Away from the "Grand" Opera House

It is often forgotten that the first performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte took place in the suburbs of Vienna (the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden). Sometimes the most interesting opera performances are found outside of "established" settings like the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. I was aware of this when I was still living in Palo Alto and I saw news that Carlisle Floyd's operatic adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was going to be performed by Opera San Jose. Not only was this an opportunity for me to make up for having failed to get a ticket the last time New York City Opera had presented this work, but also I learned that Floyd himself would be on hand to supervise the production. This remains the only production I have seen of this impressive work, and it was far more than highly satisfying.

In San Francisco one does not have to leave the city limits for a similar "suburban" experience "beyond the pale" of "grand" opera. I have already written about how one may have such experiences through the student work at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, not only in the Conservatory building itself but also in the better equipped Cowell Theater at the northern tip of the peninsula (which affords some of the best views of both San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, fog permitting, of course). Cowell Theater is now also the home of the San Francisco Lyric Opera, which, according to the statement by its Board of Directors, "provides young artists with a unique opportunity to sing classical repertoire in the original language, thus broaden their repertoire and enhance their musical experience." In other words, to continue my Jane Austen rip-off, the "truth universally acknowledged" is that any aspiring vocalist "must be in want of" any performance opportunity, rather than just those for recitals; and the corollary to this "truth" is that any of these performance opportunities can then serve the rest of us as opportunities to hone further our listening skills.

The latest Lyric Opera production is a perfect example of such an opportunity from many points of view. Through June 7 they will be giving performances of The Turn of the Screw, the opera composed by Benjamin Britten to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper based on the novella by Henry James. However, beyond the utilitarian motives behind the Lyric Opera, there is an extremely important reason to venture out of the Civic Center in search of this production. The Turn of the Screw is the quintessential chamber opera: every "voice," instrumental, as well as vocal, is a solo one. The entire orchestra consists of one first violin, one second violin, one viola, one cello, one bass, one performer of flutes of several sizes, one performer of clarinets of different sizes, an oboe player (I did not catch whether Britten used an English horn), one bassoon, one horn, one harp, a single performer for both timpani and a percussion battery, and a keyboardist for piano and celesta. The delicate weaving of this transparent fabric of sonority with the six singing voices would be overwhelmed by the vast space of the War Memorial Opera House (as it would in the Metropolitan Opera House). It needs a more intimate scale in order to "breathe" properly; and the Cowell Theater provides that scale. (As I recall, my first exposure to this opera was in the Auditorium at Hunter College in Manhattan.)

Doing justice to the original acoustical conception is equally important to the listeners. Like many of Britten's works, this offers a listening experience that, on the surface, provides excellent support to the narrative thread while, beneath that surface, teems with structural subtlety and sophistication, beginning with the architecture of the entire score as a theme with fifteen variations. This is the sort of music that is inviting at the first listening and continues to offer new things to hear with each subsequent experience; and the level of detail is such that, while one may prepare through a recording, there is no substitute for "live" performance.

Then, of course, there is that narrative thread. Nothing that Henry James ever wrote can be taken strictly on the basis of surface structure, and both Britten and Piper plied their respective arts to take the resulting opera beneath that surface. This begins with honoring James' decision to introduce the narrative with a prologue, which introduces the narrative as having been documented in a manuscript "discovered in a locked drawer," written "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand. … A woman's." James structured his prologue as a dialog between two men, discussing a "strange tale" that had been told two nights earlier "round the fire;" and there is at least the suggestion that one of those men might be one of the characters in the narrative that is then related. Britten and Piper stripped away most of this detail and reconceived the prologue as a solo for tenor; and that tenor (sung originally by Peter Pears, of course) then appears in the narrative itself (but not in the same connection that James' prologue suggests).

At this point one cannot go into how the opera provides a perspective on the novella without reviewing the basic plot line. The Wikipedia plot summary is as good as any:

An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the latter claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest whatsoever in the children. The boy is at a boarding school whilst his sister, Flora, is living at the country home in Essex where she is cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. He gives the governess full charge of the children and makes it clear he never wants to hear from her again regarding them. The governess travels to her new employer's house and begins her duties. Shortly thereafter, the boy, Miles, turns up after being expelled from his school. The governess infers that the headmaster feels that Miles is a threat to the other boys.

The governess begins to see and hear strange things. She learns that her predecessor, a Miss Jessel, and her lover Peter Quint (another former servant of the household), a clever but abusive man, died under curious circumstances. Gradually, she becomes convinced that the pair are somehow using the children to continue their relationship from beyond the grave. The governess takes action against the perceived threat, eventually culminating in Miles' apparent death.

I like this summary because it honors much of James' allusions to what may have been, rather than flat-out accounts of "known events." Ghosts figure in several of James' plots, and he tends to use them to exploit an ambiguity. In the terminology of Kenneth Burke's pentad of "the five key terms of dramatism," the ambiguity involves whether the ghosts are "agents" (which means they are characters performing motivated acts) or "agencies" ("instruments" used by other "real" characters in performing their motivated acts). Ultimately, this ambiguity has to be resolved by the stage director, since the first scene of the second act is a duet for Jessel and Quint. I have seen productions in which these two characters are alone on stage; but Heather Carolo, who conceived and executed the staging for Lyric Opera, had them sing in front of a bed in which the governess was suffering a restless slumber. In the former production the ghosts were presented as agents, but last night Carolo entertained the possibility that they were agencies of the governess.

That possibility was reinforced by the very first scene of the first act (after the Prologue), a solo for the governess set in the carriage she is riding from London to Essex. At the end of the scene, Carolo had the governess fall asleep; and the next scene shows us meeting Mrs. Grose and the children. Then, in the final scene of the opera, after Miles has (apparently) died, while the governess buries her head in sorrow, he gets up and leaves the stage. This puzzled me until I realized that Carolo decided to stage Britten's coda as a "silent replay" of the governess entering the country house for the first time. Thus, as long as we are talking about "apparent" situations, everything that occurs after the first scene of the first act may very well be the dream into which the governess slips while riding in her carriage, reflecting on her anxieties about the job she is about to begin. This would mean that the governess is the only agent in the plot structure; and all the other characters, as they appear to us in the rest of the opera, are the agencies of the dream world that is unfolding during her carriage ride.

This also provides an interesting take on Britten's choice of variations-of-a-theme structure. There is certainly a static quality to this structure, since it is basically a matter of repetitions, each of which is elaborated in a different way. Whether or not those repetitions "progress" is entirely in the hands of the composer (and, indeed, those compositions whose variations do not necessarily reflect any such "progress" tend to be the hardest to memorize). If everything that happens in the opera after the very first scene occurs in the "timeless dream world," then the variations form could be the most suitable structure for that sense of timelessness. I have no idea if such timelessness was intentional on Britten's part, but it provides a good way to approach Carolo's strategy as stage director.

An opera that asks this much of its audience, both as listeners and as witnesses to the unfolding narrative, had better be very well executed if the audience is to receive it accordingly. Those "young artists" on the stage certainly had the talent to deliver the goods. Tenor Trey Costerisan, who sang both Prologue and Quint, probably had the biggest shoes to fill, since just about anyone familiar with Britten's music is also familiar with recordings of Pears singing that music. Costerisan's voice had the clean clarity that Pears could deliver so well, but he also endowed his stage presence with his own personality without feeling a need to draw on previous performances. As the governess, Anja Strauss had no trouble with the vocal hoops that Britten provided and seemed to buy into Carolo's approach to the narrative without any difficulty. Also, the voices of the two children, Brooks Fisher and Madelaine Matej, were clear and solid, but not particularly strong (no surprise), which provided further justification for the use of a space on "chamber music" scale that did not put undue demands on their voices.

I suppose the main point of this post has been to demonstrate that there are as many ways to think about this opera as there are to think about the James text on which it was based. From that point of view, my greatest regret is that the work does not get performed enough. Of course most opera lovers would probably agree that no opera gets performed enough, even in cities that have longer opera seasons. However, by my calculations, the last time I saw this opera prior to last night was on a Public Television broadcast about ten years ago; and I would really not like to wait another ten years before my next opportunity!

Soloist and Orchestra

Last night, at a performance of two of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's concertos for piano and orchestra (written within a year of each other and with consecutive sequence numbers), I found myself thinking once again about my "inner twenty-year old" perspective of Mozart. I wrote about this perspective earlier this week with regard to his K. 330 piano sonata, which displays his capacity for "showing off all the things he can do just because he can do them;" but, where these concertos are concerned, Mozart is showing off far more than his keyboard virtuosity. As I wrote about two months ago, Mozart is just as interested in dazzling his listener with the give-and-take between piano and orchestra as he is with the solo passages. Thus, the orchestra is not there just to provide a conducive background for the soloist but to serve as an "active agent," whose actions provide even more opportunities for the soloist to strut his stuff, so to speak.

This brings us to why I had a problem with last night's performances at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music: If the orchestra does not do its part as that "active agent," then the soloist cannot be expected to bear the entire burden of making the performance "work." Last night's concert seems to have been conceived without what we might call "adult supervision." Accompaniment was provided by the "Oak Street Chamber Orchestra," rather than the "official" Conservatory Orchestra; and the conductor was a graduate student, as were the two piano soloists for the concertos being performed (K. 488 followed by K. 482). Unfortunately, while this event was probably conceived with the best intentions in the world, none of that give-and-take was there to enhance the solo work, however well prepared the soloists may have been. There were major problems of acoustic balance, not only between solo and orchestra but also within the orchestra itself; and, possibly because of those problems, there was hardly any eye contact between conductor and soloist. We thus had all of the solo virtuosity but none of the "magic" through which Mozart escalated these concertos to something more than virtuosic preening.

This left me realizing just how spoiled San Francisco audiences are where Mozart is concerned. Not only the San Francisco Symphony but also the orchestra for the Midsummer Mozart Festival are so well-versed in orchestra-soloist relations that they tend to make it seem like the easiest thing in the world (which may be one reason why I keep accusing the San Francisco Chronicle of not "giving Mozart his due"). Well, it's not that easy; and it almost approaches the level of "chamber music for a very large chamber" (the complement of the Brahms C minor piano quartet, which I have described as a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra"). Nevertheless, one studies in order to learn; so the best I can hope for is that there was a serious "lessons-learned" session after last night's performances.

Fiction, Reality, and Microsoft

Having riffed yesterday on the relationship (which may well be deceptive) between well-dramatized fiction and reality, I could not help but notice the emergence of multitouch interface technology on both fronts on a single day. The reality side of the story was summarized this morning by Steven Musil in his "Week in review" column for CNET News.com:

In an interesting but not surprising move, Microsoft revealed that it would add a multitouch interface to Windows 7.

The new interface, which is expected to appear in late 2009, was unveiled at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., this week.

Corporate Vice President Julie Larson-Green demonstrated the multitouch technology, painting with several fingers at the same time to show how it can process not just touch, but multiple simultaneous input.

However, while the Wall Street Journal elites were taking in a demonstration neatly packaged by Microsoft, a similar demonstration of the technology was being offered to the general public through the remake of The Andromeda Strain on the A&E channel, in which Michael Crichton contributed to a screenplay that attempted to cast the speculations about science and technology from his 1969 novel in a more contemporary (as in paranoid) setting. Does Microsoft have a controlling interest in A&E Network programming? There is no doubt that scenarios provide excellent means to demonstrate not only what innovations have to offer but also, perhaps more importantly, how the innovator anticipates that they will be used. Nevertheless, compared with the original Robert Wise production (to which Crichton had also contributed to the screenplay), this version, directed by Mikael Salomon runs the gamut from lame to silly. If Microsoft had wanted to invoke fiction to get us hooked on their new interface technology, couldn't they have picked a better piece of entertainment?

ALPHA DOG, the Sequel?

The Thin Blue Line, released in 1988, was the first film the brought documentarian Errol Morris to major public attention. Organized by Executive Producer Lindsay Law for the American Playhouse series on Public Television and subsequently distributed to movie houses, the film was a compelling documentary of the case of Randall Adams, who had been convicted of the murder of a police officer in Dallas County, Texas. The Trivia page for this film in The Internet Movie Database provides some interesting items concerning both the nature and the impact of Morris' effort:

• Errol Morris spent 2-1/2 years tracking down the various players in the Randall Adams case and convincing them to appear in the film.
• In light of the new evidence uncovered by the film, an evidentiary hearing was held. David Harris testified, recanting his earlier testimony against Randall Adams. "Randall Adams knew nothing about this offense and was not in the car at the time," Harris testified. Adams' capital murder verdict was overturned, and he was released from prison in March 1989.

The grounds for that evidentiary hearing basically involved the extent to which Morris' film had demonstrated that Randall Adams had been convicted by a corrupt justice system, meaning that the whole case, beginning with the charge against him, needed to be reexamined.

However, there are two other items on the Trivia page that cannot be ignored:

• The release of this film resulted in 'Randall Adams' (I)' case being reopened. He was exonerated. He then filed suit against filmmaker Errol Morris over the rights to his life.
• David Harris, at age 43, was executed by lethal injection on 6/30/04 in Huntsville, TX, for murdering a man, Mark Mays, during an attempted kidnapping. That crime occurred on 9/1/85, and was unrelated to Harris's murder of the police officer discussed in this film. The Mays case was mentioned in the film, in which Harris was wounded in the neck before the victim was killed.

People like to watch movies, including documentaries, for their narrative qualities, the most important of which is a satisfying sense of closure by the end of the film. Since closure is rarely such a neat matter in the life-world, the demands of narrative often trump the constraints of reality in even the best of documentaries. This painful fact of life has come back to bite Morris in his latest effort, Standard Operating Procedure, although the lawsuit from the man who was exonerated due to his efforts was probably an equally unpleasant unintended consequence.

What happens, however, when the justice system is confronted by a fiction, which never claims to be anything more than based on a case that has not yet been closed? This was basically the situation with the 2006 film, Alpha Dog, both written and directed by Nick Cassavetes; and the consequences of this production may well form the basis for another narrative. A first cut at that narrative has now been provided in a story by Chris Summers for BBC NEWS. Some of this material can be found on the Alpha Dog Trivia page in the Internet Movie Database, but there is a lot more flesh to Summers' account.

At the heart of Summers' narrative is Michael Mehas, who served as Cassavetes' research assistant. Cassavetes had decided to make a film based on a crime story, which Summers summarized as follows:

When the body of 15-year-old Nick Markowitz was discovered in a shallow grave just outside Los Angeles in August 2000, it set in train a saga which is still unfolding.

The boy was the brother of a small-time drug dealer and it emerged he had been killed after a dispute over $2,000 (£1,000) worth of marijuana.

Four young men from the prosperous San Fernando Valley were arrested and, with emotions running high in the area, were convicted. Three were jailed for life but 21-year-old Ryan Hoyt was sentenced to death.

It emerged during their trial that Nick had been held hostage for several days, before being bound with duct tape, struck over the head with a shovel and shot several times.

All four said they acted out of fear of the gang's leader, Jesse James Hollywood.

Fugitive from justice

He had vanished after reading in a newspaper about the body being found.

Summers then describes Mehas' activities for Cassavetes:

While researching the film - and writing a book, Stolen Boy, which came out of his research - Mr Mehas contacted the Santa Barbara District Attorney's office and spoke to Ron Zonen, who was keen to track down Hollywood.

Mr Mehas said: "He wanted to use the film as a sort of global wanted poster to help find Hollywood and bring him back to face justice."

Mr Zonen handed over virtually all his case files to Mr Mehas.

But before the film came out Hollywood, who had been on the FBI's Most Wanted list, was captured in a surfing resort in Brazil in 2005 and extradited back to California.

At this point the narrative shifts its focus from Hollywood, now charged with the Markowitz murder, to his defense attorney:

His lawyer, James Blatt, soon discovered the cosy relationship between the prosecutors and the film-makers and kicked up a fuss about it.

Attempts were made to prevent the film's release until after Hollywood's trial. In the event the film came out last year to mixed reviews.

Mr Blatt then sought to throw Mr Zonen and his colleagues off the case, claiming their integrity had been compromised.

He said it was the first time a prosecutor had effectively acted as a "co-producer of a film" based on a case he was due to bring to trial.

Mr Blatt told the BBC News website: "Any time you have a major motion picture presenting the district attorney's viewpoint of the case it may have a damaging impact on the chances of someone receiving a fair trial."

Thus far Blatt's case has proceeded as far as the California Supreme Court:

Earlier in May, the California Supreme Court rejected his arguments to have Mr Zonen and his colleagues thrown off the case but he has 90 days to decide whether to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

But Mr Zonen, who has now in fact been replaced on the case, was criticised by the California Supreme Court judges, who said: "We find his actions in turning over his case files... highly inappropriate and disturbing". However, they accepted his motives were honourable - to find Hollywood.

I find the parallel between the two films an interesting one. Both were ultimately concerned with seeing justice properly served. The documentary basically undertook research to reopen the case and used the resulting film to present it argument to the "court of public opinion." The fiction, on the other hand, was dealing with a case that had not yet been entirely closed; and Zonen's motives basically involved using the public exposure of the film to help locate the remaining prime suspect. Nevertheless, Blatt's argument about whether or not that suspect can now receive a fair trial is a valid one. I have written before about how easy it is to confuse a well-dramatized fiction with reality; and, whatever its box office numbers may have been (not particularly outstanding under Hollywood logic), Alpha Dog was definitely a compelling piece of work. Given that it has now received international and cable distribution, I can imagine that it will be very difficult to find a jury not aware of how Hollywood was portrayed, particularly since the actor was Justin Timberlake. Thus, Summers' narrative is far from a point of closure; and I suspect that, if that closure is ever reached, there will be more than enough material to make another film.

"Give Readers Something They Want to Read"

Reporting on Rupert Murdoch's appearance at the All Things Digital conference in his Outside the Lines blog, Dan Farber seemed more interested in the acuity of Murdoch's wit than he was in whether or not what Murdoch was saying made any sense. Consider Farber's opening paragraphs:

Sitting across from his employees and writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D6 conference, News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch shared his view on newspaper editing.

"A Wall Street Journal story is touched or edited by 8.5 people, and the story gets longer and longer, and people don't have time for that," he said. "There is not a story you can't get in half the space."

If the whole Wall Street Journal were like Mossberg's column, Murdoch said he would be a happy man, getting some big laughs from the D6 crowd. The 77-year-old media mogul understands the shortening attention span of the planet.

Murdoch apparently isn't fond of journalism prizes. "Stop having people write articles to win Pulitzer Prizes--give readers something they want to read."

While I sympathize with the spirit of the first half of that last sentence (which I equate with my own distaste for young musicians who concentrate too much on winning competitions), the second half demonstrates why, for all of his financial success, I find little to praise in Murdoch's accomplishments. I find at least two critical flaws in those last seven words:

1. The most important flaw is a category error. It presumes a lack of diversity in any "community of readers," whether that community is as broad as everyone comfortable with reading English (for example) or as narrow as the subscriber base for The Wall Street Journal. To speak of "the readers" as a sort of "collective agent" with a consistent set of desires and motives is, at best, a statistical myth. Like any statistical myth, it is basically a representation of a collection of data points from the past, which may or may not say anything valid about how the individuals in that collective are behaving in the present or are likely to behave in the future. If Murdoch is concerned about the circulation figures of the Journal for the rest of this calendar year, that representation is a relatively blunt instrument, although it may still be the most suitable instrument for the way in which he plans to run this new acquisition. All this means, though, is that Murdoch would not be the first to make business decisions (even successful business decisions) based on premises that are fundamentally fictitious.
2. However, even if we accept that fiction behind that pronoun "they," Murdoch may also have failed to recognize the subtle distinction between what an agent wants to read and what that agent will read. The former resides in the subjective world of the agent's individual psychology, while the latter is more a matter of how that subjective world can be manipulated by the social world. For example, my guess is that those blunt statistical instruments would indicate that "readers" are not particularly interested in reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. Nevertheless, HBO decided to develop a television miniseries around this book, which seems to have done a better-than-expected job of creating enough "buzz" in the social world to sway the subjective interests of those "readers" (at least as far as their television viewing time was concerned). As a reaction to that "buzz," The New Republic bet that "readers" would now "want" to cross a bridge, so to speak, from entertainment to scholarship and hosted an episode-by-episode symposium, which gave voice to the respective authorities of a historian, a writer, and the HBO co-executive producer. This constituted another instance of engaging the mechanisms of the social world to influence individual subjective reading behavior. I could see Murdoch dismissing these examples as too elitist to have any general significance, and it is probably true that Fox News uses a different logic than HBO does in making programming decisions. However, like the first point, the key to this subjective-social distinction resides in the rich diversity of the social world in which individuals (such as those who read The Wall Street Journal) are embedded.

Yesterday I wrote about how it is in the best interests of the media (or, more specifically, the business interests of the media) to keep their customers "in a perpetual infantile state." Murdoch's precept is based on a fundamental property of infantilism, which is the prioritizing of self-gratification above all other interests. Thus, at least on an intuitive level, Murdoch recognizes that the social world is as important as the subjective world; but he recognizes it more as an instrument of manipulation than as a reflection of the nature of his present and potential customers. From that point of view, all of that wit that so impressed Farber was probably nothing other than one of Murdoch's many manipulation gambits.

In Search of the Bad Guys

Given the level of disgrace that can now be associated with the current Administration, it seems almost quaint to look back on the Administration of Richard Nixon, who remains the only President to have resigned his post. He did so in the wake of articles of impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee, which had been reported to the full House but not yet put to a vote. The grounds for those articles were never further investigated, because Nixon's successor to the Presidency, Gerald Ford, issued a blanket pardon for Nixon shortly after taking office (and after having told the American public that their "long nightmare is over"). These days, perhaps the greatest value that comes from understanding the enmity that Democrats felt (and probably continue to feel) towards Nixon is that it provides a model for the enmity that Republicans feel towards the Clinton family.

I therefore find it interesting that Book TV has recently been highlighting books that try to make the case that the Nixon Administration did not consist entirely as villains by offering their subjects as counterexamples. Ford himself participated in writing one of those books, working with Dale Van Atta on With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics. The former Secretary of Defense emerges from this book as the one cool head who understood the magnitude of the mess in Vietnam and committed himself to withdrawing the troops. He is also portrayed as Henry Kissinger's most formidable opponent, at least where American policy in Southeast Asia was concerned. This makes him a victim on several fronts: in the National Security Council, where Kissinger always managed to prevail, and before the press, who decided that, where mistakes in Vietnam were concerned, the proper place for the buck to stop was on the desk of the Defense Secretary. We have known that the press chose the wrong fall guy at least since Stanley Karnow wrote about Laird in Vietnam: A History; but we also know that Kissinger was very good at playing the press, so good that we have to wonder to what extent he has been advising the current Administration on the best techniques for manipulating the media.

The other book shifts the reader's attention from Vietnam to Watergate. It is the memoir of L. Patrick Gray III, former Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, written with his son, Ed Gray, entitled In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate. In the lecture he gave at the Nixon Library, which was broadcast on Book TV, Ed Gray presented this as another case where the press chose the wrong fall guy; but he carried the argument into new territory. He now entertains the hypothesis that the now public identification of "Deep Throat" is erroneous, that the source labeled "X" in Bob Woodward's notes is almost certainly several different individuals, one of whom happens to be Mark Felt, who has now "confessed" to being "Deep Throat." Thus, for anyone with the resolve of an Oedipus to learn the "whole truth about Watergate," the nightmare is far from over. The younger Gray has made a compelling argument about any number of loose ends that remain, most of which, like Harry Truman's buck, seem to dangle in the Oval Office.

It is hard to tell how much attention these books will get. Time passes a lot faster in the Internet age; so books like these already have to compete with the first crop of tell-all books coming out of the current Administration. Also, how much is to be gained from sorting the political cast of characters (present or past) into heroes and villains? This is the stuff of our media at its most simplistic, which has done little other than to infantilize our electorate. We shall only begin to grow up when we recognize that all the players in the cast are all-too-human and that our Constitution has the machinery to compensate for their weaknesses, as long as it is given a chance to do so.

Putting the First Amendment in Perspective

The title of this week's column by Robert Scheer, which can now be read at the Truthdig Web site, is "Where Is the Outrage?" The question is elaborated and justified in his opening paragraph:

Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

I agree that the question needs to be asked, but more under the Socratic precept that "life without this sort of examination is not worth living" than in the hope that self-examination need necessarily make us "better people." Having been born a Jew after the end of the Second World War, much of my life has been exposed to considerations of the question about why a civilization as sophisticated in music, literature, poetry, and philosophy as that of the German people should succumb so readily to the atrocious irrationality of National Socialism; and, as far as I am concerned, that question has yet to be resolved. If that question remains unresolved after over sixty years, can we really expect a reasoned reply to Scheer's more recent question?

One way to begin such a quest, however, might be to start with one of Scheer's assertions that, while rhetorically useful, is a bit flawed on the logical side:

That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently described “bad apples” but rather represented official policy condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment.

I found it interesting that I should be reading this sentence less than 24 hours after reading Jeremy Waldron's review of Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, by Anthony Lewis. I had heard (and enjoyed) an interview that Lewis had given about this book on Book TV and appreciated the opportunity to flesh out that memory with printed text (until I can create the time to read the book itself). Scheer's (potential?) logical flaw involves overlooking the Sedition Act, which was passed in 1798, some seven years after "the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment" (along with the rest of the Bill of Rights). The spirit of the Founding Fathers was, at that time, still very strong in all three branches of the Federal Government. Waldron gives us an appreciation of the paradox of these conflicting views through an account of Colonel Matthew Lyon's effort to challenge the Sedition Act, after having been arrested for seditious libel:

At his trial he disputed the constitutionality of the Sedition Act—a plea that was peremptorily struck down by the judge (Supreme Court Justice William Paterson, riding circuit as Supreme Court justices did in those days).

These days such peremptory judgment would probably invoke the wrath of any member of the American Civil Liberties Union; but Waldron continues his argument by explaining why "these days" were not "those days." Consider the context he provides:

Why did locking these critics up seem like an appropriate thing to do in the early years of the republic? I am sure no explanation would be complete if it did not mention the volatile combination of wounded vanity and—for the time being—legally unlimited authority of leaders at the time. But it would also be a mistake to omit the point that political institutions are sometimes a lot more fragile than they look. The state—which to us appears so powerful and self-sufficient—depends crucially on the opinion of those over whom it rules and it requires for its operation a modicum of deference and respect.

