Böcker av Samuel Jay Keyser

Why we enjoy works of art, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure we receive.Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures (1976) extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists’ refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. Play It Again, Sam takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that rhyme in metrical verse is identical to the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (Satin Doll) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (My Funny Valentine) constructed their iconic melodies. Furthermore, the form of these tunes can be found in such classical compositions as Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca and his German Dances as well as in galant music in general.The author also looks at repetition in paintings like Caillebotte’s Rainy Day in Paris, Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans, and Pollock’s drip paintings. Finally, the photography of Lee Friedlander, Roni Horn, and Osmond Giglia—Giglia’s Girls in the Windows is one of the highest grossing photographs in history—are all shown to be built on repetition in the form of visual rhyme.The book ends with a cognitive conjecture on why repetition has been so prominent in the arts from the Homeric epics through Duke Ellington and beyond. Artists have exploited repetition throughout the ages. The reason why it is straightforward: the brain finds the detection of repetition innately pleasurable. Play It Again, Sam offers experimental evidence to support this claim.

An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one.At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats—Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky's boss to negotiating with student protesters.