September 11, 2025 • 47 mins
🎙 Betsy Wurzel welcomes Professor Samuel Jay Keyser, author of Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts. Known as Jay, he shares why repetition comforts us — from familiar songs and stories to beloved art and photography.
💜 Betsy and Jay discuss why repetition is especially meaningful for neurodivergent individuals and how children naturally love hearing rhymes and stories over and over.
🎶 From Dixieland tunes that light up faces in nursing homes to Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Jay reveals how music, memory, and healing are deeply connected. Betsy also shares touching memories of her husband, Matt, and her father, both comforted by music.
🖼️ The conversation even touches on Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans — showing repetition’s role in visual art. 📚 Professor Keyser isn’t just a musician — he’s a distinguished MIT linguist, jazz trombonist, and 2025 Wilbur Cross Medal honoree. 🎷 Listen now to Betsy Wurzel’s inspiring interview with Professor Jay Keyser. Discover how repetition bridges us to comfort, memory, and joy.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/chatting-with-betsy--4211847/support.
🎙 Passionate World Talk Radio Network LLC — Where real conversations matter.
📧 Contact us: pwrtalknetwork@gmail.com
🌐 Visit: www.passionateworldtalkradio.com
📲 Follow & share with #PWTRN
💜 Betsy and Jay discuss why repetition is especially meaningful for neurodivergent individuals and how children naturally love hearing rhymes and stories over and over.
🎶 From Dixieland tunes that light up faces in nursing homes to Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Jay reveals how music, memory, and healing are deeply connected. Betsy also shares touching memories of her husband, Matt, and her father, both comforted by music.
🖼️ The conversation even touches on Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans — showing repetition’s role in visual art. 📚 Professor Keyser isn’t just a musician — he’s a distinguished MIT linguist, jazz trombonist, and 2025 Wilbur Cross Medal honoree. 🎷 Listen now to Betsy Wurzel’s inspiring interview with Professor Jay Keyser. Discover how repetition bridges us to comfort, memory, and joy.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/chatting-with-betsy--4211847/support.
🎙 Passionate World Talk Radio Network LLC — Where real conversations matter.
📧 Contact us: pwrtalknetwork@gmail.com
🌐 Visit: www.passionateworldtalkradio.com
📲 Follow & share with #PWTRN
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello everyone, This is Betsy Worthal. You're a host of
Shining with Betsy. I'm passion World Talk Radium Network, a
subsidiary of Global Media Network LLC, and where a mant
just to educate, enlighten, and entertain. The views of the
guest may not represent those of the hosts of the
(00:21):
station and folks. I am so excited about today's guest
and I want to thank you for joining me today.
With me today is Samuel J. Kaiser. He has a
Kimsey My Grand's the name of this theoretical linguist. He
is Peter D. Flores, Emeritus Professor and meritith member of
(00:45):
the Linguistics and Philosophy Faculty, and former Associate provost at MIT.
He has authored numerous books and scientific publications, and this
editor in chief of the journal Linguistic Inquiry. He is
also a jazz trumbone player, a recipient of a ill
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences twenty twenty five Wilver
(01:10):
Cross Meadow for Alumni Achievement. Jay lives in the Boston area.
Jay wrote the book Played Against Sam Repetition and the
Arts by Stanuel J. Kaiser, but he likes to go
by Jay. Welcome Professor j Kaiser to Johnny with Betsy.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thank you so much for having me Betsy, it's a
pleasure to be able to talk to you about the book.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Ow I'm excited to talk to you. First, I'm going
to ask you, Jay, what motivated you to write this
book about repetition in the arts.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Well, there's a number of things. Just one of the
things that I guess. One of the first things is
that years ago, with a colleague of mine, my mentor
Marris Holley, we proposed a theory that became known as
(02:08):
generative metrics, which was really essentially a field of study
that wanted to explore what makes a metrical line metrical?
Why is it? A sophisticated reader of poetry, for example,
(02:30):
we'll be able to tell that the line when to
the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought, which is the first
line of Shakespeare's thirty sign a number thirty, and the
second line I summon up remembrances of things past? Why
is it that those two lines are from the same meter?
(02:53):
Whereas owed to the West Wind by Percy Bishelley is
not What is it we know in order to make
that judgment, which is an accurate judgment and I think
that that kind of study made me ask more a
(03:16):
more sort of wide ranging question, why meter at all?
Why should poets have metrical lines at all? Why should
they try to fit the words of English into the
Prequstian bed of a meter. So that was something that
was always on my mind. And then in nineteen in
(03:39):
twenty twenty, I published a book called the medical called
the Mental Life of Modernism. And in that book I
had run across a discussion of repetition by Leonard Bernstein,
(04:00):
the great composer, conductor, and performer. That you can find
that discussion in his the book, which was the publication
form of this Norton lecture series at Harvard University in
the early nineteen seventies. And what Bernstein said just really
(04:23):
caught me by surprise. He said, the reason why there's
been so little progress in music theory is because music
theorists have not paid attention to repetition in music. Now,
here's something that really caught my attention. Why should Bernstein
(04:43):
be complaining about repetition? And here I am thinking about
why the poetry use repetition? And then what actually nailed
it for me and really turned the corner in my
mind the corner that says one street is called music
(05:04):
about and the end of the street is called Let's
write about It. And what made me turn the corner
from U Street to Let's write about It Street was
an experiment performed by a musicologist at Princeton University. Her
name is Elizabeth Helmut Margoulis, and she put together a
(05:29):
remarkably simple but elegant experiment which really I thought was
just caused veils to drop from in front of my eyes.
Here's what she did. She took two composers of atonal music,
(05:56):
Lucciano Berrio and Elliott Carter. Now you don't have to
know the difference between tonal and a total music for
me to explain this experiment, So in the interest of
time led me not to go into that. But let
me just say that these is that.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Okay, Betsy, Yeah, that's fine, that's fine.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Okay, Okay. So here's what she did. She actually took
two pieces by these composers and using the groupe force
functions of her computer, one labeled copy and one labeled paste.
And what she did was she copied a segment of
(06:41):
the music and pasted it later on in the music.
And so she did that for both composers. So let's
imagine that the music that she was looking at could
be divided up into five segments one two, three, four five,
and copied segment number one, and in one experiment, which
(07:06):
she called immediate repetition, she pasted it right after it occurred,
so that new doctored piece of music was not one
two three four five, but it was now one one
two three four five. Then she did the same thing,
but she pasted it a little farther down the line
(07:27):
in what she called delayed repetition, so that music was
now not one two three four five, but it was
one two three, one four five. Okay, So she had
four pieces of music, two the originals and two doctored,
doctored with no esthetic goal in mind at all, just
(07:48):
simply using the group force capability of the computer. She
copied and she pasted, and once she did was she
played these four pieces of music to uh uh two
groups of people. The first were uh college students who
(08:08):
were not particularly versed in music theory or had any
special qualifications in that direction. They just liked music. I mean,
they probably listened to all of the l latest pop pieces,
you know, uh uh, And that sort of thing. The
latest stars Beyonce and uh uh uh uh s s so forth, Madonna,
(08:32):
Lady Gaga, uh okay so uh. Well she did was
she asked them which they liked better, Just ask them
which one they liked better. To a significant degree, the
students liked the Doctor pieces better. Then what she did
was she took the same experiment to a conference where
(08:55):
the attendees were all PhDs in music theory. These were
people from whom music was their career. They knew it,
they knew it all they knew, certainly knew Lucian Burial,
and they certainly knew Elliott Carter. And what she did
was she played it for them and lo and behold
the same result. They liked the Doctor piece better. What
(09:19):
Mygoulas concluded was that the mere addition of repetition had
enhanced the esthetic appeal of these pieces of music. It
was exactly like a master chef adding a spice to
a recipe in order to enhance its flavors. It was
(09:43):
as mechanical as that in building repetition, you'd like it better.