To many people, federal authority seemed weak and precarious in 1798. Public agitation by Colonel Lyon's supporters led to a brief uprising in Vermont, and there was a threat of considerable political violence elsewhere. George Washington was denounced as a thief and a traitor; John Jay was burned in effigy; Alexander Hamilton was stoned in the streets of New York; our hero, Matthew Lyon, attacked a Connecticut Federalist with fire tongs in the House of Representatives; and Republican militias armed and drilled openly, ready to stand against Federalist armies. Over everything, like a specter, hung fears of the Jacobin terror in France.

It was by no means obvious in those years—though it seems obvious to us—that the authorities could afford to ignore venomous attacks on the structures and officers of government, or leave their publications unmolested in the hope that they would be adequately answered in due course in the free marketplace of ideas. That government could survive the published vituperations of the governed seemed more like a reckless act of faith than basic common sense.

In other words it was the fragility of our political institutions that differentiated "those days" from "these days" and explained why the Sedition Act endured until 1802, when it was repealed by Thomas Jefferson. (Note, however, that there was also a Sedition Act of 1918, passed as an amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917, which was not repealed until 1921.) Waldron's point is that the "biography" of the First Amendment is closely aligned with the strength of the government that had conceived it:

For the story of First Amendment freedom is not only that government came to seem so strong that it did not need the law's protection against criticism; the story of First Amendment freedom is that the government came to seem so strong that it constituted itself as a menace to individual freedom, and that is why it had to be restrained from interfering with free speech and freedom of the press.

That is how "those days" turned into "these days;" and in that "narrative of progress" we may find an approach to Scheer's question. The value of the First Amendment in "these days" ultimately resides in that "free marketplace of ideas" as defense against a government whose strength needs to be checked; and in these "right-now" days such checks are particularly important since the checks and balances within the workings of the Federal government have been both attacked and undermined by the Executive Branch. The problem is that the First Amendment has become almost as irrelevant as the Constitutional system of checks and balances, because the Executive Branch does not need to interfere "with free speech and freedom of the press" when it can direct its power to manipulate more directly that "marketplace of ideas" whose freedom becomes more of an illusion every day. Thus the media that provide the electorate with news of both their country and the rest of the world are free by virtue of the First Amendment but (in the spirit of the Social Contract of Jean Jacques Rousseau) are everywhere in chains forged by the machinations of the "power elite" (as C. Wright Mills called them) within and surrounding the White House.

Within this framework we may now return to the question in Scheer's first sentence. However, rather than resort to his rhetorically charged language, I would prefer my previous attempt to classify behavior that is undesirable or counterproductive as bad, malicious, or pathological. In that classification I distinguished between bad and malicious by associating the former with "childish," which is to say not particularly well informed or seriously intended. From that point of view, Americans are neither savage nor venal; they are just childish. They are childish because it is in the best interests of the media (and those who manipulate the media) to keep them in a perpetual infantile state (in the spirit of the popular hypothesis that a dog kept as a pet from the time of its birth remains, behaviorally, a puppy until the time of its death). Thus, the media are in chains forged by the government; and, in our perpetual childhood, we are then enchained by the media. It all comes down to "induced bad behavior," which, as Tony Judt recently observed, comes very close to the sort of banality that Hannah Arendt had tried to address in her study of the nature of evil. The irony is that this behavior has been induced under the Administration of a President who, through his faith-based ideology, has tried to present himself as the leading warrior against evil.

Soloist and Friends

It can be a fortuitous occasion when a recitalist has the opportunity to introduce compositions by personal friends, particularly when those friends are close enough to have dedicated those compositions to him. This was the case for three of the works on the program of today's recital by pianist William Corbett-Jones in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco (which also happened to be a celebration of the pianist's 79th birthday). The works in question were two preludes from a set of 24 by Roger Nixon and the final movement of the Opus 26 piano sonata by Kirke Mechem. Corbett-Jones also preceded the latter composition with the "Nocturne" movement from Mechem's Suite for Piano. He also prepared our ears, so to speak, by preceding these four compositions with two of the movements from the first (Swiss) of Franz Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage collections. I have to confess that this is my favorite of the four collections (three "years" and the Venezia e Napoli supplement). Those who know my biases would probably guess that this is because it is the only non-Italian "pilgrimage;" but I also feel that these selections strike the right balance (because they are Swiss, rather than Italian?) between the display of virtuosity and the use of composition for the purpose of tone-painting. One can appreciate this balance particularly in the two selections that Corbett-Jones played, "Au lac de Wallenstadt" and "Au bord d'une source," both of which invoke images of bodies of water; and his performance properly captured images of fluidity set, in both cases, within the "steady flow" of sixteenth-note passages. Liszt was very good at such virtuosic writing, to a point where some might say he was too good at it and should have put more time into other techniques as well; but, at least in these particular works, there is a purpose served by that virtuosity.

I say that the Liszt compositions prepared our ears because both Nixon and Mechem imposed similar virtuosic demands but in twentieth-century idioms. The Nixon preludes thus also captured that spirit of tone-painting, even if the paintings were a bit more abstract in nature; each prelude took its own approach to "coloration" and oriented its virtuosic demands around that approach. The clear contrast between these two selections made a case for wanting to hear the full set of preludes in a recital setting; and a pianist who would be particularly interested in contrast might even consider pairing the Nixon set with the 24 preludes of the Opus 28 of Frédéric Chopin. The Mechem selections also left me curious about the settings from which they were extracted. The sonata movement was marked "Finale" and had much of the spectacle of a Finale movement in a nineteenth-century sonata, but again with more contemporary idioms. However, there remained the question of what this movement was "finalizing" and how it brought its preceding movements to an overall closure. In the case of the "Nocturne," on the other hand, I had no way of knowing where this movement was situated in the course of the entire piano suite and what its role as a nocturne was. (I had considered, for example, that the suite might have been based on the different forms the Chopin had utilized.)

There was at least one "Chopin connection" in the conception of the overall program: Liszt preceded the selections by Nixon and Mechem and Chopin followed them. The program concluded with two polonaises, Opus 40, Number 1 in C minor and Opus 53 in A-flat major. The latter is sometimes known as the "Heroic" polonaise, although, as the most familiar in the collection of polonaises that Chopin composed, it might better be called the "War-Horse!" Like the earlier "Military" polonaise, Opus 53 performs an interesting experiment with an ostinato pattern subjected to a gradual crescendo; and Corbett-Jones did a wonderful job of making that crescendo the backbone of the middle section of the work.

All of these works were then embraced by music from markedly earlier times. The program began with the K. 330 C major piano sonata of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and concluded with Egon Petri's transcription of "Sheep may safely graze," the most famous movement from the BWV 208 cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, "Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd," a secular cantata about the joys of hunting. (What the sheep are doing there is left as an exercise for the reader.) Petri was a leading exponent of the piano music of Ferruccio Busoni, who, as I have previously written, mastered Liszt's capacity for virtuosity and then took it to the next level. (One might even take Busoni's "All' Italia!," the second of his collection of seven Elegien, as a "response" to Liszt's Venezia e Napoli!) Busoni had taken his own venture into Bach cantata territory with his transcription of the fourth movement of "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" (BWV 140); but this was actually a piano transcription of Bach's own transcription for solo organ in his collection of Schübler chorales. Petri's transcription was probably from the original cantata score, and Corbett-Jones exhibited excellent control over the interleaving of the vocal solo with its orchestral accompaniment.

K. 330 is the first of a set of four sonatas Mozart composed between 1781 and 1784, meaning that these date from his late twenties. These sonatas display what was taken as virtuoso in Mozart's day; and K. 330 is an excellent reflection of what I have called Mozart's "inner twenty-year old," showing off all the things he can do just because he can do them. The virtuosity of this sonata lacks the sort of flamboyant display we would find in Liszt; but it is still a show-off piece with a good-natured sense of thwarting listener expectations, making it clear that, in spite of "conventional wisdom," Mozart was as good as Joseph Haydn at this game. Corbett-Jones approached this display with a quiet elegance, which enticed the ear rather than dazzling it as the later displays of virtuosity would do. The overall result was a well-conceived program, which provided the listener with a road-map of the terrain of virtuosity over two centuries and then explored several key paths on that map.

The Right to Ask Questions

There is a lot to be said for Malise Ruthven's recent New York Review article, "The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists," which provides an excellent "guided tour" of nine books, each of which provides a different perspective on the problem that underlies the frustrations of our military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Most important for me, however, is the final portion of this review, which turns to the "reality check" provided by How We Missed the Story, by Roy Gutman. Here is, for me, the key paragraph from that portion:

Gutman provides many details of bin Laden's growing ascendancy over the Taliban and their leader Mullah Omar, and of various ways in which the "Arab-Afghans" humiliated their Taliban hosts and subjected them to a Wahhabite religious agenda. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, giant sandstone statues that had stood for more than 1,500 years, was the most egregious of the iconoclastic acts carried out under pressure from the Arabs and Pakistani mullahs.

Note that, at the time these statues were destroyed, the media presented this as an act of the Taliban; so what is particularly interesting is that Gutman is trying to shift the blame from the Taliban, as a "grass-roots" Afghan organization, to the more global agenda of Osama bin Laden.

I found myself thinking about this paragraph when I encountered the following article summary on the BBC NEWS Web site:

Baitullah Mehsud, who heads the loose grouping of militants known as the Pakistan Taleban, has given a rare press conference to invited journalists. They included the BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan.

Here is the crux of Hasan's account of this press conference:

We are part of a group of journalists invited by Mr Mehsud to his stronghold to see for ourselves "the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army in its recent campaign in the area".

Pakistan's army and pro-Taleban militants led by Baitullah Mehsud have recently agreed to a ceasefire after being locked in battle for most of 2007.

The ceasefire is part of attempts to secure a lasting peace in the area.

Earlier this month the army brought in journalists to show their successes against the militants in January.

Now it's the militants' turn to have their say.

The rest of Hasan's account is based on the examples that Mehsud presented to make his case. If I am to take this article as a complete account, then it would appear that none of the journalists had much (if any) opportunity to ask Mehsud any questions. I find this unfortunate, because, if there were serious grounds for detaching Mehsud's organization from that ghastly destruction of a Buddhist monument, this would have been an excellent opportunity for Mehsud to establish those grounds; and the right question from the right reporter could have set the ball in motion.

By considering such a wide variety of books, Ruthven reminded us that those who continue to pursue a "Global War on Terror" are no better than those proverbial blind men grabbing different parts of an elephant. We are thus as ignorant of the nature of terrorist threats than we were on 9/11, not to mention the many years prior to the attacks on that day. I would suggest that some (if not all) of that ignorance stems from a desire to promote hypotheses that impedes the ability to ask potentially penetrating questions. For approximately seven years we have been content to fob those hypotheses off on an Administration fixated on a faith-based ideology; but that Administration will be changing soon. Will the next Administration do any better at bringing those potentially penetrating questions to light, or will it succumb to the sort of simplistic thinking that seems to play so well for the media? The paradox is that, since the media are not interested in whether or not the next Administration will ask such questions, they will not ask the candidates about those matters; and we, as voters, will remain in the dark over whether or not we shall continue to live under the cloud of fear that was so deftly constructed and manipulated by the current Administration.

Another Casualty of the Digital Age

There is a certain irony that the morning after Memorial Day should bring news of another significant departure, not of an individual but of a major artifact. The news was reported by Sam Zuckerman in the San Francisco Chronicle, who began his article with the following paragraphs:

The California State Automobile Association produced its first road map in 1909. It showed major highways in California and Nevada, and was sent free to all members.

Ninety-nine years later, San Francisco's CSAA is set to produce its last paper map, another victim of the shift to digital technology.

The auto club, which serves Northern California, Nevada and Utah, is phasing out its 12-person cartographic unit by year-end, the association said. Members will still be able to get paper maps at no charge, but they will be produced at AAA national headquarters in Heathrow, Fla.

This, of course, is just another example of an institution collapsing under the stress of trying to make economic ends meet. Since the world the Internet has made is a world of outsourcing, we are again confronted with the question of how important "proximity to the source" is to providing service that is both effective and efficient. However, as Zuckerman pointed out, this particular story is about more than outsourcing and proximity:

CSAA's exit from cartography is part of a technological transformation remaking the map field. Digital direction-finding tools, particularly Internet maps and in-car navigation systems, are drawing growing numbers of users at the expense of paper road maps.

In 2007, as members used more digital services, CSAA's demand for paper maps dropped 13 percent, Mack said. Meanwhile, use of the association's online TripTik Travel Planner has been growing at double-digit rates since it was introduced in 2000.

Currently, CSAA and the automobile club of Southern California are the only regional auto associations still putting out their own maps. CSAA issues 99 of its own maps, primarily of regions and cities in its service area.

In other words the Internet world of digital documents may have more to do with the passing of locally-informed cartography than the economics of outsourcing does.

However, that phrase "locally-informed cartography" captures more that the value of proximity. Zuckerman provided the following quote from Stuart Allan, founder of Allan Cartography in Medford, Ore., whom he calls "one of the deans of mapmaking in the West," which addresses the CSAA products in terms of the second half of the noun phrase:

They're exemplary, especially the county and regional series. The standard of design and accuracy of the work is fantastic.

Like probably just about everyone who is reading this post, I have made frequent use of the maps provided through both Google and Yahoo!; and it is clear, to me at least, that such a "standard of design and accuracy" is all but absent in those digital offerings. Now, to be fair to Google, the last time that accuracy really mattered, I was able to resolve my problem with a Street View, which I would not have been able to do with even the best CSAA map. Nevertheless, when it comes to homing in on just what you need from either a Google or Yahoo! map, the interface runs the gamut from clunky through inconvenient to practically counterproductive. We thus face an interesting variation on Gresham's Law, according to which the "artificial" currency of the "new Internet" (or "Web 2.0") concept of a map has driven out a "specie" standard based on almost 100 years of design experience.

Once again we are confronted with a familiar question: How did we get into this mess? Ironically, the answer has been with us for at least as long as anthropologists have been studying the impact of technology (particularly "smart" technology) on work practices: The reconception of the map in the digital domain has grown out of a study of the map artifacts of the physical domain that neglected to take into account the rich repertoire of human activities in which those artifacts were involved. (This is, of course, a generalization of the approach that Ludwig Wittgenstein had taken to developing a theory of language, based on the premise that it is more important to concentrate on how terms are used than on what they mean or are.) This is the same mess that has confronted every effort to "translate" reading practices from the physical to the digital domain: The product-development focus has always been on building better hardware and interfaces based on an understanding of the physical books we read, rather than the activities in which we engage while reading those books (in spite of an abundance of data about those activities in studies such as those that address the "affordances" of physical media).

From a personal point of view, I would like to point out that one my own activities applied to road maps had to do with treating them as play objects. As a child I would turn to them for games of vicarious exploration, usually beginning in my own neighborhood and then asking what would happen if I went in a direction that my parents never took me. Since I was raised in Brooklyn, I came to know a fair amount about the geography of Long Island through such games. (I also happened to have an old globe that indicated the lanes for passenger vessels, so I could play the same games on a global scale.) In my student days I would play similar games with transit maps, particularly in cities, such as Philadelphia, where one could transfer freely among subways, trolleys, and busses on a single fare. Since the Philadelphia transit map included an index of points of interest, I learned about, and then visited, sites I had never previously considered (such as Benjamin Franklin's grave). With experiences like those in my personal life history, I am particularly pained whenever I read reports of how little kids now seem to know about geography on any scale, local, national, or global. Like many I have heard Google evangelists talk about playing with their products; but I find those games impoverished compared to those I would play with physical maps, perhaps because the physical maps offered more leverage for the imagination (just as reading a novel feeds the imagination more than watching a film adaptation of that novel).

Thus my discontent at the passing of the CSAA road maps goes beyond the usual grumbling about the limitations of the Web 2.0 age. It is not just a matter of examining artifacts with blinders that block out the observation of activities. It is a matter of artifacts whose practical utility in one setting was accompanied by an educational utility in another setting. Solving the problem of efficiently getting a motorist from here to there is certainly important. However, one paragraph towards the end of Zuckerman's report reminds us (in a way that cuts close to the bone of Web 2.0 thinking) that general geographic awareness is also a problem:

Stuart Allan said people are gaining clear directions, but sacrificing information that lets a user see the whole picture. He cites the example of James Kim, the Bay Area journalist who became marooned on an Oregon mountain and died in 2006 after following online travel directions that led him to a little-used forest road.

Positive Chutzpah in the Name of Education

By my records it has been well over a month since I have given a Chutzpah of the Week award for a positive connotation of chutzpah. So, while it is very early in the week, the positive circumstances behind this particular act of chutzpah compel me to recognize it in the best possible light. The award goes to Professor David Mumford of Brown University, who, along with fellow algebraic theorists Pierre Deligne and Phillip Griffiths, both from Princeton University, won this year's $100,000 Wolf Foundation Prize for Mathematics. As the coverage of this story on Al Jazeera English reports, this is an Israeli award:

The Israel-based foundation was established by Ricardo Wolf, a German-born inventor, diplomat and philanthropist who was Cuba's representative to Israel, where he died in 1981.

Needless to say, Al Jazeera does not specialize in reporting on advances in the world of higher mathematics; and that is where the chutzpah enters the picture. Interviewed about the award by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Mumford made the following declaration:

I decided to donate my share of the Wolf Prize to enable the academic community in occupied Palestine to survive and thrive. I am very grateful for the prize, but I believe that Palestinian students should have an opportunity to go elsewhere to acquire an education. Students in the West Bank and Gaza today do not have an opportunity to do that.

Taking $33,333 from an Israeli foundation and immediately transferring it to Bir Zeit University (the "academic community" that Mumford selected, located in the West Bank) would be chutzpah enough for someone whom Al Jazeera English claims "did not see himself as a political person." However, Mumford used his Haaretz interview to stress the importance of his motives:

The achievements I accomplished in mathematics were made possible thanks to my being able to move freely and exchange ideas with other scholars. It would not have been possible without an international consensus on an exchange of ideas. Mathematics works best when people can move and get together. That's its elixir of life. But the people of occupied Palestine don't have an opportunity to do that. The school system is fighting for its life, and mobility is very limited.

When I visited Israel in 1995, there was a feeling of hope, but that is not the situation today. Education for people in the occupied territories gives them a future. The alternative is chaos. I have tremendous regard for Israel, which is without a doubt a major force in the mathematics world. But unfortunately, the Palestinians cannot take part in this prosperity.

For the record the last time I was in Israel was in 1994 for the 12th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Jerusalem. There had been a terrorist bombing on Jerusalem's "Restaurant Row" the day before I arrived. My wife had been nervous about my attending the conference and was determined that I should venture no further than my hotel after that news broke. I cannot say I experienced any strong feeling of hope, nor can I say that things changed very much over the following year. However, while I may not agree with Mumford's perceptions, I certainly honor his intentions and am delighted that he was able to achieve them with an element of chutzpah that managed to penetrate the Israeli press!

Fortress America

A new American Embassy opens for business in Berlin this week. It was built on land that the American government had owned since 1930, the southwest corner of the Pariser Plaz, which is home to the Brandenburg Gate. The original embassy built on that site was bombed during World War II and demolished by the post-war East German government. So this new Embassy building represents somewhat of a homecoming or, as William Timken, the current American ambassador to Germany, put it, "the closing of a circle." It has also been received poorly (to say the least) by the German architectural critics, whose reactions were so consistent in their annoyance to merit a summary report on SPIEGEL ONLINE. Even those who rarely (if ever) read architectural criticism are likely to find this report fascinating.

The strongest criticism, published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, may also be the most representative, since it ends up saying in more direct language what is waltzed around with more discretion by other writers. Here is the Spiegel account of this analysis:

But the harshest words come from the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The paper's critic singles out the embassy's windows for scorn, saying they "look as if a bankrupt homeowner had bought them in a home-improvement store near Fargo in order to get his house ready for the winter. Such windows are exactly what the 'critical reconstruction' approach is meant to prevent -- the invasion of the industrially produced throwaway aesthetic, the plastic culture of the suburbs in the historic city center."

"On the whole, the American embassy -- with its cheap materials, its narrow windows which resemble arrow slits, its defensive tower which has everything except for battlements -- looks as if it was originally planned for another, more unsettled part of the world," the author continues. "Of course an embassy needs security features -- but the French, British and Italians manage to achieve that without giving the observer the impression that he is about to enter the Green Zone in Baghdad. Is that the message of the embassy: that the Americans suspect that their German representation is located in a completely uncivilized wasteland, located beyond the permafrost line and populated by aggressive maniacs, and that they want to secure it as a result?"

"The new US Embassy in Berlin fits together with trends towards nostalgia in architecture -- it is the knights' castle that you can knock together with items from the home-improvement store," continues the FAZ's critic. "On the other hand, there is hardly a modern building -- with the exception of bunkers and pesticide testing centers -- which is so hysterically closed off from public space as this embassy. There is not a single window on the upper part of the building's south side. Here America shows itself as living a completely impenetrable, erratic bunker existence. One doesn't need to be as bitchy as certain angry passers-by, who postulated that the top part of the building must be home to the 'wellness and waterboarding' area, to be disturbed by such a lack of windows."

"If a building could stand with its arms crossed, it would look like this one," the paper writes. "Perhaps it is also typical of the first decade of the 21st century that public space, which once looked like a promise, is now perceived as a threat. The stranger, who was once the projection surface for the most beautiful collective and private fantasies, could be a terrorist, have AIDS or be transporting the plagues of globalization like factory closures, migration flows or bird flu.

"The American Embassy does not reflect the image of a country that was once a melting pot for immigrants from around the world, a place for new beginnings and reinventing oneself. The embassy represents a country which has been traumatized by 9/11 and the consequences of globalization -- a nation which is now so protected by armor that it can no longer see the world."

The Spiegel report attributes this fortress mentality to an increased focus on security in the wake of the 1998 terror attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as 9/11. However, I left Singapore in August of 1995, right around the time of the completion of the new American Embassy building there; and even the slightest glace at that structure reveals that the fortress mentality was already in place, even in a supposedly friendly country with a strong sense of law and order. So, while the invocation of the Baghdad Green Zone is probably appropriate, the spirit behind that invocation is far more deeply rooted than either Spiegel or its sources may have imagined.

My personal conjecture is that it is a reflection of the "New World Order," which Bush I declared after his Desert Storm mission was "accomplished." This would make it both appropriate and ironic that the official opening of the Berlin Embassy building will be presided over by the elder Bush and will take place on July 4. This is about as symbolic of the New World Order as one can hope to get, even if Bush II has managed to reduce the New World Order vision to piles of rubble scattered across Iraq and Afghanistan accompanied by a faint taste of ashes in our collective mouths. However, without trying to detract from the physical damage, the greatest damage done by the Bush Administration has been to the reputation of the United States in the world community; and Bush II was already building up that damage prior to 9/11 with his obsessive defiance of both the Kyoto Accord and the International Criminal Court. We now have an architectural symbol of our presence in the heart of the European Union which practically screams out that same obsessive defiance; as such, it may also serve as the best possible symbol of the magnitude of the challenges that will face the next occupant of the White House.

(Relatively) Early Brahms

The performance of A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms seems to have been programmed as the culmination of this month's Brahms Festival, presented by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. Yet it is important to recognize that this work, whose first performance in its entirety in Bremen in 1868 was a great success, which, as Michael Steinberg wrote in his program notes, "marked a turning point in his career," predates all of the music performed at the first concert of this Festival (including the pre-concert chamber music on May 11). Brahms was all of 35 at this premiere; and, while he had accumulated a significant portfolio of vocal music, chamber music, and solo piano works, his efforts at orchestral writing were far more modest. Other than his two orchestral serenades (the second of which was performed at last week's Festival concert), his only extended orchestral work was his first piano concerto, whose 1859 premiere in Leipzig had been a "brutal" (Steinberg's adjective) failure.

From this point of view, to return to the language I had used in writing about the May 11 concert, there is a strongly prospective element in the orchestral writing of the German Requiem. From the very opening sonorities, which divide the lower strings (violas, cellos, and basses) into five voices, we are experiencing Arnold Schoenberg's "progressive" Brahms experimenting with the kinds of sonorities he had evoked in his two string sextets by translating them to orchestral scale. In the course of the work, we hear anticipations of not only sonorities but also rhetorical gestures in later orchestral writing that we know so well, such as the four symphonies.

All of these orchestral resources support a compositional hand already confident in writing for chorus and solo voices. The first half of the program provided us with the context of this compositional experience base. It began with the 1856 "Geistliches Lied" (Opus 30), for accompanied (in this case by an organ) four-part mixed chorus. This work was then followed by the Opus 17 set of four songs for women's chorus (written in 1860, in spite of its earlier opus number), in which the voices are accompanied by two horns and a harp. This probably counts as Brahms' first "experimental approach" to instrumental sonority; and he uses those elements cautiously and modestly. It is almost as if the choral writing began as an elaborate pencil drawing or woodcut; and, after it had been conceived, Brahms then experimented with introducing color as a way to highlight the details of the drawing without overwhelming them. Perhaps that 1859 piano concerto premiere had shaken Brahms' confidence in writing for instruments, leading him to pull back to more subtle approaches.

By the time of the German Requiem, Brahms no longer felt a need for such subtlety. Thus, when the text of the second movement arrives at "Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit" ("But the word of the Lord endureth forever," from the last verse of the first chapter of The First Letter of Peter), both orchestra and chorus burst forth in the full strength of "Herrn Wort" with an "eternal resonance" that celebrates the "good news" of Peter's letter. Indeed, there is a pervading spirit of "good news" that distinguishes this work from the Catholic requiem text, with the terrifying visions of its "Dies irae" and "Libera me" sections. Those texts have certainly inspired some of the most impressive orchestral writing throughout the centuries, but Brahms was inspired by an entirely different spirit. The emphasis in Brahms' treatment is on rest and comfort, free of all intimidating ghosts of a punitive afterlife. Thus, while he appropriates the same "trumpet shall sound" text that Handel had used in Messiah, the connotation lies in the subsequent text (which Handel also set) of the death that has lost its sting.

I realize that, when I wrote about the first concert of this Festival on May 11, I wrote absolutely nothing about the performers, primarily because there was so much to write about the music. In many respects this may be the highest form of praise for a performance, because it means that the performance has become so much at one with the music that the music itself registers most in memory. This was again true for last night's performance, particularly in the first half, which served more to introduce us to unfamiliar works. However, I think it is still important to observe that, if Brahms' compositional hand was confident in unfolding his conception of A German Requiem, then the "conducting hand" of Michael Tilson Thomas was just as confident, tuning the pace and balance of the entire ensemble with the same sure subtlety that Brahms had engaged in applying instrumental color to his Opus 17 songs. It is also important to recognize Matthias Goerne, whose diction was as impeccable as his tone and who applied his own sense of subtlety in providing just the right level of dramatic presence behind the texts he delivered. Soprano Laura Claycomb also homed in on that same level of dramatization; but her own quality of tone was slightly impeded by a tendency to neglect the consonants in the text. It would also be remiss to ignore Michael Grebanier's cello solo, which was one of those "rhetorical gestures" of instrumental writing that we would encounter in later Brahms compositions.

I have to confess that I was particularly attentive to Grebanier, because my evening began with the Opus 111 string quintet as the pre-concert chamber music offering. This work was about as far from the spirit of the main program as you could imagine, unless you took the approach I suggested of viewing those works in a prospective light. This quintet is not orchestral writing; but, compositionally at least, it provides a good sense of where Brahms ultimately headed (perhaps even in the context of those five string voices that begin the Requiem). That sense of "arrival" is there with the very opening gesture of a soaring cello solo set against the tightly-knit tremolo passages for the two violins and two violas. After this quintet Brahms would compose only four more chamber compositions, all featuring the clarinet: the Opus 114 trio, the Opus 115 quintet, and the two Opus 120 sonatas. Whether or not Brahms felt he had said all he had to say about a string ensemble after Opus 111 is debatable; but these particular "last words" are some of the most positive to have been written for such a group. Thus, now that the Brahms Festival has concluded, I realize that my only regret is that the full scope of this man's work was not given adequate justice in such a small number of concerts.

From the Ring's Point of View

San Francisco is preparing (bracing?) itself for the San Francisco Opera's launch of an "American Ring" with its local premiere of Francesca Zambello's conception of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold on June 3. I have already contributed to the preparations with an account of Anthony Tommasini's review of this production when it was presented by the Washington National Opera. The Wagner Society of Northern California has planned an all-day symposium for June 14 entitled "Gold Rush – Forging the American Ring;" and the San Francisco Public Library will host its usual preview lecture event. Nevertheless, I tend to cast my lot with Anna Russell, who described such preparatory events as being delivered by "great expert[s], primarily for the edification of other great experts," which tend to leave those poor souls in the audience "as befogged as before."

In some ways the whole Ring des Nibelungen cycle poses the same sort of problem that one encounters with War and Peace. It's hard enough to keep track of everything that happens over the course of four operas, the shortest of which (Rheingold) is 2.5 hours (and is intimidating in its length because there is no intermission); but the overwhelming sequence of events is matched by an equally overwhelming cast of characters. Indeed, it terms of individual characters, Rheingold boasts the largest cast, with four gods, three goddesses, and seven "demigods," who are definitely not of the mortal world but who lack divine status. These include three "Rhine Maidens" (also called "daughters of the Rhine"), two Nibelungs (a race of dwarfs, who are gifted craftsmen working in caves beneath the surface of the earth), and two giants, whose brute strength was contracted by Wotan, chief of the gods, for the building of the castle Valhalla (Hall of the Valiant) to house not only the gods but also mortal warriors who die heroically in battle. (Die Walküre has the same sized cast. However, eight of them are Valkyries, only one of whom, Brünnhilde, figures significantly in the action.) My point is that anyone new to the Ring is likely to feel confused by the cast listing in the opera program even before trying to take on the synopsis on the next page.

However, it is important to remember that narrative structure shares a significant property with musical structure, which is that complexity is almost always a matter of embellishment. Thus, just as I have approached musical complexity by taking a "syntactic" approach to sorting out the embellishing and the embellished, one can do the same with the events that unfold in the course of the four Ring operas; and the best way to do that is to regard all of those cast lists as embellishments and focus on the Ring of the title as if it were the central character. In all fairness, however, I should point out that this is not the way Wagner approached his project. Drawing upon the Nibelungen Lied, Wagner began with the goal of relating the legend of the death of the hero Siegfried and then "worked backwards," addressing how Siegfried became a hero, how he came to be born, and, ultimately, why he came to be born. Having developed the plan for his four operas through an act of backtracking that would be the envy of any Prolog programmer, Wagner then realized his composition by "working forwards" through the plan. From my point of view, however, this overlooks why these four operas are often called the "Ring Cycle;" and it is only if we consider all of the events from the point of view of the Ring itself, so to speak, that we appreciate the cyclic nature of the conception.

The very title of the first opera ("the gold of the Rhine") encourages us to take this approach: Before worrying about Siegfried's origins, we address those of the Ring itself, which is initially an enchanted lump of gold at the bottom of the Rhine guarded by those three daughters of the Rhine. The essence of the enchantment is that this gold will bestow absolute power on anyone who can forge it into a ring but that such a craftsman can only succeed by first renouncing love. That is basically all you need to know about the Ring. All you need to know about Das Rheingold is that it is a story of three thefts:

1. Alberich, a Nibelung craftsman, steals the gold from the daughters of the Rhine, having renounced love after each of the three of them rebuff ("Pfui!" in the libretto) his efforts to woo them, and forges the Ring from the gold.
2. Wotan steals the Ring from Alberich, offering it as an alternative to the terms of his original contract with the giants. (There is an important irony here: One of the attributes that gives Wotan his chiefly status is that he is the god of laws and contracts.) In response to Wotan's theft, Alberich casts a curse on the Ring.
3. The giants, brothers Fasolt and Fafner, accept Wotan's offer. However, as soon as Wotan concludes the deal by giving the Ring to Fasolt, Fafner kills Fasolt in order to steal the Ring from him. This is the first manifestation of Alberich's curse.

Lots of other things happen over the 2.5 hours of this opera: Alberich and the Rhine Maidens, arguing over the Valhalla contract, forging the Ring, and a massive climax in which the seven gods and goddesses cross a rainbow bridge to enter Valhalla. However, these are all embellishments, far from irrelevant but still embellishing. So, in the spirit of such reduction, let's breeze through the remaining three operas:

• Die Walküre: Wotan conceived a "cunning plan" to recover the Ring. This will be achieved by a hero, who will be conceived from the incestuous union of two of his own illegitimate children, Siegmund and Sieglinde. He enlists another illegitimate daughter, Brünnhilde, to assist him in his plan; but his wife, Fricka, objects that the plan violates all the laws (for which he is responsible) of house and hearth. Fricka forces Wotan to forbid Brünnhilde's intervention in the plan, but she disobeys. Wotan punishes her by making her mortal but then protects her by putting her to sleep on a rock surrounded by impenetrable fire.
• Siegfried: This is the child of Siegmund and Sieglinde. His first act of heroism is to forge a sword from the shattered remains of the sword Siegmund had used in abducting Sieglinde. He then uses the sword to slay Fafner, who used the power of the Ring to turn himself into a dragon to protect his ill-gotten gains. Siegfried also uses the sword to shatter Wotan's staff, on which all laws and contracts have been recorded. Now possessing both the Ring and its curse, he discovers the fire-surrounded rock, rides through the fire, kisses Brünnhilde, and awakens her.
• Götterdämmerung: Now it is the turn of Alberich to recover the Ring. Actually, he is now dead; but he haunts his son (he renounced love but not sex) Hagen, whom he conceived with a queen of the Gibichung tribe. Hagen plots to kill Siegfried by first arranging for him to marry the Gibichung princess Gutrune and then enlisting the support of the betrayed Brünnhilde. After Siegfried has been slain, Brünnhilde realizes that she was deceived. She builds a funeral pyre for him and immolates herself along with his body. The fires of the pyre rise high enough to consume Valhalla. The Rhine Maidens recover the Ring from the ashes of the fire. Hagen makes one last attempt to retrieve it and drowns. The gold has been restored to its original position at the bottom of the Rhine. (As Russell puts it, "You're exactly where you started forty hours ago!")

What I have tried to do in this summary is focus on how the Ring changes hands, which it does in every opera except Walküre, which is about planning for a change of hands. If Billy Wilder believed that you could understand any plot by following the money, you understand this one by following the Ring (which endows the holder with both power and money). Everything that does not directly involve following the Ring is detail, however memorable that detail may be (as with the Walkürenritt, which begins the third act of Die Walküre).

Will all this translate effectively into an "American Ring?" Tommasini's report from Washington was certainly positive enough, and he is not known for pulling his punches. Thus far in the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman has chosen to focus on Mark Delavan, who will be singing Wotan, describing the baritone's tumultuous past as one of "alienating everyone he came across;" but then, in my approach to synopsis, Wotan is not particularly big on winning friends and influencing people. My own expectations hinge more on conductor Donald Runnicles, whom I heard conduct the last San Francisco Opera Ring and enjoyed thoroughly. One cannot conduct Wagner without a strong sense of how to endure by controlling expenditure of energy, and Runnicles has that sense down pat. At his last performance his capacity for endurance assisted the audience's; and that can make all the difference when you are confronted with 2.5 hours without an intermission!

George Eliot and "The Appearance of Evil"

Having just finished George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, I want to allow myself one last reflection on a passage from the novel's final chapter (not counting the "Conclusion"). The passage concerns one of the novel's more interesting secondary characters, the Reverend Dr. Kenn, who is determined not to let his attitudes be swayed by groundless slanderous gossip. Eliot's narration invokes an interesting turn of phrase for such gossip; she refers to public opinion as being "always of the feminine gender—not the world, but the world’s wife." Thus, it matters little if there is no warrant for slander through either the presence or absence of evidence. As Eliot puts it:

But the refined instinct of the world’s wife was not to be deceived [by the absence of warrant for slander], providentially! Else what would become of society?

Where the critical element of slander in Eliot's plot is concerned, Dr. Kenn is initially strong in his resolve to prefer solid argument to "the refined instinct of the world's wife;" but, as is the case with many public figures (such as ones we are now encountering in the race for the White House), he must ultimately capitulate to the pressures of public opinion. Here is how Eliot justifies his decision:

Dr. Kenn, having a conscience void of offense in the matter, was still inclined to persevere, was still averse to give way before a public sentiment that was odious and contemptible, but he was finally wrought upon by the consideration of the peculiar responsibility attached to his office, of avoiding the appearance of evil, an ‘appearance’ that is always dependent on the average quality of surrounding minds. Where these minds are low and gross, the area of that ‘appearance’ is proportionately widened.

Eliot's recognition of the reality of "low and gross" minds reminds me of my favorite Samuel Johnson story: He was supposedly approached on the street by a very haughty lady, who complimented him on having omitted all "offensive" words from his dictionary. Johnson's reply was, "Were you looking for them, madam?" Today the world's wife makes her home in front of television cameras and looks for the appearance of evil as assiduously as that woman who accosted Johnson was looking for her offensive words. She will "live long and prosper" in her new setting as long as the need to distinguish appearance from reality remains secondary to the need to dominate "market share." No matter how much she may be ridiculed by Eliot (or, for that matter, Jacques Offenbach), she will prevail with the same strength that sustained her in the past two centuries.

Another Trillion Here and There

Between the reckless spending by the Bush Administration and the (apparently futile?) attempts of economists like Joseph Stigliz to restore some sense of reality to the numbers that confront us, the media have pretty much inured us to the idea of a trillion-dollar price tag. Nevertheless, it is worth at least a pause to consider the report that the BBC NEWS Web site ran under the headline, "Food imports 'to top $1 trillion.'" This particular price tag comes from the findings of a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); and, while I regard this group as a reputable body, I have at least one question about the reasoning, at least if the BBC report is reasonably thorough and accurate. The problem is a classic "dead moose on the table," the omission of a factor that other sources have taken to be critical and appears to receive no attention from the FAO. That factor is the role of market speculation, which, as the Financial Times reported at the beginning of this month, was being taken so seriously in India that their finance minister was considering a "blanket ban on trading in food futures." If we have learned anything from our years under the Bush Administration, it is that, when the talk escalates to more than nine figures, the "walk" is no longer down the path of financial theory but is, instead, guided by purely greed-driven motives. Thanks to Thomas Friedman's "gospel of globalization," those motives can be exercised on a global scale in any market, whether it is the manpower to run a call center, the price of loans issued by a bank, or, in this case, the cost of staple foods.

There are those who will take this as a sign that we should all become locovores. This may work for some of us; but it overlooks the plight of developing nations, which are often sorely lacking in arable land and/or the seeds to plant on that land. Thus, while the FAO should receive at least some credit for shoving another trillion-dollar price tag in our faces, they really should have done a better job of getting down and dirty over why this number came to be in the first place.

Dissenting from Conventional Wisdom

Now that President George W. Bush has made an early grab for the Chutzpah of the Week award there, we are not hearing much news out of this week's meeting of the World Economic Forum. More disappointing, however, is the neglect that the business press seems to have shown towards the recently published findings of the Growth Commission, to the extent that, had it not been for a report by Steve Schifferes on the BBC News Web site, I probably would not have known that this organization existed. Schifferes describes the commission as "set up to find out the key elements that lead poor countries to get rich;" and its members are "key policy makers and economists" under the chairmanship of Michael Spence. The member name that was most familiar to me was Nobel laureate Robert Solow, who I still think has done the best job of any economist in cutting through all the claptrap we have to endure that invokes the noun "value." (Other members cited by Schifferes are "former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, and South Korean president Han Duck Soo.")

The Growth Commission is best viewed as a voice of dissent in a time when we should be debating all the problematic issues of economic crisis, rather than circling the wagons in defense against an unseen enemy. The primary targets of its dissenting position are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While these organizations are taken to task for their economic orthodoxy, there is at least an implicit assumption that such orthodoxy derives from an elitist perspective that probably knows little about what actually happens in poor countries and may very well care even less. As I have suggested on many previous occasions, such elitism is also stock-in-trade at the World Economic Forum.

The primary elitist dogma that the Growth Commission attacks is the belief that markets are the sole engine of economic growth. After all, what belief system would you expect from those elites who now exercise global control over those markets? As Schifferes reports, the Commission is thus making a noble effort to get economic leaders to stop drinking Milton Friedman's Kool-Aid and "go back to the basics" of John Maynard Keynes:

Government intervention in the economy, and a degree of protectionism, will be needed in the early stages of development.

The Commission thus shares with Keynes the need to balance short-term solutions against long-term consequences:

The report reaffirms the need for engagement with the global economy - including the transfer of key technologies and export specialisation - which are key to long-term sustainable growth.

But it points out that policies which support equality are also crucial to making sure the benefits are equally distributed, and to ensuring political support for globalisation.

Put another way, while economic growth may be a major goal of every developing country, it would be a mistake to view it as the only developmental goal of a country. As the report puts it, "no country has sustained rapid growth without also keeping up an impressive rate of public investment in infrastructure, education, and health. … far from crowding out private investment, this spending crowds it in." Thus, a long-term path to development is more about equitable growth than about "creation of wealth," regardless of where the wealth ends up going. This leads to an observation, cited by Schifferes, that is sure to upset the ideological fixations of our current Administration:

However, the report points out that democracy does not seem to be essential for fast growth, at least in the early stages.

Many of the 13 fastest-growing developing countries over the past 40 years - including China, Indonesia, Korea, Brazil and Singapore - had one-party governments for at least part of that period.

Having lived in both Singapore and the United States, I have a deep appreciation for the lack of correlation between democracy and equitable growth; and it may be that a country is only ready for democracy once it has demonstrated an ability not only to assure the economic well-being of its population but also to do so in an equitable manner. (It may also be that when such equitability is jeopardized then so is the underlying democratic foundation.)

In terms of the voices that speak loudest about current economic conditions, the findings of the Growth Commission are very much a "minority report." What interests me the most is the extent to which any of our Presidential candidates will take the trouble to examine this report with the attention it deserves. BBC news analysts, such as Matt Frei, seem to be coming to the conclusion that this will be another election whose outcome will depend on who the country thinks will get us out of the current hard times. If a candidate like Barack Obama wants to maintain his "audacity" stance, then he may wish to consider the audacity of questioning the conventional economic wisdom that got us into this mess in the first place; and a good place to begin the questions could be with the findings of the Growth Commission.

Violin Virtuosity

Back when I was living in Palo Alto, I had a friend in Portola Valley who turned over his house to host a recital by the winner of the annual Irving M. Klein International String Competition every spring. Now that I live in San Francisco, the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco has given me the same opportunity. Today's concert was given by the winner of the first prize in the 2007 competition, Jing Wang, accompanied at the piano by Jeewon Lee. His offering was an hour of full-out virtuosity.

The middle work on the program was also very much the centerpiece of the concert, particularly since it featured Wang unaccompanied. It was the fourth sonata (in E minor) of the Opus 27 of Eugène Ysaÿe, a set of six sonatas for solo violin. These were composed in 1923; and each sonata is dedicated to a personal friend, all of whom were celebrated violinists at that time. The dedicatee for the fourth sonata is Fritz Kreisler, who, himself, was one of the great virtuosos of his time. While the score indicates a classical structure of three movements (Allemanda, Sarabande, Finale), one would be hard put to hear the first two movements in the same terms of the dance forms that Johann Sebastian Bach had in his settings. Indeed, while Ysaÿe may have intended to hide this, the entire sonata sounds like it was heavily influenced by the concluding chaconne from Bach's D minor (BWV 1004) partita for unaccompanied violin, which has a similar tripartite structure. Since, according to the Nimbus notes by Margaret Campbell, Ysaÿe conceived of his Opus 27 project after having heard Joseph Szigeti perform one of Bach's solo sonatas and since, if you count both sonatas and partitas, Bach wrote a total of six of these works, it would not surprise me if a little bit of Bach resides in each of them, implicitly if not explicitly. (His presence in Ysaÿe's second sonata is downright blatant!)

Thanks to Ferruccio Busoni, Bach's chaconne has become of monument of virtuosity for the piano, as well as solo violin. Since Busoni composed his transcription in 1900, it is entirely possible that Ysaÿe was familiar with it and may have taken it as a challenge. If Busoni could "up the ante" of virtuosity by transcribing Bach violin music for piano, Ysaÿe could "raise the stakes further" with a violin solo even more demanding than the one Bach had composed; and I think that this provides a better way of listening to Opus 27, Number 4 than by trying to think in terms of the movements and their labels. I have no idea if this is how Wang approached the work; but his technical execution was so solid and robust that it was almost as if he had summoned (and honored) the spirits of Bach, Busoni, Ysaÿe, and Kreisler.

As I said, this performance assumed the role of centerpiece; but it was far from the highest point of Wang's virtuosity, since, without leaving us much time to catch our breaths, it was followed by Maurice Ravel's "Tzigane," composed around the same time as the Ysaÿe sonatas (1924) for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi. The accompaniment was composed for Luthéal, a piano-like instrument with organ-like stops for a variety of tone colors. One of those options was the sound of the Hungarian cimbalom; and, as its name implies, "Tzigane" is an invocation of the spirit of Hungarian gypsies. For this performance Lee played an ordinary grand piano, but the gypsy spirit was alive and well Actually, the violin plays solo for approximately the first third of the composition; and much of that solo consists of the dark growl of the G string. The work builds from an initial somber darkness to dazzling bright light at a pace that gets wilder and wilder until you expect both performers to collapse.

However, even after performing the Ravel, Wang had not yet exhausted his virtuosity. As an encore he then dashed off "La ronde des lutins," the Opus 25 "Scherzo fantastique" of Antonio Bazzini. Bazzini is late nineteenth century; and this is one of those works that, in its time, set the bar for virtuosity (which Ysaÿe and Ravel then proceeded to raise). "Lutin" is French for "goblin;" so this is one of those works that glorifies the diabolical quality of violin virtuosity made so famous (notorious?) by Niccolò Paganini. This was Wang's "final statement" for his program; and it certainly made his departure of blaze of glory (with a faint whiff of sulfur).

Since I seem to make a habit of accusing San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman of not paying enough attention when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is on a San Francisco Symphony program, I do not want to commit the same sin by ignoring that Wang's program began with Mozart K. 454 B-flat major violin sonata. The catalog of recordings that Jascha Heifetz made for RCA includes only three Mozart sonatas. This sonata is one of them; and he recorded it twice, first in 1936 and again in 1954. (With the exception of Ysaÿe, whose works Heifetz never recorded, this was very much a "Heifetz program" in both substance and spirit.) Mozart composed violin sonatas almost throughout the entirety of his life. This one was composed in 1784, after he had been in Vienna for a few years. In the Köchel catalog it sits right in the middle of those six string quartets that Mozart dedicated to Joseph Haydn, which means that, to some extent, virtuosity of composition takes precedence over virtuosity of performance. Much of that virtuosity of composition has to do with the way in which the piano provides both accompanying harmonies and one or more melodic voices that engage with the voice of the violin. In this case the performance hinges on the extent to which the melodic voices blend properly without ever obscuring their harmonic context. This was thus the most demanding work on the program for Wang and Lee playing as a well integrated ensemble (even if there were only two of them). The demand was all the greater, since this was the work that began the program; and their joint understanding of Mozart definitely got things off to the best possible start, serving almost as an excellent supplement to last week's "pre-season preview" of the Midsummer Mozart Festival.

Bush Family History Repeats (sort of)

Reading Marie Cocco's Washington Post column this morning, as it was reproduced on Truthdig, I thought I caught another whiff of the repetition of history (without any Marxian overtones of farce). Her headline, "When It Costs Too Much to Support the Troops," certainly had a familiar ring; but that was not the repetition that tweaked me. Nor was it the introductory story she offered to justify the headline:

The comment was outrageous, but it was not the least bit surprising. A psychologist responsible for assessing returning war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder—a psychological ailment that could entitle them to monthly disability payments—told staff members not to diagnose the illness because to do so would increase the government’s costs.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” the psychologist at a Department of Veterans Affairs center in Texas wrote in an e-mail. She suggested diagnosing a less severe disorder that would not carry the greater long-term disability costs.

Rather, I was struck by the way in which she escalated this account to its obvious generalization, calling it "a demoralizing reminder of the way the U.S. health care system works for just about everyone."

This historical memory this provoked was one of our current President's father. In this age in which elections are strategized in terms of large collections of highly specialized demographic units, it turned out that one of the units that seemed to cohere in its opposition to George H. W. Bush was what we now call the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community. When the press picked up on this and hit the elder Bush with a question about how he planned to win over this group, his reply was that he "wished the homosexuals would just go away;" and the press had a field day with that answer. Unfortunately, this happened during the 1988 campaign, which is the one that made him Bush I.

Just go away. It was that phrase from history that was ringing in my ears, but now it was a new Bush Administration casting it in a new light. It is a light that differentiates the population of the United States into two categories. In one category we have the "productive members of society," where the semantics of "productivity" amounts to "serving our needs and interests as we wish them to be served." In the other category is everybody else; and, whether the issue is health care, education, or even serving your country, Bush II has revived his father's attitude in a broader context. In his heart of hearts, he wishes they would all just go away.

Well, not only did not the LGBT community refuse to go away; they have now received a significant vote of confidence from the California Supreme Court. That casual dismissal by Bush I-to-be was also a dismissal of the very diversity that is such a great asset to this country. It also provided an interesting foreshadowing of his wife, Barbara, observing that Katrina victims had better conditions in the New Orleans Superdome than those they had in their homes. I suppose we can now see Barbara as having taken the first step towards generalizing her husband's attitude, so it should be no surprise that her son would take matters to an even more general level.

Still, just what did the elder Bush mean by "just go away." I suppose that the most innocuous reading was that he wanted them to stay away from the polls on Election Day. Less innocuous would be the implication that they should cease to be Americans, picking up their life style and settling somewhere else, like Canada or Holland (where all sorts of permissiveness runs wild, they say). In the case of the current Bush, however, the semantics may be more brutal. With his strong convictions of faith and Divine Justice, "go away" could well mean "depart from the living." If he could go to Sinai in the spirit of delivering the Mosaic Code to the Arab World, he could just as easily see himself as the mortal instrument of the Last Judgment in his own country.

I have suggested that the ultimate goal of the War Against the Poor is the creation of a new class of slaves. Since slaves are objects, rather than subjects, when they cease to satisfy their "productivity goals," one can simply dispense with them, as one might dispense with a car one no longer wishes to drive. If one is to recognize a need for motivation at all (which is not necessary if they are really objects), it is only through the simplest of slogans, like the one about work making freedom, which kept the prisoners in the Nazi death camps at their jobs in the vain hope that they would eventually be delivered from that hell-on-earth. However, it is that connotation of "dispense" that supports the semantics of "go away" in the world of the current Bush Administration; and, if the LGBT community could hold fast and not "go away" to satisfy Bush I, then all of us in that "second Bush II category" should hold just as firm. As they used to chant in protest against the Vietnam War, "Hell, no, we won't go!"

Chutzpah Confirmed

Last December Stephen L. Johnson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), received the Chutzpah of the Week award on the basis of the following report from the Los Angeles Times by Richard Simon and Janet Wilson:

The Bush administration Wednesday denied California's bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, dealing a blow to the state's attempts to combat global warming and prompting an immediate vow from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to take the decision to court.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson denied the state's request to implement its own landmark law, noting that an energy bill signed by President Bush earlier in the day would go a long way toward reducing emissions throughout the United States. The bill provides the most significant increase in vehicle fuel economy standards in more than three decades.

The Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee decided that this case deserved investigation; and, as a follow-up post reported, there were plenty of people, including EPA staff members, who had things to say on the matter. The depositions have now been collected, and the House Committee has issued a report. According to Associated Press Writer Erica Werner, the conclusion appears to be that all the scientific expertise of the EPA staff had been brutally trumped by White House authority:

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency initially supported giving California full or partial permission to limit tailpipe emissions — but reversed himself after hearing from the White House, according to a report Monday.

The report by the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which cites sworn depositions by high-level EPA officials, amounts to the first solid evidence of the political interference alleged by Democrats and environmentalists since EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson denied California's waiver request in December.

Johnson's decision also blocked more than a dozen other states that wanted to follow California's lead and regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. It was applauded by the auto industry and supported by the White House, which has adamantly opposed mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

The good news is that those scientific voices have now been officially acknowledged by the House Democrats. The bad news is that it took half a year to make this much progress. This case thus serves as a harsh reminder of the extent to which the Executive Branch can get its way simply by waging exhaustive wars of attrition (and the environmental conditions keep getting worse).

Silence is Rhetorical

The last time I wrote about Ludwig van Beethoven's E-flat major Opus 7 piano sonata, it was in terms of what I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest." This was a reflection on the first concert that András Schiff had given in his performance of the complete cycle of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas. I had written about the "great profundity" of the silences that pervade the second movement of this sonata to such an extent that I had ignored the ways in which the silences in the third movement are equally effective, although in significantly different ways. I found myself returning to this matter yesterday morning when I attended a Graduate Piano Recital in the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which began with this sonata. As almost always seems to be the case with Beethoven, there is more to this music than first meets the ear (not to mention the eye reading the notes from the page).

On this occasion the first thing that struck me was how the movement was listed on the program: "Allegro - Minore." This is a ternary form movement whose structure is very much in the vein of the third movements of the Opus 2 sonatas that precede it; but, even in Opus 2, we see a shift in the "rhetorical stance" of this movement in the overall scheme of the sonata. In Opus 2, Number 1, the movement is listed as "Menuetto, allegretto;" and it serves as a nice acknowledgement of how Joseph Haydn, to whom the Opus 2 sonatas were dedicated, had advanced the Menuetto form. However, the other two Opus 2 sonatas label the third movement as "Scherzo," which I see as reinforcing a remark I had made at the time of Schiff's recital about the nature of his dedication:

Nevertheless, Haydn was using this own piano sonatas to explore those "compositional challenges;" so I think it makes sense to think about the Opus 2 sonatas as a response to Haydn's own activities. It is not that Beethoven is offering an homage but that he seems to be saying, "I see what you were getting at when you did it that way; but what do you think of this way?"

This shift from Menuetto to Scherzo was not unknown to Haydn. All of his Opus 33 string quartets, composed in 1781, substitute a Scherzo for a Menuetto; but, since, for example, we do not encounter this transformation in any of his symphonies, we should probably view those six quartets as an opportunity for experimentation. We can similarly assume that Beethoven was aware of the experiments and decided to try his had at them. However, when he got to Opus 7, he seemed more comfortable with dispensing altogether with a "form label," providing a tempo for the movement and distinguishing the middle section only by its shift to a minor key.

It is that middle section that particularly differentiates the movement from any expectations that "Menuetto" or "Scherzo" might induce; and I would not be surprised if it was because of that middle section that, in the concert in which he played this sonata, Schiff decided to play, as an encore, the first of Franz Schubert's D. 946 three piano compositions, which he did not call anything more than "Klavierstücke" (although the catalog by Otto Erich Deutsch also calls them "Impromptus"). This was one of Beethoven's first steps (if not the first of those steps) in going beyond the limiting constraints of traditional labels. We would experience the consequences of those steps in just about all the genres of his later compositions, and we would later experience Schubert taking those consequences to a new level.

From this point of view, Beethoven's use of pauses for an uneven segmentation of the outer sections of the third movement of Opus 7 provide a striking contrast to the sense of an ongoing drive in the middle section, whose "triplet dynamo" would later drive the first of the D. 946 Schubert compositions. Does the ear really hear this? Well, as I had observed in writing about Schiff's recital, the first real challenge is to achieve the right conditions under which the ear can "hear the silence," so to speak. I had written that this is not necessarily an easy matter in Davies Symphony Hall and reflected back on a similar problem I had experienced in the Herbst Theatre. The Conservatory Recital Hall, on the other hand, is more conducive to such listening. Not only is the space itself more intimate; but one can usually count on those who occupy the audience portion of the space to be more serious about their listening than those whose motivations may be more social than musical (putting things as politely as I can). Thus, yesterday morning's recital became my latest example of how it is that we learn to listen to music by listening to music under the best possible conditions.

Superstitious about Language

Paul Reynolds, world affairs correspondent for the BBC, has written a useful think piece for the BBC News Web site on the role of foreign policy in the coming Presidential election, contrasting the current position statements being delivered by John McCain and Barack Obama. He structured the piece in terms of McCain speeches directed to attack Obama and Obama responses that, in turn, attack McCain. Unfortunately, one of the Obama quotes invoked a haunting memory from my high school history days:

The American people are going to look at the evidence. We don't get a sense that this has been a wise foreign policy or a smart foreign policy or a tough foreign policy.

The memory was of a Democratic candidate who lost a Presidential election. The candidate was Al Smith; and he gave a famous (at least still in my high school days) speech attacking the policy of Prohibition. He is best known for the first sentence of that speech (to the extent that more people remember the sentence than remember that the speech was about Prohibition):

Let's look at the record.

He then confronted the American people with evidence (choosing my words from Obama's text) to demonstrate that a Constitutional Amendment that had been motivated by what may be called a "War Against Sin" had actually led to a significant increase in violent crime, much of which was directly related to the trafficking of goods that had been declared constitutionally illegal.

My point is that, compelling as Smith's speech was, the American people didn't look at the evidence. They were more preoccupied with fear. Prohibition was escalated to Constitutional authority through the zealous efforts of Protestant evangelists, who knew precisely how to cultivate fears, not only of sin and hell-fire but also of those who did not embrace their particular breed of Christianity. Smith was victimized by those fears not only by opposing Prohibition but by being Catholic. (In 1884, long before Prohibition became a Constitutional Amendment, the Republicans had already classified the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.")

One lesson from Reynolds' analysis is that things have not changed very much. The Republicans still know how to cultivate fear of rebellion and have reaped considerable political gain from transforming their predecessors' "War Against Sin" into a "War Against Terror." Romanism, on the other hand, has been replaced by Islam, particularly as embodied by the new linguistic barbarism of our culture, "Islamofacism." (Invoking The New Oxford American Dictionary, Wikipedia uses a less extreme characterization than I do, calling the word a "controversial neologism!") Thus, Reynolds offers a simple example of McCain's skill at fear-mongering:

The McCain campaign circulated this comment: "We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad."

In one sentence, John McCain linked three American foreign policy fears - Hamas, Iraq and Iran - and tried to isolate Mr Obama as unreliable on all three.

However, if good slogans come in threes, then the Republicans have been very careful about manipulating the third element. I would suggest that the issue of rum has now evolved into the issue of race. This is particularly evident in a post written last week by Doug Feaver for his dot.comments blog for The Washington Post. The post is a reflection on a report that had recently appeared on the front page of the Post's print edition, summarized by Feaver in his first paragraph:

Kevin Merida wrote a front-page story earlier this week reporting that Sen. Barack Obama's "phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president."

The Web version of that story accumulated 3300 comments in the time between its appearance (last Monday) and the time of Feaver's post (last Thursday). Feaver used his post to reproduce what he felt was a representative sample, neither offering any critical observations nor trying to draw any conclusions.

Reading his selection reminded me of the sorts of calls placed to C-SPAN's Washington Journal (which I listen to on XM, rather than watch on television). While this program gets its share of "oddball calls," it has a high proportion of listeners who deserve attention; but, what I like most is that C-SPAN provides separate call-in numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and independents. This provides an approximation (which, of course may be disguised) of the background of any caller who chooses to make a comment about race, whether it involves Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, or racially divisive language in political advertising. The Washington Post made no effort to identify the backgrounds or persuasions of the authors of all those comments it received; but we have already been exposed to accusations (which may or may not be valid) of Republican involvement in cultivating fear of race.

My point is that the Republican rallying standard of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" may now very well have been transformed into "Race, Islamofacism, and Terrorism" (even if it is no longer alliterative); and this new standard draws just as much strength from cultivating fear as the old one did in 1884. If Obama really believes that this standard can be pulled down because "The American people are going to look at the evidence," then he may be lacking sufficient respect for how formidable the force of well-cultivated fear can be. I would suggest that he and his strategists set aside some time to examine what were the most critical factors in Smith's loss to Herbert Hoover in 1928 and make sure that they do not find themselves bitten once again by those same factors.

A New Voice in San Francisco

I spent the better part of the day at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, since a Graduate Piano Recital at 11 AM was followed by a San Francisco Performances event for which I had purchased tickets at the beginning of the season. This latter performance was the final event in their "Young Masters Series," consisting of the San Francisco debut recital of mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard. Ms. Leonard certainly deserves to be called a "young master," since she has already made her Metropolitan Opera debut (as Stéphano in Charles Gounod's Roméo et Juliette) and has sung Zerlina in the Chicago Opera Theater production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni and will sing Cherubino this summer in the new Santa Fe Opera production of Le Nozze di Figaro. Nevertheless, the circumstances of her schedule make her new to San Francisco.

Her selection for a program was particularly interesting. For one thing all the selections fit within the span of a single century, although that century happened to begin in 1890. For another it was refreshingly polyglot, with songs in Spanish (Joaquin Nin and Manuel de Falla), German (Hugo Wolf and Arnold Schoenberg), French (Reynaldo Hahn), Russian (Serge Rachmaninoff), and English (Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Meredith Wilson, and Richard Rodgers). I tend to be skeptical about opera singers venturing into both cabaret songs and show tunes. However, Leonard did both (Schoenberg providing the cabaret repertoire) and pulled it off more than effectively, first by recognizing that these songs were not the same as the other "art songs" on the program and second by endowing her performance with a level of theatrical smarts that was neither too much nor too little.

Since some of that skepticism came from my recently recorded impressions of Heidi Melton's Schwabacher Debut Recital last month, I should also observe that Leonard did not have that problem of scale that had frustrated me at the Melton recital. The Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is on a scale comparable to the Temple Emanu-El auditorium (the site of Melton's recital); but Leonard had a good sense for how to project into this space without overwhelming it with an intensity intended for a full-sized opera house. Indeed, she was so good at maintaining a proper level of energy that she had enough strength at the end of the recital to give three encores, two of which featured music that she had prepared for Roméo et Juliette and Don Giovanni. Those theatrical smarts also cultivated a well-understood sense of the diversity of the program she had prepared, which made for a much broader sense of variety than I had experienced at the Melton recital.

When programs are so diverse, I tend to dwell, as I did in writing about Melton, on those selections that are personal "old favorites" (usually associated with memories of first hearing them at recitals during my concert-going days in Manhattan). The "old favorites" that Leonard offered to me were six selections from Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch (which I had the joy of hearing performed in its entirety at one 92nd Street Y recital) and Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (for which, at the latest count, I have two recordings). Leonard had an excellent feel for the Falla songs, which are definitely "art songs" rather than "popular songs," that feel being one of an almost impetuous spontaneity. There was less of that variety in the Wolf selection, but she still endowed each song with a distinctive personality. These "old favorites" helped whet my appetite for the works that were unfamiliar to me and left me hoping that Leonard will be returning to San Francisco for further performances in recital, with the San Francisco Opera, or with the San Francisco Symphony.

Commandment Chutzpah?

Since I do not particularly want to withdraw Carl Icahn's Chutzpah of the Week award (particularly since it was his first), I figure that, even though this is about as early in a week as you can get, President George W. Bush has already sealed up his ninth award for the coming week (unless he is trumped by something really outrageous). In terms of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic framework, the scene could not have been better. This is the week when the World Economic Forum again convenes, descending from its lofty Alpine summit to the sea level of Sharm El Sheikh on the coast of the Sinai wilderness. For those who accept the visions of Saint Helena, this is not very far from the mountain upon which Moses received the Ten Commandments (followed by a list of amendments long enough to fill three books of the Bible). So one has to wonder if, with his heavily faith-based orientation, Bush felt he was addressing the World Economic Forum in a voice that was channeling Moses (if not a more primary source). Here is how Al Jazeera English reported his speech:

George Bush, the US president, has called for continuing reform in the Middle East, saying democracy is the best way to nurture economic growth.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Egypt on Sunday, Bush also called on Arab nations to accept the existence of Israel and support the Palestinians.

In a tone critical of his oil-rich Gulf allies, Bush said Arab states must "move past their old resentments against Israel".

"All nations in the region must stand together in confronting Hamas, which is attempting to undermine efforts at peace with continued acts of terror and violence."

I suspect that Bush is about the only individual with enough chutzpah to take the Arab nations to task for "their old resentments" and then immediately rake up his own resentments against Hamas. Once again, as I have previously put it, Bush's words reflect the "'wisdom' of his faith-based heart;" and, given our current economic condition (not to mention his recent effort to beg for lower oil prices), this is as true of his proposition about democracy and economic growth as it is of his reflections of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. If anything good has come out of this latest burst of award-winning behavior, it has been the opportunity for the Al Jazeera staff to present their own analytical wisdom:

But his criticism of Hamas is likely to stir new controversy.

Hamas - shunned by Israel and the West since winning parliamentary elections in 2006 - has recently put forward its list of requirements for a truce with the Jewish state.

Egypt, a key US ally, has been acting as a mediator in the indirect talks between the two sides.

Amani Soliman, Al Jazeera's Middle East analyst said: "For Bush to come out and say this in Egypt ... puts the Egyptians in an uncomfortable situation."

"These people are sitting down to talk to the Israelis, albeit through Egypt."

I am hoping that such reporting will continue for the remainder of this World Economic Forum meeting. For my part I see it as a vast improvement over the media neglect of the social side of economic issues that was so prevalent in the coverage of the last meeting in Davos.

From Guantanamo to Bagram

This may turn out to be a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story. There is now a sign that those who have been calling for the closing of the US Military Detention Center at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba may have their wish granted, but not necessarily in the way they expected. Drawing upon its wire sources, Al Jazeera English has now released the following report about the other side of the world in Afghanistan:

The United States plans to build a new detention camp at Bagram military base in Afghanistan, a Defence Department spokesman has said.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed the move on Saturday, detailing that a planned 40 acre complex at the Bagram military base will soon be built.

Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright said: "I can confirm there are indeed plans to build a new detention facility at Bagram airfield."

The new facility is said to hold about 1,100 detainees and cost about $60million.

According to Wright, the move came as "our existing theatre facility is deterioriating", referring to a jail at Bagram currently holding about 630 alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured under the pretext of the so-called "war on terror".

Presumably the "existing theatre facility" is the one that held prisoners who were subsequently transferred to Guantanamo during the early stages of that "war on terror." Thus, this is not only a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story; it is also a what-goes-around-comes-around story:

The move is said to signal that Washington expects to hold detainees abroad indefinitely, despite claims from the White House that they want to shut down the US-run camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The New York Times newspaper also reported that the current Bush administration previously indicated it would transfer a large number of detainees to the custody of the Afghan government at a new prison outside Kabul, the capital, financed with US funds.

But US officials say the Afghan-run jail cannot handle all the Afghans detained by US forces or new prisoners taken amid an increasingly bloody fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the Times wrote.

As usual, our government is trying to get this story to strut its stuff in a positive light:

Wright also said the new facility would offer more room and more opportunity for vocational, educational and religious training.

Nevertheless, the Al Jazeera team did a good job of reminding us that the original Bagram facility was, in at lease some ways, a forecast of how we would come to know Guantanamo:

Former detainees allege they were beaten, chained in uncomfortable positions and stripped naked at the Bagram prison after it opened in 2002.

Two Afghan men died in US custody at Bagram in December 2002.

Once again we feel history repeating; and once again we see Karl Marx' claim (that the second time plays farce to the tragedy of the first time) is being refuted!

A Turn of Phrase from almost 150 Years Ago

The sentence is from George Eliot's novel, The Mill on the Floss (which had preoccupied me when I was thinking of questions with which to test Powerset), published in 1860. The speaker is Mr. Deane, uncle of the two protagonists of this novel, a junior partner at Guest & Co., a successful business in the exchange of commodities. I have already established the geographical scene through my questions about the river Floss and the town of St. Ogg's. What makes this particular text interesting is its temporal scene, which is the early rise of the industrial revolution:

It’s this steam, you see, that has made the difference; it drives on every wheel double pace, and the wheel of fortune along with 'em, as our Mr. Stephen Guest said at the anniversary dinner (he hits these things off wonderfully, consider he’s seen nothing of business).

It was that parallel between the metaphorical wheel of fortune and all the physical wheels speeded up by steam power that struck me, the idea that an increase in the pace of production also increases the rate at which "fortune" leads some to success and others to failure. The "Mr. Stephen Guest" cited by Deane is the son of the senior partner at Guest & Co., introduced to us by Eliot as one "whose diamond ring, attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure at twelve o'clock in the day are the graceful and odoriferous result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St. Ogg's." In other words, unlike other characters in this novel, he is one who does not need to worry about the pace of fortune, since fortune took care of him through the circumstances of his birth. Those circumstances allow him to have opinions to which others are obliged to attend (if not to heed). Today the finances endowed upon him at birth would probably be invested in an education from which he would emerge as an academic or a consultant ("inclusive or" again). The value of his opinions would most likely be determined by today's even faster pace of the wheel of fortune!

The Language of "Nakba"

This is the first year that I can recall general media recognition of the Arabic word "nakba" in conjunction with the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. The word, which means "catastrophe," has been part of general Palestinian vocabulary ever since so many of them were driven from their homes in 1948 as a consequence of that founding. The fact that it has taken sixty years for this word to emerge in media coverage of the ongoing contentious debate over the plight of such Palestinians is an indication of the extent to which those media have elected to tunnel their vision on Israel and its development. Evidence of just how contentious the debate is can be found by visiting the "Israeli-Palestinian history denial" entry in Wikipedia, which explicitly warns the reader, "The neutrality of this article is disputed," exercising a level of understatement traditionally associated with the British. (This is probably a case where Powerset Factz are most useful in helping the reader keep track of just how many points are being contested, and I have to wonder whether or not the debate might be assisted by providing such Factz for the Talk page.)

The good news is that things are changing. Both yesterday and today, Amy Goodman devoted all of the discussion portion of Democracy Now! to Nakba-based perspectives, which included those of Israelis. An example of the extent to which dialog over Nakba could be shared by Jews (including Israelis) and Palestinians can be seen in the biographical sketches for today's guests:

Benny Morris is seen as one of the most important Israeli historians of the 1948 war. From his first book 20 years ago, Morris has documented Israeli atrocities and the expulsion of the Palestinians. He was considered part of a group of so-called ‘revisionist’ historians who challenged conventional Israeli thinking about 1948. However, unlike his critics to the left, Morris did not consider the expulsions to be part of a systematic Israeli policy of transfer. His latest book published this March by Yale University Press is called “1948: A History of the First Arab Israeli War.” He joins me now here in the firehouse studio in New York.

We’re also joined by Saree Makdisi from Los Angeles. Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. His latest book is called ‘Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation’ out this month from Norton. His most recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times is titled “Forget the Two-State solution: Israelis and Palestinians Must share the Land Equally.”

And joining us on the telephone from Brussels is Norman Fimnkelstein [sic]. He’s the author of four books including “The Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict” and “Beyond Chutzpah.”

It was not long after this broadcast that I found myself reading an interview with Lila Abu-Lughod on SPIEGEL ONLINE (rather more mainstream than Democracy Now!), Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, whose father was the "well-known Palestinian political scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod." Abu-Lughod's perspective is a bit more nuanced than Makdisi's. Thus, she provides an excellent perspective on just how narrow, and therefore counterproductive, American policy has been in trying to defuse attitudes which, on the occasion of this anniversary, have risen to a very hot temper:

It's not a simple choice between one or two states. The original UN Partition Plan in 1947 that called for two states also called for much more equal ways of sharing the land of Palestine, for forms of economic union and for Jerusalem to have international status. People now look at the extent of Israeli control of Palestinian territory and resources, including water, and realize that any solution will have to involve more creative thinking.

In its own ironic way this discourse emphasizes my ongoing discontent with our distorted thinking about innovation: If we can only think about innovation in terms of new technologies and their contributions to economic growth, then we are allowing the sort of "creative thinking" that Abu-Lughod has in mind to atrophy. If ever there were data points that demonstrate the folly, if not peril, of trying to sweep inconvenient truths about the social world under the rug, so that they don't interfere with innovating new technologies, Palestinian Nakba provides them to us at their most persuasive.

"Privacy is a red herring"

When I was living in Palo Alto I would, from time to time, stick my head in at a meeting of the Churchill Club. These usually felt like gatherings of the Silicon Valley mutual admiration society of technology evangelists, all so full of hollow rhetoric that I had a hard time associating any of them with a former English Prime Minister known for both his oral and written command of the English language. I was so convinced that this organization must have been named after some other Churchill that I finally checked out the Club History Web page, where I was able to read the depressing truth:

The Club was founded by Rich Karlgaard, now publisher of Forbes magazine, and Tony Perkins, now Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring Communications. Together, Tony, Rich, and a group of friends from the Ed Zschau senate campaign, built an organization dedicated to producing programs where "important people say important things". As a Churchill Club speaker, then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton suggested that America needs a nation of Churchills-leaders rather than followers.

Why Churchill?

Perhaps there is no historical personage who would more heartily approve of this endeavor than the Club's namesake, Winston Churchill. Reared in the tradition of parliamentary democracy, Churchill's character and career personify the democratic values of open discourse and freedom as well as what is now called the "entrepreneurial spirit"-attributes epitomized in Churchill's own qualities of intelligence, creativity, risk-taking and boundless energy. His vision, perseverance, and wit provided the bridge necessary to bring together great leaders, opinions, ideas, and events. In fact, Churchill is just the sort of freely achieving personality that highlights democracy at its best. In America, we will gladly adopt him as our own and more particularly as the namesake of the Club.

The only comfort that I can now take is from a growing crop of historians who are taking a fresh look a Churchill and chipping away at his pedestal. Geoffrey Wheatcroft has examined four recent books on Churchill in the latest New York Review; and he describes the revisionist position as displaying him as "a warmonger or an incompetent blunderer." (I am not sure how meticulous Wheatcroft is with his formal logic, but I am willing to take this as an "inclusive or!") I do not think I encountered any warmongering on my visits to the Churchill Club; but there was always an ectoplasmic feel of the presence of the Ghost of Incompetent Blundering in the meeting room, if not up on the stage.

I have to wonder if anyone else has ever lumped The New York Review together with Ghostbusters in a single paragraph!

Thus, when I read about the Churchill Club from the safe remove of San Francisco, I am usually drawn to reports delivered in a cautionary tone. The most recent of these was filed last night by Charles Cooper as a post on his Coop's Corner blog for CNET News.com. He was reporting on a familiar Churchill Club bill of fare, a panel of "some of the A-List venture capitalists in Silicon Valley" discussing "the top ten tech trends." Despite my aversion to "top-dog thinking," I was interested in how Cooper chose to focus on a single contribution:

Most of what got offered up was unexceptional, but one comment in particular from Josh Kopelman may turn out to be one of the most prescient forecasts of the year. I'm actually hoping he's wrong because Kopelman's prediction scares the pants off me.

Kopelman presented a scenario for the rise of the "implicit" Internet. I'm simplifying, but he was referring to the vast web of personal data that until now has existed relatively undisturbed in different corners of the data world. For example, you may have made a reservation over the Internet one day, or bought a book from an online reseller on another. But that that data is going to get collected from heretofore separate "silos" as companies that figure out ways to break through the barriers and deliver information based on that implicit cyber data.

That shouldn't strike anybody as a pipe dream. It's already happening in small ways and it's an idea that VCs will be in a hurry to fund. Some, though perhaps not all. Roger McNamee, who also participated in the panel, pointed out the obvious elephant in the room. Not only might Facebook know what I'm doing, he said, "but the Chinese government also knows." True enough. And not just the Chinese. Any government.

Vinod Khosla, who also took part in the discussion, was less impressed by the obvious privacy objections. Sounding a lot like his former partner in arms at Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, he described this as a big opportunity, giving short shrift to nitpickers like me. "Privacy is a red herring," he said. "There are rules and laws and ways to address the privacy issue."

I definitely share Cooper's fear of Kopelman's vision, but I am even more dismayed by Khosla's casual dismissal of Cooper's misgivings. I was reminded of the last time that I had been rather painfully slammed into Khosla's proclamations, which was a little over a year ago when the MIT Club of Northern California organized a forum on the topic of solar technology. As I previously wrote, the event, which was sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric, was highlighted by the friction that ensued between Khosla, with his venture capitalist orientation, and Hermann Scheer, with his decades of experience in both the technical and social issues behind nuclear energy. Here is how I described the initial situation and its aftermath:

To understand the origins of the friction, we should first recognize that any event sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric will have, as its first priority, the business of energy. To warp my recently-cited Mencken adage, no one ever rose through the ranks of an energy company by obsessing over the consequences of a clearly sound business decision. (When the energy companies put out those advertisements that try to convince you otherwise by showing really cool nature footage, it helps to remember another adage: Whenever anyone says, "It's not about the money;" you know it's about the money!) So, when we read about what happened at this forum, we should put aside anything Al Gore may be trying to tell us about the future of the planet and recognize that this was a discussion about making good business decisions.

In that context Khosla, with his reputation for making some of the best business decisions in the history of Silicon Valley, was perfect for the forum. The fly in the ointment was Scheer, whose combination of technical and social expertise has earned him a seat in the German parliament, where he now feels more beholden to the German public than to any business institution. Thus, the heated dispute that ensued was not so much about energy policy as it was about the classic question of whether an enterprise is more accountable to its customers than it is to its shareholders, with Scheer serving as advocate for the customer and Khosla assuming the role of "shareholder par excellence."

The good news is that the debate has spilled over from verbal exchanges to text; and CNET News.com has provided a "venue" for the resulting texts. Khosla provided his position statement last week. His rhetorical strategy was to frame the argument as one between environmentalists and pragmatists. Personally, I think this put him in a weak position, since everything else he said then begged the question, "Pragmatic for whom?" After all, this would not have been the first time in history where what was pragmatic for the shareholders was not at all pragmatic (and perhaps even damaging) to the customers! This forced Scheer into the position of defending his own pragmatism from the customers' point of view, and that is basically what he did in responding to Khosla this morning.

