Something You Play
“Over four years of G.O.T.H.S. and you haven't turned in one piece on Philip Glass, Tony.”
I did not move to Los Angeles in 2010 to try and become a comedian; rather, I moved to Los Angeles because my day job in corporate sales moved me there, and I figured while I was there that I might as well try to become a comedian. So I spent a lot of money on improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater, and I spent a lot of time with my friends at indie improv shows that all started at 11pm on a weeknight in some crumbling black box theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I tried very hard to be funny with my friends in front of other people.
One of our teachers told our class once that it was critically important, in order to be good at this sort of thing, that we each have some sort of life outside of improv. We couldn’t just spend all of our time hanging out with other comedians only doing comedy things. We had to have jobs and hobbies and opportunities to interact with other people outside of the world of comedy. UCB’s improv style revolved around very grounded, realistic people having very grounded, realistic reactions to generally absurd situations. So you had to know how very grounded, realistic people behaved in order to reflect that properly on stage, and as anyone who has spent time around comedians knows, they're not the best people to hang out with to understand how grounded, realistic people talk and act and react to things. Because I spent my days in a corporate sales job, I had a decent ear for how people talked about stupid office bullshit or stupid business bullshit. I could play a boss very well, or a coworker trying to awkwardly shoot the shit with a near-stranger; it was very different from the standup I wrote in college, because I was observing a different kind of person than I had been in college. It was easy for me to draw on the deep well of stupid office bullshit and stupid business bullshit that I saw every day.
People assume, correctly, that studying improv helps you develop certain skills that are helpful in your day job. Because of the time I spent grinding out west fourteen years ago, I'm very comfortable speaking in front of large groups of people, and I can think on my feet pretty well when I get a curveball thrown at me in a meeting, that sort of thing. Being a comedian made me a much better business idiot. But what I never assumed was that being a business idiot would make me a much better comedian, because knowing how business idiots talk and act would make comedy about those business idiots much more grounded and authentic. It would help me understand how comedy worked in a way that was very legible and immediate in my life, help me articulate what made funny things funny both on and off stage, and give me new methods of trying out what I believed was the best way to be funny, to see if those methods worked.
Mark P. Shea had a nice little piece on his blog a couple of weeks ago on the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. I had not heard the latter term before, but it's pretty clear from context and etymology that orthopraxy refers to “doing the right things” just as orthodoxy means “believing the right things”. The two, as Shea argues, cannot be separated. What you believe informs what you do, and what you do informs what you believe, and the cycle keeps going forever. When Shea sees internet memes lamenting that the Creed doesn't tell us how to act or the Sermon on the Mount doesn't tell us what to believe, he contends that, actually, both of them do that:
“The silly demand that we choose between belief in Christ and obedience to Christ is a nonsensical schism. Faith in Christ is the only thing that makes it possible to obey Christ and obedience to Christ is the only way to incarnate living faith in Christ. The Creed is not attempting to replace the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount is packed with implications about what Christ demands we believe about who he is: the incarnate Son of God. The last thing the Church needs is yet another demand that we choose between things that are in no way opposed.”
Here's how I think of it: every person of faith, knowingly or unknowingly, is writing theology in their head. They are deciding what they believe and what is important to them, and those decisions then influence how they act when they are around other people. But then, when those people of faith interact with the rest of the world and encounter other people and have conversations and succeed at some things and fail at others and get excited and burned out and overjoyed and miserable, they, consciously or unconsciously, go back and revise the theology that they've been writing in their head. They adjust what they believe and what's important to them, based on what they have encountered in the world. And then that adjusted mental theology affects how they encounter the world moving forward, which leads to additional revisions of that mental theology, and the cycle goes on forever. Meeting someone new, encountering someone without a home, getting help from someone at a protest, having a conversation with a frustrated asylum seeker, sitting with a couple trying to get medical care as they try to start a family, all of these things will reshuffle what you consider “preeminent” in your practice of Catholicism and get you rewriting your own personal theology. Part of the reason I write G.O.T.H.S. is to give myself an outlet to try and better articulate my own personal theology to myself, so I can understand it better and, hopefully, act more compassionately out in the world. And then the other reason I write G.O.T.H.S. is that nobody wants to talk to me about the new Philip Glass album so I'm going to just make you read my thoughts on it.
Philip Glass just released a new album. It's great. The octogenarian composer recorded the accurately-named Philip Glass Solo in 2021, when he was still waiting out the plague in his apartment; as you'd expect from someone who will be remembered as one of the most influential (and polarizing) composers of the twentieth century, he spent a lot of his downtime playing the piano. Solo has no new pieces and is made up entirely of staples from the Glass catalog: parts of Glassworks and Metamorphosis, as well as Mad Rush and a part of the soundtrack that Glass composed for The Truman Show. As Pitchfork's review of the album - they gave it an 8.0 - points out, not only have all of these pieces been recorded multiple times by multiple artists, all of them have also been recorded by Glass himself at previous points in his career. But he wanted to play and record them again, decades after he played and recorded them for the first time. In his view, they are different this time around.
