Getting the Scale Right

Last night's String and Piano Chamber Music recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music confirmed my thoughts from Monday about "recital scale." The major work on the program was the C Minor piano quartet, Opus 60, of Johannes Brahms. I had heard Joel Krosnick coach the Andante movement of this quartet when he visited for his Master Class; and I really wanted to hear it in its entirety, since I had not heard a "live" performance since 1983, during a series of concerts at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan that covered all of Brahms' chamber music for piano and strings. Brahms was very clear about this being a highly emotional work; and Krosnick invoked the adjective "heartbreaking" for the cello solo that begins the Andante.

However, all of that emotion is not a matter of unbridled wailing. There were certainly fortissimo moments last night, but they were all the stronger in a context where loudness was strictly modulated to achieve the highest intensity. Furthermore, Brahms put so much into the piano part that it comes close to being a piano concerto for "very small orchestra," which makes the proper balancing of the four quartet voices particularly critical. The result was a striking opposition to the approach I had experienced in Heidi Melton's vocal recital. In this one piece of chamber music Brahms may have made his most "operatic" gestures; but he made them at "chamber" scale. The Conservatory students performing this piece seem to have put in the necessary effort to comprehend how those gestures should be delivered at the requisite scale; and the result was far more exciting than anything I heard on Sunday, including Richard Strauss' "Frülingsfeier," which posed the same problem of operatic gesture at chamber scale.

The program opening on an even smaller scale with Maurice Ravel's sonata for violin and cello. Ravel is usually best appreciated for his sonorities (and justifiably so); and this work experiments with such sonorities in its two instruments. both as individual voices and as blends of coloration. On the other hand Ravel is only seldom known for his wit, even though his G major piano concerto opens with a slapstick. The experiments in this sonata are clearly playful ones, which was a clever rhetorical move on Ravel's part. For his contemporaries many of the sounds were likely to have been perceived as bizarre, so he had the foresight to provide a spoonful of sugar to make the weirdness go down. He also kept his movements relatively brief, but each was still a minor gem in its construction.

The remaining work on the program provided me with a second opportunity (twice in one month) to hear Ernő von Dohnányi's Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. As I had previously observed, this is also a work of relatively brief gems. It is nowhere near as experimental as the Ravel sonata, but it displays the same appreciation of wit. Thus, the first half of last night's program began on the light side, so after the intermission we were settled in enough to deal with the emotional wallop of Brahms' venture into the darkness!

Elitism, Exclusion, and the Fallacy of Community

Some interesting conundrums continue to boil up in the stew the media have cooked over the charge of elitism leveled against Barack Obama. Given that one of his messages has been that of uniting groups with many different interests and values under a single "umbrella," under which they can discuss their differences as well as their agreements, an accusation of elitism is tantamount to an accusation of hypocrisy. Thus, as I had previously speculated, this attack may have been concerned more with finding and piercing Obama's most critical point of vulnerability than with weighing the many issues relevant to deliberating over who would make the best successor to the Oval Office. My reasoning is simple enough: The American electorate may not fully grasp all the intricacies associated with the rights and duties of the Executive branch of their government, but they know hypocrisy when it bites them. If they are convinced that, for all of his "audacity of hope," he is as hypocritical as any other politician, then there is a strong chance that they will turn away from him.

Unfortunately for Obama there may be a paradox behind his "umbrella" vision; and that paradox involves a fallacious conception of the concept of community. I last discussed this problem with respect to the legal qualifications for Swiss citizenship at a time when the Swiss People's Party was running an electoral campaign that most would describe as discriminatory. Without trying to defend the Swiss People Party, I discovered that trying to get to the heart of the nature of community led to some rather troubled waters:

The position I have previously endorsed is that community is the expression of "self" across a group. This, of course, is the old rabbinical trick of answering one question ("What is community?") with another question ("What is self?"); but, even if we hold any detailed account of that second question in abeyance, we must still recognize that one cannot had a sense of "self" without a sense of "other." Thus, when a community is deciding on whether or not a "new applicant" should be a member, they are basically ruling on the "otherness" of that applicant. If that "otherness" is recognized by the community as a whole as being too "alien," then membership is denied; and, by the very criteria that constitute the nature of community, this is probably as it should be.

Nevertheless, all this academic scare-quoting of everyday nouns like "community," "self," and "other" does not refute the assertion that this approach to determining community membership is, by its very nature, discriminatory. If you cannot have self without other, you cannot have community without exclusion; and exclusion is just a synonym for discrimination.

In other words that "umbrella" is a myth; and, while many might still invoke it as a "fiction of convenience," when we start to tease out all of the underlying social issues, the inconveniences may well outweigh the conveniences.

After writing this I found myself reflecting on the extent to which I engage of "rhetoric of exclusion" in my writing, particularly on this blog. Consider some of the "exclusionary gestures" a reader of yesterday's post would encounter:

• At the most general level, anyone not interested in vocal recitals is likely to feel excluded.
• However, the reference to Jane Austen is probably even more exclusionary.
  • Some will be put off by the tacit assumption that they recognize the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice.
  • Those who recognize it may be put off by finding it to be cliché and/or passé.
  • Others may take it as a red herring that distracts from more substantive observations about music and its performance.
• Many readers may be put off by analytical speculation on why recitals are different from opera performance.

Nevertheless, I suspect that all readers, even if intuitively, have a "feel" for this rhetoric of exclusion: There is so much to read that we use any cues we can to indicate whether we should be spending any more time on a particular text.

Perhaps a better way to attack the charge of elitism is to accept it. After all, the very principle of a representative government (as opposed to an inclusive one on the model of a town meeting) presumes that "the masses" will be represented by an "elite." This is entirely acceptable if everyone has a hand in choosing those representatives, which is why so much attention has gone into providing every American citizen with an effective electoral process. From this point of view, electoral decisions can be made on the basis of who is likely to be best represented by which candidate. My wife likes to tell the story of the early days of choosing delegates for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For most government business local communities would tend to send one of their "distinguished elders" as a representative; but, if the debate was about taxes, they would prefer to send a farmer who had to worry about the day-to-day economics of living off of his plot of land. It is no longer practical for us to change our representatives depending on the subject of debate, but this example demonstrates our cultural history of taking representation seriously. Karl Rove recognized this and knew how to convince enough of the electorate that they would best be represented by our current President. If we are to judge by the polls, most of that electorate is no longer convinced, which this means that they will be much harder to convince by any candidate in November. The worst that can happen is that, under the control of highly unrepresentative special interests, the mass media will disenchant the electorate to the point that they will feel that no candidate can possibly serve as an effective representative. This will continue our trend of poor voter turnout and probably leave us with a new Administration as disappointing as the current one (if not more so). It should also leave those inclined to conspiracy theories to wonder whether the mass media have been deliberately churning up the "teapot tempest" of elitism to achieve that disenchantment and thus strengthen their own hands as "players" in a political process dominated by "power-elite capitalism."

A "Debut Recital"

Having seen Sheri Greenawald, Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, "in action" giving a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I suspect she would forgive (if not sympathize with) me for beginning by shamelessly ripping off Jane Austen: It is "a truth universally acknowledged" that any aspiring vocalist (not to mention the seasoned ones) "must be in want of" good recital opportunities. As she explained after yesterday's intermission at Temple Emanu-El, the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series is run (under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center) to serve that truth. From my own point of view, this series is particularly important because, where matters of performance are concerned, a vocal recital is a significantly different beast from an opera; and any vocalist serious about making a career must be prepared to excel in both environments.

The difference between the two has less to do with repertoire than with scale. A recital does not belong in the "grand" space of today's large opera houses. If it has been set there, then the motives have more to do with selling lots of tickets than serving the music on the program. The recital is the "moral equivalent" of chamber music for vocalists. In the absence of the proper "chamber," neither music nor performer is well served. The best vocal recitals I can remember were experienced at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and Greenawald is fortunate that Temple Emanu-El has an auditorium on a comparable scale. All this should be taken as a preface to considering the recital that soprano Heidi Melton gave yesterday afternoon with John Parr as her accompanist.

Melton is a current Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera, and she has already made much of her tenure in that position. Most importantly she had the privilege of creating the role of Mary Todd Lincoln last fall in Appomattox, which meant, among other things, that hers was one of the first (and last) voices we heard in this still-memorable premiere. She has also sung the role of Marianne, Sophie's duenna, whom we hear only briefly in the second act of Rosenkavalier but whom we hear negotiating those breathless passages that Richard Strauss composed so well as the two of them anticipate the rose-bearer's arrival; and, during that same spring season she sang the disembodied voice of Diane, who resolves all the plot tensions in Iphigénie en Tauride. (Given the way I felt about the staging of this opera, being disembodied may have had some advantages.) All of these roles demand a strong and clear voice that can establish a well-defined presence in a space like the War Memorial Opera House; and Melton did not fall short in any of them.

However, the reason for my extended preface is that the Temple Emanu-El auditorium is a far cry from the War Memorial Opera House. Having established her "street creds" at the latter, Melton still has a bit more to do with the former. Thus, to stick with the music of Strauss, for all the Sturm und Drang in "Frülingsfeier" (both Strauss' music and the text itself by Heinrich Heine), this is not the final scene from Salome; and its performance requires a more attenuated intensity to deliver the right impact in a chamber setting. Similarly, Melton did not seem to find the right level of intimacy for a Strauss setting as sensitive as "Meinem Kinde," even though I fully believed her introductory remarks about how much this song meant to her at a personal level.

To be fair, Melton set herself some serious challenges in selecting her program. Wrestling with Arne Garborg's Norwegian texts for Edvard Grieg's Haugtussa ("Mountain Maid") song cycle without also having to take on questions of how to approach Grieg at all (which I had been struggling with, in my own modest ways, about a year ago). Particularly in light of the specific texts, it is no easy matter to get beyond Michael Flanders' old "more sherbet than Schubert" quip and tap into the "cultural bedrock" of this music (the motivation behind Robert Mann's advice about understanding a composer by understanding his folk music). As I had written, the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer eventually helped me find that bedrock; and it would not surprise me to learn that Melton may still be prospecting.

Similarly, the Grieg was preceded by beginning the program by skating onto thin ice (an appropriate metaphor for Grieg's Norwegian influence). Johann Sebastian Bach was listed as the composer; but, on the basis of current scholarship, this was true of only the third of the songs performed, "Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen." The second, "Bist du bei mir," was by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel; and both of these songs are included in the 1725 Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. The first, "Komt, Seelen, dieser Tag," like the third, is from a Pietist hymnal edited by George Christian Schemelli; however, in this case current thinking is that Bach took his melody from some other source, rather than composing his own. The Pietistic movement in German Protestantism involved a very personal and expressive declaration of faith. Putting aside the question of how appropriate this was for the auditorium of a synagogue, they provide a good example of that lack of "attenuated intensity," since, however overtly expressive these hymns may be, their level of expression is definitely not that of the nineteenth-century opera house!

Melton was much more in her comfort zone after the intermission, with art songs by Johannes Brahms and Strauss, as well as a "cabaret assortment," which included Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, and Benjamin Britten. The Britten, set to a text by Wystan Hugh Auden, was probably the most effective, particularly with a concluding gesture of staging that involved accompanist Parr. I have a personal affection for Weill's setting of Bertolt Brecht's "Barbarasong," composed for Die Dreigroschenoper, since it provides such a sharp-edged reflection on just-say-no morality. Still, that edge requires scrupulous dramatic attention to each successive delivery of "Nein" in the text that I felt was missing in this particular performance.

Having laid my critical cards on the table, I should conclude by observing that this was a Debut Recital Series. As I have already observed, Melton set some major challenges for a "first time out" offering; and, had she not selected the composers she did, I might not have been drawn to her recital in the first place. Thus, while she is far from the student performers about whom I wrote on Saturday, hers is still very much a world of the "lifelong learning" I cited in that post. Therefore, I shall continue to follow her progress at the San Francisco Opera at my same level of enthusiastic appreciation and would be only to happy to hear her next recital to take stock of her personal learning experiences.

Irony Comes to Singapore

The following Reuters item, reported by Jan Dahinten and filed last night, caught my attention this morning:

Singapore's government is advertising food stalls that offer S$2 ($1.47) meals to help people in Asia's second-richest country cope with consumer prices at a three-decade high, a newspaper reported on Monday.

The pro-government Straits Times said Singapore's Minister of State for Trade and Industry Lee Yi Shyan had launched a website (http://ekampong.com.sg/) listing food stalls that tells people "where they can find cheap, tasty food".

"The list will come in handy for Singaporeans who are in the midst of battling rising costs," the newspaper said.

Countries across Asia are grappling with higher food and energy costs and Singapore's inflation accelerated to 6.7 percent March from a year ago to a 26-year high, official data showed last week.

Economists believe inflation is close to peaking after a run-up in the past year and the government predicts that inflation will stay above 6.5 percent for the first half of the year before dipping in the second half.

Fifteen years ago, when my wife and I were living in Singapore, food stalls were one of our favorite elements of the "local culture." They provided one of the best ways to get acquainted with the extraordinary diversity of cuisine in the country at remarkably little expense. Five years later, when I started making regular business trips to Singapore, regardless of what my expense account could cover, I still enjoyed checking out the food stalls, seeking out old favorites and prowling around in search of new ones. (If I was travelling with colleagues, my question, at the end of a working day, was always, "Do you want to eat where the hotel recommends, or do you want to eat where I used to eat?") The problem was that the food stall was turning into an endangered species, and I saw some of my favorite sites being forced to yield their modest but precious real estate to the global powers of Thomas Friedman's "flat world" (meaning, of course, cookie-cutter joints like McDonald's, who built customer bases by powerful advertising campaigns, rather than neighborhood word-of-mouth).

Now that Singapore is feeling the impact of the global food crisis as much as any other nation, the tables seem to be turning (perhaps literally as well as metaphorically). I could not resist checking out the URL in Dahinten's report and was pleased to see that the food stall culture is still alive and well. (I just finished breakfast, and I was still drooling over memories of all of those offerings!) However, the "e" in that URL stands for the east side of the island, where, in spite of some major efforts such as Tampines New City, development may not have been moving quite as rapidly as it did to the west, with the National University and a prodigious assortment of science and industrial parks. That was where we lived, in a district called Holland Village that was practically an expat enclave. It was the sort of place that Tom Friedman could visit after a night in his luxury hotel and convince himself that globalization was alive, well, and thriving in Singapore.

The last time I visited Holland Village, all of my favorite haunts had been displaced. All the fun of the place had been squashed out by "Friedman flattening." It was a great comfort to read that one could still eat well on the cheap to the east in Bedok. Still, it would be nice to hope that, one day, all those global mega-chain eateries will give their real estate back to the hawkers; and the food stall culture will rise again throughout the island!

Return to Haydn

For all the attention I have been paying to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, I realize that it has been five months since I have written about a performance of Joseph Haydn's music (as opposed to music that Mozart dedicated to him). Furthermore, while I have recently used this forum to needle San Francisco Chronicle Music Critic Joshua Kosman for being too dismissive of Mozart's portion of a San Francisco Symphony program, this week's program at Davies Symphony Hall was all-Haydn, meaning that there was no one around to upstage the master! This particular program was prepared by guest conductor Bernard Labadie, and he took an interesting approach. The heart of the program was the Mass in Time of War, performed after the intermission; and the first half of the evening prepared us along two unrelated paths. The symphonic path lead through the "Military" theme of the G major Symphony Number 100; and the evening began on the choral path with the "Te Deum for the Empress Marie Therese," which I had not previously heard.

The first sentence of Kosman's review provides a good point of departure for reflection on this program:

Joseph Haydn's gifts as a musical wit are often the first thing we think of in connection with his music, if only because they put him in such sparse company. Yet he was just as adept at serious business, as Wednesday's spotty but often compelling all-Haydn concert by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall demonstrated.

In the first place, given that neither Mozart nor Ludwig van Beethoven was shy about exercising wit in their respective compositions, Haydn's company may have been sparse but hardly insignificant, particularly since both of these composers were within his sphere of influence (probably in both directions of influence). Secondly, the attempt to pose wit in opposition to seriousness is a rather serious misreading of the very nature of wit in that period that bridges the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wit had less to do with humor and more to do with the inventiveness of looking at the familiar from an unfamiliar point of view, very much in the spirit that Arthur Koestler examined in his Act of Creation. Thus, wit played an instrumental role in laying the groundwork for the French Revolution, which, within Haydn's time-frame, was about as serious a piece of business as one could encounter.

Having said all that, it would still be fair to say that wit is not Haydn's top priority in the Mass in Time of War. The music has a certain predictability to it that is absent in, for example, the symphony that preceded it. Perhaps Haydn felt that too much invention would interfere with the solemnity of the occasion, remembering the challenges that had confronted Palestrina. After all Haydn was probably most inventive during a "Strum und Drang" period that significantly preceded the rise of German Romanticism; but he was only able to push his inventions so far before the officials of the Esterházy Court finally made it clear that they had experienced "enough of that." In 1796, when Haydn composed this work, most of aristocratic Europe must have felt that they had experienced "enough of that" from countries like France; so it would have made sense for Haydn to choose routine over revolution.

However, if there are no bold experiments of composition in this setting of the mass, there are some of the best ensemble sonorities that one can find in the pre-Romantic repertoire. There are few pieces in which the soloists blend so well not only among each other but also with the chorus that one is almost not aware of them as soloists. Labadie understood this in balancing his resources; and his soloists (soprano Christine Brandes, mezzo Kelley O'Connor, tenor John Tessie, and bass-baritone Nathan Berg) all "bought into" his approach. Indeed, the most outstanding "solo voice" may have been the cello solo, accompanying the bass-baritone setting of "Qui tollis," which almost sounds as if it had never found a place in one of Haydn's cello concertos. Michael Grebanier performed this solo almost as if it were an operatic duet with Berg, and the result was particularly effective in reinforcing the overall solemnity of the occasion.

In contrast there was more of a sense of inventiveness in the "Te Deum," which is a slightly later (1800) composition. Indeed, moments of this work sounded a bit like Haydn was revisiting some of the more inventive techniques he had only recently deployed in his Schöpfung oratorio. Also, while the text of the mass often feels secondary to the rhetorical direction of the music, the "Te Deum" music seems to be more strongly guided by the text. As a result the evening began with Haydn's wit in full force.

That force continued into the symphony. It is easy to recognize the good-natured humor with which he deploys extra percussion instruments more likely to be found in a military band. However, it is only the timpani that intrude in the unexpected style of his earlier "Surprise" symphony. Labadie recognized that the "sound effects" were not intended to overwhelm; and he managed them excellently. As a result Haydn's wit revealed itself primarily in the rhetoric of his phrasing and in the interplay of strings and winds. I am not sure why Labadie opted for playing his grace notes "short" (less than any measured amount). For my ears that approach short-changed some of the phrases and the wit that they entailed. However, so many of his other rhetorical approaches to the score worked so well that I should not criticize him for this one decision but think more about why he made it. After all, as I mentioned at the beginning, it has been five months since I have heard "Haydn in the house." What was most important was that he had returned, leaving a bit of regret that he had been away so long!

The Scourge at the Gasoline Pump

The second definition of the noun "scourge" in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is "A person or thing seen as a figure of severe punishment or retributive justice." I first learned the word through a series of lectures on William Shakespeare's Richard III. The lecturer took the position that Shakespeare saw Richard as a scourge to rid England of all the corrupt figures that had emerged in the wake of the Wars of the Roses. In other words they all deserved all the cruelties that Richard dished out, after which all that remained was for "young blood" (Henry, Earl of Richmond) to dispense with the villainous Richard and begin the Tudor line as Henry VII. Of course, as Josephine Tey pointed out in The Daughter of Time, Shakespeare's primary source for his play was a biography of Richard written by Thomas More, which was basically a propaganda tract to justify that Tudor line; and, given Shakespeare's needs for support for his work, there is no doubt that pro-Tudor propaganda was good for business. As further context, since the primary definition of scourge (a whip or lash used for punishment) figures in the last days of Jesus, one could easily see "the Sainted More" (as Tey called him) invoking Richard as the instrument of chastisement of a corrupted England.

It would be easy to take a similarly moralistic view of current economic conditions, particularly in the United States, where it seems to take very little to stimulate a culture of living beyond one's means. It is hard to raise too much sympathy for a family in front of a television camera talking about having to sell the Mercedes in order to make the next mortgage payment, just as Shakespeare allows us little sympathy for most of Richard's victims. More interesting is when the scourging escalates from individual follies of finance to a more institutional level.

This brings us to a report that AP Business Writer Adrian Sainz filed yesterday under the headline "Dealers see SUV glut as drivers trade in gas guzzlers." Here is how Sainz began his report:

For used car dealer Ivan Hoyos, accepting a sport utility vehicle as a trade-in is no longer good business. The only SUV he's offering at his Florida Auto Sales and Finance is his mother's red 2004 Mitsubishi Endeavor.

With only 21,000 miles on it, he's advertising the six-cylinder vehicle with the online network Craigslist for $13,991 — about $200 less than Kelley Blue Book's suggested retail value. Hoyos' mom purchased a Mazda 5, a smaller crossover vehicle with plenty of interior room but better gas economy — up to 28 miles per gallon as opposed to about 20 for the Mitsubishi.

"Nobody is buying used SUVs," said Hoyos, 35, who stopped accepting them six months ago. "The truth is more and more dealers are staying away from used SUVs and large trucks ... It doesn't pay. You can't have a unit sitting on the lot forever."

As gas prices pass $3.50 a gallon nationally and the economy teeters on recession, independent used car dealers like Hoyos and massive chains like AutoNation Inc. are having trouble selling used SUVs as buyers prefer smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles likes hybrids and crossovers (CUVs). Crossovers such as the Ford Edge, Honda CR-V, and Toyota RAV4 have more interior room and more rugged styling that the average car, but with a lighter chassis and generally better gas economy than an SUV.

Used SUV sales in March were down 14 percent nationally compared to last year, according to data compiled by CNW Marketing Research. That follows drops in used SUV sales of more than 8 percent for the first two months of the year, compared to the same months in 2007.

That trend has sent used SUV prices plummeting, giving owners a shock when they try to trade theirs in and find out how little they can get.

At the risk of sounding too vindictive, I must confess that I find myself thinking less of Richard III and more of Hamlet, particularly his meditation on the skull of the deceased jester Yorick:

Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Mind you, I do not think of Hamlet addressing these words to all those duped consumers. This is a text for all of those engines of propaganda that flooded consumer minds with the gospel that all of these big wasteful toys were absolutely necessary for all the fun they provided. In the face of such intense advertising, it is extremely difficult not to be duped.

Fortunately, Sainz is much better than I am at keeping vindictiveness out of his text:

David Tivadar has spent three months trying to get fair trade-in value for his 2005 Lexus SUV, which gets about 17 miles per gallon. He would like to trade it in for a minivan that gets better mileage and can accommodate his baby daughter.

He bought the Lexus new for about $33,000, and said the monthly payments of $465 "would be more manageable if gas prices weren't so high."

Tivadar would rather trade in his SUV than deal with the hassle of selling it himself, and he plans to visit other dealers to see if he can get better trade-in value.

"At first gas mileage was a secondary issue — we wanted something bigger and safer for the baby," said Tivadar, an operations manager in Murrieta, Calif. "But the gas issue becomes more and more important as the price goes up. It's already $3.79 here."

