Another Side of Hayek

The name of Friedrich Hayek comes up on this blog from time to time; and, by my count, I have invoked it in three contexts:

1. Most recently has been his role as a "founding father" of "Chicago School" economics, known best for its mathematical models of "efficient" markets in support of the ideology of "free" (as in maximally deregulated) markets. Ironically, when he joined the University of Chicago in October of 1950, he was a Professor of Social and Moral Science. According to John Nef, "the economists had opposed his appointment in Economics four years before largely because they regarded his Road to Serfdom as too popular a work for a respectable scholar to perpetrate."
2. The Road to Serfdom is the second of my own contexts. One can understand why the University of Chicago viewed this book with a jaundiced eye. Ideologically, it opposed the economic philosophy that had extricated the United States from the Great Depression and then provided the foundations for economic recovery after the Second World War. If that were not enough to make the book questionable, if not heretical, it had also been published in condensed from by the Readers' Digest, hardly a suitable entry for an academic resume! Ironically, Hayek wrote the book to confront the spread of socialism across the world, viewing Joseph Stalin as a worst-case-scenario of consequences. Here is what I wrote about the book last year:

   Hayek's Road to Serfdom addressed the question of how, through subtle manipulations in social context, a free society could prepare itself for fascist domination. His target was the rigid controls of economic planning; but, were he alive today, he might view technocentrism through the same lens, since, at the end of the day, it, too, is all about control.

   Thus, the very arguments that have fomented the knee-jerk alarmist fears of socialism that now contaminate serious efforts to deliberate our way out of the current economic crisis may just as easily explain why we are in the mess that now confronts us. Hayek may have made some good points about the danger of ceding control to fascist domination; but in the early Forties he could hardly have anticipated that a society could end up dominated by sophisticated technologies they did not understand, technologies that could enable and facilitate social disorders far beyond the abuses of deregulated markets (the broader view I was taking in writing about Hayek a year ago).

3. Finally, there is the Hayek who wrote "Economics and Knowledge," based on his 1936 presidential address to the London Economic Club. This was the Hayek who learned his economics from Carl Menger's Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, perhaps the first serious text to question the premise of intrinsic value in favor of value that "can only be determined in relation to other possible uses," as Stephen Kresge put it in his introduction to Hayek on Hayek. This use-based context enabled Hayek to develop a corollary to Menger's premise to the effect that, as I put it last year, "economic behavior may ultimately depend more on the exchange of knowledge than on the exchange of value." I suppose that the neglect of this paper can be attributed to our cultural ignorance of history, just as the fundamentalist reading of The Road to Serfdom is a product of our faith-based ideologies.

My interest in Hayek has been revived because, having finally slogged my way to the end of The World in Six Songs here in the pastoral setting of Tomales, California, I turned to Hayek on Hayek for a bit more substance in my reading. I particularly enjoyed Kresge's biographical introduction, whose "Chicago School" ideological asides were kept to a tolerable minimum. More important was my first exposure to one of Hayek's final works, The Sensory Order. I suppose that the theme that unites the three items on my list is Hayek's recognition that any attempt to model the social world mathematically would require what we now call a "complex system," based on nonlinear equations whose interactive behavior cannot be reduced to the better-understood principle of linear systems and that, from a statistical point of view, may easily be perceived as chaotic. This is probably why my sometime-colleague Brian Arthur, whose research now specializes in complexity theory, holds Hayek in such high regard. Hayek's personal philosophy emerged from his own understanding of complexity through the principle that you need to be very careful in trying to control mathematical systems that you do not understand very well (if at all), which is the philosophy behind The Road to Serfdom and explains why the book is as much about technocentrism as it is about socialism.

In The Sensory Order Hayek became bold enough to take on the mother of all complex systems, human consciousness. The result was a book that was "largely unread" (as Kresge politely put it); but that neglect probably had to do with it being too early for its own good. Professionally, Hayek was always interested in patterns; so it should not surprise anyone that the mental capacity for dealing with patterns should have served as the foundation for his approach to consciousness. Consider this summary that Kresge provides in Hayek on Hayek:

The classifications which the mind acquires to sort out undifferentiated sensations stem from prior experience. "Every sensation, even the 'purest' must therefore be regarded as an interpretation of an event in the light of the past experience of the individual or the species." The use of a prior classification to determine the 'sense' of a sensation differs from Kant's use of an a priori category in that Hayek's classifications emerge within the process of perception itself and do not remain fixed. They are not equivalent to a principle or axiom. And therein lies the link—or "linkage," in his terminology—with the development of spontaneous orders.

"The reclassification which is thus performed by the mind is a process similar to that through which we pass in learning to read aloud a language which is not spelled phonetically. We learn to give identical symbols different values according as they appear in combination with different other symbols, and to recognize different groups of symbols as being equivalent without even noticing the individual symbols" (The Sensory Order, p. 169).

The "family resemblance" of these ideas to Gerald Edelman's biologically-based model of consciousness, which, as I have observed, "involves not only our capacity for forming perceptual categories but also the interplay of those categories that arise from 'sensation of the world' with categories based on 'sensation of self,'" is almost uncanny. To some extent it may have been based on intuitions arising from Hayek's early interest in biology combined with his mathematical insights into complexity. Unfortunately, Hayek's speculations arose at a time when he could not have anticipated someone like Edelman discovering biological processes that would reinforce those speculations with substantive observations. Edelman himself does not appear to have acknowledged Hayek's work, but this is entirely understandable. The book was languishing in obscurity almost from the moment of its publication in the early Fifties, but those of us with more respect for history might now prefer it to much of the far more shallow writing that now seems to fill too many bookshelves.

Legacy Chutzpah

It was only two weeks ago that I wrote, "President George W. Bush apparently has no intention of letting his lame duck status interfere with his capacity for building up a collection of Chutzpah of the Week award;" and now, with only a one-week interval to allow for an award to go to Henry Kissinger (an opportunity so irresistible that I grabbed it at the beginning of last week), Bush is back to push his count up from an even dozen to a baker's dozen. This time the occasion was a conversation with his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and reported for ABC News by Jennifer Parker. Like his tenth award, number thirteen is based on his growing attention to his own legacy; but, while number ten was awarded for trying to make a bad joke about that legacy, this one is grounded in the sheer magnitude of self-deception.

The best way to appreciate this magnitude is through his own words, and Parker has given us an excellent batch to sample. First and foremost is his own view of conditions in Iraq:

I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace.

The absurdity of this particular instance of self-deception not only justifies the award but may be sufficient for the Arab world to consider at least temporarily adopting the noun chutzpah in their working vocabulary! However, the self-deception is hardly limited to foreign affairs:

I think the No Child Left Behind Act is one of the significant achievements of my administration because we said loud and clear to educators, parents and children that we expect the best for every child, that we believe every child can learn, and that in return for Federal money we expect there to be an accountability system in place to determine whether every child is learning to read, write, and add and subtract. … The promise of No Child Left Behind has been fulfilled.

From here his sense of self-accomplishment gets even broader, saying he wanted to be known as a President

… that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package; that came to Washington, D.C., with a set of political statements and worked as hard as I possibly could to do what I told the American people I would do.

Finally, we have a concluding "meditation" on his view of faith:

I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the president, and I have been affected by peoples' prayers a lot. I have found that faith is comforting, faith is strengthening, faith has been important.

I would advise politicians, however, to be careful about faith in the public arena.

In other words, politicians should not be judgmental people based upon their faith. They should recognize -- as least I have recognized I am a lowly sinner seeking redemption, and therefore have been very careful about saying [accept] my faith or you're bad. In other words, if you don't accept what I believe, you're a bad person. And the greatness of America -- it really is -- is that you can worship or not worship and be equally American. And it doesn't matter how you choose to worship; you're equally American. And it's very important for any President to jealously protect, guard, and strengthen that freedom.

What runs through all of these texts is the invocation of simplistic formulas that substitute for serious reflection and thus lead to the distorted view of reality that has been the real legacy of the last eight years. Whether or not that sense of reality will be recovered during the coming Administration remains to be seen, but the pride that Bush seems to take in his capacity for distortion could not provide a better reason for his thirteenth Chutzpah of the Week award.

Philosophical Investigations

A probably unintended consequence of Chris Hedges' "America the Illiterate" column for Truthdig, is that it has inspired a prodigious level of literacy among those who decided to comment on it. Thus, there are times when reading these comments feels like sitting in on a graduate seminar in philosophy, which is why early stages of the discussion have prompted some of my own posts to this blog. Since such reading interests me far more than Black Friday, I wanted to address a few points that seem to have settled into the discourse alongside the Thanksgiving turkey.

Consider the following well-ruminated passage in a comment from "Anarcissie," which could well have been the product of a satisfying meal:

I find the first sentences of the Tractatus profoundly mystical: “The World is all that is the case.” ("Die Welt ist alles, das is der Fall.") When we say that X “is the case” we mean that X is a correct statement. Assuming that the German means the same as the English, then W. is saying that the world (whatever that is) is made up of correct statements—a patent absurdity, it seems. Then he goes on to say the world is composed of facts. So one wonders what W. was up to there.

What I find particularly interesting about this reading it that it nice sets the context for Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself, wondering that he "was up to there!" It would probably even be safe to say that the wondering had begun before the Tractatus had been approved as his doctoral thesis. By the time we get to the speculations in Philosophical Investigations, that foundation of facts as the compositional elements of the world has dissolved into what may be called a radically counter-analytical practice of language games. At the risk of carrying Wittgenstein's ball farther than he might have dared, one might say that the world is that which emerges through our conversations. Ironically, there are seeds of this thinking in Plato's "Theaetetus," that wonderful account of the failure to define the concept of knowledge. We do not emerge from the other end of this dialogue with a definition; but we have discovered that knowledge is tightly coupled to several other equally elusive concepts, the most important being, memory, description, and being itself. One might say that the lesson of Philosophical Investigations is that both the "being of the world" and being-in-the-world are emergent properties of the descriptions we exchange in our language games.

This provides as an interesting perspective on a passage from a comment subsequently submitted by "Shenonymous:"

Physicist Paul Davies said something to the effect that It is an illusion to believe that time flows. “This is because, in fact, time does not flow at all.” Davies quotes J.J.C. Smart, an Australian philosopher, who once wrote: “Talk of the flow of time or the advance of consciousness is a dangerous metaphor that must be taken literally...Certainly we feel that time flows. This feeling arises out of metaphysical confusion…It is an illusion.” Agreeing with Smart, Davies adds:

“In other words, the ‘river’ of time is not really there. That may seem as
absurd as claiming that material objects are not really there, but Smart is
on firmer ground on this one…Since Einstein, physicists have generally
rejected the notion that events “happen” as opposed to merely exist in the four-dimensional spacetime continuum.

Shenonymous then reinforced this perspective with the following passage from Plato's "Timaeus:"

They are all parts of time, and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he “was,” he “is,” he “will be,” but the truth is that “is” alone is properly attributed to him, and that “was” and “will be” only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot become older or younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will be, older or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the cause. These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become is become and what becomes is becoming, and that what will become is about to become and that the non-existent is non-existent-all these are inaccurate modes of expression.

When you think about it, however, this passage has an interesting reductio ad absurdum, which is that, for all intents and purposes, we should be able to manage very well in a language consisting entirely of noun phrases. (Alain Robbe-Grillet put this to the test in his novel Jealousy.) Nevertheless, the boots-on-the-ground reality is that most (not necessarily all) of the languages in which conversations are conducted have not only verbs but also a rather sophisticated verb grammar whose structure is radically different from the grammar of noun phrases. Whether or not, from an analytical perspective, the flow of time is an illusion, I still have to wonder why it is that the language games we play over time have cultivated such a sophisticated grammar!

So let me put aside all of those great minds cited in the comments of Truthdig and offer a few morsels of my own thoughts. Most of these philosophical engagements are grounded in the world as we find it (thanks to Wittgenstein) through sensory perception; and most discussions of sensory perception begin with vision. The thing about vision is that any "object of perception" can be frozen in an instant of time (as it is when we "document" it in a photograph). The problem is that our understanding of visual perception is a poor foundation for our study of auditory perception, simply because sound cannot be so "frozen." At any instant of time, there cannot be a sound; one cannot even describe a sound (by, say, Fourier analysis) without having a sample of it in a time interval. I thus have a lot of trouble dismissing the flow of time as "a dangerous metaphor," since, without that flow there would be no auditory signals! For further details I would refer curious readers to Husserl's Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness. He did not get all the hard details of physics quite right, but his finger was pointing in the right direction!

The Amateur Professional

My wife wanted to get away from San Francisco for the long weekend, so we are currently at a nice little hideaway that we discovered in Tomales. This is giving me extra time for reading, and I decided to apply it to satisfying my curiosity about the book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, by Daniel Levitin. Levitin runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University; but his background seems to be more in popular music production than in research. Unfortunately, I am probably far too serious a reader for a book like this. Levitin is not so much interested in penetrating the depths of complex questions like brain function or human nature. Rather, he seems to have decided to use self-indulgent autobiography for a lightweight tour of these complexities. His commercial success means that he can do a fair amount of name-dropping; but the conversations associated with those names sound more like dormitory bull sessions than sources of insight.

The book is not actually about six explicit songs, like "Happy Birthday" or "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." Rather, the thesis is that human nature is a product of our capacity for making songs; and Levitin categorizes those songs according to six topics. Those topics are:

1. Friendship
2. Joy
3. Comfort
4. Knowledge
5. Religion
6. Love

I have now completed the introductory chapter and the "Friendship" chapter; and I find the text so sloppy and so ill-conceived that I wonder if I shall be able to make it through to the end. Much of my irritation is probably a product of my recent efforts to penetrate the anthropological thinking of Pierre Bourdieu. Reading Bourdieu has had a major impact on my own efforts to understand the nature of listening to music. Indirectly, it was through Bourdieu that I ended up putting so much time into the work of George Herbert Mead; but, more directly, it was through Bourdieu that I confronted the intellectual fallacy of focusing on the opus operatum to the exclusion of examining the modus operandi. From my point of view, Levitin is too hung up on his songs and song-types as artifacts and too disinclined to pursue how those artifacts emerge from "musical practices." This is particularly frustrating when one considers that his pre-research professional background should have provided him with a wealth of data involving not only his own practices but those of all those names he keeps dropping on us readers. I have to believe that, within Levitin's life story, there is a wealth of data points that could contribute to a better understanding of how we listen to and make music; and those data points could form the basis for a story that is struggling to get out from under the text he actually wrote. I just wish that someone in his Laboratory (if not Levitin himself) would get around to teasing out that story!

A Hostage Situation?

It appears that, around the time I was laboring over my "Confidence We Can Believe In?" post about moves by both the current and future Administrations towards economic recovery, Robert Scheer came out with a far more aggressive column entitled "Obama Chooses Wall Street Over Main Street." True to the precepts of good journalism, Scheer has his cards (both logical and rhetorical) on the table within his first two paragraphs:

Maybe Ralph Nader was right in predicting that the same Wall Street hustlers would have a lock on our government no matter which major party won the election. I hate to admit it, since it wasn’t that long ago that I heatedly challenged Nader in a debate on this very point.

But how else is one to respond to Barack Obama’s picking the very folks who helped get us into this financial mess to now lead us out of it? Watching the president-elect’s Monday introduction of his economic team, my brother-in-law Pete said, “You can see the feathers coming out of their mouths” as the foxes were once again put in charge of the henhouse. He didn’t have time to expound on his point, having to get ready to go sort mail in his job at the post office. But he showed me a statement from Citigroup showing that the interest rate on Pete the Postal Worker’s credit card was 28.9 percent, an amount that all major religions would justly condemn as usurious.

I was not surprised to see this column trigger a flood of comments on Truthdig, most of which seemed to be generating far more heat than light. Still, the heat was a necessary part of the process. How else can people vent their frustration with a system that has created such an untenable situation?

Reading through all of this frustration, I was reminded of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek's recent observation that we no longer have an adequate socio-political narrative to address questions as fundamental as our justification for being or how we choose what to do. Where this economic crisis is concerned, however, the quest for a narrative (such as has been explored by the economist Deirdre McCloskey) may be too ambitious. Perhaps we just need to home in on a good solid metaphor.

In a grim sort of way, I may have found that metaphor in Mumbai. Wall Street has put the world in a hostage situation whose conditions are not that different from that of the people in those five-star hotels in Mumbai that were attacked yesterday; and Barack Obama is trying to assemble a team of skilled hostage negotiators. "Success," such as it is, involves averting total economic collapse (which would be devastating to Main Street) and the restoration of the "monetary confidence game" to a degree that folks on Main Street are back in a position to provide food, clothing, and shelter without having to prioritize one over the others. To the extent that we value self-sufficiency over welfare, that position will have to involve the restoration of viable income, most likely through properly-compensated jobs.

In the context of this metaphor, has Obama provided us with a skilled hostage negotiation team? Most of us probably lack the knowledge to make an assessment; but that assessment will involve more than the sort of elementary-school-level arithmetic that Rachel Maddow has been flogging on MSNBC. I am more inclined to go with the opinion of someone like Paul Krugman, whose mathematics resides more in the complexity of non-linear equations. On the other hand I would be even more comfortable with an opinion from someone like Robert Solow or Joseph Stiglitz, both of whom are very good at translating numbers into readable text and both of whom, curiously enough, have been off the radar recently.

Mission Accomplished?

The path to an agreement with the government of Iraq over the continued presence of United States military forces has been long and hard. Now that the fundamental disagreements between Iraq and the United States appear to have been resolved, there are now contentious disagreements arising in the ratification debate taking place in the Iraqi parliament. According to Ahmed Rasheed's report for Reuters, filed from Baghdad, those disagreements may ultimately be resolved by the very democratic process that we claimed we were bringing to Iraq:

Iraq's parliament was likely to approve on Wednesday a pact that sets a date for U.S. military forces to withdraw, but could make the agreement dependent on a public referendum next year, lawmakers said.

The security deal, which would see the last U.S. soldier leave at the end of 2011, more than eight years after the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, was due to be put to a vote but continued to be subject to dogged last minute haggling.

The apparent agreement to hold a referendum is seen as a concession by Kurdish and Shi'ite blocs to Sunni Arab deputies who have said they would back the security pact if it was put to a nationwide vote. It has already been approved by the cabinet and signed with Washington.

If the proposal for a referendum is approved by parliament, the security pact would be passed, said Abdul-Kareem Al-Samaraie, a deputy from the main Sunni group, the Accordance Front, which had demanded the popular vote.

"There will be an initial approval of the security pact until we hold the referendum in 2009. It will be valid until then. If the result (of the referendum) is a 'No', it will be canceled," he said.