Glass is one of the titans of an American art music movement that emerged in the 1970s called Minimalism, which should be understood differently than the way we talk about "minimalism" colloquially. You wouldn't listen to a famous Glass piece like Einstein on the Beach or Music in Twelve Parts and think “wow, that's really stripped down”. Einstein, for instance, was a massive production that Glass calls an “opera” simply because opera houses are the only venues physically big enough to stage it; the complete piece is five hours long and scored for three reeds, two organs, a sixteen-member choir with soprano and tenor soloists, a violin soloist, and a narrator reading poems by a boy who was on the autism spectrum:
Minimalist music is not necessarily stripped-down; minimalist music is repetitive. Here's how you start listening to Philip Glass: start with a piece from early in his career, like “Music in Similar Motion”:
Obviously, this piece is built around repeating elements. It's the same phrase, over and over. Except…it's not. Just when you think you've settled into the pattern, the pattern changes very slightly, usually because Glass has added or subtracted a note from the phrase, upending the normal musical understanding of meter. So you think you can just kind of zen out and float on this nice ambient pattern - Glass is a longtime student of Tibetan Buddhism, after all - but you really can't, because you keep getting pulled out of it as the pattern shifts. I personally think the music is very pleasant to listen to - the Minimalists were reacting to the radical experimentation of the postwar era and focused on writing pieces with recognizable tonal consonance and rhythmic pulses - but it's a different listening experience than a piece of traditional Western art music. Glass’ additive and subtractive processes are a hallmark of his composition - other Minimalists like Steve Reich or Terry Riley would take different approaches to manipulating their repeating musical elements - and they require tremendous virtuosity as a musician to properly perform. Imagine you had to play a twelve-minute piano etude that was just the same thing over and over except there were miniscule variations in each “over and over” and you had to get every one exactly right. You'd not only have to be a good piano player at a base level, you would need to have a remarkable sense of focus and endurance, and an extraordinary ability to listen. Glass wrote music for all different sizes of ensemble throughout his long career, but he wrote a large percentage of his early work intending to play it himself, or in the Philip Glass Ensemble, which was originally Glass and his friends performing regular concerts in Glass’ loft. And this was against the conventional wisdom for a Juilliard-trained musician like Glass. His 2015 memoir Words Without Music is a great read; he's had a fascinating life and career, and he's extremely good at articulating his creative process and performance practice. As he writes:
“At Juilliard there was a division between music theory and music practice. Once I was officially in the composition department, I was told I wouldn’t need to play the piano anymore, as there were very good players at the school who would perform my music for me. I was given a piano teacher for several years, but no one in the composition department was in the least interested in the possibility that I might want to be a composer-performer. I have no idea where the notion came from that performance need not be an essential part of a composer’s skills. Making the practice of music and the writing of music separate activities was poor advice. It’s a misunderstanding about the fundamental nature of music. Music is, above all, something we play, it’s not something that’s meant for study only.
For me, performing music is an essential part of the experience of composing. I see now that young composers are all playing. That was certainly encouraged by my generation. We were all players. That we would become interpreters ourselves was part of our rebellion.”
Glass cannot separate writing music from performing music. Music is something you play. Here he is in the same chapter:
“A work of art has no independent existence. It has a conventional identity and a conventional reality and it comes into being through an interdependence of other events with people. Later on, when I would be talking with students, I would ask them, ‘What do you have in the library here?’ ‘Music books,’ they would say. ‘No, but what is it?’ I would ask again. ‘It’s music,’ they’d say. ‘No, it isn’t music. It’s pages with lines and dots on them, that’s what it is. Music is what you hear. Those books aren’t music, they’re just the evidence of somebody else’s idea. Or you can use them as a way of making music. But they’re not actually music.’”
Pretty good, right? If you hold up a sheet of music, it's just a piece of paper with lines and dots on it. The piece of paper doesn't mean anything by itself until someone plays it and someone hears it. Are there any other fields you can think of where the piece of paper doesn't mean anything by itself?
In late 2023, Pope Francis released Ad Theologiam Promovendam, a new papal document on the proper orientation of the field of theology. Unfortunately, the document has not been translated into English yet - a classic case of racism against the world's most oppressed group, Americans - so I have to dig up English-speaker commentary to get a handle on what's actually in the document. But the gist appears to be this: theology, a field which can famously get up its own ass, needs to reorient itself explicitly towards service to the margins of society, and the only way to assess the success of a piece of theology is not the piece of paper but rather the material impact it has on the world. Cardinal McElroy of San Diego put it like this:
“[Francis] calls for a transformation of Catholic theology so that it moves away from abstraction and ideology and towards "mercifully addressing the open wounds of humanity and creation and within the folds of human history, to which it prophesies the hope of an ultimate fulfillment."