For a decade, many Americans bought big SUVs like the Ford Expedition, the Chevrolet Tahoe and the Toyota Land Cruiser as they benefited from a booming housing market, low fuel costs and a steady economy. The SUV became a status symbol.

"What is unusual is that a segment that had grown very quickly in the '90s and the early 2000s has really shrunk dramatically," said Mike Maroone, AutoNation's chief operating officer. "The difficulty is in valuing them, because the market has clearly softened on those vehicles."

What strikes me most about Tivadar is that he was well aware that he was making a trade-off; but it is far from clear that his final decision was grounded on the sort of rationality that too many economists worship. He may well have tried to be as objective as possible before making a purchase decision; but, even now that our economy is so bad that we argue over the words we use to describe it, the advertising is still out there, beating potential consumers over the head with bigger and bigger sticks.

The one benefit that may emerge from this fiasco is the possibility that people will begin to see that "green" purchasing is more affordable. At a time when every penny counts, this may make for an ironic advantage for environmental movements. Perhaps we may ultimately see a King Kong ending, where the beauty of Mother Earth ultimately brings down the beast of over-polluting self-indulgent vehicles!

Student Performers

Regular readers may have noticed a tendency on my part to refer by name only to professional musicians, as opposed to students, such as those at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, or adult amateurs. This may be a reflection on my personal experience. One of things I remember about being a student, particularly a graduate student, was the way in which it seemed to grant me the ability to experiment "from a safe place." Education is very much a matter of exploration, and one cannot be a successful explorer by going down paths that have already been beaten smooth. Forging a new path, however, always carries an element of risk; and in the "real world" some of those risks could entail dire changes in the rest of your life if they are not approached with considered caution. Educational institutions provide at least some level of buffering against such drastic consequences, although, at a school like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are any number of subject areas where the potential risks to a student can be pretty serious. One of those subject areas is biology, which is one reason why I tend to worry about increased numbers of students choosing it as a major simply because they see it as the best choice for a career path.

In the performing arts the risks are not as serious as infecting the world with an antibody-resistant virus when an experiment goes wrong; but, from the point of view of trying to make a career, the risks are still there. The problem is a relatively simply one, even if it has to be expressed in totally inartistic terms: The demand ("slots" in blunt business-speak) for performers is an extremely small fraction of the supply (as is also the case in professional athletics). Thus, while I tend to take a dim view of what a "culture of competition" (which includes not only prize-awarding contests but auditions for employment) tends to do to both the craft and art of performing, that culture is an unavoidable consequence of the number of institutions that now contribute to the supply level. This is not to imply that I would be providing unfair advantage by naming students who will soon be contributing to that "supply population," since most competitions are conducted behind reasonably (but not always) effective barriers of anonymity. Rather, I am just trying to encourage that idea that, in an educational setting, it is "safe" to take certain chances that would probably impose too great a risk in a serious competition.

Another reason stems from the primary theme behind all of my posts about music, which is that we listen to music in order to be better listeners. To the extent that I would not call myself a "professional listener," I feel it is one thing for me to write about what I have learned about listening from Menahem Pressler or Michael Tilson Thomas and quite another to address this topic where someone not yet in the professional arena is concerned. After all, if I am trying to argue that learning to listen is a critical element in learning to play, who am I, still learning to listen myself, to dwell too much on others who are also learning? Indeed, if we go back to that remark by Stravinsky, which I so value, about the distinction between hearing and listening, we never arrive at a "goal" in the course of learning to listen, because we shall always be exposed to new experiences that will demand the synthesis (as I recently put it) of new strategies for listening. Thus, to invoke one of my least favorite clichés from the business world, listening to music is a matter of "lifelong learning."

From this point of view, a writer can do little more than document "evidence of things heard" (if I may warp the language of Paul's epistle to the Hebrews—11:1). This is what I tried to do yesterday in writing about Thursday evening's student recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. What emerged was not so much a review (at least in the sense of material that professional performers and their agents scan to harvest items to put in a press kit) as one person's account of what it was like trying to be a good listener at the event. To the extent that any text can serve to initiate a conversation, the difference resides in my writing for the sake of conversation with the students as well as the audience, rather than with any of the "players in the professional game." Within that context the "bottom line" of the entire post may be an account of listening to a student recital that provided as much of a learning experience as those master classes I have previously witnessed and documented. For those who insist on turning any such proposition into a value assessment, I would say that I can think of no better statement of praise for students preparing to "make it" in the professional world than such an assertion!

Another Neglected American Composer (and much much more)

We are coming to the end of the term at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and I am trying to catch up on opportunities to hear some of the compositions explored in recent master classes now played in their entirety. Last night it was Robert Schumann's Opus 47 piano quartet, whose first movement had been coached by Peter Frankl. Given Schumann's ongoing interest in integrating the multiple movements of an extended structure into a "unified package," this is a work that gains more from being taken as a whole, rather than a focused view on a single movement. Indeed, I would go a step further and propose that one could make an excellent listening experience out of a program that would couple Opus 47 with the Opus 44 piano quintet (as the Benda Musicians did in their PRICE-LES$ CD of Schumann chamber music), since each takes experimental steps in a different direction and both prepare us for the more finished strategy that Schumann applied to his Opus 120 D minor symphony a little less than ten years later. Opus 44 can be heard as an acknowledgement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's final K. 551 symphony ("Jupiter"), whose concluding movement climaxes with its thematic material coming together in a single closely-knit contrapuntal network; and Schumann's fabric adds the thread of the theme that began the opening Allegro brillante movement. However, while Opus 44 climaxes by looking back to the very beginning, Opus 47 experiments with looking forward.

In this case the integration resides in the link between the third Andante cantabile movement and the following Vivace Finale. Drawing upon an extended melody line for the cello, the Andante cantabile has that same heartbreaking quality that Joel Krosnick had identified when he coached the Andante movement from Johannes Brahms' Opus 60 piano quartet, thus reinforcing the heavy influence that Schumann must have had on this movement (including its position as third, rather than second, of the four movements). Schumann's experiment, however, involved linking the coda gesture of the Andante cantabile (which, by its very context, is saturated with reflective melancholy) with the burst of energy in the opening theme of the Finale. One might almost take this as evidence that Eusebius (in the third movement) and Florestan (in the final movement) are, indeed, the same person wrapped into Schumann's body; but that does not make it a sign of dysfunctional bipolarity. This is Schumann in his early thirties, accepting his psyche for what it is and letting it lead him down unexplored paths, which means it also constitutes a critical part of the nineteenth-century repertoire that would shape how we still listen to music today.

Taking that as my own attempt to link to the present, I was also pleased that last night's program included a duo for viola and cello by Walter Piston. Piston is another example of an American composer who received too little attention in his own time and was too often dismissed as a dry academic. (Since he had written a full complement of textbooks for the study of composition and was a Harvard Professor, one could appreciate the origins of such dismissal!) There was certainly nothing to dismiss about his duo, beginning with his unique ear for the colors that emerge when viola and cello are combined without any intervening higher instruments. My only regret is that I approached this performance without any preparation, which meant that I could do little more than grasp at the most salient surface-level features, such as Piston's use of pizzicato to mark structural boundaries. I suspect there was as much ingenuity in Piston's contrapuntal fabric as I have come to love in the work of Mozart and Schumann, but I shall need several more opportunities to listen to this work before writing about such matters from an informed position.

This makes for another link, since the Piston duo was preceded by Mozart's K. 465 string quartet ("Dissonant"). This is one of the quartets that Mozart wrote for Joseph Haydn and which Haydn himself played (along with Mozart). The nickname applies only to the Adagio introduction to the first movement, but it is another source for reflection on how ideas evolve into the future. One has to wonder whether or not Mozart's little experiment with taking a repeated C natural and forging a winding trail through many tonal ambiguities before coming to a sustained dominant G in the 22nd measure planted a seed in Haydn's mind that he would then cultivate when faced with the problem of representing that state of chaos that preceded the opening text of Genesis for his Schöpfung oratorio. The "trick" in performing this Adagio is to lead the ear confidently along that trail; and it may well have been the confidence that these particular student performers brought to the very beginning of the evening that encouraged and sustained the listener from Mozart to Piston to the final bars of the Schumann piano quartet.

Jimmy McNulty and the Confederacy of Liars

The extent of my addiction to The Wire is so great that I could not resist reading David Sirota's latest Truthdig report, "Matthews vs. McNulty," whose premise is laid out in his opening sentence:

If television is the nation’s mirror, then no two TV characters reflect the intensifying “two Americas” gap better than Chris Matthews and Jimmy McNulty.

Unfortunately (from my own biased point of view), Sirota invests almost all of his column space in a rant (albeit a well-conceived one) against Matthews and his ilk in today's world of what passes for news on television. So McNulty only shows up for the punch line:

Pop culture tells us “The Cosby Show’s” economically privileged family represents the ordinary black experience, politics tells us a money-controlled electoral system is “democratic,” and pundits tell us that aristocrat George Bush is a “regular guy.” Propaganda is ubiquitous—and it results in Jimmy McNulty.

He is the cop from HBO’s “The Wire”—the quintessential everyman. For a time, he tries to understand politics by watching vapid Matthews-style talk shows, but quickly becomes frustrated. “It doesn’t matter who you’ve got [running for office], none of them has a clue what’s really going on,” he says, lamenting that politics treats him “like a [expletive] doormat”—as if the day-to-day challenges he faces are “some stupid game with stupid penny ante stakes.”

McNulty may be fictional, but McNulty-ism is a very real reaction to Matthews-ism. When the media responsible for explaining our world deny the existence of the world most of us inhabit, they breed—yes—bitterness. And the more the Matthewses treat us McNultys like reality is just “stupid games with stupid penny ante stakes,” the wider the gulf between the two Americas will become.

Now there is nothing wrong with using a fictional character as a metaphor for a "real-world" human condition. As far as I am concerned, that is why literature has value in the first place; so Sirota has bestowed upon David Simon the ultimate honor for his efforts, recognizing that The Wire managed to elevate a television series to the level of what we should all be comfortable calling literature. My only real quibble with Sirota's analysis is that he did not carry the metaphor far enough, perhaps because he did not tease out enough of its substance from Simon's text.

To do this we need to look deeper than McNulty's bitterness born of frustration (not to mention the booze and loose sex). The most important plot element in the final season of The Wire was the pervasive role played by lies in “getting the job done.” This was most evident in the parallel between McNulty and his counterpart over at the Baltimore Sun, Scott Templeton. Templeton employs fabrication to advance his career, and we are definitely left with the impression that his advance could well lead to his being the next Chris Matthews. McNulty, on the other hand, fabricates just to do the stuff required by his job description in an organization whose budget has been gutted, regardless of either social norms or the consequences of his acts (both of which come back to bite him as the narrative works its way to the final episode). The result is a society that has evolved from John Kennedy Toole’s “confederacy of dunces” to a “confederacy of liars.” Once we examine all the lies that support Simon’s plot structure, we appreciate that exposing any one of them will bring down the very social foundation in which all his characters abide (even the ones most admirable, like Gus Haynes).

Sirota's report originated not so much in the world of The Wire as in the world of the negative ballyhoo over Barack Obama, whether it involves questions of race stemming from his association of Jeremiah Wright or questions of elitism over "bitterness" and "clinging." As a result, Sirota may have (unwittingly, perhaps) played into that ballyhoo and lost sight of what Simon's literature may actually be telling us: The fictional McNulty depends on the lies of the fictional Templeton in order to sustain his own lies. Could it be that, in some way that none of us may yet have anticipated, Sirota's "McNulty-ists" depend upon (rather than react against) his "Matthews-ists" for reasons we may not yet have penetrated? Think of some of McNulty's rationalizations for his fabrications:

1. It's the only way to get the job done.
2. Operations are so screwed up, who's gonna notice?
3. I can live with the worst of what may happen to me.
4. Everybody is doing it.

What makes McNulty such a powerful metaphor is that each of these excuses is so consistent with the very identity of his character. Thus, the extent of McNulty's bitterness and frustration is the extent of Sirota's McNulty-ists; and we understand them better not from the surface-level feature of the bitterness Obama was citing but from a deeper structure in which qualities such as honesty need to be sacrificed in the name of basic hand-to-mouth survival. By concluding The Wire with McNulty reflecting on what he had become, Simon was applying his literary skills to get us all to reflect on what we have become. That is a major challenge for an author, but it is an even greater challenge for his readers. Sirota took one small step in that direction; are we prepared to follow his path?

On the Value of ANY "Encyclopedic" Reference

It has been some time since I have dwelled on the significant distinctions between the world of nouns and the world of verbs, but I am beginning to realize, in the context of my recent experiences, that these distinctions may be relevant to how one approaches this question of "encyclopedic" references. I would like to consider two perspectives that may highlight these distinctions. One concerns the "inertia" of reference sources; and the other deals with what to do about "volatile" content.

Through our "cultural memory," we have come to view an encyclopedia as a relatively static reference. True, the Britannica publishers have long issued their Book of the Year "addenda;" but we tend to consult an encyclopedia for things that don't change, rather than for "keeping up with the latest." Put another way, the world of the encyclopedia is a world of noun phrases, based on objects and their attributes (and, therefore, not unlike most of the databases upon which we all now depend so heavily). However, as Isaiah Berlin kept trying to remind us through our his study of the history of ideas, there is a "tragic flaw" in any worldview that is fundamentally static, even when it involves the objects and attributes described in an encyclopedia. What we learn when we study the history of ideas is that just about any subject area is always changing due to advanced scholarship. This can occur on the micro level (a cantata attributed to Bach later found to have been composed by Telemann) or the macro level (as in scientific theories that assign to information the same fundamental priority assigned to matter and energy). When the macro level involves a major shift in worldview (akin to Kuhn's paradigm shift), that would entail more than "surface-level" emendations in an encyclopedia, which is why there have been essays and books about "the encyclopedia problem" for at least the last fifty years. If Berlin has left us more comfortable with the fluidity of such worldviews, then it is easy to recognize that any reference source that is, by nature, static will never have more than limited value.

If we can accept fluidity, then we should also be able to accept volatility. At the very least we can use the Internet to make sure that we never have to be informed by a single source (at least when the information is critical to some aspect of our lives). However, if we accept that volatility, then we must also live by the caveat lector precept, which has been a recurring theme on this blog. There is a much greater risk in being a "casual reader" than there used to be; but we are well-equipped to deal with that risk. The good news is that on Wikipedia a reader can consult the discussion tab to get some sense as to how volatile the content is and adopt appropriate reading habits accordingly. Thus, the very premises behind the design and implementation of Wikipedia may allow it to sustain the nature of a fluid and volatile world, in which the verb phrases that capture the very nature of that fluidity and volatility engage in a Hegelian synthesis with the noun phrases of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, perhaps even to the point of prevailing over the recent Britannica "confrontation."

An Inconvenient Truth about the Global Food Crisis

Whenever I worry that investigative journalism is having its teeth systematically extracted by the power-brokers of mainstream media, I remember that Frank Hornig is still on the job and that I can read his dispatches through SPIEGEL ONLINE. I have probably not done him sufficient justice by citing him only three times on this blog:

1. For his report with Gabor Steingart on the global regulation of hedge funds
2. For his really perceptive "Outsourcing your Personal Life" article
3. Most recently for the "What's Really Driving the Price of Oil?" piece that he prepared with Beat Balzli

However, given the current significance of the global food crisis, the analysis he prepared today (again with Balzli) may be the most important follow-up to their (or any other) analysis of the oil crisis. The significance lies in the extent to which these problems arise from the same cause. Just as the price of oil has nothing to do with supply and demand (or even how OPEC regulates the supply) and everything to do with what is happening in commodities trading pits, the same is true for the price of food. Yesterday Emily Buchanan prepared an excellent report on the United Nations World Food Programme, which I saw broadcast on BBC World Service News. In that report Josette Sheeran, who runs the program, described the crisis as "A silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world." Just as important, however, was an off-hand remark on the broadcast, which did not appear in the print version, that called the price of food "an inconvenience for the rich."

I have written in the past about the speciousness of that old cliché from the days of the first Reagan Presidential campaign about a rising tide lifting all boats; but we now have to confront increasing evidence that the rising tide of speculative investment (driven by nothing more than the greed of "haves" wanting to "have more") could well sink many (most?) of the boats in the sea, particularly where food (commodities futures trading), shelter (trading on the anticipated income from loans), and even clothing (heavily dependent on the price of petrochemical products) are concerned. Whatever the traders may be doing or saying, Balzli and Hornig took the trouble to get out of the trading pits; and, as far as both farmers and food producers are concerned, the commodities markets are "broken." This brings us to the heart of the argument that Balzli and Hornig have developed:

Biofuels and global warming have been blamed for shortages driving up the price of food, and both trends have played their role. The planet's grain reserves are almost empty for a number of reasons, including global population growth and greater prosperity in some countries like India. Feed corn is in short supply because industrialized nations have used it for ethanol. Droughts -- in Australia, for example -- have devastated rice and wheat harvests. Wheat reserves worldwide are only sufficient right now to cover about 60 days of demand.

This helps to explain why commodity prices have rallied since early 2006, with the price of rice ballooning 217 percent, wheat 136 percent, corn 125 percent and soybeans 107 percent.

But classic supply and demand theory offers only a partial explanation. Sudden price hikes since last January have been alarming. The UN estimates that at least $500 million (€312 million) in immediate aid will be needed by May 1 to avoid serious famines. Agricultural scientists at the world body's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have presented a report on the world food crisis. And criticism is growing that hedge funds, index funds, pension funds and investment banks bear part of the blame.

Unfortunately, the Balzli-Hornig analysis gives little indication of there being any light at the end of the tunnel. At best we may candidates in the coming election trying to turn up the heat on commodities speculators; but, when campaigns are financed heavily by those speculators, can we expect that heat to be anything more than hollow rhetoric? More likely we are witnessing the emergence of yet another battle in the War Against the Poor, in which case it may be time for those waging this war to reflect (if that is within their cognitive capacities) on just why this war was waged in the first place. What good is having all the marbles, if you can no longer do anything with them? What good will come of enslaving the poor, if they have become too enfeebled by the lack of food, clothing, and shelter to do the will of their would-be new masters? Iraq has taught us that it is possible to wage a war without clear logic, so it may well be that the basis for the War Against the Poor is nothing more than the product of the illogic of greed. Unfortunately, recognizing that the mess we are in is little more than a side effect of what Susan Jacoby has called "the age of American unreason" does little to inform us about getting out of that mess!

Chutzpah as Meme

Speaking of local bias, it appears that the strategy that won San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom his Chutzpah of the Week award has crossed the Pacific Ocean (far more efficiently than Kon-Tiki) and has been adopted by Canberra, Australia, for their leg of the Olympic torch ceremony. Here is the story, according to the wire service sources for Al Jazeera English:

The Olympic flame has been taken to a secret location in Australia following its arrival there on the latest leg of its journey across the world.

Australian police promised a "dynamic" relay to avoid people protesting against China's human rights record and Beijing's crackdown in Tibet.

Mike Phelan, Canberra's police chief, said on Wednesday the torch route, expected to start with a lake-crossing, "is something that will be dynamic", with contingencies in place if expected protests turn violent.

This report did not include any explicit acknowledgement of Newsom by Phelan; but we have to assume that Phelan has been closely following the news of the torch's controversy-laden path to Canberra. Knowledge is a product of experience, that of others as well as one's own. Phelan seems to have been well-informed by the San Francisco experience!

Chutzpah over States' Rights

Conflicts over legislative authority between individual states and the Federal government have been around literally as long as the United States of America, since such conflicts figured heavily in the drafting of the Constitution. Therefore it should be no surprise that such conflicts erupt into acts of chutzpah, particularly in light of the predilection the current Executive Branch has for such acts. Indeed, while our President and Secretary of State seem to have an almost innate talent for "slam-dunk chutzpah," we still get occasional glimpses of full-court team work where other key members of the Administration get to sink a shot or two. This week the ball was passed to Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who demonstrated that she could commit that particularly Administrative style of chutzpah with the best of them while fighting for one of the Administration's favorite causes: defending those responsible for environmental damage against a growing global trend of environmental responsibility and planning.

To pursue the basketball metaphor, one might say that the ball was first passed to Peters last week when President George W. Bush finally put his stake in the ground on the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. As was noted at the Times Online Web site, the general reaction was that it was not much of a stake:

President Bush has been criticised by environment groups after he called for a halt to the growth of US greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 but offered few ideas on how to achieve it.

The proposal on global warming, which fell short of European proposals, was announced as the US Congress prepares to consider more ambitious plans and before international climate change negotiations take place in Paris.

Mr Bush offered only broad principles, such as focusing on emissions from the power industry, and rejected new taxes, abandoning nuclear power and trade barriers.

This now brings us to Peters' part in this game through an early-morning report by Zachary Coile from the Washington Bureau of the San Francisco Chronicle:

When the Bush administration announced proposed regulations Tuesday to raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks to 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015, even some environmentalists applauded. But then they read the fine print.

Tucked deep into a 417-page "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" was language by the Transportation Department stating that more stringent limits on tailpipe emissions embraced by California and 17 other states are "an obstacle to the accomplishment" of the new federal standards and are "expressly and impliedly preempted" by federal law.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown called it a covert assault on California's rules. Environmentalists said the language will be used by automakers in their legal challenges to two recent federal court rulings that sided with the states.

The language showed that beneath the bipartisan veneer of support for new fuel economy standards - approved by Congress and signed by President Bush in December - the conflict is still raging between the White House and the states over who will set the nation's first limits on greenhouse gases.

Now, just to make it clear that this is not another case of local bias, at least two of those "17 other states" have been pursuing their cause (successfully until now) through the proper legal channels:

The Supreme Court ruled in the Massachusetts vs. EPA case last year that the Transportation Department's authority to set fuel economy standards should not impede other efforts under the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gases. California traditionally has had special authority under the Clean Air Act to set limits on air pollutants that are tougher than federal standards.

A federal judge in Vermont ruled in September that the state rules do not conflict with federal mileage standards, and a Fresno court in December found that both California and the EPA are empowered to set limits on vehicle emissions.

This legal history provided Peters with the opportunity to exhibit her chutzpah with a little flourish:

In its new document, the Transportation Department said, "We respectfully disagree with the two district court rulings" and noted that an appeal has been filed by automakers.

It is no surprise that, in an ideological battle between the automobile industry and the global environment, our Administration should side with the former; nor is it a surprise that such a battle should find its way onto the grounds of the Department of Transportation. However, given the opportunity to act, the Department managed to do so with that style of chutzpah that seems to have become a trademark of the Administration as a whole. So, if that Administration decided that it was Peters' turn for a Chutzpah of the Week award, then I am happy to oblige. Let it not be said that I refuse to cooperate with the Bush Administration on all matters!

The Ultimate Abandonment of a Sense of Reality

Here's a news flash from the Geek Gestalt blog on CNET News.com:

According to a report out Tuesday from Virtual Worlds Management, the trade group that puts on the Virtual World conferences, a total of $184 million was invested in such businesses in the first quarter of 2008.

That is $184 million that could be alleviating a global hunger crisis, providing affordable housing to the victims of predatory lending practices, or doing anything to make sure that ten years from now our environment will still be life-supporting. Yes, I know this money is invested on the basis of what it is likely to return; but what does it profit one to gain an abundant ROI and forfeit the world that supports one's life-style? Do these investors think they will be able to live in their virtual worlds after our only real one has gone down the tubes? Once again our sense of reality has turned out to be our most endangered species!