A senior lawmaker from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa party said he had no problem with that and a Kurdish lawmaker, whose group is a partner in Maliki's Shi'ite-led coalition, concurred. A government spokesman said the proposal had not been finalized but appeared to do "no harm."

Given that the economic crisis has become the highest-priority problem of the incoming Administration, this will give Barack Obama some well-needed breathing space before having to confront his campaign promises about withdrawing from Iraq. If the agreement is voted down by referendum, then he simply has to accept Iraq's own wishes for a withdrawal; and, if the agreement is approved, then there will be at least some evidence that our continued presence over there is desired. Either way, this story makes an interesting contrast to that comment of Patricia Williams that I cited yesterday to the effect that the Bush Administration has never been particularly serious about government itself. The timing is such that George W. Bush will leave office at the time of a rather significant lesson in what it means to take government seriously, and that lesson will be coming from Iraq. Could there have been a more ironic conclusion to the eight-year mess we have endured?

Ask the Questions; Don't Dictate the Answers!

The reason why Nieman Watchdog is on my What I Read list is best captured by the subtitle on their header: "Questions the press should ask." In an age in which media treatments of the news have more to do with self-serving (if not self-deluding) distortion than with the fulfillment of a "public trust," we all need the benefit of the sort of "watchdog" provided by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. I therefore find myself seriously annoyed with Dan Froomkin, Deputy Editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project, for using his bully pulpit to promote the shallow thinking of Web 2.0 evangelism in his Commentary piece, "It's time for a Wiki White House." This has nothing to do with the Nieman agenda and may ultimately confound that agenda by finding one more avenue to raise the noise level over what is already a weak signal.

I have no problem with Froomkin embracing the principle that "the Internet doesn't look kindly on information that just flows one way;" but, like many of the media sources that the Nieman Foundation criticizes so rightly, he uses this principle to hang himself (and therefore his readers) on a dangerous half truth. The half truth is that communication is not strictly a matter of the flow of information, and confusing the latter for the former can have dire consequences on how governance is practiced. Once we get beyond the naive view of information as a resource, we can begin to recognize that the quality of any social order is primarily a function of the conversations it supports and the capacity of those conversations to shape its structures and processes. Equally naive is Froomkin's apparent effort to reduce such conversation to talking, listening, and responding.

Consider his account of where the Obama team has already puts its boots on the ground, so to speak:

And there are already auspicious signs that Obama intends to continue using the Internet in compelling new ways [beyond mobilizing voters and raising campaign funds]. His transition Web site, change.gov, launched with not only press releases and position papers, but a blog – and several nascent opportunities for public participation. “The story of bringing this country together as a healed and united nation will be led by President-Elect Obama,” the Web site states, “but written by you.”

First of all, anyone who has visited the blog that Froomkin has cited knows that it does not accept comments, which means that it is not that different from New York Law School professor and technology expert Beth Noveck's dismissal of the current Administration's Web site as "brochure-ware." Those "nascent opportunities for public participation" amount to a rather feeble context-limited (if not context-free) form through which you can state your piece with little knowledge that anyone, even your fellow blog readers, will ever see, let alone read, it. This is not conversation. This is, if the metaphor has not already been used to death, lipstick on a pig.

What Froomkin fails (or has been too addled by Web 2.0 Kool-Aid) to recognize is that conversation, as it takes place in social situations where computers do not mediate, does not necessarily scale to the level of a President trying to "engage" with his electorate. When I read Froomkin envisioning a White House staff that will listen and respond to "information input" from that electorate, I am reminded of my wife's reaction as a teacher who now has to deal with electronic mail from her pupils' parents: What part of my job do you want me to stop doing, so I can put time into giving this electronic mail the attention it deserves? I would modestly suggest that, in the absence of a serious commitment of "attention resources" to deal with the volume of traffic that the Internet produces, Froomkin's vision risks turning our representative government into a plebiscitary one. I would then further suggest that government by plebiscite is the first step down the road to totalitarian fascism. Consider the extent to which the Wiki vision of the "wisdom of crowds" can easily devolve into the madness of brute force. Consider the extent to which Google's appreciation of the subtleties of governance may best be described as "Philistine," even as their belief in "making money without doing evil" is flouted by a technology whose primary function seems to be cultivating public addiction to consumerism. Is this a world in which the Executive Branch of our government can and will "converse" with its citizens? There may be flaws in our representative system, but would a "brave new world" of "Internet information flow" resolve those flaws or replace them with more serious ones?

This is not Luddite thinking. I am not recommending that we throw our wooden shoes into the workings of the Internet. I am only recommending that "watchdog thinking" be applied to one who is trying to promote answers when he should be asking critical questions appropriate to his station. Rather than promoting technologies, a watchdog should be asking questions about those technologies having to do with the consequences of using those technologies, becoming dependent on them, and becoming victims when others discover how to turn use into abuse.

Confidence We Can Believe In?

Last month, in response to Japanese broker Masatoshi Sato's remarks about seeing to the needs of the "real economy," I offered the proposition that, if Main Street is unhappy, then Wall Street cannot help but be unhappy. Since that time it has become increasingly apparent that this unhappiness is a two-way street: When Wall Street is unhappy, Main Street has little to be happy about, since happiness has so much to do with having money to spend. The economic crisis may have had some impact on readjusting individual spending priorities to focus more on necessities and less on the unrealistic luxuries of a consumerist culture; but, at the end of the day, it is still all about money. Money may be the root of all evil; but it is also the root of happiness in any society developed enough that each individual is no longer directly responsible for providing his/her own food, clothing, and shelter. As Niall Ferguson has put it in his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, money is the "root of most human progress." Given the critical role that progress plays in any "developed" culture, one may just as well say that money is the root of that culture's very existence.

Those who have become familiar with Ferguson's book (which is based on a television series that will hopefully air soon in the United States, although his recent interview on Book TV provided an excellent introduction) now know his hypothesis that the root of money itself is trust. This is a point of view that I addressed in comparing the comparatively sound status of Grameen Bank, where trust is based on the day-to-day utility of cows and chickens, compared with Citigroup (to choose a timely example), where trust resides in the anticipated benefits from complex instruments of exchange based on even more complex mathematical models whose underlying hypothesis of efficient markets is, to say the least, questionable. There is a phrase that describes the prospect of trusting a system that, through its complexity, you really do not understand: that phrase is "confidence game." In the "developed world" economic theory has acquired such a level of sophistication that Main Street cannot help but be caught up in the confidence game; but, because the game can only survive as long as it has players, every now and then theory gets dragged back down to the realities of practice. From a dialectical point of view, "economic recovery" may ultimately be a matter of reconciling the opposition of those realities of practice with increasingly complex (because of the complexities of life itself) theories through some sort of synthesis.

We may now be seeing moves towards such a synthesis in both the current and incoming Administrations. Thus, one may be cynical and suggest that Barack Obama chose his economic team with the deliberate intention of cheering up Wall Street, more through trust than through concrete achievement; but, like it or not, the first moves in his confidence game have yielded a payoff in the short run that has circulated from Wall Street to the markets in both Asia and Europe. The same can be said about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's decision to apply his "bailout budget" to Citigroup. At the same time Obama is trying to keep his eyes on the fundamental role played by Main Street by seeing to the needs of the unemployment crisis, while the Federal Reserve is trying to see to the needs of resolving the credit crisis. Ultimately, it will still be about putting trust into a system that is poorly (if at all) understood, which means that we are all still stuck in playing a confidence game.

However, if we cannot get away from the game itself, we would still like to be able to count on our government to do something when we are egregiously cheated. That is why we have, for example, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; and it is why some (enough?) of us voted the way we did in the (audacious?) hope for an Executive Branch that would show more respect to the Legislative responsibility for such oversight (thus solving the deeper problem of what Patricia Williams dramatically described as "a failure to govern at all"). Perhaps the path to that synthesis between economic theories and the practices on Main Street begins with taking government seriously again. If Obama can restore trust in a government that takes itself seriously, that trust may propagate into trust in fiscal operations. The confidence game may still be there, but we may all feel less vulnerable to being victimized by it.

Quiet Desperation in Rhode Island

This week's episode of Brotherhood on Showtime may have acknowledged William Shakespeare in its title ("The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth"); but the "poetic wisdom" of the story line came straight from Henry David Thoreau:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Indeed, had the series been set in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts, rather than Providence, Rhode Island, a more appropriate title for the episode might have been "In Search of Walden Pond." The episode did little to advance the overall narrative of the series; but, using the setting of a Labor Day Weekend, it offered a reflective examination of all the major characters, all but one of whom had retreated to a Walden-like setting. The reflections may not have been as deep as those Walden inspired in Thoreau; but, this being television, we should be thankful for the few crumbs of reflection we get!

The episode was basically structured around three "Walden surrogates." The most important of these (emphasized by its role in framing the entire episode) actually involved a physical body of water in the form of a lake whose shore serves as the border of a country house. This is where Tommy Caffee wants to take his family to retreat from the world of Rhode Island politics, having become fed up with it all in the previous episode. His is the embodiment of a life "frittered away" (again, Thoreau's words); and the key question is whether or not he can recover his life in a pastoral setting so alien to the life he has led since birth. Indeed, the setting is so peaceable that Freddie Cork, a lion (somewhat weakened) of the gang world, is there by the lake playing badminton with Tommy's family, perhaps as in indication that reality will intrude on this ideal retreat sooner than Tommy may have anticipated.

The second Walden is a bed-and-breakfast in some unnamed Rhode Island town on the Atlantic coast. Declan Giggs has come here to try to patch up relations with his estranged wife Cassie. This "kingdom" is far less peaceable when Cassie encounters her boss; and it comes out that she had an affair with him while separated from Declan. Both characters then drown themselves in drink, leaving their "Walden" in greater (and noisier) desperation than when they arrived.

The final Walden is an anonymous motel room where Colin Carr hopes to final consummate his passion for Kath Parry, whose life with Michael Caffee (Colin's boss) has been steadily deteriorating. The setting is anything but pastoral; and the interplay is as awkward as it is dangerous, particularly in the context of Michael's uncontrollable capacity for violence. Both of these characters are mired in quiet desperation out of the necessity of their situation. The progress of this mini-narrative is thwarted every time it inches forward; and, in the context of what we know about the possible consequences, this is probably just as well.

Indeed, in the course of his one-hour episode, Michael is the one character who does not find a Walden to which he can retreat. It may be a holiday weekend, but he remains all business. However, this is probably because his "business" is his only strategy for warding off the symptoms of his damaged brain. Thus, while a Walden is offered to him in the form of a barbeque at the home of the Italian gang leader, he can do little other than aggravate the Irish-Italian division, ultimately getting cast out from the would-be Edenic setting.

As I said, none of this has really advanced the underlying narrative. Rather, it used the holiday setting as a pretext for taking stock of the characters. Whether or not the Walden concept was deliberately intended as a setting for this stock-taking, the shoe turned out to fit very well, providing some comforting evidence that, every now and then, television can still satisfy the literary mind.

Creator and Creation

When I mentioned yesterday that I had seen a production of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust in New York back in the Eighties, I neglected to mention that this production covered both parts of Goethe's drama. This was a major undertaking by the Classic Stage Company: Part One was performed in the afternoon, after which there was a dinner break, followed by Part Two in the evening. Taking time off for dinner was nothing compared to the interval in Goethe's life, since Part One was published in 1806, while Part Two was not completed until 1832, the year of his death. Just about any musical treatment of Faust is pretty much confined to Part One, and even dramatic stagings of Part Two are pretty rare. The reason for this is apparent from the Wikipedia summary:

In contrast to Faust Part One, the focus here is no longer on the soul of Faust, which has been sold to the devil, but rather on social phenomena such as psychology, history and politics.

I do not entirely accept this summary, but it is still a good point of departure. A better way of approaching Part Two is to view Part One in terms of how Mephistopheles manipulates Faust into signing his contract and what Mephistopheles then "delivers" to "seal the deal." Gretchen (Marguerite in Hector Berlioz' version, La Damnation de Faust) is the critical "deliverable." However, while Berlioz' libretto ultimately resolves the plot with Faust being condemned to Hell (true to his title) and Marguerite being received in Heaven, Goethe's Faust survives this episode and pretty much forgets it.

Part Two brings about a rather interesting role-reversal, in which Mephistopheles becomes servant to Faust; and Faust becomes a magus figure marketing his skill-set (which he only has by virtue of his contract with Mephistopheles). In the course of Part Two, Faust expounds on Goethe's theory of color, rescues a financially failing empire by introducing paper currency, encounters Helen of Troy, and mounts a major utopian urban renewal project that destroys the pastoral home of Baucis and Philemon. Ultimately, he runs out of things to do and succumbs to the same boredom that Berlioz captured so well at the beginning of his version. Mephistopheles finally sees the opportunity to seize his side of the bargain; but Faust is basically "rescued" by a "subjunctive loophole" in the contract, leading to a final scene of his salvation.

That final scene may best be described as "extreme spectacle," almost a reductio ad absurdum of the argument for spectacle delivered in the "Prelude in the Theatre" all the way back at the beginning of Faust Part One. The opening description depicts a setting that might give even the imaginative intellect Robert Lepage applied to Berlioz a hard time:

Mountain glens, forest, rock, solitude. Holy Anchorites sheltering in the clefts of rocks, scattered at various heights along the cliffs.

The first monologue is delivered by Pater Ecstaticus "floating up and down;" and it begins a prolonged meditation on Faust's salvation, in which his soul is received by angels and penitents (one of whom is Gretchen). In the production that I saw in New York, this scene was cut down to a bare minimum and with good reason. The audience had already been setting through quite a lot by this time!

However, the text of this scene formed the core of Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony in E flat major, meaning that yesterday I experienced a "day of Faust" that began at 10 AM in a movie house and ended at about 10 PM in Davies Symphony Hall. Mahler definitely had the right idea for this unwieldy material: Rather than approach it as opera, he let the music convey all the staging details; and, given the dramatic expressiveness of his music, even when text is not involved, the result is probably about the only approach that does justice to Goethe's over-the-top conception. All of this, however, is only Part II of Mahler's symphony.

Part I is a setting of the ninth-century hymn for Roman church ritual, "Veni, Creator Spiritus" (Come Creator-Spirit). It is not a stretch of the imagination to view this opening movement as Mahler's summoning of his own "creator-spirit" to assist him in the task of doing justice to this massive body of Goethe's text. (Remember, prior to this work, most of the texts that Mahler had set had been relatively short and of folk origins.) The prefatory nature of this movement is confirmed by a duration that is roughly one-third the duration of Part II. More important, however, is that Part I serves as a "listener's guide" to Part II. It lays out all of the thematic material, that material is arranged in a structure that serves as a "skeleton for prolongation" in the grammar of Part II, and the ear is introduced to all of the rhetorical devices summoned to manage a full orchestra (including organ, harmonium, and mandolin), two mixed choruses, boys' chorus, girls' chorus, three sopranos, two mezzo-sopranos, tenor, baritone, and bass. (When the impresario Emil Gutmann decided to call this the "Symphony of a Thousand," he was not far from the mark; the total "body count" for the first performance was 1030!)

The fact that the San Francisco Symphony performances of this work were sold out testifies to how successful Michael Tilson Thomas has been in cultivating an audience for Mahler in this city. Even the favorable review by Joshua Kosman for the San Francisco Chronicle could not get beyond the received opinion of this composition as an unwieldy monster, but Saturday night's audience seemed to have no sense of it being unwieldy in the way Thomas presented it. Yes, there is a certain artificiality to the episodic nature of Goethe's text; and Mahler deconstructed the text of the Roman hymn to prepare the ear for that episodic structure. However, Thomas knew exactly how to pace both parts of the symphony, guiding our ears through all of the twists and turns of Goethe's spectacle, leading us to a mystically hushed final text (the "Ewig-Weibliche" invocation of the "eternal feminine") followed by one last triumphant celebration of all the instrumental resources. Far from an unwieldy monster, this symphony emerged as what could well be Mahler's greatest triumph.

In writing these reflections I realize that I have focused entirely on why the music came out the way it did. This is not to slight the many soloists who responded so ably to Thomas' conception of this "finished product." Rather than running through all the names, I refer readers to the Chronicle hyperlink in the preceding paragraph, since I, too, may have had to confront the problem of straining my audience's attention span!

The Devil in the Technical Details

I have to confess that the open editing philosophy behind Wikipedia can sometimes keep it impressively up to date. Consider the beginning of its "La damnation de Faust" entry:

La damnation de Faust (English: The Damnation of Faust) is a work for orchestra, voices, and chorus written by Hector Berlioz (he called it a "légende dramatique").

Berlioz read Goethe's Faust Part One in 1828, in Gérard de Nerval's translation; "this marvelous book fascinated me from the first", he recalled in his Memoirs. "I could not put it down. I read it incessantly, at meals, in the theatre, in the street." He was so impressed that a suite entitled "Eight Scenes from Faust" became his Opus 1 (1829), though he later recalled all the copies of it he could find. He returned to the material in 1845, to make a larger work, with some additional text by Almire Gandonnière to Berlioz's specifications, that he first called a "concert opera", and as it expanded, finally a "dramatic legend".

He worked on the score during his concert tour of 1845, adding his own text for "Nature immense, impénétrable et fière"— Faust's climactic invocation of all nature— and incorporating the Rákóczi March, which had been a thunderous success at a concert in Pest, Hungary, 15 February 1846.^[1] Its first performance at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, 6 December 1846, did not meet with critical acclaim, perhaps due to its halfway status between opera and cantata; the public was apathetic, and two performances (and a cancelled third) rendered a financial setback for Berlioz: "Nothing in my career as an artist wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference", he remembered.^[2]

The Damnation of Faust is performed regularly in concert halls, since its first successful complete performance in concert in Paris, in 1877; it is occasionally staged as an opera, for the first time in Opéra de Monte-Carlo on February 18, 1893, where it was produced by its director Raoul Gunsbourg, Jean de Reszke singing role of Faust. The Metropolitan Opera premiered it first in concert (February 2, 1896) and then on stage (The United States stage premiere on December 7, 1906). The Metropolitan Opera revived the production on November 7, 2008 directed by Robert Lepage, with computer-generated stage imagery that responds to the voices of the performers.^[3]

The only thing missing from that last sentence was the Met's decision to include that revival in its Live in HD series, and that may only be because the HD broadcast took place today! I also call attention to that third footnote, which provides a link to the New York Times background article that discusses the technical details at great length and was definitely a factor in drawing me to today's broadcast. What this article did not say was that all of the computer-generated technology was an add-on to a staging that Lepage had already conceived. This came out when Thomas Hampson interviewed Susan Graham about her performance of Marguerite, and she talked about performing in the original incarnation of this production.

