Art and Science, Beauty and Truth, Performance and Analysis?

[1] In their introductory essay, Daniel Barolsky and Edward Klorman cite the Performance and Analysis Interest Group's mission statement, which ends with the following two goals: "to facilitate dialogue between performers and theorists, and to open new avenues for such interaction." The mission statement was crafted in 2004, but its identification of the existence of two distinct cultures--performers and theorists--and its implication of a lingering Cold War between them still resonates; even today, despite the many hopeful signs of a cultural detente to which Barolsky and Klorman refer, there is much work to be done towards a thawing of relations. Such rhetoric puts me in mind of Charles Percy Snow's famous Cambridge lecture of 1959, "The Two Cultures," about the standoff between the arts and humanities on the one hand and the sciences on the other. Surely we must squirm with ashamed recognition when we read Snow's account of the gulf of distrust, fear, and/or indifference that has kept the "two cultures" separate, only to the detriment of the health and vitality of both (Snow 1998).[2] One of the perennial factors impeding a more robust dialogue between the performance and analysis communities is an apparent conflict of languages. I suspect that those of us who identify as both performers and scholars, or who pursue some variety of "performance as research," may sympathize with my own enduring frustration at the fact that theory-based analytical language often fails to get a point across in rehearsals, while the colorful or dramatic language that performers regularly use to communicate their expressive intentions can still raise a red flag for editors and reviewers when it appears in an article submitted to a scholarly journal. I think there is an instructive comparison to be made here with the similar but not identical communication problem between Snow's "two cultures," art and science.[3] This disciplinary divide was the very topic of a public conversation that took place in November of 2013 between the novelist Ian McEwan and the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed (McEwan and Arkani-Hamed 2013).(1) McEwan and Arkani-Hamed agree that the cultural impasse between art and science has been softening, thanks largely to the efforts of scientists who attempt to explain their work in widely accessible, jargon-free terms. Yet there is a persistent note of caution in Arkani-Hamed's remarks. Metaphors can be useful in communicating scientific knowledge, he says, but "there's a difficulty with metaphors, which is that you can't take them too far--they're not literally what's going on." Only the language of mathematics, he says, can fully and accurately express the "truth with a capital T" that scientists are seeking.[4] McEwan accepts this view of scientific truth, but he also wonders whether the beauty of scientific theories might form a Keatsian bridge to the culture of art; after all, he recalls, it was once remarked that the beauty of Watson and Crick's model of a DNA molecule was a kind of proof that it had to be true. Arkani-Hamed is quick to refine McEwan's suggestion. "Ideas that we [scientists] find beautiful are not a capricious aesthetic judgment. It's not fashion, it's not sociology. . .The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there's no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that's what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful."[5] This is where music makes a breathtaking entrance into the discussion: Arkani-Hamed's example of the scientific understanding of beauty as inevitability and eternal truth turns out to be Leonard Bernstein's legendary television lecture on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (1954). …