Late Brahms and Early Dohnányi

Doing my best to get back from today's Noontime Concert at Old St. Mary's Cathedral (which happens to be in San Francisco Chinatown) before a threatening rain storm reminded me that the last time I had heard a live performance of Johannes Brahms' Opus 115 clarinet quintet had been in the McCarter Theater at Princeton University. There was a raging storm outside and a hole in the McCarter roof directly above where the cello was supposed to sit. (If memory serves me correctly, the ensemble was the Tokyo String Quartet performing with Richard Stoltzman.) This is little more than one of those odd free associations. It is certainly not meant to associate Brahms with any of those corny illustrations of Beethoven stomping his way through a wind-driven rain; and there is nothing "element-driven" about this particular quintet!

If anything, because of the high opus number, there is a tendency to assign it a valedictory quality. It is certainly a very poignant composition; so one can be forgiven for hearing it as a "farewell to life." However, poignancy was Brahms' strong suit for much of his life; and, given the works he composed after this one, there is no reason to assume that this was intended as a meditation on death. Rather, as we can read in the Wikipedia entry for Brahms, the work grew out of a new sense of discovery brought about by the clarinet itself:

In 1890, the 57 year-old Brahms resolved to give up composing. However, as it turned out, he was unable to abide by his decision, and in the years before his death he produced a number of acknowledged masterpieces. His admiration for Richard Mühlfeld, clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra, moved him to compose the Clarinet Trio Op. 114, Clarinet Quintet Op. 115 (1891), and the two Clarinet Sonatas Op. 120 (1894).

This makes for an interesting parallel with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who wrote his K. 581 clarinet quintet for Anton Stadler in 1789, within two years of his death. Like Mozart, Brahms appreciated that the three registers of the clarinet constituted three distinctive "voices" and felt that each of these voices should "sing" in the course of the entire composition. While there is plenty of other chamber music for clarinet, these two quintets still occupy pride of place in the repertoire and show off the best abilities of their respective composers.

The Laurel Ensemble, which performed the Brahms quintet today, may not be as elevated as Stoltzman and his colleagues were; but that did not diminish from their performance. Clarinetist Ann Lavin commanded all three of her instrument's registers with equal capability, always finding just the right blend with the string quartet members. The result was not necessarily as poignant as other performances but had more to do with an almost meditative calm over the discovery of a new palette of sounds. Given all the things I have written about workplace pathology, this was the sort of performance that was the perfect escape from the strains of a workday.

Music that "brought Brahms out of retirement" was preceded by a work by the 25-year-old Ernő von Dohnányi, his Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. I cannot recall having an opportunity to hear this work in performance, so I know it only through the recording the Jascha Heifetz made in 1941 with William Primrose and Emanuel Feuermann. Dohnányi may not have had quite the elaborate sense of development that Brahms had. The work is in five short movements, the longest being the fourth in theme-and-variations form. Even there the variations are more straightforward than the exploratory variations in the final movement of the Brahms clarinet quintet (which ultimately lead back to the first theme of the entire work). Nevertheless, having been written in 1902, the Dohnányi trio is one of those works that looks back fondly on the gestures of nineteenth-century romanticism while searching for how to take composition in new directions. This piece certainly deserves to be heard more often, and it was good for the Laurel Ensemble to provide us with an opportunity.

Calling Something by its Proper Name

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle had an interesting analysis piece by Verne Kopytoff on the current prospect for startup entrepreneurs in today's economic conditions. Publication was probably motivated by the fact that the Web 2.0 Expo starts today and runs through Friday at the Moscone West convention center here in San Francisco. Whether or not his analysis is a sound one, I have to give credit for Kopytoff calling this gathering an "Internet industry revival meeting," thus having the guts to acknowledge that these meetings are more about evangelism than they are about technology. He made this point not only by appealing to a religious tent show as a metaphor but also through his implicit omission of the noun "value" in his article. The closest he gets is when he talks about valuations of startups; but serious discussion of value seems to be taboo among technology evangelicals, just as faith-based politicians have their taboo concepts (such as "recession"). Since I continue to hold to the precept that the very concept of Web 2.0 is little more than patent medicine for the technology age, if not more harmful than most of those old nostrums were, I shall be interested to read the reports of how many of "the faithful" actually pay for admission to this year's tent show and how many are more interested in current assets than in promises of wealth!

A Metaphor that Tells us Who we Really Are?

In reviewing my recent posts, I have discovered that I have invoked the metaphor of WWE Friday Night Smackdown! in two independent contexts:

1. The discussion and editing of Wikipedia entries
2. The approach to political debate either assumed or accepted by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

Apparently that second context is extending further beyond the scope of this blog than I could have anticipated. Derrik J. Lang of the Associated Press reported that all three of the leading contenders for the White House decided it would be appropriate to "leverage" last night's Monday Night Raw broadcast's being on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary:

Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain will appear on World Wrestling Entertainment's live "Monday Night Raw" (8-11 p.m. EST on cable's USA network) but instead of smacking each other down, they separately will deliver some wrestling-themed stumping in taped messages before Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary.

"Tonight, in honor of the WWE, you can call me Hillrod," Clinton says in her message. "This election is starting to feel a lot like `King of the Ring.' The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman."

Obama borrows The Rock's famous catchphrase during his appearance.

"To the special interests who've been setting the agenda in Washington for too long and to all the forces of division and distraction that has stopped us from making progress, for the American people, I've got one question: Do you smell what Barack is cooking?" Obama says before flashing a smile.

McCain, meanwhile, looked to Hulkamania for inspiration for his message.

"Looks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to celebrate their differences in the ring," McCain says. "Well, that's fine with me, but let me tell you: If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man. Come November, it'll be game over. And whatcha gonna do when John McCain and all his McCainiacs run wild on you?"

The candidate appearances will be used to promote "Smackdown Your Vote!" — the WWE's voter registration drive.

I suppose that last sentence is to assure us that this is all in good fun and all for a good cause, but who are they kidding? The race between Clinton and Obama in Pennsylvania is so tight that every investment in media counts as much as every investment in personal appearances. However amusing this may have appeared, it was clearly all aimed at the serious business of getting the right people to show up at the polls today, presumably to "vote the right way."

Since I do not follow WWE, I have no idea whether they have had a past history of getting political. After all their time slot overlaps with both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (at least here on the West Coast); and I do not really see them competing with those two programs for the same viewers. More likely, this was intended by at least Clinton and Obama as a final shot over the bow aimed at that open sore of elitism that the media (or at least ABC) continues to scratch.

So, if things were more serious than they appeared on the surface, did either of these candidates anticipate that, as Abby Livingston reported for NBC, WWE would "retaliate" by taking on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with their own attempt at political humor:

WWE featured a wrestling match between Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton impersonators. There were lots of body slams, knee lifts and even some sneaky moves (Bill). "Bill" primarily stayed out of the action, but both "Obama" and "Hillary" got some pretty good licks in on each other. Then an actual wrestler came out and took them both down. The announcers declared it "a draw." The skit ended with Obama and Hillary's bodies strewn across the wrestling ring with Bill scampering away.

Note that the Web page from which I copied this text also includes the YouTube clip of the entire sketch.

I first discovered this video through Truthdig, which described it as "hilarious, ridiculous and disturbing." This, of course, is a matter of taste (a topic in which I found myself immersed in the writings of Immanuel Kant, whose birthday today happens to be, over the last week or so, which probably has not helped me very much); so I do not mind disputing their first adjective. Both Stewart and Colbert usually know how to punch my hilarity button; but this act fell firmly on the "ridiculous and disturbing" side of my taste meter.

Yes, it was nothing more than a comedy sketch; and, as the "E" in "WWE" should remind us, the whole WWE enterprise has absolutely nothing to do with wrestling as athletic competition and everything to do with extended comedy sketches. The problem is that, when a metaphor is enabled by being acted out on television, that particular medium has this disturbing effect of shifting it from the figurative to the literal. Thus, it ceased to become "only a metaphor" for the way in which both candidates have managed their behavior over the last couple of weeks and became a reductio ad absurdum statement of who they really are and, for that matter, who we really are for wanting to see them in that light. Make no mistake, in some collective sense we really did want to see that sort of thing, since, if we wanted to concentrate on issues and opinions, we would have turned off all network coverage of the campaign a long time ago (perhaps as long ago as when the media were systematically ignoring those candidates who were offering serious voices of dissent). So, like it or not, that little video clip is one of the more accurate mirrors of our national character. We should all look in that mirror and reflect (literally as much as figuratively) on whether we are disturbed by what we see or whether we can accept it with the same complacency that allowed us to accept all of the self-serving political decisions that got us into the mess that has become our day-to-day life, all in the name of our obsession with our diet for "entertainment."

Too Little or Too Much

My Encyclopædia Britannica subscription has now been processed; so I figure I should provide at least a brief follow-up to yesterday's post and the ensuing comments. As I mentioned in a comment this morning, I knew I was not going to find anything like the "Propædia;" and it turned out that the closest I could get to any organization structure involved outlines for the "Macropædia"-like articles. My first impression was that those outlines were neither better nor worse than the ones I have found for the longer articles on Wikipedia. Thus, there was very little to pique the sort of exploratory adventures I used to have with the print edition. Instead I was back in the world of search queries and quick scans to see if what I found was answering some immediate question I had.

Things where not much better when I explored the blog space. The most important thing I observed was that it was not very active. Also, the "stable" of bloggers did not interest me very much, probably because I was perusing it primarily in terms of my interest in the performance of music. I did note Andrew Keen's name on the list, but I already have an RSS feed for his own blog! Besides, his Britannica posts are now about a year old.

Will I now start to use Britannica content instead of Wikipedia sources? For all that I have written about contentious behavior on Wikipedia, the music contributors have (so far, at least) been a rather amicable and mild-mannered bunch. They have also been really good at cataloging, which helps when I am interested (as I was recently) in such things as a chronology of the operas of Francesco Cavalli. I shall still continue to argue that Wikipedia has limitations if you really want to learn about something (particularly something unfamiliar); but I am not sure that the online version of Britannica is doing that much better a job. It is certainly not doing the job that the old print edition used to do.

A Serial-Killer Opera

I found Rupert Christiansen's Telegraph review of the new English National Opera production of Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy a fascinating read. I once used the CD of the performance of this work by The London Sinfonietta to push the envelope with one of my research groups in Singapore and would like nothing more than to see a staging of this work here in San Francisco. In his limited column space Christiansen did an excellent job of setting context before undertaking critical assessment:

But the more I get to know Punch and Judy, the more powerful and fascinating it becomes.

Perhaps the best way to approach it is as a primitivist opera, born before the genre became noble, romantic and refined.

Critics have noted that Birtwistle and his librettist Stephen Pruslin draw on the conventions of Bach's Passions and Greek drama, but even deeper is the influence of pantomime and puppet-show theatricality and anonymous urban folk traditions - playground games, crude ditties, tavern rounds, the clang and clatter of street and fairground.

Stravinsky's Petrushka comes to mind, too, refracted in its abruptly episodic structure - the score is composed of more than 100 tiny units, few more than a minute long - and the bright, hard orchestral colours and relish in dissonance.

I like the reference to Igor Stravinsky and certainly understand it; but, when you take in all the factors that Christiansen enumerated and then add in the fact that Punch is, in modern language, a psychotic serial killer, then I suspect that any acknowledgement of Stravinsky should also include "Renard," which casts brutal murder into the framework of a clown-show portrayal of barnyard animals. Anyone fortunate enough to have seen the video of this work that The London Sinfonietta made under Paul Crossley along with a choreographed troupe of acrobats will immediately see the relevance of this connection.

Christiansen began last week's review of the Covent Garden premier of Birtwistle's The Minotaur by recalling when "the story went round that Benjamin Britten had stormed out of the premiere of his first opera, Punch and Judy." Birtwistle's worldview is a radical departure from Britten's in terms of both opera subject matter and musical language, and it is not hard to appreciate the way in which the former was pushing the wrong buttons for the latter. Since the opera had its first performance at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1968, it would be interesting to see whether, in retrospect, Birtwistle would now confess to having had some trepidations about bringing such raw stuff to Britten's "turf." Forty years on, however, the media have done a good job of shifting the bar for what constitutes "raw;" and it is hard to imagine a San Francisco audience finding this work "too much," just as, for the most part, they had no trouble getting into the extremes of the San Francisco Opera production of György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (which I would be delighted to see revived). To the best of my knowledge San Francisco Opera has not mounted any of Birtwistle's works; so, in light of the recent elevation of interest in London, now might be a good time to start thinking about doing so! "Right tol de riddle doll!"

A Willful Ignorance of History … or Not?

In "What Have We Learned, If Anything?," his latest essay for The New York Review, Tony Judt, pessimistically declared, "We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us." He was writing primarily about the political climate in the United States; but, on the basis of what I just saw of Doug Varone and Dancers during their visit to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, he may as well have been writing about modern dance, if not a broader expanse of the performing arts. I make this assertion on the basis of two works, "Lux" and "Home," having made the decision to bail out at intermission and pass on "Boats Leaving," set to Arvo Pärt's half-hour "Te Deum," my mind having been contaminated by an old friend calling the Berlioz setting of this text "tedium."

My aggravation had less to do with tedium being the order to the day and more to do with why that turned out to be the case. Some would put the blame on Varone's decision to set "Lux" to "The Light," a 1989 Philip Glass composition; but, as I pointed out in writing about his Appomattox opera, while ostinato figures heavily in Glass' approach to minimalism, ostinato does not imply monotony. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to hear performances (as opposed to recordings) of Glass' music know how fortunate he has been to work with conductors such as Michael Riesman and Dennis Russell Davies (who conducted all but one of the San Francisco Opera performances of Appomattox). These conductors know that beneath the layer of ostinato lies a foundation of modulated energy, and it is because they understand the power of even the most subtle such modulation that all of those off-the-cuff accusations of monotony are so grossly unfounded.

This is why in "Lux" the dance is such a great disappointment when compared to the music. At best "Lux" is a moderately clever assemblage of steps that gradually increase in tempo; but, regardless of what the tempo happens to be over the course of the dance, none of the steps are executed with any sense of the expenditure of energy. One might as well be watching animated figures on a computer screen, which has as little to do with the performance of dance as most recordings have to do with the performance of music (particularly when, as is the case with Glass, performance is such a subtle matter). I am not saying that replacing the recording with a musical ensemble led by a competent conductor would have improved the choreography, but it could have done so had that conductor been able to communicate a sense of how Glass deploys energy not only to the musicians but also to the dancers, because those dancers were certainly not getting any such message from Varone himself.

Ninette de Valois was aware of this problem with the rise of interest in ballet in Britain after the Second World War. Of her primary rival, Marie Rambert, whose ballet company tended towards more "experimental" choreography, drawing upon recordings of relatively new composition, she once said that choreographers should know better than to spend so much time in gramophone shops. True, de Valois was fortunate enough to include performing musicians among her resources; but that is probably one reason (among many others) why the work of her chief choreographer, Frederick Ashton, has endured so much longer than anything in the Rambert repertoire. The performance of dance draws much of its strength from music that is actually performed, rather than simply partitioning the duration into intervals of time.

Yes, maintaining an ensemble of performing musicians does a lot to a dance company's budget, particularly when that company goes on tour. However, I came away from "Lux" wondering if Varone even knew enough about how to listen to "The Light" to recognize just was performance adds to this particular piece of music. Had he known that, he might have had a fighting chance of compensating for having to use a recording behind his choreography. Unfortunately, he did not know it; and, as a result, his choreography was little more than a matter of "partitioning the duration into intervals of time," most of which went on far too long.

Varone's background material does not say much about when he was born or where he studied. We only know that he has been making dances since 1986, which means he has been at it for over twenty years. Unfortunately, it also means that he was getting started at a time when the dance world was beginning to suffer from "cultural amnesia," with regard to both my "holy trinity" of ballet choreographers and all that work in modern dance that began with Martha Graham and was continued by those driven to get out from under her influence. Thus, while Judt seems to feel that we only started rejecting the twentieth century once we left it, Varone may well have been turning his back on his predecessors when he first started doing choreography.

This would seem to be the case with "Home," which was first performed by the Pennsylvania Dance Theater in 1988. This company should not be confused with the Pennsylvania Ballet Company, but both companies had the advantage of performing with an orchestra in the pit. However, the music for "Home" is a string quartet by Dick Connette, which he may have written for the Ethel quartet. So its first performance may have taken place through loudspeakers, possibly at the same ear-splitting level that the Yerba Buena audience experienced. Again, all problems could be traced back to sloppy management of the expenditure of energy. However, while "Lux" led me to question what, if anything, Varone had learned from the history of dance in the twentieth century, the male-female "alienation duet" of "Home" left me wondering if Varone knew who Harold Pinter was, because, having seen the result of Pinter having directed some of his own plays, it struck me that the playwright had a far better sense of managing human movement than the choreographer did.

I realize that one problem may be that I am just not bringing realistic expectations to dance performances in the twenty-first century. In my case it is a matter of having to carry the burden of history. Yesterday I was writing about the influence of the Sixties on the performance of music, but the decade was just as extraordinary in the development of both modern dance and classical ballet. Even that lioness Graham still had her teeth, while lions like Ashton and George Balanchine were never afraid to go after fresh prey; and, at that time, Merce Cunningham was finally coming out of the shadows and receiving recognition for his innovations from just about every critical source (with the possible exception of The New York Times). Those days are still very much alive in my memory, but I have a lot of trouble adjusting to the fact that they are pretty much beyond recall for everyone else making dance or paying to watch the stuff. So, if ours has turned out to be an age that has willfully decided to ignore history, perhaps it is just a waste of my own time, which entails that other consequence against with Mark Twain warned.

Is Britannica Confronting Wikipedia?

Yesterday afternoon the CNET News.com News Blog ran an interesting post by Zoë Slocum, which seems to involve an effort on the part of Encyclopaedia Britannica to challenge Wikipedia for Web eyeballs:

The popularity of free, anyone-can-edit Wikipedia has made academia's battle against encyclopedia referencing--and the publishing industry's efforts to sell reference material--tougher than ever. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has embraced e-mail marketing to keep its hardback business in, well, business (I've received several promotional messages in the past few months), is now making Web moves to take back its authoritative presence in the industry.

The publisher's Britannica WebShare initiative, launched April 13 with Twitter streaming of a daily topic, announced on Friday a service called Britannica Widgets, with which bloggers can "post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles" for free.

Britannica also is offering "people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers," free access to Britannica's online content, with registration.

A couple of hours after this post appeared, reader Philips responded with the inevitable comment under the title "Who cares?" To avoid being accused of distortion, I shall reproduce this comment in its entirety:

In modern Internet, Wikipedia is The Encyclopedia.

Britannica might be more accurate or something, but unfortunately, Wikipedia links to Internet, while Britannica links only to itself.

End result is that bias of Wikipedia is very easy to spot and to check. Spotting bias or inaccuracy in Britannica? - well, good luck.

If nothing else, Wikipedia is good starting point for any research. Britannica will need years and years to integrate with Internet where more or less all information turned out to be.

This is the sort of language (I hesitate to say "reasoning") that makes excellent reinforcement for Andrew Keen's "cult of the amateur" arguments. It is rare to find a piece of text in which each sentence is saturated with misconception, but it provides a good opportunity to address what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become in recent years and why that evolution may be more important to us than the radically more rapid growth of Wikipedia.

The most important part of that evolution is that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become far more than a very large number of well-written (and edited) articles by authoritative sources all alphabetized by topic and internally cross-referenced. (Note, however, that those attributes of authorial and editorial quality and authority should be sufficient to differentiate it from Wikipedia, notwithstanding the conflicting opinions of Mary Spicuzza and Nicholson Baker.) All of those articles still constitute the "heart" of the Britannica; but that "heart," known as the "Micropaedia," is only one of three basic elements. What Wikipedia does not offer (and probably sees no reason to do so) are the other two elements. One is a "Propaedia," which is basically an outline of all the knowledge covered by the "Micropaedia," thus providing a structural framework for the entire contents, which, for example, facilitates identifying related topic areas not explicitly mentioned in the "Micropaedia" entries. The other is the "Macropaedia," which is a collection of expository articles intended to provide a "big picture" view of a topic area to be read before digging into the details of the "Micropaedia." (By the way the hyperlinks for these three elements are all Wikipedia entries!)

At the risk of sounding too reductive, I would suggest that Wikipedia has become one of the better ways to get straightforward answers to straightforward questions; but, if you really want to learn about something (particularly something highly unfamiliar to you), you need the kind of resource that the full Britannica package provides. Now I have no idea whether or not this whole package is covered by what Britannica now plans to make available for free to a blogger like myself. That is why I just submitted my registration for the service and hope to report on my pleasures and/or disappointments with what I find!

Collaborating Composers

Earlier this week I found myself reviewing the Gavin Bryars discs in my CD collection. I first became seriously aware of Bryars during my time at Schlumberger, when I used to listen regularly to John Schaefer's New Sounds program on WNYC. (I say "seriously" because my first actual contact with Bryars was in late 1971, since he was the only person who had written to me requesting a copy of my doctoral dissertation! At that time, however, I had absolutely no idea who he was, let alone what he was actually doing.) One of Schaefer's programs featured "Jesus' Blood never failed me yet" in its original recording, which filled one side of a vinyl LP issued as part of Brian Eno's Obscure series. The work absolutely fascinated both my wife-to-be and me. In a sort of parody of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero," the composition was based on a tape loop of a British tramp singing this hymn on the text that Bryars assumed as his title, accompanied by a "live" chamber ensemble playing providing the tramp with more elaborate background on each iteration. It took me forever to find a copy of the recording, which I finally got when a British friend sent me a package of several of the major Obscure releases. By then I had also been exposed to the other side of the vinyl, "The Sinking of the Titanic," which offered a different (but equally fascinating) take on variation-through-repetition.

With the advent of compact discs, it became easier to collect Bryars' music; and I started learning more about him. I learned, for example, that the overall architectures of both "Jesus' Blood" and "Titanic" had been determined by the duration of music that would fit on a single LP side. Thus, when they were released on CD, they were no longer coupled; each work now pretty much filled the capacity of a single CD. More interesting, however, was my discovery of how many of Bryars' compositions seemed to grow out of musicians with whom he came to work; and those musicians made for an interesting mix of the genres they usually performed. For example "After the Requiem," composed in 1990 added Bill Frisell's approach to jazz on an electric guitar to three of the members of the Balanescu Quartet with an alluringly moody result. Similarly, in 1987 Bryars, himself a double bass player, composed "By the Vaar" for Charlie Hayden, who has performed bass in some of the most experimental jazz groups.

There is, of course, nothing new about composers working directly with performers. It is a practice that can probably be found in every era of music history. What is more interesting is the emergence of genre-crossing in what we tend to call "serious music;" and Bryars is far from alone in this practice. Each of Steve Reich's "Counterpoint" works was composed with a specific soloist in mind; and in "Electric Counterpoint" the soloist was Pat Metheny (who has experimented with collaborations of his own involving composers as radically different from his own style as Ornette Coleman, who, just to illustrate the complexity of the social network, frequently performed with Charlie Hayden as his bass).

