Still Chutzpah

The cat is now out of the bag. As Nick Mulvenney reported for Reuters last night, the International Olympic Committee knew about China's intention to reserve the right to block access to certain Internet sites all along:

"I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on website access during Games time," IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said, referring to Beijing's Olympic organizers.

"I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related," he said.

So the Chinese "art" of negotiation seems to have extended beyond "making the International Olympic Committee look like complete idiots" to making them look like calculating liars. Is this what Jacques Rogge, IOC head, had in mind by "silent diplomacy?" Whatever the answer to that rhetorical question may be, China has still earned with Chutzpah of the Week award, perhaps scoring bonus points for leaving the IOC with egg on its face.

Meanwhile, Mure Dickie has provided a follow-up report for the Financial Times:

The head of the International Olympic Committee’s press commission on Thursday suggested its president Jacques Rogge might have acquiesced to Chinese plans to censor the media’s internet access during the Beijing games reports AP in Beijing.

”I would be surprised if someone made a change without at least informing” Mr Rogge, Kevan Gosper said. “But I really do not know the detail.” Mr Rogge on Thursday declined to comment in Beijing.

This leaves me wishing that he had someone like Howard Baker investigating this whole question of Internet access: What did which members of the IOC know and when did they know it?

Olympic Chutzpah

You have to hand it to the "new China." Whether it involves trade, environmental conditions, or even diplomacy, they have raised the bar on the art of promise-anything-deliver-nothing; and now they seem to be extending that art to include making the International Olympic Committee look like complete idiots. Mure Dickie filed this report from Beijing for the Financial Times in rather more polite language:

China is to maintain its censorship of overseas websites even for journalists covering the Beijing Olympics, undermining earlier claims by the International Olympic Committee that international media would enjoy unfettered internet access during the Games.

Beijing routinely blocks access to thousands of overseas websites considered politically or socially suspect as part of a sprawling and secretive internet censorship system. However, the government had been widely expected to offer unfiltered internet access to the more than 20,000 journalists covering the Games, which open on August 8.

Jacques Rogge, IOC head, this month cited free internet access as an achievement of his "silent diplomacy" with Chinese officials.

“For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the internet,” Mr Rogge said in an interview with AFP.

However, the Beijing Games organising committee (Bocog) insisted on Wednesday that it had never promised full freedom. “During Games-time we will provide sufficient and convenient internet access,” Sun Weide, Bocog spokesman, said.

Bocog was already providing “sufficient” access, Mr Sun said, even though journalists have complained about blocks on overseas websites such as that of Amnesty International, a human rights group that this week issued a report on preparations for the Games.

There is an award-winning quality to the way in which China has managed to maintain its own characteristic brand of business-as-usual, while giving the appearance of honoring all the commitments that the IOC felt would be in the best global interests of an Olympic gathering. The best I can manage, of course, is a Chutzpah of the Week award. Given the emphasis of "face" in the Chinese approach to conduct and given that China has now pretty much demolished any sense of "face" that the IOC brought to arranging the Games that will shortly begin, I would say that such demolition is as good an instance of chutzpah as we are likely to find. So, whatever medals its athletes should win, China itself can now enjoy a Chutzpah of the Week award as part of the Olympic celebrations!

Memory, Reminders, and Wisdom

Even researchers confront "senior moments" as they get older. So perhaps Stefanie Olsen's latest Digital Media post on the CNET News.com Web site is a reflection of the "graying" of IBM Research:

For the past two years, IBM researchers have been developing technology to help people recall events, names of new acquaintances, and details of a conversation in their context with the use of cell phone and computer. On Tuesday, IBM Research Labs plans to publicize an early version of its personal-assistant software, called "Pensieve," after the fictional memory bank described in Harry Potter books. IBM posted a video on YouTube.

Not available publicly yet, the software could feasibly be used with any mobile smart phone. The technology relies on people keeping track of what's important to them by using the phone to snap photos, create text documents, or record audio. When the phone is synced to a computer via a Pensieve-enabled dock, the software takes over. It collates files by their tagged GPS location and time, among other rules, and creates associations between them.

"As it processes the information, it's building an associative network of people and places and events," said Laura Haas, director of computer science at the IBM Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

For example, if a person takes a photo of an event poster, the software's optical character recognition technology would take down the details of the event and make a calendar entry. Or if a person takes a photo of someone new at a business workshop, followed by a picture of his or her business card, Pensieve might create an address book entry that's linked to the photo and notes taken at the workshop. Later, when the person tries to remember the name of new acquaintance, he or she could use Pensieve's search engine to recall data from the workshop.

"If I'm trying to remember the name of this interesting person, maybe all I remember is that I met them at Google, I would search for 'person at Google' and it would show my contacts from there and start jogging my memory," Haas said.

I have no idea whether or not Olsen is up on her Plato; but, at the very least, it looks like those IBM researchers forgot about what that old Greek wrote in his "Phaedrus" dialogue (as translated into English by R. Hackforth):

The story is that in the region of Naucratis in Egypt there dwelt one of the old gods of the country, the god to whom the bird called Ibis is sacred, his own name being Theuth. He it was that invented number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing. Now the kind of the whole country at that time was Thamus, who dwelt in the great city of Upper Egypt which the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes, while Thamus they call Ammon. To him came Theuth, and revealed his arts, saying that they ought to be passed on to the Egyptians in general. Thamus asked what was the use of them all, and when Theuth explained, he condemned what he thought the bad points and praised what he thought the good. On each art, we are told, Thamus had plenty of views both for and against; it would take too long to give them in detail. But when it came to writing Theuth said, ‘Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.’ But the king answered and said, ‘O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If me learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.’

This is not to argue that a technology for "reminder" is entirely a bad thing; but, from the point of view of those of us who draw heavily upon our memories, it may be a displaced priority, whose most dangerous flaw is the extent to which it can escalate our reliance "on that which is written" to a richer body of captured digitized content.

As I have argued in many previous contexts, this is yet another example of what happens when technologists jump with both feet into noun-based thinking when they should be thinking about the verbs. The biological evidence now is pretty strong on the proposition that human memory is not some vast filing cabinet (or, in more modern language, database). Rather, it is an ongoing process; and Gerald Edelman has even tried to make this more specific by concentrating on the process of recategorizing our perceptions. Therein lies the problem: Capture and retrieval have very little to do with any dynamic process of recategorization; and, indeed, almost no work has been done on trying to investigate Edelman's conjecture through digital models. Instead, the digerati jump on their horses and ride off madly in all directions that take them away from any serious thinking based on ongoing processes or, to draw upon a related school of thought, Israel Rosenfield's verb-based concept of "invention" as a process of memory.

Now I have no difficulty owning up to my own problems with "senior moments." I am even willing to confess that, when I am on my own, I often rely on my own mechanisms for "reminder," many of which involve the search engines available through my computer. However, the "senior moments" that matter most tend to be those that take place when I am away from my computer; and, at such times, I have discovered that the best way to deal with them is through conversation. I confess to my loss and start talking about what I am trying to recover; and, more often than not, some Rosenfield-like "invention" emerges from that conversation and comes to my rescue. At the very least I find this far more socially acceptable than excusing myself while I pull out a mobile tether that has been designed to achieve the same effect more efficiently! I would further argue that, because my "old-fashioned" technique keeps me engaged in conversation, it keeps that process of memory (whatever it may be) properly lubricated and frees me from excessive reliance "on that which is written."

The Rich are NOT Different (at least not this time)!

First of all, rather than falling into the trap of citing a conversation between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway that never took place, let me offer an account provided by a letter to The New York Times in 1988 (back when the Times was a much better newspaper):

In 1926 Fitzgerald published one of his finest stories, ''The Rich Boy,'' whose narrator begins it with the words ''Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.''

Ten years later, at lunch with his and Fitzgerald's editor, Max Perkins, and the critic Mary Colum, Hemingway said, ''I am getting to know the rich.'' To this Colum replied, ''The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.'' (A. Scott Berg reports this in ''Max Perkins, Editor of Genius.'') Hemingway, who knew a good put-down when he heard one and also the fictional uses to which it could be put, promptly recycled Colum's remark in one of his best stories, with a revealing alteration: he replaced himself with Fitzgerald as the one put down. The central character in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro'' remembers ''poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [ the rich ] and how he had started a story once that began, 'The very rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Scott, yes, they have more money.''

Well, this may have been the case during the Roaring Twenties and even during the Great Depression; but, according to a report by Francesco Guerrera and Saskia Scholtes for the Financial Times, "it ain't necessarily so" today:

The US financial crisis is spreading from subprime borrowers to wealthier consumers, with evidence mounting that more affluent people are failing to pay their mortgages and credit card balances.

Growing concerns over the financial health of richer borrowers are prompting banks and card issuers to tighten lending practices in moves that could futher dampen consumer confidence and spending more.

In other words, while the rich may think they are rich enough to keep spending in the manner to which they have become accustomed, when it comes to paying the bills, they are no better than the rest of us. Indeed, those who are overextended in their real estate investments may find that selling some of that property to pay the bills will not work any better for them than it will for all those middle-class families faced with the prospect of selling their current (and only) house at a painful loss. Perhaps this economic crisis will turn out to be a great equalizer, one in which the rich have as much trouble paying bills and putting food on the table as everyone else. Realistically, this is unlikely to be the case; but it would still be nice to dream for a minute or two that the tide may be turning in the War Against the Poor!

Find That Song!

I have now encountered my first serious discontent with the Brilliant Classics' collection of the complete works of Johannes Brahms; and, as far as I am concerned, it is much more serious than a quibble over the usage of the phrase "a cappella." It is the matter of the thirteen discs labeled "Songs & Duets" on the box. It is not the arbitrary combining of songs and duets that provokes me as much as the failure to honor any sense of the order in which these works were composed. It is bad enough that there is no attempt to order all of these works by their respective opus numbers; but, even worse, the songs collected under a single opus number are rarely grouped together on the same disc.

The reason for this is that the discs are ordered according to who is performing on them. Thus, all the songs on Volume 1 are sung by the tenor Christian Elsner. On Volume 2 Elsner is joined by soprano Simone Nold, and this disc offers a combination of songs and duets. Volume 3 then gives us performances by alto Ingeborg Danz (including the two Opus 91 songs with viola accompaniment). Indeed, it was only by accident that I realized that the songs I knew best were on this particular disc, not only Opus 91 but also "Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer" (Opus 105, Number 2, which draws upon the same theme as the cello solo for the second piano concerto) and the most sung of all Brahms songs, the "Wiegenlied" (Opus 49, Number 4).

Thus, when it comes to finding a specific composition, the situation is far more problematic than it was in the Brilliant Bach Collection. In that package the listing on the box gave the BWV numbers of the cantatas on each disc. There was no order to the numbers, but at least it was easy to skim for the number you wanted. There is no room to do this on the Brahms box; nor is it really possible to do so, since the songs are not grouped by opus number. In this case, if there is a specific work you want to hear, then you have little choice other than to consult the data CD, preferably with a tool that can search its contents. I might be willing to argue that the inconvenience is a fair price to pay for the bargain price; but, since most of what I have had to say about Brilliant has been generally positive, I figured it would make sense to point out this particular inconvenience out of a sense of fairness!

Stay Drowsy

If Anna Russell is best known for her hilarious (but surprisingly accurate) routine in which she analyzes the entirety of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in less than half an hour, then her second-best routine would have to be "How to Write your own Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta." She concocted this one at a time when practically every American city had some group along the spectrum between professional and amateur mounting a Savoyard production, making it, as she put it, "a pity that there weren't a few more." To deal with this lack of material, she tapped into the basic formula behind the best-known G&S creations, gave it a new setting ("the New York upper crust") and proceeded to make up a whole set of new songs to go with a new plot, singing all of them, regardless of voice range and including the obligatory madrigal ("You'll have to excuse me. My quartet singing is not what it used to be.") … all in less than fifteen minutes! As was the case with her Wagner analysis, this became a great hit for anyone who knew the material and a meaningless antic for anyone else.

These days it feels as if the Broadway musical extravaganzas in the years leading up to the Great Depression (and Hollywood's effort to keep carrying that torch after the Depression hit) have displaced Gilbert and Sullivan as a prime object of nostalgia. One would have thought that, once Mel Brooks broke the mold with Springtime for Hitler (in the original film version of The Producers), audiences would have become too rattled for such parodic humor; but this spirit keeps going with the robust energy of that well-known pink bunny. For those who prefer not to go over the top with Brooks, The Boy Friend remains an old reliable source for revival, although I have my own fond memories for a revival I saw of Dames at Sea during my time in the New York vicinity. Back in those days a director like Tommy Tune could take the ridiculous material of A Day in Hollywood; A Night in the Ukraine and turn it into a sublime escape from reality, exactly in the spirit of the source material being lampooned.

Nevertheless, as was the case with Russell's routines, these are products best appreciated by those with a sharp sense of the details of that source material. In other words these are entertainments about "the business" best appreciated by those closest to, if not in, "the business." As the background piece that Doug Sturdivant provided for Playbill on April 6, 2006 explains, The Drowsy Chaperone first emerged as such an entertainment:

The Drowsy Chaperone, which bows (or is it curtsies?) May 1 directly on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre, first saw the bleary light of day in the back room of a Toronto club called The Rivoli as the centerpiece entertainment of a bachelor party - a "stag," as Canadians call it.

Back then - "then" was August 9, 1998, for any showbiz buffs out there - it was a faux 40-minute musical created, just for the fun of it, for the happy couple: Bob Martin and Janet Van De Graaff. It was the work of several friends from the groom's side of the aisle. Among them, lyricist Lisa Lambert and book writer Don McKellar were buds since high school, and composer Greg Morrison came from a TV series Martin wrote called "Slings and Arrows."

That back-room party was probably a real hoot. If the production took more time than it took for Russell to do her number on Wagner, I suspect there were enough libations to make the duration more than endurable. This is the stuff of which did-you-hear-about stories are made; and, now that I have had a chance to see what emerged while it is on tour in San Francisco, I kind of wish that it had remained the subject of a you-had-to-be-there account.

The problem is that, when you take a mountain of details appreciated by a select few and try to make them palatable to the many who have to buy tickets to keep the production afloat, much (usually including the best bits) of the humor goes down the drain. The homage is still there, and there are still plenty of jokes that are good for a genuine belly laugh. However, the overall effect is leaden when it should be light; and any sense of love (even illusory) for the source material, without which the ridiculous cannot rise to the sublime, is depressingly absent.

To add insult to this injury, the original creators decided to frame their product in a run-down Manhattan apartment whose resident (the "Man in Chair") greets the audience with, "I hate theater." He then proceeds to play for the audience his treasured vinyl of the "original cast" (Did he really say "soundtrack" when I heard him last night?) recording of The Drowsy Chaperone, providing us with a running commentary (too much like Russell's "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts") as the performers come (almost literally) out of the woodwork and into his living room. Needless to say, this is no longer a 40-minute romp; and it has the chutzpah to keep us in our seats when the "original show" has its intermission. This is not to suggest that I spent much of my time in the Orpheum Theatre seeing if the light was good enough to check my watch (I knew the formula well enough to know what was going to unfold before the final curtain) but just to observe that the final product was so overloaded in the interest of audience appeal that it lacked any sense of what a Duck's Breath Mystery Theater routine used to call pace (as in, "We have got to get this production of Music Man to run less than nine hours!").

