In the April 2008 Newsletter, “Creating,” author, artist and creativity guru Robert Fritz gave a moving tribute to a friend and mentor, Karlheinz Stockhausen. “I was in shock,” Fritz wrote. “I must have thought that Stockhausen was never going to die. That he was, somehow, beyond death, not exactly immortal, but […]”

The emotional tenor of his eulogizing remembrance resonated deeply with me, capturing as it did my stupid incomprehension a few years ago when one of my own academic mentors passed and my more recent wave of nostalgia at the death of a treasured high-school teacher and friend.

Aside from the shared experience of mourning, though, Fritz’s narrative caught my attention for another, very different, reason. In describing his own intellectual and artistic development, Fritz related how he had initially disliked Romantic music and how many people both hated and (in his view) did not understand Stockhausen’s words or art. In a particularly poignant example, he mentions how Stockhausen took fire for comments that were misquoted or misunderstood in the wake of 9/11.

According to Fritz, Stockhausen made a point that “evil’s” works of art are destructive in nature and that viewed through that lens, 9/11 might be seen as “Lucifer’s greatest work of art.” When what was reported was only that a prominent and (to some) eccentric musician said that 9/11 was “a work of art,” it seemed to confirm the suspicions and prejudices that so many people had about modernists or postmodernists, and so people believed it and vilified Stockhausen.

I’ve been reminded a lot lately through various conversations (both face-to-face and online) of this natural human tendency to jump on anecdotal information that confirms a presupposition and to take it as evidence that somehow proves or validates one’s beliefs. On Tobacco Road the head basketball coach of Duke University was recently lambasted in the local and national media (including a national panel discussion show) for making disparaging remarks about a rival team. Only he claimed he never made the remark that prompted the backlash, and days later, after reviewing an audiotape of the remarks, the radio station that broke the story offered a chagrined apology. The national panelists who piled on did not, they simply changed the target of the criticism from the coach to the radio station that broke the story that they ran with.

The media is an easy target, but the truth is this tendency to overvalue sketchy, preliminary, skewed, or second-hand information when it confirms what we want to (or already) believe is pretty universal. Steven Jay Gould assiduously documents in The Mismeasure of Man how even scientists, those champions of empirical evidence, have a long history of allowing their biases and predispositions to cloud what they accept as evidence, leading them to often accept as evidence data or logical conclusions that those who don’t share their presuppositions (or biases or prejudices if you prefer the more emotionally charged words) can easily see problems with.

Christians, sadly, are not immune to jumping to unshakeable conclusions based on unverified or uncontextualized anecdotal evidence.  People see YouTube clips of Reverend Wright and say not that they wonder whether Senator Barack Obama has been influenced by Black anger but that this is evidence that he must have been. How could he sit under this man’s preaching, they ask, and not be? The clip confirms what I think or fear, therefore it is evidence, and my mind fills in the gaps. The forthcoming movie Expelled purportedly links evolutionary Darwinian philosophy with Nazi concentration camps and Christians rather than arguing that this makes about as much sense as saying that Christianity leads inevitably to the Spanish Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan, nod their heads sadly and murmur about how we knew it all along.

Perhaps one reason why Fritz’s Stockhausen eulogy hit such a raw nerve in me was because although I hadn’t heard that specific 9/11 quote, I did have previous, independent experience with Stockhausen being (to my mind) misrepresented. In my first full-time teaching job I was called on to teach a section of a class on the history of Western civilization, the curriculum of which was built around Francis Schaeffer’s book and film series How Should We Then Live?  I actually like and respect Schaeffer’s works quite a bit. It was evident in my own reading of most of Schaeffer’s work that he had read widely from philosophy, science, music, arts, history, and theology. Like all great popularizers, though, Schaeffer’s accessibility comes with a brutal reductive tendency attached.  Most of the time, when his text or films dealt with thinkers I knew first hand (Kierkegaard, Kant, Bergman), I often felt he oversimplified their work. Occasionally, I found him to be simply wrong, such as when he reported that Jackson Pollock’s paintings were created not by throwing paint but dripping it from swinging paint cans.

Here’s what Schaeffer has to say about Stockhausen: “Stockhausen produced the first published score of electronic music in Electronic Studies. A part of his concern was with the element of chance in composition. As we shall see, this ties into the work of John Cage, whom we will study in more detail below” (194). There is some ambiguity here about whether Schaeffer is offering his own assessment or continuing to summarize Joseph Machlis; in other words, the Christian students being introduced to Stockhausen may actually in this instance be getting a third-hand account of what Stockhausen’s work means, itself filtered through the presuppositions and assumptions that harmony is the point of music and that because chance leads to dissonance, music of this style is evidence of its artist's postmodern, atheistic worldview.

I’m tempted to summarize at greater length Fritz’s analysis and defense of Stockhausen’s music, but really the more interesting and relevant point (for me) is that Fritz’s own aesthetic and worldview was not limited by somehow becoming enthralled to Stockhausen’s underlying philosophy of life (which he argues is much more complex and varied than a reactionary reading like Schaeffer’s would make it out to be) simply because it (and he) influenced Fritz’s development as an artist and person. It was other artists (Fritz notes especially the influence of Robert Frost) and their expressions that challenged and pushed Fritz to enlarge his conceptions of and understandings of truth rather than simply to accept or reject Stockhausen's own as gospel.

It seems like as a culture as a whole and, especially, as an evangelical subculture, we’ve arrived at a point where we cannot sift, we can only reject, we cannot build, we can only debunk.

My growing disenchantment with teaching Schaeffer’s book (if not the book itself) was rooted in the ways I saw the practice reinforcing this already troublesome tendency to mistake anecdotes for proof and counter-opinions for debunking. Let me clarify and say that it doesn’t and didn’t disturb me that an occasional student (or even the majority) might walk away from the class with a different assessment of the value or meaning of a particular artist, philosopher, or theologian than my own. The good teacher, to paraphrase George MacDonald’s Wilfrid Cumbermede, may have to sometimes trust that truth needs wait until the pupil can see it as such and that even truth can be a bond and fetter to those as yet unable (or unwilling) to see it as such. What was disturbing to me, rather, was that I saw too many developing thinkers come out of that class not with a deeper understanding of (or even knowledge of) figures such as Darwin, Marx, and Derrida or artists such as Pollock, Cage, and Stockhausen but with a series of prefabricated, second-hand opinions and sound-bites designed to confirm, bolster, and defend their preconceived notions about why and how such figures must be wrong. Because many of those rebuttals tended to gibe with what they already believed, they were easier to accept as evidence even when they were only sketchy opinions or misrepresentations.

Karlheinz Stockhausen died this year at the age of seventy-nine. To Francis Schaeffer he was part of the German Cologne school who unfortunately and wrongly tried to incorporate chance into music and in doing so negatively influenced Western culture by pushing it further past a line of despair. To Robert Fritz he was a creative genius (influencing among countless others The Beatles, Miles Davis, and David Bowie), encouraging mentor, and generous friend who taught him most of all to try to continually look at the world afresh and to listen not just for confirmation of what we already know but for those surprising strains of music the universe might be trying to play for us.

What is the measure of a man? We are all so very quick to think we know.

Kenneth R. Morefield is an Assistant Professor of English at Campbell University

8 April 2008