Such a theology is inherently pastoral, with theological reflection starting from "the different contexts and concrete situations in which people find themselves," placing itself at the service of evangelization. It seeks "engagement and dialogue in every sphere of knowledge, in order to reach and involve the whole people of God in theological research, so that the life of the people may become theological life…such a fundamental shift in our understanding of the objective of theology can prevent our teachings from becoming disengaged from the actual life situations of women and men and the insights of human wisdom that have become apparent to us through other, non-theological forms of knowledge.”
Or, here's some reporting on it from the AP:
“Francis said that theologians must "confront themselves with profound cultural transformations." He didn't mention specific issues. Instead, the pope urged them to adopt "openness to the world, to man, in the concreteness of his existential situation, with its issues, its wounds, its challenges, its potentials." Thus, "theological reflection is called to a turning point, a paradigm change" that commits it to "be able to read and interpret the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women daily live, in different geographical, social and cultural environments." That includes, Francis continued, being able to "enter in the culture, in the vision of the world, in the religious tradition of a people.””
You can write whatever you want, but what you write, what you say you believe or are supposed to believe, does not exist separately from your actions as you perform what you believe, and it does not exist separately from the people who are witnessing you as you perform those actions (or are on the receiving end of those actions), and from what you learn as you listen to those people. A piece of music does not exist separate from the musician playing it or the audience hearing it.
Joseph Strickland, who has recently grown a “everything is going fine for me ever since I found myself with all of this extra free time” beard, has been very clear that he is a great Catholic, because he readily provides a list of seven key things he believes, and because he believes those seven things, he's a great Catholic. He doesn't point to his service to the church or to anyone else, he doesn't point to anything he's done or anyone he's helped, he points to the sheet of paper, and in fact whenever he opens his mouth or does anything, he seems to go out of his way to be cruel, stupid, or both.
So here's a question: if you say you're a great musician, and the way you prove that is by holding up a sheet of music that nobody ever plays and nobody ever hears - and if, in fact, the only times anyone ever heard your music it very obviously sounded like dogshit - are you a great musician? Are you a great composer? Is what you're saying worth anyone's time at all? Music is something you play and something people hear. What is Catholic theology? Is it something you do and something that people witness and receive? Is a list of seven things on a “plumb line” actual Catholicism, or is is just the evidence of somebody else’s idea, something that, at best, you could use to create actual Catholicism?
Look, I'm not inventing anything new here. I've been exploring the concept of “you can't just say words and have them not mean anything” from early 2022 all the way through late 2022. I like the way Glass puts it, though; it really locks it into place for me. When I think about the theologians that I like, and that I've shared with all of you, they are people who clearly see theology as something you do, just as Glass sees music as something you play. Susan Bigelow Reynolds wrote a great book about the theology of Vatican II and how it manifests at a parish level, and it was very obviously a book she never would have written had she not worked at a parish, witnessed parishoners bringing that theology to life firsthand, and participated in that herself. Kate Ward writes brilliantly about Catholicism’s response to wealth inequality, and I'm guessing a lot of her insight came from her time working as a union organizer. Reneé Roden writes about God's love for the poor, and she knows that love firsthand because she's a poor person who has spent a lot of time with other poor people, not “fixing” or “serving” them but as one of them. Kaya Oakes or Kathleen Sprows Cummings write about how the church has often failed women materially and theologically, and guess what, they're both women that the church has failed.
“You're saying you should rewrite theology, literally change what you believe, based on what you observe in the world and how people respond to how you act on those beliefs?” Yes, that's how being a person in every other aspect of life works. You're supposed to write comedy based on the life you observe and that's going to change over time. You're supposed to write music with an understanding of how it gets performed and heard. “Then do you really believe in anything?” Believe in the person in front of you asking for help, because the “theology” that you want to be eternal and unchanging does not exist separate from your response to that person. Catholicism is not an exercise in saying the same thing over and over and over again. There are changes, every time, in every person encountered, in every situation that demands charity, and being able to notice those changes in what feels like an endless sea of droning repetitive noise requires constant practice and eventual virtuosity. It requires listening. It requires treating music as something you play. Here's Glass:
“I immediately abandoned any idea I had that music had some kind of eternal existence, an existence that was independent of the transaction that happens between the performer and the listener. What John [Cage] was focusing on was that transaction. Later on I understood that the performer has a unique function in terms of what I call this transactional reality which comes from being in the presence of the work: that the interpreter/player of the music becomes part of that. Until then, I had really thought of the interpreter as a secondary creative person. I never thought he was on the same level with Beethoven or Bach. But after I had spent some time thinking about all that and began playing myself, I saw that the activity of playing was itself a creative activity and I came to have a very different idea about performance and also a different idea about the function that performing can have for the composer.
The activity of the listener is to listen. But it's also the activity of the composer. If you apply that to the performer, what is the performer actually doing? What is the proper attitude for the performer when he is playing? The proper attitude is this: the performer must be listening to what he is playing. And this is far from automatic.”
And here's Glass again: