Our Knowledge of the Musical World

I picked up an interesting tidbit about a recent performance of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. One of the critics who attended the performance sent a message to the conductor to the effect that, even after preparing himself by attending a lecture about the work, he still did not understand it and did not know what to write; so he did not write a review of the performance. My immediate reaction was that this was the most honest act in journalism I had encountered in many years (which, when you think about it, carries the pathetic implication that the best place to find honesty is on the Arts pages). On the other hand I cannot help but be reminded of the final entry in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Wovon man nich sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

[What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.]

However, I believe it is important to read this text in the light of two other philosophers, one of whom preceded Wittgenstein and one of whom followed him. The predecessor is Plato on ground that I have visited many times concerned with the intimate relationship that exists between knowledge and description. The more recent philosopher is Richard Rorty, who talked about "keeping the conversation going" as a (if not the) major obligation of philosophy. Put another way, much (if not most) of what we know emerges from our "conversations" with others. This is true whatever we may "acquire" through our personal experiences; and it comes about through the extent to which we share those experiences. This reflects back on Plato to the extent that much of that sharing derives from our capacity to describe the experiences. Some of us can achieve such description through musical performances or "works of art" (as when Igor Stravinsky once told a television audience, "I don't want to tell you more, I only want to play you more"); but the rest of us all-too-humans usually cannot get at description by any means other than through our command of the language(s) we speak!

This raises at least a potential paradox of knowledge acquisition: Can that "local critic" in San Mateo ever get beyond passing over Messiaen in silence? To be even more reductive and trying to deftly avoid those who try to play Beethoven to a child still in the womb, we come into this world with no experience of having heard Messiaen (and, for the sake of argument, let us assume Ludwig van Beethoven, as well). Yet many of us eventually come to a position from which we feel we can speak about Beethoven. Can we say anything "developmentally" about how we get there? My own stab at answering this question (heavily informed by the work of Gerald Edelman) is that we have the ability to build up our own experience base; and, as we do so, we begin to form perceptual categories, which we can invoke to inform our speech. However, experience does not come overnight; so it would probably be unreasonable to expect a newspaper critic to bring himself up to speed on Messiaen for the sake of submitting a review on time!

Nevertheless, if we move beyond the specifics of Messiaen or Beethoven, my "Platonic" view of knowledge allows for the possibility that we can prepare ourselves for the task of describing new music (unless it springs from an abstraction that is deliberately removed from all experience bases). This takes us back to my favorite quote from Stravinsky:

Others let the ears be present and they don't make an effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

In light of Edelman's insights, what separates us from ducks is the richness of perceptual categories we can manage in the course of our perceptions. From a strictly personal point of view, it took me quite some time (including several feeble efforts at trying to play some of the stuff) to build up some perceptual categories to inform my having anything to say (at least in Wittgenstein's sense) about Messiaen! Thus, what Stravinsky calls "an effort to understand" may ultimately come down to allowing oneself to acquire as broad an experience base of listening to (if not playing) music as "world enough and time" can allow, because it is only through those experiences that perceptual categories will emerge, primarily as a consequence of the cerebral cortex doing what nature has endowed it with the capacity to do; and, the richer the base of categories we acquire, the less we have to worry about passing over in silence!

It's All about the Diva

I had a music professor who used to like to say, "There are those who like music and those who like opera." It should be clear from many of my past posts that I disagree with him. Yesterday, however, after seeing the San Francisco Opera production of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (having seen the opera itself only once before on a Metropolitan Opera telecast), I have to wonder if my professor had intended his assertion to apply only to bel canto opera. It is hard to imagine this work as anything more than a three-hour framework for one spectacular mad scene aria. It certainly does not honor Walter Scott (in either music or text) the with creative understanding that Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito brought to William Shakespeare in their adaptation of Othello; and, having had a few opportunities to hear the composer's chamber music, I would say that Lucia does not even provide Donizetti with much of a platform for his compositional skills. Indeed, I might be so bold as to observe that the high point of his creativity came with the decision to have a glass harmonica accompany Lucia's mad scene, which provided for a truly eerie depiction of her unhinged state.

Even this decision has problems, however. The glass harmonica yields an effective sound, but it is also physically unwieldy. Thus, it works best as a solo instrument. (Mozart's one effort to put it in a chamber music setting was an Adagio, for good reason!) Getting such an instrument to track coloratura passages is a high-wire act for both parties. Thus, if yesterday's performance was about little more than not falling from the wire, I am happy to report that Natalie Dessay delivered the aria with all the intensity it demands; and Alexander Marguerre had all the necessary command of his glass harmonica to give her the supporting accompaniment she deserved.

Is there anything more that can be said? Interestingly, Joseph Kerman, in his Opera as Drama book, pretty much ignores Lucia's mad scene but singles out the concluding scene, in the Ravenswood cemetery, as a high-point of pre-Verdi operatic drama. Musically, Donizetti seemed to find his best sounds and thematic conceptions when he brought together the voices of Enrico Ashton (baritone) and Edgardo (tenor). However, in spite of the fact that what drama there is revolves around the antagonism between these two men, this happens seldom; and one of those times is when they introduce the second act sextet, which as Daniel Mendelsohn pointed out when he reviewed the Metropolitan Opera production for The New York Review of Books, is only a sextet through the gratuitous presence of Alisa (whose voice I never really heard).

So, do a few isolated moments of inspiration justify a full commitment to a three-hour performance? My guess is that much of the audience was there to hear Dessay, and they were more than satisfied with that experience. Mendelsohn makes a strong case that there is far more to what Donizetti and his librettist Salavadore Cammarano put into this opera than I seem to have gotten out of it. On the other hand, after building up an argument for all of the substance in this opera, he proceeded to explain why Mary Zimmerman (who directed the Met production) did not "get it." So it is possible that Graham Vick, who originally staged the San Francisco production for the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence also did not "get it." However, when we consider how much dramatic significance Vick was able to extract from a single tree in his staging of Tannhäuser earlier this season, I have to wonder if the cardboard characters and melodramatic histrionics of Lucia were a rebellion against the injustices to Scott wreaked by Cammarano.

A more generous explanation may have been that Lucia was just in the wrong company. Both George Frideric Handel and Richard Wagner knew how to explore depths of the human heart through the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of their compositional skills. Donizetti was just not the same sort of player in that kind of league. He had the talent to entertain but not to reflect. Had Lucia been placed in a repertoire between the legacy of Gioacchino Rossini and the innovations of Verdi, I might have received it with more understanding and appreciation.

Eastern European Wonders

I do not know if this was an accident of the timings of the individual works on the program or a deliberate act to prompt our approach to listening; but the program for the final "official" concert by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall (before the Summer in the City series gets under way) was presented in reverse chronological order. When I wrote about Johannes Brahms during the "Festival" series of concerts that Michael Tilson Thomas had arranged last month, I explored the extent to which Brahms had to contend with "the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven" and suggested that we needed to apply a listening strategy to Brahms that was "both retrospective and prospective at the same time." In many respects this week's program challenged us to apply that strategy on a broader geographical scale, which encompassed one recently deceased composer from Poland (Witold Lutosławski) and two from Czechoslovakia (Leoš Janáček and Antonín Dvořák).

I am actually not sure it is fair to place these three composers in a common category. Beyond the boundaries of geography, Lutosławski is separated from the other two by not only the Second World War but also influences that are about as remote from the Czechs as one might imagine. Indeed, by Lutosławski's own account, his two primary sources of influence are, themselves, radically different: On the one hand there is the influence of the Second Viennese School, which grew out of Arnold Schoenberg and his two primary students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern; and this is the influence that usually comes to mind when we hear performances of Lutosławski's music. However, he was also influenced by Claude Debussy; and we became more aware of that influence in his final years of composition. In his notes in the program book for "Mi-Parti," the Lutosławski composition that began the Symphony program, Scott Fogelsong wrote about these influences in terms of an opposition between technical logic (Schoenberg) and expressiveness (Debussy); and, while Fogelsong never invokes the noun "dialectic," "Mi-Parti" may best be heard as a resolution of this opposition through synthesis.

Actually, my own first impression of "Mi-Parti" involves a composer whom Fogelsong never mentions: Igor Stravinsky. From a rhetorical point of view, the first of this composition's three sections follows the familiar path of a gradual emergence of "signs of life" from some initial sparse gestures to the near-chaos of an entire ecosystem. Stravinsky broke the mold for this rhetorical strategy in the "Introduction" to his Rite of Spring. However, where Stravinsky's gestures were all melodic, Lutosławski distilled the "raw material" for his approach to this strategy to little more than basic sounds (or, as musique concrète pioneer, Pierre Schaeffer, called them, "sonorous objects"). In addition there is an aleatory element to the "ecosystem" that emerges, in which performers play rapid passages based on a pre-specified selection of notes but with the freedom to choose the order in which those notes are played.

The impact on the ear is nothing less than dazzling. While, even in Stravinsky, there is traditionally a sense of an integrated ensemble following a "direction" set by the conductor, Lutosławski's effect comes far closer to that sense of a "primal nature" than anything Stravinsky invoked. As in a rainforest, one is first struck only by how much activity there is; but, as the ears become acclimated to the environment, one begins to be able to extract specific activities from the overall texture. This is not always easy to achieve in a performance, particularly when dealing with an ensemble as large as the one Lutosławski has specified. However, visiting conductor David Robertson did an excellent job of find the right path between leading the Symphony when they needed to be led and allowing them "freedom of choice" when this was what the score required. The result was that, while it was clear that technical logic played an extremely strong role in the conception of this music, not to mention preparation for performance, it was the expressiveness that emerged "at the other end" for the benefit of those of us in the audience.

Janáček preceded Lutosławski by approximately half a century; but he, too, commanded a strong sense of music as a structuring of "sonorous objects." Within Janáček's frame of reference, however, this conception could be approached through the devices of orchestration. The down-side of such an approach is that the underlying "vocabulary" he invoked for melody, harmony, and counterpoint is relatively limited; so, without the narrative thread that runs through his operas, a full evening of his music might end up sounding a bit repetitious. However, any one of his works, taken on its own terms, usually turns out to be a real gem; and, indeed, each of the three movements of his Taras Bulba "rhapsody" (as he called it) is a gem unto itself.

For those unfamiliar with the novella by Nikolai Gogol (or, for that matter, the Yul Brynner movie) that provides the underlying narrative for this rhapsody, the story concerns a Cossack warrior (of the title) and his two sons, Ostap and Andrei. In the context of my argument that the opera Das Rheingold may best be understood as a story of three thefts, Janáček seemed to have regarded Gogol's novella as an account of three deaths (and I would share that point of view). Ultimately, it is the saga of a father who witnesses (and, in the case of Andrei, the younger son, brings about) the deaths of his two sons. (Ostap is executed by the Poles, and Taras finds himself witness.) Leading the Cossacks across Poland to avenge Ostap's death, Taras is ultimately taken prisoner and burned at the stake, but not before going out with one last defiant call to arms to his fellow Cossacks. Janáček's rhapsody depicts each of these deaths in the order in which they occur in Gogol's narrative.

The result is that each movement is, more than anything else, a character study. If his thematic vocabulary was limited, he compensated with rich orchestration and, particularly for Ostap, a keen sense of gesture, which, in many ways, provides a "transition point" between the use of melodic motif employed by so much of the music that had preceded Janáček and that more fundamental concept of "basic sound" that lay at the heart of Lutosławski's musical language. Thus, the order of the program may have served Janáček best of the three composers by providing the opportunity to hear his music both retrospectively and prospectively.

The evening concluded with Dvořák's Opus 104 cello concerto. Like Taras Bulba, this was a relatively late work; but it preceded the Janáček rhapsody by almost a quarter century. Dvořák only wrote three concertos, and this was the last of them. Furthermore, the level of expressiveness he achieved in writing for the cello tends to make this far more popular that the two preceding concertos for piano and violin, respectively. However, that expressiveness had already emerged in his chamber music; so it is no surprise that, towards the end of the concerto's final movement, the cello engages in a dialog with a violin (usually played by the concertmaster) which may have, itself, involved a retrospective view of his compositions for piano trio. Cello soloist Alisa Weilerstein had little trouble homing in on these expressive qualities and meeting the double challenge of holding her own against the entire orchestra while maintaining the intimacy of her brief "conversation" with Associate Concertmaster Nadya Tichman. (Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik had exercised his solo chops during Taras Bulba; so it was nice to see the way "division of labor" was applied to this program!)

Finally, it is interesting to note a somewhat shorter-range view of retrospection and prospection surrounding this concerto. According to the program notes, Dvořák began working on it on November 8, 1894; but his inspiration seems to have originated in the spring of that year. This was when he heard the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera play his own second cello concerto in a concert (in Brooklyn, probably at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). That cellist was Victor Herbert, barely remembered today and not for his symphonic music but for a string of operettas that became part of the early history of movies with music! Had it not been for Herbert, Dvořák might not have begun his project; and that makes for one great "sweet mystery of life!"

Variations without a Theme

The last time I heard Sandro Russo in recital, at St. Patrick's Church in San Francisco under the auspices of Noontime Concerts™, I suggested that his program had been "organized around the theme of the art of embellishment." I heard him again last night at San Francisco's Old First Church; and I would say that, while there was hardly a lack of embellishment, the emphasis did not seem to be as great. However, in spite of my habit (or, as I sometimes suggest, natural inclination) to find a unifying theme in last night's program, I suspect that any hypothesis I would pose would be a stretch. To some extent one might say that the recital was "about" listening to music through the medium of the solo piano (even when that music was not written for solo piano); but can we not the say the same about any piano recital?

Nevertheless, many of the works on the program seemed to demonstrate this approach from different points of view. Consider, for example, the second work on Russo's program, the "Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen" by Franz Liszt. The title comes from the BWV 12 cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, which is the text of the opening chorus (preceded by an orchestra sinfonia). There is a slight irony in that the chorus is, itself, a chaconne of variations woven around a repeated "ground" bass passage; so, in some sense, Liszt's work could be called "variations on a set of variations." Bach, himself, would later "repurpose" this chaconne for the "Crucifixus" movement of his B minor mass (BWV 232), which was consistent with the mournful text of BWV 12. However, if Bach's music was meant for mediation on the "root tragedy" of Christian faith, Liszt's approach to "variation" is primarily one of bombast. Introverted grief is trumped by extroverted histrionics. Yet, there is also an extent to which these "variations" turn into a reflection on the entire cantata, or at least the beginning and the end; for, after it seems as if Liszt has exhausted everything he possibly can build on top of the poor little bass passage, he presents us with a coda based on the final chorale of the cantata, "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan," which blazes with as much glory as his divisions on the ground bass. From Bach's point of view, this chorale closes the meditation with the most frequently recurring theme of his faith: "Thy Will be Done." Liszt turns that precept into a celebration of God's will, if not a celebration of his view of himself as an instrument of God's will! This music, after all, precedes by many decades Liszt decision to take the cloth and become an abbé. Indeed, to the extent that we have a reasonable chronology of Liszt's works, he seems to have been working on these variations around the same time he was composing his "Totentanz" with equal flamboyance and throwing in orchestral accompaniment for good measure.

I find it interesting that it is possible (but probably not very likely) that Liszt could have been exposed to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" at the time he was working on both of these compositions. Whether it is a reflection on that "root tragedy" or on the horrors of the afterlife, Liszt's music may best be heard as a rebellion against the solemnity of church services that deprive the congregation of the essentially "emotional underbelly" of faith. Liszt's music lays siege to such churches and their rituals. Had he been aware of Whitman's words, he would have stormed through the doors to play his music first proclaiming:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

This, of course, is my own conception of what was going on in this particular piece of piano music. I also have no idea if Russo is familiar with Whitman's writing. Whether or not he knows Whitman's text, however, he certainly knows how to bring a "barbaric yawp" to his performance; and that is precisely what the performance of Liszt's approach to a humble little Bach cantata required!

Liszt was also represented on Russo's program by his "Réminiscences de Don Juan." This comes from an earlier period but also may best be viewed through that song-of-myself perspective, because, by the time he set to work on what, ostensibly, was an homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni, he had accumulated his own "catalog" of female conquests, which, while not quite as numerous as Leporello's list was still pretty impressive for any mere mortal. Thus, while this paraphrase of Mozart begins with the apparition of the Commendatore in the graveyard, once the music "gets down to business," it is all about seduction and sybaritic indulgence. The heart of the work is a set of variations (once again, highly flamboyant) on the Don's temptation of Zerlina in "Là ci darem la mano" (possibly in response to the set of variations composed by the then teenaged Frédéric Chopin); and the composition goes out with a bang (almost literally) with "Finch'han dal vino calda la testa," in which the Don describes in manic detail his plans for the party at which he plans to add Zerlina's name (and others) to Leporello's list. Needless to say, Liszt had no trouble at all capturing this manic element of the Don's character; and the good news was that Russo had no trouble in rendering the way Liszt had captured it.

While it might have been interesting to offer Chopin's "Là ci darem" variations to provide both context and comparison to Liszt's treatment, Russo chose to represent Chopin instead with his more mature Opus 22, the "Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise." This provided an excellent contrast, since, while the Liszt compositions had well defined episodes to frame his yawps and indulgences, this particular coupling of two movements has a much better defined (and, for that matter, refined) architecture than just about anything Liszt ever wrote. Within that architecture embellishment is less for virtuosic display and more to, well, embellish a core structure through which the listener orients to the beginning, middle, and end of each movement. Perhaps the most important thing about such a core is that the end is there less to "go out with a bang," as I had put it for Liszt, but to close off what had begun; and one way to listen to these two movements is as two different perspectives on how one comes to closure. Now, when I last wrote about Russo, I questioned whether he was more interested in the rapidity of his embellishments than in their function; and I reinforced that question with my observations of how he had approached Joseph Haydn's "classical" approach to embellishment, in contrast to Liszt's "virtuosic" approach. Russo did not perform Chopin at this earlier recital; but last night's performance demonstrated how firmly Chopin holds that "middle ground" between Haydn and Liszt. The rapidity was still there (sometimes a bit more than I would have liked) but delivered with a lightness of touch that made it clear that the function of embellishing was being served; and, as a result, we learned more about listening to embellishment from this particular coupling of Chopin and Liszt than we would have learned had Russo opted for the "Là ci darem" variations.

Russo's program also provided an interesting exercise in listening to counterpoint, particularly as it was practiced by Bach. It began with the Largo movement from Bach's C major (BWV 529) organ trio sonata as transcribed by Samuil Evgenyevich Feinberg, a highly romanticized conception of Bach with little concern for an "authentic" sound and all concern for taking what was probably a relatively abstract exercise in counterpoint and endowing it with profound emotion. Feinberg's approach was complemented by the coupling of a prelude and fugues in G sharp minor by Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev, a pupil of Piotr Tchaikovsky. Wikipedia has an excellent entry for Taneyev, which includes the following paragraph relevant to Russo's selection:

Taneyev's specialized field of study was theoretical counterpoint. He engrossed himself in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Palestrina and Flemish masters such as Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez and Lassus. Eventually, he became one of the greatest of theoretical contrapuntists^[26].

This particular prelude and fugue, Taneyev's Opus 29, was composed in 1910, which is a time when Feinberg's "spirit" of Bach was flourishing; but Taneyev chose to capture this spirit through an original composition that honored Bach's craft, rather than through a transcription of Bach's own music. With its post-romantic perspective, Taneyev's conception unfolds the underlying forms of The Well-Tempered Clavier with far more layers of embellishment (not to mention duration) than Bach would have found suitable; and I have to confess that my immediate reaction to Russo's performance was that I wanted to hear this work again, since I was pretty certain that I "got" only a modest portion of it on first exposure. As I have previously observed, listening to Bach's counterpoint it no easy matter; and, regardless of how "authentic" the instrument is, the best Bach performers are those who can guide us through the intricacies of Bach's logic and grammar. Taneyev offered up a new composition as an alternative guide; but that just means that performing this twentieth-century work confronts the same challenges as performing Bach! Thus, I would have to beg off trying to evaluate Russo's performance until I am more familiar with the work; but I deeply appreciate his exposing me to this alternative to approaching Bach through transcription.

Vladimir Leyetchkiss' recent transcription of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Opus 17 suite for two pianos, on the other hand, is quite another matter. While I appreciate the desire of a solo pianist (like Russo) to play this music without having to seek out another pianist, the performance had too much of a technical display of how to compress four hands worth of notes into only two. More suitable was Russo's encore, which was Giovanni Sgambati's transcription of the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo de Euridice. Within the history of transcriptions and paraphrases, this was probably the closest thing to a warhorse that Russo performed; and it offers the best possible way to demonstrate that neither a transcription nor a paraphrase need necessarily be all about flamboyance. Russo understood this, and his sensitivity endowed his program with a perfect sense of closure.

Stepping on the Long Tail (again)

For any of my disagreements with Andrew Keen, I continue to read him because I continue to support the basic precepts of his Cult of the Amateur book, particularly those relating to his subtitle about "how the Internet is killing our culture." About a year ago, thanks to Book TV, I got to see Keen participate in a "debate" over this book, which was held at the Strand Bookstore in New York. I visited this topic a couple of times in blog posts, partly because, while I did not say it explicitly at the time, it had to be one of the most bizarre broadcasts I had ever seen on Book TV. (I have to say "one of," since the recent broadcast of David Horowitz haranguing the National Press Club, ostensibly on the topic of his book, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11, is, without a doubt, the most bizarre event I have seen on Book TV!) One of the more important themes at the Strand had to do with the conviction of Internet evangelists that everyone could get rich through the virtues of the "long tail effect." Reduced to its simplest terms, the principle behind the effect is that whatever you have to supply, given a large enough population of buyers, there will be enough demand within that population for you to make a living from supplying it. Therefore, since the Internet gives you access to the largest population of buyers conceivable, you are sure to make money by satisfying that demand with your supply. Here is how I summarized Keen's refutation in an earlier blog post:

Keen's basic response was that, indeed, anyone (including all of the "amateurs" that occupy his book) out on the long tail could be "discovered" to the benefit of others; but he was skeptical that anyone could make money by being discoverable.

When I reported this refutation, I followed it up with some more analytic results that had been reported on CNET News.com:

Keen's skepticism has now been confirmed with more specific data and analysis posted by Gordon Haff on his Pervasive Datacenter blog for CNET. The bottom line of his argument is that money is made on the long tail, rather than in it. Put another way, Amazon can (and probably does) make a healthy share of their revenue by aggregating a vast number of books, each of which is known to have very little appeal, and handling the sale of all of them. Any author of any of those books, however, is not going to earn enough for a loaf of bread off of the increased sales (s)he gets by virtue of being in the Amazon catalog.

This morning Matt Asay has come up with further fuel for the fire on his Open Road blog for CNET News.com:

As new research highlighted in Harvard Business Review suggests, the answer may well be that the real money is in the blockbuster, not the long tail, after all:

Meanwhile, our research also showed that success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve. From 2000 to 2005 the number of titles in the top 10% of weekly sales dropped by more than 50%--an increase in concentration that is common in winner-take-all markets. The importance of individual best sellers is not diminishing over time. It is growing....

Is most of the business in the long tail being generated by a bunch of iconoclasts determined to march to different drummers? The answer is a definite no. My results show that a large number of customers occasionally select obscure offerings that, given their consumption rank and the average assortment size of off-line retailers, are probably not available in brick-and-mortar stores. Meanwhile, consumers of the most obscure content are also buying the hits. Although they choose products of widely varying popularity, top titles generally form the largest share of their choices. (The wide appeal of these top titles is, of course, what makes them popular in the first place.)