So is the result an opera production; or is it a tech-fest for those averse to the noise level of today's rock music? To invoke terminology I introduced earlier in the day, this is the sort of production that could well serve as a "tourist magnet," regardless of its virtues or vices. From a similar point of view, it could well attract a new generation of younger listeners to the Metropolitan Opera (or to an HD screening), including some (many?) with no idea of who Berlioz was (not to mention Johann Wolfgang Goethe). For those of us who are more serious about both opera and music, the approach brings a mix of virtues and vices; but my own feeling was that the vices are easily overshadowed by the virtues.

This is the second time I have seen this work staged. Several years ago it was performed in concert version by the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Charles Dutoit; and I was particularly impressed at how the singers were able to "deliver the message" with only a handful of postural and gestural cues. However, because I always believe that there is room for effectively imaginative staging, I have never been a purist about keeping this work in the concert hall. Lepage's approach was indisputably imaginative, and on the whole it was effective. By this I mean that he produced a conception of the work based on entirely believable characterizations of Faust (Marcello Giordani), Méphistophélès (John Relyea), and Marguerite (Graham). That believability has to include a conception of Méphistophélès as a supernatural force; and, as Goethe said explicitly in the "Prelude in the Theatre" for Faust Part One, that conception really requires a heavy dose of spectacle, pretty much as Aristotle conceived the nature of spectacle in his "Poetics." (Note that this Prelude involves a Stage Director in conversation with a Poet and a Comedian. It is the Comedian who speaks up for spectacle. In the production that I saw in New York back in the Eighties, the actor playing the Comedian later appeared in the role of Mephistopheles!) Lepage is as good a servant of Aristotelian spectacle as I have ever seen, making him a key virtue of this production.

However, Aristotle also cautions against too much spectacle; and there were times when I was not sure that Lepage was ignoring this advice to the disadvantage of us all. Nevertheless, I am not sure I can effectively evaluate his judgment on the basis of Barbara Willis Sweete's camera work. Lepage had clearly conceived of the entire stage as his canvas. This was not only important when the stage provided context for actions localized in a relatively small portion of the entire area. It was also important when Lepage used the full stage as a grid for many repetitions of images or actions. Sweete's decision to pan across these repetitions took away from the impact of their very number, threatening that impact with a sense of tedium. So, for all the past virtues of these HD transmissions, I have to conclude that this was one performance that probably benefits from the viewer being present in the hall itself, rather that being only "virtually" present.

If we give Lepage the benefit of the doubt for certain visual ideas that did not translate well to video, then only one performer was seriously disadvantaged. That was conductor James Levine. Berlioz was such a master of orchestral resources (at least the video let us see the four harps!) that any conductor who elicits a credible performance deserves to be watched; and this performance was many orders of magnitude better than credible. Berlioz not only commanded extremes from his orchestra but shifted between extremes like turning on a dime (sou?). Levine was on top of every twist and turn, summoning all the sounds of Hell itself from his pit and then abruptly withdrawing the sublimity of Marguerite's reception into Heaven. Of course, had I been watching Levine, I would have missed the "equal opportunity" Lepage gave to Hell and Heaven on stage; so I certainly cannot fault Sweete for keeping her camera eyes out of the orchestra pit! Thus, while video may not have done sufficient justice to the staging, this was a musical performance that I hope will be eventually made available as a commercial recording.

Attracting Visitors

In responding to Matt Smith's SF Weekly column concerned with whether or not, faced with a $90 million budget deficit, the city should continue to support the fine arts with a specific allocation of $2.6 million, I tried to offer an admittedly naive analysis of benefits and costs for San Francisco residents. This approach overlooked what may be a key facet of the overall story, which is that the support of the fine arts benefits not only the city's residents but also its visitors. This raises a possibly interesting contrast between the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony. Much of the Symphony's "world class" reputation comes from its touring schedule, particularly when the tour takes it to cities like New York and London, since those are the cities with some of the most knowledgeable music critics and the most scrupulous audiences. On the other hand the Opera has a reputation for attracting people to visit San Francisco. This is most evident when Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is staged as a cycle of all four of its operas, since Wagner brings out a passion among his devotees that motives them to travel anywhere to get a good fix. However, San Francisco Opera has also attracted visitors for many of its new productions. Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise may not have attracted as many visitors out of raw Wagnerian passion; but I suspect it still drew quite a few out of curiosity, particularly those who wondered if such an opportunity would ever arise again in the near future. Similarly, both John Adams and Philip Glass have the sorts of reputations that motivate contemporary opera lovers to come to world premieres of their works, such as Doctor Atomic and Appomattox. Indeed, Doctor Atomic now has a second production at the Metropolitan Opera, which the Met decided was important enough to "export" through HD broadcasting. From this point of view, it is interesting to note the extent to which the Met uses these broadcasts to highlight the "opera house experience," applying it as a draw to attract those who enjoyed the broadcast to New York.

Under Michael Tilson Thomas the San Francisco Symphony has certainly established a similar potential for attracting visitors. This has been particularly evident with his attention to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, which led me to wonder whether or not Valery Gergiev's decision, as principle conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, to conduct the complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler during the 2007–2008 season was motivated, at least in part, as a strategy to draw visitors to London. Before he came to San Francisco, Thomas had already established a reputation as a conductor of Charles Ives in cities such as Chicago and Amsterdam; and, personally, I wish he would do more Ives here. There may not be as many Ives fanatics will to travel the sorts of distances that Wagner fanatics do; but I suspect the prospect of an "Ives festival" in San Francisco could have more tourist attraction than might be assumed at first.

The Symphony, of course, has the advantage of recordings that can "capture" a performance experience. However, as the Met keeps trying to remind us, even with the fidelity of HD images, there is no substitute for "being there;" and this is as true of Davies Symphony Hall as it is of the War Memorial Opera House. Perhaps one way to deal with questions of budget priorities would be to address the role of the Symphony as a "tourist magnet" as a point of departure for new funding strategies. This, of course, is free advice, which means that it is probably worth every penny of its price!

A Temporal Spectrum of Chamber Music

It is the middle of the academic year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and that means that it is time for the semiannual series of concerts of String and Piano Chamber Music that reflects the works the students have been preparing since the beginning of the term. Given how satisfied I was with the end-of-term events last April, I am hoping that my schedule can accommodate at least a representative sample of these concerts, if not the entire series; and, on the basis of repertoire alone, last night's event was an excellent way to begin. Most important was that my claim about a month ago that there was more to Amy Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet in F sharp minor that could be grasped by a single performance, particularly when that performance was a "first contact," was put to the test; but equally interesting was the company provided for Beach's attention-deserving chamber music. While last month the quintet was approached from a pianist's perspective (which, admittedly, was also my own perspective of her music) "as a gradus ad Parnassum … by way of Domenico Scarlatti, Joseph Haydn, and Franz Liszt," last night's performance gave the work more of a chamber music perspective, following it with La Bonne Chanson, the Opus 61 of Gabriel Fauré; and after the intermission the gradus took off in another direction, so to speak, with Alberto Ginastera's second (Opus 26) string quartet.

There is a lot to be said for beginning a program with an unfamiliar work. Not only is the mind likely to be in its most alert disposition; but also it is at its most "context free," which means that it is more likely to hear connections based on its own experiences, as opposed to those induced by how the program has been ordered. I particularly appreciated this opportunity, since I had written last month that, while Liszt may have been an influence for Beach's piano music (such as the Sketches, where were really the only pieces I could claim to know at any level deeper than the superficial), I could not hear him as an influence on the piano quintet. For one thing, as I observed after my first exposure, this was very much "a work for five 'equals,' as opposed to the frequent domination of the piano (evident in anything Liszt wrote for piano and orchestra) resulting in a 'concerto for piano and very small orchestra.'" Thus, in last night's setting I found myself thinking about Beach's work more from the context of Fauré, not through anticipation of La Bonne Chanson but from my familiarity with his early chamber music, such as the first (Opus 13) violin sonata and the first (Opus 15) piano quartet. In both of these works there is an element of urgency in the allegro passages, which serves to provide more by way of forward momentum than the sort of platform for virtuosity one often encounters in Liszt. I was most aware of this momentum when, upon arrival at the Adagio come prima in the final (third) movement, Beach revealed the cyclic nature of her architecture, through which, as Thomas Stearns Eliot put it, we "arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time." (Ironically, Eliot did not begin work on "Little Gidding" until about 35 years after Beach had completed this piano quintet in 1907!) Now that I am more familiar with this piano quintet, I am all the more eager to hear it more often and "know its place."

La Bonne Chanson may not exhibit that element of urgency that I could hear in Beach; but it is very much a work for "equals." The composition is a song cycle of poems by Paul Verlaine scored for mezzo-soprano and piano quintet; but Fauré was very selective in how he scored each poem (although not quite as selective as Arnold Schoenberg was in scoring his Pierrot Lunaire cycle). The title is Verlaine's, and the imagery of his texts suggests that his approach to the "goodness" of that title is one of irony, if not sarcastic vulgarity. This is thus the same spirit that would later be found in the Paul Éluard poems that Francis Poulenc set in La Figure Humaine, but without the context of the Nazi occupation of Paris. Fauré's settings, however, are anything but vulgar: His phrasing of the texts is as attentive as those found in any of his songs for voice and piano, but he has added the transparency of the piano quintet to enhance the accompaniment. This turned out to be my first exposure to this side of Fauré's vocal writing; and, as was the case with Beach's chamber music, I just hope that I do not have as long a wait before having another opportunity.

In approaching Ginastera's second string quartet, I found Deborah Schwartz-Kates' analysis of his stylistic periods for Grove Music Online a useful frame of reference:

Traditional studies have divided Ginastera's output into three stylistic periods: firstly ‘objective nationalism’ (1934–47), in which he referred directly to Argentine folk materials with traditional tonal means, secondly ‘subjective nationalism’ (1947–57), in which he integrated sublimated symbols in forging an original Argentine style, and thirdly ‘neo-Expressionism’ (1958–83), in which he combined magic surrealism with dodecaphony and avant-garde procedures.

Since the quartet was published in 1958, this puts it on the cusp between the second and third periods; but there is nothing "neo-Expressionist" about it. Indeed, while I have been unable to find any explicit support in the published literature, I would argue that Ginastera may have found his path to "subjective nationalism" through the subjectivity of another nationalist composer, Béla Bartók. If the ear needs a frame for reference for listening to this quartet, I can think of no better place to begin than with Bartók's fifth quartet (number 102 in András Szöllősy's chronological Sz. numbers), with which it shares both the five-movement architecture and Bartók's disposition for the use of inversion in the development of his melodic material. This is not to say that Ginastera was appropriating Bartók. This quartet not only has a unique voice of its own but also a rhythmic physicality that is more Argentine than Hungarian. However, that Grove entry indicates that Ginastera published an article entitled "Homage to Béla Bartók" in 1981; so it would not surprise me that he had already felt the need for such an homage over twenty years earlier and expressed that need through music rather than text.

My overall experience, then, was exposure to three new works (with only a vague familiarity with the first of them), all of which left me with a hunger for further experience. For my money (under the disclaimer that this was a free concert), that is what the performance of music is supposed to do. Once again the Conservatory has demonstrated that it can fulfill the public service role of educating audiences while educating its students!

Same Request; New Response

Democratic Representative Michael Capuano from Massachusetts, quoted in an Associated Press story by Ken Thomas and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, came up with the best response when the Chief Executive Officers of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler came to Washington to ask the House of Representatives for some $25 billion worth of loans:

My fear is that you're going to take this money and continue the same stupid decisions you've made for 25 years.

Capuano's Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, decided to take him seriously, as did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Democratic leaders in Congress sidetracked legislation to bail out the auto industry Thursday and demanded the Big Three develop a plan assuring the money would make them economically viable. "Until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money," Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said at a hastily called news conference in the Capitol.

She and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Congress would return to work in early December to vote on legislation if General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC produce an acceptable plan.

This may be the most sensible move yet to come out of Washington in dealing with the economic crisis: Don't fork over the money without some guarantee that it will be spent effectively! So why didn't anyone think to say the same thing to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson? Was it just because he asked for a larger amount of money?

Fighting Words over the Fine Arts

Matt Smith has thrown down a pretty stiff gauntlet in his column for this week's SF Weekly, and he has thrown it right in the face of San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. Here is the basic argument as set forth in his opening paragraphs:

These are trying economic times — unless you're Michael Tilson Thomas, the baton-waving tycoon at the head of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He is one of a troika of symphony honchos who, when you include money allocated to agents and personal projects and a personal loan, drain $2.6 million from what is, in essence, a charity partly supported by taxpayers.

San Francisco fine arts nonprofits such as the symphony have consistently failed in their mission of instructing residents in what they should accept as great culture. That patronizing mission would be outdated even if they were earnest about pulling it off. But they're not: They've turned our local culture palaces into sites for air-kiss orgies among the superrich.

As the symphony helps create a recession-proof standard of living for Tilson Thomas, the city finds itself contributing to the kind of superstar worship that makes a farce of classical music. Meanwhile, the tycoons' wives behind the nonprofit that runs the de Young Museum are turning the museum into an extension of their own closets, producing fashion shows featuring clothing that regular San Franciscans could never afford.

The megawealthy can do as they please with their money. But we can choose not to have them play with ours. Legislation recently introduced by the lame-duck Board of Supervisors claims to target fat-cat executive directors of government-funded nonprofits, but it's worded so that its effect on mammoth salaries earned by such directors as Tilson Thomas will be nil. In January, newly elected supervisors should put their radical pretensions to work and find real ways to excise taxpayer subsidies from the city's exalted cultural institutions.

There are any number of ways in which this position can be contested. In the face of Smith's full-frontal attack, I would like to consider two questions that cut to the heart of whether that position is muckraking in the face of an abuse of public trust or a distorted account of an institution whose "world class" status has won recognition from knowledgeable music critics in both New York and London:

1. Who benefits from the San Francisco Symphony in general and the ways in which Thomas has made it "his" ensemble in particular?
2. What is a reasonable cost for those benefits, and how shall that cost be met?

In order to answer the first question, it is necessary to understand the nature of the benefit itself. Smith seems to want to reduce that benefit to "the kind of superstar worship that makes a farce of classical music." Given the amount of work I have put into understanding both the theory and practice sides of classical music (for which this blog provides a recent but modest sample), I feel I have at least some authority to recognize what constitutes farce; and, at the very least, I have to question just where Smith acquired his data points to make his claim.

There is no doubt that Smith's "megawealthy" have a serious presence in Davies Symphony Hall. On one occasion when my wife was given the gift of two tickets in the Loge, I learned how to find them; and I confess to feeling a bit like a field anthropologist encountering a previously undiscovered culture. Scott Fitzgerald was right; they really are "different from you and me!" However, the Loge is a relatively small (and therefore deliberately elite) portion of the Davies seating plan. My wife and I usually sit in the Front Orchestra section: It's a price we can afford, and I am willing to sacrifice a good view for minimizing the number of people between myself and the music. The view I get, instead, is of the occupants of the rush seats in the Center Terrace, who are at the opposite end of the wealth spectrum. I do not know where Smith got his data, but at least I can account for where I got mine!

What do my data tell me? The bottom line is that I have never seen more consistently attentive audiences than the ones I have encountered in Davies; and I have been going to concerts since, as a pre-schooler, I was taken by my parents to a Philadelphia Orchestra children's concert to hear our child-prodigy pianist neighbor! So I am willing to hold my data points up to Smith's on any occasion. Granted, there are times when I hear nervous coughs; but I have never heard them come from the Terrace seats or from my immediate vicinity. For all I know, they come from the Loge! From my vantage point I always feel that I am sharing my space (doesn't that sound Californian?) with those who, like myself, have come to listen; and we (if I may use first person plural) come to listen to visiting conductors as much as we come to hear Thomas. Whether or not any of the others come, as I do, for the sake of listening to be a better listener is not important. All that is important is that most of those seats in Davies are occupied by people who are far from being "megawealthy" who find benefit in the experience of listening to the San Francisco Symphony as the current Music Director has come to fashion it.

The heart of Smith's argument, however, is concerned less with benefits than with costs. Smith is not so much attacking the question of whether there should be a certain element of public trust in the fine arts organizations of a major city as much as the specific allocation of $2.6 million for "a charity partly supported by taxpayers." Now I am not sure how much of the Symphony budget is public record; and, as a rule, I tend to be in favor of transparency where any budget is concerned. However, Smith recognized that there is an interesting historical context for Symphony support:

In 1935, after the symphony went bankrupt, voters relaunched it by establishing a permanent taxpayer set-aside for the orchestra, currently $1.8 million per year. A lifetime later, that quaint act of civic-mindedness — resurrecting the orchestra — has grown into a monster bent upon enriching one man. As fine arts institutions turn toward commercial success and placating rich donors and away from the public interest, they eliminate all rationale for government subsidy. What's more, taking the symphony off the dole would have a pianissimo effect on its total budget, which in 2005 was $63.6 million.

This is worth examining sentence-by-sentence. I knew about the bankruptcy from reading the memoir by violinist David Schneider, who joined the symphony right after its "resurrection." Having acquired a reasonably good understanding of how the Symphony progressed while Schneider worked there and a basic sense of what happened after he retired, I have a lot of trouble accepting the proposition that the institution "has grown into a monster bent upon enriching one man" (presumably its Music Director, whether that Director is Thomas or any of his predecessors). I would have to wonder, however, why, if Thomas is being so "enriched" by his compensation package, he still actively maintains his commitments to the New World Symphony and the London Symphony Orchestra. That must make for a maddening schedule, particularly if he works with those other ensembles as intensely as he works with ours. As to the Symphony's total budget, this is where the question of transparency arises. I am reasonably confident that the list of expenses that the Symphony must face annually is longer than any list I could hypothesize on my own. Again, if Smith has better data points than I do, I would be happy to see them and reconsider my position.

On the more objective plane of the relation between costs and benefits, I can only speak to my own financial management. Having come to the age of fixed-income status, I had to work with my broker to determine whether or not I would be able to support the sorts of things on which I wanted to spend money; and tickets to the performing arts were part of the budget from which we worked. So I am more careful about the money I spend on tickets than I was when I first moved to the Bay Area, which basically means that I am a lot more picky about getting my money's worth! Regular readers know that I certainly do not like everything I hear at Symphony concerts, but just as certainly I do not in any way feel that this part of my budget is being poorly spent. All I ask of retirement is the means to keep my mind alive; and the San Francisco Symphony does a great job of providing those means, thank you very much!

Thus, I feel that Smith's attack does not hold up particularly well in the face of the two fronts I have proposed for challenging his position. I would be only too happy for him to respond to those challenges. For that matter I have to admit that I sympathize with him when he directs his attack at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and have even used this blog to "voice" my misgivings about that institution. However, given how important the San Francisco Symphony has become to my life here in San Francisco, Smith's column awakened in me a need to "speak up" on its behalf!