That made me realize that repetition is not just a
philip not just something en passant as they say, but
rather this was a rather deep issue about human cognission
and what we find pleasurable. And so that's what shot
(10:04):
me in repetition.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
You know what, a professor Jay, I'm glad you brought
that up because when reading of chapters in your book,
and you know, it just hit me as being part
in the neurodivergent community because my son has a kind
of disability my husband had early on set Alzheimer's. I
(10:31):
worked with children in preschool. I have found that repetition
definitely is comforting and it does give people pleasure. And
I want to pick your brain because is that why
young children they love to hear rhymes over and over again,
(10:52):
They love to hear the songs, the same songs over
and over again. My son, who is a nerdivergent, he
likes the same things repeated every day, over and over again.
It's a sense of perfect to them. Have you noticed
that in the nerd divergent community. I have to pick
(11:15):
your brain about that.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, actually that's been noticed, That was noticed a long
time ago. And I think that given your background and
what you've just described about your son's disability, I think
you'll find this very interesting and you may even want
(11:37):
to research it on your own. But in nineteen sixty eight,
there was a social psychologist by the name of Robert
Zcience who wrote an article in which he described what
he called the mere exposure phenomenon. And here is what
he said. Quote Repeated exposure of the individual to a
(12:03):
stimulus object enhances the subject's attitude toward it. In other words,
it's almost paraphrase of Elizabeth Margulis's comment about the mere
inclusion of repetition. He saw a repetition as a kind
of safe environment sensor. This has nothing to do with
(12:28):
the arts now, and this is very important, Betsy, because
what I'm telling you now has to do with fundamental
cognitive functioning of Homo sapiens. And he saw repetition as
a kind of safe environment sensor, something that is essential
for a creature driven to live within a cohesive social organization.
(12:52):
In other words, it was a marker which guided the
sub to a safe environment. So long as this sensor
kept firing, the environment was labeled safe. The glue that
(13:12):
makes the label stick to the sense of pleasure it
bestows is the glue that makes the label stick is
the sense of pleasure that is to say, if you
keep firing something over and over and over again, what
happens is you develop an affection for it. This place
(13:34):
feels good now. He In the course of his article
Zience referenced work that points to infants going from fear
to interest, as a sound frightening on the first hearing
becomes a matter of interest upon repetition. The idea is
(13:56):
that we all come with our own hard wired self
monitoring the baby monitor. As long as our surroundings register sameness,
the odds for survival are in our favor. But as
soon as a big enough difference is spotted, or you
become aware of a big enough difference, an internal version
(14:19):
of a warning light begins to flash. Be careful so
you can easily imagine how this might happen. What happens
is that an infant. When an infant is born, the
first image, or certainly one of the first images that
it's going to be exposed to, is its mother's face.
(14:41):
And if ever there was an image that the infant
ought to bond to to enhance its possibility of survival,
it's to its mother, And so by the repetitive appearance
of that image tells the infant this is a safe
place for me to be. I don't want to fight
being here. Okay. So that is an evolutionary development designed
(15:13):
to maximize the possibility, the probability of an infant surviving
long enough to contribute to the gene pool. After all,
that's Nature's only concerned. And what my book is about
is the claim that this connection between repetition and pleasure,
(15:36):
which nature built in in order to make sure that
the infant survived, was co opted by artists to make
sure that pleasure was installed in their works of art.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yes, I said, Oh, I can't wait to talk to
Professor Jay about this topic because you know it and
especially working with children. I worked with children ages two
and a half to six, and they love watching the
same stories, hearing the same stories, or watching it on
(16:14):
the We had the VCR at the time. We're DVD.
But they love rhyming and they love to hear the rhyming. Yes,
go ahead. Protection.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
The reason is because it gives them a sense of pleasure. Yes, yes,
that's where they feel safe.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yes and no. It's incredible and it, you know, just
boggles my mind sometimes, Professor j how the brain works
because someone and it's been proven that music. The music
therapy is very beneficial to those who have Alzheimer's or
any type of dementia. And when my when my husband met,
(17:03):
when he would hear Glenn Campbell's song which it talled Lineman,
and this is you know, in the early stages, he
would say, my dad liked that song and he was
on lineman for the our electric company down here, PF
and G. He remembered that for the longest time, and
you can you know, I saw how music really helped
(17:27):
him to calm down because it was pleasurable for him
to hear that. It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Well, I have I've had I've had the same experience
myself earlier on in my life when unfortunately I no
longer walk without age because of an action that happened
to me about eleven years ago. But before that, I
(17:55):
used to play in the Dixieland band that went around
to four nursing homes in a new report. And what
we would do is we would go to each of
these nursing homes and we'd go to a place where
the staff had assembled the residents to hear us. And
(18:19):
I remember distinctly one ward where the residents couldn't leave
their beds. They were so enfeebled, and I think that
most of them must have had dementia. They were just
when we would come into the ward, there was no
interest at all in us. Whatever they were staring at,
they continued to stare at it, But as soon as
(18:42):
we started to play, they had lifted up and they
turned toward us, and in many of them you could
see a smile. It was amazing to me to see
that kind of reaction. All that happened was we started
playing music.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's that's so true. I'll tell you what my father
would have loved you with, Professor J. My father loved jazz,
and you mentioned Duke Ellington and Satin Dahal. My father
loved Duke Ellington. I said, I gotta tell that to
Professor J because it brought back memories I had. I
(19:22):
had to go on to YouTube and play that song
Sattens Up because I forgot what it. You know, sounded
like excuse me, but you brought back memories of my dad.
So I want to thank you for bringing back those
memories to me. And uh, so you see the importance
(19:45):
of repetition. Do you think musicians take that seriously?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Well, I think that they certainly take playing the music seriously,
and that's all you need because the music embodies the repetition,
and really good musicians know how to bring out the
heart of the music. So the answer is yes, they
may not be aware of what they're doing that mainly
(20:13):
they are playing a repeated motif. In some cases, the
repetition that is built into a piece of music is
so complicated that it's unlikely that anybody gets it. But
that said, I think that musicians indirectly are aware of
(20:34):
it when they play the piece with love.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yes, I'm just fascinated, and I'm fascinated to hear you
discuss your intense knowledge about how important repetition is an art.