Not only this, but the researchers find that "No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles." So, not only is the long tail less profitable, it's also less enjoyable. Chris Anderson, the man who made long-tail theory de rigueur, tries to defend his theory, but it doesn't measure up to HBR's analysis.

Will this put all of that long tail claptrap to rest? Of course not. One reason I so delight in calling Internet promoters "evangelists" is that their reasoning is as faith-based as most of the political logic exercised over the last eight years that has now left us in a morass of consequences far ghastlier than we could ever have imagined. Indeed, in the grand scheme of history, the faith behind Internet evangelism may be relatively minor compared with faith-based decisions that have impacted the prospects for world peace, the growing problem of world hunger, and the potential ruination of our planet's basic ecosystem. Furthermore, I basically agree with George Lakoff that "You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain;" and, on the basis of my own studies of "wet brains," I can both follow and appreciate his explanations for why our brains are hooked on precepts of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment that run the gamut from outdated to flat-out wrong. However, just as I recently argued "that Google is one of the primary technologies through which the Web feeds our addiction to consumerism," I would further argue that the entire Internet is such a monument to Enlightenment ideals that it inhibits the development of our brains to accommodate 21st-century insights. I thus feel it is necessary to bring my own resources to bear against those Internet evangelists for the fundamental reason that what they are promoting is almost certainly going to have an inhibitory effect on our ability to confront and deal with all those crises that are far more serious than whether or not the Internet economy rises or falls.

America's Next Unaudacious Chapter

It was through "The American reawakening" posted by Andrew Keen on his Great Seduction blog that I discovered Gary Hart's Op-Ed contribution to The New York Times, entitled "America's Next Chapter." Now that Barack Obama is the designated candidate for the Democratic party and he has made a strategic decision about funding his candidacy, the one "resource shortage" he will not be facing will be the opinions of others. Hart is hardly the first to get this ball rolling; and, for what it is worth, he has "the wisdom of one who tried and failed." More importantly, he writes from a base of understanding far broader than Presidential campaigns; and his piece is worth reading simply for the appreciation of that base.

What he builds on that base is another matter. After stimulating us with a second paragraph in which he invokes (in his ordering) Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Adams, when he finally gets down to the nitty-gritty of how Obama should move forward, his primary source is more populist:

Senator Obama has two choices. He can focus on winning the election to the exclusion of all else and, like Robert Redford in “The Candidate,” ask, “What do we do now?” after it is over. Or he can use his campaign as a platform for designing a new political cycle and achieve a mandate for starting it.

It is not often that we see Redford (or, as in this case, one of his fictitious personae) as a negative role model; but this made for an interesting rhetorical flourish on Hart's part. The reader was thus "softened up" for the more substantive core of Hart's argument:

Noting the power of “custom and fear,” and “of orthodoxy and of complacency,” Schlesinger believed that “the subversion of old ideas by the changing environment” would give a new leader the best chance to create a new cycle of reform and innovation.

No individual can entirely determine the architecture of a historical cycle. But much of the next one will be defined by how we grapple with a host of new realities, ones that reach beyond jihadist terrorism. They include globalized markets; the expansion of the information revolution into places like China; the emergence of new world powers including India and China; climate deterioration; failing states; the changing nature of war; mass migrations; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; viral pandemics; and many more.

Senator Obama’s attempt to introduce the next American cycle should include, at minimum, three elements. National security requires a new, expanded, post-cold-war definition. America must transition from a consumer economy to a producing one. And the moral obligations of our stewardship of the planet must become paramount.

Treating "cycle" as a synonym for "revolution," I am reminded of a quip that G. K. Chesterton once made about a farmer he encountered while on a walking tour in France: The farmer made the observation that the problem with revolutions is that they always take you back where you started. Peter Weiss expressed this more cynically in Marat/Sade: "The soup is still burnt." If Hart (or anyone else, for that matter) wants to open a conversation on a "new chapter," then it is just as important to be clear about what we are leaving behind in the "old chapter," as well as turning our gaze to "new realities."

The reason I feel there is too much "old chapter" (or "burnt soup") thinking in Hart's recommendations lies in the second of his "three elements:"

America must transition from a consumer economy to a producing one.

The problem is that production supports consumerism as much as consumption does; and, as I have been trying to argue (again inspired, at least in part, by Keen), our prevailing "culture of consumerism" is the most dominant part of that "old chapter" that we need to put behind us. Put another way, a "transition" to production is more about whether or not we are drowning the world in unnecessary "stuff" than about whether we are the major consumers of that "stuff." From this point of view, there is a potential conflict between the second and third items of Hart's list, particularly when you factor in the need for the planet's resources to produce all that "stuff" in the first place! Furthermore, while the globalization of our addiction to consumerism may not be the primary cause of all of those "new realities" in Hart's list, I suspect that it still emerges for each of those realities, if not in a primary way then in a secondary or tertiary one.

If Obama really wanted to write an "audacious new chapter," he could embrace the premise that there is more to living a "good life" than economic growth, particularly when the only thing that is growing is the Gross Domestic Product! There are all sorts of other criteria we could choose for being a significant world leader: lowering infant mortality and raising the level of educational achievement (for both students and teachers) would make for a good start. Then, of course, there are criteria that are not country-centric, such as contributing to a more equitable distribution of wealth around the world. This last is the basic mission of the Growth Commission (which I have already discussed and provides about the only context in which I can utter the word "growth" without spitting). This is my idea of serious language about the "audacity of hope;" but I doubt that we shall hear much of that talk from Obama. Now that his staff will be counting electoral votes every day, I suspect they would muzzle him, even if he wanted to talk about it!

"Blindered" Lawyers Subvert Blind Justice

I was more that a bit surprised to discover how little scathed the current Administration's Department of Justice had been by Chutzpah of the Week awards. The closest they seem to have come was on March 9, 2007, when they probably acted jointly with the Department of Defense to lay down the procedural groundwork for due process of law [sic] for the detainees in Guantanamo. The "sic" is, of course, related to the "chutzpah" and was focused on one of the ground rules (as had been reported by the BBC):

The hearings are being held with no defence lawyers present, and human rights groups say the panels of three military officials could consider evidence obtained by force.

Fortunately, while George W. Bush has been occupying himself with the legacy he wishes to leave, this turned out to be a good week to honor the Justice's Department's legacy for chutzpah.

The chutzpah in this case is not so much a matter of news as it is one of a skeleton that finally managed to get out of the closet. The story started to break last night that there was yet another brick in the wall of ideologically discriminatory practices in the Department of Justice, particularly under the watch of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Here is how Stephanie Kirchgaessner covered it (from Washington) for the Financial Times:

Officials at the US Department of Justice illegally favoured conservative candidates when they made hiring decisions for the department’s top recruitment programme, according to a report by the DoJ’s inspector general.

The findings marked the first time that allegations of illegal hiring and firing practices, cited for some time by former DoJ officials and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, were confirmed by an independent report. The review cited numerous instances in which qualified candidates were passed over for jobs because they were perceived as politically liberal.

I once gave a lecture on semiotics during which I joked about Bush's inability to interpret a sign in any reading other than the most literal one, probably as an ironic corollary of all of his readings being faith-based. Thus, the very construct of a symbol, which we may regard as a sign being employed deliberately for some figurative interpretation, was alien to him. In this case the irony is even greater, since the very nature of the Department of Justice is embodied in one of the most famous symbols in the world (by which I mean frequently recognized beyond our own borders).

The symbol, of course, is that of blindfolded Justice; and it would be fair to say that much of its global reputation comes from our having appropriated it from Great Britain. The blindfold basically symbolizes the abstract ideal of argumentation, the ability to arrive at a judgment through nothing but evidence and the ability to use that evidence to both warrant and refute assertions that are brought to the attention of the court by lawyers and witnesses. The blindfold even has a literal interpretation: As long as Justice can hear the development and conclusion of an argument, she has no need of her eyes.

Thus, one way to think about the DoJ hiring practices that have now come to light is that they have replaced the idealism of Justice's blindfold with ideological blinders that were assumed to be necessary for both doing DoJ business and for selecting new colleagues to assist in that process. Of course those blinders have extended to practices beyond DoJ operations, as we have seen in some of the recent Supreme Court opinions, regardless of what decision happened to prevail. However, in this case we should focus on the Executive Branch, particularly in light of the reputation the President has acquired for going to war against the Constitution with almost as much energy (and probably more success) than in his efforts towards a Global War on Terror. Thus, the Chutzpah of the Week award for this week will go (unshared) to the Justice Department for its legacy of hiring practices; and it should make a nice complement to all of those awards already sitting in the Oval Office!

The VOX POPULI of Ridicule

Is it really the case that I have not written about my preference for ridicule over outrage since March (when word was first coming out about Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay)? Have I been taking things too seriously, or has their been a serious paucity of reports on ridicule in the mass media? Certainly, today's story is a local one; and it will be interesting to see if it gets picked up on a national scale (or, through the good graces of either the BBC or Al Jazeera, a global one). It concerns a recent movement here in San Francisco, reported by Marisa Lagos in today's Chronicle:

They're the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, but don't let the serious name fool you. The group's intentions are in the gutter: They want to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant come January, when the next president is sworn in.

During the inauguration, the group also wants supporters to participate in a "synchronized flush"- a way to send a gift to the renamed plant, which supporters say, would be a "fitting monument to this president's work."

It sounds like a harmless joke, or maybe a college civics lesson gone awry. But the handful of friends who dreamed this up over beers one night say they have already collected 8,500 signatures in support of the plan - 1,300 more than the minimum needed to put the question to city voters in November. When they submit the signatures in July, election workers will have to verify that at least 7,168 are from registered city voters for the measure to qualify for the ballot.

Now, as Public Utilities Commission spokesman Tony Winnicker pointed out, this plant has won awards for the effective job it does of keeping our local water clean (thus reinforcing our Mayor's decision to ban bottled water from official meetings in favor of tap water). It is a little bit like the old joke about a guy who walks into a Texas bar and shouts at the top of his lungs that Lyndon Johnson is a horse's ass. While everyone in the bar is beating him up, the bartender explains that no one in that town can tolerate that kind of an insult to horses. Still, if we are to regard those signatures as vox populi, then we also need to acknowledge the wit of one specific vox. That comes from the specialist experience of plumber Bright Winn, who observed:

[Bush] has always done well for the affluent of America, and anyone that does well for the affluent should be named for the effluent.

"Once in Love with Amy"

The San Francisco Public Library is planning an exhibit on Amy Beach and the time she spent living in San Francisco. This coincided with the premiere of her piano concerto, which is currently planned for the first concert by Symphony Parnassus this coming fall. Therefore, it seemed to make sense for me to haul out my copy of John Gillespie's Nineteenth-Century American Piano Music anthology, which has two of her Opus 15 Sketches (composed in 1892). I have started in on "Dreaming" (which I had attempted many years ago); and I am struck by the post-Liszt feel it has, almost in the spirit of Ferruccio Busoni. She has a wonderful feel for chromaticism (even if my sterner teachers would have called that technique "slimy"); and, at least in this languid work, she does not make me jump through the hoops I usually encounter in Busoni or, for that matter, Franz Liszt. This is not the first time I have tried to post "dispatches" as I attempt to get both mind and hands around a piece of music; but the timing seems right for doing it again!

BON VOYAGE to the Youth!

I hope that conductor Benjamin Shwartz was not put off by my dwelling on the element of vulgarity (not to mention the reference to the Godzilla remake) in reviewing his performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Asteroids; but I had the feeling that the final concert of the San Francisco Youth Orchestra before embarking on their European tour tended to err on the side of tameness, particularly in the first half of the program. This is not to say that either the violin concerto of Jean Sibelius or the Dance Suite of Béla Bartók can be called vulgar (certainly not in the sense of The Miraculous Mandarin); but each of these works taps into the heart of its nationalistic roots by invoking some particularly raw qualities. The dances "behind" Bartók's suite are all based on indigenous sources, lacking any pretention of refinement (which is why "raw" is such an appropriate adjective); and Bartók is true to those sources, not only through the melodies he honors and the harmonies behind them but also through the sonorities evoked by his orchestration. In many ways this is a perfect piece for a youth orchestra, since it abounds with passages where one can "pull out all the stops" but which turn on a dime into more reflective moments. Unfortunately, what emerged from under Shwartz' baton was too much polite reflection and not enough raw spirit; and I have to wonder how such a performance will be received when they take it to the Czech Republic during their tour.

In the case of the Sibelius concerto, the raw element also has a lot to do with a performance style more appropriate to a folk setting than to a concert hall, even if the music itself does not draw on folk materials to the extent that Bartók did. Having had an opportunity to hear such folk music while attending a "cognitive musicology" conference in Finland, I can attest to the high intensity of energy that is applied to bowed string instruments for even the simplest of tunes; and energy is what matters most in the solo lines of Sibelius' concerto. Yes, many of those lines are long and elaborate (beginning with the very opening gesture); but they are not worked out with the inventive intricacy that we would find in Ludwig van Beethoven. There is also less of a sense of dialog between soloist and orchestra. Instead, the orchestra provides more of an aural landscape; and, consistent with the geography of Finland, that landscape challenges the ear with harsh features analogous to the harsh features of the land itself that confront the eye. So, again, raw spirit was the order of the day; and, again, Shwartz did little to deliver on that order. In this case, however, he may have been holding back because soloist Jennifer Koh too often seemed to be putting more energy into her "personal choreography" than into the sound of her performance. Ultimately, her appearance was a distraction from the music; and I suspect that, on more occasions than I noticed, her intonation and phrasing suffered from all that excessive movement.

Fortunately, things were on somewhat more solid ground after the intermission with scenes from Serge Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet. The vulgar pretentions of the Capulets, the street fights, the "public merrymaking" (which featured three harlots in Kenneth MacMillan's choreography for The Royal Ballet), and the violent death of Tybalt (topped only by Lady Capulet's reaction) all came to life in the Youth Orchestra performance; but, at the same time, the sensitivity of the "Balcony Scene" was not neglected. If there was any problem, it was that the selection did not really follow the narrative flow of the ballet (or, for that matter, Shakespeare); but there is no doubting that Lady Capulet's grief makes for a grand finale, even if, in MacMillan's scenario, it is only the finale of the second act!

One interesting programming decision was Shwartz' decision to conclude the afternoon with an encore of the "Cuban Overture," by George Gershwin (preceded by an encore of the polonaise from Piotr Tchaikovsky's opera, Eugene Onegin). Subscribers to the Youth Orchestra season (as well as any really dedicated readers) will recall that this is the work that began the season back in November. Presumably, it will be part of the repertoire for the tour; and well it should be. It is a work of spirit, wit, and wonderfully American sonorities (whatever its title may be). Indeed, were we to be bold enough to compare this performance with the one that the New York Philharmonic gave in North Korea, I might then be bold enough to confess a bias in favor of this American impression of Cuba over that more familiar American impression of Paris!

Nostalgia for EINSTEIN

I was not there for either of the American premiere performances of Einstein on the Beach, the "opera in four acts" resulting from the collaboration of Robert Wilson (who designed and directed all the staging) and Philip Glass (responsible for all the music and lyrics, such as they were), in November of 1976. At that time I suspect that I was not adequately prepared for the experience, although I had already built up an "experience base" for both Wilson and Glass. Indeed, as I have previously written, I was at the Anderson Theater to review The King of Spain, Wilson's first major work and a "coming out" of his Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, for Dance Magazine in 1969. Out of a fit of masochism, I tried to dig out what I had written for what I think was my first "straight review" (as opposed to feature article) for Dance. However, the digital archive for that magazine does not (yet?) extend back that far; and I do not seem to have saved my own copy of that issue. Unless I am mistaken, I did my best to document what I had experienced at that performance without trying either to interpret or to evaluate. The fact is that I was too stunned to do either, but not so stunned to turn down an invitation to see Deafman Glance when it was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971.

Between those two experiences I had my first exposure to Philip Glass. It was as part of a series of "new music" concerts given at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970. The other two concerts featured Steve Reich and the Sonic Arts Union. I knew about the series because I was performing with the Sonic Arts Union in "Conspiracy 8," which I had co-composed with Gordon Mumma (and, thanks to Gordon, is now my only "appearance" on a compact disc). I am not sure that there was a program listing specific compositions at the Glass concert; but my guess is that what I heard were a few (three?) of the works that were eventually compiled into the Music in 12 Parts series.

Looking back on these two events, I am not afraid to admit that both of them (and we can add Deafman Glance as a third) were major tests of my patience. All sort of intriguing things happened during King of Spain; but my cognitive capacity was still too saddled with traditional thinking to deal with a full evening without any well-defined sense of beginning, middle, and end. Similarly, the Glass compositions had wonderful sonorities; and I could not help but be struck by the simplicity of the ways in which he worked with his "repetitive structures." Nevertheless, it was hard to resist the urge to keep asking myself how many repetitions would play out before the composition ended!

By the time the Brooklyn Academy of Music decided to stage of revival of Einstein in 1984, however, I was much better prepared for the experience, if not downright eager for it. In that interim period I had already seen the American premiere of Satyagraha at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was gradually coming to the point of thinking of these performances as more than a test of my patience. Ironically, for the Einstein revival Wilson (I cannot remember if it was with Glass) put out a statement to the effect that we in the audience should not treat the work as a "grand opera" experience. Rather, we should accept it as something more like a gallery exhibit, feeling free to walk around and examine it from different points of view or even to venture out into the lobby for a break and then return. In other words it appeared as if Wilson wanted to make this work as accessible to us as possible.

However, through pure accident, my wife-to-be and I found ourselves in the front row right on the edge of the orchestra pit; and about the only movements I made involved shifting my weight! Yes, on stage the focus was on images with a bare minimum of motion (as I had experienced in other Wilson works); but, if I needed more visual stimuli, all I had to do was shift my attention to the musicians. The Philip Glass Ensemble knew full well that those repetitive structures could lead to physical fatigue, and I was fascinated with the ways in which some of the keyboard passages could be handed off from one performer to another in a perfectly seamless manner. I had not previously thought about this challenge to execution. Indeed, about the only thought I had given to execution had been at Satyagraha, when I saw conductor Christopher Keene holding up fingers to keep count of the number of repetitions!

Now it is 2008, and I realize that both Satyagraha and Einstein remain as the most memorable experiences I had at the Brooklyn Academy and probably the most memorable experiences I have had of opera. Those memories have probably been reinforced by the extent to which "the establishment" is now lining up behind both of these works. The English National Opera mounted a new production of Satyagraha this past season, and that production was subsequently shared with the Metropolitan Opera. This was a far cry from the Byrd Hoffman Foundation raising the funds to pay for using the space of the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center for the American premiere of Einstein; but now the word is out that Einstein may well return to Lincoln Center under more "established" auspices, if the New York City Opera goes through with its plans to mount a production after the renovation of the New York State Theater. All this attention, including Daniel Mendelsohn's highly perceptive review of the Metropolitan Opera Satyagraha for The New York Review, has led me to add both Einstein and Satyagraha to my CD collection, finally making up for the vinyl recordings I used to treasure.

Both of these recordings have followed an interesting path of progress in my world-view. I am not embarrassed to say that both of them were initially purchased as "statements of commitment." I wanted those albums on my shelf to number myself among those who supported these new approaches to opera. (Some of that attitude remains, since, to this day, I have more recordings of Glass than I do of Vincenzo Bellini!) The commitment to purchase was then followed by the more "intellectual" commitment to "understand," to become familiar enough with both works to "hear through" the repetitions and to find my way to an orientation in terms of beginning, middle, and end. As far as Satyagraha is concerned, Mendelsohn has done all the heavy lifting in that regard; and now I can say that I still listen to these recordings regularly because the listening experience is fun! Just as the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven remains fun through all those centuries of different approaches to performance, I find that Glass is doing an equally promising job by holding up over the decades; and, as I have pointed out (too many times?), listening to Glass can actually have a profoundly positive impact on how we listen to Beethoven.

Would I make a special trip to New York for a City Opera revival of Einstein? Probably not. Those "statements of commitment" are still strong enough that I would probably chafe at watching all of those traditionalists now decide to start gushing over this work. I know that is a cynical answer, but I suspect that this is one of those cases where my own memories of the past are likely to trump any experience of the present. Besides, I think one of the most interesting things about Appomattox is the extent to which Glass himself has moved on from what he was doing when those of us who counted ourselves as "committed" were reveling in his "new language." Similarly, all of the listening experiences I have accumulated have allowed me to "move on" in directions I could not have anticipated. Thus, the "Glass of then" is an important part of my memory; but, in terms of my current activities, I am far more interested in the "Glass of now!"

New Sounds and Old

If there was a unifying theme to this week's San Francisco Symphony program at Davies Symphony Hall, it probably had less to do with any perceptual categories common to the offerings and more to do with the versatility of conductor Sakari Oramo, since he presented himself to us not only as a conductor but also as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy. When considered in the context of Debussy's consummate skill in writing for orchestra (and I happen to feel that Michael Tilson Thomas' interpretation of La Mer is one of his strong suits in the repertoire he has built up with the San Francisco Symphony), it is hard to view an orchestration of music by Debussy as anything other than an act of chutzpah. ("Dammit, if Debussy had wanted the voice to be accompanied by an orchestra, he would have written these songs that way!") Regular readers, of course, know that I have plumbed the depths of the semantics of chutzpah to the extent that I can admit positive, as well as negative, connotations; and I am willing to acknowledge that Oramo's intensions as an orchestrator involved the positive connotation. The performance, on the other hand, was another matter.

The problem is that, since these songs were performed by the conductor/orchestrator's wife, Anu Komsi, it is hard to escape the conjecture that this whole affair was a vanity project. Now vanity projects can turn out for the better as often as they turn out the other way. One of the most compelling performances of Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung" I ever heard took place at a Cleveland Symphony Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall when Christoph von Dohnányi was conducting his (then) wife, Anja Silja (whom I had recently seen singing Marie in the Metropolitan Opera production of Wozzeck). In this case, however, I am disappointed to report that Komsi is no Silja. The former may well be able to jump through more virtuosic hoops than the latter ever did, but she made it through those hoops with what must politely be called a neglect of the nuances of dynamic control. (Less politely, most of those jumps stood out like sore thumbs!)

If that were not enough, I could not help but feel that this particular Finnish diva was just not that all comfortable with the French language. This involved more than the usual trend of ignoring the consonants for the sake of getting the vowels right. It had more to do with the extent to which the poets being set by Debussy, such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, took the very sound of the text as seriously as Debussy took the sound of the music setting the text. To put it in more extreme terms, a poem delivered without a gut-level sense of the sound is no longer that poem; it is little more than an abstract exercise in performance. Thus, the failure of Komsi to do as much justice to the poets Debussy had selected as to his settings of those poets rendered the question of the effectiveness of Oramo's orchestrations little more than moot.

Fortunately, this "vanity project" was a relatively minor part of the evening, sandwiched between one of the major monuments of the past and a truly awesome West Coast premiere. The latter was "Seht die Sonne" by Magnus Lindberg, jointly commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic (who first performed it under Simon Rattle) and the San Francisco Symphony, leading me to believe that Thomas and Rattle may be able to get along, regardless of whatever "Mahler rivalry" they may have. That Mahler reference is more than incidental, by the way. Rattle's premiere of "Seht die Sonne" was coupled with Gustav Mahler's ninth symphony; so I suspect that it is not coincidence that the very opening motif of "Seht die Sonne" is the same motif that begins the Mahler ninth, even if the title of Lindberg's work is taken from one of the poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen that Schoenberg set in his Gurrelieder. Nor is it a coincidence that the orchestral resources of "Seht die Sonne" bump those of the Gurrelieder up to the next level (without including either solo or choral voices, mind you). Indeed, it would probably not be unfair to say that, in "Seht die Sonne," Lindberg has taken the very palette of sonority, which may well be the greatest virtue of the Gurrelieder, and extrapolate it to even greater orchestral resources.

From this point of view we would do well to consider two additional "sources of inspiration," one acknowledged by Thomas May's program notes and a second, unacknowledged but a corollary to the first. The acknowledged source is Pierre Boulez, particularly in the context of what Boulez learned about sonority from Olivier Messiaen. However, one cannot listen to the closely-knit passages of a large number of distinct wind voices cavorting through eccentric rhythmic patterns without thinking of all that Boulez had done, particularly with his Ensemble InterContemporain, to champion the compositions of Frank Zappa. Lord knows, Zappa's own groups, even the one he assembled for 200 Motels, could not cope with that particular aspect of Zappa's writing as well as the "Boulez band" could! Thus, Lindberg's escalation of orchestral resources applies as much to the Ensemble InterContemporain (particularly in the context of the demands that Zappa placed on them) as it does to the orchestration of the Gurrelieder.

The result, as one might imagine, is a mighty noise, never shy about its dissonances but always exhilarating. This made for a sharp contrast with the recent performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage's recent Three Asteroids, which, from an arithmetical point of view, may have used greater resources than Lindberg did but ended up using them to lesser effect. If we were to seek out another composition for comparison, we would do better to look back to Olivier Messiaen's "L'Ascension," not just for the numbers of the resources but also for the ways those resources were put to textural (as well as melodic and harmonic) use. All this is basically to argue that there would be much to be gained from "Seht die Sonne" making a "return visit" in some season in the not-too-distant future. This work does not deserve to be put on the shelf after it has had its first innings. It may well shape how we hear music in this new century, and for that alone it needs to be heard more often.

Thus, to say that "Seht die Sonne" was capable of holding its own against its "complementary bookend," which was the seventh symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, is to say quite a lot. Scores whose ink is barely dry rarely deserve to be compared to those of a man who, as I have previously observed, tends to be more monument than master. However, if we try to get "beyond the monument," as I have done by trying to view Beethoven as the "omen" of John Cage and Philip Glass, the pairing of these two compositions is less intimidating, particularly since, for all of his other influences, Lindberg does not appear to owe any debts to either Cage or Glass! Nevertheless, that seventh symphony (which, as I recall, was Beethoven's first composition after losing all of his hearing) shows that same attentiveness to the rhetorical significance of both silence and ostinato, which I have observed, respectively, in Cage and Glass and which I continue to hear in all periods of Beethoven's life as a composer.

It was also apparent that Oramo appreciated that attentiveness. Indeed, his use of attaca transitions between the first two and last two movements were a sign that, one the larger scale, he wanted us to hear this as a two-movement composition in which the silences in those two movements were as important as the sounds. From that point of view, the silences we encounter in the seventh symphony prepare us for the even greater profundity of the silences Beethoven summoned in his ninth symphony. Beethoven's use of ostinato in the seventh symphony, on the other hand, has more to do with the obsessive persistence of specific rhythmic patterns, rather than with either the melodies behind those patterns or how those melodies are orchestrated. To a great extent the fundamental idea of a rhythmic pulse is scaled up to the level of a motif and becomes the primary driving force of each of the four movements (meaning that, if there is a two-movement scheme, then that force goes through a transition in each of the movements). Thus, one of the things that made Oramo's performance so interesting was the extent to which he conducted by this pulse, rather than "by the beat." (There was one passage in the Allegretto where his baton was barely moving, if it was moving at all.)

The result was a performance of Beethoven in the spirit of Thomas Stearns Eliot's Beethoven-inspired poetry. Oramo brought us to where many of us "started," when we were first getting to know the experience of hearing a symphony orchestra. However, when he brought us there, we came to know that "place for the first time;" and any conductor who understands how to do that has an understanding of Beethoven that transcends the mere document of a musical score!

The Shame of the Public Schools

I am used to BBC reporters showing up within a stone's throw of where I live. Between the Circuit Court of Appeals and City Hall itself, there is almost always something happening of interest to the international BBC audience. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see that today's BBC NEWS Web site has a feature report, which Rajesh Mirchandani filed from Los Angeles, on the utterly pathetic conditions (not to mention future) of public education in the state of California. The bottom line is that, as Mirchandani put it, "with the economic slowdown and falling revenue from sales and property taxes, the state faces a budget deficit that could top $20bn this year." This puts our illustrious Governor in the sort of crisis situation that none of his movie personae ever had to confront:

In March, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to rule out tax rises and deep cuts in services, including education - anything, he said, that could help make ends meet.

Needless to say, this has administrators, teachers, and parents all worrying about whether California will end up ransoming off its future in order to keep treading water in the present "slough of despond." As they say, when you are up to your eyeballs in alligators, it is too late to worry about draining the swamp. The alligators are there, they are hungry, and the prevailing opinion is that this is no time to ask how we got into this mess in the first place.

Still, in light of my recent indulgence in a conspiracy theory, I have to wonder whether we got into this place purely out of our stubborn resistance to just about any form of taxation (Wikipedia even has a page for "California Proposition 13 (1978)") or whether we are here through an act of more "intelligent design." After all, it is worth remembering that Newt Gingrich's Contract "on" America involved some rather long-term thinking and planning; and the "side effect" of "The Project for the New American Century" was launched through the momentum of Gingrich's spade-work. This latter effort could not be sustained for even ten years, but Newt is still a presence. He is now more of a "background presence," rather than a "foreground presence;" but the guy is so good at planning that this could well be by his latest "cunning plan."

So what if there is a design to introduce (in the words of my conspiracy theory) "a new class of slaves?" Consider how such a design might benefit from a wholesale undermining of our public education system, not just in California but across the country. On the surface this would seem like bad news for all those wealthy institutions: there would be a shortage of skilled talent available for hire. On the other hand, notwithstanding the latest claptrap from JP Rangaswami on "a genuine war for talent," from the point of view of the institutions themselves, that bad news might actually be good news! Yes, it would mean that such an institution would have to assume the responsibility of training all new hires in the necessary skills; but it would also mean that we would have a future work force dependent on those institutions for most, if not all, of the education they get. That dependency could ultimately result in a "new economy" of indentured servitude. (I use those scare quotes out of cynicism for the economic thinking that was so seductive as the dot-com bubble inflated; but I see that I have used it more recently in conjunction with my writings about the War Against the Poor.) Yes, if you want their "hearts and minds," one way is to get them "by the balls;" but controlling their education may be an alternative. Furthermore, it is an alternative that is, on the whole, less painful and is thus less likely to be met with resistance!

When I was working in Singapore in the early Nineties, I had the opportunity to hear a talk by the Dean of the Business School at Carnegie-Mellon University. About the only thing I remember from that talk is what he had to say about their work-study program. I was familiar with this idea, particularly since many of my personal undergraduate friends at MIT had benefitted from it. What struck me, however, was that Carnegie-Mellon was taking a new approach, which required an entering freshman to commit to a corporate work-study sponsor before even matriculating. This early commitment was required, because the "work" side of the work-study plan could begin even before the student had completed the basic core requirements. That commitment would then sustain through the entire undergraduate career; and, unless I am mistaken, it also involved a "payback" commitment of serving as an employee for some fixed period of time after graduation. I heard all of this about fifteen years ago; and even then it sounded as if the corporate powers behind work-study at Carnegie-Mellon were basically calling the shots on the sort of academic life a student could lead. If this sort of thing could happen at the undergraduate level, why could it not have a similar impact on how education is handled at the level of what we currently call "public education?" Are we witnessing the disappearance of "public" from "public education?"

An Inconvenient History of Democracy

In his latest piece for The Nation, Tom Hayden wants to introduce to a man he describes as "the New Dr. Strangelove:"

His name is David Kilcullen, an Australian academic and military veteran whom the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks once described as Gen. David Petraeus' "chief adviser" on the counterinsurgency doctrine underlying the surge in Iraq.

What makes this man a real-world embodiment of Stanley Kubrick's best-known fictitious creation? From Hayden's point of view, it all comes down to a

briefing given "in a private capacity" at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies. It was an argument for appearing to get out of Iraq while staying in, expressed in the Kilkullen formula "Overt De-Escalation, Covert Disruption." Kilcullen argues that the American troop presence is so large that it's counter-productive, only inflaming Iraqi sensibilities. What is required is a combination of US combat troop withdrawals combined with "black" special operations to "hunt terrorists" plus "white" special operations forces training and embedded with the Iraqi security forces, turning tribes against tribes wherever possible. Covert warfare is the future: "over the long run, we need to go cheap, quiet, low-footprint." And, he might have added, off the television screen and front pages.

Here, then, is Hayden's assessment of both the man and his idea:

What Kilcullen means is a kind of deception-based warfare that is contradictory to democracy itself, with its instruments of critical media, congressional oversight, and public disclosure of the cost in blood, taxes and honor.

This is rhetoric guaranteed to stir righteous indignation in the hearts of (at least) those who bother to read Hayden's contributions to The Nation; but my own trivium-fed habits made be blink at least twice when I hit on that direct object construct, "contradictory to democracy itself." Just what, if anything, would that mean? Put another way, what is it in the historical tradition of democracy that is being contradicted?

When Jürgen Habermas decided to take a historical view of governance in the series of essays collected in English translation under the title Theory and Practice, he began with the "Politics" of Aristotle; but, to the extent that Aristotle theorized about what he observed, I suspect we might do better to begin with a broader historical perspective. I found one such perspective at the Web site Dēmos: Classical Athenian Democracy, which maintains a collection of articles edited by Christopher Blackwell. If we want to understand how Athenian democracy actually worked, a good place to start is with Blackwell's article, "Athenian Democracy: a brief overview" (listed on the Dēmos home page as "An Introduction to the Athenian Democracy"). The reason I feel this introductory piece is valuable is because it gives us a clear picture of who did (and therefore also who did not) participate in the Athenian democratic process.

First, Blackwell begins, as he should, with the semantics of that word "democracy:"

For the Athenians, “democracy” (demokratia, δημοκρατία ) gave Rule (kratos, κράτος ) to the Demos ( Δήμος ).

Thus, how Athenian democracy actually works depends on just who constituted that Δήμος. As Blackwell observes, this word has several different meanings, all of which are relevant. However, for purposes of this discussion, I would like to begin by focusing on the first definition he offers:

Demos is the Greek word for “village” or, as it is often translated, “deme.” The deme was the smallest administrative unit of the Athenian state, like a voting precinct or school district. Young men, who were 18 years old presented themselves to officials of their deme and, having proven that they were not slaves, that their parents were Athenian, and that they were 18 years old, were enrolled in the “Assembly List” (the pinax ekklesiastikos, πίναξ έκκλησιαστικός ) (see Dem. 44.35; Aristot. Ath. Pol. 42.1).

This tells us pretty much all we need to know about who was excluded from the process: all women, all males under the age of eighteen, all slaves, and all men whose parents were not Athenian. This raises an interesting question: Were those excluded from the process subject to its laws and judgments? After all, slaves were property; so it is probably the case that, in practice, a slave's owner was responsible for his/her behavior. (The operative analogy might be that, if a car runs over a man and kills him, the driver, not the car, is legally responsible for the homicide. Perhaps the best reason to see a production of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline is for the way this proposition is considered.) By similar reasoning, a woman was also property, first of her father and then of her husband; and children are also property of the father. That leaves the "adult foreigners." My guess (and it is no more than that) is that such a "foreigner" could only enter (or at least remain) in Athens under the "sponsorship" of an Athenian (just as Plato had been "sponsored" by Dion in Syracuse). Thus, it is likely that the "sponsor" would be responsible for the behavior of the "foreigner," just as the slave-owner was responsible for the behavior of the slave.

If my hypotheses are valid, then the foundation of Athenian democracy rests on a "language game" (right out of the playbook of Ludwig Wittgenstein) over the words "subject" (those who are entitled to take motivated actions legitimized by a framework of government in which they participate) and "object" (those whose actions are the responsibility of others). Consider, then, the hypothesis that the "Kilcullen formula" is one in which actions are taken beyond the scope of the responsibility of government. They could be the actions of foreigners (as in the model of the French Foreign Legion); or the model could subsume the introduction of a new class of slaves. Neither of those options would then be "contradictory to democracy itself," at least if we take classical Athens as our model! (Sorry, Tom!)

Yes, this borders on the outrageous (if it does not go over the line)! I probably would have dismissed it out of hand, had I not found myself returning all too frequently (most recently on Wednesday) to the proposition that the wealthiest institutions (perhaps public as well as private) are committing themselves to a War Against the Poor, whose ultimate goal is likely to be the creation of that new class of slaves! In other words, in trying to tease out a few subtle semantic details, I may have stumbled on the Mother of all Conspiracy Theories! As a rule I am not big on conspiracies; but, if Hayden's rhetoric may have been a bit sloppy about democracy, his argumentation over why we should be very afraid that someone like Kilcullen is "in the system" has a lot of convincing points. When we combine his rhetoric with a more historical view of the origins of democracy, we may well have even more reasons to be afraid. At the very least, it allows us to think about the War Against the Poor as more than a fight to "control all the marbles!"

The Chutzpah that Keeps on Not Doing

As far as I can tell, Barack Obama's only Chutzpah of the Week award is the one I awarded last November 9. This was an award that he shared with three other Senate Democrats, all of whom, at that time, were vying to be the Democratic candidate for the next President: Joe Biden of Delaware, Hillary Clinton of New York, Chris Dodd of Connecticut. For those who do not recall such ancient history, the occasion was the Senate vote to approve the appointment of Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. All four Senators opposed the nomination, but none of them showed up for the vote. As the title of my blog post that day indicated, I was faced with the question of whether or not chutzpah could be attached to inaction, rather than action; but I think I can dodge the question by saying that the chutzpah was attached to a choice. The choice was the decision that it was more important to be out on the campaign trail than to be hard at work at your "day job," particularly when that "day job" is "doing the people's business." Put another way, if this decision reflected how these four would-be candidates felt about representing their state, would it not also presage how they would feel about representing the entire country in that new "day job" they were seeking?

I offer this little bit of retrospection, because, at least as far as Obama is concerned, it really is not "ancient history," because he still seems to be making the same decision. Here is how Ari Melber reported this particular repetition of history in his post to the Campaign '08 blog on the Web site for The Nation:

Democratic leaders in Congress are poised to grant new spying powers to President Bush and arrange retroactive amnesty for telecommunications companies accused of illegal surveillance, according to a deal announced Thursday evening. Today's New York Times describes the legislation, which the House could vote on today, as "the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years" and a "major victory" for the lame duck president. If passed, the bill would constitute the largest capitulation by Democratic leaders since winning control of Congress, an especially striking setback as Democratic voters rally around a presidential nominee who has flatly opposed Bush's spying policies -- and repeatedly promised to challenge the corruption, doubletalk and "politics of fear" that rule Washington.

Yet Barack Obama has been mostly silent as the House caved into White House demands for more surveillance power this week. He has advocated civil liberties and accountability during previous clashes over surveillance, voting against a White House spying bill in August, but Obama has sidestepped the issue this week, despite pleas from supporters. "If Obama remains missing much longer, it may be necessary to issue an Amber Alert for him," wrote Glenn Greenwald, an attorney and Salon blogger who rallied activists to raise over $115,000 in two days to run primaries against Democratic incumbents who undermine the rule of law.

Obama's quiescence on this fundamental issue is disappointing, but not new. In February, I criticized him and Clinton for going MIA during an earlier spying stand-off, when a coalition of liberal incumbents, netroots activists and the civil liberties groups ACLU and EFF successfully beat back Bush's threats to stop a similar bill. Now things are just worse, for Obama and the Congress.

That last paragraph indicates that I am far from alone in my grounds for criticism. Indeed, last February that criticism extended far from the blogosphere, since, at that time, even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was not afraid to speak about that problems of doing his day job when so many of his most important "workers" were not there! The good news is that it is not too late for Obama. This time the bill in question has yet to come to the Senate floor, but I agree with Melber that Obama's silence is a bad sign. Like deciding that other things are more important than showing up for an important Senate vote, decided to keep silent on legislation as ugly as this counts as chutzpah no matter what rationalizations Obama may choose to contrive. This time, however, he gets to keep the Chutzpah of the Week award all to himself!

The Model of THE FEDERALIST PAPERS

Ever since I saw Michael Meyerson on Book TV delivering and enthusiastic and stimulating talk about his new book, Liberty's Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote The Federalist, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World, my interest in his source material has taken off with comparable enthusiasm. I suppose this was due, at least in part, to Andrew Keen's "Digital fascism" post on his Great Seduction blog; but I think it also arises from my appreciation of just how hard it is to "sell" ideas of governance, having experienced this problem first hand in trying to initiate a conversation about governance within the Internet. Yet it is in Number 51 of The Federalist that James Madison (according to Meyerson, although the THOMAS site claims that Alexander Hamilton may also have been the author) made the now famous remark as to why governance is necessary in the first place:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

This is the fundamental premise behind the primary argument of this particular paper, as expressed in its title, "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments." The "punch line" of the argument captures why such checks and balances are so important:

In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good; whilst there being thus less danger to a minor from the will of a major party, there must be less pretext, also, to provide for the security of the former, by introducing into the government a will not dependent on the latter, or, in other words, a will independent of the society itself.

This extended sentence is often reduced to the more manageable formula: "majority rule with minority rights." Put another way, since men are not angels, there is no reason to suppose that coalitions of men are any more angelic; and therefore it is necessary "to provide for the security" of those not part of such a coalition. In more modern language a majority coalition may form to make the trains run on time, but the unintended consequence of its success may be fascism. As I have observed many times, unintended consequences continue to constitute the primary blind spot of Internet evangelism.

However, the recent news from Europe has made me realize just how important The Federalist papers were in determining how our government turned out the way it did in the context of the governance of the European Union. Consider, for example, the SPIEGEL ONLINE report, based on multiple wire services, in the aftermath of Ireland's rejection of the second draft of a European Union constitution:

Despite Ireland's "no" to the Lisbon Treaty, Europe has to stay together. That was the message delivered by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday during her speech before parliament in Berlin.

"European treaties must be developed on the basis of consensus," she said in her speech. There should be room for different levels of integration when it comes to issues like the common currency or border-free travel, she explained: "But when it comes to institutional questions -- like the rights of the European Parliament or the responsibilities of the European Commission -- we need unanimity."

"Unanimity" is the operative word in Merkel's statement; and it reflects the decision of our own Founding Fathers that the Constitution they drafted could only function effectively (which, to them, was more important than efficiency) if it were unanimously ratified by all the states of the republic-in-formation. It was in the interest of achieving that unanimity that The Federalist papers were conceived and published. As we see from the Table of Contents provided at the THOMAS site, each of these papers appeared in an independent news periodical circulated among the general public. Alexander Hamilton makes the motivation behind this "publication blitz" clear in Number 1 ("General Introduction"):

THE UTILITY OF THE UNION TO YOUR POLITICAL PROSPERITY THE INSUFFICIENCY OF THE PRESENT CONFEDERATION TO PRESERVE THAT UNION THE NECESSITY OF A GOVERNMENT AT LEAST EQUALLY ENERGETIC WITH THE ONE PROPOSED, TO THE ATTAINMENT OF THIS OBJECT THE CONFORMITY OF THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION TO THE TRUE PRINCIPLES OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT ITS ANALOGY TO YOUR OWN STATE CONSTITUTION and lastly, THE ADDITIONAL SECURITY WHICH ITS ADOPTION WILL AFFORD TO THE PRESERVATION OF THAT SPECIES OF GOVERNMENT, TO LIBERTY, AND TO PROPERTY.

As propaganda, the papers were intended to explain the principles behind the proposed Constitution in terms that general readers could understand, rather than in the legalese of the Constitution itself.

Without arguing over the effectiveness of the latest draft at a European constitution, it is reasonable to assume that the "propaganda engine" for promoting it has not been anywhere near as effective as The Federalist was. Furthermore, given that there were Anti-Federalist Papers, arguing just as compellingly against ratification, it is clear that the question of ratification for our government was as contentious as it now seems to be in Europe. The important underlying question is whether the European debate is being conducted in a forum accessible to the general public and in language that public can understand or whether it is being dominated by single-issue-centric manipulations of the media in the same manner as the current excuses for political debate in our own country. Europe may be older and more experienced than the United States in that grand scheme of history; but, unfortunately, age and experience do not guarantee that their current practices are any more mature or reasoned than our own!

Dramatistic and Verb-Based Thinking

I realize that I have been waltzing around Kenneth Burke's opposition of dramatism to scientism without homing in on what it is about the difference that is so important to him. A good place to see just what he means by this distinction is in the appendix to his book Permanence and Change, which is entitled "On Human Behavior Considered 'Dramatistically.'" This appendix includes the following passage:

Human conduct, being in the realm of action and end (as contrasted with the physicist’s realm of motion and position) is most directly discussible in dramatistic terms. By "dramatistic" terms are meant those that begin in theories of action rather than in theories of knowledge. Terminologies grounded in the observing of sensory perception would be classed as theories of Knowledge. In the same classification would fall all theories of conditioning (which is the lowest form of learning). We do not mean to imply that "scientist" approaches (in terms of knowledge or learning), do not yield good results. On the contrary, such perspectives can contribute many important modifiers to the essential nouns of human relationship.

The point that he seems to be making is that his "scientist" approaches are restricted to the grammar of noun phrases, nouns and their modifiers, while dramatistic terms expand this scope into the grammar of action, which is to say the grammar of verbs. However, in my own efforts to develop the distinction between verb-based and noun-based thinking, I have come to the recognition that the grammar of verbs may well involve more than what Burke had in mind for a theory of action. The fact that voice is a critical element of verb grammar means that verb-based thinking involves more than what active verbs tell us about agents taking motivated actions. There are also passive verbs that tell us about agents subjected to actions, either the motivated actions of other agents or what Seymour Chatman calls "occurrences," which just "happen" (like you-know-what).

However, there is far more to verb-based thinking than the grammar of voice. There is the whole rich repertoire of tense, which, in many respects, arises from our efforts to capture of consciousness of time in the language we use. As I recently wrote, the world of nouns (even with their modifiers) is a fundamentally static world, which does not require time-consciousness. There is, only now, no future, no past, no perfect, and certainly no pluperfect! This is why I chose to consider the problem of "encyclopedic" references in terms of the problems of inertia and volatility (which are little more than my own terminology for Burke's "permanence" and "change"). Because those references have, by their very nature, inertia, they can never accommodate the volatility of the "real world;" but, when we move beyond the limitation of Burke-style theories of knowledge to noun phrases, we discover that verb tense allows us to describe (and thus think about) such volatility (which, incidentally, includes a history-based approach to that fundamental concept of αγών, which figured in yesterday's post).

Beyond tense there is the grammar of mood, through which we recognize the distinction between the "grounded" here-and-now of the indicative and the "hypothetical" of the subjunctive and the "directive" of the imperative. While we can invoke constructs of voice and tense as part of our own efforts to make sense of the world and describe the sense that we make, even if only to ourselves, the subjunctive and imperative moods are "instruments" of the social world. They broaden the scope of verb-based thinking from the volatility of our own (subjective) life-world to the (social) life-world that we cohabit and share with others. Thus, through mood we can transcend the "immediacy" of αγών with a capacity to prepare for what might be.

Thus, the "theories of action" behind dramatistic thinking involve more than the actions themselves. They also involve the richness of how we can talk and think about those actions by virtue of the variety of grammatical constructs for the expression of verbs. Unfortunately, we still succumb to our positivist roots by constructing abstractions that attempt to reduce verbs to nouns; but those abstractions seldom carry us very far through that volatility of the real world. Furthermore, since those abstractions continue to lie at the heart of what we call "enterprise software," that software will be seriously impeded in any workplace whose very existence depends on keeping up with that volatility!

Who is Rich? What is Aid?

This morning I read the following report, which Ben Hall filed from Paris for the Financial Times:

Rich countries have so far given only one-seventh of the extra aid they promised to Africa three years ago, with France particularly off-track, according to a report published on Wednesday.

The G8 group of industrialised countries in 2005 promised to increase their combined aid to Africa to $50bn a year by 2010. But so far they have provided only $3bn of the extra $22bn required to meet the target, said DATA, the aid campaign group supported by rockstars Bob Geldof and Bono.

Launching the DATA study in Paris, Mr Geldof rounded on G8 governments, saying the promises they made at the Gleneagles summit were a “great lie”. “It’s grotesque,” he added.

The report said Italy was “hugely off track”, Germany would need to make bigger increases, and that Japan and Canada actually cut aid to Africa in 2007.

The US and UK come out relatively well in the report. It said that while Washington was not on track to meet its pledge to increase total development aid to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product by 2012, “it has sufficient increases in the pipeline” to meet its 2010 promise for Africa.

The UK, which had done more than any other country to increase aid to Africa “will come close” to meeting its 2010 target.

But France is criticised for having actually cut aid to sub-Saharan Africa by $66m in 2007 even though its total aid budget excluding debt relief increased. The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has also quietly changed France’s 0.7 per cent target, saying it will meet this goal only in 2015 rather than 2012.

“France has given only 6.7 per cent of its promise,” said Mr Geldof. “That’s a measure of the failure of the political classes in this country.”

Far be it from me to make excuses for the G8 governments; but, if the primary function of DATA is, as its acronym (explained on its Web site) implies, to deal with issues of debt, AIDS, and trade with a focus on Africa, then it may be time for its spokespersons, such as Geldof and Bono, to take a broader view of those questions in my title. Who really controls the wealth that can be applied to the serious economic needs of sub-Saharan Africa; and how may that wealth best be applied?

It cannot have escaped Geldof and Bono that all G8 governments are currently in a state of major economic crisis. This does not refute the proposition that, when developed nations take to bed with the flu, most of the developing world is contracting double pneumonia. However, if we pursue this analogy, then it would be fair to say that, when those developed nations are doped up on Robitussin, their decision-making acumen is not in the best of shape for confronting accusations about broken pledges.

Now, since it is clear that wealth that could have (and was supposed to have) been applied to the DATA mission has not vanished into thin air, Geldof and Bono might do better to figure out "where the money is" (as Willie Sutton put it) and tap into those that have it, rather than castigating those who have less than they did when they made those promises. To write this mess off as a "failure of the political classes" in France or any other country amounts to exchanging the pulpit for foreign aid for a political agenda. Were DATA to do this as an institution, it would seriously damage public perception of their mission; and that, in turn, would make it even harder for them to raise the funds their beneficiaries in Africa so urgently need. It is not that DATA has encountered a "failure of the political classes" as much as it has been forced to recognize that governments are not particularly efficient institutions (and most of the time their performance is not as effective as anyone would like it to be). So where is the money these days? At a national level, we cannot ignore how much of it China controls; but we also have to recognize that China has been and will be plowing a lot of its wealth into the welfare of the victims of its recent internal catastrophe. Then there are those private sector institutions that always seem to increase their resources, regardless of whether times or good or bad. However, before DATA shifts its fund-raising targets, it would be well to consider that second question that I posed.

Institutions that amass large quantities of wealth tend not to part with any of it without first addressing the what's-in-it-for-me question. The problem in this case is that the most obvious answer would entail the resources that can still be found in sub-Saharan Africa. This is why China has been investing heavily in Africa, as well as South American countries, such as Peru, as the BBC reported yesterday. My point is that, if the growth of wealth is the highest priority, then the drive to accumulate resources will probably displace, if not totally eliminate, any more "humanitarian" goals, such as improving public welfare through better health care, education, or job opportunities. This is why I keep returning to the hypothesis that wealthy institutions, public or private, seem to have committed themselves to a War Against the Poor, whose ultimate goal is likely to be the creation of a new class of slaves. To the extent that private institutions are, at least at present, better equipped to wage such a war, we may very well see that today's multinational corporations will become tomorrow's empires, that, through the lack of both efficiency and effectiveness in governmental institutions, the very domain of geopolitics will shift from those governmental institutions to the strongest of the corporate institutions. This is, to say the least, a bleak state of affairs; but, when we see it at the end of what may be the only path towards aiding the welfare of disadvantaged countries, it becomes downright tragic.

Oliver Sacks and the Illusions of Scientific Method

I think I first became aware of Oliver Sacks when I read his essay "The Twins" (which would later be included in the collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales) in the February 28, 1985 issue of The New York Review. I found it absolutely riveting, in no small part because the style of writing was such a departure from the "scientific" (or, for that matter, "clinical") writing that I usually encountered in either the professional or popular press. However, it took at least a decade for me to cotton on to why his prose was as compelling as it was; and, having formed my hypotheses on this matter, I discovered, upon reviewing the Preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that they are confirmed by his own observations, but in a terminology different from my own. Since I have invoked my own terminology in several posts on this blog, I figured I would take the opportunity to discuss the extent to which I read Sacks' text as a confirmation of my own ideas.

The common theme that runs through my observations might be called an awakening (since Sacks used that for one of his titles) from a very long nightmare of positivism. The fact that I should have thought of positivism as a nightmare at all was probably a result of a rebellious spirit that emerged when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music, but I have social theorist Anthony Giddens to thank for helping me to take those unkempt rebellious thoughts and put them into a bit of order. Closely aligned with positivism is the "gospel" of scientific method; so, having been more than adequately prepared by my readings of Giddens, I was delighted to discover that the literary theorist Kenneth Burke had devoted much of his professional work to develop a theory of "dramatistic" thinking, which would serve as an opposition to "scientistic" thinking. Burke was enough of a Hegelian to recognize that this was an opposition that would not benefit from either side dominating over the other; but his own career was more than sufficiently filled with the study of "dramatism." So he left it for others to resolve the opposition through synthesis.

One can either try to theorize about such a synthesis or jump in and try to achieve it. In my few brief exchanges with Sacks, the topic of Burke and his theory never arose. I would not be surprised to learn that Sacks is totally unfamiliar with the man and his writings. Nevertheless, were he still alive, I suspect that Burke would quickly see the dramatistic element in Sacks' writings and probably discuss it as pointedly and eloquently as he would any literary source. Sacks, himself, actually acknowledges this synthetic aspect of his work when he writes about

a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and dramatist [eureka!], am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness—animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

What, then, is the nature of Sacks' particular approach to dramatism? To some extent it is a synthetic approach to a matter of form, the idea (which, as Sacks observes, goes all the way back to Hippocrates) that a case history is as much a narrative as a scientific account. From a scientistic point of view, the most important element in the documentation of a case is description; but in a case history (by the very virtue of its name) that description is achieved through historiography. This then brings us to the most important element of Sacks' literary style, which is that his historiography is achieved through a subject-based narrative. A case history is ultimately the history of the individual enduring sickness, as Sacks puts it, "the experience of the person, as he faces, and struggles to survive, his disease." Thus, the case history, as Sacks has chosen to write it, probably comes as close to a synthesis of "scientism" and "dramatism" as we are likely to get.

Sacks then threw yet another radical declaration at me in his Preface:

The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.

This immediately reminded my of my favorite dialogue by Plato, "Theaetetus," which tries to define the concept of knowledge, fails, but still leaves us recognizing that knowledge is hard to define because it is so tightly coupled to the concepts of description, being, and memory. The path to knowledge is a path that leads through description, but only because it leads through fundamental questions of being. Indeed, if one wanted to be really dramatistic, one could accord the status of "personhood" (or, as Burke would probably put it better, agency) to the disease as well as the patient, which would mean that the case history embodies that concept of αγών fundamental to Greek drama. From this point of view, one might then view Gerald Edelman's pioneering research in how antibodies work as being based on further endowing those antibodies with agency, making for αγών between both patient and disease and disease and antibody. In the essays that I have read, Sacks never goes quite that far over the dramatistic line; but I know from his writings that he has a high opinion of Edelman's theories about consciousness. Since those theories are, in many ways, an extrapolation of his antibody theories, my guess is that Sacks would see the dramatistic element of Edelman's model were it called to his attention (unless he has already done so).

I have one final observation about Sacks methodology, and this one reflects on my recent citation of Daniel Mendelson. To a great extent Sacks believes that, if you want to understand how the body works, then you need to observe it in circumstances where it doesn't work. You learn little from the healthy state beyond some good hypotheses about normative conditions and behaviors; and that is not, as they say, "where the action is." Healthy bodies, like Mendelson's "good people" do not "make good subjects for operas" (or any other dramatic form). To go back to the Greeks, it is through the study of αγών that we get to the heart of what Sacks calls the patient's "essential being;" so, while it would be a flattering exaggeration to call Sacks' case histories Homeric, there is at least a modest spirit of the Homeric bards about them.

This all leads back to my personal "agonizing" (so to speak) over the sorry state of liberal education. We still seem obsessed with specializing as quickly as possible, in order to jump in and start doing "useful things." We thus see the study of anything as unscientistic as literature as a waste of time that will not equip us with additional instruments for our toolkit. Sacks provides us with specific examples that illustrate the fallacy of this reasoning. Given how long he has been writing these examples, one would think that our educational institutions would wake up and smell the coffee; but their reasoning along these lines remains deep in slumber. As Goya once told us, that kind of slumber produces monsters!

The Anxiety (and Joy) of Influence

This afternoon's Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco featured a piano trio of faces familiar to most San Francisco concert-goers. Since cellist Miriam Perkoff provided some spoken remarks, I assume that she had much to do with organizing the trio and probably the program. She performed with violinist Mariya Borozina and Miles Graber; and the program consisted of two works, the first piano trio by Sergei Rachmaninoff and a suite of five Bergerettes by Bohuslav Martinů. These works were as radically different in sound as their composers were in their approach to their work.

Were anyone to remark that Rachmaninoff's trio, written when he was nineteen and subtitled "Trio Elégiaque," seemed to indicate the influence of the first movement (Pezzo elegiaco) of Piotr Tchaikovsky's trio, Rachmaninoff might easily have responded with the Russian equivalent of Brahms' remark about the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata on his own first piano sonata (observing that every jackass notices that sort of thing). Had this observation been made near the end of Rachmaninoff's life, the jackass would probably then have been treated to a sermon over how most composers have become so preoccupied with the head that they have forgotten about the heart. It is clear that Rachmaninoff had a lot of heart, and he was already capable of displaying it to good effect at the age of nineteen. I do have to wonder, however, whether his final years might have been overly bitter. If it was hard to hear the "heart" in the music of, for example, Arnold Schoenberg, that may have been due to performers who had not been adequately prepared or even (dare I say it?) a reluctance on Rachmaninoff's part to give the really "new" music a fair shot at those techniques of good listening! Today it is probably Rachmaninoff who suffers for being viewed as too old fashioned and not always given the attention he deserves by performers.

This was not a problem with this afternoon's performance. The music was rendered on its own terms. Given his background and talent, Rachmaninoff showed a bit of a bias towards the piano part; but Graber was excellent at keeping that part balanced against the two string players. This work is unlikely to ever be as popular as Rachmaninoff's compositions for piano and orchestra, but those interests of good listening were well informed by hearing the output of a student who would eventually grow into a monument of virtuosity.

On the other hand audiences (at least in the United States) are usually not that familiar with the work of Martinů. Even his Wikipedia entry (which may have been what Perkoff consulted for her introductory remarks) is relatively modest. What is more interesting is that, while he tends to be associated with Czech nationalists, he left Czechoslovakia for Paris in 1923 to escape the Nazis; and, if we are to judge by the Bergerettes, he soaked up just about every influence being explored during a really dynamic period. The result was not a pastiche of influences but a characteristically unique voice filled with enthusiastic energy. All five of the pieces in this suite are in "standard" ternary form; but there is nothing standard about his choice of thematic material, the cadences that delimit the sections, or even some of the performance techniques, particularly for the violin. Nevertheless, there is a decided Czech flavor to the sound, almost to the point that the work makes a fascinating complement to the "Dumky" trio of Antonín Dvořák. One way to view the Dumka form of the six movements of that piano trio is as basically ternary but with a coda based on the middle section. However, while the Dumka tends to progress from melancholic to energetic, Martinů's Bergerettes tend to start with high energy, using the middle section for catching up with one's breath.

It is thus hard to find two composers as radically different in outlook at Rachmaninoff and Martinů, and the same may be said of the pieces chosen to represent each of them. Nevertheless, each work was given the same respect on its own terms. So the result was a recital of contrasts, which, itself, offered much to make us better listeners.

Writing the Elephant

As could have been anticipated, Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," has attracted a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere; but what has struck me more than anything else is the vast diversity of reactions, many of which seem to demonstrate that reading practice of zipping "along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski" that provoked Carr into writing this piece in the first place. In my own post I had to distinguish between Carr's text, my reading of Carr's text, Charles Cooper's reading of Carr in his blog post (which first directed me to Carr's article), and my reading of Cooper's text! It is as if, because Carr wrote an article of such considerable length and depth, he elicited from his would-be readers those same bad habits that he quoted Bruce Friedman describing:

I can’t read War and Peace anymore. I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.

Carr's text has thus become a latter-day instance of that elephant being groped by blind men. The one grabbing a leg thinks the elephant is like a tree. The one holding the tail thinks the elephant is like a rope. The one who finds the trunk thinks the elephant is like a snake.

This phenomenon may actually reinforce one aspect of Carr's article, which seems to have been ignored by most (if not all) of these blind men (possibly because many of those Jet-Ski-readers latched on to the quote by Friedrich Nietzsche about how "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts" and would prefer to argue over whether Nietzsche became a better philosopher for using a typewriter). Those who ventured no further than Nietzsche never made it to the discussion of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose initial work that would eventually culminate in his Principles of Scientific Management happened, coincidentally, to begin around the same time that Nietzsche learned to type. Carr's discussion of the impact of Taylorism was well developed; but I think he would have done better to adopt the phrase that Raymond Callahan invoked, describing Taylorism as "the cult of efficiency." Cults have a tendency to take some single principle and hold it above all others; and, as Carr rightly observes, ours is now very much a culture dominated by the cult of efficiency. I would even agree with him that the Googleplex is the "high church" of this cult and that, while Taylorism was first conceived to improve the efficiency of brute-force manufacturing production lines, today's priests of Taylorism are more concerned with what is called (ironically, if not laughably) "knowledge work." (Callahan probably could have seen this coming, since he introduced his phrase in a book about the deleterious impact of Taylorism on public education.)

The primary consequence of this domination of efficiency is, as I have observed on several past occasions, a suppression of the value of effectiveness in both the products we encounter and the very actions in which we engage in both work and leisure time. Thus, in a time of economic crisis (such as the present one), we encounter a lot of jargon about the virtues of "efficient markets" with little reflection on whether those virtues apply to either producers or consumers or whether they only benefit those who trade in shares of the businesses that have to do the actual producing and consuming. Similarly, as Callahan discussed, public education institutions find themselves forced (usually through inadequate resources) to think only about how "efficient" they are at "producing" students who can jump through the hoops of standardized tests, thus ignoring the more fundamental effectiveness question of whether or not those kids are actually learning anything.

There is, of course, a reason for this bias. Efficiency can almost always be measured with highly objective instruments. Effectiveness, on the other hand, almost always comes down to the exercise of judgment in the social world. Viewed through the lens of a social theorist like Jürgen Habermas, effectiveness is something that is recognized through negotiated understanding of the situation being assessed, enabled by communicative actions. The objective instruments need to be given less priority (but not ignored), because, as I entitled one of my posts about a year ago, "If you reduce it all to a single number, that number is almost certainly wrong!"

From this point of view, we can drive home Carr's punch line with a rather powerful hammer. Yes, we are being "made stupid" in the world the Internet has made with Google as one of its primary instruments. However, we might do better to be more specific and assert that our capacity for understanding (particularly understanding that arises from negotiations through social engagement) has been seriously eroded (or, in more politically correct language, "challenged"). We experience this erosion in the deteriorating quality of the goods and services that we pay for with our increasingly meager cash supplies, but the cult of efficiency is so strong that we cannot see that change will not come until that cult is abandoned. Unfortunately, when it comes to viewing our own life-world, we are no better than those blind men groping the elephant; so it is unlikely that we shall be experiencing any "deprogramming" of our cult of efficiency in the foreseeable future.

Is Barack Obama Flirting with the Banality of Evil?

If I am going to try to examine a candidate for President of the United States through the lens of Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil," then I feel obliged to begin by being clear about my terms. The best way to do this is to return, once again, to Tony Judt's reflection on that concept:

But if we wish to grasp the true significance of evil—what Hannah Arendt intended by calling it "banal"—then we must remember that what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews [in the Holocaust] is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little.

Alongside this text, I wish to consider a comment by Uri Avnery on Barack Obama's "performance" at AIPAC, as reported in the Truthdig comment by Tony Wicher:

AFTER MONTHS of a tough and bitter race, a merciless struggle, Barack Obama has defeated his formidable opponent, Hillary Clinton. He has wrought a miracle: for the first time in history a black person has become a credible candidate for the presidency of the most powerful country in the world.

And what was the first thing he did after his astounding victory? He ran to the conference of the Israel lobby, AIPAC, and made a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.

That is shocking enough. Even more shocking is the fact that nobody was shocked.

In other words "nobody was shocked" because everyone has become so benumbed by political-business-as-usual that, in the grand scheme of maneuvering for electoral votes, that speech "mattered so little." The United States has become the new model of Arendt’s banality. Claiming that our current President is responsible for our achieving that status is not the whole story. The rest was told by Walt Kelly: "We have met the enemy, and they is us."

Rhetoric and Music

Since I keep returning to the question of the relationship between rhetoric and music (particularly after seeing an opera such as George Frideric Handel's Ariodante, whose performance depends so heavily on its suasive capabilities), I realized that it was time for me to return to the "Rhetoric and music" entry, which George J. Buelow had contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians of 1980 (edited by Stanley Sadie). Reviewing this material made me realize that my longstanding interest in using the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric as a framework for the examination of both composition and performance probably had its roots in my having read this entry, probably within the first ten years of its appearance. (I recall meeting Buelow at a musicology conference and telling him how delighted I had been with his work along these lines.)

As Buelow observed, there is a long tradition of trying to apply the classical principle of rhetoric to musical composition:

In 1739, in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Mattheson laid out a fully organized, rational plan of musical composition borrowed from those sections of rhetorical theory concerned with finding and presenting arguments: inventio (invention of an idea), dispositio (arrangement of the idea into parts of an oration), decoratio (the elaboration or decoration of the idea) – called elaboratio or elocutio by other writers – and pronuntiatio (the performance or delivery of the oration). Dressler's structure of exordium, medium, and finis was only a simplified version of the more usual sixfold division of the dispositio, which in classical rhetoric as well as in Mattheson consisted of exordium, narratio (statement of facts), divisio or propositio (forecast of main points in a speaker's favour), confirmatio (affirmative proof), confutatio (refutation or rebuttal) and peroratio or conclusio (conclusion).

While neither Mattheson nor any other Baroque theorist would have applied these rhetorical prescriptions rigidly to every musical composition, it is clear that such concepts not only aided composers to a varying degree but were self-evident to them as routine techniques in the compositional process.

For the record, since I did not mention it in yesterday's account, Ariodante received in first performance in London on January 8, 1735; so there is a good chance that Handel was one of the composers that Buelow had in mind in describing rhetorical concepts as "self-evident to them as routine techniques in the compositional process."

I bring up these details because they may throw some useful light on how composers like Handel applied that da capo aria form in the overall narrative flow of the plot. If we think in terms of all six elements of the dispositio, then it makes sense to think of narratio being provided by the recitative that precedes the aria. (The usual approach is to provide all of the "plot facts" in recitative and use the more musical sections to reflect on those "facts.") To the extent that there is an exordium, it would lie in the orchestral introduction to the aria, which means that the classical ordering of the elements is not strictly honored. The first part of the aria's ternary form then provides the divisio. The second part can then provide either a confirmatio or a confutatio, but rarely (if ever) both. (We encounter both in Ariodante, and we never encounter them both in the same aria. There is also a heavy bias in favor of confirmatio.) The peroratio is then the da capo section, basically structured as an iteration of the divisio in the context of the affirming or refuting material and possibly capped off with a coda. As I see it, there is a lot of sense in assuming that these structural details are nothing more than an attempt to represent practices that were routine to a composer like Handel (just as the classic source for training in counterpoint, the Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux is best viewed as an attempt to represent the practices of Palestrina).

The other element of rhetorical theory that figures very heavily in musical composition (and must therefore be grasped in the activities of performance) is the decoratio, which I have written about in terms of embellishment. In writing about Ariodante's mad scene I also cited a "sighing motif," which, in technical language, is called an "affection." Much has been written about the extent to which such motifs provided a systematic "vocabulary of affections." Buelow, however, is not convinced:

It has been assumed incorrectly, especially by writers such a Pirro and Schweitzer and those influenced by them, that composers worked with stereotyped musical-rhetorical figures – analogous to the Wagnerian leitmotif – in order to create a predetermined form of tone-painting. Other writers including Bukofzer continued to believe that such a stereotyped set of musical figures was an essential aspect of a Baroque Affektenlehre. More recent research has clearly shown that a concept of stereotyped musical figures with specific affective connotations never existed in the Baroque composer's mind or in theoretical explanations. Musical-rhetorical figures were devices meant only to decorate and elaborate on a basic affective representation and to add dramatic musical stress to words and poetic concepts. They functioned in music just as figures of speech function in oratory – as part of the decoratio.

My guess is that the jury is still out on whether there really was a "vocabulary of affections;" and it will probably stay out in the absence of any way to get into the mind of any deceased composer! My personal feeling is that it makes just as much sense to assume that composers like Handel had "routine techniques" of decoratio as they had for dispositio, which is why the figures invoked in Ariodante's mad scene share a "perceptual category" with those applied to Ginevra's corresponding aria. If Buelow is trying to take issue with those who have tried to catalog such motifs, then the real object of his criticism may be later composers who would try to use such catalogs in a prescriptive capacity, when, as was the case with Fux's treatise, they were documented only for the sake of describing the practices of past masters. Thus, an appreciation (if not a thorough understanding) of the principles of both dispositio and decoratio can contribute much to being a better listener to Handel's music, particularly his settings of texts that have a dramatic element, as long as we recognize that theory is never a prescription for practice!