I find it somewhat ironic that we should be revisiting the question of whether or not what is good for the shareholders is good for the general public at a time when the most forceful shareholder voice is coming from Carl Icahn; and, if I thought that the fate of my personal privacy lay in the hands of Icahn (as it might if he acquires the power to bend Yahoo! to his will), then I really would have the pants scared off of me (in Cooper's language). While I do not think that Khosla is as much of a brute as Icahn has demonstrated himself to be, I still feel it is dangerous to assume that "the privacy issue" can be dismissed with talk of "rules and laws and ways." Privacy is but one facet of the social world that the Internet has become, which means that the future of the Internet will depend as much on the innovation of "empowering technologies" as it will on the far more nebulous question of the behavior patterns that emerge from that empowerment. Thus, if "no one ever rose through the ranks of an energy company by obsessing over the consequences of a clearly sound business decision," I would hazard a guess that no successful venture investment was ever made based on obsessing over the behavior patterns it could or might induce or trying to identify, as I have done, which of those behaviors are "bad," "malicious," or "pathological."

There we have the paradox. If Khosla devoted as much attention to Deadwood as he did to the portfolio of venture funds that he manages, then I would not be surprised if the performance of his portfolio suffered. On the other hand, when voices informed from social perspectives (such as the one that the script of Deadwood developed about frontier mentality) raise objections, he should probably not take such a confident posture of dismissing them out of hand. Those voices are inquiring into a future beyond any specific return-on-investment goals; and, as Gore demonstrated in his own vivid way, if that future impacts the nature of our life styles and the planet on which we exercise them, then we ignore it at the peril of our own and future generations. After all, as I have previously put it, what is the good of having all the marbles, if you can't play with them?

Same-Sex Marriage in California

I usually get my daily hit of television news at 3 PM from BBC World Service Television, made available through one of the digital channels provided by KQED. The anchor desk for this broadcast is in Washington, which is usually consistent with where the most recent "action" has been. In the context of such an editorial organization, I am used to seeing not just California but also San Francisco specifically on their broadcasts; and I take a certain comfort when something happens "down the street" that received worldwide distribution from the BBC. So I shall be very curious to see if what happened about an hour ago a couple of blocks down the street that my unit overlooks will be included among today's story.

The event was the decision of the California Supreme Court on the legality of a state ban on same-sex marriage; and the decision (by a 4-3 vote) was to overturn the ban. For those interested in details, Demian Bulwa, Staff Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, provided this summary of how the seven justices voted:

-- Chief Justice Ronald George, 68, a Republican appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1991. Considered a moderate, he wrote today's 4-3 opinion striking down the state ban on same-sex marriage, which he said violates the "fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship."

-- Justice Joyce Kennard, 67, a Republican appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian in 1989. She is considered a moderate and joined the majority opinion legalizing same-sex marriage.

-- Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, 72, a Republican appointed by Wilson in 1994. She is considered a moderate and was part of the majority in today's ruling.

-- Justice Carlos Moreno, 59, the court's only Democratic appointee, having been named to the bench by Gov. Gray Davis in 2001. He is considered a moderate and voted with the majority in today's ruling.

-- Justice Marvin Baxter, 68, a Republican appointed by Deukmejian in 1990. He is considered a conservative and wrote a dissenting opinion in today's ruling that accused the court of substituting "its own social policy views for those expressed by the people."

-- Justice Ming Chin, 65, a Republican appointed by Wilson in 1996. He is considered a conservative and joined Baxter's dissenting opinion.

-- Justice Carol Corrigan, 59, a Republican appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. She is considered a moderate and wrote a separate dissent to today's ruling saying that while she did not think the court should invalidate the state ban on same-sex marriage, she believes that "Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages."

In addition the Associated Press reported Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as saying, "I respect the court's decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling."

My wife and I bought our San Francisco condominium in September of 2003. We were living in Palo Alto, but we had gotten tired of driving back and forth to all the events we wanted to attend in San Francisco. We decided to use Labor Day Weekend to go to some open houses in search of a pied-à-terre place. Instead, we found one with so much space that we figured it would serve our retirement needs; and this is now our primary residence.

I mention this as context because our first extended stay in San Francisco was during the "ski week" vacation at the school where my wife was teaching. This also happened to be the weekend of St. Valentine's Day. Those who know this history behind today's ruling know that on that weekend Gavin Newsom, who had just been elected Mayor of San Francisco, opened City Hall to perform same-sex marriages; and from our unit we could catch a glimpse of the line that had formed there. My wife asked naively if we should be bringing them coffee, until we went down and saw just how long the line was. We had also decided to go to the Castro movie theater to see The Battle of Algiers; and, as we had sort of anticipated, the whole of the Castro was one big wedding party. I cannot remember the last time I had experienced so much positive energy in a city; and I suspect that, even then, I was thinking ahead to leaving Palo Alto and making San Francisco my base of operations.

This is thus a news story that has been with me almost as long as I have had a residence in San Francisco. Over the intervening four years I have seen a lot of protests and a lot of celebrations. I have had many opportunities to write about something that happens very close to my doorstep; but that usually involves Davies Symphony Hall, the War Memorial Opera House, or other nearby performing spaces. Today the proximity was to a political issue that has been addressed (often more for worse than for better) at just about every level of government, from Federal all the way down to Municipal. My guess is that the celebratory mood I witnessed a little over four years ago will soon surface, and it will probably do so in sight of the window of the room from which I am writing this post!

Ichan's Way (and Chutzpah)

The current news about the future of Yahoo! and who is likely to control it is coming with sufficient rapidity that you almost have to refresh any account you read (such as the report provided by Reuters) after you have finished to check if anything has changed. Nevertheless, beneath all this turmoil lies the foundation that troubles just about any publicly traded business these days, and that foundation is a question of priorities. Whose satisfaction is most important? Once upon a time the "talk" (if not the "walk") was that customer satisfaction was always paramount, although one of the corollaries of the "quality movement" was the premise that highly satisfied workers constituted a prerequisite for highly satisfied customers. These days, however, it is hard to find a business where the raw profit-motive interests of the shareholders do not overrule the interests (not to mention actual satisfaction) of both workers and customers; and it is this realignment of priorities that has led Yahoo! into its current dire straits.

From one point of view, the current narrative may have begun as a game of chicken: Microsoft made an offer. Yahoo! did not like it. Yahoo! said so. Microsoft made a better offer. Yahoo! pondered it; and, right about the time we expected the game would end, Microsoft withdrew its offer. This brings us to the morning news and the three opening paragraphs of the Reuters report, which appear to have converged to a stable state:

Financier Carl Icahn on Thursday launched a proxy battle to force Yahoo Inc to reopen buyout talks with Microsoft Corp, saying the Yahoo board had acted "irrationally" in refusing its $47.5 billion offer.

Icahn harshly criticized Yahoo for the breakdown in talks, saying he accumulated 59 million shares and options in Yahoo and assembled a 10-member dissident board slate for election at Yahoo's annual meeting on July 3.

"It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft," Icahn wrote in an open letter to Roy Bostock, Yahoo chairman. "It is obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative than Yahoo's prospects on a stand alone basis."

While it is possible that both Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang brought a bit of the video gaming culture of their respective youths to their takeover confrontation, one certain thing is that Icahn does not share that culture. Here is how the Reuters report put it:

One analyst said Yang will face a rougher road dealing with Icahn, a blunt-spoken veteran financier known for bare-knuckle takeover tactics, than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

"If Jerry Yang had a tough time dealing with Steve, wait till he meets Carl Icahn," said Colin Gillis, a Canaccord Adams analyst.

If the description in that first paragraph is not convincing enough, consider the following paragraphs from Icahn's Wikipedia entry (complete with Powerset links, which include Wikipedia footnotes):

Icahn began his career on Wall Street in 1961. In 1968, he formed Icahn & Co., a securities firm that focused on risk arbitrage and options trading. In 1978, he began taking control positions in individual companies. He has taken substantial or controlling positions in various corporations including: RJR Nabisco, TWA, Texaco, Phillips Petroleum, Western Union, Gulf & Western, Viacom, Uniroyal, Dan River, Marshall Field, E-II (Culligan and Samsonite), American Can, USX, Marvel Comics, Revlon, Imclone, Federal-Mogul, Fairmont Hotels, Kerr-McGee, Time Warner and Motorola.

Icahn made extensive use of financier Michael Milken's junk bonds. After the junk bond and overall market bust in the early 1990s, Icahn played a lower-profile role in the business world, preferring to be less public in his dealings.

Icahn developed a reputation as a ruthless corporate raider after his hostile takeover of TWA in 1985.^[1] The result of that takeover was Icahn systematically stripping TWA of its assets and selling them off.^[2]

Speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Airline Consolidation on February 7, 2001, United States Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York spoke of “... an [airline] industry that once upon a time, not too long ago, was represented by two individuals whom I believe have the lowest of character and no integrity. Two individuals who intentionally bankrupted successful companies for their own personal gain. As many of you know, I am speaking of Carl Icahn and Frank Lorenzo.”

Chutzpah, of course, is not a matter of brute force. There has to be more to the story. Things get interesting with the next quotation from Gillis in the Reuters report:

It's not clear that he has a buyer. We think that Microsoft has really walked away.

Gillis' conjecture has been confirmed in a report by Andrew Ross Sorkin for The New York Times, which for some odd reason that probably has to do with the world the Internet has made has tomorrow's date on it. However, beyond asserting that "Microsoft has given no indication that it would be willing to return," Sorkin provides a bit of elaboration:

People included in Mr. Icahn’s proxy effort say he wants to propose a full slate so that he will have enough leverage to push the company into the arms of Microsoft. Getting Microsoft, or any other suitor, to make a bid for Yahoo would raise the share price and yield a profit for Mr. Icahn.

Still, Microsoft has given Mr. Icahn no assurance it will re-enter talks, these people said. Mr. Icahn has tried to approach Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, and his advisers through various channels.

We now see the chutzpah emerging in the first of these two paragraphs. Icahn is in the game for no other reason than to jack up the price of Yahoo! shares, whether or not that constitutes a fair present or potential valuation of a company that is in a lot of trouble but still has a lot to offer. Now I suspect there are those who would feel it is unfair to give Icahn a Chutzpah of the Week award for doing no more than exercising the "virtues of capitalism." I am not one of them. I prefer to cast my lot with Meeks, because I have a vivid memory of what happened to the airline industry. Yesterday I would not have put much of a chance on the software industry going the way of the airline industry; but now that Icahn has become a "player" I shall probably have to rethink my likelihood metrics!

Updike on Truth

Having defended my position on digital reading against John Updike's opinion of the virtual world, I am now emboldened to take him on over a more profound topic, that of truth. In his New York Review piece John Gross offered the following quotation from the new Updike collection, Due Consideration:

It is alarming to me that historical novelists openly brag that they have knowingly distorted the record, transposing dates and fudging conversations in the name of some supposed higher truth. But what truth can be higher than what actually did happen, moment by moment, incident by incident?

This is, to say the least, a touchy question; so I would like to begin with a slightly frivolous parry. In light of Updike's overall concern with questions of faith (one of the longer essays in his new book is entitled "The Future of Faith"), I would be curious as to the extent to which Updike's own faith is based on the two book of Chronicles in the Bible! More seriously, Updike has tripped himself over a fundamental principle of historiography, which is that the writing of history is more concerned with the interpretation of those moments and incidents than it is with cataloging them. However, interpretation is better served by the domain of narrative than it is by chronicling; and narrative may often be better served by distortions of the record (or, if you really want to fudge matters, examining the record through nonstandard lenses).

A fair amount of discussion over the recent HBO John Adams series concerned fidelity to the historical record. Thanks to The New Republic I was able to read remarks by the primary scriptwriter, and I did not find him bragging about distorting the record. He was open about what he did and readily with explanations based on the demands of delivering a narrative effectively through film or video. I might well share Updike's skepticism with any act of bragging; but I have not encountered it in my own experiences (which are admittedly not as extensive as his). Any account of history, essay or novel, must, of necessity, involve interpretation; and what matters most is the communication of the interpretation involved in the writing. As long as that is achieved without any efforts to deceive, I, for one, am happy with what I read.

Reading about Reading Books

Having just read John Gross' review of John Updike's Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism for The New York Review, I realized that I may have more reactions to Gross' account than I might have to the 703 pages of Updike's book! This is not to criticize Gross but to appreciate the extent to which those aspects of the book that interested him are most likely the ones that would also interest me. I am not sure I shall cover all of these areas, each with a separate post; but I know that I do want to address one that struck close to my own home in the domain of reading in the digital and physical worlds.

Here is how Gross characterizes Updike's general approach to reading:

Whatever the occasional remembrance of past reading that misfires, as in the James essay, there is something admirable about his [Updike's] insistence on the act of reading as a sensuous or even a sensual experience. "The average book," he writes, "fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback." Due Consideration abounds in such reminders of the book as love object, and of the extent to which physical associations can be part of a book's elemental appeal.

This should at least suggest that Updike is not particularly keen on "electronic text delivery," as Gross puts it. Gross elaborates on this point as follows:

Unlike computers, books lend substance to "our fickle and flighty natures"; without them, "we might melt into the airwaves, and be just another set of blips.

In case this sounds like the special pleading of a professional bookman, one should add that he sees our whole society as undergoing what he calls "the dephysicalization of experience." A word that was badly needed, "dephysicalization"—and one that Updike doesn't use in connection with books, incidentally, but in the course of setting out his objections to electronic poker.

I think that Updike has some good points. I would even go so far as to say that much of the comic writing that has appeared to ridicule those who seek "a life of the mind" involve plots that hinge on what happens when aspirations of virtual experiences collide with actual physical experiences. Thus, talk about "virtuality and its discontents" (an ironic allusion to the extent to which Sigmund Freud tried to ground his psychological analyses in physical phenomena) often seems to gravitate towards a specific discontent with dephysicalization.

Nevertheless, I have gone on record as an advocate of reading in the digital domain; and, for all of my agreement with Updike, I still hold to that position. My explanation is that I do not think that Updike's reading matter has been as susceptible to that caveat lector principle as mine. I would guess that Updike can assume that what he reads has been scrupulously edited; and he may even be able to make this assumption because, in many cases, he knows who those editors are. Most of us cannot make that assumption, even when, as I recently suggested, we pick up a newspaper. When I last addressed this situation, I argued that we need "to change our reading practices from passive to active;" but this is not to suggest that Updike is a passive reader. I have read enough of his criticism to know that one cannot develop ideas like those by reading at a strictly passive level. All I was arguing when I raised the point is that, with my own limitations, I need to rely on the Internet to be an effective active reader; and I developed some guidelines dealing with what it takes to do this. Furthermore, those guidelines are such that it is much easier to pursue them in the virtual world of cyberspace than it would be to do so in the physical world of even the best of libraries. Updike, on the other hand, does not have the resource problems that I have; indeed he probably has such a broad base of experience for what he reads that I doubt that he would care a fig for my guidelines!

Having said all that, I can still confess that I much prefer reading in the physical domain. In light of my current reading, I might be willing to try reading The Mill on the Floss on a new Kindle; but my guess is that, after a few pages, my hands would be itching for me to restore that comfortable feel of my Signet Classic paperback! At the very least that physicality conveys, even if ever so slightly, a sense of the progress I am making as I read.

On the other hand, if I were reading Kant and would benefit considerably from having a diagrammatic representation of each sentence I encountered, then digital support would probably matter more to me than a subliminal sense of progress!

Anticipating the Midsummer Mozart Festival

The Midsummer Mozart Festival Ensemble gave a pre-season preview as part of the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco. The program of chamber music offered some interesting perspectives on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his times. Most interesting may have been Johann Wendt's 1792 arrangement of Mozart's opera, Die Zauberflöte, for flute, violin, viola, and cello, the same ensemble for which Mozart composed his K. 285 and K. 298 quartets. In the remarks he delivered after this work was performed, George Cleve, who directs the Midsummer Mozart Festival, noted that Wendt had arranged almost all of the opera; but only eight selections were performed, which gave a good illustration of when Wendt had to apply his own sense of adaptation over more direct transcription. While it was easy enough to enjoy the "opera without words" experience, anyone familiar with the opera would probably miss the rich spectrum of sounds that could only be provided by the orchestration Mozart had originally conceived. Nevertheless, as Cleve observed, before the age of recording, this was often the only way one could experience this part of Mozart's repertoire, unless one were in a city where the opera was regularly performed; and certainly the sound made for a good fit in the Old St. Mary's Cathedral.

The greater challenge, ironically, was the K. 478 G minor piano quartet, at least on acoustic grounds. St. Patrick's Church, where more than half of the Noontime Concerts™ presentations used to take place, had an altar area that was more accommodating to the presence of a grand piano. The space in Old St. Mary's could not support the usual layout for a piano quartet, with the strings in front of the piano, all within the line of sight of the pianist (and each other). At this performance the piano was behind violinist Mariya Borozina, who directly faced violist Elizabeth Prior-Runnicles with cellist Dawn Foster-Dodson between them. The piano lid was raised to full-stick level; and I suspect that pianist Miles Graber had major eye contact problems. However, what they could not achieve by sight, they seemed to achieve quite effectively by ear; and, while I was worried that the piano would overwhelm the three string players, the whole performance was excellently balanced (an element of performance to which I have become more sensitive recently).

The last time I wrote about K. 478, it was about how it tends to have a better reputation than Mozart's other piano quartet, K. 493; so I concentrated on why K. 493 should not be dismissed lightly. Still, K. 478 probably deserves its reputation for a variety of reasons. With my Brahms listening experience so recent, I was particularly attuned to Mozart's approach to that concept of prolongation that was so important in Heinrich Schenker's studies of musical form. In several of the Mozart compositions I have practiced, I noticed that he did not always throw a lot of weight behind what is called the "development" portion of a sonata-form movement; and, in several cases I found that the development was little more than a "breather" before recapitulating the expository material. On the other hand Mozart used this recapitulation as an opportunity for further development, somewhat along the lines that Brahms would later take in his first symphony, where the allegro portion is a prolongation of the introductory material.

I tried to dig up some material that would determine whether or not this was the first time Mozart approached a sonata-form movement this way. However, the only innovative credit that this work gets is that it is generally recognized as the first work for piano and string trio in which the string voices are as important as the piano's. On the other hand this is a work from 1785 Vienna that was composed shortly after the six string quartets that Mozart had dedicated to Joseph Haydn. The conventional way in which Mozart is compared with Haydn in exemplified by a passage from a text by Homer Ulrich that was incorporated by Louis Biancolli in his Mozart Handbook:

Haydn was a master of the unexpected. His theme often recur in an unorthodox fashion; occasionally, when their return has been prepared for in the usual way, they do not reappear at all. Mozart was not given to shocking or surprising his listeners.

Needless to say, it is absurd to make this claim of the last of those six "Haydn" quartets. If anything, as I have previously observed, Mozart's experiments with dissonance may have even inspired Haydn to perform similar experiments in Die Schöpfung! So it would not surprise me if, with Haydn's inventiveness in mind, Mozart would have decided, "hot on the heels" of those string quartets, to experiment with a recapitulation that bore some "family resemblance" to what one tended to hear during development. This is, of course, pure speculation; but, for better or worse, is seems to have been brought on by the way in which the Midsummer Mozart Festival Ensemble chose to shape their performance of K. 478!

Of course Ulrich's observation comes from a book he published in 1948 and more contemporary minds (Joseph Kerman comes to mind immediately) have no trouble viewing Mozart as a radical for his times in many ways. Indeed, this view has become the norm in most of the Mozart performances we are now likely to hear, which is why the annual Midsummer Mozart Festival always promises to be an exciting and stimulating affair. If Bird still lives for those who make bebop their primary jazz diet, then Mozart is just as alive for whose of us who still delight in the classical repertoire!

The Powerset Adventure Continues

I was pleased to see that my recent Powerset experiments attracted the attention of Powerset Product Manager Mark Johnson, even if his comment appeared only on Net News Publisher, rather than on this site! Most important was that he called attention to a Powerset feature that I had not really explored and that had received only a passing reference in Eric Auchard's Reuters report:

Powerset offers richly annotated ways for searching inside Wikipedia entries to find related concepts. Called "Factz", these related ideas generate outlines, summaries and automated answers to users' questions.

I must confess that, when I first encountered this feature while running my experiments, I found it very appealing. I have long believed that, when faced with the challenge of coming up to speed in a new area, it is good to have a view of the topic that gives a general sense of the content and how that content relates to other areas. If you are familiar with any of those other areas, they may provide you with your best individual approach to getting familiar with the new material. When I was doing some research in this area, I spent some time examining those "dummies" and "idiots" guides and appreciated how well they provided this kind of perspective on the subject matter; and I conjectured that it was such a perspective that had made those publications so successful. Thus, my first impression of the Powerset Factz was that they were pursuing the same strategy but (at least in the material available for testing) on the smaller scale of Wikipedia articles. So, since Johnson's comment encouraged me to play around with Factz, I decided to do so in the setting of my original test set of questions.

I began, as Johnson had suggested in his comment, with the Factz display associated with the Wikipedia article for George Eliot. It was certainly easier to skim than the article itself, but I suspect that I would have found many of the entries confusing without some personal background knowledge about Eliot. (Actually, with the background knowledge I had, some of the Factz were still confusing; and I suspect that some of them would confuse my wife, who holds a Master's degree in English Literature from New York University, where she had to so some pretty strenuous work in the area of Victorian literature!) Faced with what we might call "the dummies/idiots challenge" (without making any assumptions about the sort of technology I might be able to use), I probably would have written a few introductory paragraphs (not like the two that begin the Wikipedia article, which are valuable in their own way) that would encompass a higher-level classification of all of those Factz and, like the Factz, would include hyperlinks into the body of the article.

Note that in this case I was reading the article on Eliot, rather than the one on The Mill on the Floss; so I was looking at material I had not read when I performed my experiments yesterday. Nevertheless, the questions of whether or not Eliot's geographical names were fictitious and, if so, whether they had "real" models (as Marcel Proust's locations did) remained unresolved. The Factz did help me home in on that portion of the Eliot article that discussed The Mill on the Floss; but, as I pointed out yesterday, this was a situation in which the answer to my question was beyond the scope of the content that Wikipedia provided.

My next exploration involved the Factz provided for the Johann Sebastian Bach entry. In this case I was pleased to find "theology informs structure" among the Factz under the "Style" heading. This was basically the concept I was getting at in the last of my test questions, "Who tried to analyze the music of Bach in terms of religious interpretation?" Unfortunately, the author of the Wikipedia entry did not explicitly credit Albert Schweitzer with identifying or promoting this structural insight. Indeed, by doing a text search I discovered that Schweitzer's name only appeared among the References and there under the heading of "Earlier scholarship," along with Philipp Spitta and Johann Nicolaus Forkel, both of whom are so much earlier that Schweitzer's text is almost an outlier (although he might also count as an outlier in the "Modern scholarship" section).

This brings me to the question that I had initially formulated incorrectly, the one test case in which AskWiki prevailed (probably accidentally) by figuring out that I was asking about the general algebraic solution for quintic, rather than cubic, equations. Since Johnson had suggested that I did not need to state my queries in natural language, I decided to type "algebraic solutions" into Powerset. This only gave me a list of Wikipedia articles without any Factz, but I continued my search by clicking on the "Timeline of algebra" link in the first ten hits. This entry also did not have any Factz; but that did not surprise me, since it was already in summary form. Down at the bottom of the timeline I found two entries relevant to my question. The entry for 1824 was:

Niels Henrik Abel proved that the general quintic equation is insoluble by radicals.

The one for 1832 was:

Galois theory is developed by Évariste Galois in his work on abstract algebra.

This led me to guess that Abel had achieved his result without using Galois theory, because Galois had not yet developed it; so I decided to consult the Abel entry. Here I did find facts, but none of them addressed any questions concerned with algebraic solutions of equations. It was only by skimming the entry that I found the following text in the "Career" section:

While learning languages, Abel published his first notable work in 1824, Mémoire sur les équations algébriques ou on démontre l'impossibilité de la résolution de l'équation générale du cinquième degré (Memoir on algebraic equations, in which the impossibility of solving the general equation of the fifth degree is proven). While others were questioning ‘what is the solution’, Abel asked ‘is there a solution’ and he proved the impossibility of solving quintic equation in radicals in 1823 (see Abel–Ruffini theorem). This work was in abstruse and difficult form, in part because the page count was severely restricted in order to save money on printing. A more detailed proof was published in 1826 in the first volume of Crelle's Journal.

This time I was able to visit the Abel-Ruffini theorem entry with a Powerset enhancement; and, sure enough, the "Galois connection" (pun intended for the specialists) was there among the Factz! Through those Factz I was able to dismiss an incorrect conjecture, which was that Ruffini had simplified Abel's "abstruse and difficult" proof with the benefit of Galois theory. Actually, Ruffini had attempt his proof in 1799; but it had a gap that Abel had filled! The applicability of Galois theory only surfaced in 1885, which I learned from the final paragraph of the Wikipedia text.

All this leads me to conclude that my "personal jury" is still out on just how much benefit the Factz feature provides. I think that, if I want to be fair, I need to give it more opportunities when I am trying to use Wikipedia more seriously, which is mostly when I am writing my music posts, since that is where I have found Wikipedia to be most reliable for my own needs. I could see that I might have drawn upon the Factz provided for the Francesco Cavalli entry, even if no Factz had been supplied for the specific article on Egisto. In other words it is time for me to start thinking about Powerset in terms of my day-to-day writing activities, rather than in terms of the results of contrived experiments!

What AskWiki Told Me

A former colleague suggested that I run the seven questions I had put to Powerset by AskWiki, which is also trying to take a semantic approach supported by the Wiki culture of community involvement. The extent of my own involvement was to classify the answer I received (if I received one) as Correct, Incorrect, or Uncertain. This seemed like a fair test, since it was again based on content available through Wikipedia.

The reason I inserted that parenthetical remark is that my first two questions (Where is the Floss? Where is St. Oggs?) did not receive any answer. I realized that I had not compared my Powerset results with keywords submitted to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search for "Floss" took me to the "Embroidery thread" pages (with a pointer to the "Dental floss" page); but the St. Oggs search provided several pointers, the first of which was to the page for The Mill on the Floss. So I am not quite sure why AskWiki choked on both of these questions.

