Nature, Art and Values; an Essay in Three Parts. 1.

 by Koenraad Kortmulder                                       k.kortmulder@kpnplanet.nl 

I. On Art and Nature; some parallels.

II. On Imaging in Art and Nature.

III. On Values of Art and Nature.

Abstract.

Individuals are members of classes, and of classes-of-classes. That is true for both individual animals and separate works of art. Classes result from break-throughs and the origination of new morphospaces. (I).

Interaction between or within individuals leads to imaging of one onto the other, and thereby creates an archive of the evolution of nature, art and the planet. (II).

The archive of retained images and their integration defines an object’s value. (III).

Part I

I. On Art and nature; some parallels.

I.1 Parakeets and piano-concertos.

I turn the radio on. Presently, sparkling piano notes come tumbling out. They are accompanied and relieved by orchestral sounds. Familiar and yet full of unexpected moves. A Mozart piano concerto. One I have not heard before. No wonder, for Mozart wrote 27, and at best half of those are part of the regular repertoire.

But stop, how can I identify this as Mozart’s if I do not even know the music? Admittedly, the instruments pin down the genre: concerto for piano and orchestra. Harmonic transparence, the quick passages and rhythm define the approximate period when it was written. But why Mozart specifically? Why not Haydn or Beethoven or, if I can exclude them, Clementi or others? Because Mozart had his own personal style (or styles). It would take a professional to sum up its specific features. I can only say that Mozart developed his style in a number of phases, disengaging himself from his teachers; Johann Christian Bach, for example; and above all his father, who had very precise opinions on what music should be like, as well as on his son’s career. As a result, one can even assign a composition to a specific period of Mozart’s life, though roughly and with some room for error.

A contemporary critic praised the new inventions in Mozart’s music, but complained that there were too many of them. No keeping pace with it, even for an expert. The man did not see that Mozart was creating a wholly new way of writing music, reaching beyond all those details.

Let us take an example from another art: architecture. The invention of the gothic style has been attributed to Abbot Suger. His abbey church of St Denis was the first gothic building. The choir, that is. The nave was reconstructed later, also gothic, but in a more developed version.

Characteristic of the gothic style are the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress - the external arch that connects the nave to the vertical buttress. Each of these three elements had already been put into practice in Suger’s time. The Romanesque cathedral of Durham, for instance, has rib vaults, and pointed arches may be seen in many a Romanesque church of Southern Italy (1). The quintessence of gothic is not in any of these structures alone, but in using them to create thin, flowing lines leading the forces of gravitation from the vaults, the walls and the columns towards the ground. These lines may be emphasised by thin shafts accompanying the great pillars and the walls above them and connecting to the ribs of the vaults. Also the shafts were an invention of the late Romanesque (for instance La Madeleine at Vezelay) and they were even incomplete in some early gothic churches (Notre Dame, Paris).

The flowing concentration of forces, typical for gothic, creates an impression of lightness. Not only an impression: the walls between the supports can be thinner and the windows larger without the whole losing its stability. The three elements mentioned above are thus only means to the goal of lightness (Pevsner, 1963), just like Mozart employed diverse inventions to create his own style. After St Denis, builders followed suit, exploring the possibilities offered by the new concept. Ever higher and seemingly lighter the great churches became, culminating in the unfinished cathedral of Beauvais.

The break-through to gothic took place in a Romanesque environment. The latter, in its turn, may be identified on the basis of certain features, such as the groin vault and round arches. As with the gothic, these elements had been invented earlier, but were now used to a new end: the orderly and transparent articulation of space, an ideal that took shape during the 11th century in several parts of Europe (Pevsner, op.cit.). 

Back to the radio. To test my guess, I can only wait for the announcer. The composition might be an imitator’s work, one Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s or Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s, or even an early Camille Saint-Saëns. Many a composer to-day would be able to write a concerto in Mozart’s style so well that you and I could not distinguish it from the real stuff. Yet, the inventor of that style was Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. ‘Mozart’ is the label of the style which unites all of Mozart’s works and those of his imitators.

