brute-forcing Sibelius
and other things your teacher told you not to do
The transition at the end of the first movement in the Sibelius Violin Concerto is such a dramatic tone shift and one of my favorite moments in music—from the octave / first trill to the second trill it’s like a transition from heartbreak to anger (not that this sort of thing is uncommon in concertos e.g. Mendelssohn’s allegro molto appassionato has a dramatic buildup towards the end but it’s a more gradual agitated restatement of an earlier theme).
The Sibelius is one of those pieces that’s rather fun to return to, long before you’re ready to actually play it, just to see how you fare. I briefly contemplated going from “playing at it” to “playing it,” but that’s really not necessary or a good idea right now. The arpeggios were manageable, the jumps felt fine. In other words, the technical challenges didn’t feel discouraging—but that doesn’t mean I’m going to hack away at it just yet.
I’ve been thinking more about how the most skilled among us can perceive difficulties and intricacies that most of us can’t. Heifetz is said to have called the Mozart concerti the most difficult of all, and we learn those at the end of the Suzuki method! (apparently he also took one look at the Schoenberg and said he’d need to grow a sixth finger, so idk)
Just because you can brute-force technical challenges doesn’t mean you’ve mastered a piece—I made that mistake in early adolescence, jumping to the first movement of Mendelssohn when its technique was a real challenge for me. I was visiting family in Pakistan for the two weeks prior to my planned “performance,” and forced myself out of jetlag to practice four hours every morning. I promptly fell asleep at 3pm every day, woke up in time for dinner, probably slept very weirdly at night, and repeated this cycle for the duration of my stay.
I think the ability to observe difficulty is a bit more subtle than seeing something is obviously beyond your skill level. Getting the notes down in Sibelius is one thing (and a hard thing)—playing it musically at all literally multiplies the difficulty. I like to think about how Sibelius once dreamed of becoming a violin virtuoso, but had to resign his dream:
His Violin Concerto is imbued both with his feeling for the instrument and the pain of his farewell to his “dearest wish” and “overriding ambition.”
It’s amazing how someone can take the drama of the self, a whirlwind of experience and emotion, inject it into music that communicates confusion, anger, tension, far better than words could. Proust’s Vinteuil had dug into himself for the Sonata:
Vinteuil, striving to do something new, interrogated himself, with all the power of his creative energy, reached down to his essential self at those depths where, whatever the question asked, it is in the same accent, that is to say its own.
A work of art, a musical piece, communicates something non-propositional. The effect can’t be captured in mere language. Struggling through the notes, hacking through it, does not make for a good medium. To articulate properly the complexity of what a composer puts into a challenging work, you have to transcend the notes on the page. There’s a reason Hahn’s Sibelius looks effortless. The act of communicating yourself—playing with intention and making artistic choices—demands an effortlessness in technique.
In the musical context, this is really just an ode to the virtues of practice. In a different context, I sometimes wonder if a language model is like the overambitious student, brute-forcing passages until it can creak their way through a piece far beyond its ability. There are almost lyrical, non-propositional components to human communication, even as it happens through language. When you and I speak in a language we’re fluent in, we’re not thinking about the next word (e.g. the next note), but about something we want to communicate—also, importantly, there is a lot we communicate that we do not think about, because we share context and have common sense.
Language models miss a lot of this. They say nonsensical things! They get facts wrong! They can’t do arithmetic! So many floating point operations have to happen correctly for a language model to give you the wrong answer to your multiplication question!
Language affords an impressive description of the human experience, but there are many ways of knowing and experiencing the world that we cannot represent propositionally, that we can’t put into language. It does seem fair to observe that we haven’t existed with things that compose reasonably human-sounding text before. It’s easy not to know how to react.
You might read things like this to say we’ll never “get there”—never replicate what is most truly human. That’s a comforting thought, and something I’m going to choose to remain agnostic about for the time being (though I have my sympathies). Does each thing we figure out how to automate force us further into a corner where we will find what actually defines us?
A high school English teacher of mine had us read William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech for class, and it sticks with me as a beautiful ode to the audacity of the human spirit:
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory but -- but to make out of the material of the human spirit something which was not there before…
the young man, young woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
The human heart in conflict with itself is an interesting drama to place at the center stage of the human condition. Faulkner ends his speech with a truly memorable statement:
Until he releases -- relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will still endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I began this essay with some pithy comments on the Sibelius concerto. It’s not writing, but Faulkner might agree that it molds something wholly new out of the materials of the human spirit, out of Sibelius’s own unrealized ambitions, the internal drama of his personhood.
Writing has its own music, too—Proust’s writing feels symphonic sometimes. “Reading between the lines” carries a lot more depth than figuring out a narrators’ point of view or reliability; words communicate far more than they state. Notes and words aren’t something to be composed or read merely in sequence, and I still think even our favorite RLHF models miss something important. Humans aren’t next-word prediction machines. Just as the most musically capable among us understand difficulties the rest of us might not, so too would it take great experience to spot what’s truly core to language and communication.
All this seems like a great excuse for me to not edit this essay, hit publish, and hope it communicates something beyond my words.
word blocks
'Cause we are not afraid of who we are
But of what we have become
And we are not afraid of what's to be
When this road has just begun
So we will turn our backs
And close the doors for the last time
Give me back what's mine
~ “Boardwalks” by Little May
things consumed recently
new yorker did another end of the english major piece (I do sympathize with lots of what’s here but also the issue is way more complex than the perspective I can inhabit)
Parmenides is such a weird dialogue
I somehow had never heard of The Prancing Pony Podcast before this month and I am so happy it exists
Related. Bret Devereaux has a great essay on why the world (Middle Earth) of the Rings of Power didn’t feel real/believable. Favorite quotation: “Horses, of course, are famously quite a bit bigger than humans…”
Joel Lehman’s wonderful new paper Machine Love
Hilary Hahn’s 2022 album Eclipse WHICH I ALSO MISSED WHEN IT CAME OUT brilliant Dvořák recording but does that even need to be said