How does that repetition concern the art of painting? Well,
(21:02):
Tory in the.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Chapter fourteen of my book is devoted to showing you
how repetition works in painting and in photography, and I
think in order to bring that out in as in
(21:29):
as clear fashion as possible, if you don't mind, I
would like to start not with your question about painting,
but I'd like to show you what goes on in poetry,
and in particular that part of poetry which we call rhyme.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Sure, go ahead, okay, yankies. Of course, consider a couple
with this I wrote. I wrote this couple for the
purposes of discussion. Here's a couplet. I am searching for
rhyme to spice this couplet. Let's say time.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Now, we know that rhyme and time. There when I
use the word time, I refer to it in terms
of the spice th hyme. But of course I'm also
wants you to think about the word time time. But
we know as soon as we hear that that rhyme
(22:28):
and time rhyme. We know that rhyme and time rhyme,
but that rhyme and foot doesn't.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
We know that I'm in time rhyme, But we also
know that rhyme and rhyme don't rhyme, at least not
as end rhymes r We know. Here's what we know.
What we know is we have the ability and I'm
going to greatly simplify this, but I think it's the
(22:59):
basic idea. We have the ability to take a word
or look only at monosyllables for the moment, and we
divide it up into two parts, which I'll call the front.
In the back. The back part begins with the stressed vowel.
And what we know is that a word and the
front part is everything before the back part to the
(23:21):
beginning of the word. So let's take the word rhyme.
The back part is i'm, as in the word i'm,
I'm going to the store, The back part is i'm.
What is the front part, it's R. In the word time,
what is the back part, it's i'm. What is the
front part, it's T. And what we know is that
(23:45):
for a word to be to rhyme, to be part
of a rhyming pair, the back parts must be the
same and the front part must be different. That's by
rhyme and foot don't rhyme because in rhyme the back
part is i'm, the front part is are, and in
(24:08):
foot the back part is ut and the front part
is F. Well, it satisfies the front part, which is different,
but it doesn't satisfy the back part, which is not,
which is different, and it's supposed to be the same.
So when we determine whether two words rhyme or not,
what we do is we say, divide each word into
(24:28):
front and back parts. Are the back parts the same?
Are the front parts different if the answer to two
and three is yes, than the words rhyme. Now, this
relationship between the front and the back parts I'm gonna
call same accept. So you can pay the two words
rhyme if they are the same except for the front part. Now,
(24:53):
that same accept relationship shows up in music. So for example,
you may that your father was a great devotee of
Duke Ellington, and indeed so am I. In fact, I
played a jazz orchestra that is devoted to avant garde
jazz and the works of Duke Ellington. We have a
(25:15):
concert coming up on the ninth of September, in fact
here in the Boston area where we're going to play.
A good part of it will be the works of
Duke Ellington.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Oh wow, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Yeah, we did a YouTube. We did a concert at
the local public radio station television station WGBH on the
sixth of June last year, and that was one hundred
and twenty fifth year of Duke Ellington's birthday, and it
went all over the world and it was a celebratory
(25:51):
concert for Duke. And I'm very proud to say that
I played in it, and I'm so pleased that I
was able to anyway. One of the tunes that Duke wrote,
he wrote in nineteen fifteen with Billy Strainhorn, called Satin Doll.
It was, as you said, one of your husband's, your
father's favorites, and you went listen to it again. So
(26:13):
you're gonna have to listen to it again with me
singing it. I'm going to do it a wretched job
of it, but let me do that anyway. The interesting
thing about the the interesting thing about that Satin Doll
is that it is the musical version of rhyme. It
is composed of a melody that is the same except
and let me show you how that works. The first
(26:36):
two bars of Satin Doll are bauda bou up, bah
dude up, and the second two bars are bah Buddha
Buddha bah dude up. Now those two bars rhyme. They
are the same, except but the dimensions along which the
(26:57):
rhyme is defined being in music is different. It's not
the sounds of words, but rather it's the combination of
rhythm and pitch. A musical notation combines into a single notation.
Both how the pitch of a of a note, that
is to say, where it appears along the scale how
(27:19):
high or low it is. And the second thing it
encodes is the rhythm. Now let's split those two things apart,
and now lets me give you the rhythmic version of
the first two bars of Satin Ball. It's ba b
dah bout dup bah du bap You'll notice I'm not
(27:41):
changing the pitch at all. And what is the rhythm
of the second two bars. It's identical. It's the same
bad da ba du bah. Now let's take a look
at the pitch. The pitch of the first bar is
bob ba ba brued up. The pitch of the second
(28:03):
two bars bo brewed up, burnt up, bar turned up.
It's different. And what is the difference. It's one step
higher in the scale. So the first four bars of
Luke Dallington, Satin Doll and Billy Fayle and Satin Doll rhyme,
they're the same in rhythm, and they are different in pitch,
(28:24):
but their rhythm is the pitch is close. So it's
uh uh, it's the musical version same. Except now if
you go to the bridge of Saturn Doll, the bridge
is eight bars long. It's an interval between the first
eight bars, and the last eight bars of the tune
is typically called the bridge in jazz. And now listen
(28:47):
to the to the bridge. The first four bars are
ba ba ba. Okay, well, let me do the second
four bars for you, bob ba but better bar. And
if you understood what I said about the beginning, you'll
see that the bridge is identical. The rhythm of the
(29:08):
first four bars are the same. The pitch is different.
The first I mean, the rhythm of the first four
bars is the same as the rhythm of the second
four bars of the bridge. The four measures. Let me
not be technical. The rhythm of the first four measures
of the bridge and the rhythm of the second four
measures of the bridge are identical. They're the same. The
(29:30):
pitch of the first four measures of the bridge differs
from the pitch of the second four measures of the
bridge by one step, exactly the same thing that we
saw in the beginning. The whole tune is built on
same except it is a rhythmical It is a musical
version of rhyme. Now we've looked at poetry and we
(29:53):
found same accept and we've looked at music and we
found same accept And now let's go to your original
question I say something about painting. Well, perhaps the most
famous painting that everybody there would know might be Andy
Warhol's Campbell soup cans. Yes, it was a poke in
(30:19):
the eye of abstract expressionism, which was a Warhole did
this in nineteen sixty two, and at that time abstract expressionism,
in the hands of painters like Da Cooney and Jackson
Pollock were all the rage, and Andy Warhol made fun
of it. Rather than be abstract, he wanted to be
(30:41):
as concrete as possible and in fact, as mundane as possible.
So what did he do. He actually painted the most
common thing you could think of. It was an item
that you could find in any supermarket or corner grocery store,
a can of can amble soup. And he painted thirty
(31:03):
two of them. They were all the same. And what
he did was he arranged them on the wall in rows,
in four rows of eight cans each, so you had
eight cans, and then underneath that eight cans, and underneath
that eight cans, and underneath that the last eight cans.
Thirty two cans, every one of them absolutely identical, except
(31:28):
there was one difference. Can you guess what the difference
would be? Let's see a flavor exactly exactly every can
was the same except for the label. The first row
was clamm showder and then followed by chicken noodle, and
then followed by cream of vegetable onion, green pea, scotch groth,
(31:52):
vegetable split pee. That's just the first of roll. The
cans were the same except exactly the same principle that
we saw in Duke Ellington satin doll. Exactly the same
principle that we saw in end rhyme in a couplet,
Like I am searching for rhyme to spice this couplet.