We may have the Sixties to thank for at least part of this kind of cross-fertilization. After all, Frank Zappa's early fascination with Edgard Varèse (because the guy behind the counter in a record shop could not imagine why anyone would want to listen to that kind of music) eventually led to his collaborative work with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain; and we should probably take at face value claims from The Beatles about the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen (even if, as I have suggested, Stockhausen was more reticent about his own influences). More important, however, is the way in which this trend provides us with yet another reminder that the music is all about the performance, rather than about a composer wrestling with filling up the pages of blank sheets of manuscript paper. As a corollary we have come to recognize that each genre engenders a different approach to listening. So the crossing of genres is an opportunity for the synthesis of new listening strategies, which will then engender new approaches to composition and performance that will elicit their own new approaches to listening. Has music ever before be so alive with so many avenues for creativity?

The Turner Thesis Comes to Cyberspace

The Turner Thesis, described in its Wikipedia entry as "the conclusion of Frederick Jackson Turner that the wellsprings of American exceptionalism and vitality have always been the American frontier, the region between urbanized, civilized society and the untamed wilderness," was very popular when I was in high school and was probably the motivating force behind newly-elected President John F. Kennedy's vision of a "new frontier." We do not hear very much about it these days; and it appears that in my blogging I have invoked it only once and then when I was quoting from a book proposal I had prepared for a project that is still not going anywhere. In the recent past Deadwood may have come closest in bringing the Turner Thesis back into national consciousness (without every mentioning it explicitly, of course). I brought this up when I was writing about my first impressions of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which, among other things, declared The Seven Samurai to be "no less than the Kurosawan theory of the origin of the state." Since Kurosawa's film was, in many ways, an homage to the classic Westerns of John Ford, I responded to Coetzee's text with the observation that Deadwood had similarly elevated the genre of the Western to an exploration of issues also concerned with "the origins of the state." This morning Tim Goodman was grousing in his TV Repairs column for the San Francisco Chronicle about HBO's failure to deliver on the promise of Deadwood movies that would "close out the narrative" (my phrase, not Goodman's), after David Milch moved on to his John From Cincinnati project; but Goodman may not have realized that any narrative true to the real story of Deadwood could not be anything but a downer.

Think about Milch's original project as fundamentally a narrative about two men whose respective moral compasses point in opposite directions: Seth Bullock (who quickly discovers that "once a lawman, always a lawman") and Al Swearengen (who sees and exploits the profit motive in unchecked liberty). Both men come to Deadwood to escape the expansion of "the state," not only through institutions of governance but also through the institutionalization of that profit motive (embodied in the character of George Hearst). (In real life, as we learn from his Wikipedia entry, Hearst actually embodied a merging of these two institutions, when he was appointed to represent California in the United States Senate.) While the HBO series ended with Hearst's "retreat" from Deadwood, taken as a dramatic endorsement that Deadwood would continue to be Deadwood, any continuation of the story would have had to dwell on how Deadwood ultimately ceased to be Deadwood in submission to those two institutions consuming it.

I have written all of this as a prologue to current thoughts about the future of the Internet, motivated in part by the invocation of Deadwood in the Blog Wars documentary I discussed yesterday. When Kennedy delivered his inaugural address, I doubt that anyone could have conceived that a vision of a new frontier would be fulfilled by the Internet. Yet that is what happened, and it is why it makes sense to think of Deadwood as a metaphor for the blogosphere. This morning, however, Andrew Donoghue filed a report for CNET News.com, which should remind us that, if Deadwood has come, then the Turner Thesis cannot be far behind (to put a slight warp on Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"). In other words the forces of "urbanized, civilized society" are encroaching on the "untamed wilderness" areas of cyberspace. True to the Deadwood narrative, this message is coming from a representative of that institutionalization of the profit motive:

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.

He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. "Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today," he said.

The AT&T executive pointed out that the Internet exists, thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet--it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said.

The ensuing question period made it clear that many in the audience saw this forecast as a stake in the ground in the debate over Net Neutrality:

Although Cicconi's speech did not explicitly refer to the term "Net neutrality," some audience members tackled him on the issue in a question-and-answer session, asking whether the subtext of his speech was really around prioritizing some kinds of traffic. Cicconi responded by saying he believed government intervention in the Internet was fundamentally wrong.

"I think people agree why the Internet is successful. My personal view is that government has widely chosen to...keep a light touch and let innovators develop it," he said. "The reason I resist using the term 'Net neutrality' is that I don't think government intervention is the right way to do this kind of thing. I don't think government can anticipate these kinds of technical problems. Right now, I think Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem."

Net neutrality refers to an ongoing campaign calling for governments to legislate to prevent Internet service providers from charging content providers for prioritization of their traffic. The debate is more heated in the United States than in the United Kingdom because there is less competition between ISPs in the States.

Content creators argue that Net neutrality should be legislated in order to protect consumers and keep all Internet traffic equal. Network operators and service providers argue that the Internet is already unequal, and certain types of traffic--VoIP, for example--require prioritization by default.

"However well-intentioned, regulatory restraints can inefficiently skew investment, delay innovation, and diminish consumer welfare, and there is reason to believe that the kinds of broad marketplace restrictions proposed in the name of 'neutrality' would do just that, with respect to the Internet," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement last year.

In his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln reminded all who would hear that we cannot escape history (and we can thank Aaron Copland for keeping that message alive by including it in his "Lincoln Portrait"). However, while Lincoln's address did not have this specifically in mind, what we really cannot escape is the inevitability of governance and the regulatory authority of governmental institutions. Swearengen and Bullock tried their best to escape it, but the Deadwood that nurtured their escape eventually capitulated. Similarly, as I mentioned yesterday, the blogosphere is full of voices that have fumbled over questions of governance; but that fumbling does little more than stress the capacity of regulation to sort things out when complex problems are at stake.

If governance is inevitable, how, then, are the institutions of governance in cyberspace to be constituted? Without trying to promote HBO as a "classroom for our times," I would suggest that this is where we need to set aside the Deadwood narrative and turn instead to John Adams. We need to remember how much passionate and painful debate went into not only our Declaration of Independence but also the composition of our Constitution once that independence had been won; and we need to remember that the debate did not cease with the ratification of that Constitution. Internet evangelists get so carried away with the prospect of the Internet as a functioning anarchy that they become positively sybaritic in their rhetoric; but, as I observed yesterday, they celebrate Deadwood through a deliberate blindness to the dark side of its history. If we are to recognize that cyberspace has now become a social world unto itself, then we can no longer inhabit that world guided by nothing more than myopic self-indulgence. Like our Founding Fathers, we must begin to take on difficult questions that will engender unpleasant arguments in the hope that, however painful the process may be, it will ultimately address the needs of cyberspace government with a social system as robust as the one that our Constitution has provided for our own country.

Internet Pathology in the Schools

Regular readers know that I like to collect (if not analyze and comment on) reports of things going so bad in the social world of cyberspace that they may best be described as pathological. I suspect that one of the earliest of those reports involved a (pre-Internet) case of cyber-rape in the pioneering LambdaMOO chat space, which I had discussed in my previous blog and which Julian Dibbell documented in an extended report for The Village Voice entitled "A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit. Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozen Turned a Database into a Society" (subsequently anthologized in Mark Stefik's Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors). Last year was rather a banner year for such reports:

• In March there was the story about the death threats that Kathy Sierra received on her own blog. One immediate consequence was that Sierra canceled public appearances in which she praised the power of the blogosphere. A more interesting consequence, however, was the revelation of how fumbling the blogosphere became when questions of its own governance were suddenly thrust before it.
• In April there was the complete trashing of a home in Tacoma, Washington, in response to a fake ad placed on Craigslist.
• In May the blogosphere was the site of an unfounded rumor about Apple that briefly (fortunately) played havoc with its stock price.

Any Internet evangelists who regard these as minor aberrations from which the Internet would settle back into a less dangerous normative behavior would do well to read the extended article by Gabriel Sherman, published on March 30 and available on the Web site for New York Magazine. (I emphasize that adjective "extended" and hope to God that the article is not too long for the attention space of the average Internet evangelist!) The story begins with students at a prestigious independent school in New York City using Facebook pages to attack a teacher, but it pursues consequences in too many directions to be simply enumerated on this post. The bottom line is that Internet pathology is still with us, that the currency of social norms is on a (continuing) decline, and that one of the few points of alignment between cyberspace and the "real world" is in the undermining of normative behavior by new ways of exercising domination.

I find it somewhat ironic that last night I happened to watch my VTR recording of the Sundance Channel broadcast of Blog Wars, a documentary that focused on the impact on the blogosphere in Ned Lamont's defeat of Joe Lieberman when the former contested the latter in the Democratic primary for Lieberman's seat in the Senate. The basic message was that the blogosphere was where citizens could make a difference in the political process. The message was delivered without ever invoking that epithet of "citizen journalism," concentrating instead on having the ability to write in a space where anyone can read the resulting text. We were even treated to one journalist celebrating the power of writing without editing without quibbling over whether such writing is as "legitimate" as traditional journalism and blithely ignoring that caveat lector has become the primary rule for reading any text on the Internet. Ultimately, the documentary represents the bloggers (from both left and right) as being as articulate as they are sincere in their convictions; and, when one of those bloggers has to confront the egregious impact of one of her posts, the episode rolls off her back and she blithely moves on to her next post (with encouragement from her fellow bloggers).

The world of Blog Wars, like the world depicted in Sherman's article, is a world that lacks intervention in the interest of considering consequences before acting. This may well be normative for what I have called "the world the Internet has made;" but we should all find the prospect of such a norm to be more than a little chilling. It is a world of entropic sociopathy; and, as is the case with any entropic property, the level can only increase. One of the bloggers interviewed in Blog Wars compared the blogosphere to Deadwood, which is fine if you like the pioneering spirit but not so fine when you consider the number of bodies that filled the Deadwood cemetery (or fed Wu's pigs, as the case may be).

The Pope's Name

A German pope is going to get attention from the German press, which, for the most part represents a far broader spectrum of opinions than we tend to find in the American press. Still, there was something unexpectedly striking about the language invoked by Die Tageszeitung, a left-wing paper cited in Mark Waffel's "World From Berlin" column for SPIEGEL ONLINE dealing with the Pope's visit to the United States:

The enormous magnitude of the nationwide pedophilia scandals will define the pope's visit. Will Ratzinger at least address the scandals fittingly? Or will he go as far as punishing those bishops who were more concerned with covering-up the scandals than exposing them? A lot will depend upon that.

The puritan Ratzinger is viewed in Washington as the "Enforcer," as someone who sternly watches over morals. That is why people's expectations are high. Although Pope Benedict already apologized for the child abuse cases on his flight over to Washington, that will not be enough if he wants to convince and reconcile the faithful. But that is something the Catholic Church desperately needs to do, as it is the only large church in the US to lose members.

There is a certain tone of defiance in the refusal to acknowledge the Papal name (with or without the number) in favor of a last name unadorned with any sign of respect. This is the linguistic tone that journalists apply to politicians, particularly when indicated disapproval.

It is not as if there is a sudden burst of cultural amnesia with regard to the Pope's birth name. The early years of the papacy of John Paul II focused on the diversity of activities during his youth. In London it even prompted a West End revival of a play he had written; and the playbill listed the author of the play as Karol Wojtyła (which is how the play was published). However, I do not recall any news reports of Vatican activities that referred to him by anything other than his Papal name.

Benedict is another matter. Under John Paul, as his Wikipedia entry reminds us, he "had been Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith," which is equivalent to a position that one could find in most of the old Communist regimes, usually called something like "Chairman of the Committee on Ideology." As Joseph Ratzinger he used this position to serve as a major representative of the Vatican before the press, which put him right in the thick of the abuse scandal when it broke in so many places over such a short period of time. Prior to his arrival in Washington, the BBC showed some old footage of one of their reporters interviewing him about this scandal. The reporter was not satisfied with polite evasive language and kept pressing for a more substantive statement. Ratzinger's response was to dismiss the reporter by slapping him (lightly, mind you) on the wrist to indicate that the discussion was over.

I have no idea if this footage was representative of how Ratzinger tended to deal with the press, rather in the manner of a disciplinarian Parochial School teacher. Back in 2006 it was clear that Benedict was a highly intellectual Pope, probably one of the most intellectual in the history of the Papacy; but he also gave the impression that he might have been happier with a faculty position at the University of Regensburg than as the Holy Father. As a rule the press (whether left or right) does not take kindly to displays of intellectual superiority, nor do they want to be treated as misbehaving children. By denying Benedict his Papal name, Die Tageszeitung may have decided that, if they are going to be treated as if they were misbehaving, they may as well willfully misbehave in some significant manner.

This is unlikely to do any noticeable damage to the institution of Catholicism. Indeed, in an era in which civil behavior is practically obsolete, the level of misbehavior is pretty much too low to deserve more than this passing notice. Rather, it is one of those "safe" acts of misbehavior, to which we sometimes resort for no reason other than to feel good. Die Tageszeitung probably knew that they were not going to score any substantive points against the Vatican; so they probably decided to do something that would make them (and probably many of their readers) feel better, even if it had no impact.

Victimizing the Victims

As I wrote last month, it seemed as if the Executive Branch of our government had decided to place on the back burner (if not ignore) the plight of the victims of predatory lending practices in the wake of the credit crisis:

As I pointed out at the end of last week, the concrete actions we have observed (which the media have dutifully reported) have been blatantly concerned more with the "suffering" of financial institutions than with any "individual homeowners." If those homeowners are to take any comfort at all, it will come from actions by the Congress and only if the President does not apply his veto power to those actions!

Well it now seems clear that those homeowners will receive little comfort from the Senate, which means that the House of Representatives is their "last best hope." This was made painfully clear in the analysis that Stephen Labaton and David M. Herszenhorn prepared for The New York Times regarding the Senate vote on the Foreclosure Prevention Act. The title of this bill, which may have been assigned by primary author Christopher Dodd, would give the impression that it was concerned with means to protect those most seriously victimized by greedy lenders against the foreclosure of their homes. However, according to the Times report, Dodd himself "said the measure did not live up to its name and that he wanted changes." What happened, of course, is that the lobbyists had a field day while the bill was being debated:

To press their case on Capitol Hill, 15 of the biggest residential construction companies, including KB Homes and Toll Brothers, formed a coalition and hired a lobbying firm, the C2 Group, apart from the larger National Association of Home Builders.

Tom Crawford, a founder of the C2 Group, met with staff members of the Senate Finance Committee, several of whose members had already begun expressing concern about the effect of the slowing economy on home builders and other businesses.

The home builders were hardly the only industry that lawmakers heard from as the Senate housing legislation took shape and it became clear that the bill would provide more in the way of tax breaks aimed at stimulating the economy than direct assistance for distressed homeowners.

The cause of the automobile manufacturers was taken up by Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, and Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, who pushed to allow them access to up to $40 million each in alternative minimum tax credits.

This is why Dodd called it exactly right in stating that the bill that was passed "did not live up to its name;" those originally intended to benefit from the legislation had been lost on the cutting room floor.

If there is any good news, it is that they have not yet been lost on the floor of the House of Representatives:

These [House] Democrats said that the Ways and Means chairman, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, and other leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, would oppose the provision as benefiting builders at a time when Congress should be helping homeowners.

“This ship largely sailed when Congressional Republicans left it out of the stimulus package,” said one House Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to interfere with negotiations.

Unlike the Senate bill, which includes a tax credit of up to $7,500 for purchasers of foreclosed properties, Mr. Rangel’s bill provides a credit for all first-time home buyers — a move that drew strong support from the National Association of Realtors.

“This is a meaningful incentive that should draw into the market many purchasers who, to date, have remained on the sidelines,” the president of the group, Richard F. Gaylord, wrote. “We believe this credit can convert ‘lookers’ into first-time home buyers.”

Other industry groups were also eager to sign on as supporters of Mr. Rangel’s bill, even as many of them hope to push him to endorse a more expansive menu of tax breaks that will benefit them.

Among them were the National Association of Home Builders, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Council of Federal Home Loan Banks and the American Hospital Association.

So victimized homeowners may yet be able to come in from the cold, but none of us should hold our breath. Even if the House passes a radically different version of the bill, that will only mean that a new version will have to be wrestled out in committee; and we have no way of predicting the direction that the resulting compromise will take. Then there will be the inevitable threat of veto from the White House, so things are pretty bleak.

Meanwhile, all those victims (not to mention the rest of us) would probably like to know where our next President is likely to stand on this mess. Fortunately, we can all examine the tally. All twelve "Nay" votes were cast by Republicans; so this came down to a strong gesture of party unity on the Democratic side. However, none of the three remaining viable candidates for the Presidency participated in the vote; and their "Not Voting" status was shared only with Elizabeth Dole. In other words none of the candidates has gone on record over a piece of legislation that begin with good intentions and turned into a potential Road to Hell. It is bad enough that Dodd himself capitulated to vote "Yea;" it is worse that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would make an accountable declaration of how those hurt the most by the credit crisis were most abandoned by the first major gesture the Senate has made.

Awakening from the Nightmare of History

I first became aware of the music of Alfred Schnittke when I was living in Los Angeles and attending regularly the subscription series of concerts given by the Kronos Quartet at UCLA. The first of these series I attended covered the first three of Schnittke's string quartets; and, since there did not appear to be any budget for program notes, my initial exposure to Schnittke, the first of the quartets, left me completely in the dark, probably frustrated as much as I was mystified. Having the second quartet as my second dose did not improve the situation. It was only by persevering until I heard the third quartet that things began to make sense.

By this time I knew that Schnittke was Russian and that Dmitri Shostakovich had been a major influence on his work. This was a time when we were beginning to appreciate the strain that Shostakovich had endured in his efforts to survive as a composer in the Soviet Union. There was even a play based on a fictitious meeting that Joseph Stalin called with both Shostakovich and Serge Prokofiev, basically to let them know, on no uncertain terms, that his self-perceived obligations to the legacy of the Russian Revolution were far more important than any of their attempts to be "revolutionary" in artistic creativity, since in the interests of the proletariat, such activities were fundamentally elitist (to invoke an adjective being used rather heavily right now). This play provided a good way to set the context for why I had suggested that Shostakovich's fifth symphony (now generally regarded as one of the "great hits" of the twentieth-century symphonic repertoire) was best "viewed through the lens of a pious acknowledgement of authority" and why Shostakovich's surface-level piety was actually "invoking irony in ways that would elude the perceptions of more superficial listeners" (such as Stalin).

It is likely that by 1983, when Schnittke composed his third quartet, he was aware of what Shostakovich had endured. His studies at the Moscow Conservatory must have included a "Soviet-approved" version of history, which included the notorious description of the Shostakovich fifth as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism." Whether or not Schnittke ever had (or took) the opportunity to read James Joyce, he very likely shared with Stephen Dedalus (in the "Nestor" episode of Ulysses) the conviction that history "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." If Shostakovich tried to deal with his personal nightmare of political history through irony, Schnittke seems to have turned to metaphor by taking on the authority of music history imposed by both his training and subsequent teaching responsibilities. On this "playing field" he could more easily get away with ridicule as an alternative to Shostakovich's cryptic ironies.

We see one of the earliest examples of Schnittke's strategy in his first violin sonata, composed in 1963. This was an effort to work with the twelve-tone system technique of Arnold Schoenberg; but he called the result "a tonal world with atonal means." It was also a reflection of Shostakovich's thinly-veiled flirtations with popular music, particularly when, in the final movement of this sonata, he managed to twist his twelve-tone row around to reveal a principle theme that is basically "La Cucaracha," thus ridiculing the historical burdens of both the Soviet system and the Western obsession with Schoenberg's legacy.

This sonata can be heard as a bit of muscle-flexing in preparation for his 1972 "Suite in the Old Style, for violin and piano or harpsichord." This begins, innocently enough, as "a pious acknowledgement" of the authority that the study of music still assigns of seventeenth-century practices; but, as Schnittke leads us through his five movements, it becomes clear that he is more interested in showing us how frayed the fabric of that authority has become. His sense of ridicule thus progresses from subtle to blatant without ever wallowing in anger.

By the time of the third quartet, he is more favorably inclined towards history while still guarding against history-worship. On the very first page of the score, he introduces three statements that pretty much span music history as it is currently studied:

1. A cadential phrase from a "Stabat Mater" by Orlando di Lasso
2. The principle fugue subject from Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 133
3. Shostakovich's "signature" motif, DSCH (D, E flat, C, B)

These three seeds cultivate each other, sprouting tendrils that weave among each other for the (trying to swim?) in Richard Wagner's leitmotif for the Rhine River. History may still be a nightmare, but it can be endured if one applies the right level of surrealistic humor.

Unfortunately, Schnittke suffered a stroke in 1985 that not only sent him into a coma but also led to his being declared clinically dead several times before his recovery. However, he was never in good health after that recovery; and this may have influenced his outlook on history. Thus, in 1988 he composed a piano quartet whose first movement was a very early (1877) sonata movement by Gustav Mahler (whose later years were also plagued by bad health) and whose second scherzo movement was thoroughly Schnittke at his most aggressive approach to late-twentieth-century idioms. The few sketches Mahler had left for the scherzo are in among those idioms; but it is unclear whether they are a nightmare of history, an invocation of the Sehnsucht found in so much of Mahler's music, or a combination of the two.
Certainly, as Schnittke's health deteriorated with his age, his humor deteriorated along with it. During my time in Singapore I remember hearing that one of his last symphonies was so intense that, when it was performed by the New York Philharmonic, conductor Kurt Masur strongly suggested that the concert was unsuitable for children.

I do not come across many reports of performances of Schnittke these days. Several years ago, on one of his visits to the San Francisco Symphony, Masur conducted a truly gripping performance of his second concerto for cello from that final period of his life. I also had the opportunity to hear one violin recital that included the first sonata; and, while I can no longer remember the soloist, I do remember that he took the time to provide the audience with some background (including the "Cucaracha" reference) before beginning the performance. Since August will be the tenth anniversary of Schnittke's death, one would think this would be a good time to hear this music; but, at least here in San Francisco, I seem to be the only one with that idea!

Beyond the Food Crisis

It is amusing how many sources (not of which are particularly authoritative) a Google search can reveal for that old adage, "When you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." What may be less amusing is that most (if not all) of those sources are American, because it indicates the extent to which those with whom we refuse to communicate may have an idea or two worth noticing. This is evident is a report for Reuters filed this morning by Dean Yates based on another report just released by Refugees International:

The anti-U.S. movement of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is now Iraq's main humanitarian organization helping needy Iraqis, a relief group said in a report that is certain to cause concern in Washington.

In the report published on Tuesday, Refugees International said Sadr's Mehdi Army militia as well as other Shi'ite and Sunni Arab militias were expanding their influence by providing food, shelter and other essentials to Iraqis left destitute by war.

The findings underscore Sadr's mass appeal ahead of provincial elections in October and will cause concern for U.S. officials who see reducing the influence of the militias as one of the Iraqi government's key challenges.

Sadr's political movement will compete for the first time in the local polls and is expected to make gains at the expense of other Shi'ite parties supporting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

In other words, if you really want to win "hearts and minds," there is a lot to be said for "providing food, shelter and other essentials!"

We should not have needed Refugees International to tell us this, nor should we have needed them to tell us that the Mehdi Army is doing a better job then either the American presence or the Iraqi government being supported by that presence. However, in the wake of last week's Congressional testimony, it is worth nothing that neither the testifying subjects (General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker) nor those questioning them (nor, for that matter, the media reporting on the testimony) wanted to talk very much about the current state of the welfare (if any) of the general Iraqi population. Instead, the focus was on "security," particularly security within the "Green Zone," which has become a painful symbol of the isolation of American interests from the rest of Iraq.

Needless to say, this is news that has also been coming out of Afghanistan, where the Taliban have been reemerging in that same name of general public welfare. In both countries the officially "elected" government is perceived as corrupt; and that corruption is seen as feeding both personal gain and American interests. This is not to speak in favor of the Taliban (particularly in view of their past "legitimate" administration of Afghanistan) or the Mehdi Army; but it is to call attention to that last sentence in the quotation. If Sadr is serious about participating in the political process, then we should be paying attention to the extent to which he now seems to be more interested in butter than guns.

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was in any of the lists I cited of countries currently enduring food riots. This is probably less an indication of there being a food crisis and more an indication of the extent to which the food problem is competing with so many other problems. Sadr seems to have committed the resources at his disposal to feeding Iraqis in the same way that the institutions of capitalism have been committing their resources to those "37 countries" contending with "violent protests" over food. This could be the sort of ideological battle in which neither "side" loses. It could even provide a situation in which each "side" could learn from the other. This is, admittedly, a far-fetched point of view; but, given the way events have been playing themselves out in the first decade of our new century, the far-fetched seems to become a little bit more normative every day!

The "Immediate" Triage Category

For those who may have been skeptical of my "triage" approach to the global food crisis (justifying the World Bank taking their first actions in Haiti and suggesting that Israel could do something of the same in Egypt), the Al Jazeera English report of yesterday's address by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon concluded with a summary of where this crisis is now leading to public violence:

Food security has become a major concern in recent weeks as supplies of basic commodities dwindled in the face of soaring demand, triggering riots and outbreaks of violence in Haiti, Africa and the Far East.

Increases in the price of rice, wheat, corn, cooking oil, milk and other foodstuff have sparked violent protests in at least 37 countries including Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia.

I have net yet seen a list of the 37 countries cited in this report. However, this morning on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman provided her own variation on this story:

In Bangladesh at least 15,000 garment factory workers went on strike earlier today to call for higher wages to cover the soaring price of food. In South Africa, the country’s main union has kicked off a series of protests over increasing food prices. In recent weeks food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen.

So, while there may be some argument over specific numbers, it is clear that there are many places that require immediate attention if we are to avoid disastrous consequences. The numbers are large enough that we have to hope that the World Bank has the resources to deal rapidly with those responses that need to follow their first response in Haiti, and it is clear that the World Bank cannot carry all of this burden. Some may have thought that the final paragraph of yesterday's post, calling for an active response from Israel that could be directed at jeopardized nations with large Muslim populations, was an exercise in irony. It was nothing of the sort. For all the talk about the close relationship between Israel and the United States, this is a chance for Israel to follow our lead while, at the same time, demonstrating that it can summon its resources for the needs of a general global good. As a result, if an organization like Hamas still seriously wants to question the right of Israel to exist, then Israel, by its very deeds, can provide them with an indisputably substantive answer!

Trotsky's Chicken Comes Home to Roost

Long before our soldiers saw the value in raising their voices against the insanities they had to endure, first in Vietnam and now in Iraq, there was Leon Trotsky:

If enlightened pacifists attempt to abolish war by means of rational argument, they simply make fools of themselves, but if the armed masses begin to use the arguments of reason against war, this means the end of war.

Think of that as the text for the lesson. The sermon is left as an exercise for the reader!

Étonnez-moi, Mr. President!

Yesterday I had the temerity to suggest that the best strategy for the United States' "War on Terror" would be grounded in major contributions to solving the global food crisis. Much to my surprise, the White House seems to appreciate this kind of strategic thinking, although, as continues to be the case more often than not, I had to find out about it through a report on Al Jazeera English:

George Bush, the US president, has authorised the release of $200m in emergency food aid in an attempt to alleviate the world's growing food crisis, the White House says.

The funds will be made available through the US Agency for International Development, the White House said in a statement on Monday.

Let us just hope that this is the beginning of an ongoing story, rather than the assumption that a one-shot solution will repair all damage. At the very least enquiring minds need to know what, if any, strings are attached when the Agency for International Development starts dispensing these funds. For that matter we need to know if they are dispensing them, since having the budget and spending it are two different matters. There is also the practical question of what will be achieved with $200 million, particularly now that Joseph Stigliz and Linda Blimes have us thinking in terms of trillion-dollar budgets for waging war.

However, my own modest proposal had more to do with solving the food crisis through the institutions of capitalism. In that respect it is worth noting, as Al Jazeera did, that the White House seems to have been motivated by the World Bank:

The US pledge also comes a day after the World Bank said it had created a "new plan" to help those affected by the crisis and, alongside the International Monetary Fund (IMF), urged wealthy nations to contribute $500m towards easing the problem.

Al Jazeera also seems to have confirmed that, at least as far as the World Bank is concerned, this is a beginning act, rather than a one-shot:

The World Bank's first response to the crisis has been a $10m grant for feeding programmes in Haiti, where food riots have just forced the removal of the country's prime minister.

In addition to $500m appeal, the World Bank also called on oil-exporting countries to invest more of their windfall earnings in Africa.

Shifting just one per cent of the assets held by those countries' sovereign investment funds could put $30bn towards African development.

The World Bank said there are plans to nearly double its lending for agriculture in Africa to $800m.

This also seems to confirm that, for both short-term and long-term thinking, the World Bank is seriously talking about "real money," as they say.

Speaking of reality, we should also recognize that, while things may start moving in the right direction, significant change is not going to happen overnight. The World Bank's decision to start in Haiti is probably a good example of triage thinking, since Haiti is the first of the crisis countries to experience a governmental breakdown. Presumably the World Bank is now harnessing its team of analysts to try to administer the next shot of funds before a government collapses. Now, are we going to start reading reports like this from any other media sources?

Also, without hoping for too much, what would it do for prevailing attitudes in the Middle East if Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni were to use her "bully pulpit" at the Doha annual democracy forum (where things could well be far more substantive than they were at the World Economic Forum in Davos) to announce Israel's contribution to solving the food crisis, say, by applying some of their agricultural resources to alleviate the food riots in Egypt?

Concluding the First Half of the Beethoven Cycle

Last week I referred to Thayer's citation of "the glorious series of sonatas," which Ludwig van Beethoven composed in the years 1798 and 1799. Last night András Schiff concluded the first half of his cycle of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas with an equally "glorious series," all completed in 1801 and sporting consecutive opus numbers, a "run" that would only be duplicated at the end of the cycle. The three opus numbers in this case are 26 (sometimes called the "Funeral March" after its third movement), 27 (the two compositions called "Sonata quasi una Fantasia"), and 28 (sometimes labeled "Pastoral"). By way of historical context, by 1801 Beethoven had completed his first three piano concertos, his six Opus 18 string quartets, and his first symphony. We are still a year away from his "Heiligenstadt Testament" and his confrontation with, in the words of that Testament, "the prospect of a lasting malady" of deafness. He has not yet reached the level of Richard Wagner's heroic epithet describing him as a Titan wrestling with the Gods; but he is commanding the full use of his faculties to "push the envelope" of convention in his compositions.

Schiff's recital took an approach to time-scale similar to last week's, saving Opus 28, in many ways the most conventionally structured, as the only work after the intermission. This meant that before the intermission we heard eleven movements (four in Opus 26, four in Opus 27, Number 1, and three in Opus 27, Number 2), only one of which, the last, conformed to what theorists now call "sonata form." I should point out here that I am in at least slight disagreement with Schiff over this claim. In his interview for the program notes, he described the first movement of Opus 27, Number 2 (the movement that earned it the "Moonlight" nickname) as "a highly disguised sonata form;" but the only grounds I can see for this is the sense of a recapitulation over the final ten measures. I am more inclined to follow Donald Francis Tovey and view sonata form as less a matter of recapitulation and more a matter of an elaboration of ternary form; and, if that ternary form is "highly disguised" in this movement, then it is so disguised as to be barely recognizable. I agree more with Schiff's later remark that one should think of this movement more in terms of a Bach prelude. Also, the experience of hearing these sonatas played in chronological order left me feeling a parallel with the Adagio con molto espressione movement from Opus 22, which Schiff played last week and which I cited as one of Beethoven's first steps towards exploring a sense of calm sustained over an extended duration of time. So I shall hold to my primary point: Throughout the first half of this recital, we experienced Beethoven experimenting with a variety of departures from the form traditionally associated with a sonata, only to return to that tradition just before the intermission.

This raises another interesting point about Beethoven's "quasi una Fantasia" approach to both Opus 27 sonatas: all the transitions between movements are marked "Attacca subito" except for the transition to that "traditional" final movement of Opus 27, Number 2. There is thus a strong sense of seamlessness in Beethoven's approach to the "Fantasia." The tempo markings change (with unconventional frequency in Opus 27, Number 1); but it seems as if Beethoven wanted to treat each of these works as "all of a piece," which itself was another way to push the envelope that had been set by tradition. In this respect it was interested to see that, while Schiff allowed for applause at the end of Opus 26, he took very little pause time before beginning Opus 27; so, even with the "migrations" of tonality, there was a strong sense of unity across the entire first half of the recital.

Finally, there is the question of how to approach a single movement that is so well known that it is in danger of sounding clichéd (that, of course, being the "Moonlight" movement itself). As Schiff pointed out in his interview, Beethoven specified that this movement is to be played "senza sordini," which means without dampers. He thus kept his foot on the damper pedal for the entirety of the movement. As Malcolm Bilson pointed out in a lecture-demonstration he once gave about period instruments, this poses an interesting acoustic problem, which is that the decay time for any instrument Beethoven played is much shorter than that on a modern piano.

Bilson did not demonstrate this with the "Moonlight" movement. Rather, he argued that, in Beethoven's time, a fermata indicated that a note be sustained until it could no longer be heard. He then provided some examples of how, if one were to take this approach with a modern Steinway, it would take all night to finish the performance!

Schiff's approach provided a marked contrast to the clear articulations that had distinguished all of his previous performances, but it was also an interesting example of what it meant to take that stare decisis approach to Beethoven. The "senza sordini" requirement is preceded by "sempre pianissimo," meaning that every note has to be played so softly that its decay time will be consistent with the acoustics of the lifted dampers. I would guess that Schiff had to put a lot of effort into determining just the right level of pianissimo to produce the "senza sordini" effect properly on a modern piano; and, as far as I am concerned, he succeeded admirably. If, as I have suggested, a satisfying listening experience is an informative one, then Schiff certainly informed us with a new way to listen to one of the most familiar works in the repertoire; and the audience response was definitely a positive one.

Given all the experimentation that took place before the intermission and the more conventional formal framework for Opus 28, there was the danger that the second half might feel a bit less satisfying. However, as I initially observed, Beethoven's confrontation with the impending tragedy of deafness was still a year in the future; so that sense of wit that carried us through the first three concerts of the cycle was still very much intact and evident. This was particularly the case in the playful middle section of the ternary Andante (which then resurfaces as a coda), the false triviality of a theme in descending octaves in the Scherzo, and the concluding Rondo, which begins with a comfortable rocking motif but ends with one of those "quasi presto" flourished that Beethoven could pull off so well.

Thus, the only real "bow to convention" came with Schiff again turning to Johann Sebastian Bach for his encore, this time the G Major French Suite (BWV 816). The French Suites are far more conventional than, for example, the keyboard Partitas. They are more four-square in structure and less inclined to what I previously called Bach's gift for saying "and another thing" before bringing a movement to closure. On the other hand this particular set of four Beethoven sonatas had made for a pretty full evening, so Schiff may have wanted to give us a bit of relaxation in his encore selection! The alternative would have been to look to the future rather than the past, which Schiff did with the Schubert encore he took in his very first recital. There were certainly plenty of episodes in the Beethoven that Schiff played that were likely inspirations for Schubert; but that would have taken us into an area of music theory that probably would not have suited the "wrapping up" of the first half of this sonata cycle.

Chutzpah at the Roots

Yes, it is only Monday, which is really too early to be talking about a Chutzpah of the Week award. However, when the candidate is the current Israeli government, whose roots go back to the very origins of the word "chutzpah," one should strike while the iron is hot. Before going into details, I wish to offer two elements of context.

The first concerns my personal experiences in Israel from 1971 until 1973 (having left shortly before the Yom Kippur War). This was my first job after getting my doctoral degree. One of my colleagues in the laboratory where I was writing my thesis was Israeli, and he kept warning me about the arrogant attitudes I would find over there. This tended to be one of the first things most Americans noticed, and it became a frequent topic among those of us who felt we were expatriates, rather than the next generation of immigrants. One prevailing thesis was that the arrogance was a product of a culture that blamed all of the rest of the world for the Holocaust and had now achieved a position secure enough to allow "venting" the anger. With this as an explanation, my own sense of irony would usually chime in with the reminder that the business about turning the other cheek was not in the Old Testament portion of The Bible! The venting has not abated; and the precepts of Jesus are viewed with, at best, a detached historical perspective.

The second element of context has to do with American support of Israel on the grounds that it is the only "real" democracy in the Middle East. In this regard I feel it necessary to return to that letter that Voltaire supposedly wrote to the Abbé le Riche on February 6, 1770, which I cited about a year ago:

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

At the heart of this week's Chutzpah of the Week award is a text that has been highly detested, the book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, by former President Jimmy Carter. Carter did not have many friends after this book appeared. The Israeli government took extreme umbrage at the wording in the title of the book and fell back on the usual party line of accusing him of supporting a terrorist cause; and, as the Israeli government went, so went most of the "official" reactions to the book from Washington. Fortunately, Carter did have one friend who stuck with him and honored him with an appointment to his group of "elders" who would examine major world problems. That friend was Nelson Mandela. As I had previously quoted from the Reuters report about this appointment, Carter stuck to his guns in trying to get at why his book had aroused such violent passions:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said governments had frequently failed to tackle the world's big issues and conflicts because they were beholden to voters, inhibited by their own political agenda and beset with domestic problems.

This brings us to last week, when Carter missed out on a positive-connotation Chutzpah of the Week award, primarily because of a strong local bias on my part. Nevertheless, there was a lot of chutzpah behind Carter's decision to meet with representatives of Hamas; and I strongly supported his decision on the grounds that it was more important to view Hamas as the party of legitimately elected officials in Gaza than as terrorists.

This is where the contexts all fold together in the choice for this week's award: a meeting of the democratic recognition of the right to write "detestable text" and the Christian principle of turning the other cheek. According to a report by Adam Entous for Reuters this morning, the Israeli government has rejected both of these principles in the planned treatment of Carter during his visit to the Middle East:

Israel's secret service has declined to assist U.S. agents guarding former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit in which Israeli leaders have shunned him, U.S. sources close to the matter said on Monday.

Carter angered the Israeli government with plans to meet Hamas's top leader, Khaled Meshaal, in Syria, and for describing Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories as "a system of apartheid" in a 2006 book.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who brokered Israel's first peace treaty with an Arab neighbor, Egypt, signed in 1979, met Israel's largely ceremonial president, Shimon Peres, on Sunday but was shunned by the political leadership, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Israel has also rejected Carter's request to meet jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi, who is seen as a possible successor to President Mahmoud Abbas, a spokesman for Carter said.

Barghouthi was convicted in 2004 of murder by an Israeli court over the killing of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk in attacks by Palestinian militants. He is serving five life sentences.

American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet security service, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service security detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

I suppose the real chutzpah of this act resides in the extent to which the Israeli government has used pettiness as an instrument of vindictiveness. It reveals that any language shed over having the strength to confront the difficulties in resolving the problems with current conditions for Palestinians is nothing more than hollow rhetoric, which is probably more for the benefit of American politicians raising support for Israeli than it is for the quest for a secure life in any part of the Middle East. In light of my comments yesterday about the remaining three contenders for the White House, this is another example of an "honest truth" that "needs to be told." It will be interesting to see if any of those three candidates have anything to say (possibly audacious) about the behavior of a country that we ally with because we embrace their democratic principles.

You Can't Eat Ideology

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to trying to resolve the current financial crisis when the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Group of Seven came together to meet in Washington: Food riots broke out in Haiti and Egypt. As Krishna Guha, Chris Giles and Chris Bryant reported for the Financial Times, this convergence of "wise men of economics" recognized that a change of agenda was in order:

To the surprise of some in Washington, the high-level economic meetings ended up putting as much weight on the global food crisis as the credit crisis.

Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s finance minister, told his colleagues rising food prices were causing severe problems across the developing world.

Leaders agreed on Sunday to support a World Bank “New Deal” for food and called on donors to provide $500m in funding for short term relief.

Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, welcomed calls from Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, and Susilo Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, to make the “global food crisis” the top priority of the next Group of Eight meeting in Tokyo.

But he said “We cannot wait for that. We have to put our money where our mouth is now.”

Domininque Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, warned of “terrible” consequences if food prices continued to rise. Demands for a rapid and co-ordinated international response came as anger at rising food prices contributed to the collapse of the government in Haiti.

It is unclear whether those who were surprised in Washington were in our government. If so, then they have failed to recognized a significant opportunity for reputation repair. Even a master of agitprop theater like Bertolt Brecht knew that hunger mattered more than ideology and developed this theme particularly effectively in Die Dreigroschenoper; but the historical record is no kinder where this particular sore spot of ideology is concerned. Think of the famines that both Soviet Russia and Communist China had to endure; and, to be fair to both pans of the balance, think of the Dust Bowl in the wake of the "irrational exuberance" (remember that phrase?) of the Roaring Twenties. On a more positive note there are those who are convinced that Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War by the simple act of providing Mikhail Gorbachev with a visit to an American supermarket, where the Soviet leader could experience, first-hand, an economic system that provided consumers with abundance, variety, and affordability. Hunger needs to be fed with nourishing food, not the "pie in the sky" of inspiring ideals.

If there is anyone left in our Government who is still seriously committed to a "War on Terror," they should chew (metaphorically) on these observations. Are Osama bin Laden and his top-level colleagues in the al-Qaeda network prepared to feed their supporters when problems of food scarcity (high prices for low availability) come to their respective bases? Will their next video provide convincing explanations of how the next suicidal act of terror will put food on the table of the terrorist's starving family? Perhaps they will keep silent, viewing hunger as what Douglas Adams called an "SEP" (Somebody Else's Problem); but what will they do when that "somebody else" turns out to be one of the major global institutions of capitalism? It is not a remote possibility that Strauss-Kahn had an outbreak of terrorist acts in mind in voicing the danger of consequences facing a world that does not address the growing problem of world hunger. On the other hand it would also not be surprising if the Bush Administration has not been thinking along those lines (now that we know how little they have been thinking about the price of gasoline at the pump). We may be at a turning point in the current "clash of cultures;" and, if we play things right, we have a good chance of ending up on the side of the angels (for a change). Don't screw it up, guys!

The Point of Vulnerability

Jason Linkins, Political Reporter for The Huffington Post, probably called it right in this morning's weekly column about the "Sabbath-Day Gasbags," as Calvin Trillin used to call them:

Today is a good example of how covering these Sunday shows is like staring down the barrel of a gun. See, thanks to Senator Obama, who couldn't come up with a way of explaining the thesis of Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, to a room for of Bay Area Democrats that wasn't wholly inept, we can comfortably predict that this Sunday morning, instead of a vital discussion of the unbelievably goofy and, well, UNBELIEVABLE testimony proffered by David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker on Iraq, we're instead going to listen to the Sunday Morning hosts and panels give a national conversation on elitism. This, despite the fact that they are, to a man, out-of-touch by several million degrees and so elitist that they are practically toffee-encrusted.

On the other hand, if we really do want to focus on Barack Obama, then a better source for background may be Homer (or, to be more academically accurate, the Homeric bards). Consider, for the sake of a literary exercise, the opening invocation to The Iliad (drawing upon the translation by Richard Lattimore):

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.

This invocation says nothing about the Trojan War. The 24 books of bardic verse that unfold are ultimately about the tragic flaw of dissension within the Achaian ranks. As the invocation says, the conflict was between Agamemnon, leader of the Achaian troops, and Achilleus, who was unquestionably their strongest (and most invincible) warrior; and the argument was over claims to "spoils of war" in the form of two women abducted from Troy after an early battle. Achilleus "claimed" Briseis as has mistress, while Agamemnon claimed Chryseis, more prestigious since her father was a Priest of Apollo. However, the abduction of Chryseis was taken as an offense to Apollo, who took his wrath out on the Achaians (not the first time Agamemnon had offended a God), thus forcing Agamemnon to return Chryseis to her father. Still feeling entitled to the "better share of the spoils," Agamemnon then demanded that Achilleus turn Briseis over to him. Achilleus ultimately yielded but at the price of withdrawing from all subsequent battles to "sulk in his tent." (One of these days I hope to find out who first coined this particular turn of phrase, having failed to find it in Samuel Butler's prose translation.)

Stripped of both sexism and martialism, this is a quarrel over who has rights to a "prize," a chosen leader or an accomplished warrior. Ultimately, Agamemnon gets his way by "pulling rank;" and Achilleus' first inclination is to kill him. However, when he has the opportunity to do so, Athene intervenes; and that's when the sulking starts. Beyond any divine intervention, however, Agamemnon prevails because of the appeal of his "experience" to the troops as a whole, while Achilleus' skills, however valuable they may be, are perceived as "elitist." So it is that the Homeric saga now rams into the travails of the Democratic Party.

Those who really want to stretch this argument can consult Aeschylus to find out what eventually happened to Agamemnon! Achilleus, on the other hand, eventually leaves his tent and wastes no time in reminding both Achaians and Trojans that he is still "the greatest." However, he has another tragic flaw, which is one small point on his heel that is not invulnerable; so, in the final days of the siege of Troy, he is brought down when an arrow shot by Paris (who started this whole mess with the abduction of Helen) is guided by Apollo (still mad at the Achaians after all those years) to strike Achilleus at that one point. (We are now in the territory of Virgil's Aeneid.)

For all the tales of heroic deeds, then, the Homeric take on the Trojan War is really all about "ill will towards men" (to contrast with the message the angel delivered to the shepherds) and more among the Achaians than between Achaians and Trojans. Whether or not Achilleus is really an appropriate model for Obama, there has certainly been an impressive degree of invulnerability in his campaign strategy; and much of that invulnerability may have come from his ability to raise himself above the muck when it looks as if things are getting ugly. This has to have been a strategic decision on his part; he could not have come this far from beginnings in Chicago politics without being touched by the "dark side" of the process. Therefore, what is most impressive is how well this decision has turned out for him; but, like Achilleus, the strategy may not be entirely invulnerable.

So we come to today's obsession of the Sabbath-Day Gasbags. For all of his popular appeal, is the perception of elitism the sensitive heel which, if properly struck, can bring down Obama's strategy? Given the metaphorical arrows that have been fired by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, they certainly would like it to be (with or without any assistance from Apollo). However, as Sam Stein, another Huffington Post Political Reporter, wrote last night, Obama and his strategists are laboring mightily (with the strength of Achilleus?) to keep his discourse "on message." In the less poetic language of Warren McCulloch, they are accusing both Clinton and McCain of biting Obama's finger rather than looking where he is pointing. (One might even go so far as to suggest that a recurring Clinton strategy has been first to bite the finger and then to point in the same direction.)