On the other hand AskWiki did something that Powerset did not do at all. It reminded me that one of my questions (Why is there no general algebraic solution for cubic equations?) was wrong! It is not cubic equations that are unsolvable but quintics! AskWiki was clever (sic) enough to figure out the question I had wanted to ask and answered that the insolvability of quintic equations was the result of the Abel-Ruffini theorem. This theorem has its own Wikipedia page, which I was able to consult to confirm that this theorem was, indeed, based on Galois theory; so I took a fair amount of satisfaction in reporting this as a Correct answer!

The remaining answers were all reported as Incorrect. Here is a brief summary of why they were wrong:

1. How many operas did Cavalli write? I was given a single sentence about the history of opera that did not even mention Cavalli.
2. When did Brahms write his first string quartet? I was given a sentence from a description of A German Requiem, which at least got the right composer!
3. Who were the Smithfield martyrs? I was given a pointer to the Wikipedia page for Smithfield in Cumbria.

This leads me to reinforce that "sic" qualifying my use of the adjective "clever." I have no idea why AskWiki gave me an answer consistent with my personal cubic/quintic confusion; but I strongly suspect that it was a fluke. Nevertheless, it does point out another subtlety of that social side of communicative action, which is that the question we ask is not always the question we had intended to ask. Conversation thus not only provides a context for understanding the question being asked, as I had posited in my previous post, but also affords the opportunity to "fine tune" the question before making the commitment to provide the most useful answer. This is an aspect of conversation that Erving Goffman studied extensively and offers further perspective on the limitations of just how "sharp" that "semantic edge" can ever be.

Playing with Powerset

If we really want to be informed by the resources available through the Internet, beyond the basic need for getting straightforward answers to straightforward questions, to what extent will we be able to benefit from a "semantic edge?" Put another way, can semantic analysis assist us in finding information resources that we might not find (or find only with considerable time and effort) by figuring out the right keywords to use in poking Google? Since this is not a straightforward question, we are unlikely to find a satisfactory answer in the near future; but, thanks to a Reuters report by Eric Auchard, we now have the opportunity to get a feel for what such a semantic edge might provide. This feel comes from the technology of Powerset, a start-up, which, according to Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, "could become the basis of a Google-killer."

Auchard reported that Powerset has taken its first step towards challenging Google over the content of the entire World Wide Web with a semantic analysis of the contents of Wikipedia:

Powerset on Sunday unveiled tools for searching Wikipedia that use conversational phrasing instead of keywords, marking the first step of its challenge to established Web search services such as Google.

Powerset's technology breaks down the meaning of words and sentences into related concepts, freeing users from always needing to type the exact words they want to find.

The closely watched Silicon Valley start-up is offering a way of searching millions of entries in Wikipedia's online encyclopedia, helping users find detailed answers to questions rather than isolated links that require further research.

For example, a user who wants to know how many wives King Henry VIII had (six, or two, depending on your definition of marriage) can find an answer via Powerset's service at tinyurl.com/5qpcr9/.

That hyperlink is "live;" and it allows you to see for yourself the results of the Henry VIII question. Fortunately, it also allows you to try out and explore the tool with questions of your own.

Back in 2004, when Tom Malone was flogging his Future of Work book, he was arguing that Wikipedia was a significant indicator of the future of work. I had at least one colleague who basically believed that Wikipedia content was only worth consulting if Google gave it a high enough page rank, but I decided to see how much satisfaction I could get out of playing with Wikipedia. Since I was deep into reading Marcel Proust at the time, I decided to ask it about "Combray" and was pleasantly surprised to read an account of how the city of Illiers, where Proust had spent much of his youth, had changed its name to Illiers-Combray in honor of the author. This gave me the confidence to try "Balbec;" but that one came up dry. Nevertheless, I am happy to report that I would have better luck today. There is no entry for Balbec; but there are pointers to three other entries, one of which is for Cabourg, which was the model for Balbec, as Illiers was for Combray.

This time I began in a similar spirit of playfulness, which led to my trying to home in on questions that would get me "beyond keywords." Here is the series of questions I put to Powerset:

1. Where is the Floss?
2. Where is St. Oggs?
3. How many operas did Cavalli write?
4. When did Brahms write his first string quartet?
5. Who were the Smithfield martyrs?
6. Why is there no general algebraic solution for cubic equations?
7. Who tried to analyze the music of Bach in terms of religious interpretation?

The first two questions were motivated by the fact that this time I am deep into George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; and, for both of these questions, I was duly directed to the Wikipedia entry for the novel. (However, it appears that Powerset does not know about capitalization, since the highest-ranking articles for the first question had to do with dental floss!) What was not resolved, however, was whether or not the Floss and St. Oggs were as fictitious as Combray and Balbec. On the other hand I realized that Wikipedia may not have had the resources to answer that question, and I could not fault Powerset for not answering a question that Wikipedia could not resolve.

This led to the Cavalli question, since Wikipedia had served me so well when I recently wrote about him. Powerset easily homed in on the sentence from Wikipedia that provided a direct answer to my question; so, on the basis of yesterday's post (which was not served by Wikipedia while I was writing it), I formulated the Brahms question and got an equally direct answer. The Smithfield question goes back to George Eliot, who uses it for one of her best throw-away jokes. I was talking with my wife about it, and we both realized that neither of us knew when heretics had been burned in Smithfield. We had both assumed that these martyrs were Catholic victims of either Henry VIII or Oliver Cromwell; so I appreciated being informed that they were actually Protestants, executed under the reign of Queen (Bloody) Mary I and were properly known as the Marian martyrs.

At this point I realized that I had been asking questions that could have just as easily been answered by feeding judiciously formulated keywords to Google. So I tried harder to come up with a question that could not be so easily addressed. I did not have a particularly good answer to my sixth question in mind, except for the faint memory that it had something to do with Galois Theory. Powerset gave me all sorts of answers about the history of algebra and geometric solutions to cubic equations without any mention of Galois. This led me to probe Wikipedia directly (including the entry for Galois); and I discovered that the information was not in the sorts of places I would have expected it to be.

The final question brought me back to yesterday's post and my acknowledgement of Albert Schweitzer. I realized that I did not want to use his name in the question, since that would lead to searching his Wikipedia entry. Rather, I wanted a question for which his name was the answer. Furthermore, having reviewed the Wikipedia entry for Schweitzer, I knew that the answer was in there. Unfortunately, he was not in the first ten (out of 624) hits returned by Powerset. In fact, the answer was in the twentieth hit, which is pretty far down the list for a relatively straightforward answer, particularly in light of the number of irrelevant hits that pushed it to that level.

On the basis of this unsystematic experience, I would say that the current state of the art of the "semantic edge" is far from a Google-killer. While it will probably get better, there are still some questions as to how valuable it will prove to be and under what circumstances. To a great extent I would say that my experiments were not particularly realistic, which also constitutes a criticism of the interface through which those experiments were performed. As was the case with Smithfield, questions do not pop out of the blue; rather, they arise in conversations, which means that the best understanding of what it being asked almost always requires accounting for the context of the conversation. Put another way, it is probably unrealistic to try to "kill Google" through the same interface that has served Google so well.

This thinking, however, may lead Powerset in a direction it is not prepared to go. It would be a departure from answering a question in isolation to inferring a context from an ongoing discourse and providing (if not volunteering) information relevant to that context. This goes beyond semantic theory to many of the social aspects of a "theory of communicative action," such as that developed by Jürgen Habermas. Such an endeavor, unfortunately, would require long-range planning far beyond the scope of any research funding budget, let alone the timetables of venture capitalists!

Beyond the Long Shadow of History

Once again I find myself addressing the question of whether Johannes Brahms deserves to be stuck in the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven (and possibly others, as I shall try to explore in this post). This question is usually challenged on the basis of Arnold Schoenberg's "Brahms the Progressive" essay; but I think it may be better approach through dialectical synthesis. Dying in Vienna on April 3, 1897, much of Brahms work may best be viewed as both retrospective and prospective at the same time, recognizing, as Abraham Lincoln did, that we cannot escape history while facing the future with neither fear nor defiance. This afternoon's San Francisco Symphony concert (along with the pre-concert chamber music) at Davies Symphony Hall provided an excellent opportunity to appreciate this synthetic nature of Brahms' compositional technique. I shall also try to approach what the synthesis entails by once again trying to invoke the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The last time I attempted to do this, I was writing about Elliott Carter, who is generally regarded as progressive unto an extreme but who, nevertheless, does, have a retrospective side, as I learned from the master class that Robert Mann taught last February at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. By way of a disclaimer, however, I should begin by recognizing that, every time I attempt a trivium-based exercise, my "musical interpretations" of logic, grammar, and rhetoric tend to shift. Remember, this is a "rehearsal studio;" so my ideas in this direction are still progressing without necessarily converging.

In considering the music of Brahms, the issue of logic is probably best grounded in the ways in which he deals with overall structure. In is interesting to observe that his first string quartet (the pre-concert offering) appears relatively late in his catalog (Opus 51, Number 1), which means it was preceded by both of his string sextets (Opera 18 and 36). This may have much to do with the fact that the string quartet, itself, cast a very long shadow, not just from Beethoven and the experiments he was pursuing with his "late" quartets but also from Franz Schubert. The Opus 51 quartets were published in 1873, about 45 years after Schubert had died; and even the most enthusiastic concert-goers do not hear very much from the string quartet repertoire between Schubert's last quartet and Brahms' first. From a structural point of view, however, Opus 51, Number 1, does not advance much beyond the structural legacy of the Schubert quartets.

The same cannot be said of the two works on the program of the concert, itself, the second piano concerto in B-flat major, Opus 83, and the fourth symphony, Opus 98. In this case the retrospective view of the Beethoven piano concertos has been advanced by Robert Schumann's experiments in a more integrated approach; but Brahms breaks with both Beethoven and Schumann in a variety of interesting ways. The work is four movements long, none of the movements provide an opportunity for an improvised cadenza, there is no unifying thematic thread, and the ordering of the movements borders on anticlimactic. The first movement is monumental in temporal scale and in the sounds elicited from both piano and orchestra, followed by a highly-charged but shorter scherzo, followed by an Andante that continues to explore beyond conventional forms, and concluding with an Allegretto grazioso, so "grazioso" as to leave the listener wondering what all the preceding bombast had been about. My personal view of this strategy is that Brahms was having a bit of a joke with his audience, particularly those who had found his first piano concerto to be more that a bit "too much." He claimed that this concerto would be on a bit more modest scale, but he did not really make good on his promise until the final movement!

The retrospective view of the symphony, on the other hand, encompasses Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, not to mention other nineteenth-century symphonists, such as Felix Mendelssohn. Indeed, much of nineteenth-century music history can be cast in terms of experimentation with symphonic form; but in this case Brahms' retrospective view reaches further in the past. As a subscriber to the first publication of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach, he chose to complete his symphony with a passacaglia, particularly the final movement of the BWV cantata (Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich). Needless to say, Brahms approach to his passacaglia is less an homage to Bach and more an indication of the progressive tendencies that so interested Schoenberg; but this takes us out of the domain of logic.

I continue to approach grammar, as I did when I was trying to apply the trivium to Elliott Carter, as a model of syntactic structure through which one can "sort out" the embellishing and the embellished. When I first proposed this approach, I wrote the following:

In just about any domain there is usually considerable argument over just what constitutes an appropriate structural representation. My own musical background is one that honors the spirit (if not always the letter) of Heinrich Schenker: A structural explanation is one that sorts out the embellishing from the embellished. This is a tradition that goes all the way back to (at least) C. P. E. Bach's systematic study of ornamentation; and Schenker's greatest insight was that ornaments could, themselves, be ornamented (which also happens to be the fundamental precept behind bebop). In Schenker's language the greatest obligation that a performer has to a listener is to make it clear where the background is and what sets the foreground off from the background.

Schenker introduced the terms "prolongation" to denote his generalization of the process of ornamentation; and he had a very high opinion of Brahms as a master of prolongation (so high that he as much as believed that, in a somewhat Hegelian manner, the music of Brahms would constitute "the end of music history," which is my phrase, not Schenker's). In this respect the passacaglia of the fourth symphony amounts to a new experiment in prolongation in symphonic form, but most of the second piano concerto constitutes a similar experiment with the formal foundations of a concerto. Personally, I find less such experimentation with prolongation in the Opus 51 string quartets (both of them); but I also feel that Brahms first began to hit his stride with prolongation several years later when he was putting his finishing touches on his first (Opus 68) symphony. Both the first and last movements of this symphony have a slow introduction (Un poco sostenuto and Adagio), very much an acknowledgement of symphonic structural tradition; but that tradition is shattered when the ear discovers that, in both movements, the Allegro that follows the introduction is basically a vastly extended prolongation of the material "introduced" by the introduction! Brahms does not repeat this trick in his later symphonies but instead explores other ways to shape large structure through prolongation, as he did in the second piano concerto. On the other hand I have long entertained the hypothesis that the eighth symphony of Gustav Mahler, which dwarfs the scale of any of Brahms' symphonies, is structured in such a way that the second movement amounts to a Schenkerian prolongation of the first. (The durational ratio of these two movements is such that the second movement is approximately three times longer than the first.)

Rhetoric remains the most difficult to grasp of the trivium disciplines, perhaps in part because contemporary education does not give it the attention accorded to logic and grammar. I continue to view rhetoric in terms of how the composer communicates with the listener, which means it is also a guide to how the execution of performance can realize that communication. This approach has worked for me for most genres of "serious" music and for much of the jazz repertoire (and most of the jazz that occupies my personal listening time). I have written in the past about "rhetorical devices" applied by Beethoven and Joseph Haydn in terms of the use of melodic figuration; and, since Albert Schweitzer took a similar approach to the music of Bach, I feel pretty comfortably with this method. Melodic figuration is certainly a major feature of Brahms' first string quartet; but I would also claim that both the second piano concerto and the fourth symphony engage techniques of orchestration for rhetorical purposes. Thus, the "forward progress" through the passacaglia in the fourth symphony is as much a matter of the development of orchestral richness as it is one of Schenkerian prolongation applied to the iterated passacaglia "theme." Similarly, there is a high level of orchestral interplay in the second piano concerto on a variety of scales; and the use of a solo cello in the third movement is, in many ways, a rhetorical reflection of the third movement of the Opus 60 piano quartet, which I recently described as "a piano concerto for 'very small orchestra.'" (The solo cello is also a key rhetorical element in the third movement of Robert Schumann's Opus 47 piano quartet.)

It would appear, then, that this one concert covered so much of Brahms' ground that it was practically a festival unto itself! Nevertheless, I plan to come back to hear the Master's German Requiem, which is a "family favorite" in our household. In many ways that is a decidedly different piece of work, but it will be interesting to see how my listening will be affected by today's experience.

That's the Point, Isn't It?

One of the better cases for withdrawing from Iraq may have been made (inadvertently?) yesterday in a report that James Risen filed for The New York Times. The basic argument, complete with a zinger of a punch line, resides in his opening paragraphs:

Last fall, Blackwater Worldwide was in deep peril.

Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.

But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.

The State Department has just renewed its contract to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for at least another year. Threats by the Iraqi government to strip Western contractors of their immunity from Iraqi law have gone nowhere. No charges have been brought in the United States against any Blackwater guard in the September shooting, either, and the F.B.I. agents in Baghdad charged with investigating whether Blackwater guards have committed any crimes under United States law are sometimes protected as they travel through Baghdad by Blackwater guards.

The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. Officials say only three companies in the world meet their requirements for protective services in Iraq, and the other two do not have the capability to take on Blackwater’s role in Baghdad. After the shooting in September, the State Department did not even open talks with the other two companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, to see if they could take over from Blackwater, which is based in North Carolina.

“We cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. “If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.”

Kennedy has shifted the discourse away from moral questions as to whether or not we went into Iraq on the basis of deliberately fabricated evidence and arguments and whether or not we are remaining in Iraq for equally unfounded reasons to a question that lies behind the management of just about any operation, in peace or war and in the private or public sector: Do we have the resources? Put another way, the bottom line behind our "adventure" in Iraq is the bottom line of how we are managing the budget (and, for that matter, sustaining that budget by indebting the country to other countries with whom we also seem to have moral questions and arguments).

This not mean that we should pick up and leave Iraq because we cannot afford to be there, just as it does not imply that leaving Iraq will immediately get us out of our current morass of debt. It simply means that we should be paying more attention to the question of what we have the resources to do and planning our actions accordingly. Ironically, this is the same logic that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tried to invoke as an excuse for why our armed forces in Iraq were so poorly equipped; but that is an interesting aspect of the fine art of argumentation. Lawyers far better than I recognize the value of when a warrant for a claim can be taken at face value and then used to refute that very claim. Under Secretary Kennedy has provided the opportunity for just such a volte-face in the debate over our presence in Iraq; and, to continue the polyglot rhetoric, this could be a significant carpe diem occasion!

Reports from and of the Echo Chamber

Max Rodenbeck's piece in The New York Review on Robin Wright's new book, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, provides a helpful reminder that the Washington Echo Chamber is still with us. Recall that it was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson that seemed to have coined the "Washington echo chamber" phrase in a piece that prompted me to accuse him of demonstrating the echo chamber effect rather than transcending it. I therefore find it relevant that Rodenbeck begins his review by introducing Wright to us as "The Washington Post's chief diplomatic correspondent." He also makes it a point to inform us that she takes her work "into the field," rather that working strictly from her desk with the aid of an Internet-based "window on the world."

There is therefore an almost poignant sense of irony in the conclusion of Rodenbeck's article, which basically faults Wright for being as susceptible to the Washington Echo Chamber as I accused Robinson of being:

In many ways Dreams and Shadows is an admirable book. Yet despite Wright's determination to be objective and her skill at her craft, there is something unsatisfying about the approach to journalism that she represents here. Perhaps it is a symptom of listening to the world from Washington, where the rumble of think tanks, the clatter of talk shows, and the whine of politicians synthesize into an agenda that often clashes with the sounds of the Middle Eastern jungle. Wright does try to challenge that agenda, yet does not really escape being informed by it.

She takes pride, for instance, in relying on local sources rather than distant "experts." Yet many of her local informants are famed talking heads, working in institutions that are furrowed pitstops for foreign correspondents. Often, too, the sort of questions they are asked reflect priorities set elsewhere. At one point, for instance, Wright describes three vital issues that Middle Eastern governments must address in order to accommodate pressure for change: political prisoners, womens' rights, and political Islam. Perhaps, but that sounds closer to concerns in Washington than to the more mundane things, such as jobs, the corruption of local officials, and the soaring cost of marriage, that actually exercise many Middle Easterners.

Dictators are ugly, and democracy is, most likely, the least bad way of being governed. But demagogues can be better than democrats at keeping fragile polities together. The Arabs say warily that one day of fitna, schism, is worse than thirty years of tyranny. A quaint and anachronistic notion, maybe, but also the product of a historical experience far longer than most other peoples'. One cannot help wondering whether some of the wishful thinking that has proved so injurious when translated into American foreign policy has been influenced by the finely turned but subtly distorting prism of honest and talented reporters such as Wright, reflecting their ultimate faith that one day the rest of the world, and even the benighted Middle East, will come to embrace the American way.

While in most statistical analysis two data points almost never provide grounds for generalization, there may still be a lesson in this alignment of mentalities across two different Post desks. To some extent we read the Post because of its "proximity to the source;" just as we have long read The Wall Street Journal for the same reason. Nevertheless, Rupert Murdoch is still planning to move the Journal "off of Wall Street;" and this has prompted some interesting discussion. Perhaps the Post may be facing the problem of being too close to the source, which is why the echo chamber syndrome surfaced in the first place.

Rodenbeck is as much as accusing Wright of writing about international affairs from the Washington Echo Chamber. If one follows the hyperlink I attached to Rodenbeck's name, one will see that he holds a similar position for The Economist; but his desk is in Cairo! Some may take his review to be an instance of collegial rivalry, but it is clear from the overall tone of his article that he does hold Wright in high esteem. Therefore, I prefer to take it as a statement of method at a time when the very concept of a "foreign desk" is becoming more and more alien to the reporting of news, even when that news may be crisis-related.

The Audacity of Bipartisanship

It would appear that the bloggers for The Nation are beginning to shift their attention from handicapping the Democratic Primary to handicapping the November election. For example John Nichols put up a reflection yesterday evening on the "news buzz" over supporters of Hillary Clinton claiming they would choose John McCain over Barack Obama. Nichols decided to "compare and contrast" the "data points behind the buzz" (whose statistical validity is at best questionable) with some "hard" data on how Republicans were actually voting on Tuesday in North Carolina and Indiana:

Despite the fact that all-but-coronated Republican nominee John McCain was running essentially without opposition Tuesday, 27 percent of Republican primary participants in North Carolina cast their votes for a candidate other than McCain. In Indiana, 23 percent of Republican primary voters rejected the senator from Arizona.

Each state saw a portion of the Republican vote go to Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian, anti-war candidate who has maintained a semi-serious campaign while focusing on getting reelected to the House. But most of the anti-McCain votes went to Republicans who aren't even running anymore.

In North Carolina, almost 63,000 Republican primary voters – 12 percent of the total – marked their ballots for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who is far more visceral than the likely nominee on social issues. Another 8 percent went for Paul, while 4 percent – one in every 25 North Carolinians who took GOP ballots – checked "no preference." In effect, they said that no one at all was better than John McCain.

Almost 20,000 Indiana Republican voters cast their ballots for the living embodiment of no one at all: former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Twice that number voted for Huckabee, who won 10 percent of the Indiana vote, while Paul took 8 percent.

In both primary states, Republicans in many counties registered even greater opposition to McCain than was suggested in the statewide totals. In North Carolina, for instance, 43 percent of the voters in rural Madison County rejected the presumptive nominee, while a third of the voters in the populous Mecklenburg County cast anti-McCain votes. Most of those votes went to Paul, whose genuinely maverick candidacy has attracted backers who are not at all certain to back McCain in November.

At the very least this indicates that there is as much discontent and division on the Republican side as there is among the Democrats.

This has led Nicholas von Hoffman to speculate that, if Obama does get the nomination, his personal "platform of issues" (as opposed to whatever the Platform Committee at the Convention hammers into existence) might be better served by a Republican nominee for Vice President. Hoffman began his speculation by pointing out that Clinton would be an inappropriate running mate, since she represents the "old politics" whose opposition has been a key plank in the Obama "personal platform." Certainly, that rejection of "old politics" has had a lot to do with Obama's appeal; and, if the Convention even hinted that he might back off of that rejection, it could cost him the votes of many of his strongest supporters. This is also a point that would differentiate him from McCain; but that logic could be extended to another major issue.

That issue, of course, is the Iraq war. Obama needs to reinforce his position against that war before the "old politics" catch up with him. Hoffman proposed that Obama could run with a Republican who shared his anti-war position, such as Chuck Hagel. Hagel's decision to retire from the Senate was based, at least in part, on a rejection of "old politics;" but it may also have reflected a genuine need to "get out of the game." A possibility that Hoffman did not consider, however, is a Republican woman who has never been comfortable with having her strings pulled by the White House. That woman is Senator Susan Collins, whose backbone is strong enough to turn on the "old politics" and whose convictions may provide a healthy complement to Obama's. Hoffman concluded his analysis by stating that an Obama-Hagel ticket "might not be dreamy but it would be a turn of the page." An Obama-Collins ticket could well be just as much "a turn of the page" and may also have that "dreamy" quality, which drew so many supporters to Obama in the first place.

The Complexity of that "Dimension of Domination"

Those who follow the comments submitted to this blog may have noticed that some interesting controversy has emerged surrounding the Truthdig article by Wellford Wilms that I used as a point of departure for my "Cautionary Tale about 'The Dimension of Domination'" post. At the heart of the controversy were extended Truthdig comments by two "insiders" at Baldwin Park High School, the "scene" (in the terminology of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic framework) of Wilms article. Those comments were highly emotional, but they also revealed substantive observations that cannot be ignored. The most recent of these comments apologized that the truth behind Wilms account was not as "theatrical" as his depiction (or, I suppose, my own efforts, which invoked the likes of David Mamet).

Reflecting on this new side of the story, however, I realized that there is a "theatrical" element to this whole affair; but it comes not from Mamet but from David Simon. More specifically it comes from the fourth season of The Wire in the plot line that involved a team of social scientists getting a grant to run an experiment at an inner city Baltimore public school by focusing on those kids who were most socially maladjusted. Details aside, Simon's punch line was that the social scientists got to deliver a paper at their professional meeting and nothing changed in the Baltimore classrooms (thus reinforcing the overall theme of The Wire about the deterioration of our most fundamental social institutions).

I do not feel that these "new data points" impact my original thesis: This is still a cautionary tale about "the triumph of domination of signification." However, as I observed in my own comment to my original post, it is also a cautionary tale about what Michel Foucault has called "the authority of the author." To invoke the Burke framework again, the "teller of the tale" is also an agent in the tale, which means that he is not the detached objective analytic observer he makes himself out to be. That observer would have us believe that all the elements of domination can be traced back to Los Angeles politics. What is omitted are the elements of domination that involve academic projects always in desperate need of funding.

My own "tragic flaw" is that I did not follow the hyperlink on Wilms' name (which I reproduced from the Truthdig site in this post as well as the original one) before writing anything about his analysis. The profile at the other end of the link is up front about his UCLA "insider" connection, which explains why his narrative overlooks that element of the plot concerned with those agencies that fund the abstract world of academics and encourage them to design and implement experiments in real-world classrooms. Simon's point was that the academics never have any stake in such projects other than their publication records. My wife was involved in a summer project (which involved bringing students into a professional research laboratory, rather than going into a classroom); and since then she has been very skeptical about allowing "academic theorists" into her classroom! From my point of view, I feel more than a little chastened for my failure to follow my own caveat lector precept!

A Recital of Contrasts

This afternoon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music I had the opportunity to hear the entirety of the E-flat major D. 929 piano trio, whose second movement had been prepared for Joel Krosnick's master class last March. By way of context, at the time of that master class I wrote the following observation:

There is also an exogenous connection to the Schubert trio, but it goes in the other direction. Schubert began work on his D. 944 ("Great") C major symphony shortly after completing this trio; and, as Krosnick observed, both of the compositions have a slow movement marked "Andante con moto." However, they share a deeper connection in that the "moto" factor in each of these movements reveals at least a faint suggestion of a march (which was a music form that Schubert seemed to enjoy). That suggestion is a bit stronger due to the use of brass in the symphony. However, it is still there in the piano trio, although it is interrupted by one of Schubert's "storms" (as Krosnick calls them), which may be the basis for a forward-looking exogenous connection to the sorts of mood swings we would later encounter in compositions by Gustav Mahler.