(32:13):
Let's say time all right. In photography, there is a
woman by the name of Ronnie Horn, who I believe
is stationed is based in New York City, although she
photographs all over the world. One of her most famous
collection of photographs she made after spending a year, I think,
(32:35):
in Iceland, and the result of it was something called
Becoming a Landscape. And in that book, what she has
is a hundred pictures of faces. But these faces are
in pairs, just like end rhyme, and just like the
first four bars of satin doll. And if you look
(32:56):
at these faces, it's as if they're identical. It's as
if she simply had somebody posed and then click the
camera twice. But that's not quite true. If you look
at it, you will see that there's some very slight
differences in between the two portraits. As one commentator on
(33:19):
the web put it, he said, Horn requires that you
look and discover the identity is always different. That is
to say, these photographs are the same, except it's as
if she has taken the game Spot the Difference and
turned it into an art form. Do you know what
spot the differences?
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Noticing differences in the portraits for the painting, I would think.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
But there was a children's game, you know, called Spot
the Difference where you would there'd be two pictures and
they'd be identical on first glance.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
But what you would right is that they are really.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Differences, and the fund was to spot the difference. Yes, yes,
and that was fun. The reason why yeah, game is
because it was fun. And the reason why it was
fun was because it demanded repetition. Well she did that
in her photographs. So that's the answer to your question
about what's going on in photography.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Well, that's very interesting. I I'm ventually a paired, Professor Jay.
So when you have to look at a picture and
spot the difference, sometimes first I can't do it, and
then I got to go back, get repetition, go back
and keep looking at the difference, and then I eventually
do see the differences and the photographs. But I just
(34:49):
really I have to tell you this too. My dad,
who also had old climbers, was in a nursing home facility.
My mind brought all his jazz records there and when
he got a little feisty, they would play his music,
which calmed him down. And so when I was listening
(35:14):
to Duke Ellington, and of course I had to go
to Sarah Vaughan who he liked, and Eli Fitzgerald, you know,
and Billie Holiday, and the just brings back memories. So
repetition also to me, Professor Jay, and this might sound
a little off, repetition to me is also comforting because
(35:35):
it brings back precious memories. Do you find that, yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Well is yes, I definitely do find that. I mean,
if that's a kind of a secondary phenomenon, the repetition
is getting pleasure, taking pleasure in it is I'm saying,
hardwired intois as human beings, but that rise to pleasant memories,
(36:01):
and you remember those pleasant memories when you think of
the repetition. So sure that makes a lot of sense.
I'm glad you have memories.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
Thank you. Thank you me too. I don't know if
you have the time, professor J. But can you tell
us how did you get into theoretical my saying I
write linguistics and you can tell I'm not a linguistic
(36:32):
Can you tell us to what that is? And how
did you get into interested in that?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Well, when I was a student in undergraduate days I studied,
I was always very drawn toward literature. I just like
to read. I like to read novels, I like to
read short stories. I like to read poetry and essays.
(37:03):
It was just what That's just who I am. And
so I thought to myself, well, I think what I'll
do is I'll maybe make a career out of studying literature.
And so I began to look at what people who
studied literature did, and what I found was that for
(37:25):
the most part, what they did was they would pick
a period, they would pick poets or writers that they
liked very much, and then they would analyze the reasons
why they liked them, and I found that for the
most part their commentaries, although they were interesting, they were
(37:49):
really not what I would call hard and fast arguments.
They were not scientific arguments at all. What they were
were sort of the evocations. They were elegant descriptions of
the evocations that a work of art produced in a
(38:10):
particular reader, And as interesting as that might be depending
upon the mind of the critic involved, it really wasn't formal,
because somebody else could read the same poem and come
up with a completely different interpretation and that would be
just as good. So I wasn't satisfied with English literature
(38:34):
as a career, because, as I said, I wanted I
was much more interested in the scientific study of literature,
if that was indeed possible, and that led me through
various steps in the theoretical linguistics. First, I went to Oxford,
(38:54):
where I studied Old and Middle English. I did that
in order to sort of broaden my range of knowledge
about English literature. I read Chaucer, I read Beohof, and
I read a lot of the Middle English poetry, like
Allan in the Green Knight, and also The All of
(39:17):
the Night and Bale by the Way. Gallan in the
Green Knight is an absolutely brilliant poem which unfortunately is
lost to us, many of us because it was written
in Middle English and it does take some effort to
read it, but it's just a brilliant poem in our
(39:39):
earlier stages of our language. Well, anyway, once I had
done that, I decided, well, maybe I can marry my
knowledge of linguistics with my knowledge of I mean, my
knowledge of literature with the study of language as a
formal object. So I got a scholarship to you Yale,
(40:00):
and I went to Yale, got my PhD in linguistics
at Yale, and in the course of doing that, I
was introduced to the work of Nolam Chomsky and Mars
Halley at MIT. And that was basically a groundbreaking work
which shifted linguistic the study of language onto a whole
(40:24):
new level on a par with scientific inquiry. It is,
in fact the basis of the scientific study of the brain.
It's the at the moment, it's uh linguistic accounts of
what it is we know when we know a language
is probably the most thoroughly articulated theory of what the
(40:45):
brain knows when it knows how to speak, and over
the course of a professional lifetime, I spent most of
my life writing in uh in uh topics having to
do with theoretical linguistic subjects. I wrote on the syllable
(41:07):
structure in English and uh and in the world's languages.
And then with a colleague of mine, Nick Clements long
gone but not forgotten, and I worked on the syntax
of of of of a lexicon with another colleague, Ken Hale,
(41:29):
who is one of the most brilliant linguists I've ever
encountered in my life. And then I retired. And when
I retired, I realized I'm free. I can do whatever
I want. And so for the first time in my life,
I was able to marry my interest in theoretical linguistics
(41:52):
with my interest in in uh in art. And my
two books Mental Life of Modernism and now Play It
against Sam was the result of that. That was the
result of a life of retirement.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Well, Professor Samuel J. Kaiser, I so enjoy talking to
you today. I know you have to go, but I
enjoy talking to you. And I want to know where
can people purchase your book Played against Sam Repetition in
(42:30):
the arts.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Well you can get it on I know you can
get it on Amazon. You can, I'm sure you can
requested in your local bookstore, and I think you can
also get it in libraries. But I also think it's
available online from MIT Press. You might want to take
(42:57):
a look at their open access have so direct publication offerings,
and I think my book is there, so you can
have access to it there.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
And how can people connect with you?
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Okay, I'm on face, I'm on Facebook, and I think, okay,
you can get my contact information there. I have received
uh two or three emails about my various uh exposures
to the public. I found each one of these emails
really interesting, so I benefit greatly from that. But you
(43:38):
can you can get me through Facebook?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Oh well, you know what I'm going to do that.
I'm going to do that myself. I'm going to connect
with you on on Facebook. Uh. Thank you so much,
Professor Samuel J. Kaiser spell the last ank K E
Y s E R you heard today, folks. Thank you
for writing your book, played against sam repetition in the arts.
(44:05):
I've found it very interesting. I have to go back
and read what I didn't finish reading. But thank you
for sharing your knowledge, your wisdom, writing your book and
your career, you know, playing music in different facilities and
sharing your talents. It was such a pleasure and honor
(44:27):
to talk to you today, Jay, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
You're very kind to say those kind things to me.
Thank you so much. I also want to thank you
for making your time available to me, and if you
have any questions just email me sure.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Thank you so much. Folks, you heard Professor Samuel J. Kaiser,
author and writer, played against sam repetition and the arts.
I highly recommend for people to read that, especially if
you were I'm going to say the educational field, the
medical field, any kind of field. Read this book. It
(45:07):
will really enlighten you. And I think it's very important
for people who are going into education to read this book.