For my part I hope Obama keeps his finger intact. As I wrote yesterday, I feel as if he has finally given some teeth to all his rhetoric about audacity; and, as I put it, he identified "a systemic problem to which most players in our political processes have contributed in one way or another (including Obama himself)." That post attracted an anonymous comment, which followed up on this observation in an interesting way:

Obama, however, is in a difficult position. He can't speak out about the systemic, fundamental issues that America faces without losing the support of the elite. Moreover, his message - were he to speak plainly - might be lost in the shouts of "un-American".

The honest truth needs to be told. Will anyone actually tell it? More importantly, will America listen if it is spoken?

We are now witnessing the consequences anticipated by the first paragraph. The questions in the second paragraph remain unanswered. Obama has pointed his finger at a "dark side" that he has probably experienced first-hand. Unlike Achilleus and perhaps a little bit more like Oedipus, he wants us to believe that, having emerged from that "dark side," he is now in a better place from which he can take on our own darkness, replete with frustration and expressed in bitterness. I have no idea whether or not our country can accept looking where that finger points and listening to what Obama is telling us. The signs, however, are that they see in both Clinton and McCain more frustration and more cause for bitterness. If Obama prevails, it will be through staying "on the message" that sets him apart from his opponents in both the Democratic and Republican Parties; and he may yet show himself to be less vulnerable than the "bards of the media" want to make him out to be.

"Young Pianists Play Liszt"

The above is the title of an annual event sponsored by the San Francisco Chapter of the American Liszt Society in collaboration with the San Francisco Conservatory Preparatory Division. Over the last four years the "young pianists" have been Preparatory Division Conservatory students. However, this afternoon at the fifth annual of these events, there were two "guests;" and the second half of the concert was performed by Collegiate Division (as in "not quite so young") students. Any way you cut it, that makes for a lot of Franz Liszt's piano music.

When classical and jazz pianists talk to each other, the conversation often turns to parallels between Liszt and Art Tatum. Both were "undisputed heavyweight champion" masters of the keyboard in their day, not just for technical skill but for the way in which that skill was applied to elaborate and complex embellishments of otherwise simple melodic material. Each had a successor who both continued the line and pushed the envelope further: Ferruccio Busoni and Oscar Peterson, respectively. After that the mold for both lines was pretty much broken, and the respective genres headed into new directions.

I bring this up because even the most avid of jazz listeners often confessed that, where Tatum was involved, a little bit goes a long way. Once CDs came along and the prospect of many hours in little physical space let to a knew "cottage industry" of anthologizing the jazz masters, it became easier to appreciate the wisdom of those listeners. It was not that Tatum was not innovative in his embellishments; it was that he was so innovative that one's cognitive capacity was sated after only a few numbers.

However, Tatum had an advantage over Liszt. He could restrict the duration of a performance to the capacity of a single 78 RPM side. Liszt came from an age where such temporal constraints did not matter, which makes it no surprise that he was one of Richard Wagner's most avid champions! However, this means that Liszt could just go one exploring new embellishments, closer to the spirit of John Coltrane than that of Tatum; and therein lies the risk of trying to arrange an all-Liszt program. The good news is that the risk is somewhat abated by having multiple pianists who bring different ways of performing Liszt to the program. The bad news is that Liszt's excesses often play out in a single composition.

At this particular recital the good news was pretty good. Seven Preparatory and five Collegiate students each executed their respective shares of the program with a sense of their own personality, and we as listeners could appreciate the extent to which that personality grew in depth with the age of the performers. The other good news was that the "bad news" pieces, such as the "Tarantella" movement from the "Venezia e Napoli" supplement to the second of the Annés de Pèlerinage, were kept to a minimum. Furthermore, one of the "guest" students even seemed to have a keen sense of the overall architecture of "Les jeux d'eaux à la villa d'Este," from the third of the Annés de Pèlerinage. Thus, over the "long haul" of a two-hour recital, Liszt fared relatively well in this setting, making it a good opportunity to learn a thing or two about listening to him.

Still, without going into details as excessive as Liszt's embellishments, I should observe that the recital ended with a roaring performance of the "Totentanz" (with a second piano covering the orchestra accompaniment), the same composition that Louis Lortie performed with the San Francisco Symphony under Kurt Masur near the beginning of this season. Now while I would think nothing of sitting through several performances of Tristan und Isolde in a single season (and my wife and I were sorely tempted to return to the movie house for the "repeat broadcast" from the Metropolitan Opera), I wasn't sure I would be up to a second "Totentanz" in a single season (even if separated by about six months). However, if Masur and Lortie seemed to have endowed their performance with the spirit of Halloween, I had to credit the young woman from the Collegiate Division for performing in a gown that was straight from the closet of Morticia Addams. She recognized, as Lortie did, that, for a piece like this, satisfying all the demands of execution is not enough; one must also honor the spirit of the work. In this case that is the spirit of either Halloween or The Addams Family!

The Analogy that Dare Not Speak its Name

In reporting on Barack Obama's efforts to ward off attacks from his opponents (both Democratic and Republican), Associated Press Writers Jim Kuhnhenn and Charles Babington did a good job of providing the context for the firestorm that ensued:

At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political Web site Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama Achilles heel — the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant, aloof and carries himself with an air of superiority.

His campaign scrambled to defuse possible damage caused with working class voters that Obama needs to win in upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

"Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois who are bitter," Obama said Saturday morning at Ball State University. "They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through."

"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."

After acknowledging that his previous remarks could have been better phrased, he added:

"The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to.

"And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream."

I suspect that, as I am writing this, the pollsters are already hard at work trying to determine how good a "save" this was for Obama. My own perspective, however, is that Obama was not speaking as a "Harvard-trained lawyer" (arrogant, aloof, or otherwise) but as an astute reader of history. Back when we were just beginning to tally up the real numbers that accounted for the "hidden costs" of the Iraq war, I pointed out that there had been another successful politician in another country who rose to power by emphasizing issues that were not particularly relevant but highly irritating to major sectors of the population. That politician was Adolf Hitler; and the state of the German economy was reflected by postage stamps that had, as I put it, "incredibly large numbers on them."

Now, if Obama had come out and said that the Bush Administration is talking about guns, religion, and immigration the way Hitler talked about the Jews, then he would probably be in really deep yogurt, perhaps too deep to be remedied with any form of damage control. Still, the analogy is worth considering. The weak animal cornered by a predator may still lash out, because there is nothing else to do. Much of Karl Rove's strategy hinged on channeling that need to lash out to the advantage of the Republican Party. Obama reminded us that the majority of the electorate is still in danger of being victimized by any number of predatory practices, but he is trying to appeal to our better natures as an alternative to lashing out in a way that would again benefit the Republicans, rather than the country as a whole. My guess is that, no matter how he framed this point, he would have been attacked for doing so, because he was identifying a systemic problem to which most players in our political processes have contributed in one way or another (including Obama himself). Putting the point on the table at all may have been his most evident act of audacity. In that respect his "rhetorical recovery" should be seen as an attempt to keep the point on the table while defusing his opponents' efforts to use the initial remark to rouse the rabble, so to speak. Since in the past I have accused Obama of invoking the concept of audacity for little more than shallow rhetorical purposes, I now find myself admiring him for finally hauling out a significant instance of the real thing!

The Post-Petraeus Rhetoric Battle

The rhetorical battle pitting General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker against the two houses of the Congress has now shifted to the radio airwaves with the President's weekly address and Democratic rebuttal. As Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann reported, there were no surprises in what President Bush had to say:

President Bush, defending his decision to halt withdrawals of U.S. troops after July, said Saturday that Iraqis are shouldering more responsibility for securing their future.

The United States will stay on the offense, support the Iraqi security forces and move toward an oversight role, Bush said in his latest effort to garner support for the unpopular war. He used his Saturday radio address to promote his war policy, even though his approval rating hit a new low of 28 percent in an AP-Ipsos survey this week.

The president on Thursday said he would heed the advice of his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus. After the current drawdown of U.S. troops ends in July, Petraeus wants 45 days to evaluate security — followed by an indefinite period to reassess U.S. troop strength in Iraq, where flare-ups of extremist violence are threatening to undercut security gains.

"I've told him he'll have time he needs to make his assessment," Bush said.

That stance guarantees a heavy American military presence in Iraq for the rest of Bush's presidency as the war grinds through its sixth year. The current total of 160,000 troops is scheduled to shrink to about 140,000 by the end of July. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that he no longer thinks, as he did last fall, that it was possible for troop levels to drop to 100,000 by year's end.

More interesting was the Democratic response, which was reported by Associated Press Writer Will Lester:

The growing cost to the United States of fighting the war in Iraq "is not only linked to our economic skid, but is a leading cause of it," a Democratic congressman said Saturday.

Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky linked the costly, unpopular war with the growing economic troubles — some say recession — in this country.

Yarmuth said in the Democrats' weekly radio address that the testimony this week of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the Iraq war served as reminder of the billions of dollars being poured into Iraq as the U.S. economy struggles.

"General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker failed to offer a plan to change direction in Iraq and redeploy our troops," Yarmuth said. "Instead, they offered more of the same, with U.S. troops and taxpayers paying the price."

The U.S. government has spent "more than half-a-trillion dollars" in support of the war effort, while that money could be spent on pressing needs in this country, he said.

In February, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that pulling out of Iraq was the most named remedy for fixing U.S. economic problems.

Forty-eight percent of those surveyed said a withdrawal would help the country's economic problems "a great deal" and 20 percent more said it would help somewhat. Some 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal; 36 percent named cutting taxes.

"Across America, our roads and bridges are crumbling and are in desperate need of repair, yet taxpayer dollars are being squandered on an Iraqi government that is riddled with waste, fraud and corruption," Yarmuth said.

He said "the cost of one month in Iraq could extend the Children's Health Insurance Program, which the president vetoed, to 10 million children of working families for a full year."

He noted that Congress has passed an economic stimulus package to send millions of Americans up to $1,200 that could provide a boost to the economy.

I, for one, was very glad to hear this perspective, just as I have been pleased by the number of radio interviews I have heard recently that cite the recent book by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, which may well have provided source material for Yarmuth's rebuttal address. Stiglitz and Blimes have done this country a great service by converting that old "a billion here, a billion there" remark into real numbers (that are also really depressing).

My wife likes to remind me that, while William Shakespeare's Henry V is basically a celebration of a great military victory, the real King Henry pretty much bankrupted his country's treasury to achieve that victory. One could imagine some latter-day propagandist celebrating our current administration with a similar effort at mass entertainment. One could even imagine the result being so successful as to block the Stiglitz-Blimes book from our "cultural memory." Nevertheless, this is not a time to be quibbling over the judgments of history. Congressman Yarmuth did well to remind us of the full extent of the mess in which we are bemired, but that only emphasizes how little serious thinking has been applied to getting out of that mess.

Give Mao a Chance

By all rights Thursday's election in Nepal should be the model of a democratic process for a country that has just made the transition away from an absolute monarchy. True, it took an armed conflict to unseat that monarchy; but, when compared with the recent elections in Africa (not to mention the hanky-panky in our own last two Presidential elections), the Nepalese election was about as orderly and legitimate as anyone could have hoped; and that "anyone" included Jimmy Carter in his capacity as official observer. Nevertheless, on the basis of the latest BBC NEWS report of the results, it will be interesting to see the "official response" of the United States government:

The Maoists have won 14 out of 24 seats declared, and their leader has taken a seat in the capital, Kathmandu.

The party is also ahead in many other seats, for which partial results are coming through as the count proceeds.

The polls, for an assembly to re-write the constitution, are the first to test the Maoists at the ballot box after their 10-year guerrilla campaign.

I suppose the key question will be whether the armed conflict that led up to this election will trigger our we-don't-talk-to-terrorists knee-jerk response, however orderly the election may have been (not to mention that the election was not for leadership but for a representative assembly to prepare a constitution). Carter has been a recent victim of this response through his attempts to meet with representatives of Hamas, since our government prefers to view them as terrorists, rather than the party of officials legitimately elected in Gaza. One can understand his wanting to use the Nepalese election as an opportunity to take a few jabs back at his own government:

It's been somewhat embarrassing to me and frustrating to see the United States refuse among all the other nations in the world, including the United Nations, to deal with the Maoists, when they did make major steps away from combat and away from subversion into an attempt at least to play an equal role in a political society.

The real underlying question, however, will concern the nature of Nepalese Maoism in both theory and practice. After all some of the better (and more quoted) precepts of Mao's Little Red Book were cribbed from the Tao Teh Ching; but I doubt that anyone would confuse Maoism with Taoism. Besides, once Mao had achieved pretty much totalitarian control, those precepts mattered as little to him as the "Declaration of Principles" mattered to Charles Foster Kane as he became more successful and powerful. (For that matter has anyone taken a look at the "Ten things Google has found to be true" in light of some of their more recent activities?)

This is the point where most readers pull out Lord Acton's chestnut:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

More relevant, however, may be a speech that William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, delivered on January 9, 1770, which included the line:

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my lords, that where laws end, tyranny begins.

It is good to remember Pitt, particularly while we are all watching John Adams, since he was able to use his "bully pulpit" to advocate the decision of the American colonies to fight for their independence. Presumably the Founding Fathers knew they had a friend in Pitt, and his personal philosophy may have been one of the influences behind drafting our Constitution on the basis of a need for separation of powers.

Who will influence the Nepalese assembly as they go through the same contentious experiences that eventually culminated in a Constitution that all thirteen former colonies were willing to ratify? We have no way of knowing. We do not even know if they plan to ask for assistance in this process from other governments with stable constitutions. However, if they do ask us for help, then it would be more than "embarrassing" (as Carter put it) for us to refuse it; it would be the folly of ideological myopia!

Entertainment in the Seventeenth Century

My guess is that, when the San Francisco Conservatory Opera Theatre began preparing their performance of L'Egisto, there was not a whole lot of familiarity with the music of composer Francesco Cavalli; so both composer and opera were probably even greater unknowns to most of the audience. At least I had the advantage of seeing L'Ormindo, the opera that Cavalli composed almost immediately after L'Egisto back in the days when I would take the train from Stamford to New York for as wide a variety of musical offerings as my schedule could manage. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to confess that about all that my wife-to-be and I can remember from that event were the really eye-dazzling costumes by Beni Montresor. Beyond that I think the performance was in the Auditorium of Hunter College but would not bet anything serious on that. According to the Wikipedia entry for L'Ormindo, it was performed by the Pittsburgh Opera in February of 2007; but I doubt that this had anything to do with the Conservatory's decision to prepare L'Egisto as this year's full opera project. A more likely explanation is that director Richard Harrell had recently staged Cavalli's La Calisto for the San Francisco Opera Center and wanted to give this composer another try.

I certainly cannot blame Harrell for his interest. Cavalli's obscurity today is one of those cruel artifacts of history. As Nathaniel Marken's program notes observed, L'Egisto was one of the greatest hits of the opera repertoire in the latter half of the seventeenth century, at least "up and down the Italian peninsula." There could be a variety of reasons for this. For one thing it may have one of the largest casts of solo voices in the opera repertoire (at least if you do not count Der Ring des Nibelungen as a single opera); so, whatever one may have thought about the plot, one could always attend a performance as a "monster" recital (in the same sense of the "monster" piano concerts arranged by Louis Moreau Gottschalk two centuries later). However, the plot itself is rather a departure from the prevailing esthetic in that it is not tragedy, comedy, or history; rather, as we learn from the Wikipedia entry, it was called a favola dramatica musicale, favola being Italian for "fairytale" or, if you want a similar-sounding English word, "fable." Whether or not this was a deliberate effort to situate the work beyond the pale of Aristotelian esthetics, there is something decidedly different about the plot; and, if Aristotle is being rejected, then this may be because his belief in the theatre as a source of education is also being rejected. L'Egisto is there to entertain and nothing particularly more.

That emphasis on entertainment may explain the large cast. In the interest of variety, we have mortals (such as Egisto himself), gods (such as Venus and Apollo), demigods (such as Cupid), allegorical figures (such as the Four Hours), and even four heroines from a rather diverse collection of other fables (Semele, Phaedra, Dido, and Hero). Furthermore, all characters are decidedly human in their strengths and weaknesses (which, in the case of the elderly nurse Dema, includes sexual appetite), which means that the Aristotelian classification of characters as noble or base is also being rejected. Perhaps the work was so popular because, while the composer and librettist (Giovanni Faustini) may have been Italian, the "culture" of the plot is more in keeping with the humanist outlook of Northern Europe.

This sounds like quite a lot to cram into a single opera. So anyone familiar with the background of this opera was probably braced for a very long evening. However, the other thing I remember about the performance of L'Ormindo that I saw was that it was very skillfully edited down to a form that honored both plot and music without demanding the endurance required for sitting through Das Rheingold. I assume that both Harrell and conductor Christopher Larkin had a hand in editing L'Egisto down to a length sympathetic to the audience sitting in the Cowell Theater, in which case they both came up with a good strategy for moving the plot along at a brisk pace without depriving any of the singers of their respective opportunities for virtuoso display (which may include the first real mad scene in the history of opera as we know it). So, if this was an opera that was intended primarily (if not entirely) to entertain, then the "teamwork across time" of the "creative staff" of Cavalli and Faustini and the "production staff" of Harrell and Larkin came off totally successfully.

While most Conservatory performances take place only once, four performances were scheduled for L'Egisto (with two casts), All of my impressions came from Opening Night, meaning that three performances remain: tonight, tomorrow night, and Sunday afternoon. I suppose that the strongest of those impressions is that Cavalli really does not deserve the obscurity his ghost must currently endure. There is nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake when properly executed, and this particular execution has shown itself to be a real gem. Besides, how likely is it that this kind of lightning will strike again in the near future?

Bad Judgment about Judgment

Just what were the organizers of the RSA 2008 conference on security technology thinking when they invited Malcolm Gladwell to deliver a keynote address? Had they really been taken in by the title of his bestselling book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, to the point that they had abandoned any critical thinking of that book's text? As a comment to Elinor Mills' account of Gladwell's talk for CNET News.com observed, Gladwell is heavy on anecdotes and distressingly light on whether or not all those anecdotes substantively add up to any lessons learned (including the one implied in the subtitle of his book). This comment highlighted the real issue behind the snake oil that Gladwell has now been pitching for several years, which is the question of what constitutes "the optimal amount of information to make sound judgment." Those who wish to dig into this question seriously would probably do well to go back to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, just to get an appreciation of the complexity of that underlying concept of "sound judgment;" but I doubt that many folks out there will pick up on this advice. Given the sort of stuff that Gladwell writes, I doubt that his attention span would last for more than a single page of any Kant source (and he is far from alone in this situation, so I really am not trying to pick on him); and I suspect that all those security professionals would be just as impatient with Kant and attack me for advising them to read old stuff when they should be concentrating on more up-to-date sources.

However, without trying to attempt a Kant for Dummies exercise, there is at least one fundamental lesson to be learned from the old guy. This is that "judgment" is almost always a matter of teasing out universal principles from specific examples. In other words Kant's Critique takes on the very problem that Gladwell cannot seem to tackle, the transition from anecdotes to lessons learned. You don't really need to read Kant to recognize that this is a problem, but it is nice to know that someone had applied so much systematic analysis to that problem over two hundred years ago!

This takes us back to the more serious question: What is this superficial claptrap doing on the agenda of a conference as serious as RSA 2008? One answer may be that the organizers decided to invite Gladwell for entertainment value, in which case my only response would be to ask if that meant they could not afford Penn & Teller. However, even where entertainment is concerned, there is a risk of trying to reduce thinking about security to anecdotes. The risk is that the result will be the same sort of deluded thinking that has led our Congress to debate questions about interrogation techniques on the basis of the pure fiction of episodes of 24; and, believe it or not, Kant has something to say about that problem, too!

It turns out that his Critique is actually in two (admittedly massive) parts. The first part is a "Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment;" and it is only after he has dug into how we judge aesthetic experiences that he moves into the more practical second part, the "Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment." The overall logic of this approach has to do with applying the model of how aesthetic experiences inform us on the more practical matters of teleological questions of cause and effect. (John Dewey was also interested in how aesthetic experiences inform us for dealing with "real world" situations; but he felt that Kant was more concerned with neat abstractions than he was with messy realities.) In other words the aesthetic experience of watching 24 (however low the aesthetic standards may be) does shape our thinking about more teleological questions, such as making decisions about interrogation or network security techniques; and, from that point of view, the satirical barbs of Penn & Teller have it over both Gladwell's grab-bag of anecdotes and the cheap melodrama of 24 hands down! If we are really concerned about the security of either the "homeland" or our computer resources, we have to "be more cynical," as Bill Maher put it and then apply that cynicism to our "teleological power of judgment." Happy reading!

"I was elected to succeed Congressman Lantos. No one will ever replace him."

The above remark was not false modesty on the part of Jackie Speier, who won a special election Tuesday for the honor of succeeding Tom Lantos. Nevertheless, as Zachary Coile of the San Francisco Chronicle reminded us, in his report of Speier's swearing-in ceremony, while she did not survive Hitler's concentration camps, she did survive a more recent horror:

Her election to Congress was a homecoming for Speier, who served as legal counsel in the 1970s to former Peninsula. Rep. Leo Ryan. Ryan was gunned down at the Guyana airport in 1978 by followers of cult leader Rev. Jim Jones, and Speier was also critically injured in the attack.

This is a woman with the courage of her convictions, and she made that clear in her first speech on the House floor:

The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately. The president wants to stay the course and a man who wants to replace him suggests we could be in Iraq for 100 years. But Madam Speaker, history will not judge us kindly if we sacrifice four generations of Americans because of the folly of one.

In return the House Republicans "honored" her with a display of the "new civility" that has become part and parcel of our legislative process:

While Democrats applauded, Republicans began a chorus of low boos. Some Republicans who had congratulated her just moments before, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), walked out of the hall in protest.

However, given her ability to survive physical gunfire, I feel confident that her convictions will not be swayed by anything as petty as "low boos" coming from a partisan chorus acting out of nothing more than loyalty to a partisan creed that has earned its Commander in Chief the lowest public approval rating in history.

Confronting Propaganda with Chutzpah

I realize that I may be accused of local bias in assigning this week's Chutzpah of the Week award to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, but I view this as more than "a local thing." Besides, given how bad things are, I figure every opportunity to give the award for a positive connotation of chutzpah should be seized. Furthermore, the award is intended, at least in part, to compensate for the editorial in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle, which took Newsom to task for turning yesterday's Olympic torch ceremony into a "keep-away game," thus cheating "thousands" of the opportunity to "express their passions, positive and negative, about the upcoming Games." This may have made for good editorial grousing; but it missed out on the most important point, which is that Newsom managed to come up with "a cunning plan" to extricate the torch ceremony from the political arena and give it back to the relay runners.

By way of context, had Newsom not played his "keep-away game," that political arena could well have been more contentious than the events we had already witnessed in London and Paris. This context was provided by C. W. Nevius in his column for this morning's Chronicle:

For all the talk of protests leading up to the Olympic torch relay, we didn't hear much from the supporters of China.

We learned why early on Wednesday morning. They planned to take over the event.