Good People and Good Fortune

Watching the first performance of George Frideric Handel's Ariodante, presented this afternoon by the San Francisco Opera, I found myself thinking again about Daniel Mendelsohn's proposition that "Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas." There may be a somewhat loose analogy that applies to good fortune. We are, of course, used to the dramatic arc through which good fortune is interrupted by bad fortune and restored by the conclusion of the plot. Mendelsohn uses this approach to elaborate his proposition in his New York Review article about the Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha:

Aristotle, in his Poetics, refers to plot as a knot tied by the author (he calls it a dêsis, a "binding up") out of the manifold strands representing competing wills or desires or ideologies; an ugly and worrisome knot that will, in due course, ultimately come undone in a climactic moment of loosening or release of tension (the lysis, or "undoing")—a concept that survives in our term "dénouement."

This is why "bad people" are so important, since they are the ones doing that necessary "binding." This Aristotelian model still holds for most plots we encounter. It is certainly there in Ariodante, but this opera presents an interesting problem of scale. How long must we wait for the "binding up" to being in earnest?

In Ariodante my simplistic three-stage reduction of Aristotle pretty much corresponds to the three acts:

1. Ariodante loves Ginevra, daughter of the King of Scotland. She returns his love. His father approves their marriage, and they are destined to become the next King and Queen of Scotland. The only problem is that the Duke Polinesso also loves Ginevra; and Ginevra's lady-in-waiting, Dalinda loves Polinesso. Polinesso enlists Dalinda to help him get even with Ginevra for her spurning him; this will be the dêsis of the plot.
2. Polinesso convinces Dalinda to wear Ginevra's clothes. He then romances the disguised Dalinda in front of Ariodante to convince Ariodante than Ginevra is not pure. Ariodante goes off and jumps off a cliff. His brother Lurcanio (who happens to have been spurned by Dalinda) pleads with the King for justice and accuses Ginevra of being the cause of Ariodante's death. The King denounces Ginevra as impure and has her put in chains. (Is that bound up enough for you?)
3. Ariodante survives his leap. He encounters Dalinda, who tells him everything. Polinesso offers to defend Ginevra's honor before the King and is mortally wounded in a duel with Lorcanio. Ariodante returns to court and sets everything right. Dalinda marries Lorcanio, and Ginevra marries Ariodante.

While is this as neat a division as you are likely to get, the problem is that music tends to be at its most interesting where bad fortune is involved. Put another way, there is only so much you can take of people singing about how happy they are (as was nicely satirized in the El Dorado song from the musical Candide). Perhaps Handel planned his first act for its "publicity value," providing every member of the cast with the opportunity to sing at least one da capo aria (which I previously compared with Shakespeare giving every one of his characters a soliloquy). No matter how interesting the music is and how good the voices are, this tends to get very top-heavy very quickly. It becomes a classic case of "one damned thing after another!"

This puts a tremendous burden on the conductor to make sure that there really is more to the succession of arias than that Churchillian put-down. Handel does not help very much; but, at this particular performance, I suspect there was more variety in the "text" of the score than conductor Patrick Summers managed to elicit from his orchestra and singers. Each aria certainly had an ample share of virtuosic demands; and some (but not all) of the performers (Susan Graham and Richard Croft doing the best jobs) found their way through to nuanced shadings while jumping through their respective hoops. Nevertheless, this was not the sort of first act that left one sitting on the edge of one's seat eager to find out what will next ensue.

Nevertheless, returning from intermission for the second act (rather than bailing on the whole affair) was extremely rewarding. This is one of those cases of dêsis in which both of the principal characters get to have mad scenes. Handel did not invent the overcome-with-grief aria (since that can be traced back to Orpheus after losing Eurydice in Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo); but, as I previously wrote, he could do this sort of thing very well indeed (so well that he was known to transplant one of those arias into a new opera). In this opera Handel is as good as he ever gets with Ariodante's mad scene. The strings have their prototypical "sighing motif;" but they set off a solo bassoon line which is profound enough to belong in its own concerto. Meanwhile, the vocal line runs through enormous intervallic leaps in both directions, all at a slow but steady pace. This particular staging required Graham to sing the final passage lying on her back, which she did without having any problems with projecting her voice to the entire audience. Ginevra's aria, which concludes the act, is not quite as sophisticated musically but carries the greater dramatic burden. Ariodante is all set to kill himself; Ginevra, on the other hand, is still in the dark as to why she is about to be imprisoned and even more uncertain about what will happen to her. Ruth Ann Swenson's acting was definitely at a high point during this aria.

This left the third act for the lysis. In terms of timing, it was a lot more conducive to the attention span than the first act was. This was due, in part, to there being one duel fought and another almost fought (before Ariodante reveals himself to Lurcanio). After that, Dalinda spends a bit more time than she should trying to make things right with Lurcanio, particularly after all the first act arias about how wonderful things are going to be; but we eventually find our way through to a double wedding and joyful chorus.

Finally, it is worth noting that the arrangement of the orchestra was rather similar to that employed by the San Francisco Conservatory students in their production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto. Most of the instruments were modern, including a cello for much of the continuo work. However, the continuo also included a harpsichord (two in the San Francisco Opera production, one for the conductor); and both productions included a theorbo. This is basically an overgrown lute with a sufficiently long neck to allow plucked strings to sound bass notes that have a rather eerie sound (definitely not like the low notes on a harp). This instrument is amazingly effective when profundity of emotion (particularly grief) is paramount. I was impressed with how well the Conservatory production had employed it and delighted to find it being used equally well by the San Francisco Opera. Now, if they can only figure out a way to put a bit more pace into that first act!

Cultural Archaeology

The first time Michael Tilson Thomas presented The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater at Davies Symphony Hall (with a little help from the San Francisco Symphony), my wife and I waited too long to get tickets and then discovered that they were no longer available. This time we ordered our tickets at the beginning of the season; and, even then, it was pretty clear that the demand was already high. It is a curious piece of work; but then Yiddish theater (not to mention the Yiddish language) is, itself, a curious piece of work. According to the program notes, Yiddish theater can be traced back to Jassy (in Romania), where the first productions were offered in 1876 by Abraham Goldfaden, now called the "Father of Yiddish Theater." The practice followed the Jews who migrated across the Atlantic Ocean and took a firm root in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For the most part it did not extend particularly far beyond that New York base; but it attracted a sufficiently large audience that calling it a "niche market" might be unduly pejorative. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, there were still signs of Yiddish Theater activity, although the only one I recall was my parents going to a Yiddish performance of The Pirates of Penzance. As was the case with more classic sources (such as Shakespeare), this was not simply a matter of translating Gilbert's text into Yiddish but of modifying that text to "fit" the cultural interests of the audience. By the time I was in graduate school moonlighting as a dance critic, the Anderson Theater, on Second Avenue, had ceased to be a major venue for Yiddish Theater and had become a showcase for avant-garde theater. My first visit to the Anderson was also my first exposure to the work of Robert Wilson, The King of Spain. During the time I was teaching in Israel, there seemed to be an itinerant Yiddish troupe that attracted almost no attention. Today we know Yiddish Theater best in terms of those it influenced, Fannie Brice probably being the best example. As a result of The Thomashefskys, we now see its influence on MTT.

As I said, the Yiddish language is also a curious piece of work. While Leo Rosten makes it clear at the very beginning of his Preface that The Joys of Yiddish is not a book about Yiddish, he still gives a bit of historical background, most of which is captured in a single sentence:

Around the tenth century, Jews from what is now northern France, who spoke Old French and, of course, Hebrew, migrated to towns along the Rhine, where they began to use the local German dialect.

Thus, one way to describe Yiddish is as a transmogrification of a German dialect under the influence of Hebrew written in the letters of the Hebrew alphabet from right to left (as Hebrew is written). This would be enough to keep the linguists occupied for some time; but, as Rosten demonstrates, Yiddish is as much about the spirit in which the language is spoken as it is about the syntax and semantics of the text. I say "spirit," rather than "rhetoric," because I am talking less about a tradition of rules and conventions and more about the whole cloth of a cultural context. For example Rosten cited Isaac Bashevis Singer's observation "that Yiddish may be the only language on earth that has never been spoken by men in power." During the two years I lived in Israel, I encountered almost no Yiddish. If you did not speak Hebrew, you could usually get by with some combination of English, French, and German. (The Russians were just beginning to arrive when I was there.) To a great extent Yiddish has had a far greater impact on the English we speak in the United States (such as in William Safire's Political Dictionary, whose latest edition recently appeared) than it has had in Israel. However, it is one thing to use Yiddish as a potent spice to add to English text (as I continue to enjoy doing) and quite another to suss out that underlying cultural context.

This brings us to The Thomashefskys. On the surface this is basically MTT showing us a family album about his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who were the giants of New York Yiddish Theater when it was at the height of its popularity. This has been realized through a script that was written by MTT and staged by Patricia Birch. The extensive use of projected images makes that "family album" experience more literal than metaphorical; but one usually does not peruse a family album with enhancements by a small theater orchestra and four singing-and-dancing performers. If Rosten did not write his book to tell us about Yiddish, MTT did not conceive of The Thomashefskys to tell us about Yiddish Theater so much as to give us a taste of what it meant to experience Yiddish Theater. This turns out to be quite a challenge.

The crux of that challenge lies in the extent to which Yiddish-the-language is so tightly wrapped up in Yiddish-the-cultural-context. I suspect that MTT would appreciate the above comment that speaking (or singing) Yiddish has more to do with "spirit" than with syntax and semantics; but, out of all the performers in the cast (including MTT himself as narrator), only Judy Blazer came close to capturing that spirit and embodying it as much in her stage presence as in her singing and readings from Bessie's texts. Why I reacted this way is hard to explain. So little of that spirit has been well captured in either sound or visual recordings; and the reason I invoked the name of Fannie Brice (not to be confused by Barbara Streisand's meshuggener attempts to portray Brice) is because the few film clips we have of her come closer to that spirit than just about any other documented performance (with the possible exception of the film clip of Boris Thomashefsky himself shown as part of The Thomashefskys). There is a rising interest in klezmer music, which is part of the Yiddish spirit; but that interest is usually far too academic to resonate with much authenticity. The same can be said of Uri Caine's rather odd attempts to tease out a Yiddish spirit in the compositions of Gustav Mahler. At the risk of invoking a cliché that I prefer to avoid, I suspect that the closest recent encounter I have had with that spirit has been through its reinvention by Frank London and Greg Wall in their group Hasidic New Wave, probably because, as is the case with Yiddish itself, the performance matters more than what is actually being performed.

However, whatever "weakness of spirit" there may have been in the performances, I feel that MTT put this "family album experience" to good use. Ultimately, this is less a story of Boris and Bessie than it is about how they (particularly Bessie) shaped this Jewish boy who would grow up to assist Leonard Bernstein and eventually direct two orchestras, one on each side of the United States (not to mention many other major visiting commitments). This may seem like egotism, but what story is not fundamentally a reflection of the storyteller? Eventually, the narrative all comes down to a narrative about making strudel (far more wholesome than any of those political metaphors that have occupied me recently) and a joke that says everything about how you prepare to make strudel and nothing about the making itself. MTT's point is that there is not much difference between his standing on the podium before the San Francisco Symphony and his grandmother standing in the kitchen tying on a fresh apron while facing a table full of strudel ingredients. Understanding this point is yet another step (and, I would say, a rather important one) on the path to being a better listener.

Learning to be Stupid

The last time I encountered the work of Nicholas Carr, it was in the review by Mary Eisenhart of his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google for the San Francisco

Carr devotes the second half of his book to the study of unintended (at least by the innovators and cheerleaders) consequences of the 20th century's technological breakthroughs and likely parallels in the 21st's.

Now Carr has an article in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?;" and my kindred-spirit-feelers are tingling again! He presents the crux of his argument (which also makes it clear that his question is a serious one) through the assertion that "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." In my own writing I have tended to dwell on the noun "reflection" (along with its grammatical variants), rather than "concentration" or "contemplation;" and I seem to have a preference for the verb "erode." Beyond these lexical differences, however, I am delighted to see Carr squatting down on that same page I have been trying to develop for so many months (years?)! However, there are at least two directions to this argument that appear to be absent in Carr's piece; and I would like to pursue each of them.

The first is that, for all of my points of agreement with Carr, I have a different explanation for why Google is making us stupid! It resides in the way in which Google searches cultivate a view of knowledge as the ability to deliver straightforward answers to straightforward questions. Whether is this a matter of semantic analysis of the question (as, for example, Powerset tries to do) or of being clever enough to home in on the right keywords for Google or Wikipedia, this is a frighteningly impoverished view of knowledge. Our knowledge emerges from our experiences in the life-world, and we do so much more in that life-world than ask question for the sake of getting answers.

My second point comes not directly from Carr but from Charles Cooper's reading of Carr in his "Circling the wagons against Nick Carr" post for his Coop's Corner blog on CNET News.com. That reading is summarized as follows:

Carr's real concern is less with Google as the new bogeyman than on how our reliance on the Web might be turning us into multitasking scatterbrains.

Now my reading of Carr did not uncover much (anything?) about multitasking or, for that matter, the celebration of our youth culture for their capacity for multitasking. Nevertheless, Cooper's proposition deserves some consideration, although I think he fails to recognize that our capacity for multitasking is probably not as important as what gets multitasked. That question of what then brings me back to yesterday's attempt to write about our national malaise, because, from my point of view, the real danger of the Web is that it feeds our addiction to consumerism to such an extent that our consumerist life now interleaves with everything else we do, even in the classroom or the workplace. As a case in point, I share Cooper's interest in an anecdote by former chess champion Josh Waitzkin about sitting in on the class of a former professor:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation's enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

My reading of this anecdote is not that we are scatterbrains but that we have been reduced to that self-indulgent infantilism that I tried to examine yesterday. Nevertheless, in spite of what may have become a rather muddled amalgam of Carr, Cooper-reading-Carr, and my-reading-Cooper, I think that this line of reasoning recognizes that Google is one of the primary technologies through which the Web feeds our addiction to consumerism. Whether or not this makes us "stupid" according to intellectual criteria for intelligence, it certainly indicates a level of stupidity (some might prefer to say "immaturity") according to social and emotional criteria!

Repetition without Being Repetitive

I realize that when, at the beginning of this week, I wrote about Philip Glass calling what he composed "music with repetitive structures," he was probably reflecting a historical continuity even stronger than the one Anton Webern had pursued in his Path to the New Music lectures. Indeed, to the extent that listening to music (or, for that matter, listening to anything) is, as I have claimed, a matter of forming perceptual categories, any deliberate attempt to eliminate repetitive structures is more likely to result in noise, rather than signal. Thus, it should be no surprise that so much of the overall architecture throughout the history of music has involved what is generally called "ternary form." Reduced to the simplest possible terms, the structure of this architecture (with numerical support) may be described as:

1. Do something
2. Do something else
3. Do the first "something" again

As Webern pointed out in his lectures, this framework was already well in place at the time of Johann Sebastian Bach and ran through most of nineteenth-century music like a spinal chord, serving as the very basis for structural experimentation by both Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. (Really, is there anything wrong with considering the music of Glass and Mahler in the same paragraph, regardless of their different takes on repetitive structures?)

What makes it all "music," however, comes down to the extent to which doing that "something" again involves also doing something different. When we view the experience of listening to music through this lens, the San Francisco Opera has provided us with an interesting framework, which began with the world premiere of Glass' Appomattox and is now about to conclude with Ariodante, by George Frideric Handel. Could any two composers be more different? Could any two operas separated by such a wide gulf of time be so similar? To be sure, the two compositions do not sound particularly similar, to which someone like Brahms surely would have remarked, "Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel." If we really want to talk about similarities and differences, we have to dig beneath the surface.

On the side of similarity, I continue to hold to my primary impression of Appomattox as a dirge scaled to the duration of an entire opera. Now, while Ariodante is not a dirge on that scale, it is, in many respects, a musical examination of the human heart subjected to the most intense mourning. The tragedy of two lovers, each of whom thinks the other is dead, goes all the way back to the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe (which only William Shakespeare could have mined for the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and the comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream). Handel establishes this perspective in the second act of Ariodante, giving each of the lovers da capo arias of some of the strongest emotions we are likely to find in the history of Western music.

Yet it is in the formal aspect of those da capo arias that we also encounter the key difference across the centuries in which these two operas were conceived. The da capo aria was the ternary form stock-in-trade for the operas by Handel and his contemporaries. They were the primary window on the reflective nature of the character doing the singing:

1. The character "does something," which is usually a matter of expressing some feeling
2. Having made that expression, the character usually elaborates through "doing something else"
3. Nevertheless, because that initial feeling is so fundamental, the character does that first "something" again

The repetition reinforces the primacy of the feeling, establishing that it is so important as to be the focus of the character's reflections. The reflection is, in a sense, as literal as it is figurative.

The trick to making this work, though, is that the repetition of that "again" must not feel repetitious, so to speak. Things have changed since the character began the aria. Having first expressed the feeling, the character departs for "new territory," only to return; and returning to a place is not the same as remaining in that place. (Jews know this through the concept of teshuvah, which, as I previously discussed, is the idea that God attaches more value to returning from sin to piety than to unwavering piety.) The challenge, however, is that, in most da capo arias of Handel's time, the notation for the return is identical to the notation for the initial expression. Thus the score provides the performer with no information about what makes the repetition of the text different from the initial statement. That difference must be worked out by the performance itself; and in opera this tends to involve a collaboration of the stage director, the conductor, and the singer.

There is then a further challenge, which is that almost every number in a Handel opera is a da capo aria! That makes for an awful lot of reflection in the course of an evening! All the characters may not be equally important, but we end up encountering them all through a musical form the highlights their personal reflections. (Even Shakespeare knew better than to give every one of his characters a soliloquy!) Thus, stage director and conductor have to collaborate further on the overall architecture of the entire evening, lest the succession of da capo arias turn into Winston Churchill's "one damned thing after another!"

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, Glass was far less flexible in his demands on the performers. There are decisions of expressiveness that may be applied to the score, but the score is far more specific than anything that Handel had written. Nevertheless, as I had noted at the time of the premiere, it was virtually impossible to find a review of Appomattox that did not invoke the noun "monotony," which is just another way for the reviewer to say "one damned thing after another!" It is thus not too far-fetched to suggest that the challenges of performing Appomattox were not that different than those of performing any Handel opera, because there is yet another similarity, which is the similarity of the listening situation that is shared by Handel operas and Glass operas.

There is thus an interesting pedagogic value in the opera season that provides us with Handel, Glass, and a rather broad sampling of "everything in between" those extremes. The whole season is a journey. However, it is a journey that had already been related to us in "Little Gidding," the last of the Four Quartets of Thomas Stearns Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I can think of no better way to know the "place" of Handel "for the first time" than through a da capo exploration that led us through the music of Glass!

Too Much Chutzpah?

This has been one of those weeks when there have been just too many candidates for the Chutzpah of the Week award. Nevertheless, having just written that one of the greatest virtues of our American government is its foundation on a principle of checks and balances, I suspect that the act of chutzpah that deserves most attention is one that seems directed at thwarting that system. This act has received a fair amount of coverage this morning. Nevertheless, in the interest of the very nature of chutzpah, it seems appropriate for me to cite the Al Jazeera English version of this coverage:

The US attorney-general has vowed to go ahead with military trials against foreigners held at the Guantanamo Bay prison despite a supreme court ruling giving detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts.

Michael Mukasey said in Tokyo on Friday that he was disappointed with the decision because it would lead to "hundreds" of cases being referred to the federal district court.

"I think it bears emphasis that the court's decision does not concern military commission trials, which will continue to proceed," he said.

"Instead it addresses the procedures that the Congress and the president [George Bush] put in place to permit enemy combatants to challenge their detention."

The Bush Administration has run up quite a track record of denying and/or ignoring Supreme Court decisions on the unconstitutional practices applied in the name of the Global War on Terror. Nevertheless, I think Mukasey deserves the award for trying to pull out a fine point of procedure to justify the continuation of business-as-usual. Hopefully, this point will be tested soon enough by a defense attorney at one of those military commission trials trying to appeal the case on the grounds that the original arrest and detention were both unwarranted and illegal. There is also a fair does of chutzpah in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision, which amounts to his saying, "Now we have to do something about those detainees," rather than just letting them rot like the many prisoners that had been "disappeared" by the Chilean junta not so long ago.

When you think about it, Mukasey has done a pretty good job of keeping a low profile (far lower than his predecessor) since assuming the post of Attorney General. Indeed, the closest he got to a Chutzpah of the Week award was when I gave the award to four senators who missed the vote on his nomination because they felt that campaigning for President was more important. At this rate he will never rack up the number of awards his boss has received, but I think he deserves at least one shot in the limelight with a Chutzpah of the Week award he can call his own!

Our Greatest Loss: A Loss of Balance

I have just read Andrew Keen's latest blog post, "The America that we want back," with great interest, particularly since it emerged that many (if not all) of the "we" in that post are not Americans. I do not mean this in a pejorative, let alone sarcastic, sense: Whether it began with our winning our Revolutionary War or with the ratification of our Constitution, American has been perceived, particularly by Europeans, as a "grand experiment" in government; and given the historical record of volatility of social systems, particularly those which are constituted rather than simply "emerging" (for better or worse) out of existing practices, the endurance of our system for over two centuries probably deserves to be recognized as an accomplishment. Thus, I both believe and sympathize with this paragraph near the beginning of Keen's post:

Over a tapas lunch [during the Direct and Interactive Marketing Global Forum in Barcelona], one guy, a very senior Catalan marketing executive, confided in me. "The America we all know, the America of innovation, the America that continually reinvents itself, " he asked with a childish hopefulness. "Is that America dead? Can Obama reinvent America?"

Keen's own answer to these questions is not particularly optimistic:

The mistake, I fear, is to expect too much of Obama. The one area most resistant to change in America is politics. Change, real change, in America is going to come through business, technology and education. That's where we have to look for Emerson's beginnings, projects, vast designs and expectations. But the America political system has become so ossified that it will take more than a sweet talking lawyer to transform government into the core engine of American innovation.

That first sentence reminded me of when I first started writing about Barack Obama not too long after launching this blog. In was in a post entitled "Secular Messianism;" and it involved a theme that I revisited on several occasions. I later developed that theme in a post in which I explored the hypothesis that the "American way of life" had led to a general infantilization of the American population. Thus, the attribution of messianic powers to a Presidential candidate was nothing more than a consequence of this infantilization:

To live as an infant in the face of the practical trials of reality is to believe, as an act of faith, if necessary, that someone (the father figure in that "beautiful paternalistic dream") will always be there to take care of those trials. Put another way, the infant lives without any sense of responsibility under the conviction that there will always be a deus ex machina to set things right. This is why so much of the current Presidential campaign seems to be based on appealing to what I have called the "Secular Messianism" of the electorate. Going beyond governance to everyday life, this form of infantilism was also embodied in the Eloi of H. G. Wells' Time Machine.

Thus, I think that what Europeans perceive as the "death" of America may have less to do with the "ossification" of the political system and more to do with the cultural values that now support all of our institutions, whether they involve politics, business, technology, or education. Indeed, it may very well be that the current state of our economic health (which certainly bodes ill for any signs of "reinvention" in the institutions of business, technology, and education, let alone politics) is probably a reflection of that general infantile lack of responsibility.

