get into music and some thoughts from Leszek Kolakowski on the weaknesses of clever autodidacts

 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/id-do-these-seven-things-if-i-were-4c8

At some point during my teenage years, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician. But I didn’t have a coherent plan.

I just spent a lot of time at the piano. And when I wasn’t sitting at the keyboard, I listened to jazz—on records and in concert. I also read jazz magazines and books at the local public library (which had a subscription to Downbeat).

But here’s what I didn’t do:

·         I didn’t get a music degree.

·         I didn’t take any lessons after the age of 18—and never had a single jazz lesson.

·         I didn’t try to get gigs.

·         I didn’t network with influential people in the music business.

·         I occasionally glanced at a music textbook, but never really studied one.

·         I didn’t learn anything about music technology (except how to plug in my Fender Rhodes).

That ... sure explains a lot ... about how and why I have come to find Gioia's work on music that isn't jazz or blues to be so reliably out to lunch. It also reminded me of this zinger from Kolakowski about Proudhon.

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393060546

Main Currents of Marxism

Lescek Kolakowski

Copyright © 2005 by Leszek Kolakowski

Copyright © 1978 by Oxford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-393-32943-8

Page 127

 

While Marx’s criticism was unjust and dishonest in some respects, he was intellectually far superior to Proudhon, who had all the faults of a clever autodidact: self-assurance, unawareness of the limitations of his knowledge, incomplete or desultory reading, lack of skill in selecting and organizing material, and the hasty condemnation of authors whom, for the most part, he did not properly understand.

Leszek Kolakowski on scholars who write as though they can create a historic text out of its "ingredients" from the past

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3632441.html

Modernity on Endless Trial

Leszek Kolakowski

Translated by Stefan Czerniawski, Wolfgang Freis, and Agnieszka Kolakowska

Paper  ISBN: 9780226450469

epub  ISBN: 9780226217406

pdf   ISBN: 9780226217406

 

from Chapter Twenty-Two

Fabula mundi and Cleopatra’s Nose

 

… once we decide that everything is explicable, everything is indeed explicable. My late friend Lucien Goldmann displayed admirable ingenuity in linking up the smallest details of Pascal’s Pensees with the plight of the French noblesse de robe after the Fronde. One would think that he could really write the Pensees without reading them, solely on the basis of the historical evidence concerning the class conflicts of the time. And it is here that the crucial point lies. For if there were a reliable method for a historical explanation of culture, we would also be able to use it as a tool for prediction. To be able to explain what has happened is also to be able to predict what has not yet happened, otherwise the word explain would not have the meaning normally attributed to it. To believe that we have at our disposal an effective method of explaining a philosophical idea in its entirety, whether it be psychoanalysis or historical materialism or any other explanatory theory in the history of ideas, is to believe that we can reconstruct it solely on the basis of our knowledge of the “factors” which we take to be the cause of its birth and mentally reproduce the same creative process, just as we reproduce an experiment in chemistry. That such a feat is unimaginable is proof, if proof is needed, of the impossibility of historical explanation of philosophical ideas. It is proof, in other words, that no method of explanation exists.

 

Page 355

… we find our justification for the claim that one philosopher is the “precursor” of another, as if the sense of a human life could be teleologically determined by something that was yet to come, as if the culture of an age were waiting for someone to appear, striving toward a certain point of culmination, a culmination ultimately embodied in a person of genius: to wit, Fontenelle’s “At last Descartes appeared.” But a culture does not really develop in this way. Aquinas’ Contra Gentiles did not lie dormant, as a potentiality, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, awaiting its actuality; the works of Marx led no latent in existence in Hegel’s Phenomenology; no Plotinus lurked, germinating, among the pages of Plato, nor did Plotinus carry within his own bosom the invisible embryo of Maimonides.

In musicology and music history the predictable variations would be "At last Beethoven appeared" or "At last Debussy appeared" or "At last Louis Armstrong appeared" or "At last John Coltrane appeared" or insert-their-name-here.  At last ... the Beatles.  At last ... Nirvana.  At last ... Led Zeppelin.  At last ... Michael Jackson.  At last ... Beyonce.  At last ... Taylor Swift.  

Kolakowski could joke about how this kind of just-so post hoc approach to the history of philosophy lets people pretend that the point to which we have come now was the only point to which we have come.  

Richard Sibbes on spiritual tyranny

... Spiritual tyranny is the greatest tyranny, and then especially when it is where most mercy should be shown; yet even there some, like cruel surgeons, delight in making long cures, to serve themselves through the misery of others. It brings men under a terrible curse that they `remembered not to show mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man', that they might `even slay the broken in heart' (Psa. 109:16).

In the same way, to such as raise temporal advantage to themselves out of the spiritual misery of others we must add such as raise estates by betraying the church, and are unfaithful in the trust committed unto them, when the children cry for the bread of life, and there is none to give them, bringing thus upon the people of God that heavy judgement of a spiritual famine, starving Christ in his members. ... 

Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed, Chapter 10