"When we try to pick out anything else in the universe, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
– John Muir
You are a performer. Whether you are an instrumentalist, a singer, a dancer, an actor, a director, an athlete, a salesperson, a coach, or a teacher, the key to your ability to perform at your best is not only your talent, or your technical proficiency, but your ability to deliver consistently high quality performances throughout your career. This requires that you know the facts about your ability, your goals, and what is required of you in order to achieve them.
If it exists or existed, or happened, then it is a fact, sometimes called a hard fact because its existence usually generates hard evidence. A fact is a unit of existence. The intonation of any particular pitch is a fact. The speed with which you can reliably execute a particularly difficult musical passage is a fact. And whether you covered all the important content in a sales presentation is a fact.
Most of the facts in the universe are unknown to humans. Callisto is a moon of Jupiter and has been there for millions of years, but was totally unknown to humans until about 400 years ago when discovered by Galileo. Callisto is a hard fact.
Some facts exist only for fleeting moments, like quarks, which seem to exist only for a fraction of a second when two atoms collide. Truly great performances often exist only for the moment, and then they are gone.
Every fact is a sub-fact of a larger fact. A rock is part of a mountain, which is part of a continent, which is part of a planet, which is part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, which is part of the universe, which is part of…God? The links to ever larger facts should go on into infinity, but my mind doesn’t seem to be able to believe in an absolute infinity, so I’d rather just say that God is at the top of that chain of facts.
In the same way, each fact is made of sub-facts. The rock is made of particles of smaller rocks, which are made of minerals, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, each of which is made of…strings? Extending this logic seems to be limited by our knowledge of very small facts.
You are also a fact made of sub-facts like arms, skin, eyes, etc. You are also part of other facts, like family, city, country, planet, etc.
"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself" – Mark Twain
You exist. Each of us joins the world and leaves the world while it is in progress through time. Some people think of time as a river. Where are you in the river of time? In the U.S., a person currently in their 20s or 30s has a high probability of living until about age 100. This probability can be reduced by stupidity and carelessness, and increased by exercise and eating well.
Among the more interesting properties of a fact is validity. Ice is a hard fact, but it is valid only when the temperature of the water is below freezing. When the temperature rises to a certain point, it is no longer valid as ice, but it is valid as liquid. If the temperature continues to rise to a certain point, it becomes invalid as liquid, but valid as vapor.
Validity is part of a hard fact, and depends on the corresponding validity of one or more sub-facts.
Intonation is a hard fact, and when evaluating a performance, there may be some notes or passages where one performer’s intonation is invalid when compared to other players in the performance, or compared to what the composer intended.
If one of the tones in a phrase is a B-Flat, there are tools that can technically verify that it is a B-Flat, thereby confirming its validity. But as a fact, is it true?
A fact and a statement about a fact are obviously not the same thing. A statement about a fact can be considered true. Sometimes a fact must be judged to be true or false in a court of law based on arguments and evidence. But arguments can only be statements about facts, and hard evidence can only verify the validity of a hard fact, so the judgment of truth is just that, a judgment, a legal fact that must be accepted whether we agree with it or not. A hard fact, on the other hand, exists whether a court says it exists or not, or whether any human in the universe even knows it exists. Truth is not part of a hard fact. Is Callisto true? Is F-Sharp true? Is the number five true? As much as we might want truth to be part of a fact, truth simply cannot be part of a fact.
What is the meaning of B-flat? What is the meaning of Callisto? Or of Schumann's "Dichteliebe?"
I’ve never been a big fan of "Dichteliebe" mostly because it seemed to be a “poor me” self-indulgent lament that goes on for too long. However, one summer I sat in the second row to hear Thomas Quasthoff sing the song cycle. It was one of the most moving Lieder recitals I have ever heard. The woman who sat next to me wept for five minutes into the intermission. His performance was not only musically excellent, but he infused it with the pain of unrequited love. For me, his physical stature added tremendous depth to his performance. Quasthoff is three feet tall; a dwarf, and yet this Grammy-winning artist is rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand bass-baritones in the world.
His performance was very moving, and inspired me to create a deeper and totally new and personal meaning for "Dichteliebe." Quasthoff had created a personal meaning for himself, but his meaning is not the same as mine, and cannot be the same meaning as that created by any individual audience member.
Here is another example: A friend of mine attended a logging exhibition in the Pacific Northwest, and was having a great time until he turned from one display to see a man standing on top of an eighty-foot pole. Everyone around him was delighted to watch the fellow dancing on top of the pole, but my friend was horrified. To the others, the meaning of this stunt was an entertainment, and funny. To him, it meant a man was risking his life and memories from his childhood overwhelmed him. About seventy years earlier, as a small child, while holding his father’s hand at a carnival, a man standing on a tall pole fell to his death only a few feet from where he was standing. Each person’s meaning for a current event is created from everything they have ever known that relates to the event, and although there are some meanings that seem to be commonly held by "everyone," each person creates their own meaning.
Neither truth nor meaning is part of any hard fact. Callisto could have no meaning until it was discovered by Galileo, and the meaning for Galileo was entirely different than the meaning for the church at that time. The church’s Inquisition put him under house arrest for many years because his discovery was blasphemy. Even now Callisto has different meanings. There are some folks who think some of the moons of Jupiter might be nice places to visit. I’ll just watch from here, thank you.
"I don't pretend to understand the universe; it's a great deal bigger than I am." – Thomas Carlyle
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