About Paul S. Dachslager, Ph.D.—Author Biography

Biography

Paul Dachslager, Ph.D., studied history and philosophy at The Great Courses.com.
Paul studied music composition at the Manhattan School of Music, and he studied Classical guitar with David Tannenbaum.

Paul is a native of Berkeley, California. His parents are former San Francisco beatniks. He grew up in a lively house of Marxists, feminists, and a mathematician father, who is an accomplished pianist. His father has a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley, and Paul suspects that this endowment is the true source of Paul's accomplishments. Some of Paul's earliest memories are listening to his father playing Chopin, Beethoven, and Brahms.

As a teenager, Paul was active with the radical Committee Against Racism, and he studied feminism before the school of hard knocks converted him to evolutionary biology. The race and sex scene in Berkeley and New York, well documented by the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, proved to be a heady cocktail indeed.

Paul was raised to be a good man and to believe that the West is the root of all evil, but the real world corrected these erroneous beliefs learned from his wayward stepfather and benighted Berkeley.

Paul flunked out of high school but passed the GED with flying colors. His first job after high school was in construction, and the only thing he learned from that job was that climbing a ladder in that trade was impossible.

At that point, he realized that studying music was a better alternative.

While attending the College of Marin, Paul read Frederick Jameson's article Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New Left Review, 1984). If capitalism was "late" in 1984, then I suspect that Dr. Jameson will be senile before "capitalism." It was this article that introduced Paul to the problem of periodizing contemporary society.

Paul is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), the International Plato Society, and the Wagner Society of Northern California. The papers he has presented before conferences of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society scientifically peer review two of the central theses of Human Sin or Social Sin. The abstracts for the papers are on the peer review page. A publisher commissioned from Paul a textbook on evolutionary psychology.

Paul has a formal Ph.D. equivalence from the American Philosophical Society, and an informal Ph.D. equivalence from membership in the American Philosophical Association. From American Military University he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and completed most of a master's degree in European history.

It was while reading an introductory sociology textbook that Paul saw the original ideas (his "three theses") that led to his books.

A past president of the International Plato Society confirmed that Paul's use of Plato qualified him for membership in the Society. He described the book with a superlative.

Paul gave the Inaugural Lecture before the Socratic Philosophical Honor Society. His paper presented before the Wagner Society of Northern California was also distributed to a class on Wagner at the University of Cincinnati, and the paper was posted by the Brückner Society of America. A Stanford professor described the paper as "brilliant."

Paul has attended Richard Wagner's music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen 12 times by such opera companies as the Bayreuth Festival, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Seattle Opera, and the Mariinsky Theater. Paul attended Der Meistersinger and The Flying Dutchman in San Francisco, and Christian Thielemann conducting Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany during the opera's 150th anniversary. Paul has been a member of the Wagner Society of Northern California for over 20 years.

Other memorable concerts were cellist Alicia Weilerstein in the Schumann Concerto in San Francisco, pianist Yefim Bronfman in the Beethoven fourth piano concerto in San Francisco, Daniil Trifonov in recital in Aspen, Montserrat Caballe in recital in New York, Sabine Devielhe in recital at Carnegie Hall, Jonas Kaufmann's Die Schone Mullerin at Carnegie Hall, Elena Garanca's Wesendonck Lieder at Carnegie Hall, Bryn Terfel's Figaro and Falstaff in San Francisco, William Christie's direction of Lully's opera Atys in New York, Anna Netrebko's Violeta in San Francisco, Dolora Zajick's Azucena at the Met, Angela Gheorghiu's Mimi and Tosca in San Francisco, Nina Stemme's Brunhilde and James Morris's Wotan in San Francisco, Matti Salminen's Hunding and Siegfried Jerusalem's Siegfried at the Met, Thomas Quasthoff in the St. Mathew Passion and in recital in Berkeley, Anna Sophie Mutter's complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas in San Francisco, Joshua Bell's Tchaikovsky violin concerto in San Francisco, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in San Francisco, Garrick Ohlsson's Chopin's Preludes to celebrate the composer's 200 birthday, Denis Matsuev in recital in Carnegie Hall, Kathleen Battle's Susanna at the Met, Isabel Leonard in recital in Napa Valley, Angelika Kirchschlager in recital in Berkeley and her Cherubino in San Francisco, Barbara Bonney and Dawn Upshaw in recital in San Francisco, Gerald Finley's Winterreise in Berkeley, Rene Fleming's Lucrezia Borgia in San Francisco and in recital in Berkeley.

Paul attended a moving tribute held by the Metropolitan Opera Guild to commemorate the peerless life and career of soprano Rene Fleming. He was dazed by the end of the event. Special thanks to San Francisco Performances which brought so many wonderful Classical artists to San Francisco. 

I would like to thank the Vatican for their gallery Centrale Montemartini which displays Classical sculptures next to machine parts. The shocking contrast helped to wake me from my dogmatic slumbers.

For visual splendors, Paul has spent 25 hours beholding Michelangelo's masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel, 150 hours in the Musée de Louvre, and Alina Cojocaru's flawless Aurora in the ballet Sleeping Beauty in New York, and George Balanchine's Symphony in C performed by the San Francisco Ballet. 

