DD: When someone listens to the track ‘Roses And Teeth For Ludwig Wittgenstein’, does it matter if they don’t know that the rhythm was made by us using roses as beaters? Yes and no.
It matters that we’re not lying, that we really are making beats out of roses and it matters because objects matter… because they determine what the sound outcome is. Does it matter in the sense that people who don’t know the sound source are somehow cut off from what the work is? I don’t think so. The rhythms that we got on that song have everything to do with how a bunch of roses sound when they strike a surface and if we had have used twigs or branches it would have been a different sound and therefore a different rhythm. Therefore, yeah, I do think it matters. But does that get us any closer to [the philosophy of] Wittgenstein?
I was very much enamoured with Wittgenstein at this point in my life. I was a philosophy major and I was debating whether to pursue philosophy for the rest of my life or not and I fell under the spell of the Wittgensteinian argument that philosophy is rooted in problems of language and that if we attend to language we can climb up the ladder and then throw it away and get rid of the need for philosophy. We can therapeutically cure ourselves for the need for philosophy. I believed in that so deeply that I abandoned philosophy and did English instead. So I went to English grad school and now I’m an English professor. So there was a time in my life when Wittgenstein really directed my path. But does that mean my song somehow expresses Wittgenstein? I think frankly he would have hated that song. I don’t think he would approve.
But also it should be said that Martin playing the roses is different to how I would have played them. I think Martin’s ability to play these objects is the important thing here. So perhaps instead of trying to create a portrait of Wittgenstein we’re actually creating a portrait of Martin.