Presently, my attention is diverted away from the radio by some high-pitched shrieks outside. A bird? But what bird? I step into the garden and see two birds flying overhead: the size of a dove and bright green. They produce the sounds I heard. Long, pointed tails, rounded heads on short necks, and hooked beaks. Parrots or parakeets, no doubt. An article in a nature periodical comes to mind: these must be Ring-necked Parakeets. Native to the heights of the Himalaya, they have found the way to Europe, some 20 or 30 years ago. Probably not on their own wings, but introduced by a bird-fancier or just escaped. They survived and reproduced in our urban environment, now numbering thousands in every town.

Now I know what species they are, but note that one could identify them as Psittacidae - a bird family - without knowing the species. Just as I could identify an unfamiliar piece as ‘Mozart’.

As I re-enter the house, music is still pouring from the radio, but different. I have missed the announcer and it would now take some effort to ascertain whether, a few minutes ago, I listened to Mozart or ‘Mozart’. I do not mind. It was not the reason for this little story, as you may have guessed.

I.2 Breakthroughs and morphospaces.

So, what does it mean, that almost trivial fact that one can successfully guess at an organism’s or an objet d’art’s taxonomic status? It must mean that each individual or species is a member of a natural class, distinct from other classes on a few, clear-cut criteria. Those distinguishing characteristics came into being at a certain moment as ‘break-through’ within an extant routine. The break-through opened a new, untrodden space of possibilities. One may think of a master of chess who finds a worm-hole in an already well-analysed variant, creating new vistas; or a child at play stumbling upon a new insight, for instance a combination of two toys. Next, it will apply the discovery to all familiar situations. Claude Debussy (or Eric Satie) discovered that music can be based on parallel chords as well as on classical tone scales, and whole new worlds of music came within reach.

As a term for such newly discovered spaces ‘morphospace’ seems appropriate; borrowed from developmental biology. A morphospace delineates the limits and possibilities of the class that it represents. This applies to works of art as well as to animals or plants. Both evolve, and in both evolution is marked by break-throughs alternating with phases of exploration of the new spaces. Exploration leads to the actualisation of some or all of the possibilities of the morphospace.

Break-through and exploration do not always neatly alternate. In practice, new break-throughs, small or big, often pop up while the new space is still being explored. Thus morphospace itself may grow. As already indicated, ‘Mozart’ did not arise in one stroke, but it evolved in phases. Not every composer is as inventive as Mozart. Stravinsky once complained that Vivaldi was overrated as a composer. Once you had heard one of his violin concertos, you had heard them all. Grumpy Stravinsky may have ignored that Vivaldi was also a composer of vocal music, for both the stage and the church. As to the majority of the concerti, however, he was right. Vivaldi wrote them for practical use and in doing so explored and rather filled out their morphospace. Another space: ‘Concerto for flute and orchestra’ was explored extensively by composers of the Mannheimer Schule (2) and their contemporaries (3). Giorgio Morandi created hundreds of superb paintings on the theme: ‘still life with vases’.

These were examples of the exploration of new spaces. Let us now look at their coming into existence. I have already dealt with architecture in some detail, so examples from music, painting and nature next.

I.2.1 music.

Music can be described according to other criteria besides composers.  Dependent on instrumentation, for instance: violin solo, string quartet, symphony orchestra, opera. Another is rhythm: waltz, forlane, siciliano. Most relevant for our purpose are classifications of the internal structure, the ‘architecture’ of music: fugue, air, sonata form, tri- or quadripartite form of large instrumental pieces. Structures of that sort are the skeleton of the work.

The authors of some of these structures are known. The air, element of opera and cantata among others, has a long history, but it was Alessandro Scarlatti who bestowed upon it a very successful form: tripartite, with the last section repeating the first. A fugue is characterised by two or more voices beginning the same subject each in turn and at a different pitch. Typically, the first voice takes the main or tonic key, the second the dominant, the third one octave up from the first, etc. As the piece develops, variations on this configuration are added, linked by episodes. Who composed the first fugue I do not know. In any case Johann Sebastian Bach contributed significantly to its evolution and propagation. He made modulation an integral part of the episodes (Kennedy, 1997). 