The Man in Chair is right, of course. When it comes to the current fare on Broadway (even without road productions), things are a far cry from what they used to be. Unfortunately, The Drowsy Chaperone plunks this poor grieving soul right in the middle of the very sort of stuff that now drives him to so much grief.

Massive Mozart

It is rare to encounter a full evening of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that consists of only two works, but that is what the Midsummer Mozart Festival offered for their second program at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco last night. The intermission was preceded by the K. 361 serenade in B flat Major and followed by the K. 491 C minor piano concerto. These works are separated by only five years, and K. 361 comes at the beginning of Mozart's move to Vienna in 1781. Thus they originate from the same cultural environment, so to speak. However, the only other feature they share is how they reflect Mozart's approach to working with longer time scales.

K. 361 is scored for a rather unconventional collection of solo voices. Double reeds are represented by two oboes and two bassoons. Single reeds are represented by two clarinets and two basset horns. Brass are represented by four horns, two in F and two in B flat, covering a broader range of pitches than usual. Finally, there is a solo string bass, which has a few witty melodic comments that raise it above the usual continuo work. Thus, to revisit the language of Jos van der Zanden cited last week, Mozart is very much back in his playground for "exploring a variety of timbres;" and the qualities of those timbres contribute much (if not most) to the listening experience.

The temporal scale of the work has a lot to do with the number of movements (seven). These include two menuetto movements, two adagio movements (the second a "Romance" with an allegretto middle section), and andante theme with six variations, all framed by two energetic molto allegro movements (the opening preceded by a largo introduction). I think it would be fair to say that Mozart resorted to so many movements for the opportunity to experiment with how these thirteen voices could be deployed in different combinations; so, while the forms themselves may feel a bit repetitive, the sounds themselves never fail to be anything other than fresh and original.

We rarely encounter situations in which mere words can do justice to the richness of purely sonic qualities of a listening experience; but, in the case of the first adagio, we have a descriptive text that provides a far better than usual account of such an experience. The author is Peter Shaffer; and the source (as many either know or can guess) is the text for his play (as opposed to screenplay) Amadeus. The speaker is Antonio Salieri, who has already had two impressions of the Mozart who had just arrived in Vienna. The first impression, in the presence of Emperor Joseph II, was one of a show-off brat. The second is one of his sexual excesses with his wife when they thought they were alone in the library of one of the palaces of lesser royalty. That palace is the site for a performance of the serenade, which became Salieri's first serious listening experience:

I heard it through the door—some serenade—at first only vaguely, too horrified to attend. But presently the sound insisted—a solemn Adagio in E flat.

It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers—bassoons and basset horns—like a rusty squeezebox. It would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it instead a sort of serenity. And then suddenly, high above it, sounded a single not on the oboe.

It hung there unwavering, piercing me through, till breath could hold it no longer, and a clarinet withdrew it out of me, and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight it had me trembling. The light flickered in the room. My eyes clouded! The squeezebox groaned louder, and over it the higher instruments wailed and warbled, throwing lines of sound around me—long lines of pain around and through me. Ah, the pain! Pain as I had never known it. I called up to my sharp old God, "What is this? … What?!" But the squeezebox went on and on, and the pain cut deeper into my shaking head, until suddenly I was running—dashing through the side door, stumbling downstairs into the street, into the cold night, gasping for life. "What?! What is this? Tell me, Signore! What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable, yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it Your need? Can it be Yours? …"

Dimly the music sounded from the salon above. Dimly the stars shone on the empty street. I was suddenly frightened. It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child!

Of course not every movement has the profound quality of this adagio, but each movement does speak with its own unique approach to combining the voices of the ensemble. This makes the roughly fifty-minute duration of the serenade one of the most stimulating listening experiences that the entire repertoire of "serious music" affords.

Fortunately, conductor George Cleve has a good sense for how such music is more about that listening experience than about anything else. Yes, he knew how to pace the fifty minutes without letting any individual episode feel like a tax on our time; but, far more importantly, he presided over an impeccable blending of those thirteen solo voices. Thus, whatever we might have known (or not known) about Mozart, the forms of music found in a serenade, or even the "musical scene" in 1781 Vienna, Cleve and his ensemble delivered a performance that was "all about the sound;" and it is performances like those that make San Francisco such a good city for listening to Mozart.

The C minor piano concerto, on the other hand, takes a different approach to composition on a larger temporal scale. As the notes in the program book put it:

When Mozart writes in a minor key, pay attention! Something special is going to happen.

Actually, it is not just what "is going to happen;" it is also a matter of the context that Mozart would bring to minor-key composition. The heart of that context consists of the minor-key works composed by Joseph Haydn between 1765 and 1775. My old Musical Heritage Society liner notes (by Karl Geiringer) called this Haydn's Sturm und Drang period, although, as H. C. Robbins Landon observes in his monumental (five-volume) Haydn: Chronicle and Works, these dates really do not align very well with the rise of Strum und Drang in German literature. Robbins Landon prefers to call this period one of "Crisis Years" (the title of Chapter Four in Volume II), where the musical crisis involved an attempt to break from "business as usual" in the act of composition.

We seldom (if ever) encounter the attribute of Sturm und Drang when we read about Mozart. Nevertheless, we know of the strong personal relationship between Mozart and Haydn; so it is reasonable to assume that, if Haydn was using minor keys as an opportunity to experiment with new approaches to composition, those experiments would have encouraged (if not provoked) Mozart to do the same. From such a point of view, the K. 550 G Minor symphony may be seen as a culmination of Mozart rising to Haydn's challenges, in which case viewing the K. 491 piano concerto as a significant milestone along that path to K. 550 can be seen as enhancing, rather than detracting from, the value of that concerto. So that injunction in the program book to "pay attention!" really is more than shallow rhetoric.

Much of the large scale of the work lies in the opening allegro movement; and this is where we encounter Mozart at his most experimental in matters of form, melodic shape, interplay between soloist and orchestra, and orchestral color. However, even if the following two movements, the (major key) larghetto and concluding allegretto are closer to the usual durational scale, Mozart is still seeking out new territory in them. This is particularly the case in the final movement, where we again encounter the theme-and-variations form; and, as was the case in K. 361, the processes of variation have just as much to do with diversity of sonority as they do with thematic invention. This makes the larghetto a bit of a "calm" between the storm of aggressive declamations in the first movement and the storm of variety in the closing; but that calm weaves its own spell of invention in which, once again, sonority plays a crucial role.

Soloist Nikolai Demidenko had a keen sense of the breath of approaches that a soloist must take in delivering all of this material. Mozart's moods change with the swiftness of turning on a dime, and Demidenko never failed to be in the right "affective place" at the right time. He also chose to perform on a Fazioli piano provided by Piedmont Piano Company. I once heard a lecture about this new standard of piano technology at the old Piedmont showroom in San Francisco; but before last night I had never heard one of these instruments "in action." To the extent that it really is more responsive than more traditionally designed instruments, Demidenko seemed to be working it for all it could deliver. Thus, this was not an "authentic sound" for Mozart; but it was a highly expressive one. Indeed, the choice to go for a more "contemporary" sound was reinforced by Demidenko's decision to play a cadenza for the first movement composed by Johannes Brahms, which begins relatively deferential to Mozart but builds up to pretty much "pure Brahms" by the time it reaches its final trill; and the sensitivities of that Fazioli displayed those "pure Brahms" moments in the best possible light.

Like Jon Nakamatsu last week, Demidenko was given (and accepted) the opportunity to play an encore. He chose two sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti (and, no, I cannot identify them by either Longo or Kirkpatrick numbers). From the point of view of imaginative invention, Demidenko's choice of Scarlatti was far preferable to Nakamatsu's choice of Felix Mendelssohn. I doubt that anyone would associate Scarlatti with anything like Sturm und Drang, but he always displayed an uncanny spirit of invention (and often wit) in his brief sonatas, regardless of whether they were in a major of minor key. Demidenko approached his two selections with just the right blend of assertiveness, delicacy, and wit; and, if that Fazioli piano facilitated his decision to take such an approach, then we were all beneficiaries of that choice!

Innovation and Security

A frequent topic among innovation evangelists is whether or not the "Silicon Valley miracle" can be replicated. This is usually argued in terms of a laundry list of the assets of Silicon Valley. At the nut-and-bolts level there are items such as proximity to quality academic institutions and a "critical mass" of non-technical assets, such as venture capitalists and lawyers specializing in intellectual capital. Then there are social factors like nice weather, options for entertainment, good public education for the kids, and housing commensurate with compensation (if not affordable by the standards of the rest of the country/world).

All this reminds me of a joke that John McCarthy used to tell about the nature of common sense. He considered the question, "What do you need to know to start a car?" He then proceeded to develop a similar laundry list that included the need for fuel in the tank, having the key for the ignition, and (just as important) knowing the right way to turn the key once it has been inserted. After leading his audience to believe that a complete list had been compiled, he would ask, "What about the potato in the tail pipe?" His point was that, while we tend to compose these lists in terms of what needs to be present, there are all sorts of things that need to be absent (such as an object obstructing the exhaust system) that are ignored because we usually do not have to think about them.

Well, when it comes to the efforts of the Indian city of Bangalore to replicate Silicon Valley (under the sobriquet "Electronic City"), this morning's Financial Times ran a story by Amy Kazmin about a potato in the tail pipe:

India’s information technology capital, the southern city of Bangalore, was rocked on Friday afternoon by a series of eight small bomb blasts that killed at least one person and injured nearly a dozen others.

The blasts happened in quick succession at about 1.30pm local time and caused temporary traffic chaos in the city, which is the hub of India’s global software outsourcing business. Known as India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore is home to 1,500 companies such as India’s Infosys Technologies and offices of global groups such as Microsoft, IBM and Intel.

Authorities said the bombs were placed at traffic circles, near bus stops and other locations along important thoroughfares, including the road to Electronic City. They were triggered by timer devices and had metal bolts to add to their damage.

This is not to imply that innovation evangelists are oblivious to the impact that crime might have one where we choose to live and work. Rather, it is to suggest that the rose-colored glasses of their evangelism seem to filter our distinctions between the undesirable and the catastrophic. Those who spend much, if not most, of their time living in Silicon Valley begin to fall under the spell that any part of the world can replicate Silicon Valley as long as the right incentives can be implemented. This overlooks at least one critical element of social context, which Kazmin drew upon for the punch line of her article:

Bangalore was shocked in 2005, when a Kalashnikov-armed militant opened fire at the Indian Institute of Science, killing one retired professor and injuring four others. That attack was blamed on Islamist militants fighting for independence for the Himalayan state of Kashmir.

Is this a problem that can be solved by implementing "the right incentives;" and who is going to do the implementing (not to mention how)? This is not to say that the problem is being ignored:

In recent years many Indian cities – including the popular tourist town of Jaipur – have been rocked by serial bomb blasts, often causing serious loss of life.

While authorities suspect militant groups eager to fan hatred between Hindus and Muslims, and raising tensions between India and neighbouring Pakistan, police rarely have success in identifying, arresting or prosecuting the perpetrators.

Mohandas Pai, chief financial officer of Infosys, said the Bangalore attack highlighted the need for greater investment in policing, including electronic surveillance. “It’s a wake-up call,” Mr Pai told an Indian television channel. Other local executives echoed his call.

This is where we recognize the most important factor about that potato in the tail pipe. However extensive the laundry list may be, I doubt that anyone has ever included in it the following item:

Silicon Valley is not (nor does it need to be) a police state.

We do not think about such things, because we take it for granted that our Constitution protects us from them. However, our cultural context provides us with not only the Constitution but also a positive spirit of eternal vigilance moderated by due process of law. Not only are such matters not "universal" standards; but also, as anyone who has given more than a passing thought to what Clifford Geertz called "the interpretation of cultures," there is no reason that they should be universal standards.

The question, then, is not one of replicating something that works, so to speak. Rather, it involves recognizing that different settings "work" for different reasons in different times. In the history of art, Paris was long assumed to have the same level of priority that Silicon Valley now has for technology; but nothing is forever. The Nazis put an end to that priority; and, for a variety of reasons, the priority, such as it was, shifted to New York. These days it is probably more distributed, with different settings drawing different sorts of artists. Why should it not be the case that a similar tendency towards greater distribution for the sake of greater diversity would have an equally beneficial effect on the innovation and development of future technologies?

The Knol Challenge

Will Knol take the "Wikipedia fight club" mentality out of the pursuit of documenting reference material? Wikipedia may like to present itself as the ultimate demonstration of the "wisdom of crowds;" but as I, and many others, have pointed out, the longest pole in Widipedia's ideological tent has been anonymity. This is a critical issue, because there is very likely a tight coupling between how "knowledgeable" a crowd can be and how accountable individual members are for their contributions. Google has been in the process of trying to address the problem of anonymity with a new product called Knol; and, as Jennifer LeClaire reported on NewsFactor Network yesterday afternoon, that product is now ready for public consumption:

On Wednesday Google took the lid off a new product called Knol. The search-engine giant first announced it was testing the product in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

My guess is that LeClaire got that last sentence from press-release material; and, on the basis of how it was written, I would classify it as "news," rather than "opinion" or "analysis." I therefore see it as fair game to question the validity of this particular sentence.

Note that the sentence actually makes two claims:

1. Every article is written by someone who knows about its particular topic.
2. Regardless of the credentials of the author, the content of the article is authoritative.

On my first visit to Knol, I decided to take a look at an article entitled "A Crisis In Leadership." In addressing the first point, it is easy to observe that the author of this article is Angelo Mastrangelo; and, to the right of the article, we see a photograph of him along with the description, "Entrepreneur, Professor, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY." Following the hyperlink attached to his name, we find the following Web page:

Biographical knol not published

The requested biographical knol has been unpublished by the author.

View author's published knols

That is all we know; but, to invoke the "poetic wisdom" of John Keats, I would argue very strongly that it is a far distance from all we need to know. There is nothing wrong with asking an author to provide a biographical statement of credentials, as long as two fundamental questions are addressed:

1. Should the author's article be released for publication if credentials have not been provided?
2. What is the process for vetting those credentials (moving from Keats to Plato's "Republic" or, in more contemporary language, "checking your sources"), once they have been provided?

Under current Knol operations, we definitely know the answer to the first question; my guess is that the answer to the second is no better.