I first floated this hypothesis in discussing the consequences of the world the Internet has made, which puts me in sympathy with the subtitle of Keen's Cult of the Amateur book, "How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture." However, with the death of Susan Sontag I have been drawn to her attacks on consumerism; and I have begun to wonder whether or not the Internet has been only a predisposing cause of the cultural rot through its capacity to escalate our capacity for consumerism, not to mention globalize it. Thus, going back to the conclusion of my original "Secular Messianism" post, the rot was there long before the Internet. The rot was there when Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" was such a success on television that Chayefsky was never again allowed to write for network television:

Marty's "sin," as it were, was that he was able to solve his problem through his own devices rather than buying some deus ex machina consumer product; and advertisers just did not want any more stories like that being told on television, particularly if it turned out that viewers liked them!

In that respect I have to say that I find it very ironic that the subject of Keen's introduction should be "a very senior Catalan marketing executive." After all, this is a guy who earns his (probably pretty impressive) salary off of consumerism; and his very existence is a sign of the extent to which the spirit of consumerism is as strong in the European Union as it is in the United States (even at a time when Americans can barely afford to buy anything any more). Thus, I share Keen's pessimism; but my reason runs far deeper than his. It will take an awful lot of audacity to pull us out of our addiction (which is what it is) to consumerism; and I suspect that will be far more audacity than even Obama had in mind!

Is there a way out? Personally, whatever my feelings about consumerism may be, I have no problem with private enterprise. However, I believe in the need for a balance between private enterprise and that concept of "public trust," which in the past I have associated with quality journalism. As I wrote yesterday, I feel that this latter concept is in real jeopardy; but, in a government founded on a principle of checks and balances, I also feel that it is the only way in which we can keep private enterprise in check from dragging us even further into our addictive dependency on all that stuff they want us to consume. Since the post in which I last discussed this concept had to do with Eric Schimidt's latest thoughts [sic] on Google, online display advertising, and newspapers, my guess is that this role of public trust is not long for this world and that Keen's chickens of an Internet ruining our culture are coming home to roost!

Our "Last Best Hope" for National Journalism?

If, as I have just suggested, American newspapers are suffering (perhaps irrecoverably) from "gutted staffs" and "gutted reputations" in the wake of the world the Internet (not to mention Google) has made, then we should probably take comfort in the fact that Al Jazeera is beginning to provide us with national, as well as international coverage. This has become particularly apparent since the beginning of this month, although AIPAC coverage might best be viewed as national news with strong international implications. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see the extent to which they covered the impact on Barack Obama's campaign (which, itself, also has international implications). More interesting, however has been the seriousness they have attached to the efforts of Dennis Kucinich to kick-start impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush. This seriousness has apparently not been lost on Kucinich himself.

So, it is no surprise that Al Jazeera put out a report on yesterday's efforts by the House of Representatives to thwart Kucinich's quest:

A US congressman and former presidential candidate has vowed not to give up his fight to impeach the president over going to war in Iraq, after the House of Representatives sidelined his bill, possibly until after George Bush leaves office.

Dennis Kucinich said if hearings on the issue were not held within 30 days, he would introduce more articles of impeachment against Bush to the US congress.

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to send Kucinich's impeachment bill to a committee in what has been seen as a delay tactic.

The House Judiciary Committee is not likely to hold hearings before the end of Bush's term in January.

What is surprising is that Kucinich seems to have allowed Al Jazeera to interview him on this matter:

Kucinich, a Democrat, told Al Jazeera that the impeachment attempt was not just about the past, but also about the future.

"If we do not establish that the rule of law must apply to the president of the US now, what we are doing is through our inaction creating a precedent that would let the next president know that he could go ahead and wage war without congressional approval.

"That he could approve of wiretapping, rendition, spying, torture or anything because congress wouldn't act.

"We need to take a stand now not just for justice for what's happened over the last six, seven years but also to restrain any abuse of power in the next administration."

This may well be because Al Jazeera was the only news source interested in interviewing him; but that does not diminish the significance of the encounter (and may even enhance Al Jazeera's standing among its competitors).

Shortly after Al Jazeera English was launched, I remember hearing an interview on the BBC in which their general manager said that he saw the BBC as Al Jazeera's primary competitor. My guess is that the BBC took this as a serious challenge. It may have even had something to do with the "full court press" they applied to covering the American primary elections, basically demonstrating that their desk in Washington was as strong as the one in London. Well, I have yet to hear a peep out of the BBC (on either radio or television) about Kucinich's latest activities; and I am beginning to wonder whether its Washington desk is as loathe to dig into news about progressives, who try to push the envelope of "established liberalism," as the Washington desks of American news sources are. If so, then, as Michael Porter put it in his Competitive Strategy book, they have discovered the "generic strategy" of differentiation and found a way to implement it. On the principle that everyone benefits from such competition, I wish Al Jazeera the best of luck and hope that more of those progressive voices, who have some very constructive things to say, will recognize that this institution provides a new platform from which they can be heard!

Eric Schmidt's "Moral Imperative"

There are times when I wonder whether or not Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google, learned his personal "art" of rhetoric from President George W. Bush. Consider yesterday's report from Associated Press Business Writer Michael Liedtke:

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that the Internet search leader hopes its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick will aid newspapers as they struggle to corral more online revenue.

"It's a huge moral imperative to help here," Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session at an event hosted in San Francisco by Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick's system for serving up online display ads could generate "significant" revenue online for newspapers.

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won't be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

Let's accept this for what it is, which is nothing more than a public relations ploy for those still concerned that the DoubleClick acquisition was fundamentally monopolistic. Everything else is basically like the air in whipped cream, grounded on, at best, vague speculations about an optimistic future.

If there is any moral imperative at stake here, it has more to do with the viability of journalism as both an institution and a profession. It has to do with that old-fashioned role of the newspaper as a public trust. It has to do with professional journalists who know how to "get" a story and translate what they got into that concise and compelling manner that used to leave us all hungering for one paper to read while commuting to work and another for the ride home. (Boy, are those images old-fashioned!) This, in turn, involves not only the journalists themselves but also the "standards of practice" of journalism, itself, as an institution. This institution is on the ropes, if not down for the count, as we recently saw in Michael Wolff's story on The New York Times for Vanity Fair.

This is a moral imperative that grew out of the practices of capitalism that emerged from the world the Internet has made. In other words it is a consequence of the very practices that made Google a success and Schmidt as rich and powerful as he now is. The moral imperative is for Google and its executives to choose between growing their assets further (so they can spend on things like airplanes, space flights, and private power operations) or channeling a useful (as opposed to token) chunk of those assets to a few newspapers to help them recover their gutted staffs and, hopefully as a consequence, their gutted reputations. Oblivion to the latter choice would be nothing more than (to borrow a word from Judge John Sirica) moral poppycock.

Spiking News about Impeachment?

It was not until shortly before 10 AM this morning that I encountered the following sentence in a report on the Al Jazeera English site:

Dennis Kucinich filed 35 charges against the president at the US congress on Monday, despite the fact Bush is due to step down from office in January.

I did not find either Kucinich's action or the number of charges particularly surprising. As a matter of fact, I was already aware of both through reading comments on Truthdig. This morning, however, it dawned on me that Al Jazeera was reporting that this had happened on Monday; but I had seen nothing about it on any of my RSS news sources for all of Tuesday!

This led me to do a Google News search with the keywords "Kucinich," "Bush," and "impeach." If I am to believe the time stamps on the search results, then the earliest report was provided by Associated Press and appeared at ap.google.com (where no time stamp is given). To give you an idea of the level of attention that was given, let me reproduce the content in its entirety:

Rep. Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution

1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential contender, said Monday he wants the House to consider a resolution to impeach President Bush.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi consistently has said impeachment was "off the table."

Kucinich, D-Ohio, read his proposed impeachment language in a floor speech. He contended Bush deceived the nation and violated his oath of office in leading the country into the Iraq war.

Kucinich introduced a resolution last year to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. That resolution was killed, but only after Republicans initially voted in favor of taking up the measure to force a debate.

Kucinich won 50 percent of the vote in a five-way House Democratic primary in March, beating back critics who said he ignored business at home to travel the country in his quest to be president.

I am still not quite sure about that "1 day ago" excuse for a real time stamp; but, compared to the Al Jazeera coverage, this was a pretty skimpy piece of work.

Reuters did a slightly better job. They provided a real time stamp: "Mon Jun 9, 2008 10:10pm EDT." They also provided one more paragraph than Associated Press did, but neither of those wire services chose to give the count of the number of articles of impeachment. Even more amusing was that I was only able to find the Reuters article from a link on a blog post that Michael Clancy had provided to the Web site for The Village Voice. However, even Clancy fell short of the amount of background that the Al Jazeera team mustered.

At this point I need to make a digression before I get to my punch line: My morning actually began over at Truthdig by examining the comments over a report that Ron Paul had announced that he would be staging an event of his own in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area during the week of the Republican convention, probably on the day that John McCain would be officially named the Republican nominee. Anticipating that this would be yet another news story that would be ignored by mainstream media (MSM), I wrote the following comment:

Just remember, if it doesn’t happen on television, it does not happen. Make sure to let all those media sources that depend on “eyeballs for advertising” (beginning with MSNBC) know that you want to hear what Paul has to say. If their channel decides not to give the event live coverage, you will switch to one that does! (My guess is that, if all of the commercial channels give the event a pass, CSPAN will still cover it!) If our voices can affect the choice of a nominee, they should be able to affect the speeches we hear!

This was followed by a comment from cyrena (who writes some of the most interesting "no-prisoners" comments I have encountered on any of the news sites) taking me to task for supporting Paul in spite of all the questionable items on his record. She then took my to task for my underlying premise:

In other words, I’m less likely to believe that for serious people, ‘it’ doesn’t happen if it doesn’t happen on TV. We have different ways of communicating now, which is exactly why Barack Obama is the Democratic Party nominee. He’s used 21st Century technology to build a *new* movement of the Democratic Party. Most of his supporters have *not* relied on MSM for their information or their motivation.

This brings me back to my punch line, which is that we all have a responsibility to stick thorns in the side of the media whenever the opportunity presents itself. This can involve a "preemptive strike" over anticipated lack of attention to what Ron Paul chooses to say during the week of the Republican Convention; or it can involve asking, as stridently as possible, why Kucinich's (albeit quixotic) effort to bring articles of impeachment to the House floor was virtually (if not actually) spiked by just about every news source (including my beloved BBC) except for Al Jazeera! After all, Paul did an impressive job of fund-raising through those "different ways of communicating;" yet, as I observed in my reply to cyrena, as far as his active campaigning was concerned, "it was harder to gather reports on what he said on a day-to-day basis than it was to do the same for Kucinich (only because the latter had, and still has, the chutzpah to be brash and outspoken)!"

Meanwhile, for what it is worth, CNN has now "recognized" this story. Their time stamp reads "updated 3:07 a.m. EDT, Wed June 11, 2008;" and their account opens with the claim that Kucinich introduced his resolution on Tuesday, thus contradicting the other accounts that claim the resolution was introduced late Monday! The lesson to be learned is not whether or not "serious people" find out about things through television but about how well-equipped even the most "serious" reader is to filter out signal from noise. My guess is, in this case, that most media sources either do not want us to know that there is a signal or do not particularly care whether or not we get that signal. Either option is pretty pathetic for someone who grew up with the slogan "All the news that's fit to print!" It is equally pathetic that the only way in which we may be able to assert our rights against these media is to fight them on the advertising front. This is not to imply that there was once a "golden age" when reporting the news was "fair and unbalanced;" but, if Internet evangelists are going to go on and on about how their technology empowers us, then the least we can do is exercise our empowerment in the interest of being better informed!

The Themed Program

Looking back over all the accounts of concerts I have accumulated since launching this blog, I found myself thinking about how many of them involved a program for the evening that was based on some kind of organizing theme. This is a far cry from the way concerts were organized when I first started attending them. The usual model seemed to be that a concert would involve three compositions, two of which preceded the intermission. The program would begin with something short and relatively familiar, if not an established warhorse. An overture would make for a useful play on its terminology but was not obligatory. This would be followed by a work that featured a soloist and/or a new composition. Then after the intermission there would be the "blockbuster warhorse."

As is the case with any rules, there were, of course, exceptions. For example the last season concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra was a "request program," which usually involved the "winners" of a poll of subscribers, none of which required an "imported" soloist (but might involve a member of the Orchestra). The works themselves were then ordered in such a way that the two halves of the evening took roughly the same amount of time. About the only time one would encounter a concert with a theme would be in a Children's or "Youth" (as in high school) concert, where you had to listen to the conductor tell you what the organizing theme was and why all the compositions were relevant to it. It all added up to too much talk (usually poorly delivered) and not enough music.

I am not sure when I first became aware of a themed program designed with the adult audience in mind. However, I have a feeling that the first one I encountered was shortly before I left the Boston area, having completed my doctoral work. This was shortly after Michael Tilson Thomas had become the Assistant Conductor at the Boston Symphony; and he was given the liberty to prepare a few (four?) concerts of works that were off of just about any beaten path you could imagine. Unless I am mistaken, one of those concerts had to do with unusual ways to use keyboards and may even have involved a near-riot that broke out over a performance of Steve Reich's "Four Organs."

When I was living and working in the New York area, I remember that the first season of Ransom Wilson's Solisti New York Orchestra involved themed programs, the very first of which was "Meet the Minimalists." Reich figured in that one, too, since a high point of the evening involved Wilson exchanging his baton for his flute for a performance of "Vermont Counterpoint" in which all the flute parts were "live." It was pretty awesome. It was also my first exposure to John Adams' "Grand Pianola Music," which was not particularly well received by the audience. I think the audience reaction may have had more to do with a "rivalry of the coasts" than with the music, though. It was certainly the most "maximal" of the "minimalist" compositions and seemed to be driven by a relatively wacky sense of humor (which I later heard Adams acknowledge, in somewhat more refined language, in a pre-concert talk).

I find it interesting that I associate Thomas with my earliest memory. Presumably, he has a strong hand in what gets programmed for each season of the San Francisco Symphony; and I suspect that his hand has a lot to do with having programs that can be taken in as a whole. Saying that he has had an influence on programs by other ensembles I have heard (particularly the visiting ones) may, however, be taking things too far. More likely is that my evenings at the San Francisco Symphony have conditioned me to finding patterns (which Gerald Edelman would say is the bedrock of our very consciousness), even when those patterns were not intended. That "consciousness connection," however, is an important one, since consciousness plays a strong role (if not the only role) in how the experiences of the past influence the perceptions and actions of the present. (Those remarks that John Adams made about "Grand Pianola Music" discussed the context of recent activities in which that composition was conceived.)

Much of the literature of consciousness tends to focus on areas such as visual perception (where much of the experimental data are based on static images, the easiest to manage in a laboratory setting) and linguistic behavior (where all of the data involve the manipulation of symbols through operations that are particularly conducive to computer technology). Listening behavior rarely receives as much attention; and much of the attention it does receive has to do with speech recognition, which, without trying to sound too reductive, is a matter of translating time-domain signals into a particularly reduced class of symbols. It is only when we try to broaden our scope to an area such as listening to music that we have to contend with the formation of perceptual categories that could not take place without an underlying foundation of the very consciousness of time itself, a question of consciousness that has challenged some of the sharpest minds going at least as far back as the days of Aristotle. From such a perspective themed programs may actually serve sort of like a set of "training wheels" (but without any pejorative connotations) for the formation of time-based perceptual categories; and, if we are well "trained" by these experiences, then we are likely to discover that, even if the program does not induce category formation, our capacity for perceiving those categories will be as robust as ever.

Beethoven the Progressive

For all of Arnold Schoenberg's insights about "Brahms the Progressive," it is important not to overlook the progressive side of Ludwig van Beethoven. By this I do not mean all the anxieties of influence among nineteenth-century composers living in the shadows of such monuments as the late string quartets, the last three piano sonatas, and the ninth symphony. San Francisco Opera subscribers will have a hard time dismissing those anxieties this month, since it is hard to imagine how Richard Wagner could have come up with his Vorspiel for Das Rheingold without first having offered up a sacrifice before Beethoven's monument (figuratively, is not literally) out of respect to the opening measures of that ninth symphony. Rather, I am thinking of influences that extend beyond twentieth-century modernism into the "backlash" (if not "postmodern") efforts of composers such as John Cage (the Schoenberg student that the master would probably have preferred to forget) and Philip Glass. Whether or not Stephen Paulson, Music Director of Symphony Parnassus, had such influences in mind in preparing the all-Beethoven program that concluded the Parnassus season, we cannot escape listening to the past in the context of the present; and this gives us the pleasure of hearing even the pieces we have known longest and loved best in new contexts that we can never anticipate.

Paulson took an interesting approach in arranging his program. He coupled the first (Opus 15) piano concerto (presumably the 1800 revision of the original 1795 version) with that shadow-casting ninth symphony, first performed in 1824. Thus, on the one extreme we have a concerto that first emerged with the earliest piano sonatas and was probably revised within the same time-frame as the Opus 22 sonata; and, on the other hand, we have a symphony that includes vocal writing, which will soon be followed by the exploratory final string quartets. I single out Opus 22, because it was from hearing this sonata performed by András Schiff in Davies Symphony Hall that I first starting thinking about Beethoven in terms of an "extended influence." At the time Schiff performed this sonata, I wrote that "we also hear Beethoven resuming his experiments with the impact of silence, now on a somewhat subtler scale than previously (as in Opus 2);" any my writing about Opus 2 explicitly cited the irony of Cage-like silences, since Cage never spoke particularly well of Beethoven (possibly because master Schoenberg spoke all-too-well of him).

Beethoven's own relationship to the rhetorical impact of silence can be found in both the early piano concerto and the final symphony; and it runs a gamut from playful "freeze-frames" to suspensions of a natural flow that feel almost heart-stopping. To be fair, neither of these extremes really has much to do with Cage's own aesthetic of silence, which is more about obliging us to listen when we think there is nothing to hear (choosing my words according to Igor Stravinsky's terminological framework). Nevertheless, to a great extent Beethoven experiments with the duration of silence, from the brief pause to the suspended moment, in ways that would be extended to previously unimagined scales by Cage. Some of these experiments even emerged in the approach that piano soloist Elizabeth Dorman took to her cadenza material, which offered us at least possible clues into what the young Beethoven might do in his more spontaneous moments.

The second influence does not originate in the first piano concerto, but it is in full force in the ninth symphony. This is the influence of what Philip Glass calls "music with repetitive structures," the phrase, as Daniel Mendelsohn pointed out in his New York Review piece on Satyagraha, which Glass prefers to "minimalism." Beethoven's symphonies provide fertile ground for such repetitive structures, whether they are single chords exerted again and again, as in the first movement of his third symphony, or a simple motif that repeats maddeningly through almost the entirety of the development section of the first movement of the sixth symphony. Again, out of respect to the irony of any connection to Cage, that sixth symphony experience is right up there with the repetitions in Cage's "Lecture on Nothing." Of course this particular Beethoven example is not a strict repetition: It is an ostinato that supports a more gradual harmonic unfolding (a technique that Glass will later develop on his own terms) gaining strength through a sustained crescendo (which would emerge in Franz Schubert's symphonic writing).

None of this should suggest that we listen to Beethoven as if he were the progenitor of either Cage or Glass. It only serves to demonstrate that those of us who have listened to these two latter-day composers cannot help but listen to all stages of Beethoven's compositional career in a context that differs radically from those of Donald Francis Tovey or perhaps even Charles Rosen. Beethoven's virtue is that his music not only sustains these contextual shifts but flourishes under them, which is why every performance of Beethoven presents us with yet another exciting listening opportunity.

Once again I find myself writing more about the music than about the performers. Nevertheless, from a purely personal point of view, I feel a need to single out, in the vocal portion of the ninth symphony, the performance by alto soloist Heather Carolo. This is not because I have been following her vocal career closely. Quite the contrary, a text search of this blog on her name will reveal that the staging of The Turn of the Screw by the San Francisco Lyric Opera was by Heather Carolo; and, on the basis of the biographical summary in the Symphony Parnassus program, I have every reason to believe that the stage director whose work I so admired is the same as the alto. This does not seem out of place at a Symphony Parnassus program, since Paulson is principal bassoon with the San Francisco Symphony. I suspect that neither of these cases is what Lennie Tristano had in mind when he opined that every serious musician needed a "day job;" but it may be a sign that even the best of musicians now see beyond honing their talents to be one-trick-ponies. There can only be advantages from approaching performance from more than one point of view; and, if more performers are exercising those advantages, then we shall all be the better for it.

Intimations of Vulgarity

Vulgarity might seem an unlikely theme for a San Francisco Symphony concert; but, when the climax of the evening was the suite that Béla Bartók prepared from the score for his one-act pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin, the possibility is worth considering. As I previously mentioned, the work was banned after its first performance in Cologne, such was the offense that the church officials took to the scenario by Menyhért Lengyel. That previous post provided a brief sketch of the scenario taken from Halsey Stevens' The Life and Music of Béla Bartók. However, James Keller's notes for the Symphony program book included Bartók's own description of the plot, which is worth repeating:

Three [thugs] force a beautiful girl to lure men into their den so they can rob them. … The third [visitor] is a wealthy Chinese. He is a good catch, and the girl entertains him by dancing. The Mandarin's desire is aroused, he is inflamed by passion, but the girl shrinks from him in horror. The [thugs] attack him, rob him, smother him in a quilt, and stab him with a sword, but their violence is of no avail. They cannot kill the Mandarin, who continues to look at the girl with love and longing in his eyes. Finally feminine instinct helps: the girl satisfied the Mandarin's desire, and only then does he collapse and die.

I have seen this staged only once, back in the early days of the Opera Company of Boston, which is to say the let-it-all-hang-out days of the late sixties. In my brash youth I had expected more shock value. Today, however, I am more impressed by a narrative that draws its material from the gutter and escalates it to a mythical plane whose level is comparable to that of Das Rheingold (as I have already suggested).

Bartók's suite does not include the Mandarin's death scene, but it does not skimp on any of the sex and violence. The orchestral resources are as rich as those Igor Stravinsky had mustered for his Firebird suite. However, while Stravinsky concluded his suite with the spectacle of a coronation, Bartók brought his to the climax of desire, going out with a bang, so to speak. Under the baton of Assistant Conductor James Gaffigan, the Symphony perfectly rendered the fever pitch of the conclusion as the inevitable destination of all the acts of physical and sexual violence that had already been depicted. Vulgarity was definitely given its due, commanding our attention with a force that simply can never be achieved by Hollywood trivialities, such as those Quentin Tarantino projects over which film critics love to fawn.

The work obviously belonged at the end of the evening, since it was an impossible act to follow; but, as I suggested, it may have also served as a final statement on several perspectives of vulgarity. This seems to be the appropriate way to approach Francis Poulenc's Figure humaine cantata, based on eight poems by Paul Éluard, all directed towards the final poem, "Liberté." Without historical context one might take this to be a celebration of libertinism; but the work was composed during the summer of 1943, which is to say during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Thus, if one feels as if Éluard was reaching for the ugliest possible turns of phrase in the texts that he fashioned, it was probably because he was writing in response to the ugliness he saw every day when going out on the streets of Paris. These poems are a far cry from the explicit sex and violence on Lengyel's scenario, but they are just as focused as Lengyel was on life in a debased state. Éluard was probably taking just as many risks in his writing as Lengyel had done; but, as an active member of the Résistance, he had also probably accepted risk as an element of his day-to-day life.

