What a 19th Century German Composer Can Teach Us About Arts Evaluation
Robert Schumann and the Meaning of Music
Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter helping arts and culture leaders understand the language of public value. Sometimes I think we reject evaluation because it cannot tell the full story of our art. This post asks what a useful, partial story might be. If you find this work useful, please consider sharing and subscribing.
Arts funding acquittals often ask something like: “What were the outcomes of this performance?” To an artist, the question can be somewhat mind-boggling. The artist might wish to respond: “Uh, the outcome of the performance was… a performance.”
This situation — the unique, puzzled bewilderment — always reminds of a quote from Wittgenstein's Mistress, a novel by David Markson. The narrator, Kate, is an art historian recalling a (probably fictionalised) story about the German composer, Robert Schumann:
“Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.”
In the novel, Kate’s testimonies are unreliable. She has a faulty memory and frequently contradicts herself. Her story about Robert Schumann is almost certainly untrue in a literal sense. It is, however, true enough for our purposes.
The novel is a fictionalised take on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher and logician. Wittgenstein believed there were limits to what could be communicated with language. In Kate’s retelling of the story about Robert Schumann, she is making the same argument as Wittgenstein. She felt that Robert Schumann’s artistic works couldn’t be reduced to a singular ‘meaning’ which could be expressed in language. Instead, the ‘meaning’ of the music is the music itself.
As arts organisation leaders, we’re often in the same position as Robert Schumann is in Kate’s story. People will come and see our work, and then ask: “Well very good. But what are the outcomes of it? What is it all for?” Of course, we can’t just sit down and play the music again, restage the performance, or rehost the workshop.
In order to appease those asking the question, we find ourselves taking complex artistic work and reducing it to simple language: reports, acquittals, bar graphs, pie charts, ticket sales, bums-on-seats, and perhaps the occasional out-of-context audience quote or two. We wish people would just let the work speak for itself.
These wishes are fair enough. Nothing speaks as loudly as the work itself, though the work speaking is no guarantee that others have the ears to listen.
However, it’s worth considering that Wittgenstein and the fictional Kate each used language in spite of its limits. Wittgenstein had absolute pitch and was committed to music, but was ultimately remembered for his highly ordered philosophy. We may not be able to explain the full meaning of art, but we can use language to strain in that direction, provided we are aware of its limits. The good arts evaluation, we could say, is one which knows its limits. Good evaluation is complimentary to the work rather than a replacement for it.