This is a sensitive matter, particularly where a topic like leadership is concerned. "Business school" articles cannot be reviewed in the same manner as contributions to scientific publications. It is not a matter of adhering to proven methods that address the collection and interpretation of data. Ultimately, it is a matter of argumentation, which is as likely to be supported by enthymematic reasoning as by the rigors of a propositional or predicate calculus. Thus, within the framework of the medieval trivium, the soundness of the text depends on some combination of sound logic and sound rhetoric. Unfortunately, in this particular article there is far more self-promotion than there is argumentation; and, as far as the needs of the trivium are concerned, there is a comment to this article (also by an author without credentials), which observes that the grammar is also weak! We are thus faced with an article by an author whose background we are justified in questioning (regardless of whether or not his background actually is questionable) providing content that reads more like an advertisement for the author (jumping from Plato all the way up to Norman Mailer) than an "authoritative" statement about leadership and its associated "question of crisis." All in all, then, this particular article puts a considerable strain on that "unit of knowledge" (which is what the designers of this system claim a "knol" is) epithet that sits at the top of ever page.

This brings us back to LeClaire's report. Rather than performing a similar exercise in evaluation, she did what reporters often do, which is to complement the promotional material from a press release with some source who can articulate the opposing point of view. This occupies her final four paragraphs:

Knol is a potentially valuable property, according to Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. But that potential, he said, depends on the content. It could take years for Knol to build the volume of content Wikipedia boasts, and the nature of the site -- relying on named authors -- could slow the content-generation process. That means Knol is not an immediate threat to Wikipedia, Sterling said.

"The difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is edited by a group of people, a community or a select number of editors, and this has a single author," Sterling explained. "An individual expert or author is the source of the information, or at least has the byline."

Knol, then, offers pros and cons for its readers. The benefits, Sterling said, might be more authoritative or reliable content. The downside may be people motivated to write pieces as a promotional vehicle for books or other products.

"Maybe there's a subject like heart disease and both Wikipedia and Knol have articles. Both articles would both show up in search results," Sterling said. "People could look at them both and make their own determination."

Whether or not Sterling actually saw a "promotional vehicle," such as the one I just examined, his pro-and-con thinking was definitely running along the right lines. Now I have to confess to a certain bias towards Sterling, since his punch line is basically a reinforcement of my own caveat lector philosophy: In the world of the Internet, the reader must be actively responsible for being informed. Unfortunately, in its current state Knol provides little (certainly far less than Wikipedia) to support "reader actions;" but such a reader can still get considerable mileage out of the Google parent!

One final point is that any visitor to Knol would do well to take that "BETA" in print both fine and faint very seriously. It is not at all easy to figure out what content is worth looking for in the first place and the Browse hyperlink (also in very fine print) constitutes one of the greater abuses of terminology, even by Internet standards. It is only when you follow the link and find a page headed "Bag o'knols" that you encounter any truth in advertising. This is a truly unstructured list, and it currently runs to seven Web pages! As an alternative to browsing, my only test of the search tool did not surprise me:

Search Results:

No results found for Brahms

Don't like empty search results? Know something? Write a Knol

Thanks for the invitation guys, but I am currently making far better use than I might have anticipated from the Wikipedia entry for Johannes Brahms!

Brilliant Brahms Piano Music

In grousing over Brilliant Classics' editorial abuse of the term "a cappella" in their collection of the complete works of Johannes Brahms, I seem to have skipped over any observations about the Piano Music section. I had already observed that none of the pianists in this section were familiar to me, but none of them disappointed. This section was not very large, only eight discs; but it includes some of the most impressive, as well as some of the most problematic, of Brahms' compositions. In the latter category the three piano sonatas were shared between Kamerhan Turan (Opus 1) and Alan Weiss (Opera 2 and 5). Opus 5 is about the only one that gets played regularly; but all three are massive works that border on the unwieldy. Thus, the primary virtue of the performances by both Turan and Weiss is how accessible they are. The trip for each of these sonatas is a relatively long one, but both pianists have selected tempi and phrasing decisions that make the journey interesting enough that the duration becomes less of an issue. On more familiar ground I was particularly delighted with the performances and the Paganini (Opus 35) and Handel (Opus 24) variations by Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy. The two Paganini books are amazing exercises in miniaturization, which take an approach similar to that of Ludwig van Beethoven's 32 variations in C Minor (WoO 80) and push that particular envelope a bit further. Finally, there are the two discs of "Miscellaneous Piano Pieces" performed by Louis Demetrius Alvanis, which include some wonderful gems in the forms of "studies" and transcriptions. Where Ferruccio Busoni had converted the chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach's D Minor solo violin partita (BWV 1016) into a flamboyant display of piano virtuosity, Brahms adapted it into an etude to be performed by the left hand in which Bach's source receives as much attention as the pedagogical goal of developing left-hand technique. My favorite, however, is his adaptation of the slow movement from his Opus 18 string sextet, probably because I like the music so much that I was delighted to have it in a form that I could play! This was similar to the point behind Vladimir Leyetchkiss' transcription of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Opus 17 suite for two pianos, which Sandro Russo recently played here in recital. There are certain compositions that one would just like to sit down an play at the piano, even if they were not written to be played that way; and working on Brahms' arrangement of his sextet movement was one of my most satisfying experiences in front of my piano keyboard!

Speak Loudly and Carry a Flimsy Stick

It seems like only yesterday that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was disclosing "inconvenient truths" about the cost of health care; but actually it was closer to six months ago. These days he is attracting more attention for the war he is trying to wage against child pornography. While it would be hard to find anyone who would dispute the merits of such a war (at least if it were well waged), as Declan McCullagh pointed out this morning on his Iconoclast blog, it would be even harder to find any of us who remember when the Internet emerged from the network of gateways that sustained Usenet in approval of his methods:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has found a novel way to shake down law-abiding broadband companies: accuse them of harboring child pornography and threaten to prosecute them unless they do what he wants. That might just happen to involve writing Cuomo a hefty check.

The latest company to be honored by Cuomo's personal attention is Comcast, which received a two-page letter on Monday threatening "legal action" on child pornography grounds within five days, if its executives failed to agree to a certain set of rules devised by the attorney general.

In the letter (PDF), the Democratic politico says he wants Comcast and other broadband providers to "volunteer" to take actions "surgically directed" only at child pornography and "not at any protected content." (He's targeting Usenet, the venerable pre-Web home of thousands of discussion groups that go by names like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin.)

That might be laudable, if it were true. But Cuomo's ham-fisted pressure tactics already have led Time Warner Cable to pull the plug on some 100,000 Usenet discussion groups, including such hotbeds of illicit content as talk.politics and misc.activism.progressive. Verizon Communications deleted such unlawful discussion groups as us.military, ny.politics, alt.society.labor-unions, and alt.politics.democrats. AT&T and Time Warner Cable have taken similar steps.

I kind of like that phrase "ham-fisted pressure tactics." However, I have enough personal history to remember when our military talked about our method of "surgical strikes" during Operation Desert Storm. More importantly, I remember I. F. Stone's post hoc analysis of both the war and how it was reported, in which he pointed out that the Pentagon's semantics of "surgical precision" was a far cry from the sort of treatment you would want to receive on a operating table. This seems consistent with the semantics of Cuomo's "surgically directed" phrase.

As I see it, Cuomo has decided to deal with child pornography by going after the Internet with a big stick without giving much thought as to where he is swinging it. My guess is that this strategy will have little impact on the proliferation of child pornography in cyberspace. My fear is that Cuomo's actions will reawaken the dimwitted thinking of some of our more vociferous Internet evangelists on the subject of governance, running them once again into the brick wall of a failure to comprehend why governance is necessary in the first place. This could very well lead to a sort of "rhetorical arms race" over the pornography problem that could easily culminate in those eye-for-an-eye exchanges, which, as Gandhi reminded us, ultimately make the whole world blind.

Perhaps it would be better to view Cuomo's action as one of "chutzpah for show," giving him another crack at a spotlight that shines on more that New York. Thus, in the hope of encouraging him to sheathe this particular sword, I would like to placate him by offering him the Chutzpah of the Week award. Take it, Andrew. Treasure it. Show it off in your office, but stop trying to bash Usenet! As I continue to preach in my own evangelical streaks, Usenet taught us more about the true nature of "social software" than just about anything the Internet evangelists now promote with such vigor; and perhaps it could teach you a thing or two about how to moderate (if not regulate) the proliferation of child pornography through cyberspace (even on Facebook, if that investigation you launched last September is still active).

Terminological Blunder

Whatever else may be said about the folks who compile these Gesamtwerk collections over at Brilliant Classics, their command of terminology leaves a bit to be desired. I have just begun the collection of eight discs grouped under the title, "Works for Choir a Cappella." I knew something was fishy when the first of these discs turned out to be the two collections of "Liebeslieder" waltzes (Opera 52 and 65), which are accompanied by four-hand piano! I was also a bit disappointed that these waltzes were sung by the Chamber Choir of Europe, since I have always preferred four solo voices; but one cannot exercise many choices in selecting a complete edition. It turns out that, of the eight discs in this group, only two are for unaccompanied voices. In order to distinguish them from the first three of the Vocal Music discs, this collection would more accurately be described as "Works for Mixed Voices without Orchestra," which does not consume that much more printing ink (or toner)! One final nit to pick is that the Chamber Choir of Europe uses solo voices for some of their performances. These voices are named on the "Liebeslieder" disc but on none of the others, nor do they seem to be given on the "Digital Guide" CD.

Post Script: Upon closer inspection, I found that the solo voices are listed in the "Digital Guide." However, they are listed on the final page for each disc, rather on the page that gives the texts of the songs! Thus the problem has more to do with design than with content!

Scare quotes?

I can't quite figure out whether or not the quotation marks in the headline for the Al Jazeera report of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic are scare quotes or, for that matter, why they are there at all:

'War criminal' Karadzic arrested

As their report makes clear, the man is, at the very least, a fugitive from a UN-approved international judiciary body:

The former Bosnian Serb leader was indicted on genocide charges in 1995 by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and topped the its most-wanted list for more than a decade.

It is almost as if the quote marks are questioning the legitimacy of the indictment or the authority of the United Nations to arrest the man. As one of the few remaining sources of reliable journalism, Al Jazeera would have done better to compose a more objective headline!

Virtue Put in its Place

The Merola Opera Program presented the first of its two complete opera productions at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. The opera was Albert Herring, composed by Benjamin Britten with a libretto by Eric Crozier, based on the story, "Le Rosier de Madame Husson," by Guy de Maupassant. The work is a comic chamber opera, written (at least according to its Wikipedia entry) as a "companion piece" to the far more serious Rape of Lucretia. The term "chamber" applies less to the rather generous cast of characters than to the musical resources, in which, as in The Turn of the Screw performed at the Cowell at the end of the spring, each "voice" is a solo: first violin, second violin, viola, cello, bass, flute (including alto and piccolo), oboe, clarinet (including bass), bassoon, horn, harp, a single percussion performer, and "recitative" piano. The Merola company is less a "suburban" affair (as I had described the San Francisco Lyric Opera in their Screw production) than a workshop setting for singers who have completed their education and are embarking on careers as opera performers. Albert Herring is an excellent opera for such a setting. The music is both challenging and enjoyable, and the comedy provides an opportunity to take on more dramatic substance and creativity than one encounters in the usual bel canto repertoire.

The basic story concerns a small market town, Loxford in East Sussex, whose one blue-blooded resident, Lady Billows, is annoyed about the deterioration of morals. Her annoyance comes to a climax when it is discovered that none of the girls of the town is "morally fit" to be crowned Queen of the May; so, to teach the girls a lesson, the "search committee" decides to elect a May King, choosing Albert Herring, a shy and dull young man who has been under his mother's thumb for as long as anyone can remember. Sid, the closest to a friend that Albert has, finds this absurd and decides to teach this "moral majority" a lesson. At the crowning ceremony he spikes Albert's lemonade with rum. The transformation exceeds Sid's expectations: Albert gives himself such a night on the town that he cannot be found the next morning. The villagers turn on a dime from despair over his presumed death to fury when he appears in a hung over state. Nevertheless, Albert emerges from it all as a stable (no longer shy) force of moderation, who is finally capable of getting a life.

Albert's role makes for an interesting musical affair. For roughly half the opera we hear little from him other than the odd polite note or two; but, once the rum takes effect, we get to enjoy major stretches of solo tenor writing. This is particularly important, since none of the other characters has anything close to an aria: almost all of this opera is driven by (usually rather clever) dialog, often spiked with arch references, such as the schoolteacher named Miss Wordsworth (who appropriates Emily Dickenson in her speech at the May Day ceremony and presents Albert with the award of a two-volume edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs) and the vicar Gedge, whose advocacy of Albert's virtue verges on Keats' Grecian urn. For his part Britten is not shy about matching Crozier's wit with his own. Every mention of Foxe is accompanied by the ominous sound of a large gong, while the pouring of the rum into Albert's glass draws upon the inevitable passage from Tristan und Isolde.

All of this provides ample opportunity for the performers to have fun with their work; and that is precisely what the Merola cast did, without sacrificing the seriousness of technique required to make sure that the fun found its way across the stage and into the audience. Lady Billows, sung by Kate Crist, made her entrance in a wheelchair with all the imposing presence of Doctor Strangelove and dominated every scene in which she appeared. However, the center of attention was James Benjamin Rodgers, who nailed Albert's transformation perfectly. His "before" Albert was played exactly according to plan without deteriorating into a ridiculous prig. One understands why Sid (sung by Darren Perry) sees potential in him. His first extended solo, at home after the ceremony, where his mother is expecting him to go to bed, delivered a wonderful sense of the emergence of the "new Albert," which makes the opening of the third act, in which the entire village assumes he has died and is searching for his body, all the more ludicrous. Finally, Rodgers provided this "new Albert" with just the right combination of backbone and proper manners to face up to not only Lady Billows but (more importantly) his own mother.

All this was presumably the product of the two directors behind this production: Peter Kazaras for the staging and Mark Morash for musical direction. Similarly, the Cowell Theater deserves credit for providing a stage of a scale appropriate to the drama (as it did for The Turn of the Screw). Martha Graham used to say that comedy is always far more difficult to deliver than tragedy. If that is really the case (rather than just an apology for her own work), then the skills of the current Merola crew bode well for the future of opera!

Private Enterprise Trumps the Public Trust

I have written several posts about the deterioration of balance between the interests of private enterprise and those of the "public trust;" but, for the most part my writing has focused on the consequences of this deterioration in the institutions of journalism. However, the need for extending the scope of the public trust and providing it with due support extends far beyond keeping the public better informed than corporate interests would have them be. This morning the Reuters Web site ran an article by Debra Sherman, which is a poignant (at the very least) demonstration of the lack of public-trust thinking in our current health care system. Like most informative reports, this one begins with an anecdote that is likely to surprise most readers:

Every year, Chicago-based cardiologist Ziyad Hijazi accompanies two or three children and their families to his native Jordan for heart operations using medical devices that are not approved in the United States.

In one such case, Hijazi implanted a device to close a hole between the lower chambers of the heart in a child from Massachusetts. The device, called an amplatzer muscular VSD, manufactured by Minneapolis-based AGA Medical, was available for 9 years in Jordan before it was approved in the United States in 2007.

