Bayes' Theorem: "Música da Sra Bach/Mrs Bach's Music" by Alex McCall, and Irini Vachlioti

I've just watched this documentary and I'm still venting... I must get these vapors out of my system!

Why are people so credulous when it comes to classical music?

It's not limited to classical music. Why are people credulous? Well, for a great many reasons. In this case we have a confluence of several:

i) Bach's works have been analysed for hundreds of years, and little new information has emerged. That means it's hard for anyone to find anything new to say.

ii) its fits a nice contemporary narrative. Unquestionably, talented women have been repressed and marginalised throughout history, and only relatively recently have they received their deserved attention. This means that the potential rediscovery of another such women fits the scholastic zeitgeist, and so attracts the attention above its actual scholarly value. Twenty years ago we'd be asking if Bach's second marriage meant he was secretly gay. So it goes.

iii) the continued fascination with postmodernism in all facets of the arts mean that strong factual evidence is not actually a requirement, and people can be published on the basis of "analysis of penmanship" - a pseudoscience that makes phrenology look credible.

Probably the best way to debunk the silly claim that Anna Magdalena was the composer would be by applying Bayes' theorem to each of the categories of evidence. I have just read a fascinating book by a retired cosmologist who applies Bayes' theorem to argue that Shakespeare was not the author of the sonnets. If I have time I might do this with the Bach example but that's for another post. For now and very briefly, one would consider, firstly, the prior probability that Anna Magdalena was the composer (this would be low, since, for one thing, she is not known to be a composer). Then consider the conditional probability that Bach would do his best work given that he is married to Anna Magdalena. Finally consider the probability that he would do his best work given that he is not married to Anna Magdalena. Now I argue that the last two likelihood ratios are roughly equal hence the posterior probability would not be raised greatly, if at all, above the prior. Of course, I have only considered one category of purported evidence, that Bach did his best work after he married Anna Magdalena, but all the indications are that if all the categories are considered they will not greatly raise the prior if it is raised at all. QED.

It's a sad reflection on the current state of musicology that, rather than exploring important questions, like Bach's influences and influences on, his methods of composition and proper performance practice, someone spends their time on this ridiculous issue. Unlike a painting, the authenticity or otherwise doesn't affect anything of substance, and in this case it appears we can never know the truth. Would it make any difference anyway? Would we play, or listen to the works differently if we thought his wife wrote them?

I'm still waiting for someone to claim Bach was an alien hominid brought to earth by Erich von Däniken's extraterrestrial-friendly Mayans to further the Illuminati's centuries-old plan for world domination in conjunction with the Vatican, Tutankhamen, Scriabin, Leibniz, Elvis Presley and/or dolphins.

And we're back to questions of authorship, did Bach's wife write this, did the Earl of Oxford write Shakespeare's plays, does Victoria Beckham design her clothes – does it matter?

For art it only matters in financial terms, a different attribution can add a million quid on a painting, it's the same object before and after. It's why I prefer to look at the art in the Museu de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, mostly anonymous beautiful objects, the artists biography doesn't get in the way of seeing or hearing the work.

Bottom-Line: Bach tapped into extraordinary mathematical interplays in harmony that stretch the ear to its limit, even now, but all somehow made sense. However, one should not confuse the structural elegance with predictability. His greatest works are characterised by a sort of perpetual harmonic bifurcation: they could at any point unfold one way or the other or slip off another through relative major/minor devices. You never know which which way it will turn, you simply enjoy the harmonic journey Bach that pioneered, precisely because of his genius. He makes the unfamiliar seem familiar.

NB: If you wish to watch the above-mentioned documentary, it's here. Word of warning: The voice-over, in some parts, is in Portuguese. I think it's still watchable for those of you not conversant with Portuguese.

Small Latin and Smaller Greek: “AKA Shakespeare - A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question” by Peter Sturrock

Published 2013.