And all the information about Samuel J. Kaiser will be
in the blog that Genie White writes, who is the
station manager produces the show, and I want to thank
Lillian Caldwell, who's CEO at Pashure World Talk Radio Network,
(45:28):
who makes this all possible. And they want to thank
Lisa Warren Lisa Warren p R. Of arranging this interview.
She is a wonderful a publicist. So if you need
a publicist, you're an author writer. I highly recommend Lisa
Warren and I want to thank you all for listening.
(45:51):
Please subscribe to Chatting with Betsy this for free if
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(46:12):
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Betsye Worzel w r z e L And as I
always say at the end of my show, in a
(46:34):
world where you could be anything, please be kind and shine.
You're a light right because we need it now more
than ever before. This is Betsy Worzel, your host that
Chatting with Betsy. I'm passionate. World Talk Radio Network, a
subsidiary of Global Media Network LLC. Bye bye now
Hello everyone, This is Betsy Worthal. You're a host of
Shining with Betsy. I'm passion World Talk Radium Network, a
subsidiary of Global Media Network LLC, and where a mant
just to educate, enlighten, and entertain. The views of the
guest may not represent those of the hosts of the
(00:21):
station and folks. I am so excited about today's guest
and I want to thank you for joining me today.
With me today is Samuel J. Kaiser. He has a
Kimsey My Grand's the name of this theoretical linguist. He
is Peter D. Flores, Emeritus Professor and meritith member of
(00:45):
the Linguistics and Philosophy Faculty, and former Associate provost at MIT.
He has authored numerous books and scientific publications, and this
editor in chief of the journal Linguistic Inquiry. He is
also a jazz trumbone player, a recipient of a ill
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences twenty twenty five Wilver
(01:10):
Cross Meadow for Alumni Achievement. Jay lives in the Boston area.
Jay wrote the book Played Against Sam Repetition and the
Arts by Stanuel J. Kaiser, but he likes to go
by Jay. Welcome Professor j Kaiser to Johnny with Betsy.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thank you so much for having me Betsy, it's a
pleasure to be able to talk to you about the book.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Ow I'm excited to talk to you. First, I'm going
to ask you, Jay, what motivated you to write this
book about repetition in the arts.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Well, there's a number of things. Just one of the
things that I guess. One of the first things is
that years ago, with a colleague of mine, my mentor
Marris Holley, we proposed a theory that became known as
(02:08):
generative metrics, which was really essentially a field of study
that wanted to explore what makes a metrical line metrical?
Why is it? A sophisticated reader of poetry, for example,
(02:30):
we'll be able to tell that the line when to
the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought, which is the first
line of Shakespeare's thirty sign a number thirty, and the
second line I summon up remembrances of things past? Why
is it that those two lines are from the same meter?
(02:53):
Whereas owed to the West Wind by Percy Bishelley is
not What is it we know in order to make
that judgment, which is an accurate judgment and I think
that that kind of study made me ask more a
(03:16):
more sort of wide ranging question, why meter at all?
Why should poets have metrical lines at all? Why should
they try to fit the words of English into the
Prequstian bed of a meter. So that was something that
was always on my mind. And then in nineteen in
(03:39):
twenty twenty, I published a book called the medical called
the Mental Life of Modernism. And in that book I
had run across a discussion of repetition by Leonard Bernstein,
(04:00):
the great composer, conductor, and performer. That you can find
that discussion in his the book, which was the publication
form of this Norton lecture series at Harvard University in
the early nineteen seventies. And what Bernstein said just really
(04:23):
caught me by surprise. He said, the reason why there's
been so little progress in music theory is because music
theorists have not paid attention to repetition in music. Now,
here's something that really caught my attention. Why should Bernstein
(04:43):
be complaining about repetition? And here I am thinking about
why the poetry use repetition? And then what actually nailed
it for me and really turned the corner in my
mind the corner that says one street is called music
(05:04):
about and the end of the street is called Let's
write about It. And what made me turn the corner
from U Street to Let's write about It Street was
an experiment performed by a musicologist at Princeton University. Her
name is Elizabeth Helmut Margoulis, and she put together a
(05:29):
remarkably simple but elegant experiment which really I thought was
just caused veils to drop from in front of my eyes.
Here's what she did. She took two composers of atonal music,
(05:56):
Lucciano Berrio and Elliott Carter. Now you don't have to
know the difference between tonal and a total music for
me to explain this experiment, So in the interest of
time led me not to go into that. But let
me just say that these is that.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Okay, Betsy, Yeah, that's fine, that's fine.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Okay, Okay. So here's what she did. She actually took
two pieces by these composers and using the groupe force
functions of her computer, one labeled copy and one labeled paste.
And what she did was she copied a segment of
(06:41):
the music and pasted it later on in the music.
And so she did that for both composers. So let's
imagine that the music that she was looking at could
be divided up into five segments one two, three, four five,
and copied segment number one, and in one experiment, which
(07:06):
she called immediate repetition, she pasted it right after it occurred,
so that new doctored piece of music was not one
two three four five, but it was now one one
two three four five. Then she did the same thing,
but she pasted it a little farther down the line
(07:27):
in what she called delayed repetition, so that music was
now not one two three four five, but it was
one two three, one four five. Okay, So she had
four pieces of music, two the originals and two doctored,
doctored with no esthetic goal in mind at all, just
(07:48):
simply using the group force capability of the computer. She
copied and she pasted, and once she did was she
played these four pieces of music to uh uh two
groups of people. The first were uh college students who
(08:08):
were not particularly versed in music theory or had any
special qualifications in that direction. They just liked music. I mean,
they probably listened to all of the l latest pop pieces,
you know, uh uh, And that sort of thing. The
latest stars Beyonce and uh uh uh uh s s so forth, Madonna,
(08:32):
Lady Gaga, uh okay so uh. Well she did was
she asked them which they liked better, Just ask them
which one they liked better. To a significant degree, the
students liked the Doctor pieces better. Then what she did
was she took the same experiment to a conference where
(08:55):
the attendees were all PhDs in music theory. These were
people from whom music was their career. They knew it,
they knew it all they knew, certainly knew Lucian Burial,
and they certainly knew Elliott Carter. And what she did
was she played it for them and lo and behold
the same result. They liked the Doctor piece better. What
(09:19):
Mygoulas concluded was that the mere addition of repetition had
enhanced the esthetic appeal of these pieces of music. It
was exactly like a master chef adding a spice to
a recipe in order to enhance its flavors. It was
(09:43):
as mechanical as that in building repetition, you'd like it better.
That made me realize that repetition is not just a
philip not just something en passant as they say, but
rather this was a rather deep issue about human cognission
and what we find pleasurable. And so that's what shot
(10:04):
me in repetition.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
You know what, a professor Jay, I'm glad you brought
that up because when reading of chapters in your book,
and you know, it just hit me as being part
in the neurodivergent community because my son has a kind
of disability my husband had early on set Alzheimer's. I
(10:31):
worked with children in preschool. I have found that repetition
definitely is comforting and it does give people pleasure. And
I want to pick your brain because is that why
young children they love to hear rhymes over and over again,
(10:52):
They love to hear the songs, the same songs over
and over again. My son, who is a nerdivergent, he
likes the same things repeated every day, over and over again.