According to Hijazi, who is chief of pediatric cardiology at Rush University Medical Center, and other doctors, children are getting worse treatment in the United States, and have even died, because pediatric medical devices are not approved.

Sherman then uses this mini-narrative as a point of departure to analyze the how-did-we-get-into-this-mess question. Much of that analysis draws upon an interview with Thomas Forbes, director of cardiac catheterization at Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. This is because one of the major areas addressed by the final paragraph of her anecdote concerns the use of stents (small tubes that prop open the walls of blood vessels), which are administered through catheterization. The problem is that both stents and catheters designed for adults can be dangerous when applied to children for the simple reason that they are too large and not flexible enough.

By all rights this should be a golden opportunity for all those innovation evangelists to put aside their usual claptrap and strut their stuff to beneficial effect. Getting beyond the usual problem that too much innovative thinking tends to be in an echo chamber that blocks out any reverberations concerned with consequences, this is an example of a well-defined problem for which a robust solution would greatly benefit the general public. Nevertheless, you are unlikely to find any of those evangelists preaching about this particular problem in dire need of a solution. It does not take long for Sherman to get to the heart of why this is the case:

One factor is that companies that make medical devices focus on adults because the market is bigger. Heart diseases in children, for example, are more likely to be congenital, and rare, while in adults they are more likely to be progressive, and common.

A law signed late last year provides financial incentives to companies for making devices for children, but also requires those companies to track patients at their own expense.

"It's a paperwork nightmare. They have to commit resources and follow these patients forever," Forbes said. "If I'm a J&J stockholder, I'm saying, 'I love kids, I'd love to help them out, but move on.'"

There you have it: When innovation evangelists write their sermons, they are not preaching about solving problems; they are writing about new opportunities for Return on Investment (ROI). Put another way, they are interested in innovations that benefit shareholders; and, in the classic language of The Gilded Age, "the customer be damned." If too many children (or, for that matter, adults) can no longer receive effective health care through improved medical technologies, then the only consequence that seems to matter is that the "surplus population" may be reduced.

There is another lesson from Sherman's anecdote, which is that those who currently can enjoy better health care are those who can afford the expense of having a procedure performed in another country. Thus, the sort of "surplus population" that receives so little thought by our innovation evangelists are, as usual, the poor. The problem is that the poor are not receiving much more attention by the strongest voices of health care reform either, particularly when it comes to a complex socio-technical issue like being able to deploy the best technology to solve the most challenging problems. Thus, like so many other stories about the primacy of the interests of shareholders, this is ultimately another story about the War Against the Poor; and it appears that this particular skirmish is being waged on a battlefield where most of the casualties will be children.

Mozart's Orchestral Palette

Even before the orchestra began to play the K. 205 D major divertimento to open the 34th Season Midsummer Mozart Festival under the baton of Music Director George Cleve, one could expect that this occasion would be different, rather than merely "diverting." There were no cellos on stage. The melodic voices were concentrated in the two violin and viola sections, supported by two double basses. In addition the wind section was restricted to two horns and one bassoon. The program notes made the usual dismissive comments about the divertimento being "simply a diverting piece of music that you were not expected to listen to with the care that you might give to a weightier work" (as if the audiences at the time of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gave much consideration to the "weight" of the music being played for them), followed by the usual gratuitous nod to the composer:

This is brilliantly mature music, even if it does come from a 17-year old boy whose talent was light years beyond his calendar years.

This all diverts (so to speak) our attention from an aspect of Mozart that is seldom explored, which is the extent to which each of his compositions (sometimes down to the individual numbers of an opera) draws much of its strength from a meticulous choice of instrumentation and the resulting sound qualities. A more useful context is provided by the notes that Jos van der Zanden prepared for the Brilliant Classics edition of Mozart's complete works:

In some of his Serenades and Divertimenti Mozart experimented with unusual combinations of instruments. He not seldom enriched an ensemble of strings by adding woodwinds and brass instruments, in search for coloristic effects and new sound spectra. A fine example is the curious ‘Concerto ï sia Divertimento’ in E flat major, K. 113, composed in Milan in 1771. Here Mozart for the first time used clarinets. He revised the work a few years later, adding oboes, english horns and bassoons and enabling the clarinets to be omitted.

A daring combination was tried in the six-movement Divertimento in D major, K. 131 from the summer of 1772. Along the strings (with diveded violas) there was a flute, an oboe, a bassoon, and last but not least four horns. The horns feature as a solo quartet in several movements and these passages call for very skilled musicians. Such passages as the slow introduction to the finale, where the seven wind instruments play without strings, must have been a real playground for Mozart to exploring a variety of timbres. In a later stage he transplanted such innovations into his major works, like symphonies.

K. 205 was composed in Vienna in 1773; and, while the orchestration may not be as radical as that chosen for K. 131, Mozart is still very much in his playground. Furthermore, this is another composition that features winds playing without strings, even if it is only in the modest setting of the trio for the second menuetto. There is, however, some possibility that the decision to accompany the two horns with the bassoon was Cleve's. When I consulted the on-line version of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, I discovered that the bass line, intended for both bassoon and double basses, was marked "senza Fagotto" in this trio! Either way this composition is as much about orchestral color as it is about the inventions of melody, harmony, and counterpoint that usually draw our attention to Mozart.

K. 205 was followed by the K. 488 A major piano concerto with Jon Nakamatsu as soloist. This is a much later work (1786); but Mozart is still in his playground. This time we have a full complement of strings; but for winds we have two horns, two bassoons, two clarinets, and a single flute. This makes for an interesting blend of high voices, particularly when Mozart exploits the sonorities of the clarinet in both low and high registers. Several different combinations of these sounds unfold in the orchestral accompaniment to the second Adagio movement; and one can tell that Mozart was enjoying what he was doing, because the piano solo (which he probably played) attempts to imitate these colors!

This was but one example of how this performance was a vast improvement over the last K. 488 performance I discussed, because it demonstrated that keen sense of acoustic balance that emerged in the collaboration of Nakamatsu and Cleve. This was very much an intimate conversation involving piano and orchestra, in which the orchestra provided several significant solo voices to add to that conversation; and Nakamatsu has the confidence of a piano soloist who knows that his is not the only voice in the conversation. Indeed, his sensitivity in playing softly can be heard when he introduces a passage at piano level and then repeats it pianissimo. He understands intimacy, and Cleve knew how to get his orchestra to share in that intimacy.

While I was doing my background research, I discovered that the numbering of the C major oboe concerto, played by soloist Laura Griffiths after the intermission, opens a minor can of worms. The program listed it as K. 271k, while the score in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe lists it as K. 314 (285d) along with a footnote stating that the music is "presumably identical" (Vermutlich identisch) with K. 271k! The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe numbers are identical to those assigned to the D major flute concerto, but a footnote indicates that the oboe version is the earlier one. This all raises an interesting question in the context of Mozart's interest in orchestral color. Did he really think that instrument color did not matter in this work, or was the flute version an expedient act to satisfy a flute soloist? Both versions provide the same wind accompaniment in the orchestra, two oboes and two horns; so go figure it.

The level of Griffiths' "conversation" was, unfortunately, not as intimate as Nakamatsu's had been. Indeed, some of her solo work had a rushed sound, which tended to undermine the "grammar" of the phrasing. Thus, while there were no problems with balance, there was a certain chemistry lacking in the overall performance that made it less compelling than the piano concerto.

That chemistry quickly returned to the orchestra, however, as they concluded with the K. 504 D major symphony ("Prague"). This provided the richest assortment of colors, with the full string section filled out with two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and a pair of timpani. Cleve was right on top of all the dynamic variety, making sure that the orchestra had enough left to give to a brilliantly energetic final Presto movement. Given the resources required, we might call this the biggest playground of the evening; and Cleve knew how to deliver it with just the right balance of discipline and play.

There was one "intruder" in the performance not listed on the program. After the piano concerto Nakamatsu took an encore by performing the Opus 14 Rondo Capriccioso in E major by Felix Mendelssohn. This led me to realize how little I have written about Mendelssohn at all on this blog and how little he is played by the pianists whose discs I collect. The Opus 14 makes for a nice encore. It is certainly showy enough, and it provided Nakamatsu with further opportunity to demonstrate his command of lightness of touch. The only problem is that Mendelssohn does not make for particularly good company with Mozart from a "cultural" point of view; but, if we began with the "diversion" of a divertimento, then perhaps the encore "diverted" us from Mozart to take our intermission break!

The Media under Fire

No reporter was named for this article on the BBC NEWS Web site. Thus, there probably was not a BBC reporter on site at the time of this incident:

Three Chinese reporters attending a police briefing on the success of an anti-gun campaign were accidentally shot, media reports say.

An officer picked up one of the weapons on show - a confiscated home-made gun - but it went off in his hand.

A reporter needed surgery for injuries to his ankle, crotch and chest, after being hit by what appeared to be pebbles fired by the gun.

Two others were slightly injured in the incident in Nanchong, southern China.

There is, however, an eyewitness account (of sorts):

"Journalists from 13 media outlets were led to a hall on the second floor after attending the meeting on the 12th floor,'' one woman called Lin told the newspaper.

"One officer picked up a confiscated pistol and demonstrated it to the journalists.''

Lin said she heard a bang and saw West China City Daily reporter Su Dingwei collapse.

"White smoke was rising in the room and crushed stone-like things were scattered all around,'' she was quoted as saying.

There are any number of accounts of reporters who have come under fire (probably both enemy and "friendly") in the course of war coverage; but this may well be the first account of a reporter who was a victim of "friendly fire" at the hands of a municipal police force.

Martial Chutzpah

In another week with an ample supply of chutzpah, I find that my strongest memory is of some words I heard delivered by John McCain as part of the BBC coverage of his campaign:

I know how to win wars. And if I'm elected president, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory.

Unless I am mistaken, he reinforced this point by telling his audience that he was a "war-winner." I should put out that the above quote was cut and pasted from the Prime Buzz site managed by the Kansas City Star, which, in turn, attributes the Associated Press as its source. The Chutzpah of the Week award goes to John McCain on the basis of how much evidence there is to support his claim, but I find it interesting that this little episode in Albuquerque on Tuesday received so little attention from the media.

I suppose all this came to pass because the general question of winning wars, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, was part of this week's prevailing discourse. This leads me to wonder whether the media would ever let that discourse shift its focus from war to peace. What would be McCain's reaction in that unlikely event? Would he then tell us that he knows how to make peace? Might he play his "age card" to advantage and claim that he was there at the signing of the Treaty of Paris?

Two Views of Brahms' Chamber Music

I have now completed listening to the discs in the Orchestral and Chamber Music sections of the Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Johannes Brahms; but, as I move into the Piano Music section, I have not yet reached the halfway mark. This is because close to half of the discs are devoted to the Vocal Music section (which also happens to include a disc of Organ Works, probably for lack of any other section to accommodate it). Nevertheless, since my initial "ascent on Mount Beethoven" was interrupted by a defective chamber music disc (the first cello sonata), I feel as if I have passed a barrier, even if it happens to be a barrier of superstition!

Some readers may have inferred from a previous post that I already have the Philips Complete Chamber Music collection in my possession, so it is hard to resist making some comparisons. The Philips collection is older and most of the performers are more familiar, if not more venerable. Nevertheless, I would not want to be forced to make a preferential choice between the Beaux Arts Trio on Philips and Joseph Kalichstein, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson on Brilliant. They bring different ways of listening to the Brahms trios; and, as I recently observed about the "Beethoven's Eroica" DVD in the Keeping Score series, there is no such thing as a definitive perspective on any composition of music. On the other hand, given my personal preference for performances by Janos Starker, I find it a bit ironic that Philips satisfies that preference with the cello sonatas, while Brilliant satisfies it with the "Double Concerto."

More interesting is that Brilliant made up for Philips neglecting to include the works for two pianos and four hands on one piano as chamber music. Having played a fair amount of the four-hand repertoire (and some of the work for two pianos when I had the luxury to do so in Palo Alto), I strongly support Brilliant's decision, particularly since this gives us an opportunity to hear different perspectives on a single composition. The Haydn variations makes for the most interesting case in point; and, as I previously mentioned, it took only one listening to a good performance (by the performers in the Brilliant collection) of the piano version for me to prefer it over the orchestral. I tend to feel the same about the Hungarian dances, although I appreciate the extent to which these works gain some benefit from the right splashes of orchestral color. On the other hand I am not sure I have a preference for the Opus 39 waltzes when it comes to two hands or four; but some day I may try to work up the courage to take on the two-hand version myself. The most interesting contrast, however, comes from the Opus 34b sonata for two pianos, whose Opus 34(a) is the F minor piano quintet. This is a fascinating exercise in approaching a single "text" with two different types of sonority. Each approach has its own merits; and there is much to be said for the opportunity for side-by-side comparison. The same may be said for the Brilliant decision (also not made by Philips) to include both the clarinet and viola versions of the two Opus 120 sonatas. Again, the difference is all in the sonority; but that difference brings with it a difference in rhetorical approach, which makes for different directions in which the listener may be swayed.

So now I leave the Chamber Music base camp and begin the Piano Music ascent. None of the pianists in the Brilliant collection are familiar to me. However, it is also the case that I do not currently have that much of this music on CD, the most notable exception being the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Kristian Zimmerman playing the sonatas, along with the Opus 4 scherzo and the Opus 10 Balladen. Most of my Brahms is in my Rubinstein collection, which is far from thorough. In addition I have come to know many of these works through my own faltering attempts; so, as far as my own listening is concerned, my "pump is well primed" for the occasion. I have to confess that my greatest curiosity remains for the Vocal Music; but I am looking forward to what I may discover in new recordings of works by a composer who took his own piano-playing very seriously.

Getting into the Iran Mess

In "Iran: The Threat," his latest piece for The New York Review, author Thomas Powers provides us with a terse statement of historical context that explains much of how the current Administration has made such a mess of foreign affairs, both diplomatic and military:

Sometime during the Clinton years a faction of the Republican Party in exile lost patience with the accepted way of conducting foreign relations. Talking, negotiating, proposing alternatives, cajoling allies with economic and military aid, taking conflicts to the United Nations, convening conferences, sitting on commissions and issuing, repeating, and underlining warnings—in short, all the other "options on the table"—came to be seen in certain Republican circles as time-wasting, irresolute, and futile—a pattern of weakness that invites defiance.

Powers' context may be further elaborated with the observation that his laundry list of "options" aligns very nicely with the principles that Dennis Ross articulated and discussed in his book, Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World. Ross was, of course, one of the active agents during those "Clinton years," serving as a special Middle East coordinator, which was probably enough to make that Republican faction forget (or, more likely, ignore) the fact that he had also served in the State Department of the Bush I Administration as a director of policy planning.

However, as Powers continues his own discussion, it is clear that the Republican faction he is discussing in one that believed firmly that such matters as statecraft and policy planning were only for wimps:

The argument of the neoconservatives, stated in its nakedest form at the outset of the Bush administration, notes that the United States is the world's sole great power. We have a military capability that dwarfs all others. We need not defer to weak and corrupt governments that treat us with disdain.