By far the greatest artistic experience Paul has had in his life was Maestro Thielemann's performance of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth. Paul's brain was on fire for four hours. 

At age 21, Paul took what he called at the time “the inductive turn.” This made him start to notice the details of emotions and aesthetics, and how these contradicted the Marxist and relativist dogma he was raised with. In his twenties, he described himself as an “aesthete.” So it is with great pleasure that one study that supports Human Sin or Social Sin is entitled Aesthetics Equals Politics (MIT Press). Science imitates art?!

An early lesson came from a choral director: “If you want to be heard at the back of the hall, don’t sing louder: sing more in tune.” That rule is universally applicable. It’s the basis for all science. Special thanks to Paul Weisser, Ph.D., my editor of twenty years, who managed to turn my chicken scratch into glowing prose. Working with him is the closest thing to evidence for God I have ever come across. A miracle worker who, blessedly, edited all of my works.

Special thanks to the memory of Peter Sharkey, at the College of Marin, who taught me how to write a sentence, paragraph, and essay. When I left high school, I was functionally illiterate.

Thanks to the memory of Janet Macintosh, at the College of Marin, who strongly suggested Tom Wolfe’s satirical essays “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” Eye-opening indeed!

And thanks to the memory of Hal Sarf, who taught my first Plato class, and said, “People believe what they wanna believe.” And who brought to my attention the power of the fear of death.

And thanks to the museums I obsessed over in my twenties, which showed me a light at the end of my Dark Age: the Prado Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, the original J. Paul Getty Villa, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Frick Collection. The painting “Comtesse d’Houssonville” by Ingres, in the Frick Collection, caused me to seriously question relativism.

In professional contexts, one normally never hears the question, “Why did you tell the truth?” But, curiously, I found myself having to answer this almost unanswerable question. Woody Allen was a major influence on me with his commitment to art over academic verbiage. He also makes clear the sexualization of male aggression.

As a teenager, I assimilated Leftist models for behavior to the status of the facts or the universal truths of math. He only learned later that Leftist ideas are articles of faith, and not merely scientific facts—that can be falsified. In contrast to science, if you deviate from the Almighty Faith, you are punished. The establishment and grass-roots culture threatens people into submission.

For the immediate future, Paul will continue reading the new books that are published in support of his work, and he will prepare his autobiography. He is most definitely enjoying the opera and watching hot girl singers on YouTube.

Since my work has had a huge impact on music scholarship, I should summarize my modest musical background. My father was an excellent pianist, who studied privately until the age of 40. I lived with him as a child, and he coached me on the basics of piano technique and interpretation, how those changed in the twentieth century, and the special demands of the different composers in the standard repertoire.

 When I was age 5 and 6, my family lived in Toronto. My bedroom was upstairs, and one night as I was lying in bed in the dark, my dad played the Chopin Ballad in g, and as my head was swimming, I thought, What’s going on? An apt question at any age! That memory has haunted me for the rest of my life. (I recently confirmed these details with my parents, including bedroom location and music. Sound naturally rises, giving music a “bloom.”) My father had a baby grand Kawaii piano.

In later years, listening to my father perform the great composers in my living room was an amazing experience. Nothing less could have penetrated the thick head of a 10-year-old!

My dad gave me records that were designed to introduce children to music. One had the narrated story of A Thousand and One Nights with the symphonic poem “Scheherazade” playing in the background, and to this day that piece has a particular resonance for me. Another record had a narrator describe the life of Mozart, and one time, after it ended with his death, I started to cry.

“Why did Mozart have to die?” I asked my dad.

That was a prescient question, since twenty years later I would ask, “Why did music have to die?”

When my father lived in Berkeley, his teacher was Mrs. Margaret Gord, who was active with the Berkeley Piano Club and used the Leschetizky technique. I studied with her briefly on two occasions, around 1980, playing the Chopin Prelude in A. She told me two things: I should follow nature, and that the music audience was mostly women before about 1970, when it started to switch over to men. I had already noticed that.

My father went with Mrs. Gord to concerts and master classes. At one of those classes, as the student was playing for a teacher, Mrs. Gord wrote down all the problems, and then the teacher on stage pointed out the same errors that Mrs. Gord had listed.

When I was 12, my father moved to Los Angeles, and he and I then just listened to recordings together during my annual visits to his home. As a teenager, I wanted to fit in, so I listened to pop music—at first, lighter fare, like Gordon Lightfoot; and later, heavy metal and blues, like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin. After high school, I rediscovered classical music when I heard Handel’s “Water Music,” at which point I started to play classical guitar, enrolled at Long Beach City College, and studied harmony and choir for a semester.