Sonata form was not there in Bach’s time, but soon afterwards it was well established by the Mannheimer School, and it has served many generations. Also in the sonata form key relationships are essential. In the simplest case, a first subject is introduced in the tonic key and a second in the dominant. After the exposition of the subjects (mostly repeated) comes the development, followed in its turn by a recapitulation of the beginning, but now with the second subject also in the tonic. A coda may be added to terminate the piece. This scheme is not rigid. Already Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert played freely with variants: adding new material at the beginning of the development, omitting elements or extending the coda into a second development. Brahms let the subject itself grow from a germ as part of the composition. Bruckner introduced a third subject.

The first movement of symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets is often in the sonata form. Three or four movements make up the classical symphony in the Vienna style. Joseph Haydn played a prominent role in the early development of this scheme in all three genres mentioned above. Once its main features had been established, they were open to much experimentation, not least by Haydn himself and by Mozart. The tri- or quadripartite movements scheme is probably the least rigorous of the four skeletons discussed here, but even so it has survived well into modern times. All four morphospaces have been explored by generations of composers.

I.2.2  painting.

Jacob van Ruisdael brought about a revolution in 17th-century landscape painting. His uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael, painted tonal perspectives according to the fashion of his time: little contrast in colour and coulisses to suggest depth. Famous contemporaries Jan van Goyen and Hendrick Avercamp did similarly. Jacob developed a more picturesque manner, with contrasts of light and shadow and of colours to suggest three-dimensional shapes and enhance the dramatic effect. Before he was twenty, he had the main lines of his discovery firmly laid down. Later developments of his style were largely concerned with scaling up, as he became familiar with grander views than the Dutch dunes and vistas could provide. (See for instance his View of Bentheim Castle).

His influence was phenomenal. Not only in his contemporaries following suit. Even during the 19th century his work inspired painters such as Constable, Corot, Théodore Rousseau and the schools of Norwich, Barbizon and The Hague, to mention a few.

By no means all break-throughs reach so wide and so far ahead. Max Liebermann discovered that small rounded spots of light paint on the ground carry the suggestion of sunlight filtered through the trees. He applied the idea many times, but it remained practically his own specialty. Contrast this with a few small innovations in key-board playing by Domenico Scarlatti, which turned out to be lasting successes: repetition of notes and crossing-hands. Seemingly insignificant details in his whole work, but apparently many could use them.

I.2.3 biology.

The geological period of the Devonian, 410 to 370 mln years ago, was characterised by a relatively dry climate and the elevation of several land masses. Together, these trends made freshwater bodies shrink and dry out. At the time, these waters were already populated by early bony fishes among others. Several of these fishes found evolutionary pathways to develop lungs of a sort, that is internal organs with which they could breath atmospheric air, as gill respiration became insufficient in the O2 -depleted stagnant waters. The Dipnoi and Crossopterygii had fins with a sturdy internal skeleton. With relatively small additional adaptations, the fins were strong enough to support them on land. An elegant performance it may not have been, but this first entry onto firm soil was a break-through. Combined with lung respiration, it enabled these fishes to leave shrivelling pools in search of larger waters The first steps having been made, the whole world of terrestrial life came within reach, at least in terms of evolutionary time scales. Exploring the new spaces, some of these land-fishes evolved into amphibians, and some of those towards the first reptiles. The latter developed an innovation in their eggs: the amnion. That is an additional membrane around the embryo, holding a small quantity of water. Amphibians depend on the vicinity of fresh water, because their eggs and larvae cannot develop without it (4). The amniote egg was worthy of Columbus name: the embryo is provided with its own private stock of water, and thus can be laid on land. It opened up many new habitats for the adults. Exploring them was a matter of time.