I would say that the suggestion of a march was pretty faint; but that "moto" factor dispelled any sense that it was a funeral march, an approach that is sometimes taken, possibly under the influence of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. However, beyond the nature of this single movement, there is a deeper "family resemblance" between the piano trio and the symphony, which is the overall scale of duration. Both require approximately the same amount of time to perform, which usually clocks in at more than forty minutes; and, as I have already observed about the symphony, much of that scale is realized through repetitions (which some performers have felt to be superfluous).

Thus, the most important thing about this performance of D. 929 in its entirety is that it did not feel too long. The performers found a way to work out the right balance between the number of score pages and the amount of clock time. By keeping the overall scale manageable, they could then take Schubert's mood swings (which occur in the other three movements, as well as the second) and deliver their emotional impact without succumbing to tedium. The trio thus emerged as high drama based on a text that was lengthy without being excessive, and the result was as exciting as any performance of this trio that I had previously heard.

Those mood swings were important to the overall program, which was very much structured around sharp shifts in mood and other contrasts. Thus, the program began with the first string quartet by Bedřich Smetana. The mood swings of this work are nicely captured by the description of this quartet in the Wikipedia entry for Smetana:

His string quartet in E minor, Z mého života (From My Life, composed in 1876), the first of only two quartets, is an autobiographical work. Each movement tells a different story about Smetana's life. The first movement is expressive, demonstrative of Smetana's youthful love of art and his search for something undefinable. The second movement, carefree and somewhat raucous, takes the listener back to the days of Smetana's youth. The third movement is reminiscent of the happiness Smetana felt when in love with the girl who later became his wife. The final movement begins with Smetana's joy over the recognition which was given to the national music of Bohemia. However, as the movement progresses, the music is punctuated by a piercing high E in the first violin which, Smetana explained, represents the devastating effects of his tinnitus.

The students performing this quartet excellently captured this moment of crisis in the final movement, using is to pivot a final movement from a triumphant joy to a despair that fades into the silence of the deafness that had overtaken Smetana in 1874.

In keeping with the overall theme of the program, the remaining work on the program was the Contrasts of Béla Bartók for piano, violin, and clarinet (written for Benny Goodman). Contrasts are everywhere to be found, from the large scale differences across the three movements to the variety of acoustic effects elicited by each instrument and the ways in which these acoustic differences are combined. By way of introduction, we were told that Bartók never particularly liked Goodman; and it is easy enough to see that Bartók might not have taken very well to Goodman's approach to swing (if not to swing in general). In my personal fantasies Bartók suffered the tragedy of being to early for the jazz that would have meant something to him. With his keen ear for recording Hungarian folk music, he probably would have felt more at home with the improvisations of Charlie Parker; and, had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated the effort John Coltrane made to play along with a recording of the introduction to the first movement of his Concerto for Orchestra (from which Coltrane learned the value of wide intervals, which he would then exercise in "Giant Steps"). Whatever the hardships surrounding its composition, however, Contrasts is still a great sonic adventure, giving the ear a roller coaster ride through its contrasts on so many different scales of magnitude; and the Conservatory students did an excellent job of meeting the challenges of this piece, which really deserves to be performed more often.

The Chutzpah of Profiting from Poverty

This morning's Business section on the BBC News Web site included the following item:

Discount firms Wal-Mart and Costco saw sales rise in April, as consumers sought cheaper options to counter the rising cost of essentials.

The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart said same store sales, except for fuel, were 3.2% higher in April year-on-year.

Retailer Costco also said same-store sales were better than expected, up 8% in April on a year earlier.

As the cost of food and fuel climbs, consumers are finding ways to spend less on other goods.

One has to wonder whether or not these figures from Wal-Mart and Costco played a key role in motivating Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's comment to the Associated Press this morning that "We're closer to the end of this [financial crisis] than the beginning." If so, then I have to wonder whether there was any room in his reasoning that documentarian Robert Greenwald developed in his 2005 film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. One take on Greenwald's thesis is that Wal-Mart has succeeded by increasing the population of the impoverished, who, in turn, are then increasingly dependent on shopping at Wal-Mart for the low prices they offer. In this light it would appear that, when Paulson says "we," he is referring to a first-person-plural of shareholders (of which I am sure he is one), who continue to live in a world that abstracts away the day-to-day existence of those who work on the production side of the economy and those on the consumption side who are on the brink (if not over it) of making ends meet.

In this respect his first person plural pronoun also includes his boss, President George W. Bush, who has been taking a more antagonistic approach towards the current financial crisis, directing his antagonism at his favorite bête noir, the separation of governmental powers, embodied in this case in the House of Representatives. Here is how David Stout reported the story for the International Herald Tribune:

As the House prepared to vote on a housing-relief bill offered by Democratic leaders, President George W. Bush on Wednesday told the lawmakers, in effect, not to bother.

"I will veto the bill that's moving through the House today if it makes it to my desk," the president said at the White House, after meeting with Republican House leaders. "I urge members on both sides of the aisle to focus on a good piece of legislation that is being sponsored by Republican members."

The president's remarks were not surprising, given that the administration issued a statement on Tuesday evening declaring its opposition and saying that White House advisers would urge the president to veto it.

But Bush's personal pledge to veto the measure championed by Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Financial Services Committee, made it less likely that a bipartisan housing deal will be achieved soon, especially in this election year.

The House is expected to vote on the Frank bill, which would expand access to federally insured mortgages to help troubled homeowners refinance their loans, on Wednesday or Thursday. Under the bill, lenders would be required to reduce the principal balances for borrowers at risk of default. The troubled loans, typically with high, adjustable interest rates, would then be refinanced into more affordable 30-year fix-rate loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration. The new loans would be limited to 90 percent of a property's value, based on an updated appraisal, and the government would retain a stake in any future sale of the property.

Stout reported the President's motivation as follows:

The president on Wednesday repeated his opposition to a bill "that will reward speculators and lenders" who have suffered because of their own foolishness. More modest measures are pushed by Republicans leaders, and Bush said those steps "will do the right thing for the American people."

This language, of course, blithely overlooks the extent to which just about everything done by both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve in response to the housing crisis has done more to "reward speculators and lenders" than to address the needs of victimized homeowners.

All this language is, of course, building up at the end of the week, which is when I have to home in on a decision for the Chutzpah of the Week award. This has become a week of chutzpah volleys that would rival those of the Battle of Balaclava immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Nevertheless, in the interest of Harry Truman's (whose birthday today happens to be) principle that the buck always stops at the desk in the Oval Office, I have concluded that is it time for the President to receive his eighth award, thus widening his lead over his closest competitor, Condoleeza Rice. At a time so close to when the American public will be voting for their next Administration while thinking about the impact that their government has had on their lives, the President seems more interested in exhibiting what Stout described as an "unwillingness to surrender power before he has to." Perhaps that is what Bush really saw, when he was talking about looking into the soul of Vladimir Putin; but, while I still have the freedom to do so, I would prefer to call what he saw an immense capacity for chutzpah just waiting to be tapped!

Behavior: From Bad to Malicious to Pathological

The most annoying precept of Internet evangelism is the idea that cyberspace houses one big, happy family in which the spirit of cooperation is always thriving and where any instance of "bad behavior" can be managed by the general spirit of good will that pervades the community. I find this annoying because I believe that we are obliged to analyze any instance of bad behavior when we encounter it, because we can only deal with it by understanding it. If we fail to understand it, it can only get worse. Thus, when behavior makes the transition from "bad" (in a connotation we tend to associated with "childish") to "malicious," we need to take vigilant notice, since the next step along the progress of that behavior is "pathological," examples of which I recently reviewed.

This is the context in which we should read AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson's report on the latest "advance" in hacking Web sites:

Computer attacks typically don't inflict physical pain on their victims.

But in a rare example of an attack apparently motivated by malice rather than money, hackers recently bombarded the Epilepsy Foundation's Web site with hundreds of pictures and links to pages with rapidly flashing images.

The breach triggered severe migraines and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed the images. People with photosensitive epilepsy can get seizures when they're exposed to flickering images, a response also caused by some video games and cartoons.

However, I disagree with Robertson's own sense of context, which seems to view the instance as just another exploitation of Web site vulnerability:

In another recent attack, hackers exploited a simple coding vulnerability in Sen. Barack Obama's Web site to redirect users visiting the community blogs section to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's official campaign site.

In my personal ontology this latter example is an instance of "bad" behavior, consistent with the general tendency of political competition to devolve into street fighting with higher stakes. Preying on the vulnerabilities of epileptics, on the other hand, is "malicious," if not already over the edge into "pathological." I am inclined to agree with the statement that Robertson quoted from security researcher Paul Ferguson:

I count this in the same category of teenagers who think it's funny to put a cat in a bag and throw it over a clothesline — they don't realize how cruel it is. It was an opportunity waiting to happen for some mean-spirited kid.

If I ever get around to redesigning the architecture of the "Inferno" that Dante conceived, I may well reserve an entire circle for Internet evangelists, each of whom will sit in a small cell with absolutely nothing to look at except for a wall on which Ferguson's second sentence has been written. As scientists since the days of the Manhattan Project have known, every opportunity to do good is also an opportunity to do evil. The choices that individuals make are moderated by their social context, which is organized around a variety of institutions, such as families, schools, and governments. Internet evangelists tend not to talk about such institutions, perhaps because they see Internet technology displacing all of them. Consequently, when behavior does go "over the edge into 'pathological'" and the role that these institutions play begins to surface, all they can do is fumble around, as when attempts to address questions of governance arose in the wake of the death threats against Kathy Sierra.

My only question with Ferguson's second sentence is whether he assumes that this particular act of malice was the work of "some mean-spirited kid." Is it not also the behavior of that adult world about which Barack Obama was trying to warn us in that speech that blew up in his face? As I had put it, it is a world of adults whom circumstances have pushed over to the "dark side," "replete with frustration and expressed in bitterness." Adolf Hitler understood the power of such an adult world and engaged it to build up the momentum for what would later be called the Holocaust. Epileptics are just as easy (and irrational) a target as Jews; so my own spirit of analysis is reluctant to write this incident off as a childish prank of unwitting cruelty.

This is not to push the pendulum to the other extreme. The Internet is not, in and of itself, a "breeding ground" for pathological behavior. Such behavior is a product of a broader social context, but the Internet is now indisputably a part of that social context. Those who contribute to the development of cyberspace need to be more aware that they are developing a social world, as well as a technological one, and that such a social world, like those in the physical counterpart to cyberspace, requires certain institutions in order to function in the interest of a general public welfare. The developers who seem to understand this best are the designers of multi-player games; but the risk is that their understanding is limited to virtual worlds whose players can, in the words of Bing Gordon (currently "in transition" from Electronic Arts to Kleiner Perkins), "reach out and kill someone." (Think, also, of the $500 million sales figure from the first week of "Grand Theft Auto IV.") In terms of my favorite comparison of cyberspace to Deadwood, the latter may have made more rapid progress towards institution-building than we can expect of the former!

Anticipating DAS RHEINGOLD

Next month the San Francisco Opera will launch Francesca Zambello's new staging of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen with her production of Das Rheingold. This project is being shared with the Washington National Opera and has been promoted as a conception based in American history, with the obvious focus on the California Gold Rush. However, in spite of the California focus, Washington beat us to the punch, first performing this Rheingold in March of 2006.

Now that The New York Times has made its archives available without charge, I decided that a good way to get a sense of what this "American conception" of the Ring might entail would be to check out Anthony Tommasini's review of the Rheingold premiere in Washington. I was trained under the precept that a good reviewer is, first and foremost, a good reporter, reserving the dispensing of opinions for any column space that remains after the reportage is completed. Tommasini's talent for reporting should give us a good idea of what to expect next month:

There are many fresh and impressive elements to the company's colorful, abstract and well cast "Rheingold." But its success is only partly attributable to overtly American imagery.

It's true, for example, that in the opening scene Ms. Zambello, working with the set designer Michael Yeargan and the costume designer Anita Yavich, portrays Wagner's Alberich, the dwarf who dwells among the lower race of Nibelungs, as a hulking forty-niner, with thick boots and suspenders, panning for gold; the Rhine Maidens are a trio of sassy gals in fleecy dresses who cavort on a mining sluice, a wonderful wood contraption with chutes and ladders.

But the visual imagery that really gives this scene its impact is the depiction of the pristine river. Rushing water is suggested through swirling video projections by Jan Hartley. When the magic gold glows from the river bed, the Rhine Maidens do a celebratory dance with a billowing silken sheet atop this abstract river's sleek, clear plastic surface. Shafts of golden light (courtesy of the lighting designer Mark McCullough) fill the stage. None of this would matter, though, without the powerful singing of the baritone Gordon Hawkins as Alberich, who nearly stole the show all evening.

The giants Fasolt and Fafner (the bass-baritones John Marcus Bindel and Jeffrey Wells), having just finished building Wotan's castle Valhalla, first appear sitting on a steel beam as it is lowered from an unseen crane. They are blue-collar laborers in matching overalls with elongated legs and huge clodhopper feet. If they look a little like Gumby giants, the cartoonish humor seems intentional. Ms. Zambello is refreshingly attentive to the whimsical side of Wagner's mythological tale. The audience, sensing it was O.K. to laugh, did.

Wotan and the gods are portrayed as entitled 1920's characters out of "The Great Gatsby," arrayed in white summer suits and dresses. Loge, the god of fire, is a wily lawyer in a tailored overcoat (the tenor Robin Leggate). Still, there is nothing especially American about his look, which has a hint of Inspector Clouseau. The rich-voiced mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Bishop is excellent as a matronly and prideful Fricka, the long-suffering wife to the inconstant Wotan.

With his goatee and fedora, the sturdy bass-baritone Robert Hale makes an unusually lanky and disdainful Wotan. Still, in the scene when he descends to the lower world to wrest the magic ring from Alberich, he seems too aloof for the job. Mr. Hawkins's booming and husky Alberich looks as if he could take down the surly god — no problem.

The Americanization concept turns political when the all-knowing earth goddess Erda (the tremulous-voiced mezzo-soprano Elena Zaremba) appears with her ominous warning for Wotan. She is costumed as a Native American princess, and looks as if she had wandered in from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

The lingering image of this production comes in the deep, dank and sulfurous mine where Alberich brutally drives his slaves to hew rock and forge gold. The workers are played by a roster of some 50 mostly minority children, large and small, with tattered clothing and sooty faces. Evoking the history of slavery in America is the idea, but the image of child labor, which remains an international outrage, is what came through for me.

The San Francisco cast will be entirely different, but we may expect the imagery to be the same. Given my ongoing appreciation of wit, I was particularly struck by Tommasini's comment about "the whimsical side of Wagner's mythological tale." One usually finds that whimsy in Siegfried, whom we first see with a bear in tow delivering the operatic equivalent of "He followed me home, can I keep him?" There is even the school of thought that views the four Ring operas as a four-movement symphony of enormous proportions, with Siegfried as the scherzo movement. However, having just seen The Little Prince, I have more of an appreciation for Zambello's sense of whimsy and could see that she could apply it effectively even in a confrontation between gods and giants.

On the basis of this report, I find myself looking forward to seeing this vision realized on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House. My last dose of Rheingold was the production that Keith Warner had prepared for Covent Garden. Warner chose to play up anti-Semitic stereotypes, which may well have been part of Wagner's conception but which continue to rub me the wrong way. Zambello's politics seem to be more inclined to the exploitation of Native Americans and immigrant child labor, which probably "works" better in an American, rather than European, framework. Of course, since I was thoroughly pleased with Donald Runnicles' conducting of the last San Francisco Ring, I have equally high expectations for the musical performance!

A First Impression of Libby Larsen

I have come across the name of Libby Larsen every now and then in the music reviews I read; but last night, at the end-of-term Art Song as Theatre recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I had my first opportunity to hear one of her songs. The song was the second of her three Cowboy Songs, "Lift Me Into Heaven Slowly," a setting of the poem "Sufi Sam Christian" by Robert Creeley. (Come to think of it, I knew little about Creeley other than his name and his presence in San Francisco in the late fifties, the time when I first became aware of the City Lights Bookstore.) As Tom Jurek pointed out in some notes available at the Sam Goody Web site, Creeley seems to have had an affinity for the sort of jazz that was achieving an almost iconic status at that time:

The late poet Robert Creeley was no stranger to jazz. His own work descended from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and he provided the link in the new American poetry between the Black Mountain school and the Beats; early on, he composed his work to the music of Bud Powell. Later he collaborated with the jazz musicians preeminent among them: Steve Swallow (whom Creeley collaborated with on numerous live occasions and on the bassist's ECM Home album in 1979, where his poems were sung by Sheila Jordan), and the late Steve Lacy.

"Sufi Sam Christian" has received a blues interpretation by Swallow in his combo with pianist Steve Kuhn and the Cikada String Quartet; but Larsen's approach is more like a latter-day perspective on the traditional "Cowboy's Lament," "The Streets of Laredo." This is not to say that she has imitated or borrowed (or deconstructed in the tradition of Charles Ives); rather, she managed to capture the way in which this particular folk song is mournful without being morose and translate that atmosphere to a contemporary piece of poetry.

The "mission" of the Art Song as Theatre program is to get vocal students thinking about how best to express song texts by imagining them in a dramatic situation of their own making. For this particular song Creeley's cowboy was translated into a (female) victim of an automobile accident. I have no idea what the late poet would have thought of this approach to his text, but it certainly seemed to help the student performing Larsen's piece to achieve an effective level of poignancy in her delivery. As far as the general "mission" is concerned, I would say that sometimes the strategy works; and sometimes it doesn't. The performance of "Lift Me Into Heaven Slowly" was certainly one of the most effective of the evening, providing me with an excellent first impression of the music of Libby Larsen.

Was Leroy Anderson Banned by the Soviet Union?

That may be the best explanation for why Alexander Vereshagin seems to take such delight in offering his compositions as encores at performances by the Russian Chamber Orchestra. A year ago the encore was "The Typewriter," leading me to go off on one tangent about the "authentic instrument" problem in an age where typewriters are rarely (if at all) manufactured and another on my surprise at writing anything about a composer whose primary claim to fame lay in the number of television programs that used his music for opening and closing theme songs. Today in the Noontime Concerts™ offering at Old St. Mary's Cathedral here in San Francisco, the concert concluded with "Plink, Plank, Plunk!," which contributed to the television panel show, I've Got a Secret. Written strictly for pizzicato strings, this work did not present any demand for period instruments! There was even a certain logic to a twentieth-century encore, since the program began with the third (G major) suite in the eighteenth-century Water Music collection by George Frideric Handel and continued with Franz Schubert's nineteenth-century D. 438 rondo for violin and string orchestra! Furthermore, it is possible that the Soviets had banned Leroy Anderson on the grounds that his music tended to glorify the values of bourgeois capitalism!

What has Become of America?

Last night Andrew Keen declared this to be "the great question of our age" on his Great Seduction blog. He seems to have committed himself to this position after reading Thomas Friedman's column for last Sunday's New York Times, which began with the following thesis (sic) paragraph:

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

Regular readers probably know by now that I believe that taking any position on the basis of Friedman's assertions is risky business. It is not just his inevitable self-confessed "totally unscientific polling" that bothers me. We all do this from time to time. What most impresses me about the guy is his uncanny talent for misinterpretation, whatever the source of his data may have been.

Regardless of the source of the inspiration, however, I can appreciate Keen wanting to pursue this "great question," particularly since he is not, himself, a native-born American. However, before jumping feet-first (as Friedman is wont to do) into a question of such magnitude, I would suggest that it is necessary to cultivate a bit of background knowledge; and, speaking of knowledge, if we really want to go back to basics, the best place to start may well be with Plato's "Theaetetus." Recall that this is the dialogue in which Socrates asks Theaetetus to define knowledge. Theaetetus tries four times; and each attempt is deftly reduced to a pile of empty words (not unlike most of Friedman's texts) by Socrates. So, by the time we get to the end of the dialogue, we are no closer to a definition of knowledge than when we began. However, Socrates reminds Theaetetus that the experience has not been a waste of time:

Then supposing you should ever henceforth try to conceive afresh, Theaetetus, if you succeed, your embryo thoughts will be the better as a consequence of today’s scrutiny, and if you remain barren, you will be gentler and more agreeable to your companions, having the good sense not to fancy you know what you do not know. For that, and no more, is all that my art can effect; nor have I any of that knowledge possessed by all the great and admirable men of our own day or of the past.

However, while we may not have concluded with a definition of knowledge, through Socrates' "art" we discover that defining the concept of knowledge is problematic because it is so tightly coupled to three other fundamental concepts:

1. memory
2. being
3. description

After my last reading of this dialogue, I even tried to diagram the nature of the coupling; and it is this coupling that justifies my approaching the question of what has become of America through Plato.

This takes me back to Keen and his approach to the question. That approach was triggered by a single sentence in Friedman's column: "We are not who we think we are." Here is how Keen reflected on this assertion and began to develop a methodology:

Oh dear: we are not who we think we are. So what, exactly, do Americans think that they are? What are the illusions that they hold in common? What deludes Americans?

It's such an illuminating question that I'd like to come up with my own equally illuminating answer. So, tomorrow, I'm flying to New York City to hook up with a film crew. And, on Wednesday afternoon, we'll go out onto the highly unrepresentative streets of Manhattan to discover the lie/truth about who those poor deluded Americans think they really are.

At this point I have to give Keen credit for recognizing that "America" is such a socially-constructed concept that the only way to address the question of what has become of America is through the question of what Americans have become. Furthermore, in the interest of data collection, one could narrow the domain at bit further by choosing to consider, for example, only those eligible to vote in the November election. Still, if Keen (or anyone else) wants to start talking methods, then the quest for useful background material will have to leap a couple of millennia forward; and, for my money, the best place to leap would be into the first three chapters of The Interpretation of Cultures, the collection of essays by Clifford Geertz. Geertz' approach to anthropology is refreshingly consistent with the thinking behind "Theaetetus" (and his attention to the concept of interpretation makes him, in many respects, an "anti-Friedman"). One might even say that his methods are oriented around those four tightly-coupled concepts:

1. Being: What is an American?
2. Memory: What do Americans remember about "American experiences" (their own and those of others)?
3. Description: How do they talk about what they remember and who they are?
4. Knowledge: What do Americans know?

Furthermore, we learn from Geertz that any pursuit of that last question comes not so much from what American say as it does from what they do. Thus, any data mined out of conversations on "the highly unrepresentative streets of Manhattan" is likely to be more deceptive than informative. Much of the interpretation of a culture involves a shift of focus from what people say to what they actually do, which then requires teasing out the motives behind what they are doing.

A final observation is that there really is no such thing as a "normative American" (given how diverse the population is). In other words the streets of Manhattan are as "highly unrepresentative" as a strip mine in Montana or the Googleplex in Mountain View. This leads me to seek further background material from, of all people, Henry Miller. Specifically, his Air-Conditioned Nightmare collection, along with its follow-up volume, Remember to Remember, addresses the question of what Americans are by seeking out some really interesting outliers. Thus, the interpretation of the American culture may be better informed through those outliers than it would be by more "representative samples," such as those collected by, for example, The Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University. I realize that such an approach flies in the face of the reasoning of political pollsters; but I also believe that those pollsters are responsible for getting the Democratic Party into its current conundrum, where it has still not settled on a Presidential candidate. Perhaps the most important thing about the four questions is that Americans do not describe themselves as "representative norms" and that, as a result, every American has some personal set of "outlier characteristics." This would expose the folly of Friedman's "totally unscientific polling," the conclusions that ensue from his flawed methodology, and, I am afraid, Keen's efforts to follow up with a similar approach.

THE LITTLE PRINCE as Opera

I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I went over to Berkeley yesterday afternoon to see Rachel Portman's opera, The Little Prince, with a libretto by Nicholas Wright adopted from the short novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, produced by the San Francisco Opera and presented under the auspices of Cal Performances. The original text (supplemented by the author's own illustrations) is such a magical piece of storytelling, so unlike just about any storytelling one encounters in the United States, that the very thought of adapting it for stage performance, with or without music, struck me as a perilous undertaking. On the other hand in the context of my recent remarks about the "technique of disclosure" demonstrated by Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons (which presented equally daunting prospects for operatic interpretation), there are many ways in which one can read de Saint-Exupéry's text as a narrative of self-disclosure; and this appears to be precisely the reading that Portman, Wright, and director Francesca Zambello had in mind.

In the resulting strategy the greatest fidelity was to the author's illustrations, which came alive on the stage in ways that I could not have imagined. I was just leafing through my copy of the book, marveling at the dual relationship that has now been established: What I saw on the stage reminded me of what I had read many years ago, and now what I see on the pages of the book I had read remind me of what I had seen on the stage. Next in fidelity would be the overall structure of the narrative, including the fact that this is a first-person account, although the narrator is now addressing a group of children in pajamas, telling a bedtime story, rather than writing for a reader he cannot see. Then it was necessary to preserve the role of the prelude, which introduced the author as a bad artist. This seems like an apology for the crude style of the illustrations in the book until the act of drawing starts to figure in the plot. I suppose about the only criticism I might have about the adaptation is that it is a bit too faithful, taking over two hours to deliver an effect that might have been presented in about half the time.

However, that last observation takes me onto the turf of what this opera is not. That reduced time scale happens to be the approximate duration of L'Enfant et les sortilèges, a one-act opera by Maurice Ravel that may be the best example of what the publicity material for The Little Prince insisted on calling a "kid-friendly" opera. With a libretto by Colette, Ravel's little opera is an easily-grasped story of a bad boy converted to goodness by the harsh but beneficent forces of nature. It demands a rich conception of images from a time (1925) when special effects were realized as suggestions for the imagination rather than explicitly rendered; and it has enjoyed productions that leave viewers of all ages wide-eyed with amazement and wonder. It is hard to avoid memories of L'Enfant et les sortilèges encroaching on The Little Prince, but the two operas do not deserve to be pitted against each other.