It's a sense of perfect to them. Have you noticed
that in the nerd divergent community. I have to pick
(11:15):
your brain about that.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, actually that's been noticed, That was noticed a long
time ago. And I think that given your background and
what you've just described about your son's disability, I think
you'll find this very interesting and you may even want
(11:37):
to research it on your own. But in nineteen sixty eight,
there was a social psychologist by the name of Robert
Zcience who wrote an article in which he described what
he called the mere exposure phenomenon. And here is what
he said. Quote Repeated exposure of the individual to a
(12:03):
stimulus object enhances the subject's attitude toward it. In other words,
it's almost paraphrase of Elizabeth Margulis's comment about the mere
inclusion of repetition. He saw a repetition as a kind
of safe environment sensor. This has nothing to do with
(12:28):
the arts now, and this is very important, Betsy, because
what I'm telling you now has to do with fundamental
cognitive functioning of Homo sapiens. And he saw repetition as
a kind of safe environment sensor, something that is essential
for a creature driven to live within a cohesive social organization.
(12:52):
In other words, it was a marker which guided the
sub to a safe environment. So long as this sensor
kept firing, the environment was labeled safe. The glue that
(13:12):
makes the label stick to the sense of pleasure it
bestows is the glue that makes the label stick is
the sense of pleasure that is to say, if you
keep firing something over and over and over again, what
happens is you develop an affection for it. This place
(13:34):
feels good now. He In the course of his article
Zience referenced work that points to infants going from fear
to interest, as a sound frightening on the first hearing
becomes a matter of interest upon repetition. The idea is
(13:56):
that we all come with our own hard wired self
monitoring the baby monitor. As long as our surroundings register sameness,
the odds for survival are in our favor. But as
soon as a big enough difference is spotted, or you
become aware of a big enough difference, an internal version
(14:19):
of a warning light begins to flash. Be careful so
you can easily imagine how this might happen. What happens
is that an infant. When an infant is born, the
first image, or certainly one of the first images that
it's going to be exposed to, is its mother's face.
(14:41):
And if ever there was an image that the infant
ought to bond to to enhance its possibility of survival,
it's to its mother, And so by the repetitive appearance
of that image tells the infant this is a safe
place for me to be. I don't want to fight
being here. Okay. So that is an evolutionary development designed
(15:13):
to maximize the possibility, the probability of an infant surviving
long enough to contribute to the gene pool. After all,
that's Nature's only concerned. And what my book is about
is the claim that this connection between repetition and pleasure,
(15:36):
which nature built in in order to make sure that
the infant survived, was co opted by artists to make
sure that pleasure was installed in their works of art.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yes, I said, Oh, I can't wait to talk to
Professor Jay about this topic because you know it and
especially working with children. I worked with children ages two
and a half to six, and they love watching the
same stories, hearing the same stories, or watching it on
(16:14):
the We had the VCR at the time. We're DVD.
But they love rhyming and they love to hear the rhyming. Yes,
go ahead. Protection.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
The reason is because it gives them a sense of pleasure. Yes, yes,
that's where they feel safe.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yes and no. It's incredible and it, you know, just
boggles my mind sometimes, Professor j how the brain works
because someone and it's been proven that music. The music
therapy is very beneficial to those who have Alzheimer's or
any type of dementia. And when my when my husband met,
(17:03):
when he would hear Glenn Campbell's song which it talled Lineman,
and this is you know, in the early stages, he
would say, my dad liked that song and he was
on lineman for the our electric company down here, PF
and G. He remembered that for the longest time, and
you can you know, I saw how music really helped
(17:27):
him to calm down because it was pleasurable for him
to hear that. It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Well, I have I've had I've had the same experience
myself earlier on in my life when unfortunately I no
longer walk without age because of an action that happened
to me about eleven years ago. But before that, I
(17:55):
used to play in the Dixieland band that went around
to four nursing homes in a new report. And what
we would do is we would go to each of
these nursing homes and we'd go to a place where
the staff had assembled the residents to hear us. And
(18:19):
I remember distinctly one ward where the residents couldn't leave
their beds. They were so enfeebled, and I think that
most of them must have had dementia. They were just
when we would come into the ward, there was no
interest at all in us. Whatever they were staring at,
they continued to stare at it, But as soon as
(18:42):
we started to play, they had lifted up and they
turned toward us, and in many of them you could
see a smile. It was amazing to me to see
that kind of reaction. All that happened was we started
playing music.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's that's so true. I'll tell you what my father
would have loved you with, Professor J. My father loved jazz,
and you mentioned Duke Ellington and Satin Dahal. My father
loved Duke Ellington. I said, I gotta tell that to
Professor J because it brought back memories I had. I
(19:22):
had to go on to YouTube and play that song
Sattens Up because I forgot what it. You know, sounded
like excuse me, but you brought back memories of my dad.
So I want to thank you for bringing back those
memories to me. And uh, so you see the importance
(19:45):
of repetition. Do you think musicians take that seriously?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Well, I think that they certainly take playing the music seriously,
and that's all you need because the music embodies the repetition,
and really good musicians know how to bring out the
heart of the music. So the answer is yes, they
may not be aware of what they're doing that mainly
(20:13):
they are playing a repeated motif. In some cases, the
repetition that is built into a piece of music is
so complicated that it's unlikely that anybody gets it. But
that said, I think that musicians indirectly are aware of
(20:34):
it when they play the piece with love.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yes, I'm just fascinated, and I'm fascinated to hear you
discuss your intense knowledge about how important repetition is an art.
How does that repetition concern the art of painting? Well,
(21:02):
Tory in the.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Chapter fourteen of my book is devoted to showing you
how repetition works in painting and in photography, and I
think in order to bring that out in as in
(21:29):
as clear fashion as possible, if you don't mind, I
would like to start not with your question about painting,
but I'd like to show you what goes on in poetry,
and in particular that part of poetry which we call rhyme.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Sure, go ahead, okay, yankies. Of course, consider a couple
with this I wrote. I wrote this couple for the
purposes of discussion. Here's a couplet. I am searching for
rhyme to spice this couplet. Let's say time.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Now, we know that rhyme and time. There when I
use the word time, I refer to it in terms
of the spice th hyme. But of course I'm also
wants you to think about the word time time. But
we know as soon as we hear that that rhyme
(22:28):
and time rhyme. We know that rhyme and time rhyme,
but that rhyme and foot doesn't.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
We know that I'm in time rhyme, But we also
know that rhyme and rhyme don't rhyme, at least not
as end rhymes r We know. Here's what we know.
What we know is we have the ability and I'm
going to greatly simplify this, but I think it's the
(22:59):
basic idea. We have the ability to take a word
or look only at monosyllables for the moment, and we
divide it up into two parts, which I'll call the front.
In the back. The back part begins with the stressed vowel.
And what we know is that a word and the
front part is everything before the back part to the
(23:21):
beginning of the word. So let's take the word rhyme.
The back part is i'm, as in the word i'm,
I'm going to the store, The back part is i'm.
What is the front part, it's R. In the word time,
what is the back part, it's i'm. What is the
front part, it's T. And what we know is that
(23:45):
for a word to be to rhyme, to be part
of a rhyming pair, the back parts must be the
same and the front part must be different. That's by
rhyme and foot don't rhyme because in rhyme the back
part is i'm, the front part is are, and in
(24:08):
foot the back part is ut and the front part
is F. Well, it satisfies the front part, which is different,
but it doesn't satisfy the back part, which is not,
which is different, and it's supposed to be the same.