Evolution does not commonly come as quickly as an artist’s innovation. The decisive event, however, can happen in a moment in case of behavioural innovation. A now classic example arose from the year-long observations of Japanese Macaques (Macaca fuscata), kept in quasi-natural condition. The diet of the Koshima Island troop was supplemented with sweet potatoes and wheat grains thrown onto the beach. Imo, a young female, found that she could get rid of the annoying sand grains adhering to the potatoes by washing them in the sea. Similarly, she discovered how to separate sand and wheat as the latter floated on water. Her first follower was her mother. Others saw and imitated the procedures, and in no time the whole colony was washing lustily.

These simple inventions had far-reaching effects: Babies of the washing mothers came into contact with seawater at an early age. They experimented and acquired a habit of bathing when the water was warm. Some learned how to swim and dive and in doing so to pick up things from the bottom. None of their elders had ever done a thing like that. One even managed to swim to another island. Obviously, these new behaviours brought a wide range of new objects within reach, including edible ones. It takes little imagination to visualise completely different ways of life these monkeys may have developed a hundred generations onwards, including appropriate physical adaptations (5). From the very moment of the first invention, natural selection took a drastically different course.

The fore-going story has been told many times. I took my inspiration from a paper by Bill and Claire Russell (1990). They coined the term behavioural selection for the phenomenon. A more complete account is in their 1982 article. Piet Sevenster wrote about the macaques in 1973. In the same publication he summarises J. Nicolai’s work on African widow birds, Viduinae, who lay their eggs in the nests of waxbill finches (Estrildinae). Each widow species or subspecies parasitises one species or race of waxbill. The probable genealogies of Viduinae and Estrildinae even run precisely parallel, suggesting that they all descended from one widow and one finch species. That is where their common history began, probably when a female widow (which then looked very different and usually did her own incubation duties) in acute need of laying, dropped her egg in the nearest foreign nest. It happened to be a waxbill’s (which at the time responded more neutrally than their present-day descendants). Contingencies of this kind do occur sporadically in all sorts of birds. Rarely, but if it happens, the young, when hatched, is fed and reared by the foster parents and may learn the song repertoire of the latter (in case of a male; a female may learn to respond positively to the host’s song). It will also, whether male or female, remain attracted to the sorts of nests and parents with which it had its early experiences. This enhances the probability that the emergency act of the mother will be repeated by the daughter.

Only if a male and a female of the erroneously imprinted species find each other in the vicinity of  a host’s nest, the parasitic egg will be fertilised. Such a combination of events may be highly improbable, but given sufficient time, it may nevertheless take place now and then. Let the first ‘mistake’ occur in a certain neighbourhood once in 25 years. The likelihood of two similarly imprinted young co-occurring will then be once in 625 years. In 50% of the cases they will be of opposite sex. In evolutionary perspective even this is but a wink of the eye and, certainly, the original ‘mistake’ took very little time indeed. The evolutionary consequences were impressive: defensive behaviour in the waxbills and more and more accurate mimicry in the nestlings of the widow birds which nowadays are almost indistinguishable from those of the host species.

So far for the similarities between nature and art, that is to say between organisms and individual works. Comparable, though not identical processes, I think. A work of art is not an organism and vice versa. A picture does not have a life of its own and does not reproduce on its own accord. It derives its existence entirely from creation by humans. In contrast, organisms reproduce without human intervention, and have been doing so through hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved. On the other hand, both art and organisms are processes, with growth and development, and both with a history. Both come in the shape of individuals, which belong to classes, and classes of classes, as was demonstrated above. No objections, thus far, to my quest for how to assess value in both Art and Nature with similar methods.

End of part I.

Notes:

(1) For example in the apses and the West fronts of the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù, and emphatically so in the cloisters. Also the West front of Amalfi cathedral and the ancient Romanesque Basilico del Crocifisso of the 9th century beside it.

(2) Led by Johann and Carl Stamitz.

(3) Johann Christian Bach, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Frederic the Great and many others.

(4) Never say "never", to the question whether a certain trait occurs in some animal taxon. In evolutionary time, several amphibian groups have escaped from this dependency. The invention of the amnion is one of them.

(5) Sub-cutaneous fat, short fur, white bellies, shorter and broader extremities and enlarged lungs.