This is important because Portman's compositional language is not particularly "deep" and therefore does not deserve to be compared with Ravel's. In terms of approaching any "grandeur" in "grand opera," it falls far short of other more recent works that have made such an approach, particularly Stephen Sondheim's score for Sweeny Todd. This is not a matter of sophistication, since Sam Shepard also made this approach with The Tooth of Crime, Operation Sidewinder, and The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing his Wife, all of which can hold their own against the nineteenth-century warhorses. The problem is one of predictability, at least for those familiar with the operatic repertoire. Portman does not take risks with her score (not that Felix Mendelssohn did in just about anything he wrote). This contrasts with the oddball approaches she has taken with some of her film scores; so it may be that she toned down the risks (without falling back on a repertoire of familiar folk songs, as Engelbert Humperdinck did in Hänsel und Gretel) to hold the attention of young audiences.

Nevertheless, there remains the question over whether or not an opera based on a fantasy-meditation written in 1943 can hold the attention of contemporary audiences of any age. I am not going to fall into the usual trap of trying to second-guess what kids think about these days; but Saint-Exupéry's narrative, at least as it was conceived in this opera, may now be read by adults in a new context, which is that of Pan's Labyrinth. From one point of view, this tale told by a pilot of crashing in the middle of the Sahara before the modern age of sophisticated communication hardware is the story of a man facing the prospect of his own death; and, like the young Ofelia, he does that by lapsing into a world of fantasy with a highly-developed sense of its own logic. Since this pilot is now narrating to all of us, he does not make the "crossing from reality" that Ofelia does; but The Little Prince both comes into "our reality" and then departs from it along a path not that different from Ofelia's.

One final point is that, if a performing ensemble is determined to present an offering as "kid-friendly," then it helps a lot of have kids participating. Thus, there is an extent to which audiences of all ages find ways to identify with The Little Prince, whether with the Prince himself, the pilot, his "audience," which then becomes a context-setting "Greek chorus," or any of the stereotyped agents. This is a far more extended approach than that taken by Hänsel und Gretel; but, from our current perspective of music history, any new work will have to go a long way to top Noye's Fludde, Benjamin Britten's setting of the Chester Miracle Play, which comes closer than any other work I know in involving performers of all ages (including the audience that is expected to participate in singing the hymns). I had the good fortune to see a thoroughly captivating production of this one-act opera while I was living in Singapore, and have been seeking to reproduce that experience ever since!

"Put Not Your Trust in Consultants"

If my last post came across as sermonizing about an economic crisis, then any good sermon should derive from Biblical text. On the basis of yet another report in the Financial Times (this time from yesterday), the best text may come from Psalm 146, verse 3:

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no help.

In this case the "son of man" is McKinsey, at least on the basis of the Financial Times report filed by Bertrand Benoit from Berlin:

More than 10m Germans could fall into poverty by 2020 because of insufficient economic growth, McKinsey, the consultancy, warned in a study on Sunday.

The study coincides with the release of an Emnid opinion poll by the weekly newspaper Bild Am Sonntag showing three-quarters of Germans fear old-age poverty. It will add to a lively debate on the shrinking of the middle class.

Given annual gross domestic product growth of 1.7 per cent, those earning between 70 per cent and 150 per cent of the average income – the standard definition of the middle class – will make up less than half the population by 2020, compared with 54 per cent today, McKinsey writes.

I see the McKinsey perspective as further propagation of what I had called "The Growth Illusion" when I was writing about the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last January. It is also a product of what I have previously called "that old cliché from the days of the first Reagan Presidential campaign about a rising tide lifting all boats," a cliché whose speciousness was revealed shortly after Ronald Reagan became President. This is not to assert that economic growth, in and of itself, is necessarily a bad thing; but it is to question whether or not mass poverty (by McKinsey criteria or any others) is an inevitable consequence of "insufficient economic growth." Even if we accept McKinsey's "middle class metric," the fact it that the effect of prodigious economic growth in the United States has led to a vanishing middle class by creating a bimodal distribution of wealth, creating an increasing gulf between the very rich and the very poor. One would think that Germans would be particularly sensitive to such economic conditions, since the awareness of those conditions was exploited by Adolf Hitler in the course of his rise to power.

This is not to deny that there may be hard times facing the German economy. Rather, it is to assert that too many "princes" of economic thinking sustain their own economic growth by serving up what I have previously called "the moral equivalent of Jonestown Kool-Aid." Ample servings of that Kool-Aid were being passed around at the World Economic Forum; but Davos is too much a "refuge for the power elite" to provide a good climate for cultivating a sense of reality. The German government has the opportunity to reestablish that sense of reality by weighing the business interests of McKinsey against the interests of their country's population. If they do so, then they may discover that there are other paths to general welfare than the one that requires consuming the Kool-Aid of the Growth Illusion.

Two Perspectives on the Food Crisis

This morning my RSS feed for the Financial Times greeted me with two back-to-back articles about the global food crisis. One of these was actually just a report taken from their own Reuters feed. The lead paragraphs indicate the extent to which those in the power elite are still struggling to grasp the nature of the problem by understanding its source:

Food price inflation may be one of the most serious problems facing the world, but it is one that monetary policy has little power to tackle, central bankers said on Monday.

With the price of food rising by more than 40 percent a year, the issue is high on the agenda at meetings at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel which began on Sunday.

”Food pressure is a global problem, we have to observe, monitor, but we cannot use monetary policy tools to manage this problem,” said Polish National Bank President Slawomir Skrzypek. ”Food pressures could be one of the most serious problems that we have to face now.”

Regular readers may think that this will reinforce my recent position that the food crisis amounts to "yet another battle in the War Against the Poor;" but I actually think that Skrzypek may have a point. Much as I prefer to focus on the social world, rather than the objective one, his objective language in that final paragraph needs to be appreciated. Monetary policy is nothing more than a tool. Most of us do not appreciate this premise, although Alan Greenspan certainly made a noble effort to cultivate such appreciation in his recent book, The Age of Turbulence.

The thing about tools, however, is that, even in the objective world, they are not always properly used, hence the joke that, to a small boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If we have a problem recognizing monetary policy as a tool, one reason may be that, beyond some casual language about "money supply" (which we associate with how much currency can be printed, often forgetting that paper currency is nothing more than a symbol of value), we are not quite sure what the tool manipulates (certainly not the way we understand that a hammer drives in nails). The clunker in that last sentence is the noun "value," which, as I have previously argued, has almost nothing to do with all the objective mathematical models of economic theory because it is fundamentally a construct of the social world.

This bring us back to the "inconvenient truth" about the food crisis, recently revealed by Frank Hornig and Beat Balzli on SPIEGEL ONLINE. The "crisis of the food crisis," so to speak, is a crisis of two vastly separated social worlds with two equally separated constructions of the concept of value. To a worker who earns a subsistence wage (if that much), the value of a gallon of milk is not pegged to a standard Troy ounce of gold or the exchange rate between the Euro and the dollar; it is ultimately based on the subjective value of being able to live another day. On the other hand the price of that gallon of milk in the worker's country is based on a value constructed in the social world of commodities traders, most of whom would find the price of food "an inconvenience for the rich," has Josette Sheeran put it in her BBC report. The problem is that a tool whose impact is felt in the latter world is not likely to improve matters in the former; and, given the greed-driven motives of that latter world, the tool could well make matters worse.

This brings us to the second Financial Times story, a report from the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Madrid filed by Raphael Minder. Here there was apparently at least one voice trying to grasp the nature of the problem from the perspective of that former world and consider taking an action that would make getting that gallon of milk more feasible:

India’s finance minister said on Monday he was considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, underlying growing concerns in Asia over the role of hedge funds and financial market traders in the recent surge in commodities prices.

If India imposes a ban, it would come only five years after the country introduced such futures trading as part of a broader push to develop India as a leading financial centre.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank annual meeting in Madrid, P. Chidambaram said his worries over market speculation were shared by governments across the region and that India was “facing a very grave crisis on the food front”.

This left me wondering if Chidambaram was the first member of the "fiscal power elite" to read the Hornig-Beat analysis in enough depth to take it with intended seriousness of its authors. The subtext of that second paragraph amounts to a decision to place a higher priority on feeding one's population than on building economic growth through the cultivation of financial institutions. This is not the sort of language one expects from a finance minister from any country, regardless of its economic ideologies. However, it is a serious effort to address one well-argued hypothesis about the cause of the global food crisis and to apply that hypothesis to a proposal for action. My guess is that, when Chidambaram returns from his elevated company in Madrid, he will face considerable argument within the Indian government; but he should be applauded for putting this stake in the ground in a forum where all the world can see it.

"The Machine Stops"

I feel as if I am living in the world of E. M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops," at least as far as mail servers are concerned. I have been corresponding with a neighbor over some work she has been doing to promote the music of nineteenth-century composer Amy Beach (who happens to have lived some of her years here in San Francisco). My neighbor reads her mail through AOL, and I read mine through Yahoo! Recently I have been getting failure-to-deliver notices from the Yahoo! mail server, claiming the mail was "rejected by the recipient domain," that being the AOL mail server. After running some experiments, which included sending one of my blog posts through Blogger (which uses Gmail) and sending mail from the account I have at a research laboratory in Palo Alto, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is on the AOL side, because all of these attempts were getting bounced, regardless of which mail server was delivering them.

This reminded me that we probably take electronic mail for granted even more than we do our telephone service. Unfortunately, neither of these services is centralized. This means that, when things go wrong, it is difficult to home in on where the problem is likely to reside and even harder to bring that problem to the attention of responsible parties. Furthermore, those who have been following my study of service pathology know that, once the problem has been directed to the "responsible parties," there is no guarantee that they will respond effectively (or, for that matter, respond at all). In Forster's world "the machine" saw to everyone's needs; but, when it failed to behave as it had been designed to do, one discovered that it was no longer being maintained by human beings, because self-maintenance was part of its specified behavior. The result was that people started living with minor defects; and those minor defects gradually evolved into major ones, until the major ones became so major that the whole system ground to a halt.

You do not hear much talk of Forster from the Internet evangelists (small wonder). They are more interested in creating dependencies (addictions?) than in maintaining them. As I have put it previously, they take for granted that there will always be an army of Morlocks to make sure that our dependencies will always be satisfied (and that we shall continue to pay for that "service"). However, while H. G. Wells seemed to postulate that the Morlocks were a product of some bizarre synthesis of biological and social Darwinism, it is unclear how (or even if) the "future Morlocks of cyberspace" will evolve (not to mention whether they will be as alienated and hostile as the creatures that Wells imagined). Forster's story is probably best read as a cautionary tale of unintended consequences; but, as I continue to try to argue, the language of consequences is not the language of Internet evangelism. Ultimately, then, Forster reminds us of the words of one of his contemporaries, the poet Wilfred Owen, who had declared that "all a poet can do today is warn." Both Owen and Forster knew full well that warnings of the deepest consequences are the ones least likely to be heeded.

An Afterthought about THE DANGEROUS LIAISONS (the opera)

I have the good fortune to have a member of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra as a neighbor in my condominium complex. I realized that, because my knowledge of Conrad Susa's opera, The Dangerous Liaisons, was so limited, I had the opportunity to talk to someone who had performed in its premiere. Unfortunately, her only memory was that every rehearsal involved working on changes to the score that had been used at the preceding rehearsal. This is not particularly new in the normative practices in preparing an opera production, particularly when the production is a premiere. Readers may recall that I made it a point to see Philip Glass' Appomattox a second time at its final performance, since I was not sure if the production had "converged" the first time I saw it. Bearing in mind that we were talking about memories close to fifteen years old, my neighbor could not recall if The Dangerous Liaisons had ever converged during its run in San Francisco. In this respect, however, that Wikipedia stub for Susa was helpful, since it indicated that he had worked on revising the opera between 1996 and 1997!

There are any number of stories about what happens when creative artists are subjected to the sorts of deadlines that are so essential to just about any other line of work. The best one is captured in The Internet Movie Database on the Memorable quotes page for The Agony and the Ecstasy:

[repeated exchange]
Pope Julius II: When will you make an end?
Michelangelo: When I am finished!

(It's no fun without that "repeated exchange" preface!) Closer to my own experience, Elliott Carter was teaching at MIT at the time when Jacob Lateiner was preparing the first performance of his piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The work had been commissioned by the Ford Foundation, and Carter reveled in telling us how aggravating it was to have the Ford Foundation keep calling him in exactly the same way that Julius pestered Michelangelo. For me it threw a whole new light on just how beneficent these "beneficent organizations" could be!

Then there was the world premiere of Robin Holloway's fourth Concerto for Orchestra, which the San Francisco Symphony had scheduled as the first half of a program whose second half consisted of Christian Tetzlaff performing Johannes Brahms' violin concerto. The Holloway concerto turned out to be based on Piers Plowman and ended up as a massive piece of work that came close to requiring a full evening for performance. Needless to say, the San Francisco Symphony staff was not going to "uninvite" Tetzlaff (who is extremely popular here); so Michael Tilson Thomas had to explain to us why we would be hearing an abridged version of Holloway's new work.

These are all stories about how "art as a calling" can knock heads with "art presentation as a business;" and, as we can learn from Pope Julius, those heads were knocking long before the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. My guess is that those heads will never stop knocking. If you want to be a creative artist, you have to accept that a sore head comes with the territory. Susa was fortunate to be able to work on revising his score. I am hoping that Holloway will be fortunate enough that we in San Francisco will hear his Concerto for Orchestra in its entirety sooner or later. It's not a perfect world, but it is the one in which we must live!

Acquaintances Old and New

It is a bit disconcerting to begin a month like May with two posts on the theme of the arrogance of power in the public sector; so it is probably good for my spirits that the end-of-term events at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music are continuing in full force. Since my program for the Opera Theatre production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto included a list of Vocal Department performances, I decided to shift from chamber music and check out last night's Opera Workshop. This consisted of eleven scenes, each directed with minimal staging and costuming and piano accompaniment. I was struck by how many of those scenes were familiar, as a result of my opera-going experience; but I was equally struck by how the non-familiar ones appealed to my ongoing sense of curiosity.

Most interesting is that I finally had a chance to hear an extended excerpt from The Dangerous Liaisons by Conrad Susa (who happens to be Chair of the Composition Faculty at the Conservatory). Unfortunately, I was not in San Francisco when this work was premiered in September of 1994 by the San Francisco Opera; and, equally unfortunately, the Wikipedia "community of musicologists" seems far less thorough in accounting for living composers than they are with those of more distant centuries. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia stub for Susa includes the tidbit that his composition teachers at Julliard "included William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti and, so he says, P. D. Q. Bach." As I understand the history, "P. D. Q. Bach" was "born" out of Peter Schickele's efforts to inject a bit of humor into the Julliard traditions of both composition and performance. These attracted enough attention that he was able to escalate them from "internal" Julliard events to public ones, which eventually provided him with a touring schedule that he probably had never anticipated.

Whether or not Susa was involved with any of those "internal" events certainly does not bear on his treatment of Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. More relevant is that the opera seems to have emerged after Christopher Hampton had adapted it for the stage (and then reconceived for film director Stephen Frears). It also postdates the Milos Forman film, Valmont, with a script adapted from Laclos by Jean-Claude Carrière.

I was in Los Angeles when a production of Hampton's play went on tour and enjoyed his conception for the stage far more than either of those two films. I felt that Hampton had found the right way to keep the staging focused on the narrative line without unduly compromising the epistolary structure of the novel. This, then, was the personal context I brought to my first exposure to the approach that Susa had taken in conjunction with his librettist, Philip Littell. Here, again, Wikipedia provided only a stub; but fortunately the stub provided a breakdown of the scenes in each of the opera's two acts. From this I could assume that what I saw at last night's Workshop was the opening scene of the opera. I find this important because, unless I am mistaken, both the play and the films provide us with a fair amount of background on the primary protagonists, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, background that emerges from the initial letters of the novel. Susa and Littell, on the other hand, drop us in medias res, allowing the protagonists to reveal their characters (and, for that matter, establish themselves as protagonists) in a highly charged (and populated) social gathering.

Having discovered this information only this morning, I find myself in a position of "retrospective evaluation" of the performance I saw last night. Because I did not know where the scene fit into the overall conception of the opera, I found it a bit muddled; and I felt that there was not enough subtlety in the way in which the characters communicated. Looking back on it now as a scene that establishes first impressions, I have a better understanding of why the characters' behaviors were more overt than they had been in the previous versions I had seen; and I can appreciate that the approach that Susa and Littell took can work in an operatic setting, even if it departed significantly from adaptations for other media. The result is that I am now far more curious about seeing this opera in its entirety than I was after my initial exposure to the scene.

Having gone on at length about a "new acquaintance," I would like to conclude with a few remarks about an old one. The Susa excerpt was followed by the opening scene of the "opera portion" of Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss. This was conceived as an "appendix" to Molière's play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which, among other things, is a satirical look at the correlation between the rise of a bourgeois class and the rise of mediocrity in the arts. The "opera" is preceded by a Prologue, which may best be described as an operatic depiction of Murphy's Law. Everything imaginable goes wrong; and the opera that is being rehearsed becomes mashed-up (yes, in the contemporary sense of that phrase) with the low humor of a commedia dell'arte troupe. Furthermore, it is clear that everyone involved in this affair was obtained at cut-rate prices, thus reinforcing Molière's original point about mediocrity.

There are a variety of ways in which this can be staged. My personal preference tends towards beginning in a total morass of incompetence from which, by the end of the opera, something authentically sublime emerges. This provides opportunities for the opera seria characters to "play on the same turf" as the "official" comedians. This is particularly the case in that opening scene, which is a trio for Nyade, Dryade, and Echo. In the first place the very fact that Echo does little more than repeat means that she can be portrayed as the dimmest bulb in this particular Christmas tree. However, this particular staging conceived of all of them as being not particularly bright, going through "classical" motions with only the vaguest sense of what they were doing (but all staged with the same intricacy as the Marx Brothers at their zaniest). All this then takes place while they are singing some of the most luscious music ever written for three female voices. Thus, going back to the overall plan, we begin in the realm of the ridiculous; but we are already receiving cues of the sublime that will shortly come.

This brings us to why I wanted to single out these two particular scenes. Both are fundamentally revelatory. They feed the viewer's need to anticipate what will be coming next. In Dangerous Liaisons it is a transition from seemingly vapid parlor talk to the foolish circumstances under which one of the protagonists will die. In Ariadne the transition is from laughable mediocrity to a reminder that the best of art can elevate, whatever the surrounding context may be. Any evening that can present us with both of those transitions back-to-back is transcendent in its own special way.

Condi Advances her Chutzpah Count

Condoleeza Rice may continue to lag behind her boss, George W. Bush, when it comes to the number of Chutzpah of the Week awards; but she is still steadily advancing her count. Actually, this week turned into a tough call between the two of them. Bush was there with his $770 million food aid package, which might finally have thrown the guy into a humanitarian light had he not tacked the allocation on to his $70 billion Iraq war budget (the operative phrase being "tacked on," as opposed to reallocating some of that Iraq budget to wage peace rather than war). However, having just read the Al Jazeera English account of Condi's moves in preparing for today's Middle East peace talks, I decided that, this week at least, hers is the greater arrogance of power. Here is how Al Jazeera English reported her remarks prior to the meeting:

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, has criticised Arab countries for "dragging their feet" on the Middle East peace process and not contributing enough to the Palestinian cause.

Rice made the remarks ahead of Middle East peace talks on Friday with foreign ministers from the Middle East Quartet in London.

The Quartet comprises of representatives from the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.

Rice said "[Arab] states that have resources ought to be looking not for how little they can do but how much they can do".

"Countries that have resources and that have an interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state need to put those resources at use now in order to lay the groundwork for the establishment of that state."

Coincidentally, the May 1 issue of The New York Review contained the latest analysis by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (who have been filing these dispatches probably for about ten years) on the extent of progress (or lack thereof) towards an enduring peace between Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East. The chutzpah in Rice's remarks basically concerns a "target bias." Everything she says may well be valid; but it is equally valid for Israel, which also has many "resources" that could be committed to good-neighbor relations with Palestine as an alternative to the current relationship, which, at least in the area of Gaza, seems to involve little more than mutual target-practice.

A recurring theme in the Agha-Malley analyses involves the extent to which the United States can legitimately present itself as an "honest broker" in moderating dialogs between Israel and any of the Arab countries. Since the Arab's are as aware as the rest of us of the high level of lobbying influenced exercised by organizations such as AIPAC, they have every right to be suspicious of our "honest broker" posturing. So, when a new round of dialogs is about to begin, prefacing the meeting with remarks that are so overtly biased against the Arab side can only aggravate those suspicions; and, when those remarks are made from that "honest broker" pose, their very utterance constitutes chutzpah at a critical time when chutzpah is the last thing needed! For this Rice can now claim her fourth Chutzpah of the Week award (on grounds not that different from those for her third)!

A Cautionary Tale about "The Dimension of Domination"

One of the reasons why I continue to try to draw upon social theory as more than a collection of academic abstractions is that I continue to find diagnostic value in the three "dimensions" of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory when I try to address real-world workplace situations that run the gamut from problematic to downright pathological. By way of a refresher, these are sort of the underlying "channels," which regulate the processes of social interaction, including the "content of messages exchanged" through communication. They are:

1. Signification, which is concerned with the question of "what things mean" and, at a deeper level, just what those "things" are in the world in which we engage in social interaction.
2. Legitimation, which is concerned with identifying and honoring normative patterns of interaction.
3. Domination, which is basically concerned with who gets to exercise authority over whom.

Those who like to wax poetic over such matters as innovation (particularly in the interests of economic growth) tend to play up what happens along the dimension of signification, often avoiding (through either naive ignorance or deliberate choice) the other two dimensions. This is a "tragic flaw;" and, as David Mamet demonstrated by writing a tragic play (The Water Engine) about an inventor who comes up with a machine that runs on water and is then brutally destroyed (along with all apparent evidence of his invention) by agents of "Big Oil," I use the adjective "tragic" in more than a metaphorical sense.

I write this all to introduce a long article by Wellford Wilms, which just appeared on Truthdig and provides an equally tragic account of the triumph of domination over signification in the public sector, specifically the domain of public education. The setting is the Baldwin Park High School in the Los Angeles County School District. The basic "plot line" is laid out in Wilms' first three paragraphs:

Eighteen teachers, Baldwin Park High School’s “leadership team,” sit in a semicircle with their arms folded across their chests looking at the floor. The year is 2003 and the new principal, Julie Infante, an exuberant 44-year-old woman, explains how they are going to lead this high school out of its academic doldrums together. The teachers are clearly skeptical, either distrusting what Infante is saying or disbelieving that they can do it. The Los Angeles County school has hit bottom. The campus is littered with trash, fights are common, students cut classes without penalty, test scores are so low that the school’s accreditation is in jeopardy, and the faculty is demoralized. The stakes are high because failure is an invitation for the state to take over.

Remarkably, in three years, between 2003 and 2006, with coaching from UCLA’s School Management Program, the teachers and the principal accomplished a stunning success. By every important academic measure, the school made impressive gains. The campus was cleaned up, the number of disciplinary cases fell, student absenteeism declined, and test scores improved dramatically. Not surprisingly, the teachers felt more positive about the administrators and less isolated from one another, and their job satisfaction increased. But, in 2006, in an equally astonishing turn of events, the board of education and the superintendent removed Infante, replacing her with a new principal who began to reverse the bold steps that had produced the turnaround.

What happened? Why would the board and superintendent undo the actions that had produced such remarkable results? It was because they failed to understand what Infante and the UCLA coaches had accomplished. They were blinded by their own ambitions and by their conviction that administrative top-down control is the only way to run the schools. What they could not see was that Infante had turned the leadership of the school upside down, leading from behind the scenes and encouraging teachers to take control. As the teachers expanded their responsibility, a new professional authority began to emerge among them that translated into new norms for the school. Instead of blaming everyone but themselves for the students’ failure, the teachers took on collective responsibility for the students’ success.

Wilms then provides an extensive analysis of the events and the motives behind those events. His bibliography draws upon much of my favorite reading matter, including books I have specifically cited on this blog, such as Raymond Callahan's Education and the Cult of Efficiency and Robert Blauner's Alienation and Freedom). Nevertheless, the language of his third paragraph indicates that, like so many others, Wilms is determined to keep his argument confined to the dimension of signification ("they failed to understand" and "they could not see"). He does not explicitly frame his narrative in terms of the question of what happens when signification goes head-to-head with domination. Like the Galileo that Bertolt Brecht conceived for his "biographical" play, he cannot imagine an authority that would not be swayed by the power of raw evidence and irrefutable logical reasoning based on that evidence. He thus ignores the theme that pervades so many of Brecht's plays (not to mention The Water Engine), which is that, in any confrontation with signification, domination will prevail because of its very nature to dominate.

One lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that any innovative action should be preceded by asking, "Who's in charge?" (or "Who's really in charge?" to stress that this question is rarely answered by an objective chain-of-command analysis of an organization chart). If those who dominate do not "buy into" that action when it is first being considered, then it is unlikely to survive a subsequent confrontation, no matter how successful it has been. Furthermore, even more important than "getting off the ground" is the problem of "staying in flight." The field of domination is a highly volatile one. Having authority on Monday never guarantees having the same authority on Tuesday, and this is equally true in both public and private sectors. Managing an innovative undertaking thus becomes a matter of "eternal vigilance." Much as we would like to believe otherwise, there is always someone with the power to cut off an initiative, no matter how strong the support for that initiative may be. Whoever is responsible for the initiative is therefore obliged to know who that someone is and how to keep the initiative on that person's radar in a positive light. "Positive," of course, may have little to do with who benefits from the initiative and everything to do with how that someone can maintain a position of power or acquire a stronger one.

I write all this with a reputation for trying to call out endorsements of innovation that turn out to be little more than reckless talk. The ultimate lesson from Wilms' account is that, while innovation may be absolutely essential for getting out of a crisis situation, if recklessly managed it runs the risk of doing more harm than good. That recklessness comes from choosing to wear blinders while planning and executing one's actions, blinders to the larger context in which those actions are embedded. Taking the blinders off means that you have to deal with all sorts of issues that have no real bearing on the problem you are trying to solve; but, if those issues are neglected, they could well destroy the ultimate solution, however valuable and appealing it may be.