Is Anarchy Near?

Whatever Barack Obama's transition team may have planned by way of expectation management, it has been interesting to observe just how much grousing there has been about what his Presidency is likely to be even before he has been inaugurated. Without taking one side or the other on this growing movement of dissent, I think it would be useful to consider what the consequences of thwarted expectations may be. On the more innocuous side, we might see a tendency towards a chronic desire to "throw the rascals out," no matter who the rascals in office happen to be. Thus, the electorate may continue to vote, perhaps even in numbers as impressive as they were at the beginning of this month; but they will be motivated primarily to vote against office-holders, regardless of party affiliation or perhaps even past achievements. On the other hand a darker consequence could be the total rejection of the entire system of governance, beginning with the Constitution and going down from there to every last nut and bolt. The technical term for this consequence is "anarchy;" and, in spite of the fact that this word has no sexual overtones, it carries a connotation of obscenity so strong that a pap peddler like David Brooks managed to avoid it entirely in his November 17 New York Times column on the "cultural consequences of recessions." Brooks probably does not realize that there is a whole area of scholarship, perhaps best represented by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which appreciates the need to study anarchy without necessarily embracing it. Instead, Brooks seems to prefer excuses for scholarship, such as the writings of David Frum, whom I believe I recently saw on the Book TV coverage of an Ayn Rand Society gathering celebrating plans to produce a film based on Atlas Shrugged and its humanization of fascism through objectivism.

If we wish to understand our fate through literature of epic proportions, my own preference still resides with David Simon, whose five seasons of The Wire could well stand as the War and Peace of the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. I was reminded of Simon's project after reading a comment by Great Seduction reader "Jason," submitted in response to Andrew Keen's musings over Brooks' "cultural consequences" column. In his comment Jason offered the following Studs Turkel quotation from a man who had lived through the Great Depression:

When I was sixteen I was not afraid to die. Sixteen year old's today are not afraid to kill.

That second sentence provides a lens through which we need to address "cultural" issues of governance, explicitly recognizing that the sentence invokes that urban drug culture where sixteen year olds "are not afraid to kill." Throughout most of The Wire, Simon presents governance within that culture in terms of a latter-day tribalism, where domination reigns supreme over legitimation and signification; but he also examines the emerging need for inter-tribal "councils." At the same time he gives a nod to Isaiah Berlin's "Political Judgement" essay through a character who tries to apply lessons from a university classroom and experiences a short-term rise in his fortunes followed by a fatal descent.

I suspect that Simon also intended us to view addiction as both literal and metaphorical. The metaphorical reading emerges through what Brooks calls the "formerly middle class" in the title of his column, which is still fundamentally a culture of addiction. If that is the case, then, like latter-day Eloi, they will probably be too doped out (whether on drugs or a lingering Sehnsucht for consumerist practices) to exhibit any political response to alienation that Brooks anticipates; and they are even less likely to become the crazed bomb-throwing acolytes of anarchy examined by Enzensberger in "Dreamers of the Absolute!"

Lunch with Bartók

Today's Noontime Concerts™ in San Francisco concert consisted entirely of the music of Béla Bartók played by members of the Laurel Ensemble. Pianist Lori Lack accompanied flautist Sarah Holzman in a performance of the Suite Paysanne Hongroise, an arrangement of piano settings of Hungarian folk songs. This was followed by Contrasts, in which Lack, playing music that Bartók had composed for himself, was joined by clarinetist Ann Lavin, playing the part of Benny Goodman, and violinist Christina Mok, playing the part of Joseph Szigeti. (I drop these names because the work was conceived with them in mind.) When this was performed last May by San Francisco Conservatory students, I wrote the following about the music:

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

Any tension that may have existed between Goodman and Bartók was absent in the relationship between Lavin and Lack. Indeed, Lavin summoned up a variety of brash sounds that were about as remote as one could get from Goodman's brand of swing (but right at home with both Bird and Trane), entirely consistent with Bartók's particular brand of rhetoric, which could be vulgar without necessarily being offensive. Thus, the roller coaster was still there; and Mok was equally at home on it, particularly when she launched into the sort of cadenza in the final movement that Trane himself, with his habit of trying to learn new licks from recordings, would have been tempted to acquire. The opening suite was a bit more on the tame side, although every now and then Holzman caught on to the folk spirit with her own bursts of energy. Since the last time I heard Bartók's music, it was a link in a chain that ran from Ernő von Dohnányi to György Kurtág, I appreciated the opportunity to hear him dominate an entire program!

Honoring Andrew Imbrie

Cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau's Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was dedicated to the memory of Andrew Imbrie. The composer and Berkeley faculty member died at the beginning of last December, roughly around the same time as the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen. While Stockhausen's music received considerable "memorial attention" during 2008, particularly in Europe, last night was my first opportunity to hear any of Imbrie's music. He was represented on Fonteneau's program by two short pieces: the 2002 "Duet for Two Friends" and the 2006 "Melody for Gayageum."

It is unclear whether the "friends" of the 2002 composition were Fonteneau and clarinetist John Sackett, who gave the work its first performance, or whether the friendship referred to the scoring for cello and bass clarinet. There is certainly an affinity between these two instruments, so the work provided an opportunity to explore the subtleties induced by their different sonorities. Thus, the work could be approached more as an intimate conversation than as a conventional duet. For jazz listeners such a conversation is not particularly new. Charles Mingus may have played bass, rather than cello. However, he often approached his instrument more as a cello than as a jazz bass; and this was certainly the case in his improvisations with Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet. These two could go on at great length covering extensive ground that was as technical as it was emotional. Imbrie's work was far more modest, although just as technically demanding. Indeed, the intimacy of the engagement seemed to have progressed to a point where these "friends" had little to actually say beyond just enjoying their mutual presence.

The gayageum is basically a twelve string Korean zither. Thus, as was the case with Stewart Wallace's score for The Bonesetter's Daughter, Imbrie's 2006 composition seems to ask to be approached in terms of Asian music heard through Western ears. My own problem was that, while I was familiar with the music that inspired Wallace, I knew absolutely nothing about the gayageum. I was thus confronted with a lack of contextual knowledge that would elevate this work beyond just another introspective cello solo. Fonteneau certainly helped by offering some introductory remarks about the general thematic structure, but the question of how a traditional Korean instrument figured in the conception of the work remained unanswered.

The "bookends" for these rather modest works were more "monumental" in nature: Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 102, Number 2 sonata in D major and Johannes Brahms' Opus 38 sonata in E minor. Brahms was working on this sonata during the same time when he composed his Opus 34 F minor piano quintet, and both works display similar levels of emotional energy and intensity. While the resources of the sonata are not as extensive as those of the quintet, Fonteneau invested the performance with all the emotion it demands and was more than ably supported by pianist Jeffrey Sykes. Similar qualities emerged from their performance of Beethoven, although this was a work from his final years. Listening to these works in succession, I realized that Brahms' sonata was definitely not "haunted by Beethoven's shadow." There may have been a sense of a torch being passed, but it is through the passing of that torch that a work like the Opus 38 can be heard as both retrospective and prospective. If there was a problem with shadows, it was that these two works ultimately made it difficult for very much light to shine on the more recent compositions by Imbrie.

False VERITÉ

In a remote corner of the Café Momus, beyond the visual range of those who go to see and be seen, sits a distinguished bourgeois gentleman, who may be politely described as "late-middle-aged." In the midst of the raucous chaos in his midst, he is deeply absorbed in his reading. After more than half of the second act of this San Francisco Opera production of Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème has elapsed, a woman in equally distinguished bourgeois attire enters the Café and is almost immediately greeted by the maître d', as if he knows her embarrassment in the presence of the Café "regulars." She is escorted to the table of the gentleman, and we in the audience immediately recognize the intimacy of this situation. We are free to make up our own details: It does not matter if they have waited decades for this meeting or if this is the site of a regular assignation. Indeed, it does not even matter what we see them do, since their overt actions are deliberately restrained. However, stage director Harry Silverstein has clearly seen in them a way to set a context for passionate erotic attraction that is never addressed by Puccini's librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica (and may have also been overlooked by the original source material by Henri Mürger).

Whether or not Silverstein was being deliberately subversive, his inclusion of this vignette highlights how little authenticity there is in the supposedly verité spirit of one of the most popular operas in the current repertoire. At the end of what has turned out to be an impressively cerebral opera season (using even the comedy of Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore for a humane reflection on the placebo effect), La Bohème asks of us nothing other than a full and unquestioning suspension of disbelief. In return we are given an abundance of eye candy and a full measure of star turns, each of which demands that action be suspended while the audience erupts with approval. Taken on these merits, this production was as good a vehicle for introducing the new Music Director, Nicola Luisotti, as any. Luisotti's command of the score could move us from set piece to set piece without letting us dwell on dramatic details, such as crowd scenes that lack the sorts of spontaneous dynamics that Richard Wagner captured so well in Die Meistersinger or a historical context that became the basis for Karl Marx' The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850. We could enjoy the balanced coupling of Angela Gheorghiu's Mimi with Piotr Beczala's Rodolfo, even if we also wished that Quinn Kelsey's Marcello had been blessed with a Musetta with more voice control than Norah Amsellem could muster. Nevertheless, Silverstein's little mimed episode remains to remind us of the underlying humanity of that age that seemed to be as secondary in the priorities of Puccini and his librettists as it was to Louis Philippe's monarchy.

Chutzpah We Can Believe In

This is not the first time I have committed a Chutzpah of the Week award at the very beginning of the week. I always worry that such a commitment will be overridden by some greater act of chutzpah before the week has ended. However, since Henry Kissinger has been off my chutzpah radar for well over a year, it is hard for me to resist the opportunity to get him back on the beam. Ironically, his only past award was granted on a Wednesday, thus also raising the question of whether or not he would be trumped before the end of the week. He sustained the challenge than, and I suspect he will do the same this week.

The site for this week's award is the meeting of the World Economic Forum, which may provide even more fertile ground for the cultivation of chutzpah than our own District of Columbia does. What other gathering has consistently hosted and honored a delegate wanted as a war criminal by a sovereign nation, as if positive media attention had the power to dismiss the charges pending against him? On the other hand had this week's gathering in India not provided Kissinger with an opportunity to speak to the world, I might have missed out on his act of chutzpah, because the core of the act resided in his speech. As reported from New Delhi by James Lamont (assisted by Andrew Ward in Washington) for the Financial Times, Kissinger used his Forum speech to endorse the appointment of Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State!

Consider the perspective behind this act. The deterioration of the status of the United States in the eyes of other countries was probably not the factor that decided Barack Obama's election to the Presidency; but it was a factor that attracted considerable attention in our own country, as well as overseas. From a historical point of view, that deterioration can probably be traced back to the Vietnam War; and, while Kissinger was not directly responsible for getting us into that mess, he was responsible for many decisions that did little more than make things worse. One of those decisions involved the invasion of Cambodia and now provides the primary grounds for his war criminal charges. Nevertheless, his power to advise Presidents continued and grew even to a level of authority in the current Administration, through which our country's degraded state could no longer escape attention. Within this context he now presumes to offer to the President Elect his thoughts on the future Department of State!

Needless to say, Kissinger is not the sort of person to do anything without a motive; so we have to wonder what is really going on with this act. It would be too trivial to dismiss this as the act of a wise man in his dotage trying to show the world that he is as wise as ever. My guess is that it is actually the act of an old man who has become afraid of ghosts, and the specific ghost I have in mind is that of Augusto Pinochet. International justice finally caught up with Pinochet, but it did not happen until he was close to death. Kissinger looks at Obama and sees a man who takes global relations seriously enough to reconsider our country's participation in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Were that to be the case, our country would recognize the authority of the ICC to subpoena Kissinger to face charges filed by the Cambodian government, a fate from which he has been protected by the Bush Administration. Does Kissinger see Clinton as an ally in keeping that protection intact; and, if that perception is accurate, what would that say about Clinton's ability to restore the reputation of the United States as an "honest broker" in global deliberations?

Kissinger's self-insertion into the shaping of the Obama Cabinet counts as chutzpah for all the right reasons. However, in doing so, his chutzpah may have brought attention to a serious argument against Clinton's qualifications to represent the Obama Administration as Secretary of State. Thus of us who relish irony might enjoy hoping that Kissinger's little act of pretention might, by exposing a previously unnoticed flaw in Clinton's ideology, ultimately lead to that very confrontation with the ICC that he has been trying to avoid for so many years.

Description through Music

Before going over to Davies Symphony Hall last night for one of my San Francisco Symphony subscription concerts, I found myself reading "Just Remember This," Michael Greenberg's review of Sue Halpern's book, Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research, in my just-arrived New York Review. Greenberg's observation that "our memory is the fullest record we have of ourselves" reminded me of what I still feel is the most important lesson from Plato's "Theaetetus," which is that any understanding we may achieve of the nature of memory will, of necessity, be tightly coupled to the related concepts of description, being, and knowledge itself. I was thus pleasantly surprised to discover that, while the three compositions on last night's Symphony program may not have set out to penetrate the realm of knowledge, each offered its own approach to description, memory, and a sense of self, albeit in decidedly different ways.

The first of these was Joseph Haydn's incidental music for a German version of a French seventeenth-century comedy about absent mindedness by Jean-François Régnard. Given that Halpern's book is concerned primarily with efforts to treat Alzheimer's Disease, one might think that an association with such low humor would be politically incorrect, if not downright cruel; and certainly one will not find any clinical understanding of the mind in Régnard's text or Haydn's associated music. Nevertheless, when Haydn recast his work as his sixtieth, C major, symphony, he attached the name "Il Distratto," the Italian translation of Régnard's title; and this version makes for an interesting perspective on the vagaries of the easily distracted (attention deficit?) mind. Some themes are intrusively interrupted, while the second theme of the first movement seems to lose touch with its own orientation through a prolonged diminuendo. This may well have been perceived as yet another instance of Haydn injecting humor into his music; but, even if he was playing for laughs, Haydn seemed to have tapped into some of the key traits of the easily-distracted mind and captured their nature in his composition. Thus, what may have begun as low humor now carries a sense of poignancy in an age that knows more about the mind but is still humbled by how little it knows about mental disorders. Thus, when the finale of the symphony is preceded by an episode ostensibly compensating for the orchestra having gone out of tune, the humor of the strings struggling to pull themselves back into tune carries the bitter sadness that comes with the confrontation of a mental incapacity that we discover in another or perhaps in ourselves.

Haydn's symphony was followed by Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," a setting of a prose poem by James Agee, which the author later incorporated as the prologue to his novel A Death in the Family. When the text was first published, Agee offering the following introduction:

We are talking now of summer evening's in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

In other words this is description in the service of memory as a vehicle for the discovery of self, the most fundamental instance of being. Whether or not one would call that "knowledge" may be debated; but it certainly makes a good twentieth-century case for what the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico called "poetic wisdom." There is a tendency to treat such self-discovery through memory as self-indulgent sentimentality; and there are those, such as Joshua Kosman in his San Francisco Chronicle review, who hear Barber's score as matching Agee's sentimentality, teardrop for teardrop, as it were. However, this dismisses the sharp edge of Agee's introduction (not set by Barber), which as much as confesses that what is about to be offered as memory deliberately incorporates a layer of deceptive illusion. Barber's score does not so much seek out that illusion to inform the listener as much as it raises its figurative eyebrows when the text tends to drift into the too-good-to-be-true. In last night's performance this made for an interesting complementation of resources. Soprano Erin Wall sang the narration of Agee's text with all the sincerity of its surface appearances, while Michael Tilson Thomas gently but persuasively used the orchestral setting to let us know that there was more to this text than those surface appearances. The result was a convincing case that Barber was not only aware of Agee's poetic wisdom but capable of communicating it through his own musical resources.

It is unclear how much the descriptions of Ludwig van Beethoven's F major symphony (Number 6, Opus 68, "Pastoral") are a reflection of his own memories, let alone his sense of self; but they definitely push the envelope of how music could be applied to description. What is most interesting about this symphony is the extent to which that description emerges through short motives that get repeated so many times that one might feel there is a connection to Philip Glass. However, those motives are cast in large-scale dynamic progressions, such as those I recently examined in the Opus 109 piano sonata, resulting in what I called in an earlier post "repetition without being repetitive." Thomas negotiated these dynamic progressions with a sure hand, to the point of often specifying the number of strings playing at any given time. Since he was working with a reduced string section, this made for striking sonorities quite unlike any I had heard in previous performances of this work. Social theory tells us that domination ultimately comes down to the power to manage resources. It would be harshly objective to reduce this performance to a matter of resource management; but it would still be fair to say that resource management added a "secret sauce" to the recipe that made this particular Beethoven listening experience such a memorable one. Through that memory we may discover that, as was the case with Barber's setting of Agee's text, there was more poetic wisdom in this symphony than might have been taken from its surface appearances.

Justice Defied

Thanks to my cable subscription, I got to watch the film Citizen Verdict on Showtime. The basic plot concerns a producer of reality television programs (played by Jerry Springer, who thus revealed that his skills at putting on an act are more technique than intuition) who launches a program in which the entire audience serves as the jury for a trial they watch being broadcast. The whole production is made out of little more than cardboard; but, in spite of its simplistic construction, it offers several good object lessons into the nature of "due process of law" and why it is so important to the way in which our judicial system actually works. I was thinking about this film when reviewing that Charles Rosen quote about Oscar Wilde, which I cited on Thursday. Rosen's phrase, "absurdly bad taste," is absolutely apposite to the way in which director Philippe Martinez and his writers, Tony Clark and Kristina Hamilton-Grobler, have chosen to tell this story of the perversion of our judicial foundations; but, because that noun "perversion" is also so apposite, it is that very bad taste that serves, again in Rosen's words, to "embarrass and disturb while commanding our attention." It is most apparent when the citizen-filed guilty verdict leads to a death sentence, whose execution is also broadcast (pay-per-view). The execution scene was shot in the spirit that there are no limits to vulgarity; but, as such, it can claim legitimate decent from Wilde's original conception of Salomé. Whether all this is sufficient to seize the attention of those "wisdom of crowds" ideologues and give it the violent shaking it deserves remains to be seen; but, by virtue of its artistic license (take as many meanings as you wish), Citizen Verdict stands as an excellent, if unpleasant, example of how "poetic wisdom" can engender reflection on our own humanity.