So when we determine whether two words rhyme or not,
what we do is we say, divide each word into
(24:28):
front and back parts. Are the back parts the same?
Are the front parts different if the answer to two
and three is yes, than the words rhyme. Now, this
relationship between the front and the back parts I'm gonna
call same accept. So you can pay the two words
rhyme if they are the same except for the front part. Now,
(24:53):
that same accept relationship shows up in music. So for example,
you may that your father was a great devotee of
Duke Ellington, and indeed so am I. In fact, I
played a jazz orchestra that is devoted to avant garde
jazz and the works of Duke Ellington. We have a
(25:15):
concert coming up on the ninth of September, in fact
here in the Boston area where we're going to play.
A good part of it will be the works of
Duke Ellington.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Oh wow, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Yeah, we did a YouTube. We did a concert at
the local public radio station television station WGBH on the
sixth of June last year, and that was one hundred
and twenty fifth year of Duke Ellington's birthday, and it
went all over the world and it was a celebratory
(25:51):
concert for Duke. And I'm very proud to say that
I played in it, and I'm so pleased that I
was able to anyway. One of the tunes that Duke wrote,
he wrote in nineteen fifteen with Billy Strainhorn, called Satin Doll.
It was, as you said, one of your husband's, your
father's favorites, and you went listen to it again. So
(26:13):
you're gonna have to listen to it again with me
singing it. I'm going to do it a wretched job
of it, but let me do that anyway. The interesting
thing about the the interesting thing about that Satin Doll
is that it is the musical version of rhyme. It
is composed of a melody that is the same except
and let me show you how that works. The first
(26:36):
two bars of Satin Doll are bauda bou up, bah
dude up, and the second two bars are bah Buddha
Buddha bah dude up. Now those two bars rhyme. They
are the same, except but the dimensions along which the
(26:57):
rhyme is defined being in music is different. It's not
the sounds of words, but rather it's the combination of
rhythm and pitch. A musical notation combines into a single notation.
Both how the pitch of a of a note, that
is to say, where it appears along the scale how
(27:19):
high or low it is. And the second thing it
encodes is the rhythm. Now let's split those two things apart,
and now lets me give you the rhythmic version of
the first two bars of Satin Ball. It's ba b
dah bout dup bah du bap You'll notice I'm not
(27:41):
changing the pitch at all. And what is the rhythm
of the second two bars. It's identical. It's the same
bad da ba du bah. Now let's take a look
at the pitch. The pitch of the first bar is
bob ba ba brued up. The pitch of the second
(28:03):
two bars bo brewed up, burnt up, bar turned up.
It's different. And what is the difference. It's one step
higher in the scale. So the first four bars of
Luke Dallington, Satin Doll and Billy Fayle and Satin Doll rhyme,
they're the same in rhythm, and they are different in pitch,
(28:24):
but their rhythm is the pitch is close. So it's
uh uh, it's the musical version same. Except now if
you go to the bridge of Saturn Doll, the bridge
is eight bars long. It's an interval between the first
eight bars, and the last eight bars of the tune
is typically called the bridge in jazz. And now listen
(28:47):
to the to the bridge. The first four bars are
ba ba ba. Okay, well, let me do the second
four bars for you, bob ba but better bar. And
if you understood what I said about the beginning, you'll
see that the bridge is identical. The rhythm of the
(29:08):
first four bars are the same. The pitch is different.
The first I mean, the rhythm of the first four
bars is the same as the rhythm of the second
four bars of the bridge. The four measures. Let me
not be technical. The rhythm of the first four measures
of the bridge and the rhythm of the second four
measures of the bridge are identical. They're the same. The
(29:30):
pitch of the first four measures of the bridge differs
from the pitch of the second four measures of the
bridge by one step, exactly the same thing that we
saw in the beginning. The whole tune is built on
same except it is a rhythmical It is a musical
version of rhyme. Now we've looked at poetry and we
(29:53):
found same accept and we've looked at music and we
found same accept And now let's go to your original
question I say something about painting. Well, perhaps the most
famous painting that everybody there would know might be Andy
Warhol's Campbell soup cans. Yes, it was a poke in
(30:19):
the eye of abstract expressionism, which was a Warhole did
this in nineteen sixty two, and at that time abstract expressionism,
in the hands of painters like Da Cooney and Jackson
Pollock were all the rage, and Andy Warhol made fun
of it. Rather than be abstract, he wanted to be
(30:41):
as concrete as possible and in fact, as mundane as possible.
So what did he do. He actually painted the most
common thing you could think of. It was an item
that you could find in any supermarket or corner grocery store,
a can of can amble soup. And he painted thirty
(31:03):
two of them. They were all the same. And what
he did was he arranged them on the wall in rows,
in four rows of eight cans each, so you had
eight cans, and then underneath that eight cans, and underneath
that eight cans, and underneath that the last eight cans.
Thirty two cans, every one of them absolutely identical, except
(31:28):
there was one difference. Can you guess what the difference
would be? Let's see a flavor exactly exactly every can
was the same except for the label. The first row
was clamm showder and then followed by chicken noodle, and
then followed by cream of vegetable onion, green pea, scotch groth,
(31:52):
vegetable split pee. That's just the first of roll. The
cans were the same except exactly the same principle that
we saw in Duke Ellington satin doll. Exactly the same
principle that we saw in end rhyme in a couplet,
Like I am searching for rhyme to spice this couplet.
(32:13):
Let's say time all right. In photography, there is a
woman by the name of Ronnie Horn, who I believe
is stationed is based in New York City, although she
photographs all over the world. One of her most famous
collection of photographs she made after spending a year, I think,
(32:35):
in Iceland, and the result of it was something called
Becoming a Landscape. And in that book, what she has
is a hundred pictures of faces. But these faces are
in pairs, just like end rhyme, and just like the
first four bars of satin doll. And if you look
(32:56):
at these faces, it's as if they're identical. It's as
if she simply had somebody posed and then click the
camera twice. But that's not quite true. If you look
at it, you will see that there's some very slight
differences in between the two portraits. As one commentator on
(33:19):
the web put it, he said, Horn requires that you
look and discover the identity is always different. That is
to say, these photographs are the same, except it's as
if she has taken the game Spot the Difference and
turned it into an art form. Do you know what
spot the differences?
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Noticing differences in the portraits for the painting, I would think.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
But there was a children's game, you know, called Spot
the Difference where you would there'd be two pictures and
they'd be identical on first glance.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
But what you would right is that they are really.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Differences, and the fund was to spot the difference. Yes, yes,
and that was fun. The reason why yeah, game is
because it was fun. And the reason why it was
fun was because it demanded repetition. Well she did that
in her photographs. So that's the answer to your question
about what's going on in photography.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Well, that's very interesting. I I'm ventually a paired, Professor Jay.
So when you have to look at a picture and
spot the difference, sometimes first I can't do it, and
then I got to go back, get repetition, go back
and keep looking at the difference, and then I eventually
do see the differences and the photographs. But I just
(34:49):
really I have to tell you this too. My dad,
who also had old climbers, was in a nursing home facility.