One would think that such writing would arouse a passionate musical response, but Poulenc's cantata is relatively subdued. Like its predecessor, the Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence completed in 1939, it is scored for unaccompanied chorus (divided, in this case, into two choirs). Also, like that earlier work, there is little diversity in the coloration of sounds, nor, for that matter, in either dynamics or tempo. This is not to say that either the earlier or later work is little more than featureless chant but just that the features under display received almost no highlighting. Initially I was both perplexed and provoked by this approach: Was Poulenc simply rewriting the penitential motets to new texts because he had run out of musical ideas? My second thoughts, however, recognized that the harshness of Éluard's texts would not necessarily have been served by equally harsh sounds. Taking Éluard's vulgar realities and rendering them in the same quiet setting as sacred penitential texts served to emphasize the underlying vulgarity, rather than conceal it. The impact is thus as disquieting as that of the Mandarin story, albeit in an entirely different way.

Needless to say, clarity of the text is critical to the performance of this work; and, once again, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus did not disappoint. Of course it helped to have the texts in the program book (along with English translation); but all phrasing and diction were directed towards letting the poems speak for themselves, which they did with all the profundity endowed upon them by their author. This was my first opportunity to hear the Chorus led by their director, Ragnar Bolin. I was well aware of his sensitivity to the need for such clarity and his physical techniques for bringing that clarity to every word and phrase as rendered through such a low-key musical strategy. Maintaining the quiet brevity of each of Poulenc's settings is as much a challenge as scaling the energy levels of Das Rheingold is across the street in the War Memorial Opera House, and Bolin rose to his challenge as effectively as Donald Runnicles has been doing with his.

I am not sure how Mark-Anthony Turnage would feel about viewing his Three Asteroids in terms of vulgarity, but it is hard to avoid associating his first movement, "The Torino Scale," with anything other than a Hollywood disaster movie, particularly since the "scale" was intended to measure the extent of damage likely to be caused by an asteroid colliding with the Earth. Still, Turnage's orchestration probably celebrates the percussion section far more skillfully than any soundtrack would do, although his decision to incorporate a klaxon seemed like a definite bow to Hollywood realism. The other two movements, "Juno" and "Ceres," were far less panic-stricken but no less modest in their orchestral (including percussion) resources. One might almost say that Turnage's take on these two asteroids was inspired by the slogan for the Godzilla remake: SIZE MATTERS! So, at the very least, Three Asteroids brings us into the world of Hollywood vulgarity, if not the more profound vulgarities of Éluard or Lengyel.

However, does size matter? To the San Francisco Symphony, conducted for this work by Benjamin Shwartz, the size of the decibel level definitely seemed to matter, since, from my vantage point, I could see several pairs of ears protected by ear plugs. Nevertheless, all those decibels that Turnage summoned in 2005 never seemed to rise to the level of intensity that Bartók had achieved with his 1919 suite, whose overall resources were not quite as overwhelming. This may have been a good demonstration of how the old dogs can sometimes do the better tricks.

The one portion of the program that was free of vulgarity was Alexander Barantschik's performance of Serge Prokofiev's first violin concerto. Composed in 1917, this is not the sort of "firebrand" music that the Symphony tried to celebrate about a year ago. It is more an intense display of virtuosity, often framed in the raucous turn-on-a-dime rhetoric that Prokofiev exercised particularly well in his collaborations with Sergei Eisenstein. However, if his work with Eisenstein imposed major constraints on how he managed his orchestral resources, this concerto allowed him to develop an orchestral palette of stunning transparency in support of the extensive variety of sonorities demanded from the solo instrument itself. This demands a sensitivity to acoustic balance that is far beyond the scope of the kinds of microphones that Eisenstein had to use and is probably just as much beyond the scope of even today's recording technology. This is a work that is best enjoyed in a live setting for both the richness of its sound and the suspense of the demands on the soloist for a real high-wire act. Since Barantschik is the Symphony's Concertmaster, he could enjoy a rapport with the entire ensemble that achieved that acoustic balance to the best possible effect, while his solo work leapt confidently through all the hoops that Prokofiev had composed. That rapport was further reinforced by James Gaffigan's conducting, and I was certainly glad to see that his approach to a Prokofiev violin concerto was as dazzling my memory of his approach to Sergei Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto.

The Gods Must be All-Too-Human

Those fortunate enough to have a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology that includes the illustrations by Steele Savage have probably observed that the caption of the first illustration for the text (as opposed to the frontispiece, which has no caption) say, "The Greeks, unlike the Egyptians, made their gods in their own image." In other words all the members of the Pantheon were modeled on (presumably familiar) human forms, rather than specific animals or chimerical syntheses of multiple life-forms. As Hamilton's text develops this thought, those gods ultimately tell us what the early Greeks, themselves, were like in terms of the very humanity that our contemporary civilization inherited from them: "Nothing we learn about them is alien to ourselves."

Thus, the behavior of the gods is not inscrutable, as is the case with animal (wild or domesticated) behavior. Nor are the gods abstractions of ideal behaviors that are, for all intents and purposes, impossible for mere mortals to attain. Rather, they serve to mirror the behaviors we observe within our own gatherings, running that entire Aristotelian gamut from noble to base. From this it stands to reason that, the more faithful that "mirror image" is rendered, the more likely we are to reflect on our own actual behaviors.

From this point of view, the decision by Francesca Zambello to stage Richard Wagner's mammoth cycle of operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in an American setting is a challenge as admirable as it is awesome. The history of the United States is filled with home-grown myths that cover a wide variety of aspects of "the American experience." With so much mythology already in place, would there be room for an Americanization of a Nordic myth transmogrified (often radically) by Wagner's poetic imagination? Having now seen Zambello's Rheingold for the first time, I would say that the answer is affirmative and even be bold enough to venture an explanation for why.

As I see it, the question is not one of whether or not the story itself (which I have already outlined) is "universal" (which I find to be more of a weasel expression, rather than an assertion of anything concrete). Rather, in terms of that Aristotelian gamut, the matter has to do with the extent to which we Americans can identify with the characters in the cast and with the principle that we recognize a character on the basis of his or her specific (characteristic?) flaws. This is basically my take on the first sentence that Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in reviewing the Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass' Satyagraha for The New York Review: "Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas." We know our characters by their flaws and the actions they take arising from those flaws.

To make my point, let me just summarize all the members of the Rheingold cast in terms of their flaws. I shall do this using the "order of appearance" given in the San Francisco Opera program good:

• The Rhine Maidens: Their most obvious flaw is that they shirk their responsibility. They have only one job to do, commanded by their Father: To guard the magic gold from theft. When we first see them, they are already more interested in playing than in guarding; and they pay for this reckless behavior by the end of Scene 1 (which is the first of the three thefts). However, there is another flaw, which is that their play is far from innocuous. As I pointed out in comparing Das Rheingold to The Miraculous Mandarin, they have a reputation for wanton behavior that "has drawn many mortal men to a watery death." Any one of them could thus be the subject of Heinrich Heine's "Lorelei" poem.
• Alberich, on the other hand, is the "first thief." That is the primary among his many other flaws. Most of those secondary flaws have to do with both desiring and abusing power, but there are also flaws of greed and lust.
• Fricka: I would say that her primary flaw is hypocrisy. She is a stern guardian of those laws of home and hearth that will figure so significantly in Die Walküre. Nevertheless, when she first hears about the Ring from Loge, her first reaction is to add it to her wardrobe. She is happy to live in Valhalla in the hope that it will keep her husband from gadding about; but she does this by choosing to ignore its "entry fee."
• Wotan is the "second thief." This is no minor flaw, since he keeps the staff on which all laws and contracts have been recorded. Thus, if Alberich's theft is the root cause behind all the catastrophes that unfold in Götterdämmerung, Wotan's theft is the root cause behind the ultimate destruction of Valhalla and all those living there.
• Freia: At this point we need to shift our attention from the "basic facts" provided by Wagner's libretto to the "interpretation of those facts" rendered through Zambello's staging. Wagner does not attribute any flaws to her, but Zambello decided to explore the nature of her abduction by the giants. We thus see that she has the flaw of a frustratingly short attention span. We see her carried off (almost literally kicking and screaming) by Fasolt; but, according to the timetable of the plot, she is gone for less than a day. (She is carried off in the morning and held hostage until the giants return in the evening.) When she returns with the two giants, she seems to have become very cuddly with Fasolt. Some might call this Stockholm syndrome; but my own reading is that it is more a case of love-the-one-you're-with! Once her ransom has been paid, she is back on the best of terms with her sister and brothers.
• Fasolt's flaw is that self-gratification found on the bottom rung of the Maslow hierarchy. First, he is motivated to do back-breaking work with the promise of Freia as reward. Then, when Wotan tries to welsh on the agreement, he is easily distracted by the promise of the Nibelung gold. Finally, he is lured by the Ring itself. His life is one damned self-gratification after another.
• Fafner, on the other hand, is the "third thief" and achieves his robbery through murder; when we next encounter him, he will have become the ultimate embodiment of the curse Alberich has laid on the Ring.
• Froh and Donner also receive relatively little attention in Wagner's libretto; but Zambello has them clearly cut from the same tree as Freia. Their short attention spans, however, have less to do with amorous attachment and more to do with leaping to action even when they are not quite sure what to do. To some extent they are better captured by the text that W. H. Auden wrote for Benjamin Britten's operetta, Paul Bunyan: "Swedish born and Swedish bred,/Strong in the arm and dull in the head!"
• Loge's flaw is best developed through the pun on his name: Lügner, which is German for "liar." He is the master of deceit. However, he never feels the consequences of the deceptions he exerts; someone else (in the grand scheme of things, everyone else) always suffers from them.
• Mime's flaw is that he tries to emulate Loge's talent for deceit. Unfortunately, he never really succeeds at it. (He'll get his in Siegfried.)
• Erde: Traditionally, this is the one character that does not assume strictly human form (which is why Anna Russell calls her "a green-faced torso that pops out of the ground"). Zambello also has her come from the ground, since she is, in both name and character, the Earth itself. However, she not only emerges all the way from head to foot; but she also walks around a bit. So, if Zambello wants us to perceive her in human form, then we should also think in terms of her own flaw; and, from my point of view, that is the flaw of detachment. She delivers a critical message of warning; but she gives the impression of neither knowing nor caring about the import of her message. By the time we get to Siegfried, Wotan has finally "got the message." He seeks her out to ask her some questions, and she is downright crabby with him.

The Zambello staging of Rheingold for the San Francisco Opera is thus a cavalcade of human foibles, and this opera is only a Prologue. Those foibles provide the fertile soil from which the catastrophes of the following three operas will sprout and flourish, only resolving themselves when, as I previously explained, the cycle itself is closed.

All of this tends to be more dramatic weight than most opera singers are accustomed to bearing. Therefore, I feel it is important to credit Associate Director Christian Räth, who did most of the trench-work with the San Francisco Opera cast, with getting all fourteen singers not only in tune with Zambello's conception but also on top of it. From this point of view, the greatest credit probably ought to go to Mark Delavan's Wotan. There is such a tendency to view Wotan as the protagonist of the entire cycle that it is hard to resist endowing him with strains of nobility. Delavan recognized that this tendency did not have to be avoided by reducing him to a base comic character but by just letting his flaws reveal themselves in the playing-out of the narrative. Whether either Räth or Delavan would accept my own working hypothesis, that the only protagonist in this drama is the Ring itself, their collaboration led to a portrayal of Wotan as a paradigm of human flaws, against which we can better understand the flaws of the other characters.

Finally, the key to all understanding resides in the attention of the audience. This is the shortest of the four Ring operas, but it also has the longest sustained duration. The extent to which we are drawn into the action and follow it from event to event is all a matter of properly pacing the entire score. This is the second time I have heard Donald Runnicles conduct this score, and I continue to find his command of these long time scales absolutely first rate. No less a conductor than Georg Solti has spoken of Rheingold as placing the heaviest demands on a conductor, but Runnicles gives the illusion of dealing with those demands without any strain. I suppose that is a primary reason why I can find the musical values of a San Francisco Opera performance as stimulating as those I expect from a performance by the San Francisco Symphony.

On Understanding the Damage before Trying to Control It

Whether or not Barack Obama reads Al Jazeera English (or has an aide that tracks all of their stories that may pertain to his campaign), he seems to have gotten the message that his "AIPAC debut" was not the best first step towards furthering peace in the Middle East. For one thing Al Jazeera English ran a report of his attempt at damage control through an interview on CNN. Unfortunately, the sort of language he used did not serve his goal very well:

Well, obviously, it's going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.

That use of the adverb "obviously" (which was probably the most notorious adverb of my eight years of undergraduate and graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) hit me as particularly galling. Obvious to whom? To use the sort of convoluted language that ran through the halls of MIT, about the only thing that is obvious is Israel's refusal to recognize that negotiation over Jerusalem is an obvious part of the "Middle East peace process!" Even worse is that, as the Al Jazeera English report reminded us, the United States Government has legislation on the books that reinforces the obviousness of this non-negotiability:

The US Congress passed a law in 1995 describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel that said it should not be divided.

This report also demonstrates that, in the face of criticism from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (not known for agreeing on very much, if anything, as I pointed out on Thursday), Obama may have done little with his CNN time other than dig himself deeper into the hole he dug at AIPAC:

Obama told CNN that dividing Jerusalem "would be very difficult to execute".

"And I think that it is smart for us to - to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem, but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city."

That adjective "legitimate" is almost as damaging as "obviously." At the risk of sounding too reductive, I would posit that the entire question of peace in the Middle East hinges on establishing criteria for legitimacy that all conflicting parties can live with, if not embrace passionately.

Now I think it is important to observe again that my criticism of Obama is far from a suggestion that John McCain is doing any better. He dug a pretty deep hole in his AIPAC performance; and my guess is that he is still not aware that, from the perspective of relations between the United States and the rest of the countries in this world, damage control may be in order. Rather, my criticism of Obama emphasizes a point I made almost a year ago, when the media were just beginning to take him seriously. What may matter most in his effective performance as President will most likely be a matter of how he "provides himself with skilled advisors and knows how to draw upon the advice they provide." To illustrate my point, I offered, as an example, Dennis Ross, who acquired so much expertise in statecraft during the time in the Clinton Administration that he may well have written the most useful book on the topic. Since much of that book was informed by personal experiences in the Middle East, it may well be time for Obama to first read Ross' book and then have a serious sit-down with the man himself. If he is serious about damage control, this could well be the best way for him to show it.

VOX POPULI in Iraq?

While I have been invoking the vox populi vox dei principle ("the voice of the people is the voice of God") almost since I initiated this blog, a quick keyword search has revealed that I have applied it almost exclusively to the American populi, often focusing on the populi of cyberspace, again with an American bias. However, I have also held to the principle that vox populi is better embodied in the structures of representative government than it is in the far weaker structures of cyberspace. In this case I have tried to take a more global perspective on representative structures, most recently by writing about the Palestinian problem in terms of a conflict between de facto and de jure representatives. Today I find myself revisiting that conflict with respect to conditions in Iraq in terms of the extent to which the de jure Iraqi parliament provides de facto representation for the general Iraqi population.

The reason this question is important is that, as Robert Dreyfuss reported yesterday on his Dreyfuss Report blog for The Nation, the Iraqi parliament has executed the rather extraordinary action of communicating with our own representatives in Congress through a hand-delivered letter, signed by a majority of its members. Whether or not the letter consists of more than the single sentence that Dreyfuss documented, the fact remains that this one sentence packs quite a wallop:

The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq.

Thus, if the Bush Administration is going to continue to tell the Congress that the United States must remain in Iraq as long as the Iraqis want them there, the Congress now has a pretty strong argument for withdrawal based on the duly-elected representatives of the Iraqi people, all in accord with those principles of democracy that our President wanted to sow in Iraq.

The implications of this single sentence, as Dreyfuss explores them, are fascinating:

Without a US-Iraq accord, the presence of American troops in Iraq has no legal basis after December 31, 2008. Currently, the US forces in Iraq are there under the authority of a United Nations Security Council resolution that expires on that date. Both the United States and the UN have ruled out renewing that authority for another year.

If Washington and Baghdad fail to work out a treaty that legalizes the occupation, it is conceivable that the Bush administration, in its last few weeks, could go back to the UN, hat in hand, and beg Moscow and Beijing to authorize an extension of the UN authority. But that would be embarassing in the extreme, and both Russia and China would probably extract some major concessions in exchange for not using their veto. That would be seen as a diplomatic fiasco for the United States. Worst case: either Russia or China veto the extension, throwing the occupation of Iraq into legal limbo. In that case, the Iraqi government would have no choice but to demand an immediate and total withdrawal.

To avoid that scenario, it's entirely possible that the Bush Administration, sometime this summer, will force the hapless regime of Prime Minister Maliki to submit to a US diktat on a US-Iraq accord. Even though Maliki is under tremendous pressure from nearly all Iraqi factions not to accept a humiliating, US-imposed treaty, he might decide that he has no choice. But if Maliki signs the accord, and ignores the opposition from parliament, he would instantly lose whatever remaining credibility he has left as an Iraqi leader. That would plunge Iraq into a devastating political crisis. It would probably revive the Sunni-led resistance and inflame the Shia-led, anti-American forces grouped around Muqtada al-Sadr. Violence, and American casualties, would spike on the eve of the US election. Not a pleasant scenario.

If, on the other hand, Maliki submits the treaty -- whose content is still not known -- to the parliament, it's very likely that both Sunni and Shia nationalists and some pro-Iranian parties will overwhelmingly reject it. That will nullify the accord, forcing the United States back to the UN.

Of course one of the reasons that I have invoked the vox populi principle in the United States is that the Executive Branch of our government has made it a point to disregard flagrantly that vox, which is why yesterday I wrote about the traumatic extent to which the Administration has disconnected itself from both the populi and the social system they constitute. So, if the Administration is going to disregard the vox populi of those who elected it, it is hard to believe that they will show any greater respect to the Iraqi vox. Meanwhile, the timing could not be better. The Presidential candidates can debate about what they are going to do as of January 20, 2009; but, to invoke the metaphor raised by Colin Powell, the deadline means that this matter has to be resolved by the bulls who went into the Pottery Barn shop in the first place. It cannot be left at the doorstep of the White House for the next occupant as if it were an abandoned child.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to get my hopes up about anything these days. I have learned not to underestimate the skill of the Bush Administration in weaseling out of awkward situations. We cannot start thinking about ringing the curtain down on this opera when the fat lady has not yet even come on stage!

Obama's First Blowback?

If, as I have just suggested, the rhetorical stance of Barack Obama's Presidential campaign is (or at least can be) "about restoring connections rather than healing divisions," then one way he can make a case that this is more than hollow rhetoric will be to apply his precept to not only conditions in the United States but also the situation in the Middle East. Unfortunately, as I reported yesterday, his "AIPAC debut" seemed to have a lot more to do with shoring up votes than with either restoring connections or healing divisions. As a result he may well have had his first serious encounter with the blowback effect, which Chalmers Johnson introduced to the American public in the October 15, 2001 issue of The Nation (which is to say in the immediate wake of 9/11), about three years before his Blowback book appeared:

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people.

If Obama's intent had been to charm the "Jewish vote," then it did not take long for Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri to go on record with a quote (cited in yesterday's post) about other (hopefully unintended) consequences of his remarks. As I wrote, that quote was harvested from an Al Jazeera English report. Early this morning that report was followed up with reactions from what we recognize as the more "official" Palestinian government:

Arab leaders have reacted with anger and disbelief to an intensely pro-Israeli speech delivered by Barack Obama, the US Democratic presumptive presidential nominee.

Obama told the influential annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (Aipac): "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided."

His comments appalled Palestinians who see occupied East Jerusalem as part of a future Palestinian state.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told Al Jazeera on Thursday: "This is the worst thing to happen to us since 1967 ... he has given ammunition to extremists across the region".

"What really disppoints me is that someone like Barack Obama, who runs a campaign on the theme of change - when it comes to Aipac and what's needed to be said differently about the Palestinian state, he fails."

"I say to Obama ... please stop being more Israeli than the Israelis themselves, leave the Israelis and Palestinians alone to make decisions required for peace."

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, rejected the statement, saying: "We will not accept an independent Palestinian state without having Jerusalem as the capital.

"I believe that case is clear."

He said: "Jerusalem is part of the six points that are subjects on the negotiations' agenda.

"And the whole world knows that East Jerusalem, Arab Jerusalem and Holy Jerusalem were occupied in 1967."

Obama may thus have strengthened the connection (if not healed the division) between the de facto government in Gaza and the de jure representative government of the Palestinian people; and that is precisely the sort of blowback that Johnson had in mind in terms of the CIA interference in Iran, which ultimately led to the Iranian revolution that remains a major thorn in the side of American foreign policy. It is unclear what this will do to the potential electoral vote count, which at least some of his staffers are probably being paid to study on a day-to-day basis; but it can only damage how he is seen by those polled by Al Jazeera, who appeared to view him as the best possible candidate for healing the damaged relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Now to be fair, my guess is that the doubts that this sample space had about John McCain (who was even more aggressive in his AIPAC "performance") still remain; but all this will do is reinforce a prevailing opinion that relations with the next Administration will probably be as dismal as those with the current one. Still, it is not too late for damage control from the Obama camp; but my question is whether nor not (like the CIA in 1954 Iran) they are aware that there is damage that needs to be controlled!

The E PLURIBUS Challenge

Last night Tim Dickinson wrote a post for the National Affairs blog on the Rolling Stone Web site entitled "Obama’s E Pluribus Challenge." In his words the challenge he had in mind is that "the unity candidate now stands as the front-man of a party bitterly divided." There is no doubt that the Democratic party primaries disclosed major divisions among the its registered voters, nor is there any doubt that there was considerable bitterness in those divisions. However, by way of historical perspective, it should be worth recalling that the last time we heard words about "being a uniter, not a divider," they were coming out of the mouth of George W. Bush. This is why on Tuesday I addressed the assertion of "our natural inclinations to divide." In that last post I was less concerned about divisiveness than I was about our social system being robust enough to sustain that divisiveness. I would like to take the argument one step further and advance the proposition that the robustness of our social system is a consequence of our divisiveness. Indeed, as those of us watching John Adams were reminded, that divisiveness was already exercising itself in full force within the Continental Congress. The fact that the Declaration of Independence could be unanimously ratified in the face of such divisiveness was the first major testimony to the E Pluribus Unum principle.

That is the context that we should apply in considering the "soaring rhetoric" of Barack Obama quoted in Dickinson's post:

Alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.

The ingredient that Obama is addressing in this text is not unity of opinion, let alone conviction. Indeed, his operative adjective is not "united," but "connected;" and his theme is individuality, but the individuality of those participants addressed by John Donne's "no man is an island" Meditation. Each of Obama's examples takes Donne's more elevated point, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," and brings it into the day-to-day context of what it means to be an American citizen. Even the metaphor of the "single American family" is not really about being united, since just about every "birth family" is rife with divisions. The point is that, however much we may disagree with or even disapprove of some of our relatives, we are still connected to them.

I would argue that the greatest trauma of the current Administration is the degree to which its faith-based convictions disconnected it from the social system it was supposed to serve. It was disconnected from the Congress (that body of individuals that comes closest to representing individual Americans), institutions of journalism (particularly the ones most serious about informing those individual Americans about what their government was doing), any foreign country that did not cleave to its ideological line, and, most important of all, the very "rules of the game" of our social system, laid down by out Founding Fathers in our Constitution. If we are now "mad as hell and not going to take it any more," the primal source of our anger is that disconnectedness of our government's Executive Branch; and we should read Obama's "soaring rhetoric" as being about restoring connections rather than healing divisions.