It goes without saying that, as a foundation for such concepts as "statecraft" and "policy planning," the fundamental principle of understanding those with whom you must engage is also for wimps. The last time I explored this matter, I compared our current President to Pentheus in Euripides' play, The Bacchae; but perhaps it might be fairer to say that neoconservatism adopted Pentheus as their standard-bearer, forgetting (or, again, ignoring) Euripides' lesson of what happens to those who use power to enforce an ideology without taking due stock of their opposition. However, there is one important difference between George W. Bush and Pentheus. Pentheus could exercise his power directly; Bush must exercise power through our country's military, which means, at the very least, through the mediation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Powers has observed, more and more of our most senior military leaders are feeling more and more skeptical about how this Administration would exercise power; and they are getting more and more vocal about that skepticism. This may not sway the ideological fixations of the Executive Branch, but perhaps it will have a more beneficial effect on both the general public and their elected representatives in the Legislative Branch.

Losing Score

It has been almost a year since I participated in the 2007 "Bloggers' Night" at the San Francisco Symphony. While I responded to my invitation to this event with several posts about the performances that evening, I never mentioned that all participants were further rewarded with a modest element of swag, which included review copies of DVDs of the Keeping Score series that Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony had created for production by local PBS station KQED. I have never seen any of these programs broadcast. Truth be told, I have become very disappointed in what PBS has to offer in just about any subject area; and the local contributions from KQED are not much better. Nevertheless, I was curious about the project; but, in spite of that curiosity, the jewel cases gathered dust for about a year until last night when my wife and I decided to see what they had to offer, beginning with the "Beethoven's Eroica" broadcast. This seemed like an appropriate way to begin, particularly since we had heard Thomas conduct this work at Davies Symphony Hall last March.

That recent listening experience, however, made for an interesting and significant object lesson: The beauty of the "live" performance is that, like snowflakes, no two are alike. If they were alike, they would be little better than recordings; and, if that were they case, why should we bother to exchange our "virtual concert hall" for the real thing? Thomas is well aware of how the approach to performance changes from one occasion to the next, and he even talks about it when first introducing this work. However, as a result of that simple "principle of diversity," I found the "Beethoven's Eroica" presentation more than a little disquieting, because it felt too much as if Thomas were providing his viewers with a definitive perspective on what, in my own post, I called "The Ultimate Warhorse."

This observation then leads to my second observation, which is that there is too much talk and not enough music. Part of the problem is that this particular symphony is significant for its revolutionary approach to scale; and this poses a difficulty in presenting it, along with supplementary material, in a one-hour television program. The result is that we end up experiencing "significant excerpts," rather than the imposing whole ("Dear God, he's big") itself. Many years ago Kurt Masur worked with a British television production company to prepare recorded concerts of the four symphonies of Johannes Brahms. Each of those made for a one-hour broadcast; and Masur prepared his remarks to fill the space that was not occupied by the music. One might argue that this would be too little for a work as major as Ludwig van Beethoven's third symphony, but I doubt that anyone would claim that the details behind Brahms symphonies are any less than those behind Beethoven's.

This leads to my final observation: If the music is the most important part, how can the video do justice to it? Put another way, since it is virtually impossible to ignore a video signal (particularly if it is motion video), what can be done to make sure that the video contributes to the listening experience, rather than detracting from it? This is a question I have examined in previous posts. My primary regard is that many who read what I feel is the best answer to this question will regard it as ancient history:

I have always felt that this [skilled video production] was the "secret ingredient" that made Evening at Symphony on PBS such a triumph. All direction of camera shots was informed by the score being performed. This was such a serious matter that the camera crew would rehearse in Symphony Hall with a stage on which all the chairs were in the right place, each labeled with the name of the performer; and all the camera work would be executed against a recording of the performance. This whole process was the brainchild of Jordan Whitelaw, who supposedly once said, "If you don't see it, you may not hear it!" This is far from a trivialization of the listening process; it is one of the best strategies for cultivating that process. Of course it only works if it is properly executed; and, if it is poorly executed, it can do far more harm than good.

If Whitelaw's spirit remains with us at all today, it would be through the innovations that Barbara Willis Sweete has brought to videos of the Metropolitan Opera, apparently with the encouragement of general manager Peter Gelb. Sweete shares Whitelaw's keen sense of what it means for audiences to see the right thing; but she also has the advantage of working (by virtue of high-definition (HD) bandwidth) with far more sophisticated video management technology than WGBH was ever able to provide to Whitelaw. This was most apparent when she delivered a video product that caught all of the subtleties of the Met production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and made them accessible (and perhaps more comprehensible) to all of us who could only attend the performance by watching it in a movie house. Alas, the few opportunities we had to see the San Francisco Symphony performing excerpts in "Beethoven's Eroica" were depressingly uninformative, particularly when assessed by the standards set by Whitelaw and extended by Sweete. This brings to mind the Annie Hall joke about the exchange between two old ladies staying at a resort in the Catskills:

"The food here is terrible!"

"Yes, and the portions are so small!"

No, the video work in "Beethoven's Eroica" is not as terrible as all that; but those of us who have been tracking the role that video can play in extending audiences for the performing arts know it can be much better.

This brings me to my final point, which is that, if we are to take the shortcomings of "Beethoven's Eroica" seriously, then we should also entertain the hypothesis that this production is more symptom than disease. In this case the "disease" (which I have also discussed in the past) is the growing neglect of the performing arts on public television. As I previously wrote, this is a "gap that cable cannot seem to fill," since it appears that every attempt cable has made to do so has come to a dismal end. Of course the problem may well be that the performing arts are just not particularly compatible with the culture of a "technological age," such as the one we are currently experiencing. Thus, while we may get no end of jawboning in favor of arts education, even when clothed in rhetoric about "the importance of arts to the future of the nation's competitiveness in a changing paradigm of global, economic, technical and social evolution and cultural change," that jawboning is unlikely to lead to much other than a few grants, which will probably go to the same old organizations that continue to get grants to do the same old thing. Just on the basis of the impact he has had on programming for the San Francisco Symphony, I have strong confidence that Michael Tilson Thomas would like to reverse this trend; but I do not see him getting the support he would need for such an endeavor. Without that support it is hard to imagine that future projects will be much more satisfying than "Beethoven's Eroica" was.

Progress on Mount Brahms

While waiting for the processing of a replacement for my defective Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven, I have now progressed to the discs in the Brahms collection on which Joseph Kalichstein, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson perform the three piano trios. These recordings were apparently made in 1985, which would be very close to when my wife-to-be and I heard that Brahms "marathon" in Manhattan. The recordings remind me of how fresh and alive the concerts we attended had been. Having already discussed the virtue of recordings that prepare us for "real thing" events, it is nice to recognize that recordings can also "feed the memory," which is certainly the case with these performances. It was also nice to see that Brilliant Classics "recognized" Brahms' contribution to the "F.A.E." sonata as being part of the Gesamtwerk, just as the concert series at the 92nd Street Y did (and the Philips Complete Chamber Music collection did not)!

The Easy Target

The backlash against the attempt of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to arrest Omar al-Bashir on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity has begun. Whether today's mass protest in Sudan was an authentic "grass roots" movement or carefully orchestrated political theater, the event was as ironic as the decision of our State Department to comment on the ICC action. Consider the beginning of the report for Reuters from Khartoum by Opheera McDoom:

Thousands of protesters chanting "Down, Down USA!" rallied in Khartoum on Sunday after reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) may seek the arrest of Sudan's president for alleged war crimes.

Consider, also, the text of an "official statement," which the protesters plan to deliver to the United Nations:

The ICC does just what the European Union, the United States of America and Israel tell it to do.

Finally, it terms of the source of the protest, consider this remark by Awad Ahmed, who happens to work for the Agriculture Ministry:

The Sudanese people are all rejecting this -- this is America targeting Sudan. We will not send Bashir. We would die first.

The irony, of course, is that the United States has still not ratified its membership in the ICC system and that its stridently proclaimed tough stand against ratification may have even been one of the provoking causes of the 9/11 attack. Even more ironic is that the don't-tell-us-what-to-do grounds for the Sudanese protest are precisely the basis for the American rejection of ICC membership. To further add to the irony, while the American rejection may have been motivated (at least in part) by a desire of our ruling class to protect one of its own (Henry Kissinger) from similar prosecution for war crimes (on the basis of charges that the government of Cambodia had expressed a desire to file), that same rejection may now protect the highest-ranking officials (including the one at whose desk the buck stops) from the same prosecution over their "adventurism" in Iraq.

Rather than dwelling on these ironies, however, we should appreciate the extent to which they demonstrate that the very concept of an international judiciary system is as fragile as our own government was in the decades immediately following the ratification of our Constitution. That fragility can be seen in a particularly brittle (and thus fragile) approach to international justice that the philosopher Bertrand Russell proposed about a century ago. With an almost intoxicated belief in the soundness of logical positivism, Russell recommended that the entire world form a single government, in which all judicial questions would be decided on the basis of an appropriate logical calculus. Even Immanuel Kant, who tried to formulate systems for explaining how we think and act, recognized that such judgments could never be reduced to purely objective terms; but, in Russell's History of Western Philosophy, there is at least a faint suggestion that Kant's results suffered from lack of sufficient scientific knowledge of the physical world (this in spite of the fact that he wrote this book after quantum physics had developed to a point of demonstrating the limits of such scientific knowledge and Kurt Gödel had demonstrated the limits of logical calculi).

It would be fair to say that, over the last one hundred years, our appreciation of the social world has improved considerably; but it would also be fair to say that appreciation does not always lead to understanding. Since the ratification of our Constitution, the United States has evolved a complex system through which grievances may be voiced, prosecuted, and judged; but the system over which George Washington presided is a pale shadow of the one upon which we now all depend for assurances of fair judgment. The fact that the members of the European Union have yet to agree on anything as general as their own constitution should warn us that an international judiciary system recognized as fair by all is an extremely difficult (if not impossible) goal. This is, by no means, meant to excuse the official Sudanese reaction to the ICC; but, if Sudan has decided that the Arab League would constitute a fairer venue for judgment, it may be in the best interests of the ICC to encourage Arab League involvement. This would be analogous to deferring judicial review by our Supreme Court until a case has been examined at the state (and perhaps local) level. If the victims in this case (those in or displaced from Darfur or representatives of the United Nations peace force) feel that the Arab League judgment was unfairly biased (say, because the victims were not Muslim), that would probably then be the time to appeal to the higher institution of the ICC.

Two Generations of Virtuoso Piano Composition

The listing in SF Weekly for Daniel Glover's piano recital at the Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco last night read:

The pianist plays Romantic Russian brooders plus religious compositions by Liszt.

I am not sure how many members of the audience were actually drawn to the concert by that sentence. Personally, I felt it was better to view the program as a presentation of piano composition in transition, even if the earlier stage of that transition (the Liszt portion) constituted the second half of the evening. After all, viewed strictly along the timeline of history, Franz Liszt died in 1886, not that long after the births of the two Russian composers from the first half. Sergei Rachmaninoff was born in 1873, and Nicolai Medtner was born in 1880. Whether or not they were "brooders," Glover presented them to us in his program notes as members of the "Russian Triumvirate" (along with Alexander Scriabin, whose music was played as an encore). More important is that all of the compositions in the first half came from the early twentieth century, while the Liszt works were firmly settled in the middle of the nineteenth. Furthermore, the Liszt compositions were all written after he had retired (at the age of 35) from his career as a concert pianist; so they mark his own transition from the flamboyant rock-star-of-his-day performer to the more reflective soul who had gone so far as to take minor orders, thus earning the title of Abbé (hence the SF Weekly description of his compositions).

How reflective Liszt actually was will probably always be a matter of opinion. It is hard to tell how sincerely devout his Two Legends of 1863 ("St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds" and "St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waters") actually are; but then the same can be said of just about any "religiously inspired" painting. As might be expected, the birds receive more attention than their Franciscan sermon; but, as a rule, sermons do not lend themselves to musical depiction. One might be cynical and observe that, at the end of the composition (presumably the end of the sermon), the birds have not changed very much; but, given Liszt's past reputation for excess, particularly when he was deliberately playing to the crowd, his grammar of embellishment for depicting those birds is far more subdued. So the focus of the music may well be less on the preaching itself than on the establishment of a communion when Francis comes into the presence of those birds. On the other hand the second Legend is far more dramatic, capturing the contrast between turbulent waves in a raging storm and the serenity of the "other Francis" walking on top of those waves, which may be viewed as another instance of a communion, this time between a holy man and the very forces of nature. Thus, the theme of communion could well have been the stuff of Liszt's reflections; and Glover's performance allowed this theme to emerge across both of the Legends, elevating them beyond two short works that others might dismiss as "mere" tone painting.

The Legends were followed by one movement ("Benediction of God in Solitude") from Liszt's earlier (1852) collection of Poetic and Religious Harmonies. This music was intended to invoke the spirit of meditation; but I fear that my own meditations were preoccupied with that word "solitude." Was this a depiction of a "solitary" God or a divine blessing of a solitary soul? Either way, the implication seemed to be one of communion between an individual mortal and "the" individual God, which contrasts with the broader scope of communion in the Legends. The structuring of this movement into three large sections was also puzzling. Then again, I am not in a particularly good position to appreciate Liszt's particular faith, although, to the extent that I can be capable of meditating on the mysteries of Catholicism, I tend to feel better served by the more meditative piano music of Erik Satie or the seven movements of the more overt Visions de L'Amen by Olivier Messiaen.

From a more secular point of view, this was also a time when Liszt applied his compositional talent to the transcription of opera music, particularly the works of his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner. The earliest (1859) of these efforts in the "Fantasy on Themes from Rienzi." In his notes for the Dover edition of the Liszt transcriptions, Charles Suttoni calls Rienzi "Wagner's first mature opera;" and it would probably be fair to call it the first opera the "sounds like Wagner." The Wikipedia entry for this opera tells you pretty much what you need to know about it:

Rienzi is Wagner's third completed opera, and is mostly written in a Grand Opera style. The first performance in Dresden was well received despite running over six hours (including intermissions). Later, Wagner experimented both with giving the opera over two evenings and making cuts for performance in a single evening.

Because of its atypical style, and its sheer length, Rienzi is rarely performed today, and has never been performed at the Bayreuth Festival. Wagner later saw the work as an embarrassment, but it remained one of his most successful until his death. An ingenious staging at the English National Opera in London, produced by Nicholas Hytner in the 1980s, placed the hero in the context of 20th century totalitarianism.

The opera concerns the life of Cola di Rienzi, a medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles' rebellion against the people's power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which has earlier urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

It may also be worth mentioning that, while one of the more reliable accounts of Rienzi can be found in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Wagner wrote his own libretto for this opera based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel, Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes (which is not the source for the most famous Bulwer-Lytton quote, "It was a dark and stormy night")! I find this particularly ironic, since the only other composer I know who has drawn upon text by Bulwer-Lytton is Charles Ives!