My mind brought all his jazz records there and when
he got a little feisty, they would play his music,
which calmed him down. And so when I was listening
(35:14):
to Duke Ellington, and of course I had to go
to Sarah Vaughan who he liked, and Eli Fitzgerald, you know,
and Billie Holiday, and the just brings back memories. So
repetition also to me, Professor Jay, and this might sound
a little off, repetition to me is also comforting because
(35:35):
it brings back precious memories. Do you find that, yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Well is yes, I definitely do find that. I mean,
if that's a kind of a secondary phenomenon, the repetition
is getting pleasure, taking pleasure in it is I'm saying,
hardwired intois as human beings, but that rise to pleasant memories,
(36:01):
and you remember those pleasant memories when you think of
the repetition. So sure that makes a lot of sense.
I'm glad you have memories.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
Thank you. Thank you me too. I don't know if
you have the time, professor J. But can you tell
us how did you get into theoretical my saying I
write linguistics and you can tell I'm not a linguistic
(36:32):
Can you tell us to what that is? And how
did you get into interested in that?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Well, when I was a student in undergraduate days I studied,
I was always very drawn toward literature. I just like
to read. I like to read novels, I like to
read short stories. I like to read poetry and essays.
(37:03):
It was just what That's just who I am. And
so I thought to myself, well, I think what I'll
do is I'll maybe make a career out of studying literature.
And so I began to look at what people who
studied literature did, and what I found was that for
(37:25):
the most part, what they did was they would pick
a period, they would pick poets or writers that they
liked very much, and then they would analyze the reasons
why they liked them, and I found that for the
most part their commentaries, although they were interesting, they were
(37:49):
really not what I would call hard and fast arguments.
They were not scientific arguments at all. What they were
were sort of the evocations. They were elegant descriptions of
the evocations that a work of art produced in a
(38:10):
particular reader, And as interesting as that might be depending
upon the mind of the critic involved, it really wasn't formal,
because somebody else could read the same poem and come
up with a completely different interpretation and that would be
just as good. So I wasn't satisfied with English literature
(38:34):
as a career, because, as I said, I wanted I
was much more interested in the scientific study of literature,
if that was indeed possible, and that led me through
various steps in the theoretical linguistics. First, I went to Oxford,
(38:54):
where I studied Old and Middle English. I did that
in order to sort of broaden my range of knowledge
about English literature. I read Chaucer, I read Beohof, and
I read a lot of the Middle English poetry, like
Allan in the Green Knight, and also The All of
(39:17):
the Night and Bale by the Way. Gallan in the
Green Knight is an absolutely brilliant poem which unfortunately is
lost to us, many of us because it was written
in Middle English and it does take some effort to
read it, but it's just a brilliant poem in our
(39:39):
earlier stages of our language. Well, anyway, once I had
done that, I decided, well, maybe I can marry my
knowledge of linguistics with my knowledge of I mean, my
knowledge of literature with the study of language as a
formal object. So I got a scholarship to you Yale,
(40:00):
and I went to Yale, got my PhD in linguistics
at Yale, and in the course of doing that, I
was introduced to the work of Nolam Chomsky and Mars
Halley at MIT. And that was basically a groundbreaking work
which shifted linguistic the study of language onto a whole
(40:24):
new level on a par with scientific inquiry. It is,
in fact the basis of the scientific study of the brain.
It's the at the moment, it's uh linguistic accounts of
what it is we know when we know a language
is probably the most thoroughly articulated theory of what the
(40:45):
brain knows when it knows how to speak, and over
the course of a professional lifetime, I spent most of
my life writing in uh in uh topics having to
do with theoretical linguistic subjects. I wrote on the syllable
(41:07):
structure in English and uh and in the world's languages.
And then with a colleague of mine, Nick Clements long
gone but not forgotten, and I worked on the syntax
of of of of a lexicon with another colleague, Ken Hale,
(41:29):
who is one of the most brilliant linguists I've ever
encountered in my life. And then I retired. And when
I retired, I realized I'm free. I can do whatever
I want. And so for the first time in my life,
I was able to marry my interest in theoretical linguistics
(41:52):
with my interest in in uh in art. And my
two books Mental Life of Modernism and now Play It
against Sam was the result of that. That was the
result of a life of retirement.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Well, Professor Samuel J. Kaiser, I so enjoy talking to
you today. I know you have to go, but I
enjoy talking to you. And I want to know where
can people purchase your book Played against Sam Repetition in
(42:30):
the arts.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Well you can get it on I know you can
get it on Amazon. You can, I'm sure you can
requested in your local bookstore, and I think you can
also get it in libraries. But I also think it's
available online from MIT Press. You might want to take
(42:57):
a look at their open access have so direct publication offerings,
and I think my book is there, so you can
have access to it there.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
And how can people connect with you?
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Okay, I'm on face, I'm on Facebook, and I think, okay,
you can get my contact information there. I have received
uh two or three emails about my various uh exposures
to the public. I found each one of these emails
really interesting, so I benefit greatly from that. But you
(43:38):
can you can get me through Facebook?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Oh well, you know what I'm going to do that.
I'm going to do that myself. I'm going to connect
with you on on Facebook. Uh. Thank you so much,
Professor Samuel J. Kaiser spell the last ank K E
Y s E R you heard today, folks. Thank you
for writing your book, played against sam repetition in the arts.
(44:05):
I've found it very interesting. I have to go back
and read what I didn't finish reading. But thank you
for sharing your knowledge, your wisdom, writing your book and
your career, you know, playing music in different facilities and
sharing your talents. It was such a pleasure and honor
(44:27):
to talk to you today, Jay, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
You're very kind to say those kind things to me.
Thank you so much. I also want to thank you
for making your time available to me, and if you
have any questions just email me sure.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Thank you so much. Folks, you heard Professor Samuel J. Kaiser,
author and writer, played against sam repetition and the arts.
I highly recommend for people to read that, especially if
you were I'm going to say the educational field, the
medical field, any kind of field. Read this book. It
(45:07):
will really enlighten you. And I think it's very important
for people who are going into education to read this book.
And all the information about Samuel J. Kaiser will be
in the blog that Genie White writes, who is the
station manager produces the show, and I want to thank
Lillian Caldwell, who's CEO at Pashure World Talk Radio Network,
(45:28):
who makes this all possible. And they want to thank
Lisa Warren Lisa Warren p R. Of arranging this interview.
She is a wonderful a publicist. So if you need
a publicist, you're an author writer. I highly recommend Lisa
Warren and I want to thank you all for listening.
(45:51):
Please subscribe to Chatting with Betsy this for free if
you haven't already. I am on Spotify Spreaker. iHeart Amazon
Music today a few and I want to reach as
many people as possible. And I also want to thank
you well for listening to me. You can even program
me on Alexa. If you have Alexa Chatting with Betsy
(46:12):
and you could take me wherever you do. You know,
you're walking, doing dishes, you know whatever. You can listen
to Chatting with Betsy, and I would so appreciate that. Also,
if you want to follow me, I am on Facebook
Betsye Worzel w r z e L And as I
always say at the end of my show, in a
(46:34):
world where you could be anything, please be kind and shine.
You're a light right because we need it now more
than ever before. This is Betsy Worzel, your host that
Chatting with Betsy. I'm passionate. World Talk Radio Network, a
subsidiary of Global Media Network LLC. Bye bye now
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