The Messiaen Acid Test

For all the positive things I have written about approaching the music of Olivier Messiaen, I should state, by way of disclaimer, that there is one work that I have found almost impossible going. That is his opera Saint François d'Assise, at least as it was produced at the San Francisco Opera several years ago. This is a monumental piece of work, and I am not convinced that it works in a single sitting. It consists of eight tableaux distributed over three acts, and each tableau is a meditative experience unto itself. Stringing them all together feels too much like "more of the same" in the absence of any unifying narrative arc; and the "Adieu" episode in the final tableau feels as if it goes on forever (at least if one has had the patience to sit through the first seven)! Were it not an economic impossibility, this opera deserves to be spread out over a longer period, with each act, if not each tableau, performed on successive days. In such a setting the opera might feel more like the religious experience that Messiaen had in mind and less like an endurance test!

No Bretton Woods

Regardless of any questions of ideology, it is very unlikely that the spirit of Bretton Woods will be honored at tomorrow's G20 meeting. This is immediately apparent from the background piece by BBC News Economics reporter (so nice to see at least one news institution respecting that noun!) Steve Schifferes:

In the summer of 1944, delegates from 44 countries met in the midst of World War II to reshape the world's international financial system.

The location of the meeting - in the plush Mount Washington Hotel in rural Bretton Woods, New Hampshire - was designed to ensure that the delegates would have no distractions, and no pressure from lobbyists or Congressmen, as they worked on their plans for post-war reconstruction.

Can we expect any of the G20 delegates to forego all of their "instruments of communication," not to mention the use of those instruments to "test the waters" of external "sources of influence," at any meeting these days? The irony, of course, is that the reason for the G20 meeting has as much to do with a "crisis of connectivity" (on a global scale) as it has to do with the more palpable economic crisis. It is not just that technology-enabled globalization has made us vulnerable to what I have called "the discontents of connectivity;" it is also that those discontents have exposed an addictive behavior that detaches us all from the sustained attention required for serious deliberation. These are just not conditions conducive to that critical approach to the whole nature of political economy that the current economic crisis demands.

In reviewing my archives I discovered that I have often relied on Schifferes to provide a useful context where economic reporting is concerned. Thus, I found myself returning to a post I had written in which, through Schifferes, I had learned about the Growth Commission. I suspect that I would feel a lot more confident about my own economic future if those guys were on this case, doing serious nuts-and-bolts deliberation rather than providing a forum for a ceremony of the rich and mighty! Michael Spence, how can we get your attention when it is so much needed?

Wild(e) SALOME

Reading Charles Rosen's piece on Wystan Auden in the latest New York Review, I encountered the following sentence about Oscar Wilde:

De Profundis (the letter from Wilde in prison to "Bosie," Lord Alfred Douglas) and Salome, for example, make painfully embarrassing reading, the one drenched in self-pity and the other in absurdly bad taste, and yet they remain important with all their imperfection precisely because they embarrass and disturb while commanding our attention.

Looking back on my observations about Jürgen Flimm's staging for the Metropolitan Opera of Richard Strauss' Salome opera, with its highly literal adaptation of Wilde's text, my only argument would be that there is nothing absurd about that bad taste. It is through the bad taste that Wilde tapped into his ideology of decadence. It is because there is not even the slightest hint of absurdity (as we would later find, for example, in the plays of Eugène Ionesco) that the Salome experience is as embarrassing and disturbing as it is. When Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who would collaborate with Strauss on most (all?) of his subsequent operas, said of Wilde that "he insulted reality," he could well have had both the play and Strauss' operatic adaptation in mind.

Strauss, of course, was neither embarrassed nor disturbed by decadence (which is one reason why I chafe at Alex Ross choosing to begin his book about twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise, with Salome). Ross has no trouble hearing the decadence in Der Rosenkavalier; but, where he sees regress in the path from Salome to Rosenkavalier, I see progress. Furthermore, I see Hofmannsthal as the instrument of that progress. Even though I wrote about Salome as "a clash of identity-defining narratives," the ideology of decadence reduces those identities to cardboard stereotypes, just as Alfred Jarry had reduced his atrocity-ridden retelling of Macbeth, his play Ubu Roi (which, incidentally, predates Wilde's play by less than a decade), to violence perpetrated by puppets. Hofmannsthal returned Strauss to the world of fully fleshed-out human characters in Rosenkavalier, and the decadence of the music surrounds those characters with the poignant Sehnsucht over the passing from an old order to a new one. The identities clash here, too; but we feel for them as much as we detach ourselves from the characters of Salome (which is the only way we can cope with feeling embarrassed and disturbed by them). One could almost image Hofmannsthal saying, "All right, Richard, you've had your fun with Oscar's toys. Now put them away, and let's get to work on some characters in the real world!"

None of this should be take as retrospective criticism of the Metropolitan Opera production. In an age in which the entertainment industry has almost inoculated us against even the most horrible shocks, Flimm found ways to keep the embarrassing and disturbing qualities of this century-old work alive and provocative; and the Met provided him with a cast who devoted all their energies into buying into his techniques. There is no question that Salome deserves a place in the opera repertoire, but Flimm still deserves credit from reminding us of what it did to achieve that status.

Never too Late for Chutzpah!

President George W. Bush apparently has no intention of letting his lame duck status interfere with his capacity for building up a collection of Chutzpah of the Week award. Once again I have Al Jazeera English to thank for helping me with my decision, and once again the award is based on his inability to keep his mouth shut for our current financial crisis. More specifically, our President's twelfth award is based on remarks he prepared for a speech today prior to the G20 gather in Washington on Saturday. Here is how Al Jazeera English reported the content of that speech:

George Bush, the US president, is to urge global leaders to fix the current financial system rather than dismantle it completely, the White House has said.

Bush, who will host a conference with leaders of the world's top 20 economies this weekend on the financial crisis, is in New York to deliver remarks on the financial turmoil.

"[The president will] emphasise that free market capitalism - especially free trade - is still the best system to create economic growth and lift people out of poverty," Carlton Carroll, a White House spokesman, said.

"We should fix the problems we have rather than dismantle a system that has improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world."

Bush will call the financial crisis a decisive moment for the global economy but "not a failure of the free market system", according to prepared remarks.

Al Jazeera's John Terrett says that Bush's aim in his speech on Thursday will be to appear as buoyant and optimistic about the economy as possible in a bid to ease fears over the economy.

It is hard to imagine what it would take to be "buoyant and optimistic" of a mess that is decided of one's own making; but a strong helping of chutzpah would definitely have to be part of the mix! I suspect that, however superficial his knowledge of economic may be, our President is nervous about the prospect of a new Bretton Woods approach to reviewing the basic "rules of the game," not to mention the influence that John Maynard Keynes could have on that approach. Worse yet, that approach could well lead to taking a critical approach to the whole nature of political economy, meaning that he would also have to contend with the likes of Karl Marx. Our President may be uncertain about economic theories, but his ability to sort out the good guys from the bad guys is probably as robust as ever! Thus, once again he is sacrificing a sense of reality in favor of his own vision of a war of good against evil; and his assumption that the rest of the G20 will take such reasoning seriously is the highest order of negative-connotation chutzpah.

Communication and Etiquette

It had to happen sooner or later. The contentious discussion over Chris Hedges' latest Truthdig column, "America the Illiterate," has been sidetracked by arguments over the relevance or propriety of readers identifying and trying to correct errors in comments submitted by others. When this happened over on The Huffington Post about a year ago, I wrote about it in a post that I called "The Illiterate Blogosphere," deliberately choosing a title that would reflection the emotional dimension of my position. As I recently wrote, that is a position beside the likes of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil, who, from their vantage point in Vienna during the early twentieth century believed passionately that the decay of the proper use of language was an omen of the decay of the culture speaking that language. Those who have followed my attempts to deal with this topic probably remember my citing that Musil spent the better part of his daylight hours marking out all the errors in the daily newspapers! However, in the context of what seems to happen when one makes such a practice a public one through the Internet, it is probably relevant that Musil kept his critical marks to himself!

I also hold to the principle of the medieval trivium, which is that communication rests on the triple foundation of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. Thus, there are ways in which we can push the envelopes of grammar and even logic in the interest of rhetorical impact. All that really matters at the end of the day is whether the communicating agent really has something to communicate or is just "wasting air" (in deference to Dukes of Hazzard fans). We can all "read through" texts that would be torn apart by a writing professor at "some mid-western or southern state school" (in the words of one Truthdig comment); but those texts still lack the clarity of expression that most of us would prefer. They would benefit from good editing, but the Truthdig "comment space" not a forum in which content is edited before it is released. However, even with that shortcoming, I take comfort in the fact that the discourse there has not gotten as ugly as it did on The Huffington Post.

When we are engaged in personal correspondence, we usually know how to behave in response to a poorly worded text: We try to convey what we understood, possibly explain why we read the text that way, and try to confirm our understanding. That is the best we can do in the absence of a third-party editor. (Editing one's own text is always a risky matter for a variety of reasons.) An Internet forum for comments, however, is a bit like personal correspondence where everyone gets to look over everyone else's shoulder. Seeking clarification that can sometimes be frustrating, if not downright maddening; but those of us committed to participating do what we can, because we all seem to share the conviction that this stuff is worth reading.

I share the distaste expressed in a comment by "Leefeller" for what I would call pedantry for its own sake. However, I also believe there are times when clarification would serve the flow of discourse. If that clarification involves raising what appears to be an error in logic, grammar, or even rhetoric, then the error should be raised. The responsibility of raising it, however, also carries the responsibility of doing so with the "tone of voice" (so to speak) appropriate to the occasion. In the pre-Internet days this was called "netiquette;" and it has basically died off with the enormous inflation of participants since those Dark Ages. The decay of netiquette is a major reason why I tend to foam at the mouth whenever I hear talk about the "wisdom of crowds;" but I would like to believe that it can be restored in more limited communities (such as Truthdig) whose members tend to have common interests and values.

One final point: I have tried to live by the discipline of reading the entirety of any text I write before hitting Submit or Send or, in this particular case, "PUBLISH POST." It does not take a lot of time; and I catch a lot of those little things (about a dozen of them in this particular case) that are easily repaired. If each of us were a bit more patient with the process of "speaking to the world," be it through the blogosphere or the commenting process, we might then discover that "the world" is more patient with us; and we all might be better informed by the ensuing events!

Music of Faith

For all of my frustrations with the irreconcilable differences between faith and reason, my own powers of reason are still obliged to acknowledge that, in the history of Western music, there are instances of both composition and performance that can only be properly examined through faith-based lenses; and this implies that there are also listening experiences that must be partially, if not entirely, guided by faith. In the twentieth century Olivier Messiaen may be the composer who benefits most from such faith-based performance and listening. This can be problematic for the self-proclaimed secular humanist; and I tried to confront my personal problems in trying last January to write about the San Francisco Symphony performance of Messiaen's "L'Ascension," a suite of four movements, each of which is a meditation on the miracle celebrated by the Feast of the Ascension, framed with a quotation from sacred text. Even more problematic has been my own effort to practice movements from his Vingt Regards sure L'Enfant-Jésus. Beyond the obvious problem that this composition is far beyond my technical skills (which, as I have observed, has not interfered with my efforts to practice the music of Charles Ives), there are the sacred connotations of the title itself, the titles of the individual Regards, and the extended note which Messiaen has provided as a preface (in which he refers to himself as "the author," rather than "the composer"). This note, in turn, explains the significance of three key themes and provides text to establish a context for each of the movements. What is the non-believer to do when confronted with such a manuscript?

In writing about "L'Ascension," I observed that Messiaen's approach to notation was thorough and meticulous enough that, where performance is concerned, he "pretty much made all the decisions that need to be made," which I called a stare decisis approach to performance. I would say that this rule can also be applied to the individual Regards, although I am not sure it can contribute to an effort to bring structural unity to the assembly of all twenty of them. I recall all of this today, because last night's Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, conducted by violinist Anthony Marwood, began with a performance of two of the movements from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Yesterday had turned out to be a very busy day for me; and, when I realized that I was approaching this music (and Marwood's observations) in a rather fatigued state, I decided that I would not stay for the remainder of the Class. However, I have to wonder whether or not that state of mind may have facilitated my surrendering myself to the music, setting aside any efforts to cogitate and just "letting it happen."

Those who discuss this music inevitably cite the "secular" circumstances under which it was composed as well as the sacred connotations of the title. Here is the Wikipedia account of the origins of the composition:

Messiaen was captured by the German army during World War II and was being held as a prisoner of war. While in transit to the prisoner of war camp, Messiaen showed the clarinetist Henri Akoka, also a prisoner, the sketches for what would become Abîme des oiseaux. Two other professional musicians were also among his fellow prisoners (the violinist Jean le Boulaire, and the cellist Étienne Pasquier), and he wrote a short trio for them. This piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio, plus himself at the piano. This combination of instruments is unusual, but not without precedent: Walter Rabl had composed for it in 1896, as had Paul Hindemith in 1938.

The Quartet was premiered in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany (currently Zgorzelec, Poland) on January 15, 1941, to an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners of war and prison guards (Rischin, 2003: 62). Messiaen later recalled the occasion: "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."

As with the Vingt Regards, Messiaen prefaced the score with a note to establish the sacred connotations, which are based on verses from the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, reproduced in the Wikipedia entry in the King James Version as follows:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire… and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth… And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever,… that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…

This text deserves a few comments. At a purely personal level, I realized that the text "Time is, time was but time shall be no more." is not Biblical. It is from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in the third chapter, in which Stephen Dedalus is confronting his mortal sin in the context of Father Arnall's sermon on Doomsday. More interesting, however, is that translations other than that of the King James Version do not cite time, as such, in this particular apocalyptic vision. Thus, the Revised Standard Version translated "there should be time no longer" as "there should be no more delay;" and the Jerusalem Bible confirms this reading with "The time of waiting is over." Thus, the text that Messiaen cited is not strictly about "the end of time" but about "the end of waiting!" The proposition that time should no longer exist comes closer to a Zen koan than a Christian revelation. Consequently, a "faith-based listening" to this music has more to do with Messiaen's own sense of faith (which we may assume was intensely personal and therefore possibly impenetrable) than with the apocalyptic visions of John.

This conclusion should also apply to the way in which Messiaen chose to title his eight movements:

1. Liturgie de cristal ("Liturgy of crystal") – for the full quartet.
2. Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps ("Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time") – for the full quartet.
3. Abîme des oiseaux ("Abyss of birds") – for solo clarinet.
4. Intermède ("Interlude") – for violin, cello, and clarinet.
5. Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus ("Praise to the eternity of Jesus") – for cello and piano.
6. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes ("Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets") – for the full quartet.
7. Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps ("Mingling of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time") – for the full quartet.
8. Louange à l'immortalité de Jésus ("Praise to the immortality of Jesus") – for violin and piano.

Note, for example, that the implication of immortality in the final title suggests that time has not come to an end but must submit to "the immorality of Jesus." One might thus make the case that the listener is free to make of this music what (s)he will, even from a secular point of view, just as Messiaen has exercised that freedom on his source text!

Having made this elaborate excursion through the basis for Messiaen's context and the reconciliation of that context for a secular humanist listener, I should point out that none of this figured in Marwood's review of the student performance of the first and sixth movements. Instead, he focused on how the ensemble could arrive at the most effective sonority; and he supplemented his observations with his own somewhat mystical observation that the ensemble should "be" the music, rather than "play" the music. I am inclined to take issue with this, particularly if Messiaen went to those same great lengths to specify with great precision just how the music should be "played." However much we may question the reasoning behind what Messiaen wanted to tell us by way of context for this composition, there is no questioning what he tells the performers to do. If they honor the rule of stare decisis, the music will take care of itself, both in the sounds that emerge and in the way in which those sounds then impact the mind behind the listening ear.

Living with the Mess

The discussion over Chris Hedges' latest Truthdig column, "America the Illiterate," has become a very contentious affair, messy enough to remind me, in one of my own comments, of James Thurber's cowboy who jumped on his horse and ran off wildly in all directions. This apparently encouraged a comment from "FENWICK" to invoke a more recent metaphor:

Why do these threads seem to always become a textual re-enactment of the premier appearance of Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen show? With piano stools and other furniture flying back and forth on the stage, Jerry played on with his golden blonde ringlets flying back and forth and around his like a wet mop. You could hardly hear him amidt the din.

The answer to FENWICK's question is that the Truthdig forum for comments is what Joyce Rothschild-Whitt called a "collectivist organization." One of the organizations that Rothschild-Whitt studied was a town meeting in New England; and, among other things, she observed that participants in such meetings tended to experience a high level of stress. However, her observations apply to the behavior of any group of vastly disparate interests that is trying to deliberate some significant matter. What most business schools (particularly the ones with a strong faith based not in some Divine Power but in information technology) fail to teach is that serious deliberation is a messy process; and the level of the mess increases with the number of people doing the deliberating. As the mess increases, it takes its toll on the psychological well-being of the participants; but those who take such deliberation seriously soldier on, because they know the outcome will be more effective than the results of any number-crunching "decision support technology!"

My guess is that this nature of deliberation has been around since the early days of Athenian democracy and that both Plato and Socrates were well aware of the messiness of it all. This is probably why the "Republic" preferred the philosopher-king as a "preemptive strike" against such messiness. Writing with a broader temporal perspective, Hegel came to the same conclusion in his Philosophy of History. As to my own opinion, given the choice between messiness and a philosopher-king, I go for the messiness; it is part of our very humanity, which is what I felt Hedges was disregarding when this discussion was first building up steam.

Negotiating the World

Having taken Chris Hedges to task for an elitist perspective on human nature in his "America the Illiterate" column for Truthdig, I would now like to take my argument up a notch. I think that, beyond any problems with the ways in which he made and tried to justify his points, the key flaw in his approach was that he tried to peg everything on the single concept of literacy. If one seriously wants to make a case for the ills of our current culture, I believe one needs a broader perspective than such quantitative metrics as the grade level at which we can read.

My search for such a perspective was guided by a sentence that Truthdig reader "Shenonymous" submitted in one of her comments:

Ignorance and illiteracy reduces everybody to the lowest common denominator and unable to negotiate the world that has grown megamiles ahead.

I like this concept of negotiating the world and would even deem it more constructive (and pragmatic) than Heidegger's focus on "being in the world." At the end of the day, we negotiate the world in terms of how we perceive it; and what is often critically overlooked is that the act of perception is fundamentally an act of interpretation. We have to interpret all sorts of things, including the signals we acquire through our sense organs, the kinesthetic sensations of our own bodies, and, of course, all those signs that confront us, which form the basis for semiotic theory. If we want to invoke the noun "literacy," we should invoke it in terms of "reading the world," rather than just reading all the many sign-based artifacts (otherwise known as "texts") of semiotics.