Liszt's transcription is a relatively modest one (which, considering the length of Wagner's score, is a blessing). It is structured around only a few of the basic themes, two of which most of us know from the overture; and it does not go overboard (or at least very far overboard) with its embellishments. It does make a sharp contrast with his more religious work, but it also allowed Glover to bring his recital to a rousing conclusion.

Does it make sense to approach Rachmaninoff and Medtner by viewing them from "the other side of a transition" that began with Liszt? As a Conservatory student, Rachmaninoff was a pupil of Alexander Siloti, who, in turn, had studied under Liszt; and Liszt was part of his performing repertoire (although he does not receive much attention in the recordings Rachmaninoff made). On the other hand there seems to be less evidence of a "Liszt connection" for Medtner. Nevertheless, his Opus 31, Number1 "Improvisation" is a set of variations on a theme that abounds with harmonic ambiguities of a sort similar to those with which Liszt experimented towards the end of his life (but whose origins may best be traced to the "Chaos" prelude to Joseph Haydn's Die Schöpfung). Unfortunately, after stating the theme, Medtner immediately launches into an abundance of embellishments, which, at least to a first-time listener, tend to obscure all those ambiguities that make the theme so interesting.

Sadly, the problem here may not have resided strictly with Medtner's compositional technique. I was familiar with only one of the three compositions that Glover performed, the "Danza festiva," which had been recorded by Egon Petri in 1958. It did not take a lot of familiarity to realize that Glover's rushed approach to this composition pretty much deprived it on any dance-like qualities; but it was nice to have Petri as a point of reference to confirm that those qualities were there in the first place. Thus, the shortcomings of the Medtner portion of the program may have had more to do with Glover focusing so much on the notes as to miss the music than with Medtner's skills as a composer.

Rachmaninoff was represented by his second (Opus 36) piano sonata, composed in 1913 (four years after his "notorious" third piano concerto) and revised extensively in 1931. If the "monster status" of "Rocky 3" comes more from the cinema world than from Rachmaninoff's biography, the revision of the second sonata had to do with Rachmaninoff's own recognition of superfluity in the massive wash of notes he had composed. Ultimately, neither version satisfied Rachmaninoff, and eventually Vladimir Horowitz was granted permission to compile a performing version based on the best of both attempts. This is, for the most part, the version that Glover performed; and, while it has a clear sense of structure, that "massive wash of notes" is still there. On the other hand, if Glover had approached this work the same way he had approached the Medtner compositions, there may be more music in this sonata than made it to at least this listener's ears; but I still have to wonder whether or not, at some point towards the end of his life, Rachmaninoff may have just resigned himself to the problem that "the music just wasn't there" in this particular piece of work.

Recovering the Vision?

On September 22, 2006 I used my old blog to put up a post entitled, "Has the United Nations Failed the Vision of its Founders?" Its point of departure was an ABC News article based on the following argument:

Of the 20 people listed as the world's worst dictators in a new book, Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Dictators by David Wallechinsky, a best-selling author and historian, at least two are in New York this week: the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, and the President of Pakistan, the U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf.

According to a report just released by Al Jazeera English based on their wire services, the United Nations may be recovering its vision:

The Washington Post newspaper earlier reported that the prosecutor of the ICC would seek an arrest warrant for al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity, citing UN officials and diplomats.

Publicly, the United Nations has remained quiet over the issue that could pit the demands of the UN-backed ICC against UN interests in deploying a peace force in Darfur.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general declined on Thursday to say who would be named or what the consequences might be for the struggling UN-African Union force.

Seven soldiers of the force were killed in an attack by unidentified militia on Tuesday.

"Peace without justice cannot be sustainable," he said. "I will have to assess
all the situations when there will be an announcement by the ICC."

There is not much news in the observation that al-Bashir has not been "part of the solution" when it comes to bringing peace to Darfur; but now we have the first step of official action based on the old motto from the Sixties that names him as "part of the problem." Meanwhile, those of us with a sense of irony may appreciate that the United States State Department saw fit to comment of this action:

The US state department has confirmed that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court (ICC) will seek an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

"I understand that there is some notice that the prosecutor intends to go before a panel of judges to present information and request for a warrant," Sean McCormack, a state department spokesman, told reporters on Friday.

That this is irony rather than chutzpah (which would threaten yesterday's award and our President's appreciation of round numbers) resides in the fact that the United States still does not recognize the ICC, meaning that the United States remains little more than a disinterested observer where the plight of Darfur is concerned. All things considered, this occasion would probably been better served by the State Department keeping its institutional mouth shut (unlike their Chutzpah Award-winning leader) and referring inquiring reporters to the press representatives of the United Nations.

All Brahms All the Time

I am not sure whether or not the Fates from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play, Iphigenie auf Tauris, whose song provided the text for a setting for chorus and orchestra by Johannes Brahms, have anything to do with my listening habits; but it was at least a happy accident that the day on which I took my Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven to the post office as part of my exchange agreement with Collectors' Choice happened to be the day on which my order of the Brahms Gesamtwerk arrived! As I previously observed, this 60-CD set is even smaller than the Beethoven collection; and this makes for an interesting problem in packaging. The smaller the box gets, the less room there is to provide a printed index of the contents of each CD! On the other hand this is the first package to provide information about the performers as part of that index. This makes for at least one interesting decision regarding allocation of the available space: There is a single entry for the thirteen discs containing "Songs & Duets," followed by an enumeration of the twelve vocalists and nine accompanists (but no mention of the obbligato viola soloist in Opus 91).

In the earlier collections I had examined, I basically thought about the performers as I encountered them on their respective discs. Thus, as I had observed, I was particularly pleased with some of the "familiar and favorite faces" I found in the Beethoven collection. On the other hand most of the names in the collections for Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were far less familiar; but I was more interested in the relatively strong attention that had been given to recordings made with "period instruments" (often meaning reproductions of instruments from the time of composition, sometimes more manageable than the "original" instruments). Nevertheless, I was glad to see that I would now have a recording of Janos Starker playing the cello side of the Opus 102 "Double Concerto" (perhaps my own all-time favorite work for cello and orchestra, even if the cello has to share the spotlight with a violin), even if I know nothing about the violinist Emmy Verhey. I also again encountered Joseph Kalichstein, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson for the three piano trios, which reminded me of my time in the New York area when my wife and I attended all the recitals that they had arranged, in partnership with the Guarneri Quartet, to perform all of Brahms' chamber music for piano and strings (including Brahms' contribution to the "F.A.E." sonata) at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The real surprise (and delight), however, was the disc that included performances of the piano versions of the Opus 56b Haydn variations (two pianos) and the Opus 39 waltzes (four hands on one piano) by the Israeli wife-husband duo of Bracha Eden and Alexander Tamir. I used to have this recording on vinyl. I had purchased it as a "sentimental journey," since my first exposure to Opus 56b had come while I was living in Israel; and the performance was by Eden and Tamir. Both my wife and I have always preferred the piano version; so this quickly become one of the most heavily-played vinyls in my collection. When I gave up the vinyls, I had little hope of recovering these performances; so that one disc is, for me at least, a real jewel in the collection.

On the whole, however, what I have already heard and what I hope to hear (barring another problem with a dud CD) will all be up against very stiff competition. Where the symphonies are concerned, I am fanatically attached to the two conductors whose recordings I already have, Sergiu Celibidache (both the "unauthorized" Arkadia and the "authorized" EMI) and Wilhelm Furtwängler. The Brilliant collection features Jaap van Zweden conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra; and he certainly brings some interesting ideas about shaping the music to his performances (as well as taking the repeat in the first movement of the Opus 73 second symphony, which even Brahms was inclined to ignore); but I have to wonder if Brilliant could have done a better job of allocating disc space for these recordings. More problematic has been pianist Karin Lechner, whose performances of the two piano concertos (as well as the Opus 119 piano pieces included on the disc with the second concerto) were a bit too "polite" for my tastes; but I realize that my own preference for an "edge of vulgarity" in certain performances is probably a personal idiosyncrasy!

Nevertheless, even if I do not agree with all of the performance decisions, there is still a lot to say about having the opportunity to listen to even the most familiar of Brahms' compositions in the context of his "complete portfolio." This is the point I tried to make in taking issue with Anthony Tommasini's questioning the virtue of the Bis plan to release a 70-CD collection of the complete works of Jean Sibelius. In our quest to be better listeners, context may not (as the cliché goes) be everything; but it should not be treated as too negligible to be ignored. Since no recording, whether of Sibelius, Brahms, or Bach, can ever compete with the impact of a "live" performance, the primary virtue of collections of recordings resides in their capacity to prepare us for these "real thing" events; and, considering how many program notes end up trying to put a composition in its historical context, it is nice to be able to draw upon recordings at home to flesh out the musical side of those contexts.

Bush Hits the Big Ten!

President George W. Bush has been sitting with nine Chutzpah of the Week awards since May 18. Apparently he has decided that part of his legacy should be a good round number of these awards, and what better place to seal the deal than at the G8 summit? As we can tell from this Telegraph report by Deputy Political Editor Robert Winnett and Urmee Khan, there is now no doubt that the deal for the tenth award has been sealed:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

One official was later quoted as saying, "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution;" to which my reaction is, "Did everyone think he was making a joke?" Could it be that he actually wanted this superlative to be part of his legacy?

Furthermore, as sort of a cherry on top of this particular whipped cream of chutzpah, Winnett and Khan observed that this was not the only Bush proclamation that raised eyebrows:

Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice".

The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it.

Might this be a sign that at some time early in the coming year, the White House will issue an apology for the rest of the "sloppy work" executed over the last eight years?

Profile in Courage

Apparently, chemotherapy and radiation treatment are not going to stop Senator Edward Kennedy from doing the people's business, particularly where health care is involved. The report on the BBC NEWS Web site demonstrated this in an account that was a bit heavy on the dramatic:

Mr Kennedy, 76, flew to Washington from his Boston home to back a key bill concerning the US Medicare system.

He arrived in the Senate to a standing ovation from both sides of the chamber.

The bill - to cancel a pay cut for doctors treating Medicare patients - passed by 69 votes to 30. President Bush has threatened to veto it.

Arriving in the Senate chamber to sustained applause from Democrats and Republicans, Mr Kennedy eventually steadied himself to raise his hand and pronounce a loud "Aye" in favour of the bill.

There were loud cheers from the public gallery as he cast his vote.

If the BBC tried to reduce this all to political theater, then at least it was political theater at its best. The state of health care in the United States continues to be, at best, pathetic; and even the slightest efforts at reform always come under siege. Kennedy took this bill seriously and wanted the rest of us to know it:

Win, lose or draw, I wanted to be here. I wasn't going to take the chance that my vote could make the difference.

This makes quite a contrast to the presumptive nominee from Kennedy's own political party, who seemed to think that fighting the best possible battle for that nomination was more important than representing his constituency. Yes, Kennedy was putting on a show; but that does not negate the significance that the show was about something that mattered. These days, I am trying to figure out what really matters to Barack Obama (just as I would like to know his vote on this Medicare bill)!

"My pop's bigger than your pop!"

The most memorable political cartoon from my youth illustrated two enormous hydrogen bombs, one with an American flag and the other with a USSR flag, facing each other while standing on the surface of a too-small planet earth, each shouting at the other, "My pop's bigger than your pop!" Mad Magazine took this over the top in their own "article" about Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), with a series of hyperbolic images demonstrating that, by the time the fourth such missile was launched, there would be precious left of the surface of the earth to target. It was this wave of nostalgia that overwhelmed me when I saw the first images of Iran's missile test, now accompanied by follow-up reports provided by the BBC. At a time when the G8 still cannot get its act together on the economic necessity of sustaining the planet at all, we now have to put up with a new planet-destroying pissing contest, primarily between Israel and Iran but with the United States apparently only too eager to rush to support Israel. Little is gained from reproducing the rhetoric behind this pissing contest. I suspect that any reader who has been following the news regularly could invent "official statements" for all three parties with little more than a moment's thought. More disconcerting is that portion of the BBC report that spills over into the impact of this event on the Presidential campaign:

Describing Iran as a "great threat", the Democratic challenger, Barack Obama, called for tougher sanctions while his Republican rival, John McCain, said the test demonstrated the need for effective missile defence.

McCain's reaction should not surprise anyone; but, if we needed any evidence for taking Obama's AIPAC speech seriously, this will certainly contribute to it. Perhaps this is what he meant when he talked to his AIPAC audience about "tough and principled diplomacy;" but, now that he no longer needs to be audacious to capture the nomination, I fear that he has also decided that he no longer needs to be principled. As the old joke goes, we are up to our eyeballs in alligators; and it seems that Obama is as interested as McCain in breeding more of those alligators!

When Brilliant is not so Brilliant

As a footnote to Sunday's post about exploring the complete works of Beethoven at an affordable prince thanks to Brilliant Classics, I need to remind readers of a previous observation I had made about this business. The problem with these Gesamtwerk editions is that, the greater the number of CDs in the collection, the greater the probability that at least one of them will be a dud. I previously had written that, when I had purchased their box of the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn, one of the discs was missing. The jacket was there, but it contained a duplicate of another disc in the collection. Unfortunately, at least according to their Web site, Brilliant is not set up to communicate with mere mortal customers; thus, the site supports only business-to-business communication.

Fortunately, all my purchases have been through Collectors' Choice Music. I continue to do business with them because, not only do they often give really good discounts (as was the case for the Beethoven and Brahms collections), but also it is very easy to conduct business with the human being. The only downside of human conversation is that the voice at the other end of the line is obliged (by script, probably) to try to cross-sell all sorts of things you don't want; but they have always been very good about a patient remark like, "I'm not interested in that stuff right now." As I had observed with my Haydn purchase, Collectors' Choice will not replace individual discs; but they will replace the entire set through an easy exchange process in which they cover all expenses. Given my past experiences with trying to communicate with a real person over at Amazon for any reason, I shall take the ease of getting through to a human every time!

I was reminded of this because yesterday I hit a dud in the Beethoven collection. This time it was a disc that just would not play without skipping, and visual examination made it clear why. There were also sorts of marks on the surface (which could not be removed by accepted cleaning methods) that were clearly interfering with attempts to scan the bits on the disc. I went so far as to verify this by trying to do a super-slow RIP with my Nero software, which made it through the worst of the tracks but basically reproduced the skips! I contacted Collectors' Choice and give them the whole story. Within minutes after my telephone conversation, I had the material I needed for returning the box in the Inbox. Given my tendency to gripe about service practices that verge on the pathological, I feel it important to point out when someone still knows how to get it right!

Has Progressivism Lost Touch with the World of Work?

Andrew Keen's Great Seduction post yesterday, "The tyranny of free content," may actually have less to do with the content itself than with what we might call "the work behind the content." The text behind his sermon came from a talk he gave to a conference of bookseller's called Digitize or Die:

The content business is in crisis, if you want to look at the way it will go take a look at the music industry and newspapers, these sectors have really been on the front-lines of a perfect storm: the problem is that content has become simply an adjunct of advertising.