The teacher, who was “old school,” had us harmonize Bach melodies, and then compared our solutions to Bach’s to give us an object lesson in genius—or lack thereof. I then transferred to the College of Marin, where I had harmony and ear training for two semesters. I never took a music history class, but I often exhibited a true love of music as I hung around the music library and talked with other students. I would do things like walk in and say, “I’m so happy, I want to listen to the Haydn “Trumpet Concerto”! Or I might say, “I just listened to the Shostakovich ‘Second Cello Concerto,’ which opens with a thirty-minute largo. Ugh!” Apparently, from these kinds of statements, my instructor told a girl that “I was the student most likely to become a musicologist.”

I was the student representative on campus for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. At that time, I started to attend chamber music performances at the San Francisco Performances concert series, which had just recently started. A friend took me to see my first opera, a local performance of Mozart’s singspiel, The Abduction from the Seraglio. In retrospect, that was probably a good first experience.

When I was a small child, my father took me to see Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, but I fell asleep. I am reassured today that I have improved, since I would never fall asleep while watching El?na Garan?a!

A general problem during my early twenties, in my studies of both music history and art history, was my resistance to religion. I had an experience that turned out to be significant. I went to the city dump, where I kept the truck door open and played Mozart on the radio as I emptied the truck bed of garbage. As I looked out over the expanse of trash, with its random colors and shapes, the chaos created a cognitive dissonance with its contrast to the flawless music.

Around that time, a music teacher told me, “You can bump Brahms, but you can’t bump Mozart.” That observation caused me to reflect deeply on the nature of style and historical change, which haunted me throughout my twenties and thirties until the answer started to come clearly into focus.

After a recent student performance of Haydn, I said to a young woman, “That performance sounded like a piece of crystal covered with fingerprints.” I no doubt had that early comment of the music teacher in mind.

When I was still a young man, I took a computer music class at Mills College, at which the teaching assistant said that my piece “sounded like Beethoven.” The instructor strongly suggested that I take the tape-music class. Throughout that period, it became increasingly clear that I wanted to study broader historical questions in music, so I decided to move in the direction of musicology. Feeling that I needed to have a bigger cognitive space, I started to listen to music from all periods, from the late Middle Ages to postmodernism. Since I worked at Tower Records, that allowed for expanded listening opportunities, talks with knowledgeable people, and discounted recordings. During the transition from LPs to CDs, I heard the first criticisms of digital recordings. From age 20 to today, I listened to about 70,000 hours of recorded music from the late middle ages to today—about 5 hours a day.

I studied music composition at Manhattan School of Music, mostly to enjoy the advantages of living in New York City. After studying for a year, I realized that I lacked enough background to pursue that program, so I dropped out. Then, at age 24, I decided that the best way to periodize modernism and the larger social contexts of music was to study on my own and travel throughout Europe.

While my studies in New York were inconclusive, I did achieve the larger goal of participating in the art and music scenes. I attended several memorable concerts, such as Kathleen Battle starring as Susanna at the Met, William Christie conducting Lully’s opera Atys, and Montserrat Caballe in recital. I also attended a performance of Parsifal at the Met, and while the experience nearly killed me, as I left the house I exhibited my usual discipline by saying, “I’m not going to let this ruin my experience of the opera.” (I recently heard the opera four times at the Met.)

I had the good fortune of hearing Susan Graham, then a graduate student at Manhattan School, sing the “Composer’s Aria” in a masterclass given by Birgit Nielson. By the end, it was obvious that Graham was a major talent, and Nielson, with a big smile, just suggested that she sing it again.

I wasn’t surprised when I saw Graham’s name up in lights a few years later. In 2015, I heard her performing Dido in San Francisco, and after the performance, I told her I heard her sing in the Birgit Nielson master class twenty-five years earlier. Of course, she was surprised and delighted.

I also attended a master class by a well-known vocal accompanist, and after a young woman finished a French song, the coach suggested changes to her pronunciation. When she repeated the song, suddenly the vocal line “clicked into focus,” and I could maintain the lucid line in a lyrical or musical way. I was then able to contrast this unity with the earlier performance, during which the line kept breaking or “falling,” creating a jarring effect.

That experience was extremely important in my intellectual development, since it was my first powerful example of what Plato called the “intelligible” or “aha” moment, when a notion unifies itself in the mind, thereby making relationships crystal clear. A better-known example of this, which Plato used himself, is the clarity that comes with finally understanding a mathematical equation.

Since this experience occurred back in 1985, I recently contacted the teacher, who confirmed that French vowels have a problem for English speakers, who are challenged by articulating a vocal line.

While I was studying in New York, I also learned about the importance of form and training in dance. I attended ballet performances at Lincoln Center and postmodern dance downtown. I read the biographies of the dancers in the postmodern dances, noticing that the dancers with classical training maintained a line better than the dancers who lacked such training. That insight was very important to me, since it agreed with the factors I was observing in music, and later in the visual arts.

  My early goal was to periodize modernism, and the subjects I had in mind were primarily in the arts and social philosophy, such as gender and race. Studying music was particularly important to me, so I am thrilled that important studies have been published that show the canonization of my models in classical music history. These are discussed in the section, “Resurrecting Louis the 14th?”

My Teacher. My Hero!

Charles Darwin | Francis Galton | Albert Einstein | James D. Watson | Francis Crick | Melvin J. Herskovits