I would thus put forth the modest proposal that, if we have failed as a culture, it is because our educational system has failed to cultivate an effective capacity for such interpretation. I would further argue that several factors figure in that failure. The most important is that not all interpretations arrive at unchanging (analytical, if you want Kant-speak) truths. Similarly, it is often the case that two individuals will not interpret the same inputs in the same way. This is why I like that word "negotiating." The only way to deal with conflicting interpretations is to negotiate over them; and the only way to negotiate effectively is through conversation. (Jürgen Habermas preferred the phrase "communicative action" as a way of distancing himself from both formal theories of argumentation, such as that of Stephen Toulmin, and John Austin's speech act theory.) We also need to cultivate the recognition that negotiation does not always end in agreement; sometimes the only agreement is recognizing that the proponents of opposing interpretations can agree to disagree.

There is nothing new in this modest proposal. Those who invoke critical thinking will probably recognize at least parts of the items I introduced. I avoid the phrase only because I have encountered too many situations in which it has been abused to invoke its very opposite, the uncritical embrace of some ideology. When a phrase like "critical thinking" suffers that kind of a vulnerability, we are better off to discard it and invoke new language.

The greater problem behind this modest proposal is that it is not supported with a cut-and-dried curriculum. My guess is that such a curriculum would defeat the very spirit behind the proposal itself. So it may be that a consequence of my proposal would be the undermining of existing educational institutions. As a product of those institutions, I am not sure I like that consequence. On the other hand I have long believed in Brian Eno's "oblique strategy" of taking an extreme position and then coming "part way back." At the very least I am hoping that, by putting such a proposal on the table, I can encourage the formulation of alternative proposals, one of which may be more effective!

Waiting for the Resurrection

What is the key factor that divides the United States so sharply and yet so close to equally? It may well be that the issue most likely to bring opponents to blows (metaphorical, if not literal) is the dialectical opposition of faith and reason. Those who felt most strongly about the need for reason were also those most angered in 2000 when faith-based George W. Bush prevailed over Al Gore through a process that just about any "appeal to reason" would have deemed illegitimate. This engendered almost eight years of hand-writing despair, during which it seemed as if all the values of reason were mocked and eroded, if not flat-out discarded. This year the weathervane of the electoral vote system chose to reward a candidate with outstanding credentials of reason, probably the first since Jimmy Carter; yet, when we look at the popular vote, we see that this preference for reason over faith was anything but a landslide. The balance may have shifted, but hardly in a significant way and probably not for any reason directly concerned with a preference for reason over faith.

It is therefore no surprise that the faith-based are already preparing for the next battle; and there is a good chance that their anointed representative with be Sara Palin, whose primary qualification for serving as John McCain's running made appears the be the spirit of fundamentalism that supports her personal value system. Last night the BBC NEWS Web site filed a story based on a "wide-ranging interview with Fox News." Consider the following excerpt from that interview:

I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is.

And if there is an open door in [20]12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plough through that door.

I am reminded of Richard Nixon, whose conservatism had more to do with rabid anti-Communism (with a very strong anti-intellectual streak) than with matters of faith. Having lost to John F. Kennedy (whose Cabinet became a formidable gathering of intellectuals), Nixon's next major political move was to run for Governor of California, where he was soundly beaten by a liberal Democrat, after which he told the press that he would withdraw from politics, saying "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more." As we know, he rose from the grave he had dug for himself in the Presidential election of 1968, when the country was as torn apart over the new values that had emerged over the Sixties (particularly pertaining to opposition to our presence in Vietnam) and decided that it was time to bring back the "old guard," complete with its anti-intellectual roots.

Those interested in Palin's values are not interested in the powers of intellect or, for that matter, any other arguments of reason. They are not even interested in the impact of those values on how she would govern the country. The values themselves are all that matter, and those values are so entrenched that the very possibility of conversation about them has been thoroughly quashed. When conversation vanishes, reason vanishes along with it. Make no mistake: For the sector of the country that embraced Palin, reason, itself, will be on trial over the coming four years. If reason can ultimately heal the sick (by repairing a broken health care system) and restore hope to the poor (through a fairer distribution of wealth), those results may sway the convictions of many of the faith-based; but there will always be those who see reality itself as a test of faith. As I had feared, the plan to resurrect Palin seems to be under way, even before the Inauguration Day ceremonies have completed.

Spring Break

If I am going to continue my view of the current San Francisco Opera season as an undergraduate humanities seminar, then James Robinson's production of Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore must be spring break! This light-hearted pastoral riff on the tale of Tristan and Isolde preceded Wagner's more serious effort by about a quarter-century and is about as dialectically opposed to Wagner as one can imagine. The setting in the Napa Valley emphasized the distinction even further, the only dark clouds coming from the implicit suggestion that the newly-drafted soldiers we see are about the become cannon fodder for the First World War. However, those clouds never signify in the basic narrative, in which our rather simple hero (neither a Tristan nor a momma's-boy Albert Herring) longs for the town beauty, who would rather read about romance than experience it. The important twist in Felice Romani's libretto (and probably the source novel, Le Philtre, by Eugène Scribe) is that the love potion that gives Tristan and Isolde so much trouble is, in this case, recognized from the start as a fake, translating into the Napa setting as a typical item of fraudulent patent medicine. The joke is that, in spite of the con, it works, basically thanks to the logic of Ringo Starr in Help!: "It's all in the mind."

Like any good drama this opera is all about changes. So, no matter how absurd the story may be, it rises or falls over how well those changes are depicted and interact with each other. Thus, we have Nemorino, so smitten with Adina that he cannot do anything in front of her without making a fool of himself; and we have Adina making a show of flirting with Army sergeant Belcore for no reason other than to tease Nemorino. Enter Dulcamara with his potions, and in no time he has Nemorino pegged for a sucker. Nevertheless, the potion Nemorino buys does have an effect. It endows him with a confidence previously missing (not that different from the spiked punch that Albert Herring drinks); and Ramón Vargas knew exactly how to convince us of this change, which means that we could appreciate the change that Nemorino could then induce in Adina. That change, as performed by Inva Mula, was equally convincing, making it easy to enjoy the ride of these two opposites ultimately attracting each other.

Needless to say, the pacing of the changes was as important as the changes themselves; and Bruno Campanella had a perfect sense of using the music to move the action forward without being either too slow or too fast. This is a bit trickier than may seem at first blush. Donizetti, after all, had to contend with the shadow of Gioacchino Rossini, particularly in the form of his Barbiere di Siviglia, which preceded L'Elisir by about sixteen years. Rossini was a tough act to follow; and Donizetti did not follow it with half the imagination that Rossini had summoned, almost as if he was placing all of his bets on "Una furtiva lagrima" stopping the show (which, of course, if did). The score needed a conductor like Campanella, who could glide us through Donizetti's weaknesses without our being so aware of them that we would lose the levity of the story. Thus, while L'Elisir is slighter than Donizetti's subsequent Lucia di Lammermoor, the production of the former ultimately made for a more satisfying experience than last spring's presentation of the latter.

Cashing in on the Long Tail

Whatever the Internet evangelists may preach, it may well be the case that the only real money to be made out on the long tail ends up in the pockets of the most skillful spammers. According to a story on the BBC NEWS Web site this morning, this hypothesis has now been tested by a one month study conducted jointly by University of California campuses in Berkeley and San Diego. Seven computer scientists infiltrated Storm, a key network for spam diffusion and studied the behavior of (harmless) spam campaigns of their own generation. Here is the account of the project and its results:

The team used these [Storm controller] machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.

Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way Storm spreads using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.

The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) per year.

While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.

This final proposition is based on Udi Manber's old proposition that spam protection is best viewed as an ongoing arms race, meaning that those trying to make money from spam need to be as vigilant as those trying to avoid it. Under this proposition it is probably not realistic to try to scale daily revenue up to annual revenue. Nevertheless, at a time when many people reading their mail through the Internet are increasingly concerned with making their financial ends meet, there may well be an escalation in the "victim space," at least where scams such as those fake pharmacy sites are involved. We thus face the prospect that spam may continue to be a fundamental technology instrument for spreading the wealth. Unfortunately, the wealth its spreads comes from those who have very little of it in the first place, whose meager (in both numbers and finances) presence is magnified by a long-tail strategy!

Mere Humanity

Chris Hedges' latest Truthdig column, "America the Illiterate," could easily be taken as a profound jeremiad for our times were its arguments not shot through with so much fallacious reasoning. A full enumeration of these flaws would be one of those exhaustive tasks best left "as an exercise for the student." I feel it is more important to focus on a single point, which might best be described as an error of misrepresentation. This is the problem that Hedges' essay overlooks the extent to which the act of reflecting on one's own humanity has always been a relatively elite pursuit. Thus, we think of Greece as the "cradle of civilization" on the basis of a handful of data points, such as Sophocles and Plato; but just how many of the inhabitants of that land actually went to the amphitheater to ponder the fate of Oedipus or had the time to spend the day wandering around the agora with Socrates? In any community, regardless of the extent of its scale, most folks just want to get on with their lives in a way that will put food on the table, provide clothes to protect against the cold and the rain, and keep the roof secure. These priorities have little to do with whether ancestors could follow Abraham Lincoln's eleventh-grade vocabulary level (which Hedges compares with the sixth-grade level of George W. Bush) or whether their ancestors chose to ratify our Constitution on the basis of the convoluted language of the Federalist Papers. (Hedges cites the Princeton Review for his data from a study that compared the oral vocabulary of major political debates, so the linguistic sophistication of the Federalist authors was beyond the scope of that study.)

Those of us who reflect on "the human condition" almost always lose sight of how few our numbers are. The result is that there is always some "end," which the jeremiahs among us (like Hedges) claim is clearly in sight. Yet "humanity" endures, probably because it is so diverse (particularly when viewed on a global scale, as it should be) that, like Wittgenstein's example of the noun "game," it is a concept that eludes any clear definition. Through diversity "humanity" survives by simple Darwinian logic; and even the most reflective of us really have no hand at all in that survival mechanism. Rather than agonizing over the fact that Mickey Mouse today is now more famous than Voltaire was in the eighteenth century (one of his many propositions that deserves a skeptical reading), he should take Voltaire's advice by seeing to the needs of his own garden while letting "humanity" take care of itself!

A Commanding Sense of Sonority

When Nikolaj Znaider gave his San Francisco Performances debut violin recital last March, I was definitely one of the less enthusiastic members of the audience. The primary basis for my discontent was that, while Znaider had a strong command of metric pulse, he was not able to convert that pulse into an equally strong command of musical rhythm. By the time I heard this recital, I had already purchased my San Francisco Symphony tickets for the current season; and I knew I would be hearing him play the Johannes Brahms 1878 Opus 77 D major violin concerto under Herbert Blomstedt. So I tried to conclude my impressions of the recital with the optimistic hope that Znaider would "play better with others."

According to Joshua Kosman's account of last Thursday afternoon's performance for the San Francisco Chronicle, Znaider is Blomstedt's protégé; and Blomstedt's presence on the podium definitely had a positive impact on Znaider. While I had found Znaider "a bit raggedy on the details" in his recital, in approaching the Opus 77, he converted these rough qualities into a raw and visceral confrontation with the intensely emotional composer of the Opus 60 C minor piano quartet, completed about three years before the concerto. This was not the usual lush display of technique soaring above a rich orchestral base; and the interpretation was such a departure from expectations that Kosman dismissed it as "rather dry and pedantic." However, anyone who knows enough about the Opus 60 to consider it as a point of departure for approaching Opus 77 will recognize that this performances was anything but "dry and pedantic;" and the validity of the approach was reinforced by the support that Blomstedt provided. By reducing the number of strings, Blomstedt provided an orchestral sound that was, indeed, dry; but it was a dryness endowed with a driving sense of urgency, which made the perfect match to Znaider's confrontational approach. Nevertheless, with all of these forays into Brahms' darker side, Blomstedt still delivered the wind chorale that opens the Adagio movement with a serenity that was as close to perfection as any performance of this work that I have heard. Nevertheless, that serenity signifies as the brief respite between the tensions of the outer movements; and, if this was not the Brahms we were used to hearing, it was certainly a side of Brahms that we could benefit from hearing.

By choosing Carl Nielsen's Opus 27 third symphony ("Sinfonia espansiva") for the second half of the program, Blomstedt demonstrated how a single symphony orchestra could easily shift from one domain of sonority to another, radically opposed to the first. The rich sounds he elicited from orchestra made it clear that all of the urgent dryness of the Brahms performance was an intentional and logical decision. Now we could return to a space more consistent with our expectations of a symphony orchestra, although there was now a different kind of urgent drive that propelled us through the four movements of this symphony.

This was clear from the very first impression, described in the program book by Michael Steinberg as "an amazing start with a series of violent and accelerating explosions, twenty-six of them, all on A." I am not sure I would call them "explosions." Indeed, I have to wonder whether or not Nielson might have been pushing back against the old fate-knocking-at-the-door cliché associated with Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 67 C minor symphony (the notorious fifth). This was the sort of panicked knocking at the door that rouses us from peaceful slumber and summons us to some task of utmost urgency; and the orchestra responded to that summons with an "expansive" burst of energy (consistent with the tempo given as Allegro espansivo). However, this movement is followed by an Andante pastorale, where all that expansive energy dissipates into an equally expansive pastoral stillness. Indeed, the stillness expands beyond the limits of the orchestra itself to include two wordless solo voices (soprano Katherine Whyte and baritone Eugene Chan), whom Blomstedt judiciously placed at the rear of the choir loft, literally above and beyond the space of the orchestra itself.

I have another quibble with Steinberg's notes where the final movement is concerned. He wrote that it "opens with a theme that marches along in what is all too easy to think of as a British war movie style of the 1940s or 50s." Perhaps I have just been thinking more about nationalism than Steinberg did when he wrote this text; but, to my ears, this theme was more of a chorale with a distinctive folk element displayed most prominently by an emphatic use of grace notes. Thinking back on the centrality of those grace notes, I was reminded of how Alban Berg had conceived of the final act of his opera Wozzeck as a sequence of variations movements, each developing variations on a non-conventional source, such as a rhythm or a single note. This opera followed Nielsen's symphony by a little less than ten years, but Berg had apparently not considered the idea of a variation on an embellishment! Nielsen's movement develops as each voice in the orchestral fabric gets its own crack at this folk idiom, concluding as all the voices come together in one final (expansive) rendering of the opening chorale.

I owe much of my understanding of Nielsen to Blomstedt. He recorded all of the symphonies with the San Francisco Symphony when he was Music Director. It has been a particular pleasure for me to have the opportunity to hear him return to these symphonies under his current Conductor Laureate status, and the Symphony certainly seems to be sharing that pleasure.

HD ATOMIC

Opportunities to see two different productions of a relatively new opera are rare, and the opportunity to see a broadcast of a second version of such a new work are even rarer. Nevertheless, I can sympathize with Peter Gelb's decision to follow through on adding John Adams' Doctor Atomic to the Metropolitan Opera repertoire by bringing in a new stage director and greatly appreciate his then deciding to include this new production in his Live in HD series. Those of us who have seen a healthy share of Peter Sellars' stagings know that they can be hit-or-miss affairs; and in this case Sellars was already present as compiler of the opera's libretto. Why not assign production responsibilities to Penny Woolcock, who had already taken on the task of creating the film version of The Death of Klinghoffer?

Why not, indeed? The music was given an excellent performance under conductor Alan Gilbert, who seems to have worked well with Woolcock over the most fundamental questions, such as how this extended meditation on the Manhattan Project activities leading up to the first test of the atomic bomb should be paced. Note the noun phrase "extended meditation." The libretto is decidedly not a narrative. Rather it is a reflection on the events that constitute the narrative, constructed from an amalgam of source documents and literary sources, most (if not all) of which were reading favorites of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Manhattan Project.

The good news is that, for those of us with a reasonably sound sense of the history of the Manhattan Project, that first test firing, and all the subsequent events, the libretto provides a decidedly interesting point of view, even if it does not authentically reflect the personalities depicted in the opera. The bad news is the extent to which ours has become a culture of historical ignorance. When a news anchor for National Public Radio can no longer give an accurate account of Richard Nixon's dog, Checkers, while reading an editorial about Barack Obama's commitment to give his kids a puppy, can we expect a typical audience, even at the Metropolitan Opera, to have a clear sense of the story of how American warfare entered the Atomic Age?

To some extent Woolcock tried to compensate for this ignorance. In Sellars' staging for the San Francisco Opera, the characters were basically vessels for the libretto. This served the meditative objective, but it diminished the role of character as character. The work could just as easily have been performed as a cantata with voices in the appropriate ranges. Woolcock did a better job of translating the textual meditations into dramatic portrayals of the characters as motivated agents. These characters included Oppenheimer himself, General Leslie Groves, in charge of the military presence on the sites of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller, who spent most of his Manhattan Project time doing the first work on a hydrogen bomb, Kitty Oppenheimer, Robert's wife, Robert Wilson, one of the key young researchers, and Frank Hubbard, the army meteorologist responsible for the final decision on testing the bomb on the basis of suitable weather conditions. Woolcock exploited her cinematic expertise in rendering the motives of these characters through scrupulously chosen postures and gestures; and my guess is that the camera close-ups for the HD broadcast made these physical subtleties even easier to "read" than they would be in the vast space of the Metropolitan Opera House. If the Salome telecast gave us a bit too much of the facial contortions behind the demands of Richard Strauss' writing for the lead soprano voice, the Doctor Atomic telecast cut right to the core of the humanity of these characters who were critical to not only the story of the opera but the story of the Atomic Age itself.

Within this context of motivation, Woolcock also made what I felt was a critical (and valuable) shift in priorities. Where Sellars had tended to focus on the tension between Oppenheimer and his wife, Woolcock was more interested in the tension between Oppenheimer and Teller. Within the context of the overall history, this is the more crucial tension; and it was excellently depicted in the performances by Gerald Finley as the former and Richard Paul Fink as the latter. (This being opera, one could compare that tension to the one that Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito conceived for Otello and Jago.) One could write another opera (probably closer to Adams than to Verdi) that would explore the tragic αγών between Oppenheimer and Teller that ensued after the end of the Second World War; and Woolcock did well to hint that, in the decade that followed the narrative behind Doctor Atomic, an even more important narrative evolved around not just the Atomic Age but the context it established for the Cold War. If this message was a subtle one, then she drew on another subtlety to reinforce it: Julian Crouch's set design incorporated projections of the original Manhattan Project security badges. Among the badges selected for projection was that of Klaus Fuchs, who probably can be counted as the first perpetrator of "atomic espionage," passing classified Manhattan Project data to the Russians. This was the sort of gesture that was probably lost on those unfamiliar with the actual history, but the rest of us appreciated the acknowledgement!

Who Made the Most Difference on Election Day?

Andrew Keen's latest post to his Great Seduction blog posed the question "Did the Internet elect Barack Obama?" This is the sort of writing that draws me to his blog in the first place. He takes all the many truisms that spring up out of the fertile soil (less polite metaphors may be more appropriate) of Internet evangelism and tries to impose his own modest sense of reality. However, rather than my trying to analyze Keen's arguments on this topic, I would prefer to just lay out my own.