While I basically agree with this, I find that phrase "content business" a potentially dangerous abstraction that distracts our attention from the more concrete focus of those who work in the "content business" and would like to view their work as a profession from which they can garner a living wage. It is the workers who are in crisis, since the "business" will always be protected by the unholy alliance between its senior managers and its shareholders.

Thus, it is relevant that Keen should invoke Timothy Egan and a blog post he provided to the New York Times Web site entitled "Save the Press." Egan pulls no punches in assessing the fate of journalism in the world the Internet has made, particularly in light of that Internet-driven mantra of free content (as in "information wants to be free"):

Besides, there’s plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post — even though they are built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering. One day soon these Web info-slingers will find that you can’t produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter.

And just how much do most contributors at the The Huffington Post make? Nothing! “Not our financial model,” as the co-founder, Ken Lerer famously said. From low pay to no pay — the New Journalism at a place that calls itself an Internet newspaper.

Yes, the Brentwood bold-face types who grace HuffPo’s home page can afford to work for free, but it’s un-American, to say the least.

Long ago, I was a member of the steelworkers union, and also a longshoreman. If any of those guys on the docks heard that I was now part of a profession that asked people to labor for nothing, they’d laugh in their lunch buckets — then probably shut The Huffington Post down. Doesn’t the “progressive” agenda, much touted on their pages, include a living wage?

We could be left with a national snark brigade, sniping at the remaining dailies in their pajamas, never rubbing shoulders with a cop, a defense attorney or a distressed family in a Red Cross shelter after a flood.

It was that penultimate paragraph that got to me most of all. Egan is not only a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter; he is also a writer with first-hand experience (through membership) of the labor movement and its unions. He understands the world of work, not to mention the impact of progressivism on that world, in ways that those who now inhabit what I recently called the "Sweatshops of the Blogosphere" cannot even begin to comprehend.

Yet it is from the blogosphere that we hear the most strident voices for that "progressive" agenda, which is why Egan's scare quotes are so relevant. However, in the interest of always trying to find another angle, I have to wonder if the problem lies with the bloggers or with the current state of progressivism. When we consider the impact of progressivism on the world of work, we are pretty much restricting our attention to the workings of the American manufacturing economy. Could it be that those who champion those achievements have not yet grokked the transition to a service economy? Remember the strength of the progressive motto, "A fair day's work for a fair day's pay?" Just how does that apply to a troll in a cubicle reading the answers to customer service calls out of a script? Look at how little progressivism has achieved for teachers, even the organized ones? If they are still stuck in a manufacturing mindset, can we really expect them to take on "the plight of working journalists" (the phrase Keen invoked in his own comments of Egan's post)?

Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society is now about 25 years old. A "special anniversary edition" came out in 1999. He may not have called everything correctly, but this book does not deserve to be treated as either a relic or a stale monument of social theory. It provides many key insights into how the world of work has changed, and it would be nothing short of pathetic if all those now espousing the political rhetoric of change fail to appreciate the impact of change on the world of work that has now abandoned so many skilled workers.

The Fifth of July

No, this is not a retrospective post about Lanford Wilson. Rather, it is a response to a reminder from Anastasia Ustinova in the San Francisco Chronicle that July 5 is an important date in the history of labor organizing:

On July 5, 1934, long known as Bloody Thursday, more than 2,000 strikers gathered on the streets of San Francisco, demanding fair working conditions for longshoremen, who worked long hours with little compensation and spotty health care. According to the union, in any given year there were as many recorded accidents as there were longshoremen employed.

That day, San Francisco police backed by the National Guard attacked the union hall with tear gas and shot into a crowd, killing political activist Nick Bordoise and dockworker Howard Sperry. The following week, more than 40,000 people filled the streets of San Francisco mourning their deaths. Before Bloody Thursday, several workers were killed in San Pedro (Los Angeles County) and Portland, Ore.

That year, longshore workers won their demand for union recognition, wage increases and a union-controlled hiring hall.

"An injury to one is an injury to all," Corine Thornton, 85, said on Saturday, citing the union's motto. "The strike made it possible to negotiate wages and work conditions. The bosses had all the power, and that's why we had to be together."

Since then, members of the union on the Pacific Coast have been getting together for the annual event to remember those who lost their lives in what turned to be one of the defining moments in American trade unionism.

About 400 of them gathered Saturday at the ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco to reflect on what has changed over the years. On the sidewalk outside the union hall were the chalk outlines of two bodies, representing the two victims of the 1934 strike.

"It is very important for the younger members to listen to the old-timers; as I am bringing new members to take my place, some of the youngsters have to learn how to carry themselves," said Josh Williams, 75, a retired longshoreman who hosted Martin Luther King Jr. at a Local 10 membership meeting in 1967, a year before King was assassinated. "If you break away from the history, you have nothing."

As Frank Cresi, president of the ILWU's memorial association put it, "Since then, San Francisco has been a union town." The quote from Josh Williams is the real kicker for me, though. Particularly troubling is that the extent to which we have broken from history is basically a product of our ignorance of it, rather than any sort of willful defiance. At the risk of sounding too much like an old fart, this is most disturbing in the prevailing youth element in the blogosphere, which seems more occupied with that cliché about inventing the future than with learning from the past. As that youth element continues to inflate its importance in the coming election, I suspect that Williams could teach them all a thing or two!

From Mozart to Bach to Beethoven

Having first introduced myself to Brilliant Classics through their collection of the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and then received their Bach Edition as a gift (as I previously observed, in the close quarters of a condominium which already housed the Teldec Bach 2000 collection), I have now decided that, given their economies of both price and space, that it is worth investigating similar Gesamtwerk projects. Thus, having now made two ascents of "Mount Bach," I am now in the midst of my first expedition into the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven. This is a case where I have already covered most of the major categories, such as symphonies, concertos, and large portions of chamber music; but, as I did with other Brilliant collections, I am working my way through the CDs in the order in which they are packaged.

Before getting into the music itself, I wanted to make one comment on the idea of dispensing with printed liner notes and providing a data CD instead. I already observed that this CD was almost essential for finding any specific cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, since there is no systematic order to how they have been assigned to the CDs in the collection. However, the CD for the Mozart collection allowed me to pursue a specific question far more thoroughly than I could with my other resources and, in the course of that pursuit, turned up an interesting missing item. At a time when I was trying to address the phenomenological question of how the ear deals with the interplay of sequencing and simultaneity in complex contrapuntal structures, such as fugues, it occurred to me that, while I had written about this issue in the performance of Bach, I was not quite sure just how many fugues Mozart had actually written (not counting his arrangements of Bach). Since all of the files on the Mozart CD were in PDF, it was easy enough to have Windows search the entire CD for the text string "fugue." This gave me more "hits" than I found when I consulted "fugue" in the index of Louis Biancolli's Mozart Handbook; but, as I anticipated, it still left me with a rather modest number. What surprised me, however, was that I did not get a hit for the K. 546 Adagio and Fugue for string quartet (or string orchestra); and I confirmed this was a second search on the string "546!" The fugue was there in its two-piano version (K. 426); but the adagio seemed to have fallen through the cracks! My guess is that this happens to just about every project that tries to be "complete;" so I was more perplexed that it took me this long to notice the omission!

Of course recognizing that something is missing has a lot to do with the size of the search space. The Mozart collection has 170 CDs, making it the largest of the Brilliant projects. The Bach Edition clocks in with 155 CDs (which happens to be two more than in the Teldec project). The Beethoven collection is far more modest by a binary order of magnitude, with only 85 CDs; and, as I have previously observed, there are many settings in which he is clearly not at the top of his game. Nevertheless, thus far this has been an interesting journey, due in no small part to the number of "familiar and favorite faces" I have encountered among the performers. I was aware of this from the very first CD, since the symphony recordings are those of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under the baton of Kurt Masur, who remains one of my favorite conductors and whose visits to San Francisco I always treasure. I was equally delighted to encounter Joseph Kalichstein, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson providing the "solo trio" of the Opus 56 "Triple Concerto;" and, since I already had his recordings of the piano sonatas, I was glad to have the opportunity to hear what Friedrich Gulda made of the piano concertos.

What is more important is that these are performances that acknowledge and appreciate the degree of wit that Beethoven could bring to his compositions, particularly in the years before he had to confront the prospect of deafness as a "lasting malady." In purchasing this particular collection, my greatest fear was that too much of it was going to be "Beethoven the monument," rather than a Beethoven composed of a broad spectrum of human emotions. Now, while I am in the midst of the performances of the piano trios by the Borodin Trio, my only real worry will be with the contributions by Alfred Brendel, who does not monumentalize the music he plays but usually turns me off (both in recital and on recordings) with an intellectual perspective that ignores the forest by concentrating on too many trees. So, as they say, watch this space for further developments!

Another further development will be the arrival of the Brahms project, which is also now on the market. This one drops to only 60 CDs, and I hope it will compensate for all of the big boxes of the Deutsche Grammophon Brahms Edition that I gave up when I no longer had space for them. Truth be told, there were a lot of uneven elements in that collection, particularly when it came to Daniel Barenboim's accompaniment of the complete collection of all of the songs for solo voice. Meanwhile, the Beethoven collection should provide me with an abundance of ways to think about listening to this music while the Brahms collection is on the way!

Celebrating July 4th with Ridicule

Yesterday I wrote about how the ridiculous, if handled properly in a dramatic setting, could lead to insights of the deepest profundity. At the same time I have also argued that, when we try to take stock of the messes in which we are now bemired as a result of incredibly bad decisions in both the public and private sectors, ridicule is likely to be more effective than outrage. For one thing calling attention to outrage, particularly if it involves using an adjective like "bitter," may, as Barack Obama discovered, do more harm than good. On the other hand ridicule, if deployed in a manner that stresses shared humor, rather than insult or attack, can have considerable public appeal. Consider the extent to which the current electorate turns to The Daily Show to try to get a handle on serious issues of both national and global concern. Consider the extent to which Hillary Clinton attached as much value to appearances on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live as she did to being interviewed by the "established pundits" of the news media. Consider that, when the Nevada primary was coming right down to the wire, Obama delivered a speech in Las Vegas that is the closest he has ever come to a standup comedy routine. Finally, consider my favorite example, Dennis Kucinich, who discovered that the media would only cover him if he said something ridiculous and gradually (but not effectively enough, unfortunately) began to acquire Charles Ludlam's skill at using the ridiculous as a window into the profound.

There is no shortage of outlets for ridicule in San Francisco, but the one with the greatest legacy would have to be The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which prepares a politically satirical play that tours the Bay Area every summer. As an act of heart-felt political profundity, the tour traditionally begins in San Francisco on the Fourth of July; and the play is preceded by a benediction delivered by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (concluding with "Go forth and sin more."). Last year's production, Making a Killing, included performers who explicitly assumed the roles of Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice; but this year the District of Columbia is little more than a warped El Dorado in the imagination of Faustina Page, who is loosely based on Katherine Harris (who, at least as the story was told in Recount, was more than capable of ridiculing herself).

Indeed, this year's production, Red State, was, in many ways, a well-needed dose of ridicule to assuage all the aggravation stirred up by excellently-articulated outrage of Recount. Like Recount, Red State is all about the extent to which the electoral process itself has become fouled (as they prefer to say) up beyond all recognition; and, for an added measure, the very title revisits how we have endowed the semantics of "red" with a severe bipolar disorder. Thus, for the character Eugene "red" is a synonym for "Communist" and is therefore (still) the greatest danger of thinking that turns too far to the left (in the language of the Sisters' benediction). We still see this connection in Great Britain, where red is the color (or should I say "colour") of the Labor Party, while the Conservative color is blue. Over on this side of the pond, due to some fluke probably known only to the media, red has become the color of the Republican party on maps of election results, leaving blue for the Democrats. We also encounter the colors in the two settings, the town of Bluebird, Kansas and Ruby City (which figures in a clever deus ex machina shamelessly appropriated from The Wizard of Oz).

The basic plot concerns an election that is so close that the results ultimately depend on the outcome in Bluebird, whose only voting machine was delivered very late in the day and broke down before the votes could be tallied. This provides the "Mimers" with no end of targets for their agitprop barbs. We quickly see the extent to which Bluebird, itself, is fouled up beyond all recognition, primarily because it has always been neglected by the Federal government, particularly when it comes to budget allocations; and the plot revolves around a scheme to hold the results of their election hostage until all of its problems get fixed. At the risk of spoiling the punch line, the ultimate result is that, as a result of all the coverage Bluebird gets on CNN, other electoral districts across the country decide to withdraw their results in solidarity (and the hope of getting their share of that budgetary pie). The whole production thus becomes an outrageous parable of change, not in terms of the platitudes that drowned the electorate during the primaries but in terms of how to achieve useful actions. Thus, there may also be a lesson in here for the candidate who first thrust the concept of change into the current political discourse: Who would be seriously audacious must first learn to be seriously ridiculous.

The Dramatic Impact of the Ridiculous

I do not think I have ever given a Chutzpah of the Week award based on an "Arts Page" story. However, since I am always on the lookout for opportunities to point out positive connotations of chutzpah, I would like to assign this week's award to Chloe Veltman, principal Stage reviewer for SF Weekly; and, while her action may have been local, its implications are considerably more far-reaching. The basis for the award was her decision to publish a review of the San Francisco Opera production of Lucia di Lammermoor in the same column that also reviewed the local Thrillpeddlers production of Charles Busch's play, Theodora: She-Bitch of Byzantium. Her primary reason for this coupling was "that these two wildly different theatrical experiences have quite a bit in common – including a shared journey from the ridiculous to the sublime." Now my guess is that, while Thrillpeddlers will enjoy this approach to coverage, Veltman will probably raise quite a few hackles among the opera lovers, particularly those so glad that Natalie Dessay finally came to San Francisco; and that is where the chutzpah resides. However, now that I have given her the award willingly and cheerfully, I have to say that I am not sure I entirely agree with her reasoning.

First of all, to set the record straight, I have never seen any of the Thrillpeddlers productions. I have seen Busch himself, but only once in a revival of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. On the other hand I managed to spend a fair amount of my time in Manhattan building up a healthy base of experience around what could be called the "New York Ridiculous" movement. This began with my first trip to the Playhouse of the Ridiculous to see John Vaccaro's Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit; but it tended to focus on Charles Ludlam's spin-off troupe, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Looking back on those years, I would now be so bold as to say that any history of opera in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century that ignored Ludlam would be seriously negligent.