By 10 a.m. at AT&T Park, where the torch run was supposed to begin, it was obvious that the fix was in.

Thousands of supporters were already there, unloaded from dozens of buses parked across from the ball park. (One torch relay insider told me some in the crowd had been bused from as far away as Los Angeles.) During the day Chronicle reporters were told by some supporters that they had been bused into San Francisco from the South Bay, the East Bay and Sacramento by the Chinese Consulate and Chinese American groups.

They were waving thousands of huge, red Chinese flags or holding up identical, professional-looking placards that read "Beijing, 2008, torch relay."

This was the situation that confronted the organizers of the torch ceremony and Mayor Newsom. Here is how Nevius continued his account in terms of the need to neutralize an explosive situation on both sides of the ideological coin:

By 1 p.m., the appointed time for the torch runners to begin the relay, the crowd had grown even bigger. China supporters far outnumbered any human rights protesters, and anyone from the small pockets of "Free Tibet" protesters was quickly surrounded by the crowd and shouted down. When a Tibet supporter held up a sign, a Chinese supporter would sidle up, the wind would catch his flag, and it would obliterate the sign from the view of the cameras.

"We suspected that the Chinese government would want a public relations spectacle," said Kate Woznow, campaign coordinator for Students for a Free Tibet. "Something that they could broadcast back home."

Those inside the command center say city officials and Mayor Gavin Newsom watched the spectacle with growing concern. Although there was a brief scuffle with "Team Tibet" supporters around a bus early in the morning, the vast majority of the crowd was flag-waving China supporters. Sending the torch down those streets would have been like providing the Chinese government with a made-for-television commercial to show that hardly anyone in San Francisco - or North America - had any qualms about human rights abuses in China.

Newsom won't come out and say that, but he did concede that he took the decision right down to the final minutes.

"Literally, at 1 o'clock, we had two choices," he said in a phone conversation en route to the closing ceremony at the airport. "We could cancel the event or move forward in a different manner. We went to the torchbearers themselves, and overwhelmingly they said they supported the change."

Taking the torch to the other side of town and skirting the whole enormous pro-China crowd at the ballpark might have improved the chances for public safety, but it also gave the torch back to San Francisco. Suddenly, it was back to the original idea, a run through the streets with a symbol of the upcoming Olympic Games, not a carefully planned political charade.

Thus, while all Jacques Rogge and his International Olympic Committee colleagues have never been able to get beyond vacuous jawboning over depoliticizing the Olympics, Newsom achieved just that on his own turf, simply by diverting media attention from any site where confrontation could have become explosive. By his actions he demonstrated just how feeble the IOC has been while finding a way to honor the athletes, who seem to have been totally ignored by the IOC in its obsession with resolving tensions through statutory neglect.

According to the news I heard on the radio this morning, Rogge expressed satisfaction that the San Francisco ceremony had not been as ugly as the preceding events in London and Paris. However, I do not think he got the point. He seems to want to live in a blissful world of political denial, which makes him just as delusional as any politician who willfully ignores any sense of reality. Newsom saw the "rough beast" for what it was (an Irish mayor deserves the phrase of an Irish poet!), gambled on pulling a fast one by evading it, and thus avoided a really ugly scene. If the Chronicle wants to take him to task for disappointing the fans, that may help them sell papers this morning; but this ceremony was not for the fans any more than it was for the IOC. Those who were supposed to benefit from the event did benefit; and they did so by virtue of Newsom's "cunning plan." For that he deserves one of those rare positive-connotation Chutzpah of the Week awards!

Literary or Religious Pursuits?

Yesterday, Reuters ran one of those stories (reported by Julie Mollins) that seems to surface with depressing frequency:

When it comes to literary pursuits in the United States most people agree on at least one thing -- the most popular book is the Bible, according to a new survey.

It came in first in a Harris Poll of nearly 2,513 adults but the second choice in the survey was not as clear cut.

"While the Bible is number one among each of the different demographic groups, there is a large difference in the number two favorite book," Harris said in a statement announcing the results.

As one who takes my own reading habits very seriously, I tend to chafe when I encounter a phrase like "literary pursuits" that is being used improperly, if not downright deceptively; and, in this case, if there is deception lurking in the subtext of this report, it would probably have a lot to do with that ongoing rhetoric over whether or not America is a "Christian nation." My guess is that Harris never bothered to determine how many of those 2513 adults polled were conscious of which edition of "The Bible" they read, regardless of whether or not it was their first choice. For example most Jewish editions do not include the New Testament (no surprise); and, unless I am mistaken, neither King James nor the Revised Standard Version includes "The Apocrypha." The (Catholic) "Jerusalem Bible," on the other hand, includes all of the above and includes J. R. R. Tolkien in its editorial board! I include this latter observation in the interest of some of the second choices that surfaced in the poll:

Men chose J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and women selected Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as their second-favorite book, according to the online poll.

Is this point worth making? I think that, for polling purposes, it may demonstrate a latent "category error," which confuses "book" and "religious artifact" (trying to use the most neutral anthropology-speak that will serve my purpose). Where religious belief is involved, reading about Bilbo Baggins or Scarlett O'Hara is really not the same activity as reading about Abraham or Jesus. Those two activities only merge into a common category when one pursues the latter as "literature," which I doubt that many (any?) of the poll participants do. Indeed, the rather muddled results beyond "first place" should be taken as a sign that this poll says more about religious habits than it says about reading habits; and, if Harris had taken the trouble to tease out which editions were being read among the adults in its sample space, my guess is that their results would have served the purposes of those most determined to view our country as a "Christian nation." So is the Harris organization willing to disclose what motivated them to conduct this poll; and, under the assumption that it was not a matter of internal curiosity, who financed the undertaking?

In the Shadow of Beethoven and Schiff

If, as I have remarked several times, Johannes Brahms often felt as if he had to contend with the long shadow of Ludwig van Beethoven, then I have to wonder if Anne-Sophie Mutter felt that the shadow that András Schiff cast on Sunday evening in Davies Symphony Hall was hovering over her all-Brahms (including the encores) recital there last night. If so, then it could not have been a pleasant feeling. Schiff has distinguished the first three recitals in his Beethoven cycle with performances in which every note counts for its full measure of clarity and nuance. Accompanied by Lambert Orkis, Mutter performed the three Brahms violin sonatas in what felt like a fog of muddle, which barely lifted only briefly in the high-energy moments of the final Opus 108 sonata following the intermission. Most frustrating was the fact that neither of the first two sonatas, which preceded the intermission, had any real sense of a beginning (to play on the title of one of Frank Kermode's books). In both cases there was no "preparatory silence," which is problematic because both of these sonatas have very subtle beginnings; and finding oneself in medias res before realizing that the first movement has begun does not make for a very satisfying (or informative) listening experience. Even more problematic was the thin quality of Mutter's tone, which could never cut through that fog of the overall spirit of the performance.

If I were to attempt a diagnosis of last night's malady, I would probably try to attribute it to lack of breath. While her tone may have been thin, Mutter's bow work exhibited an almost awesome continuity. One could barely sense when the bow reversed direction without visual feedback. This is an extraordinary technical device, but it overlooks the extent to which bowing is responsible for phrasing and is therefore indicated explicitly in Brahms' scores. It is then through phrasing that the performer can find and appropriate the very "breath" of each musical "utterance;" and it is through that "breath" that one passes from the technicalities of execution to the rhetoric of performance. In a composer like Brahms, that rhetoric tends to be highly emotional, as was the case when Joel Krosnick paid such attention to the heartbreaking quality of the principal theme of the Andante from Brahms' Opus 60 piano quartet. Brahms began work on the first of his violin sonatas shortly after completing this quartet, and it is no exaggeration to say that the entire sonata is shot through with heartbreak. The first movement is marked Vivace ma non troppo but is so non troppo that it displays the same mournful introspection that follows in the Adagio movement. Similarly, the final Allegro molto moderato movement is so moderato that is serves as a pensive reflection (at one point literally) of the material that preceded it. To deny all this emotion is to deprive the sonata of its very raison d'être, yet with her apparent insensitivity to the ways in which emotion "speaks" through breath control, Mutter seemed to be doing just that.

Unfortunately, none of this may matter very much when one has to sustain a grueling touring schedule of performances to sold-out houses, all of the massive capacity of Davies. I was close enough to the stage that I had to wonder just what people in the more distant reaches of the hall were actually hearing. Whatever it was, their consistent standing ovations (and occasional cheers) made it clear that they were more than satisfied. However, this raises another point of comparison with Schiff.

Having now heard three of his recitals, it has become clear to me that Schiff approaches the performance of all the Beethoven sonatas in a cycle as a means by which we in the audience can come to learn more about "the man behind the legendary composer" and be better listeners to all of the music from that particular period by virtue of our experience. (Actually, given his interest in playing Bach partitas as encores, Schiff probably wants to extend the scope of that period beyond Beethoven's time.) None of this came across in Mutter's approach to the Brahms violin sonatas (which, admittedly, come from a more limited period of Brahms' life). I am not even sure there was any particular logic behind her choice to perform Opus 100 before Opus 78. All that seemed to matter was that, taken together, the three sonatas provide enough material to fill an evening's program, which means that we, as listeners, were left with more of a technical accomplishment than a listening experience. Thus, while one should not overly criticize audiences (where would performers be without them?), the enthusiasm of this particular audience may have been closer to that of sports fans enjoying some impressive maneuver than that of music lovers cultivating greater appreciation of a favorite composer.

Things perked up a bit with the encores. In a more scholarly setting the perfect encore would have been the Scherzo movement of the "F. A. E." sonata, a work commissioned by Joseph Joachim for the collaborative efforts of Brahms along with Robert Schumann (second and fourth movements) and Albert Dietrich (opening movement). (One of these days I want to hear these four movements performed in the order of a coherent sonata, just because that is how they were published, even if it is an object lesson in why such collaborations do not work very well!) Last night, however, was far from a "scholarly setting;" so we got the violin arrangements of three of the Hungarian Dances (7, 1, and 2), all of which were offered with liberal servings of improvisatory schmaltz to compensate for any lack of Gypsy soul. Mutter then gently told her audience, "Genug!," with a dry-eyed arrangement of "Guten Abend, gut Nacht," the "Wiegenlied" from the Opus 49 collection of five songs (better known as "Brahms' Lullaby"), sending us all out into a night of chill winds, where Mother Nature seemed to be mustering more emotion than anything I had experienced over the preceding two hours!

Resuming the Beethoven Cycle

When András Schiff bid au revoir to San Francisco last October after the first two recitals in his cycle of the all of Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas, I bemoaned (as I seem to do) the fact that he had left us in the middle of what Thayer had called "the glorious series of sonatas," composed in the years 1798 and 1799. He left us hanging by concluding with the Opus 13 "Pathétique," meaning that we would have to wait until April for the two Opus 14 sonatas. April has now come; and Schiff took an interesting approach to "phasing in" our orientation towards Opus 14. He did this by beginning last night's performance at Davies Symphony Hall with the two Opus 49 sonatas (often called "sonatinas," because each has only two movements) and then reminding us (through the program notes) that Beethoven's opus numbers can be misleading where chronology is concerned. All we know about these two sonatas is that they were composed between 1795 and 1798, which means that we are not sure if they are in "the glorious series" or it they actually precede it. In either case they definitely helped orient the listener before Schiff resumed the sequence-by-opus-number.

With a little stretch of the imagination, one could think of Opus 49 as a single four-movement composition. One could begin with Opus 49, Number 2 in G Major, with its Allegro ma no troppo and Tempo di Menuetto and then follow with the G minor movements of Number 1, Andante and an Allegro Rondo. One could even interchange the Andante and Menuetto without being too disruptive. Nevertheless, Schiff played this as separate compositions in their published order, presumably under the assumption that Beethoven published them that way for a reason.

The result is two consecutive exercises in contrasts. Number 1 begins with an Andante that tends towards the introspective without indulging in the moody, followed by a Rondo that reminds us that we are still in that period of Beethoven's life in which he took great delight in exercising his wit. In Number 2, on the other hand, the wit is more evident in the opening Allegro, while, as the manuscript suggests, the reference to a Menuetto is only to set the tempo. The second movement is more of a leisurely commodo, which gently pushes the envelope of our expectations for Menuetto ternary form. It is also interesting to see how Beethoven handles his dynamics. As is often the case, he experiments with abrupt changes in dynamic level; but it is interesting to note that, of the four movements across the two sonatas, it is the second movement of Number 1 and the first movement of Number 2 that end with straightforward fortissimo cadences, while the remaining two movements (which are sort of like "bookends" across the miniseries) sort of "fade out" (to pianissimo in the first and to a piano cadence separated from a last burst of forte by a single quarter rest in the second).

I should come clean and confess that I am writing this with the music at my side, but it is there to refresh my memory. This detailed and nuanced approach to the management of dynamics and tempo pervaded Schiff's performance of these two sonatas. I suspect that just about anyone who had serious piano lessons had the same memories of struggling with these pieces that I did. At least I am willing to admit that listening to Schiff was far more humbling than I had anticipated, just because it seemed so easy for him to demonstrate how much more he heard in this music than I had ever heard previously. However, it was only after Schiff followed these sonatas by "resuming the count" with the Opus 14 sonatas that I realized that Opus 49 provided a better introduction than the more radical departures of Opus 13 could have done.

Much of the Opus 49 rhetoric is also there in Opus 13. This includes the sharp contrasting of dynamics and its engagement in the interest of wit, particularly at the conclusion of a movement. There may also be an "inside joke" (because Opus 49 had not yet been published) over rondo form: The Opus 49, Number 1 Rondo is far from a conventional rondo and probably is usually classified by the academics as a "sonata rondo" (i.e. a synthesis of sonata and rondo forms, as in the last movement of Opus 13), while in Opus 14, Number 1, Beethoven basically assures us that he can still pull off a more "standard" rondo. A more explicit "joke" surfaces in the Andante of Opus 14, Number 2, which is anything but a "standard" andante and is more consistent with the expectations we bring to the miniature pieces of Franz Schubert or (even more so) Robert Schumann (which is to say that it may have inspired them)! Then, as if he were not being playful enough, Beethoven followed this movement with a not-particularly-ternary Scherzo, which is another "romp" with a pianissimo "fade-out."

It might sound a bit dismissive to say that all Schiff was doing was following Beethoven's directions. However, what makes both of these sonata collections interesting is how abundant those directions are and, therefore, how demanding it is to honor all of them. All this means is that Schiff could bring abundant life to a stare decisis approach to Beethoven in exactly the same way that Myung-Whun Chung had applied the same approach to conducting the San Francisco Symphony in both Olivier Messiaen and Gustav Mahler. Put another way, innovation does not come from mucking around with what the composer expects from the performer; it comes from satisfying those expectations while making them both logical and stimulating to the audience!

This brings us to Opus 22, the only work on the program after the intermission (not counting another Johann Sebastian Bach partita, Number 1, as an encore). Here again we hear many of the characteristic features of Opus 49 and Opus 13; but we also hear Beethoven resuming his experiments with the impact of silence, now on a somewhat subtler scale than previously (as in Opus 2). Also, in the Adagio con molto espressione movement we find Beethoven beginning to explore that sense of calm that would receive so much attention in his later works, such as the third movement of the Opus 97 ("Archduke") piano trio, which I recently discussed. Thus, as was the case with his Opus 2 performances, Schiff served us best by executing the rests for the silences they signified, rather than just as pauses. I know this sounds like mystical double-talk; but the problem is that it is just not the sort of thing that lends itself to words, which means we are in the realm where, in John Dewey's words "each art speaks an idiom that conveys what cannot be said in another language." Put another way, I am back to being humbled (this time as a writer) by the experiments realized through Opus 22 as I had previously been (as a piano student) by the deceptive simplicity of Opus 49, which may be the best way to prepare myself for the completion of the first half of Schiff's cycle next Sunday evening!

Sweatshops of the Blogosphere

The latest report on the pathology of work in the world the Internet has made was filed yesterday by Matt Richtel of The New York Times under a headline that turns out to be justifiably alarmist:

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Richtel's piece may be read as a complement to the evangelical hogwash of The New American Workplace, by James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III, which I examined (critically, of course) last December. Maintaining the tone of his headline, Richtel homes in on what may be the most inconvenient truth of the blogosphere: Bloggers who write for money are paid by the piece; and most of them are too young (and/or naive) to recognize that they have been consumed by sweatshop economics. Here is how Richtel describes the condition:

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

For those who think the language of the headline is hyperbolic, Richtel then cites cases of "dropping" bloggers:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Of these three Malik is the only one whose name I recognize from CNET News.com, which I suppose indicates that he has not made much of a dent in my reading habits. However, Malik's case reminded me of JP Rangaswami, over at Confused of Calcutta, whom I remember blogging all too quickly in the wake of his own heart attack. I bid a respectful farewell to Confused of Calcutta last November after concluding that it had lost any "sense of reality" to obsessive evangelism over social software in the face of a growing tide of counterarguments. JP was fortunate enough to have a day job that did not pay by piecework, but he had still been corrupted by the tragic flaw of promoting potential without accounting for consequences. In the days when I tried to spar with him, those consequences involved matters such as death threats; and I had not really conceived of blogging as sweatshop work. Still, I should have seen trouble coming, particularly since in the preceding August the Yearly Kos Convention had included a panel on the topic of "A Union for Bloggers."

My own problem was probably that, as I wrote about the Kos panel, I could not take seriously the idea of blogging as a profession (or, for that matter, a source of gainful employment, which is decidedly not that same beast as a profession). I had even written about what I had called the "chicken-soup logic" of signing up with AdSense for this particular blog: I could not imagine that it would earn me a living wage, but it couldn't hurt to try. I thus overlooked the fact that there were other bloggers out there who were seriously trying to live off of their writing. Consequently, it was important for me to read what Richtel had to say about at least one sector of those bloggers:

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more.

Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

These conditions are, at the very least, hazardous to mental health; and now data points are coming in that indicate that the impact is also on physical health.

Fortunately, I seem to be holding myself above this kind of turmoil. When I write about technology, I am less interested in the latest developments than I am in the consequences of those developments; and it should be no surprise that those who pay for technology news are not interested in financing "Cassandras of consequences." Indeed, if I am driven in my writing, it is by only two forces. One is the self-imposed discipline of writing something every day, which is why I started blogging in the first place. Writing is a mental exercise that is as important as any physical exercise; and, in addition to being my "rehearsal studio," my blog is my "workout room." The other drive is a need to write about musical performances soon after I have experienced them. I never take notes at a concert, because taking notes is a distraction from the performance; so I need to write while the subject matter is still fresh in my mind. I cannot always do this; and, when I can't, I do not treat it as the end of the world, since it is not going to impact that paycheck that I am not receiving in the first place!

Having written all that, I think the real lesson of Richtel's piece is not about the blogosphere but about how the very foundation of professional employment is being eroded by a general increase in sweatshop work. This is why I took The New American Workplace to task for its apparent oblivion to the work that Barbara Garson had done in the late eighties and published as The Electronic Sweatshop. This erosion was already beginning in the early days of office automation, but the Internet endowed it with an enormous injection of growth hormones. The sad truth is that few mere mortals can live under these conditions; and Richtel has now provided the evidence that this proposition is literal, rather than figurative.

Another Age, Another Country

At a time when it seems as if ideological obsessions are leading our country to ruin over both national economic conditions and international relations, it may be worth remembering the extent to which the noble ideologies behind the French Revolution quickly devolved into utter chaos. This morning I was reminded of the extent of that chaos while reading about Mainz, the German city on the west bank of the Rhine, which, in the wake of the French Revolution, was "liberated" into a self-determined republic. Here is the basic account provided by Wikipedia:

During the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary army occupied Mainz in 1792; the Archbishop of Mainz, Friedrich Karl Josef von Erthal, had already fled to Aschaffenburg by the time the French marched in. On 18 March 1793, the Jacobins of Mainz, with other German democrats from about 130 towns in the Rhenish Palatinate, proclaimed the ‘Republic of Mainz’. Led by Georg Forster representatives of the Mainz Republic in Paris requested political affiliation of the Mainz Republic with France, but too late: As Prussia was not entirely happy with the idea of a democratic free state on German soil, Prussian troops had already occupied the area and besieged Mainz by the end of March, 1793. After a siege of 18 weeks, the French troops in Mainz surrendered on 23 July 1793; Prussians occupied the city and ended the Republic of Mainz. Members of the Mainz Jacobin Club were mistreated or imprisoned and punished for treason.

In that context here is a passage from a letter that Forster wrote to his wife on April 8, 1793. This was written from Paris during the Prussian siege of Mainz. His focus, however, is less on Mainz and more on the social climate in France:

Everything is done in a blind, passionate frenzy, and in a raging, volatile partisan spirit that never arrives at calm, reasoned results. On one side, I find insight and talent without courage or strength; on the other, physical energy guided by ignorance, which does good only when the knot really must be cut. So often, though, it ought to be untied but is hacked nonetheless. Everything has now reached the point of crisis. I certainly do not believe that our enemies will succeed; but in the end the populace, too, will grow weary of always having to revolt. So it will depend on who holds out the longest. The idea that despotism in Europe will become quite unendurable if France does not carry through its intentions now always makes me so angry that I cannot separate it in my mind from all my beliefs in virtue, law, and justice, and would rather despair of every one of these than see that hope brought to nothing. There are few cool heads here, or they are in hiding; the populace, as always, is frivolous and fickle, without firmness, warmth, love, or truth—nothing but head and fantasy, no heart and no sensitivity. Despite all that, it is performing great deeds, for it is precisely this cold frenzy which gives the French their eternal restlessness and the appearance of noble impulses, whereas they really have only enthusiasm for the ideas, not feeling for the cause.

Clearly, there is not a strict analogy between our current situation and that in France at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Forster's language, particularly when he invokes the metaphor of a knot that "ought to be untied but is hacked nonetheless," provides an interesting lens through which to examine the ideological obsessions of our current Administration. Also, for what it is worth, it may be a useful reminder that our current dark times are, in no way, unique. Like France, we shall eventually emerge from them. Let us just hope that, unlike France, that emergence does not first lead us through another Reign of Terror!

MEA CULPA, Mozart!

I realized this morning that, by concentrating yesterday on the juxtaposition of György Kurtág and Franz Schubert in the Chamber Music Masters program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music I had overlooked the K. 493 E-flat major piano quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that opened the program, thus committing the same sin of omission that I seem to keep laying on Joshua Kosman's accounts in the San Francisco Chronicle. If I am to be allowed an excuse, it is that yesterday I was working "on the road" with far more limited resources under far greater time constraints and therefore felt obliged to make what I felt was the most important point about the recital. Now that I have a bit more time at my disposal, I shall try to make contrition for that sin that I try to take so seriously.