In my day job, once in a while, especially when I’m getting my feet wet with a new client, I get emails from clients saying stuff like this: “I’m really excited to have you as my new Service Manager”. This is not much different when I get an automatic response from an internet service that goes like: “Hmm, that’s not the right password. Please try again or request a new one” (or something similar). I always assumed “Hmm” was intended to make me think that the automated response was typed, in real time, by a real Turing being – a being who is my pal and writes to me in a conversational style, even using conversational interjections like “Hmm.” Ultimately this is an insult to my “intelligence”. Although I only get slightly miffed when I get responses like those above coming from a machine (or from a new client...), I get real mad when I’m reading a book, wherein the writing is histrionic, narcissistic, and bloated. And I’m not even talking about the supposed “science” therein. I don’t know where this guy, Peter Sturrock, stands when it comes to the authorship question, but after reading this drivel, I think he takes sides with the likes of Derek Jakobi and Mark Rylance. I don’t intend to dwell much on this, like I did the last time, but I’ve got to say something about the math involved. Back in the day, I studied Statistics and Probability, and we’ll knew it always came down to how well our assumptions had to be properly graded, meaning that our levels of confidence had to match our odds of exactitude. Am I supposed to believe Beatrice (one of the four characters in the book) could really make ten trillion statements (10^ (-13) and have only one of them be wrong? Even if she uses "Bayesian" methods? This book is just so full of bullshit, it’s staggering! It promotes, among other things, (equidistant) letter sequences, so popular in the 19^th century with those famous Shakespearean occultists like Ignatius L. Donnelly and Orville Ward Owen; the latter even claimed to have discovered Bacon's autobiography embedded in Shakespeare's plays… The Bayes model (the naïve kind) hypothesizes that a body of items (book, newspaper, paper, etc.) is generated by selecting a category for an item then generating the words of that item independently based on a category-specific distribution. The bullshit in question is in taking for granted the words are independent, a hypothesis that’s clearly violated by natural language texts. Moreover, Sturrock’s approach was doomed to fail, because it’s nigh on impossible to compare two real "substantial" personalities (Shakespeare and Edward de Vere) with a fictive unsubstantial "someone" else. I’d have liked to know the result, if Sturrock had replaced "someone else" by Marlowe, for example, using all the knowledge available today, and not by using mumbo-jumbo. The book is a huge fallacy from beginning to end. I’d be able to forgive the clunky and puerile prose, but the bad science not in a million years.

A few years ago I read a thing called “The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets”. I still have that book on my shelves. I opened it again and I found this gem:

“When Phoebus from the bed / Of Thetis doth arise, / The morning blushing red / In fair carnation wise, / He shows it in her face, / As queen of every grace.”

from “The Shepherd’s Commendation to His Nymph” by Edward de Vere.

Such clunkingly down-to-earth versifying surely would've hit the waste-paper basket of the author of Hamlet, Macbeth, etc., not to mention all those unfailingly fresh, inventive, powerful, yea sublime sonnets.

The Sweet Swan of Avon: "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - Evidence, Argument, Controversy" by Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells

Published 2013.

Disclaimer: I do firmly believe that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, and some of them in tandem with his fellow playwrights.

The keep an open mind argument really grates on me as it implies something is wrong with those who don't agree. I'm quite capable of analyzing data and discarding faulty propositions. I have done a lot of reading and research on this issue and there is 100% nothing to it. The entire argument is based on either making untrue statements or by revealing incomplete or out of context information and thereby making something sound compelling which is not in reality meaningful. For example, there is no extant written document in his hand other than signatures on several documents. What extant plays, letters, diaries exist for other playwrights of the day? Other than Ben Jonson there is almost nothing. One possible signature in Marlowe's hand (spelled Marley) and one possible scrap of paper with a few lines from a play on it. There is not a single extant handwritten example of a play which was published- the only ones that were saved were the single handwritten copies of unpublished plays. Shakespeare did not own his works so there was no reason to mention them in his will; they had no monetary value. Books were listed on the inventory of the will and his is lost. In any case, why is the only sufficient proof of authorship a handwritten play? If that's what's necessary, how can it be that no handwritten play of DeVere's has come to light? How could he not have saved and hidden them away? How could he not have at least safeguarded the plays he produced under his own name? Shakespeare's plays were performed by his troupe and they were published with his name on them. Many people of the time who were involved in the theater and personally worked with him and knew him agreed that he was the author of the plays attributed to Will Shakespeare, the Sweet Swan of Avon.

I have looked into the "authorship question" very thoroughly (Edmondson’s and Well’s book is just another one among many on the subject; Shapiro’s “Contested Will” is much, much better and much less dry than this one) and I find no good evidence at all that Shakespeare's works were not written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, despite the all too familiar claims of a very vocal minority with nothing better to do than to indulge in conspiracy theories. I do not intend to waste any more time on it here - I am off!