Ludlam's contribution, however, had less to do with the relation between the ridiculous and the sublime and more to do with the power of the ridiculous to disclose tragedies of the human heart that the sublime sometimes fails to reach. This was most evident in his "flagrantly unauthorized" biography of Maria Callas, Galas. (Prior to this Ludlam had already taken on the opera world with a major act of chutzpah, collapsing the entirety of Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen cycle into a single evening of Yiddish Theater entitled Der Ring Gott Farblonjet.) Galas is, without a doubt, an experience of the ridiculous; but it is also a far more penetrating examination of the trials of Callas' life than the one that emerged from Terrence McNally's more serious effort, Master Class. For my money this cuts to the heart of how the "ridiculous" spirit informs how we can watch an opera like Lucia, since, if it is really "all about the diva," as I had argued, then Ludlam reveals more about "the diva" than we may ever want to know. Furthermore, because when this work was first performed, he was "the diva," he was also the portal through which we made the journey from the ridiculous to the profound (rather than the sublime). (My wife used to say, "Charles can walk across the stage in heels better than any woman, with the possible exception of Bette Midler!")

Ludlam's primary instrument of the ridiculous was his capacity to throw the all-too-familiar in a new light. Thus, while Galas is "all about the diva," he cast it as a two-act play (one act for "the rise" and one for "the decline") in which each act is based on a separate literary source. The "rise" is presented in the framework of Rebecca, where Mrs. Danvers is transformed into Bruna Lina Rasta, a "mad soprano" who becomes Galas' personal maid and comes out with no end of gems of wisdom, my favorite being, "You only have so many Normas and each one is numbered. Make each one count." When we shift acts from "rise" to "decline," however, Ludlam exchanges Daphne du Maurier for Euripides' play Medea, setting the act on the luxury yacht of Aristotle Plato Socrates Odysseus; and Bruna becomes the Chorus. For all the ridiculous moments that "season" this act, Ludlam is as serious about his tragic view of Callas as Euripides was about his view of Medea.

Ludlam would have been in his element staging opera. Unfortunately, he had only one opportunity to do this towards the end of this life, when, in Santa Fe, he staged one of the best Fledermaus productions I ever saw. My great regret, however, is that he never had the opportunity to apply his keen sense of the ridiculous (which was right at home in Fledermaus) to a bel canto opera like Lucia, where it could have done a world of good. It is not as if the story would have been compromised, particularly if we consider all the ways in which librettist Salavadore Cammarano compromised Walter Scott's source material. Furthermore, as I have already suggested, Gaetano Donizetti was just not as interested in achieving an effective "fit" between music and narrative the way composers like George Frideric Handel and Wagner were. Ludlam could have used his innate command of the ridiculous to turn a liability into an asset, which I read as one of the underlying principles in the "manifesto" he wrote, which was published at the beginning of The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam.

In other words it is not a question of whether or not the ridiculous elements of Lucia ultimately transport us to the sublime. A mad scene does not succeed by being sublime; it succeeds by being profound and compelling you to its very depths. Had the ridiculous been better directed by a master like Ludlam, the profound would have been just as strong and the time we spent waiting for it would have been more worthwhile.

Academics and the Media

Because my doctoral thesis advisor was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, those of us who worked in his laboratory got used to the regular appearance of reporters who would come by to see the latest demonstrations of results. While they were visiting, they would inevitably tap my advisor for his opinion on not only the nature of intelligence but often "life, the universe, and everything," as Douglas Adams liked to put it. He was always willing to share his opinions, which the reporters always liked. The problem was that he had a tendency to talk to those reporters the same way he talked to his colleagues and students, and this was not a particularly good tactic. What usually happened was that the reporter did not understand very much of what my advisor said; but, unfortunately, reporters are always on the lookout for a good quote. So when my advisor came up with some really good pithy observation, it would then be quoted out of context, thereby transmogrifying from perceptive to way-off-the-wall, if not flat-out-wrong. By the time it appeared in print, it was time to call out the damage control team.

I offer up this little vignette because is appears that Dr. Himanshu Tyagi, about whom I wrote yesterday (thanks to the BBC) on the subject that I called "the child's conception of social networking," seems to have suffered the same fate at the hands of the BBC that my advisor encountered periodically. In other words, in the interest of providing lead material that would lure one to read further, the BBC seems to have missed just about all of the major points that Tyagi was trying to make. The good news is that, for all of its other disadvantages, the world the Internet has made provides a good kit of tools for damage control. Probably because he has a Google Alert on his name, Tyagi sent me electronic mail (clearly a "form letter") with a press release attached, which sets the record straight. Since this was a press release and since I do not want to propagate any further distortion, I shall reproduce it in its entirety:

It is unfortunate that media has reported a sensitive and important issue in a sensationalist way, effectively conveying an alarmist angle to my talk at Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Annual General Meeting. I am surprised that I was not approached for any comments by a large section of the media, including BBC who reported it first, on this issue, as then I would have had the opportunity to put it in right context. However, I am thankful to Sky news and 102-104 FM, Ireland for taking this effort.

To put the talk into context, it was meant for a professional audience, and it purpose was to create awareness amongst psychiatrists about the potential intergenerational difficulties we might run into if we remain oblivious to the growing importance of internet and its application in the lives of young people. I am a full member of Royal College of Psychiatrists and work as a psychiatrist in clinical settings. I addition I have an active interest in psychotherapy. I established the need for this talk after conducting a scientific survey at an international psychiatric conference to measure the attitudes of fellow psychiatrists about internet related mental health issues, which indicated a uniformly poor grasp of digital world amongst the psychiatrists worldwide. I am also the founding director of www.rxpg.com which is subscribed by 60,000 doctors and medical students throughout the world and is running as a hugely successful professional and social network for over 5 years. This dual role has made me aware about a great difference in how internet use is very rapidly changing from being an adjunct to a necessity in life. My background in psychiatry and first hand experience in running a large online community network has allowed me to explore the reasons behind the dependence and evolution of one’s identity in digital world. However, I would not call myself a “leading psychiatrist” or an “expert” which most of the media did without confirming the real facts.

It’s important to understand that my perspective is that of a clinical psychiatrist. I did not “warn” general public or professionals about social working websites as reported. If anything I warned professionals about the dangers of ignorance about the changing world that their young patients exist and are growing in. I highlighted qualitative differences in our subjective experience because the ongoing digital transformation of interpersonal communications and the possible implications of such experiences, at a formative age. I tried to ask questions and did not come to any “conclusions”. My talk was meant to be open-ended, thought provoking and constructive.

The talk was not about social networking websites; it was about interpersonal communication in a digital environment, of which these social networking websites form a small but increasingly significant part. I do not think there is yet sufficient understanding about the issue of suicides in Bridgend to reach any conclusions. The only reference made about the suicides was about the age group these young people
belonged to. I did not draw any conclusions about this unfortunate tragedy.

I feel that a responsible media would not have defeated the purpose of my talk. A tendency to panic is only going to increase the gap in our understanding between digital natives and digital immigrants, as I prefer to call the two generations in question. We need to be clear that we are dealing with two issues here. First is whether we really understand the impact of digital transformation on interpersonal communications and relationships. The conclusions and interpretations about the phenomenon would come later, after understanding it fully, as a second issue. I focused on the first issue.

I called for psychiatrists to be curious about the meaning and importance a digital native is attaching to his or her interpersonal world, a portion of which happens to exist in cyberspace. My profession deals with a vulnerable section of the society. We have a duty to care towards these vulnerable individuals. We would be failing if we do not educate ourselves in time about the meaning of these digital interactions.

How can we know what to do about it if we don’t understand it in the first place? We have to keep an open mind for a positive change. For many people, including people suffering from isolation due to mental health difficulties, Internet can be a powerful tool to get support. It has a very important role to play in future. If we deal with these important issues with an alarming response, we would be alienating a generation.

We fear things when we don’t understand them. Like any other advancement in technology, Internet is going to transform the way we socialise or understand ourselves. We need to understand this transformation by studying the past. We might be able to understand it in a better way by studying the impact on society when global networks of similar scales were introduced in the past e.g. railways and telephones. To find an answer we have to first formulate a question. I don’t think that we have yet been able to ask the right questions. We need to look back to find some of these missing questions.

As I said in my talk, no matter how much we wish to impose our well-established rules onto digital natives, ultimately it’s the migrant who has to adapt and change. And in this digital world, most of us are immigrants. This is a world, which does not belong to my generation. We are entering an intergenerational conflict wherein digital immigrants are trying to import the rules of conventional societies into cyberspace, whereas digital natives are exporting their understanding of shared global culture it to real world. It is a conundrum. Does technology develop first or the social norms about how technology is used? I do not think my generation of mental health professionals, academics or social theorists, who migrated to digital world at a later stage in their life are able to solve this puzzle. It would still be a few years until
a digital native joins my profession and bring his experience into it. Till then we can’t afford to sail in the darkness. We need to start thinking about it now.

Having done my best to set the record straight, I wish to make one observation about how Tyagi's case differs from those my own advisor experienced. Since this was a talk delivered at a professional gathering, unlike my advisor, Tyagi made the valid assumption that he was talking to "colleagues and students." It is clear from his press release that his intention was to speak to them in terms that their professional status merited. Since the BBC report does not even have a name attached to it, we, the unwitting readers, have no idea whether the author of the report had the qualifications to sit in the audience and be spoken to in this matter; for that matter, we have no idea whether or not the author of the report was even in the audience. As a matter of fundamental principles of journalism, the BBC could not have been sloppier in accounting for the sources behind this story!

Now it is no secret that the BBC is having the same budgetary problems as just about any other institution of journalism these days. Nevertheless, this makes for an interesting observation about priorities. At the risk of sounding too catty (and exercising a truly bad pun that will probably only be appreciated by those who regularly watch BBC news on television), it seems as if the BBC is throwing so much of their budget into resources to cover the American Presidential election (which, I have to say, they are doing rather well) that they are short-changing the resources required to provide valid content for their Health division, which is likely to have as much global impact as the current race for the White House. However, even if all of this comes down to a problem of how resources should be allocated, there is no excuse for violating one of the most fundamental commandments of journalism: If you do not have anything valid to say, don't say anything at all!

The Child's Conception of Social Networking

The Royal College of Psychiatrists is having their annual meeting this week. I have no idea how thorough the BBC is in covering this event. However, they seem to have been there to file a report when social networking was on the agenda:

Dr Himanshu Tyagi said sites such as Facebook and MySpace may be harmful.

He told the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual meeting people with active online identities might place less value on their real lives.

And the West London Mental Health NHS Trust expert added this could raise the risk of impulsive acts or even suicide.

They reinforced this point with an extended quote, presumably from the paper that Tyagi delivered:

It's a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don't like it, and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable.

People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating.

It may be possible that young people who have no experience of a world without online societies put less value on their real world identities and can therefore be at risk in their real lives, perhaps more vulnerable to impulsive behaviour or even suicide.

I have long been interested in such matters as the distortion of our sense of reality by social [sic] software and the pathological implications of such distortions; so I took great satisfaction in finding and expert psychiatrist framing this all in a more clinical perspective (even if my own recent focus on the reality factor in social networking has had more to do with adult political behavior). A rebuttal to Tyagi's paper was delivered by psychologist Graham Jones, quoted by the BBC as follows:

For every new generation, the experience they have of the world is a different one.

When the printing press was first invented, I am sure there were crowds of people saying it was a bad thing.

In my experience, the people who tend to be most active on sites such as Facebook or Bebo are those who are most socially active anyway - it is just an extension of what they are already doing.

As is often the case, this is one of those disputes that will probably eventually come down to who has the better data; and, regrettably, the presentation and analysis of specific data sources is beyond the scope of the BBC! The best we can hope is that they will report follow-up findings, even when those findings are not connected to a prestigious convention!

So Many Concerts; So Little Coverage!

Monday's blog post about that recent performance of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie by the Redwood Symphony, from which I tried to extract a lesson in acquiring knowledge of the musical world apparently disturbed a hornets' nest; and I was so occupied with the provoked hornets that I did not have time to write yesterday! Now that I have made a few revisions to the post to anonymize the circumstances and my stings are beginning to heal, I feel as if the main thing I learned is the extent to which acquiring that knowledge is impeded when there is only one source of information. If I truly believe, as I wrote, that "much (if not most) of what we know emerges from our 'conversations' with others" (either face-to-face or through what we read and our capacity to reply and/or comment, now facilitated by the Internet), what happens if there are not enough individuals to make for a beneficial conversation? Every now and then there will be an event for which I read multiple accounts (I shall not waltz around nouns like "review" or "criticism"); but they are vastly outweighed by those events for which I never read an account. If, as I keep arguing, it is the case that we go to concerts in order to learn how to listen, then there is a painful shortage of opportunities for conversations over our listening experiences.

While I have come to write this in the wake of a concert in the San Francisco Bay Area, my guess is that this is a pretty common problem in the United States, if not in many countries around the world. London seems to be one of the few cities where I have been able to read multiple accounts of events; but, if you take into account the number of events that show up in the calendar listings, even there the coverage barely scratches the surface. I suppose this is ultimately one of those cases where I really wish there was more to "long tail" thinking than the hard data appear to endorse. There are any number of performances of music out there on the long tail in terms of attendance figures. The irony is that many of them can be really useful for those learning how to listen and could make for extremely rich conversations about listening experiences. However, the newspapers do not have room to cover such events; and, whether or not they own up to living in an echo chamber, the bloggers tend to focus on the same events that the newspapers cover (perhaps because the newspapers cover them). To be fair San Francisco Classical Voice ran a review of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto; but this provoked a controversial exchange of comments over whether student performers should be reviewed (or, for that matter, named). (I have written about this problem myself. My position is that there is plenty to write about concerning the music and even the matter of performing that music without putting students under pressure by naming their names. I also have my own problem with San Francisco Classical Voice, which is that, all too often, I find myself reading something "by some great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts," as Anna Russell put it. Such writing seldom furthers any conversation about listening experiences!) Meanwhile, as I hope some of my own posts have indicated, the Bay Area offers a plethora of opportunities for listening to chamber music (not to mention the free Master Classes at the Conservatory, which are an excellent approach to learning to listen); yet coverage seems to be restricted to a limited set of "prime" events in an even more limited number of venues.

There are those who seem to believe that getting coverage is primarily the responsibility of the performer. I am sure there are any number of Gilbert and Sullivan fans happy to endorse the "stir it and stump it,/And blow your own trumpet" philosophy; but is that not asking a bit much of a performer who is probably putting no end of waking hours into making sure that the performance has high enough quality to be so "stumped?" Established professionals can often outsource this task to an agent; but those trying to establish themselves, so to speak, are rarely so lucky. I suppose this is one reason that so many performers throw all of their effort behind winning competitions, since competition awards tend to provide a "fast track" to establishment; however, as I continue to observe, that track does not always lead to occasions for better listening experiences.

Sadly, the bottom line appears to be that the interests of good listening experiences and the interests of professional musicians are at frustrating cross-purposes. My guess is that Igor Stravinsky could not have anticipated such a situation when he enjoined us all to be better listeners. After all, he was in a highly reputable (not to mention pretty comfortable) situation when he issued that injunction all those decades ago. It is not worth arguing over whether the situation for performers is better now than it was when Stravinsky put that stake in the ground; but my guess is that the "great man" did not give much thought to the implications of what he said for anyone other than himself! As result, he has laid a rather massive burden on not only the performers but also all of us who are so committed to keeping our conversations about music going!