I first came to know the two Mozart piano quartets from a old Musical Heritage Society vinyl. It is long gone, and I can no longer remember the performers. However, I do remember that the liner notes had a strong bias toward the K. 478 G minor work as the more substantive of the two. What I cannot remember is why the author of the notes made this judgment. It may have been a bias induced by the key of Mozart's penultimate symphony or, even worse, a tendency to regard the minor key as "deeper" than the major. Whatever the explanation may have been, it was clear from the performance that Peter Frankl developed with violinist Axel Strauss, violist Jodi Levitz, and student cellist Erin Wang that it was thoroughly specious. K. 493 may start with a sunny welcome; but it does not take much attentive listening to recognize that no end of subtle nuances unfold at every turn in the performance, many of which are endowed with that light touch that can be traced back to his earliest piano sonatas for both two and four hands. Both sonatas were composed at the time when Mozart was entering his early thirties; but K. 493 is a strong (but not forceful) reminder from Mozart that his "inner twenty-year old" is still alive, well, and up to its usual show-off tricks. This is the same spirit I cited in Richard Goode's recent performance of the final movement of the K. 456 piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony; and it is somewhat interesting that, in the overall Mozart chronology, these two works sort of "flank" the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro. What it importance in both these works is that Mozart's intensions can only be honored through just the right approach to execution, and Frankl and his colleagues appreciated this subtlety as much as Goode did. Once again, San Francisco had an opportunity to flourish as what I have called "a city of well-developed Mozart listeners!"

Two Modes of Timelessness

The most interesting thing about Peter Frankl's Chamber Music Masters recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was its two-century perspective on that element of the sublime in music in the contrast between Schubert and Kurtág. Schubert's D. 898 B-flat Major piano trio is one of his experiments with composing on a broad durational scale, but what ultimately drives this trio is the way in which time both flows and stands still at the same time in the Andante un poco mosso movement. Schubert was not always the best architect of duration; but he had one of the keenest sense of "the moment," whether in the brevity of some of his songs or in the larger expanses of chamber and orchestral music. Last night those moments of the trio were perfectly captured through Frankl's piano communicating intimately with the voices of Axel Strauss' violin and Jean-Michel Fonteneau's wonderfully elegant cello. For Kurtág, on the other hand, duration was a matter of collapsing everything into the shortest possible moments. There is a certain irony in his having done this in an homage to Robert Schumann, who had his own way of experimenting with extending the duration of musical compositions. However, Kurtág basically distilled Schumann's "cast of characters," Johannes Kreisler, Eusebius, and Florestan down to the scale of haiku, resolving the opposition of the latter two by introducting a "Meister Raro" for a "middle way" inspired by Guillaume de Machaut, a middle way that seemed to have a lot to do with Machaut's hocket technique of creating a single musical line out of two voices. In this case Frankl performed with violist Jodi Levitz and clarinetist Jeffrey Anderle in an ensemble that also explored Schumann's approaches to new combinations of instrumental color, although Anderle's final soft tap of a bass drum was probably far beyond any combinations Schumann could have imagined.

The Judgment of History or Historians?

George Mason University's History News Network seems to have gone on a binge of Bush-bashing (inducing a fit of alliteration on my own part), led by Robert McElvaine's latest blog post. However, before the rest of us break out any champagne, we would do well to examine just what the data points really are. The only really "solid" item is the following:

A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that the share of the American public that approves of President George W. Bush has dropped to a new low of 28 percent.

The rest of the data is unscientific, and McElvaine says so explicitly. Under that disclaimer, however, he presents us with two rather impressive-sounding paragraphs:

In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.

So what, if anything, are we to make of these data? At the very least we should note that this article was posted on April 1, and I suspect that historians are as capable of a good joke as any other specialist community. However, for the sake of argument, let us assume that are the results reported in the piece are legitimate.

Under that assumption we need to address an extremely important fundamental question: How do all of those people who did vote for Bush (probably twice) feel about having brought "an evil incompetent venal traitorous half-wit" (these being the words that Huffington Post reader LivingStardust submitted in a comment when Huffington Post reported the History News Network results) into office (particularly the ones who now no longer approve of him); and how will those feelings impact what they do on Election Day? (Perhaps, given the faith-based orientation of the President, I should not have used the adjective "fundamental!") No one ever got elected by telling voters that they had made a monstrous mistake. (Carter got into enough trouble just by cautioning them about energy consumption!) It is nice to have the proposition that we are in a colossal mess affirmed; but, now that we are in it, what is the general electorate going to do about it?

Goodbye to All That?

It has been a while since I have had anything good to say about Vanity Fair. I was much more positive back in November of 2006 when they published David Margolick's report on Ismail Hanyieh, prepared on the caliber of what I used to expect from New Yorker profiles; and I was a real cheerleader when David Rose used their Web site to release the initial material for an article about the neoconservatives not only backing away from the Bush administration but also blaming Bush for making a mess of things. I was similarly enthusiastic last year when they ran "advance excerpts" of Robert Dallek's book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. Nevertheless, the magazine has been too uneven for me to give it the attention that I still retain preciously for The New York Review; so instead I rely on other sources to point me to something they have published that might deserve attention.

Today's pointer came from Truthdig; and the "target" was Michael Wolff's extended analysis of the current (troubled) state of affairs at The New York Times and the likely futures that might ensue. I am less interested in summarizing and evaluating Wolff's arguments, however, than I am in addressing the premise that serves as the motive for his undertaking the analysis in the first place:

This view of the Times’s invulnerability, on the part of not just the journalistic establishment but the Wall Street establishment too, comes partly, perhaps, because the alternative, life without the Times, is just too much to contemplate—after all, the Times has been, for so long, the Establishment. Also, if you can’t believe in the Sulzbergers, who have never once in their long history given any indication that they have an iota of ambivalence about their role as the protector of the Times, then what can you believe in? And because the consensus itself supports the assumption: if the Establishment believes in the unassailable strength of the Times, then who is left to credibly take it on?

I realized that this paragraph reflects the "old school" thinking of those who still believe in the institution of journalism as it flourished in the twentieth century, as if the strength of that belief would justify ignoring the extent to which twenty-first century capitalism, reinforced by the world the Internet has made, has pretty much reduced that institution a shadow of its former self, if not a pile of rubble. Nevertheless, that same Mr. Dooley, whom I have quoted as saying, "Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us," was also famous for saying "Trust everybody, but cut the cards." Even at the turn of the century, he knew better than to put his trust in a single newspaper (but then he also had no trouble finding a second newspaper with a different point of view).

My point is that, while the Internet may have made the world over which Wolff is now wringing his hands regarding the fate of the Times, it also made the world in which it is easier for us to "cut the cards" in Dooley-speak. Not only can I contemplate "life without the Times;" I have lived that way for several years. As I have previously declared, the only RSS feed from the Times that I maintain is for the "Arts" reporting; and I keep that to check in on new Metropolitan Opera productions and little else. Any other Times content I read comes to me through a hyperlink, generally from either Truthdig or The Huffington Post. Instead, I use RSS to pull together diverse accounts from sources I can expect to have differing points of view, drawing primarily on the What I Read list that I maintain on this blog site. This strikes me as the only way in which any of us can survive as informed citizens.

Even though I may not sympathize with Wolff's motive, I still appreciate his analysis. Many of us have become intense armchair philosophers over the deterioration of news-medium-as-public-trust into news-medium-as-business; but we are better at examining what has been done, rather than how it was done. Wolff offers us an excellent guided tour of that world in which shareholders (specifically, shareholders with the power of controlling interests) overrule the interests of both workers and customers. Thus, his article may be less valuable for the way in which he is using The New York Times as a "focal case study" than as a significant object lesson in the workings of that "new economy" that has more to do with the exercise of power than with the provision of goods and services. In the War Against the Poor, we need to remember that forewarned is forearmed. For all we can read about the "generals" waging that war, Wolff may be the first to provide an important service to those of us "foot soldiers" on "the other side."

From Wit to Weight

In writing about Ludwig van Beethoven, I have had a tendency to dwell on the elements of wit in his compositions (particularly the early ones), simply because that wit is frequently overlooked due to the ways in which our culture turned him into a monument of seriousness not too long after his death. However, wit was not the issue in the chamber music Master Class that pianist Peter Frankl conducted at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night. Rather, the issue was the emotional depth that Beethoven discovered through experimenting with a form that had not previously been associated with such depth. The form is that of variations on a theme; and the specific experiment was the third movement of his Opus 97 ("Archduke") piano trio. This is a form that Beethoven pursued pretty much through the entirety of his career as a composer; and, while he had no trouble satisfying traditional expectations, he also always seemed to be thinking about how to push the envelope. Most importantly he became interested in the theme being more than a simple tune, a more elaborate structure unto itself, which could then be mined for variations from many diverse perspectives.

By way of historical context, Opus 97 was completed in 1811. However, the Opus 67 fifth symphony, completed in 1808, had experimented with variations on a "double theme," raising the challenge of starting with two complementary melodies and subjecting them to a single unified strategy of variation. That particular experiment would be pursued at much greater length (and in much greater depth) in the third movement of the Opus 125 ninth ("Choral") symphony, completed in 1824. Between these two "monuments" we have the theme of Opus 97, which is preparing us, as listeners, for a theme so extended in duration that, in earlier times, it might have been taken for a composition unto itself. Such prolonged variations on a prolonged theme would be subsequently explored in the Opus 109 (1820) and Opus 111 (competed in 1822) piano sonatas; and, in many respects, Opus 111 is a "natural" successor to Opus 97, not just for its extended duration but for the serenity that pervades both the theme and many of the variations, which transcends the sense of duration into one of timelessness.

Frankl was quite right in beginning his assessment of the student performance of this movement by dwelling on how challenging it was to execute. It is not just a question of endurance but of the modulation of energy. Making time stand still is hard work. However, both students and listeners were probably at a disadvantage, since this particular performance was the final one of the evening; and we had already been following Frankl and his insights into the domains of Robert Schumann and Antonín Dvořák. Since these master classes are conducted without an intermission, we never had the opportunity to catch our breaths and regroup the energies needed for this level of serious listening.

Mind you, I'm not sure that an intermission would have been that much help. On the way out I recalled to a friend the experience of hearing piano recitals consisting entirely of Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111, each of which is a demanding piece of serious listening unto itself. Even with an intermission, I discovered that I rarely had the "cognitive energy" necessary for giving the variations movement of Opus 111 the attention it really deserved. In the realm of monuments, you can either "stand and gape" or seek out those qualities that sustain the composition's "reputation," the sorts of qualities that Georg Hegel would call "spirit" and Walter Benjamin would later call "aura;" and that latter approach is all the more demanding if one is already fatigued. Thus, we might all have benefited had the Master Class been held in reverse order, proceeding from Beethoven to Schumann to Dvořák, rather than in reverse chronological order.

Schumann, of course, also demands considerable "cognitive energy." Indeed, there is often so much cognition in his score that the challenge of performing often involves bringing to light the emotional energy that risks being concealed by all that cognition. This was certainly the case with his Opus 47 piano quartet, and Frankl definitely had the performer's instincts required to advise the Conservatory students on how to negotiate such a challenge. However, since Frankl explicitly talked about Beethoven's influence on Schumann, he may well have benefited from having the "Archduke" movement performed first. This was particularly the case for the points he was trying to make on approaching the opening Sostenuto assai measures, whose presence in Schumann's compositional language could well be attributed to such experimental efforts as Beethoven's theme for his "Archduke" variations. Furthermore, since this Sostenuto assai passage recurs in the movement, rather than playing the role of the more "classical" introduction, Frankl was also able to address the challenge of the overall architecture of the movement. For my own listening there is something particularly magical in the recapitulation, which, while it was probably intricately calculated out by Schumann, still rounds an emotional corner in a way that few recapitulations do; and Frankl knew just how to advice the students on properly rounding that corner.

This alternation of moods was also the basic formal architecture of the movements of Dvořák's Opus 90 ("Dumky") trio, whose first two movements began the Master Class. This performance returned us to the realm of Robert Mann's precept that a composer is best understood in terms of the folk music of his "roots." The very name of this piano trio is a celebration of those roots; and for Frankl those roots are best honored with an abundance of emotional energy. He thus took an excellent reading by the Conservatory students and took into over the top into a domain in which the emotions were far richer but still modulated enough that they never overwhelmed the underlying musical substance. Just to make my point one final time, this was the sort of exuberance that should have followed us out the door at the end of the evening, rather than welcomed us into the Recital Hall. Had we been welcomed by Beethoven, our journey would have proceeded forward in time; and Dvořák would have left us relishing the extent of that journey.

Positive Chutzpah from an Unlikely Agent

The Bush Administration, collectively, has made quite a name for itself in the Chutzpah of the Week award archives; but the connotation of chutzpah in those awards has always been negative. Thus, it is with a bit of surprise that I can acknowledge Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for pulling one off with a positive connotation. The justification is right there in the lead paragraph in the report that Glenn Somerville filed from Beijing for Reuters this morning:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson raised the sensitive topic of unrest in Tibet during a visit to Beijing on Wednesday, urging a resolution to the issue through dialogue.

Present at the meeting were President Hu Jintao, Vice Premier Wang Qishan, and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi; so Paulson clearly did not raise the topic in an offhand remark to the press. There would be enough chutzpah in talking about something that your hosts clearly do not want to talk about and regard as none of your business, but the chutzpah is all the greater when you consider how much of our debt China owns.

It is hard to tell just what Paulson's motives were for such a bold gesture. Perhaps he was just upset over the cool reception he was getting back at home towards his attempts to repair our economy, figuring that, if he cannot get any attention on his own turf, he may as well try to get some in China. There may even be the possibility that this was a gesture of sincere patriotism, saying to the Chinese something like, "Our country may be on the ropes right now, but there are still some values that we take seriously and are not afraid to talk about them." He even could have been grandstanding with a gesture he knew would be futile, following the conventional wisdom that the Chinese really do not pay attention to us when we make such proclamations. Nevertheless, when we consider the many impediments Tibetans encounter in making their voices heard, as I observed yesterday, this is a step in the right direction significant enough to get a positive-connotation Chutzpah of the Week award.

Video Mensa?

The title of Ari Melber's latest article for The Nation is impossible to ignore: "YouTube for Smart People." Appropriately enough, it was only published in the Web edition. This was probably a good idea, since, without the ability to quickly check up on the story through the hyperlink provided at the end of the second paragraph, it would have been easy to dismiss that story as an April Fool's Day joke for those of us who continue to prefer The Nation to YouTube. Here is the basic theme of Melber's piece (complete with the necessary hyperlink):

Apart from search engines, YouTube is now the second most popular website in America, drawing the average visitor for a solid sixteen minutes of video surfing--a web eternity. The site hosts a long tail of clips on every item imaginable, but the top videos actually track the vices of television: sex, celebrities and sensationalism. And as the web morphs from endless text to an increasingly video-focused platform, YouTube is ground zero for some of the dumbest crap online. Yet web videos don't have to be vapid, according to the entrepreneurs behind Big Think, YouTube for the Harvard set.

After working as producers for The Charlie Rose Show, Harvard grads Peter Hopkins and Victoria R.M. Brown saw an opening for thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos targeting online audiences. The idea was simple: take the brightest, most creative thinkers alive, plunk them down for a conversation straight to camera--reality-show style--elide the moderator and provide an intimate window into the "big ideas" of our time. The erudite site drew investments from heavy hitters like Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and Facebook angel investor, and Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and treasury secretary.

The most important thing about Melber's article is that its very existence demonstrates what may be the most critical weakness in the Big Think business plan (and, make no mistake about it, once you see the word "entrepreneurs," you automatically know that "it is all about the business plan," rather than any more elevated concepts such as "public service" or, God forbid, "public trust"). That weakness is right there in the Hopkins-Brown "vision," in the failure to see that the phrase "thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos" may be inherently oxymoronic. Given the task of writing a "thoughtful" piece about Big Think, Melber had the luxury of not being constrained by "short-form" thinking. He could examine the issue from several points of view, drawing upon several sources and examples, thus avoiding the Scylla of evangelism and the Charybdis of flat-out condemnation. Could he have done this in a "short-form intellectual video?" I doubt it. Such an approach would not have allowed him to rise above the sound-byte trivialities than have made such a mess of our options for getting news on television.

Bearing this weakness in mind, however, I still felt it important to visit the Big Think site, particularly since Melber had mentioned that music, the topic about which I am most passionate, was one of the categories. The first thing you encounter at that site is the motto: we are what you think. That was cute enough but more glib than meaningful, rather like that fodder from the business world about working smarter instead of working harder. Next to the motto is a box informing you that 8,718 "ideas" (your mileage may differ) have been contributed. This is how you are welcomed to a business plan for the marketplace of ideas; and, if you have your wits about you, you will proceed with the same strategy you bring to any marketplace: caveat emptor (even if your only "expense" is your own precious time)!

Further impressions were heavily influenced by one of my strongest aggravations, which is the complete and utter oblivion that purveyors of "social software" seem to have to the role that Usenet played as a pre-Internet attempt to enable expert minds to interact within cyberspace. Just because Usenet was limited to "raw text" is no reason for it to be ignored by those who now seek such interaction through video, whether or not, as Melber put it, "Everyone knows video is taking over the web." Those of us who thrived on Usenet enjoyed not being confined by "short-form" means of expression; and the result was that a reader was as likely to encounter the first draft of a serious essay as a simple answer to a simple question.

More important than how Usenet thrived, however, was how it ultimately failed. With its complex system of gateways, Usenet anticipated what the Internet could be; but the Internet turned out to be its primary undoing. On rec.music.classical, where I spent most of my time, detailed discussions of the proper execution of a phrase in a Beethoven piano sonata or how much the "serial rules" matter when you were actually listening to twelve-tone music were displaced by the annoying recurrence of newbies who only wanted to talk about their top ten favorite recordings. So what caught my eye on the Big Think music page?

What are the top 10 greatest rock and roll bands of all time?

Who isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but should be

Who is the greatest rock bassist of all time?

It was not the focus on rock music that annoyed me but that lowest common denominator of what I have called "top-dog thinking." If this is what constitutes "thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos," then I feel my time is better spent with The Nation and The New York Review, thank you very much.

I doubt that such observations will have much impact on the Big Think entrepreneurs. Usenet was not born out of a business plan. It actually emerged to satisfy a very low-level need for communication among software engineers maintaining and developing the Unix operating system. Only after that foundation was laid did it occur to users that it would support the computer-mediated discussion of other topics; and the rest became history. The problem is that such computer-mediated discussion is just not the stuff from which business plans are made; and those who promote such business plans are a bit like vendors hawking their wares in the agora where Socrates met with his followers.

This will probably be the point at which someone decided to draft a comment taking me to task for ignoring Facebook. To that person I say, "Save your (digital) breath. Just remember what happened when the business planners decided to beef up the "marketing potential" of Facebook. As I put it in my own analysis of the blowback from that decision, far from being "social software," Facebook had finally been revealed as the antisocial artifact it really was. That little episode was actually one of the first to get me on that hobby-horse concerned with the failure of the social software set (both developers and evangelists) to ignore Usenet as a valuable source of lessons-learned.

Am I arguing that those most important of those lessons was that the "quality of ideas" (to invoke the terminology of the Big Think header) declined as Usenet became less elitist? That is probably the case to the extent that "thoughtful" and "intellectual" interactions tend to take place within relatively small social networks (see, for example, the network graphs in Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies); and business plans for social software do not think very highly of small networks. However, I think network scale is only part of the problem. Another significant part is the extent to which the software encourages reflective (rather than merely reactive) behavior. Reflection is not particularly well served (if at all) by the exchange of "short-form" content, regardless of its medium. Arguments have to play themselves out in the space they fill most naturally, just as Abraham Lincoln reminded us that a man's legs should be short enough to reach the ground; and, when those arguments are first beginning to emerge, they often require a fair amount of space in which to "grope around" before the core of the reasoning can be identified and expressed. The ultimate oxymoron of the "value proposition" that drives the business plan is the fundamental opposition between a "big think" and a "short form."

Exercising Democracy in Bhutan

Reuters may have had some bad experiences with covering news from remote locations, but they seem to have assigned Simon Denyer to track what is likely to be a critical period in the history of Bhutan. Last week Denyer was on site in Thimphu to cover the first parliamentary election in an isolated country that had been under royal rule for a century. At a time when it is hard to find a country whose electoral process is free of controversy (or worse), there was something refreshing about Denyer's account of the Bhutanese transition:

By turning out in huge numbers to vote on Monday, impeccably attired in national dress, Bhutanese people showed an enthusiasm for democracy that surprised themselves.

Yet this was not a vote against the kings of Bhutan or a century of royal rule. Most people had been upset when the fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, told them he was imposing democracy before abdicating in favor of his son two years ago.

Instead, Bhutan's people voted for stability, and chose a party with plenty of experience of serving under the fourth king, and which promised to preserve the achievements of his rule.

However, now that the country has its first elected parliamentary government, what will happen next? This question seemed to be important enough for Denyer to remain in Bhutan, rather than picking up and heading off to another assignment.

Denyer has decided to focus this question on the plight of Tibetan refugees in Bhutan. While he is a bit fuzzy on the numbers, it is clear that the problem involves a large number of refugees in a small country:

Bhutan has a population of less than 700,000 people and after an influx of Tibetans in 1959 it closed its northern borders for fear of being swamped. New refugees are no longer welcome.

What is missing is an account of how many Tibetans are currently in Bhutan, but the number is clearly enough to warrant government attention. Whether or not that government will pay attention and what sort of attention it will show, however, lie at the crux of Denyer's report. Prior to the election, the Bhutanese policy towards these Tibetans was somewhat mixed:

Those who renounced the right to return to Tibet were granted Bhutanese citizenship, and they and their children were allowed to take part in last week's elections.

But the majority told Bhutanese authorities they would like to return to Tibet one day. As a result, they remain refugees, and youngsters complained that makes them feel like second class citizens.

Without a security clearance -- something they say is virtually impossible to obtain -- Tibetans cannot get government jobs, enrol their children in higher education or obtain licenses to run private business.

Many get around that rule by renting shop licenses off native Bhutanese, but it leaves them in an uncomfortable limbo.

"It is hard for us to get papers, and we don't get jobs easily," said a woman who sells Tibetan souvenirs in a small market in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu.

"If we get independence we would like to go back to Tibet," she added. "But if we get ID cards we would probably stay here."

Despite their cultural links, Bhutan's people hardly seem to care about the problems of their Tibetan neighbors, a function of their long isolation in the Himalayas.

However, now that those Tibetans who opted for Bhutanese citizenship have a voice in the parliament, it will be interesting to see whether or not the plight of these refugees becomes a matter for parliamentary debate. The trigger for such debate may be based on whether or not Tibetans have a right to unite with other Tibetans around the world in voicing protest against China:

In a remote corner of the Himalayas, a small Tibetan refugee community felt helpless as it watched protests erupt all over the world against Chinese rule in their homeland. For in the tiny Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, ethnically, culturally and linguistically close to its giant northern neighbor Tibet, demonstrations are not allowed. Young Tibetans were even reluctant to give their names for fear of trouble.

"We want to demonstrate but we don't have the right to, and that is very bad for us," said a 24-year-old who gave her name as Tenzing. "If we could, people would know that Tibet belongs to Tibetans."

This is a difficult matter for a brand-new representative democracy to address; but ignoring it is likely to have consequences. We know this from the consequences in the United States of a legislative body that kept trying to ignore the divisive question of slavery until the country finally erupted in its Civil War. Bhutan is a far smaller country, but size does not matter when a critical issue is in danger of being ignored. The parliament may try to hide behind the assumption that the eyes of the world are looking at too many other problems to give much attention to Bhutan, but that is a feeble rationalization. Like it or not, Bhutan's representative government is facing a serious test within a week of its first election; and the country will have to draw upon at least the vast resources of accumulated cultural wisdom to attend to that test with the attention it deserves.