Once again, I find a need to counter the evangelical claptrap with the phraseology of the National Rifle Association: The Internet did not elect Obama; people elected Obama. All of the rose-colored speculations about the roles of new technologies are all very well and good. However, they may distract from the more important question: Who actually voted for Obama? This is not a frivolous question, since, once again, this was an election in which the popular vote was almost evenly divided. It is thus important to try to identify those factors that tipped the balance, even if ever so subtly, in Obama's favor.

In this respect the Thursday San Francisco Chronicle provided an interesting visualization of data. The data source was a CNN exit poll with a sample size of 17,536. The respondents were sorted according to the categories of Sex, Age, Annual Income, Independents, and First-Time Voters. As I see it, the best way to read these data is to try to identify where Obama's strengths were. The First-Time Voters category was clearly a source, with 69% of them voting for him; but this only raises other questions. Who were those first-time voters; and how were they persuaded to vote for the first time?

To answer these questions, we need to look at the breakdown of the Age and Annual Income categories. Obama's edge among the young (68%) is almost as high as his lead with First-Time Voters. So it is probably important that many of those first-time voters were young, from which it would then be valid to ask how many of them were persuaded to vote through the Internet.

On the other hand Obama's greatest strength in all the categories was among those with an annual income under $15,000: 73%. These are the people who have suffered the most under the current Administration and whose need for change may best be described as an aching pain. For them the choice between Obama and McCain for "pain relief" was a no-brainer; and I doubt that the Internet played much of a role in either delivering that message or persuading them to vote for the first time. As I see it, this particular statistic testifies to Obama taking his community organizing skills and deploying them on a larger scale; and, as is the case in most community organizing efforts, the Internet might be nice to have for support but really does not signify among the grass roots that matter the most. Indeed, from this point of view, the Republican Party may have fatally shot itself in the foot by subjecting the very spirit of community organizing to so much ridicule during its Convention.

If we were to apply the categories of the Academy Awards, the Internet would probably be a good candidate for Supporting Actor. However, the role that mattered most was shared among all those skilled in the social mechanics of community organizing. I for one believe that those same mechanics will play the strongest role in helping Obama fulfill his promises to clean up the many messes that the Bush Administration has left for him. From this point of view, I really have trouble fathoming just what Google CEO Eric Schmidt is doing up there in Obama's team of economic advisers! The best advice right now has less to do with summoning "all the world's information" and everything to do with getting back to those people at the heart of the "real economy."

Predatory Chutzpah

Now that Barack Obama has won the election, we may start to see a few signs of promising audacity again. One of these may take place through his effort to provide more transparency in government operations by using the Internet as a window on those operations. Under the philosophy that transparency begins at home, the Obama team has set up a Web site through which the public may monitor (and possibly participate in) the transition processes. Here is how BBC NEWS has reported this move:

Barack Obama is turning to the web as he prepares to become US president.

Via a website called Change.gov, the Obama campaign plans to provide a guide to the transition process.

The site also solicits suggestions from US citizens about their vision for America, and lets them apply for a post with the new administration.

This is definitely a first step in a good direction, at least as long as it is not mistaken for the entire journey (honoring the spirit of Lao Tzu). Having visited the site, my first observation is that, while there are opportunities for input (such as the contribution of "vision statements" and job applications), there are not (yet?) opportunities for conversation (the most salient example being a blog site that does not accept comments). I can understand not jumping into conversation feet first. The new Administration will be playing to a rather large population of Web-savvy readers; and that population may well involve conversation management on a scale beyond what one encounters on Truthdig or The Huffington Post.

There is also the problem that any invitation to participation usually also constitutes an invitation to predation. As I documented last March, even writing about predation seemed to be enough to trigger a comment that, itself, was predatory in nature. Thus, the BBC is to be credited for using the concluding paragraphs of their report to address this new breed of predatory risks:

It is not just Barack Obama who is using the net to get his message across. Hi-tech criminals are also capitalising on his victory in an attempt to trick web users into handing over valuable information.

F-Secure found a booby-trapped page claiming to host a copy of Obama's acceptance speech that prompted visitors to update their Flash video player before viewing the video clip. Anyone downloading and installing the supposed update would fall victim to a virus that stole bank login details.

"E-mail users who are eager to get the latest scoop on Obama's monumental presidential win should be careful that they are not being tricked by conniving cybercriminals," said Graham Cluley from Sophos.

The security firm also came across junk mail messages claiming that either Barack Obama or John McCain had died. Those following the links in these junk messages would find themselves on the website of a Canadian pharmacist.

In the run up to the US election, security firm Symantec said it had found junk mail messages that posed as a survey of voter attitudes that tried to gather and steal personal data.

Another spam message offered a free "Barackumentary" on DVD, that users could get by providing credit card and other personal details.

If this is a new breed of predation, I also see it as a new breed of chutzpah, deliberately capitalizing on those who will see the Internet as a gateway for their own participation of the "new day" of the new Administration. Thus, in the spirit of my giving a Chutzpah of the Week award to the predator who had exploited my "Predatory Practices on the Internet," post, this week's award will be assigned to the new generation of anonymous predators determined to turn the audacity of hope into the audacity of victimization.

Expectations for Barack Obama

If Barack Obama and his team are serious about managing the expectations of the electorate, even with Inauguration Day a little over two month away, then, on the basis of the exchanges currently flying around on the pages of Truthdig, they are going to have to begin with those progressives who are already grousing about betrayal. Thus, for example, we can now read alarmist cries about Obama's "imperialist bent," which would not have been out of place in old Maoist propaganda tracts. Perhaps the progressives are afraid to confront just how close the kinship between politics and power is.

To do this we would do well to go back to Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation" lecture. Weber begins with the proposition "that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." Within this premise he then defines "politics" as "striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state." Thus, at the end of the day, any "head of state" has to make decisions about exercising power (i.e. physical force legitimately used) and the effectiveness of those decisions will depend on effective "power resource management." This may sound abstract and cold-blooded; but it can still serve as a lens through which we can few such things as the human dimension of values, be they progressive or regressive.

From this point of view, all questions of agenda are secondary to whether or not Obama will be able to assemble a team that will enable his own "effective power resource management." Unless he has such effective management skills, all questions about what he does with his power are academic. From this point of view, the crucial flaw of the Bush Administration is that they were so gung ho on amassing power (a key observation in David Bromwich’s piece on Dick Cheney in the latest New York Review) that little thought was given to exercising it effectively. If Obama can function effectively in the world of Weber-based abstractions, I have more hope for the future than I had with a President who could never seem to get beyond a faith-based concrete opposition of good against evil.

The Machine Gets Confused

When I wrote a meditative reflection on E. M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" last May, the point I was trying to make was that we have become victims of those who spend too much time promoting what a technology does and not enough (if any) time addressing the consequences of what happens when the technology fails to do what it is supposed to do. Our victimization takes the form of a dependency (which I continue to suggest may best be described as addictive) on what the technology does, to the exclusion of thinking that, whatever that task may be, there are other ways to do it. Thus, the sorts of consequences I have in mind often amount to a form of withdrawal (as is the case when, for example, our electronic mail service is disrupted); but I have also suggested that the consequences may involve abandoning any "sense of reality," if not just plain old common sense.

For an illustration of this latter phenomenon, consider, as a case in point, the following story about some unfortunate newlyweds from today's SPIEGEL ONLINE:

After a wedding in the town of Hamm, just east of Dortmund, the couple set off for a hotel in a rustic village called Willingen. They switched on their car's navigation system and proceeded to follow instructions.

Unfortunately, the navigation system seemed to have no better idea of where to go than the couple had. The newlyweds found themselves driving along a bumpy, unpaved forest road toward a tall mountain. Even when a barricade blocked further progress, the navigation system led them forward. But when they tried to drive around the roadblock, their car got stuck.

Not wanting to spend the night in a pitch-black forest on the side of an 840-meter (2,755-foot) mountain, the couple called the police. By now it was about 8 p.m. The police needed another two hours to find them, since the couple was unable to say exactly where they were.

Finally, though, the cops were able to get the car back onto a main road and lead the couple to their honeymoon hotel -- where they checked in just before midnight.

The common sense part is best illustrated by the driver's decision that the car's navigation system "knew more" than a physical barricade. Put another way, the "word" of the technology was accepted without the slightest shadow of a doubt, to the point that the driver was more willing to doubt the "message" of the barricade.

This also tells us something about how the technology was designed, which is that it apparently could not tell the driver, "I don't know." In turns of my attempts to analyze what I have called "service pathology" (which is as applicable to service-providing technology as it is to human service providers), this was a case of the "pathology of ignorance" in which the consequences were pretty dire. However, just as serious was the driver's dependence on a "navigation service" for getting to a destination. As I had suggested around the same time that I was brooding over Forster, we have become a culture whose ontology no longer seems to have room for the good old-fashioned paper map and are therefore just as vulnerable as all those in Forster's story who were helpless when their all-serving machine stopped.

This is usually the point at which at least one technology evangelist invokes the logic of the National Rifle Association: Machines don't make mistakes; people make mistakes! This may be true, but it is not helpful. Was this "honeymoon nightmare" story an account of bad design or negligent implementation? Whether the designer failed to allow for the possibility that the system would accept an address it could not process or the coding team did not classify the hotel address properly makes little difference from the point of the user. It is a little bit like the automatic checkout system at my local Safeway, which works great as long as a human supervisor is present. That supervisor has been trained to a level of skill where, when things are working, (s)he can manage four checkout stations. Unfortunately, last weekend I saw the consequence of the confluence of a system failure with a supervisor unprepared for that failure; and that poor Safeway had to worry about longer lines for fewer human-run checkout aisles! Thus, if we choose to call either the German or the Safeway case study a problem of people making mistakes, they are making those mistakes under the aggravation of a technology that was supposed to "make things better!"

The SPIEGEL ONLINE story also demonstrates that this is not strictly an American problem. It is a problem that can arise in any culture victimized by technology addiction, which means that, thanks to globalization, it is a world-wide problem. Unfortunately, as was the case with Forster's fictional culture, we seem more inclined to live with the problem that to try to do something about it.

One Small Step for Civility

With all the (deserved) attention being paid to Barack Obama's victory speech, I was glad to see Tim Dickinson take note of John McCain's concession speech in his National Affairs blog for Rolling Stone. As Dickinson put it, "that concession speech was all class;" and I think one of the reasons is that, left to his own devices, McCain believes in the value of civility and takes his belief seriously enough to put it into practice. Realizing that he had nothing left to lose, he knew he could tell his political campaign "handlers" where to go; and I assume he did just that. The ironic result may well be that McCain's speech may have been the closest to "words from the heart" that we experienced in the entire campaign, because he was willing to put aside all trappings of suasive oratory (regardless of the objective of the suasion) to let us all know how he has come to terms with the outcome of the election.

Having said all that, however, I should also recognize that "Kristy from Louisiana" reminded Dickinson about those McCain supporters on the other side of the podium who booed just about every reference to the Democrats. It seemed as if McCain was the only one at that massive gathering willing to honor the phrase "loyal opposition;" and this led me to wonder if the general level of civility at Democrat gatherings was significantly higher than among the Republicans or if this distinction was just a bias of my own perception. On the other hand an observation less susceptible to bias showed up in Seth Bornstein's Associated Press report on the high voter turnout. He interviewed Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, who observed that party membership seemed to correlate with turnout level:

Breakdown by party voting also shows that Republican turnout rates are down quite a bit, while Democratic turnout rates are up, Gans said.

Republican states, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, saw turnout drop. "I think they were discouraged," Gans said.

Bearing in mind Obama's injunction to put aside cynicism, I still have to wonder if the motto of today's Republican party, as reflected by both civility in public gatherings and participating in the electoral process, is "I believe in democracy, as long as things get done my way!" This could well be the party that is already laying out plans for Sarah Palin to stand in the next Presidential election. If such is the case, then Obama would to well not to discard all cynicism and start watching his back, even before Inauguration Day!

More Beethoven and Chopin … but with a Difference!

As I tried to make clear last week, there is nothing inherently wrong with a piano recital consisting entirely of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin, as long as the pianist is fundamentally accountable "to the music itself," rather than some panel of competition judges, real or imagined. As Chairman of the Piano Department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Mack McCray, this afternoon's Noontime Concerts™ recitalist at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, no longer has to worry about pleasing competition judges and has racked up his own share of awards to affirm that proposition. (If anything, he now has to worry about being an effective judge of up-and-coming pianists!) Thus, he could fix his priorities on presenting Beethoven and Chopin to his audience without that audience suffering from déjà vu (or, as one of my friends from my school days used to say, "déjà heard")!

Beethoven was represented by only one composition, the E major Opus 109 sonata, which is certainly an impressive piece of representation. As the first of the "final three" sonatas (which will constitute the entirety of the final recital in András Schiff's full Beethoven sonata cycle this spring), these can be taken as his "last word" (whether or not he intended it as such) on the piano sonata, but not on sonata form or, for that matter, on solo piano music, since there remained two sets of bagatelles and the completion of the "Diabelli" variations. That latter may be the more important milestone, since it is likely that, while he continued to pour out more and more variations on Anton Diabelli's little waltz, two of those final sonatas, including Opus 109, conclude with a set of elaborately conceived variations on a highly extended theme. Thus, it may be that the path established by these two variations movements continues most logically to the third movement of the Opus 125 D minor ("Choral") symphony (which is also "informed" by the "double variations" structure of the Opus 67 C minor symphony).

The challenge that faces the soloist, then, is one of knowing where he (or she) is in the overall architecture of an elaborate set of variations developed over a comparably elaborate theme. I suspect it was this challenge that led Leon Fleisher to talk about understanding a composition (or even a movement of a composition) at the "macro-level," even if he had Chopin, rather than Beethoven, in mind when he raised this point in his Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory. As I have already observed, I have some very strong thoughts of my own about what it means to think at the macro-level, so in an effort to validate my own medicine by taking it, consider the following time-line visualization of a performance of the entire third movement of Opus 109 by Egon Petri:

While this is not a particularly precise visualization, it illustrates the extent to which an understanding of the entire movement has less to do with the boundaries of the individual variations and more with how energy is distributed across the approximately eleven minutes of Petri's performance. We see a series of climaxes, which progress from sparse to dense, followed by a gradual tapering off towards the end of the movement. I am not suggesting that McCray used such a visualization to prepare his own performance; but I think it would be fair to say that his performance helped the listener understand this macro-level structure in terms of organizing the distribution of energy. In so doing, he endowed the performance with a vitality that transcended the technical virtuosity of the variations themselves and clarified the role of each variation in the overall motivating force of the whole. I see such an approach as one possible demonstration of what I have been trying to get at when I struggle with that concept of "accountability to the music itself."

Considering the imposing architectural demands of this sonata, it is probably just as well that the remainder of McCray's program was devoted to shorter works by Chopin. These, in turn, required a variety of approaches. The Opus 40, Number 1 A major polonaise, with its rather clear-cut structure of repeated material, drew most of its strength from a similar approach to budgeting energy, using appropriately paced crescendos to facilitate the sense of segmentation, rather than letting the repetitions speak for themselves. The two mazurkas (Opus 30, Number 4 in C-sharp minor and Opus 59, Number 2 in A-flat major), on the other hand, were shorter and were rendered more in the manner of intimate glances on a few brief moments, rather in the spirit that Jerome Robbins took to Chopin's mazurkas in his choreography of "Dances at a Gathering." The Opus 57 berceuse then brought us back to the "turf" of variations, this time spinning out forms of increasing embellishment over a simple ostinato. Finally, McCray offered the ternary form Opus 47 ballade in A-flat major, which builds up to a single fever-pitched climax in its middle section and then subsides its way into its return to the opening section, rather in the same sense in which Beethoven closes off the Opus 109. Five compositions involving four different scales of listening, each performed in such a way as to guide the listener through the appropriate scale. After such an educational experience, McCray rewarded his audience with an encore of the "Minute" waltz. I have always preferred the story about the work being motivated not by a clock but by a dog chasing its tail. McCray delivered it as a fresh breeze of familiarity, lightweight but far from insignificant and concluding a recital that renewed my conviction that "we go to concerts in order to learn how to listen."

Off Dvořák's Beaten Path

It is a bit sad to think that most listeners know about Antonín Dvořák through a relatively limited number of compositions, while a large number of his works, particularly his chamber music, are true gems that "pass unnoticed." Last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, three of those gems received the notice they have always deserved through an "All Dvořák Program" in the Faculty Artist Series of concerts. The motivating force behind mining these gems was Paul Hersh, who contributed as both violist and pianist and was joined by both alumnae (all women, hence the feminine suffix) and current Conservatory students.

The evening began with Dvořák's Opus 47, a cycle of five bagatelles, which may well have come about as an accident of circumstance. The circumstance had to do with Dvořák meeting to play string quartets at the house of one of his friends in a room which happened to have a harmonium. This gave him the idea of involving the harmonium in the music they played; and, since Dvořák's instrument was the viola, the result was scored for two violins, cello, and harmonium. Since Dvořák had originally been trained as an organist, he had both the feel for playing the harmonium and the ear to weave it into a chamber music fabric. The result was Opus 47; and, in this case at least, its eccentric orchestration serves as an excuse for why it is so little heard. Nevertheless, it has a haunting quality that deserves more attention. The harmonium smoothly shifts from a continuo role of long, sustained chords to a voice in the contrapuntal fabric, while its reedy sonorities reinforce the element of "folk color," which we expect of those composers we classify as "nationalist." I described the work as a cycle, because its structure is cyclic in nature, somewhat like a rondo on a multi-movement scale. It may have been composed on a lark having to do with little more than Dvořák wanting to play his friend's harmonium, but the result deserves more listening.

The second work on the program also has a curious compositional history. Cypresses began in 1865 as a cycle of eighteen songs for voice and piano on love poems by the Czech poet Gustav Pfleger Moravský. This was Dvořák's first recorded effort at vocal writing; and many (probably including Dvořák himself) were not particularly happy with how the texts were set. The music stuck with him, however; and in 1887 he rearranged twelve of the settings for string quartet, five of which were played in that form last night. If this work is little known among the chamber music set, it may be more familiar to the ballet crowd. Anthony Tudor drew upon the string quartet setting (along with, as the American Ballet Theater (ABT) Web page puts it "other chamber music for strings") for one of his last (and certainly one of his greatest) works, "The Leaves Are Fading." I was an ABT subscriber when this work was added to their repertoire; and I delighted in the way that Tudor had tapped into all the passion in Dvořák's music, even without the explicit support of the Moravský texts. My only regret was having to hear this amazing chamber music played by a string orchestra, which is why this part of last night's program probably had the greatest visceral effect on me. As with the bagatelles, much of the magic could be found in the contrapuntal fabric, in which the very perception of melody often emerges across the voices, rather than within any single voice. Tudor was almost always ambitious in his selections of music. In "The Leaves Are Fading" he was downright brilliant; but it was only in hearing that music returned to its chamber music setting that I could fully appreciate how brilliant his perceptions had been.