Can those connections be restored? Listening yesterday to both the language of Senator Hillary Clinton and the efforts to analyze that language, there was little I heard about connection. However, the key message from yesterday was, "Wait until Friday." I sure hope that means that the words we hear on Friday will have some deliberation behind them, and I really hope that the deliberation leads to an appreciation of why connectedness is so important. We certainly have not heard much from Senator John McCain about restoring connections, perhaps because he either can not or will not acknowledge the current disconnected state. This gives the Democrats an easily-grasped talking point as to what differentiates them from the Republicans. If the Democratic Platform Committee recognizes this, we may yet have a campaign that will "let Obama be Obama" and, as a result, let his rhetoric continue to soar to the heights from which it has drawn so many voters to him.

Obama Faces AIPAC

When I just wrote that, as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama would have to worry about communicative actions within his party as much as those with the rest of the world, I forgot to recognize that lobbying figures very strongly where those "internal" communicative actions are concerned. I am sure that, between now and the Convention, the press will be providing us with no end of reports about Obama's relations with the lobbyists who beat a path to his Senate Office door; but today we had our first opportunity to see him in action in the face of one of Washington's most powerful lobbying organizations. Today was his day to address the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC); and, if differentiation is to be his calling card, this could have been the perfect scene for differentiating himself from John McCain, who gave his address on Monday. I say "could have" because, on the basis of the report just released by Al Jazeera English (based on their wire sources), Obama seems to have failed to "carpe the diem" (a turn of phrase, which, if I am not mistaken, I picked up from The Sopranos). While I had been hoping that "the Obama audacity" would be strong enough to confront "the confluence of mishegoss and chutzpah" that seemed to prevail during McCain's speech, my hopes seem to have been disappointed:

Barack Obama, the US Democratic presumptive presidential nominee, has pledged to safeguard Israel's security if elected president in November.

Obama also described the US bond with the Jewish state as "unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow, unbreakable for ever" and said he spoke as a "true friend" of Israel.

Hours after securing his party's nomination, Obama told the influential annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (Aipac) on Wednesday that rumours and suggestions he is unfriendly to Israel and to Jewish interests are unfounded.

Obama, the first African-American to win the presidential nomination for a major US political party, said that Jerusalem must remain the "undivided" capital of Israel in a speech to the powerful US-Israel lobby group.

"Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided," the Illinois senator said.

Obama drew a standing ovation ahead of addressing the gathering of one of US politics' most influential lobbying groups, and also addressed perceived suspicion of him in some sectors of the Jewish community.

"As president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security," Obama said.

Obama, who also said he would approve $30 billion in aid to Israel over the next 10 years, said he was not opposed to holding talks with "appropriate" Iranian leaders using "tough and principled diplomacy".

Needless to say, I was not the only one disappointed:

However Hamas reacted angrily to Obama's speech, with Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the organisation, telling AFP on Wednesday that it was "evidence of the hostility of the American administration to Arabs and Muslims".

Thus, if the world is anticipating that Obama will bring about major changes in the communicative actions that take place between the White House and the rest of the world, then he has gotten himself off to a bad start where Hamas is concerned; and Hamas is probably one of the best examples of a legitimate representative body that, as I put it, has been "intransigently shunned by the Bush Administration." Put another way, Obama's first day as presumptive nominee turned out to be a good day for business-as-usual, which means it was a bad day for audacity!

Do we Want a "Global Candidate?"

To say that the news has been flooded with reports, analyses, and transcripts of Barack Obama's speech in St. Paul last night might be called a classic case of British understatement, were it not for the fact that the one-hour news broadcast on BBC America last night was there with live coverage. Thus, it may be that the wisest place for stepping back and taking a deep breath will be the Web site for Al Jazeera English, whose coverage of St. Paul (including a transcript and a profile dwelling more on issues than on personality traits) was certainly as good as any of the "usual" sources. However, in their bid to challenge the BBC as the leading global news service, Al Jazeera commissioned a report of global opinion of the Presidential candidates; and, coincidentally, the results were published yesterday (which could well mean around the time that the polls for the final round of primaries were just opening). Here are the "bottom line" results:

In a survey of 22 countries, published on Tuesday, 80 per cent of people polled who said they were aware of the three main candidates - Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain - said they were following the election "closely".

Clinton, the former first lady and early favourite for the Democratic nomination who is under increasing pressure to concede defeat, emerged as the most recognisable candidate with 92 per cent of respondents indicating they were "aware" of her.

But it was Obama who was the preferred of all three candidates, with more than half of those who said they were aware of the candidates saying they would most like to see him as the next president

…

McCain, the all but certain Republican nominee, was both the least recognisable and least popular candidate.

Sixty-two per cent of respondents said they were aware of him, while only 15 per cent of people who recognised the three candidates said they would like to see him in the White House.

Now, to be fair, these results were not based on person-in-the-street inquiries:

Nearly 23,000 "broad elites" and "opinion leaders" were interviewed by Ipsos for the survey on behalf of Al Jazeera.

Thus, it would be a stretch to call the results representative of global opinion; but then there is so much diversity of worldviews that the very concept of "global opinion" is all but meaningless. Of greater significance is the problem, which I recently discussed, of the extent of the damage done by the Bush Administration to the reputation of the United States in the world community. This damage will only be repaired when the United States begins to improve the communicative actions through which it engages with the rest of the world, dispensing with faith-based "commandments" in favor of the recognition that opinions will always differ and differences may not always be settled but can always be negotiated. There is thus a good chance that those who will so engage with the next Administration were either part of that sample of 23,000 or were fairly represented by it. Thus, while the results may not be representative of the "world at large," they may still provide a valid representation of the sorts of people the next President is likely to encounter in the global arena (particularly those bent out of shape by the current President).

From this point of view, I feel at least a little bit encouraged by the course of events over the last couple of days. Obama has made it a point to differentiate his position when it comes to trying to open dialogs with those who have been intransigently shunned by the Bush Administration. The Al Jazeera report shows signs that Obama's position has been recognized by, at the very least, the Ipsos sample space and taken as a positive sign. However, now that Obama seems to have progressed from would-be nominee to presumptive nominee, he is also going to have to worry about communicative actions within the Democratic Party. Platform Committees are not always as big on differentiation as candidates are. Whatever powers of appeal Obama has exercised on both the electorate and the superdelegates will now have to be exercised on the general machinery of the Democratic Party to make sure that their "political perspective" does not undermine the strongest assets he may bring to meeting the challenges of the many crises that now face the United States, both domestically and globally. If those assets are undermined, then it will not take much for the election of 2008 to devolve into the fiasco of 2004; and both Americans and the world will see that, in the face of so many crises, our political system can do little more than dither.

Two Mozart Violin Sonatas

This afternoon's pre-season preview of the Midsummer Mozart Festival at the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco differed from the first preview concert in just about every possible way. While the first concert featured "chamber quartets" (flute-strings and piano-strings) of the "Viennese" Mozart (the K. 478 G minor piano quartet and an arrangement of selections from the K. 629 opera, Die Zauberflöte), today's concert presented two sonatas for piano and violin from the same year (1778) but different cities (K. 301 from Mannheim and K. 304 from Paris). Note the order of the instruments: It is taken from Elizabeth C. Moore's classification of Köchel's catalog according to (presumably) her own system of categories, which is one of the Appendices in Louis Biancolli's Mozart Handbook. The relevant portion of the taxonomy for these works is:

I—INSTRUMENTAL

C—CHAMBER MUSIC

1. Duo Sonatas for Piano and Violin

At the very least this indicates that the piano is never "mere accompaniment;" and this "equality of resources" was definitely well honored by violinist Robin Hansen (concert master of the Midsummer Mozart Festival Orchestra) and pianist Miles Graber, who performed in the piano quartet at the first preview concert. Also, if consecutive Köchel numbers indicate anything, it would appear that each of these sonatas is part of a set of three (301-302-303 and 304-305-306, respectively). More interesting, however, is the extent to which K. 301 and K. 304 differ as much as their respective cities (without necessarily reflecting either of them). Probably the only thing they have in common is that each is in two movements.

K. 301 is in G major; and the two movements are marked Allegro con spirito and Allegro, respectively. The first movement definitely involves a spirited give-and-take between piano and violin, with some relatively clever approaches to sharing material but a generally rhetorical familiarity to the material itself. In his remarks to the audience, George Cleve, director of the Midsummer Mozart Festival, described the second movement as a Ländler; and, to my ears, it seemed to occupy a middle ground between folk dance and rondo without being particularly uncomfortable in either setting. There is an affability to this music that may (or may not) have something to do with Mozart's first contact with the four daughters of Fridolin Weber (one of whom, Constanze, he married after having been rejected by her sister, Aloysia).

The most important contrasting element in K. 304 is that it is in E minor. As Cleve pointed out, Mozart tended to be at his most adventurous in the minor key (as he was in the K. 478 piano quartet). Cleve also observed that, if we did not know better, we might mistake this sonata for the work of Franz Schubert; and this is particularly true of the Tempo di menuetto, which is anything but a danceable minuet. Even the Trio of this movement, which moves to major, has an element of moody darkness that would make dancing feel like frivolous excess. The first movement, on the other hand, explores areas of light and dark frequently by choice of violin string, introducing material in the shadows of the G string and then bringing them to light with the higher strings. All of this coloration is then supported by both harmonic and contrapuntal coloration from the piano; and, as Cleve suggested, a prospective anticipation of Schubert can be heard in both of these movements. However, if we restrict our attention to Mozart's present, so to speak, his time in Paris appears to have been far less pleasant than Mannheim, which he had just departed; so his urge to experiment may have reflected the combined influences of boredom and the memory of Aloysia Weber.

Note that, while Mozart was in his early twenties, neither of these sonatas reflects that showy "inner twenty-year old," about whom I find myself writing so frequently. Both sonatas show considerable skill; but neither is a show-off piece. This may well be due to the intimacy of the chamber setting, in which Mozart is not trying to dazzle a large audience. These works thus provide us with an excellent window on the craftsman, rather than the performer; and their coupling made for an informative exposure to the diversity of Mozart's approaches to his craft.

The Chutzpah of a PILPUL

The noun chutzpah showed up rather frequently in yesterday's post about this week's AIPAC meeting, but never in the capacity of the Chutzpah of the Week award. As usual, I am reluctant to bestow this award too early in the week (particularly when it is the week of an AIPAC meeting); but I see that, the last time I decided to bestow the award on the Israeli government, it was on a Monday! So it seems as if I am being a bit more leisurely about the second such award, and let me assure readers that this award has absolutely nothing to do with mishegoss! Rather, it involves an "ongoing chutzpah," which has been highlighted by a specific event; and, as is so often the case, I have Al Jazeera English to thank for reporting that event:

The Israeli government has announced the construction of about 900 new homes in East Jerusalem amid international criticism against its policy on settlement expansion.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, on Sunday praised the plan to build new homes.

The plan evisages building 763 housing units in Pisgat Zeev and 121 housing units in Har Homa settlement in Jabal Abu Ghaneim.

In this case, however, the chutzpah involves not just the continuation of settlement development but the justification for this particular act:

Meir Shitreet, the Israeli interior minister, defended the new settlement expansion by citing Biblical claims.

"Har Homa is part of Jerusalem. It's not a settlement. And sometimes people regularly forget Jerusalem is our capital, not since Camp David, but since King David, so that claims that they cannot build in Jerusalem is totally nonsense. No one in the government of Israel ever stop building in Jerusalem."

I realized that Shitreet had provided me with an excellent opportunity to again haul out my copy of Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish for another lesson. In this case the noun is pilpul, and it is actually Hebrew. The strict translation is "debate." However, Rosten offers a wonderful colloquial paraphrase that excellently captures the underlying connotation:

Any hair-splitting or logic-chopping that leaves the main boulevard of a problem to bog down in the side streets.

This is a case where Rosten's metaphor could not have been more appropriate to the situation, but it also reminds all of us just how good Israel has been at using the pilpul to bog down just about every effort to establish peace in the Middle East. Thus, whatever AIPAC may pull out of their proceedings this week, my guess is that the Israeli government will still prevail with its second Chutzpah of the Week award.

CLINTONDÄMMERUNG?

The last primary polls have barely opened; but the "Hillary death watch" seems to be well under way. Huffington Post political editor Thomas B. Edsall may have kicked things off in the blogosphere yesterday afternoon with a post that began:

Hillary Clinton has summoned top donors and backers to attend her New York speech tomorrow night in an unusual move that is being widely interpreted to mean she plans to soon suspend her campaign and endorse Barack Obama - not tomorrow night but within a day or two.

As of my writing this sentence, that post has amassed 3264 comments. On the other hand the Truthdig article that links to this post has not yet attracted a dozen comments, but I have found that far less mud tends to get slung over at Truthdig. So I have been more interested in their lower level of activity, which seems to exhibit a somewhat higher level of reflection.

This morning I was most struck by the latest comment submitted by "cyrena," who described Clinton's campaign as "a campaign of terror, the kind that results from any orchestrated instability or chaos visited upon a population or an individual…that same terror of not knowing what you will be greeted with when you get home, or to wherever it is that you’re going." Of course there is nothing particularly new about "a campaign of terror." It has been stock-in-trade in our political system for quite some time. We can still remember what the Republicans did with Willie Horton, and I am sure we can find plenty of examples as we dig further back in history. Furthermore, this is far from an American phenomenon. Unless I am mistaken, it was a pre-Thatcher Conservative Party in the UK that ran on the slogan, "If you want a [N-word] for a neighbour, vote Labour!"

In terms of our own historical origins, I was glad to see that one of the talks scheduled on Book TV (still the best alternative to "mainstream media news") this past weekend was given by Edward Larson on his book A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign. This was a useful historical reminder, particularly since the HBO John Adams series tended to keep itself above the fray of all that tumult, probably because Adams himself had tried to do the same. However, this election turned out to be modest compared to the one in 1824, which had five candidates (as opposed to the four in 1800). In this election no candidate had a majority of either electoral or popular votes; and Andrew Jackson, who had the plurality, was beaten through some horse-trading between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay (putting an end to what historians now call the "Era of Good Feelings")!

Personally, I do not think that "good feelings" ever last very long. The real lesson of history is that the American electorate (not to mention those in the United Kingdom or, for that matter, Nepal) is a contentious lot; and we should leave the uniting-not-dividing cant to those who choose faith to shield them from not just terror but reality itself. After all, even the "characters" in Plato's dialogs had some pretty contentious personalities. As I have previously written, what matters is not that our social system unites us but that it is robust or resilient enough to sustain our natural inclinations to divide.

Thus, while I agree that we can't "expect reason and sanity to prevail," which seems to be the "consummation devoutly to be wished" in cyrena's comment, we should still be able to expect the "social system as a whole" to cohere (unlike the "center" of Yeats' "second coming"). From that point of view, faith-based thinking has probably been the greatest threat to our resilience; and it may well be the threat of greatest concern to all sectors of the rest of the world, regardless of political or economic status. Thus, I take some comfort in the rejection of faith-based positions that have come from both Democrats and Republicans. For what it is worth, I also am inclined to see Obama as the best guarantor for the resilience of our social system; but who knows if I shall still feel this way at the end of the two Conventions?

Audacity Confronts MISHEGOSS

As is the case with many Yiddish nouns, the denotation of mishegoss rarely does justice to its connotation. The denotation (relying, as usual, on The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten) is "insanity" or "madness;" but one does not invoke this noun (or its adjectival form, meshugge) in the interests of clinically certifiable conditions. The connotation has more to do with that colloquial rhetorical question, "Are you out of your mind?" For example, the knee-jerk response of declaring the slightest hint of disagreement with Israeli policy (particularly a policy supported by AIPAC) as anti-Semitic should, by all rights, count as textbook mishegoss; but of course, to continue the Yiddish lesson, to describe such behavior as mishegoss in a public forum (even one as modest as this blog) would probably be characterized as chutzpah by AIPAC lobbying interests. Needless to say, it takes an organization like AIPAC to inspire the confluence of mishegoss and chutzpah, particularly on a day like today, when Senator John McCain addressed their annual convention in Washington. Of course, being a lobbying organization, AIPAC has made it a point to invite the two Democratic contenders for the White House, as well as McCain.

Last year they invited Nancy Pelosi, and she had the chutzpah to deliver some straight talk about Iraq (straighter than some of her more recent talk), which earned her "catcalls and boos," as was reported in The Hill. My guess is that Senator Hillary Clinton is not going to court a similar response, particularly in light of some of her past AIPAC involvements. So it will be up to that meshuggener Senator Barack Obama and the chutzpah of his meshugge position on meeting with the government of Iran, particularly with that other meshuggener, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose latest proclamation was reported for Reuters by Hossein Jaseb and Fredrik Dahl:

Iran's president said on Monday Israel would soon disappear off the map and that the "satanic power" of the United States faced destruction, in his latest verbal attack on the Islamic Republic's arch-enemies.

Is the Obama audacity strong enough to stand up to accusations of mishegoss? I sure hope that it is and that he realizes that, even where AIPAC is involved, throwing his lot in with McCain and Clinton could be a perilous decision. However, disappointing she may have been in other matters, Pelosi is the right role model. Besides, McCain probably can't even pronounce mishegoss, let alone spell it in the proper alphabet!

Evils of Disregard and Denial

Having just seen the documentary Nanking, produced under the auspices of HBO Documentary Films and both written and directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, I find it hard to avoid returning to my reflections on Hannah Arendt, her concept of the "banality of evil," and Tony Judt's reflection on that concept. Here, again, is Judt's central point:

But if we wish to grasp the true significance of evil—what Hannah Arendt intended by calling it "banal"—then we must remember that what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews [in the Holocaust] is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little.

Perhaps the most important point made by this documentary is that the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during the occupation of Nanking did not matter "so little" but, in fact, mattered a great deal to the Japanese authorities. One might even say that the degree to which these acts mattered increased as one got further from Nanking and closer to Tokyo; but the conclusion from the Guttentag-Sturman script is that just about every step along the chain of command went to great lengths to make sure that eyewitness accounts did not leak out of Nanking while, at the same time, not allowing any harm to come to any of the foreigners who remained after a mass evacuation prior to the entry of the Japanese (whose documents are read by talking-head actors in the film). Nevertheless, both film footage and the foreign eyewitnesses themselves did eventually leave Nanking and still had to contend with intransigent denial from both "official" and "unofficial" Japanese.

I also have a greater appreciation of why so much controversy now surrounds the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. As the Wikipedia entry explains, this controversy emerged from "the enshrinement of the 14 Class-A war criminals in 1978." Those criminals included several key figures involved with the Nanking Massacre:

Based on evidence of mass atrocities, General Iwane Matsui was tried by the Tokyo tribunal for "crimes against humanity". At trial he went out of his way to protect Prince Asaka by shifting blame to lower ranking division commanders. Matsui was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in 1948. Generals Hisao Tani and Rensuke Isogai were sentenced to death by the Nanking tribunal.

Under the pact concluded between General MacArthur and Hirohito, the Emperor himself and all the members of the imperial family were not prosecuted. Prince Asaka, who was the ranking officer in the city at the height of the atrocities, made only a deposition to the International Prosecution Section of the Tokyo tribunal on 1 May 1946. Asaka denied any massacre of Chinese and claimed never to have received complaints about the conduct of his troops.^[32] Prince Kan'in, who was chief of staff of the Army during the massacre, had died before the end of the war, in May 1945.

I do not wish to argue with Judt over whether denial or disregard is the greater evil. What may be more important is that the denial continues, since Japanese filmmaker Satoru Mizushima has made a documentary of his own, The Truth about Nanjing, to refute the Guttentag-Sturman documentary. Ultimately, it probably comes down to quibbling over whether a sin involves commission (denial) or omission (disregard), which often does little than distract from the underlying proposition that, no matter how you cut it, it is still a sin.

The Need for Balance

The "Summer Madness!" season of the San Francisco Opera opens this week with the first two performances of the new ("American") staging of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold on Tuesday and Friday evenings, respectively. I plan to be there on Friday evening, due to my own scheduling constraints, which can allow for the fact that I have no obligation to provide "opening night coverage." (Given some of the past San Francisco Chronicle reviews I have seen of opening nights, and not just those at the San Francisco Opera, I take my lack of obligation to be a good thing.) In light of what I wrote yesterday, I should also observe that my "retreat to the suburbs" had more to do with finding complements to Wagner (as well as George Frideric Handel and Gaetano Donizetti), rather than alternatives. Indeed, if Wagner tried to reform nineteenth-century thinking about opera through his tract, Oper und Drama, it would be fair to say that Benjamin Britten had a similar impact in the twentieth-century, although, as I tried to demonstrate yesterday, he could achieve this far more effectively through his personal practices (including his selection of librettists) than through didactic and/or polemic prose.

However, for those who prefer the more established setting of the Civic Center, the San Francisco Symphony will also be providing an interesting complement to nineteenth-century Wagnerian thinking, which, with the United States premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Asteroids suite, will venture into the twenty-first century. All of the remaining composers are from the twentieth-century: Francis Poulenc ("Figure humaine"), Serge Prokofiev (his first violin concerto), and Béla Bartók (the suite he prepared for his Miraculous Mandarin pantomime). The last of these offerings is likely to provide the most interesting complement to Das Rheingold, even if it is not an opera. (The description of The Miraculous Mandarin as a "pantomime," by the way, comes from Bartók's own correspondence, or at least the English translation provided in Halsey Stevens' The Life and Music of Béla Bartók.) Like Wagner, Bartók had no trouble venturing into untested waters for his dramatic efforts; and, like Wagner, he was no stranger to controversy. Actually, this work was not performed in his native Hungary until after his death, since it was officially banned in Budapest in 1931 after its dress rehearsal. The work had previously been staged in both Prague and Cologne, but it also ran into proscription in the latter city.

It is easy to appreciate why "officials" were offended by both the narrative and the execution of the pantomime. The scene is about as far from the world of Das Rheingold as one could imagine. Here is how Stevens describes it:

The story, lurid and fantastic, was originally set in a brothel room, to which a wanton entices men whom her accomplices beat and rob. In its various productions (and near-productions) the scene has been changed—to a dark, gas-lit street, to a ravine in a remote mountain fastness—but its locale is unimportant except as it affect the décor.

Actually, to be fair, there is one interesting characteristic shared by the two narratives, which is that Fricka observes that the daughters of the Rhine have a pretty wanton reputation of their own, which has drawn many mortal men to a watery death; presumably this is her way of rationalizing Wotan's plan to steal the Ring from Alberich, in spite of her allegiance to laws and contracts, not to mention her craving the Ring as the ultimate piece of jewelry. Perhaps one could also argue that The Miraculous Mandarin is another take on the primary narrative of the entire Wagnerian cycle, which is that he who goes looking for trouble is sure to find it. Nevertheless, there is no double that Bartók raised the bar set in the nineteenth century when it comes to being "lurid and fantastic;" and, while his suite does not cover every gory detail of the plot, it certainly gives the listener a good sense of both the sexual and the physical violence. Thus, from just about any point of view, this is likely to be an excellent week to experience how the relationship between music and drama has developed over the last 132 years (starting the clock, in this case, from the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth)!