The final work on the program was the Opus 68 four-hand piano composition From the Bohemian Forest, written shortly after those Opus 59 Legends on which I am currently working. On the basis of some prefatory remarks given by Hersh, I got the impression that this was Dvořák's "Czech answer" to Robert Schumann's Opus 82 Waldscenen, since the former had apparently groused that the latter had already taken all the good names for the movements! Well, Dvořák's Bohemian woods are definitely not Schumann's; and much of the distinction has to do with "local color," much of which is the same as what I am currently encountering in the Legends. Nevertheless, this is a "four-hand voice" that is characteristically different from that of both the Legends and the two sets of Slavonic Dances; and the opportunity to hear that voice was welcome, indeed.

Making Sense of Russian History and American Politics

The lead item in today's Date Lines column in the San Francisco Chronicle is an interesting bit of opera news reported by Music Critic Joshua Kosman:

Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" probes deeply into the philosophy and ethics of politics, but perhaps not specifically enough for the audience members at Tuesday night's performance at the San Francisco Opera.

For patrons eager to hear the latest election updates without keeping a portable radio plugged into their ears, the company will keep eight high-definition video screens tuned to live TV coverage of the election - before the curtain goes up and at intermission, not during the performance.

While I seldom seem to agree with Kosman's evaluations, his description of Modest Mussorgsky's opera in terms of "the philosophy and ethics of politics" may well be the best way to introduce this opera to those unfamiliar with it. It also appeals to my own vanity in terms of my summary of the current Opera season in terms of "a seminar in an undergraduate humanities program." From an American point of view, it may have seemed more appropriate to perform Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (which I had described as "A Tragedy of Republic") on Election Day, particularly in light of its opening scene, which is basically about using money to get the election results you want; but Boris is not so much about a particular tsar or even the winning and losing of a royal throne as it is about the general public of a very large nation in very hard times.

Yesterday I cited Mussorgsky as one of the Russian "nationalists;" and he may well be the most politicized of the composers I included in the list I drew up based on an entry in The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Boris is one of two operas he wrote on the underlying theme of the relationship between government and the governed, the other being Khovanshchina. (It is also interesting to note that, according to his Wikipedia entry, between the ages of 19 and 22 he worked on (and subsequently abandoned) an opera about Oedipus; so it could well have been Sophocles who got him interested in this theme in the first place.) Thus, while we can approach most operas strictly on the basis of what the libretto chooses to tell us, where Boris is concerned, we can really benefit from political perspective on some Russian history that most of us probably do not know.

A good approach to historical background is provided in the Wikipedia entry for the Boris Godunov play by Alexander Pushkin, which is the primary source for Mussorgsky's libretto (written by Mussorgsky himself):

An understanding of the drama of Boris Godunov may be facilitated by a basic knowledge of the historical events surrounding the Time of Troubles, the interregnum period of relative anarchy following the end of the Ryurik Dynasty (1598) and preceding the Romanov Dynasty (1613). Key events are as follows:

• 1584 - Ivan IV "The Terrible", the first Grand Prince of Muscovy to use the title Tsar (Caesar), dies. Ivan’s successor is his feeble son Fyodor, now Fyodor I, who cares only for spiritual matters, and leaves the affairs of state to his capable brother-in-law, boyar Boris Godunov, now de facto regent.
• 1591 - Ivan’s other son Dmitriy dies under mysterious circumstances in Uglich. An investigation, ordered by Godunov and carried out by Prince Vasiliy Shuyskiy, determines that the Tsarevich, while playing with a knife, had an epileptic seizure, fell, and died from a self-inflicted wound to the throat. Dmitriy's mother, Maria Nagaya, exiled with him to Uglich by Godunov, claims he was assassinated. Rumors linking Boris to the crime are circulated by his enemies.
• 1598 - Tsar Feodor I dies. He is virtually the last representative of the Ryurik Dynasty that has ruled Russia for 7 centuries. Patriarch Job of Moscow nominates Boris to succeed Fyodor I as Tsar, despite the rumors that Boris ordered the murder of Dmitriy. Boris agrees to ascend the throne only if elected by the Zemskiy Sobor. This the assembly does unanimously, and Boris is crowned the same year.
• 1604 - A pretender to the throne appears, claiming to be Tsarevich Dmitriy, but believed to be in reality one Grigoriy Otrepyev. He gains the support of the Polish aristocracy, and, obtaining a force of soldiers, he marches on Moscow. Crossing into Russia, Dmitriy’s invasion force is joined by disaffected Cossacks. However, after a few victories, it loses momentum.
• 1605 - Boris dies of unknown causes. He is succeeded by his son Fyodor, now Fyodor II. The death of Boris gives new life to the campaign of the False Dmitriy, who enters Moscow. Boyars who flock to his side murder Fyodor II and his mother.
• 1606 - False Dmitriy I is murdered, and is succeeded by Vasiliy Shuyskiy, now Vasiliy IV.
• 1610 - Vasiliy IV is deposed, and dies two years later in a Polish prison. Another pretender claiming to be Dmitriy Ivanovich, False Dmitriy II, is murdered.
• 1612 - Yet a third pretender, False Dmitriy III, is captured and executed.
• 1613 - The Time of Troubles comes to a close with the accession of Mikhail Romanov, son of Fyodor Romanov, who had been persecuted under Boris Godunov's reign.

Note: The culpability of Boris in the matter of Dmitriy's death can neither be proved nor disproved. Karamzin, the historian to whom the drama is dedicated, accepted it as fact, and Pushkin assumed it to be true, at least for the purpose of creating a tragedy in the mold of Shakespeare. Modern historians, however, tend to acquit Boris of the crime.

Several points are in order by way of response to this summary. Most important is the reinforcement of a remark I already made: This opera is less about Boris himself than it is about the Russian people during the Time of Troubles. I also think the suggestion that Pushkin had Shakespeare in mind while working on this play is an appropriate one. Boris himself has traits suggesting of both Henry IV ("Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.") and Richard III (refusing the crown while at prayer), both of whom assumed the throne through regicide. For that matter Boris' refusal of the crown also links him to Julius Caesar (although Shakespeare does not dwell on the murder of Pompey), which is also worth citing for the "crowd control" scenes, in which the Roman tribunes have been replaced by Russian police officers. Then, as a final bit of spice, we have the vagabond monk Varlaam, who does not figure in the above chronology but in the dramatic framework can make a firm claim to John Falstaff as an ancestor.

This brings us to the matter of the full title that Pushkin gave to his play: A Dramatic Tale, The Comedy of the Distress of the Muscovite State, of Tsar Boris, and of Grishka Otrepyev. Presumably Pushkin knew his Aristotle, particularly the argument in "Poetics" concerning the principle that tragedy is concerned with noble men, while comedy "is an imitation of baser men." As I had tried to argue in examining Simon Boccanegra, nobility is not necessarily a matter of whether one is patrician or plebian, the basis for the fundamental αγών of Verdi's opera; and Pushkin's choice of title may serve to indicate that each of the key characters in his play is base in his or her own way (to paraphrase a later Russian novelist). Thus, the Russian people themselves are about as true as you can get to the invective of Murellus in Act I, Scene I of Julius Caesar: "You blocks, you stones, your worse than senseless things!" These "huddled masses" are not only illiterate but generally weak at understanding what they experience, making up farcical explanations grounded in imaginative flights of fancy. Grigory (Grishka) is not much better, while the political elite (the Duma, their Secretary Shchelkalov, and the manipulative Prince Shuisky) place personal gain above all other priorities, even when the rest of the country is starving from a massive famine. This leaves Boris himself, chosen by a unanimous mandate by that political elite and possibly even well-intentioned, but still a reminder that a crown does not automatically make a man noble, just as Simon Boccanegra reminds us that a buccaneer is not necessarily base.

Pushkin's play is in 24 scenes, mostly in blank verse, which makes for a rather massive script. Mussorgsky's original libretto selected seven of these scenes, which, according to Pushkin's numbering, are 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 23, and 24. Whatever continuity Pushkin may have originally conceived has been seriously disrupted, but this does not really disrupt the continuity of the resulting opera. If Pushkin used the flow of history to establish continuity, Mussorgsky turned instead to the rhetoric of Russian folk music to integrate his seven scenes. Thus, even if these folk are as "worse than senseless" as Pushkin's comic perspective made them out to be, through their music they are elevated above those whose base qualities are grounded in their political behavior. This is not to say that Mussorgsky's approach ennobles the Russian people; but it reminds us that, while Pushkin may have taken a comic approach to a dysfunctional relationship between government and governed, Mussorgsky took that relationship to be serious stuff.

This brings up another literary connection. One of the things I enjoyed most in my freshman year was the opportunity to read the original text of the comédie Le Mariage de Figaro (in French) by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. The second act of this play has a monologue for Figaro that was considerably toned down by Lorenzo da Ponte, when he prepared the libretto for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 492 operatic treatment of the work. My professor paid particular attention to the original Beaumarchais text, remarking that, if one listened carefully to the words, one could hear the first sounds of the guillotine during the subsequent Reign of Terror. In a similar way Mussorgsky's music, if not Pushkin's actual text, foreshadows both the Russian uprising of 1905 and its brutal suppression.

This closes the circle on tomorrow night's performance after the polls have closed. Our own "Time of Troubles" may not be on the temporal scale of the one experienced in seventeenth-century Russia; but its geographical scale extends far beyond our own borders. Thus, tomorrow's election is being watched around the world with a level of attention that no preceding election has received, not only because of the extended scope of news media but also because, like it or not, the entire world will experience the consequences of the results. When it comes to that dysfunctional relationship between government and governed, our sympathies lie more with the serious, if not revolutionary, perspective of Mussorgsky's music than with the comic foundations of Pushkin's text. Were our culture not so willfully ignorant of history, we might benefit from an appreciation of this particular operatic portrayal of a people situated in their own "Time of Troubles." It might not change the way in which we vote, but it might help shape the attitude with which we face the next Administration, whoever the next occupant of the White House may be.

Listening to "Nationalist" Music

From time to time I write about my good fortune in living in a building in which I have neighbors who take listening to music as seriously as I do, some of them out of professional commitment but some just out of personal feelings about the performance of music. Today's post owes a great debt to two of them. The first is one with whom I have been exploring the four-hand piano repertoire for several months. Over the last few weeks we have begun work on the Opus 59 of Antonín Dvořák, his set of ten Legends. Before our last session this past Friday afternoon, she happened to remark that there seemed to be a revived interest in "nationalist" composers, who had tended to be out of favor for much of the latter half of the twentieth century. This is where my other neighbor enters the picture, because she has provided me with the benefit of pointers to useful Internet-based resources to compensate for the way I tend to use the Internet in highly focused ways. Recently she directed my attention to the "Art & Music" section of the Articles and Databases page on the Web site for the San Francisco Public Library. This is the perfect example of the shortcomings of my own tunnel vision. I visit this page frequently, but only when I am trying to get a copy of a reprint of some scholarly publication. So I have never really browsed it and needed someone else to encourage that browsing. While my neighbor was interested in the abundance of classical music she could now hear online, after checking out the site she had encouraged me to visit, I discovered that there was a link to Oxford Music Online, to which the Library was a subscriber. Thus, by using my library card number for authentication, I could pass through a gateway to read the text of the 2002 edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, along with Web sites for Grove Music Online and The Oxford Dictionary of Music.

This is where the influences of my two neighbors came to converge. I was more than a little curious about what this wealth of resources would have to say about the influence of nationalism, if not about recent prevailing attitudes towards so-called nationalist composers and their works. All three sources had appropriate subject entries; but I decided that the best place to start would be with the Dictionary, where the entry was entitled "Nationalism in Music." The basic "dictionary definition" was given as follows:

A mus. movement which began during the 19th cent. and was marked by emphasis on nat. elements in mus. such as folksongs, folk dances, folk rhythms or on subjects for operas and symphonic poems which reflected nat. life or history.

Ironically, the first example given in the entry was the eighteenth-century composer Joseph Haydn, who often drew upon folk sources. The remaining examples represent both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are sorted geographically as follows:

• Poland: Frédéric Chopin
• Russian: Mikhail Glinka, listed as the "founder" of the movement in Russia, followed by César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Mily Balakirev, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and an "etc.," which presumably accounts for Alexander Borodin as the remaining member of the Russian "Five."
• Hungary: Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, and Zoltán Kodály
• Bohemia (which I am not sure was ever, strictly speaking, a nation): Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček
• Norway: Edvard Grieg
• Finland: Jean Sibelius
• Spain: Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albéniz, and Enrique Granados
• England: Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams
• United States: Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, and Leonard Bernstein
• Brazil: Heitor Villa-Lobos

I take some comfort in having enough experience to be familiar with all of the names on this list, not to mention the background to pick that nit over the Russian "Five." However, while I would not dispute the composition of this list, it leads me to wonder to what extent nationalism actually constitutes what I like to call a "perceptual category."

For example, when my four-hand partner and I were running through different examples of "national bases," we thought of Russia more in terms of the twentieth-century Soviet Union than in terms of the nineteenth-century "Five." My own bias was probably the result of my exposure to Robert Mann through a Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which I had invoked in a review I wrote last March:

Nevertheless, last night's Annual Subscriber Gift Concert, organized by San Francisco Performances, could be listened to as a reflection on Robert Mann's comment at the end of his San Francisco Conservatory Master Class to the effect that the best way to get to know a composer is through the music to which that composer was exposed. (Mann actually said "folk music;" but I have used Ives as an example of an "experience base" that extends far beyond what we would call folk music.)

The specific composer Mann had in mind was Dmitri Shostakovich, who, regardless of the political climate, was probably exposed to the same basic source material as "The Five," but, by virtue of a radical change in his "social[ist?] environment," probably heard that material in equally radically different ways. Thus, what was sentimental for Glinka became ironic (if not sardonic) for Shostakovich; but both were clearly drawing upon a social "experience base." More important, however, is that, as I have tried to demonstrate with Ives, the experience base encompasses more than the "folk" sources.

The underlying truism is that, except for that period of the middle of the twentieth century when composers seemed more occupied with "systems" than with music (which was also the time when "nationalist" composers were taking the greatest rap from the academics who had become enamored of such "systems"), composition has always been grounded in personal listening experience. Put another way, while most of us struggle to describe the experience of listening to music with words, composers summon their own powers of description through music itself. This is why I feel it is so important to develop that "theory of listening to music." Such a theory should, by all rights, inform us not only with respect to what we hear (thus, following Igor Stravinsky's admonition, turning the experience of hearing into one of listening) but it should also inform our understanding of the composers to whom we listen in terms of their motives for composing in the first place. After all, composition is not only an action (to be understood in terms of the dynamics of the process, rather than just the outcome) but also a motivated action (meaning that those dynamics have less to do with the objectivity of physics and more to do with the subjectivity of the composer as a "social animal"); and, as a result, listening is influenced by not only the music itself but also the social network in which its composer is embedded.

Further Aspects of a Theory of Listening to Music

My brooding over my personal dissatisfaction with how little Alex Ross had to say about listening during his appearance at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Thursday has been prodding me to work out my own vision of just what a "theory of listening to music" would entail. Having set myself the premise that such a theory is addressed by neither music theory (which may best be viewed as a theory of normative practices in musical composition) nor the psychology of listening (which is concerned with what the neurological physical apparatus can and cannot do with auditory stimuli), I have put much of my time into identifying other disciplines that could play a foundational role. Thus, I came to the position that listening is, itself, a practice; and that practice originates in an individual's conscious mind, which, from the social behaviorist stance of George Herbert Mead, is a product of those social processes that have engaged that individual since birth. Furthermore, because sound can only exist by virtue of the ongoing "flow" of time (meaning that there is no such thing as a sound at an instantaneous point in time and, on the basis of the mathematics behind the physics of sound, as intervals of time get shorter, the sounds that can take place within them get more and more limited), any conscious reflection on one's own listening behavior must be what Donald Schön calls "reflection-in-action." Where Schön meets up with Mead on common ground is where the listening mind's capacity for reflection-in-action is shaped by the social processes associated with listening to music.

The next step appears to involve establishing a more systematic grasp on the nature of those social processes, and one candidate contributor to the foundations I seek may well be Randall Collins. When I last wrote about Collins, I was reviewing the framework for his monumental book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, and suggesting that his agenda should be directed towards a Sociology of Social Theorists. Here is how I described Collins' agenda:

He basically situates the study of philosophy within a vast (and, as his title implies, global) social network of practitioners, in which the "nodes" of the practitioners themselves are connected by three primary link types:

1. The "vertical" "master-pupil tie"
2. The "horizontal" "acquaintance tie"
3. The "conflictual tie," which can be either horizontal or vertical

One could clearly approach the study of music in terms of such a social network, but I suspect that the network would have to be more complex. With only a very small number of exceptions, the nodes of Collins' philosophy network were all practicing philosophers, where practice was a matter of engaging with students in a classroom and with others through "conversation" (which we can only study if it has been documented). (Thus Richard Rorty saw "keeping the conversation going" as a major obligation of the practice of philosophy.) Where the practice of music is concerned, however, we shall probably have to distinguish different types of nodes, corresponding to different types of practices. Thus, we should recognize distinctions between the practice of composition, the practice of performance, and the practice of description (through language, thus involving criticism, teaching, and that catch-all category of conversation), even if any individual engages in any non-empty subset of these practices. (Robert Schumann, for example, was intensely involved in all three practices.) We all deal with such types and type-shifting, often using the hat metaphor to call out a specific type. ("I am saying this to you with my 'newspaper critic' hat on." "Barack Obama knows when to talk to a crowd with his 'community organizer' hat on.")

Node type, in turn, is likely to impact how we view the links between those nodes. For example a particular performer P1 may have a horizontal link to a fellow performer P2; but, if P2 decides to compose a work for P1 to perform, then there would probably be a vertical link for situations in which P2 is "wearing his composer's hat." Similarly, the execution of jazz often involves "link shifting," even within the immediacy of a specific performance. This richer approach to the representation of nodes and links does not pose any significant problem as far as the mathematical foundations of abstract network theory are concerned, but interpreting those representations is likely to be far more challenging than the interpretations that Collins had to address in his philosophy network. Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss a methodological approach just because, on first blush, it appears difficult. Such methods are, themselves, practices; and we can assume that, should we decide to exercise them, we shall become more facile at using them as we become more experienced. This may take some time, but should we expect otherwise when the practice of music itself has been evolving over millennia?