A Major Anniversary

This morning Weekend Edition Saturday presented a story about a major 50-year anniversary in the history of jazz. The story was filed by Sara Fishko and introduced as follows:

Fifty years ago Saturday night, jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk stepped onto the stage of New York's Town Hall theater with nine other musicians to perform new arrangements of some of his best-known tunes. It was Monk's first time as a headliner in a concert hall, and it was an event in the jazz world.

The concert has become the stuff of jazz lore. This week, two groups of younger players took the same stage for tribute concerts.

This was a fascinating way to begin the day, particularly because it included audio recordings of Monk working with Hall Overton to prepare arrangements for the occasion that were truly extraordinary. Just as extraordinary is the fact that all of those working sessions were captured on tape by Overton's neighbor, W. Eugene Smith and are now being digitized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

More disappointing is that Fishko never bothered to say who those "two groups of younger players" were. Fortunately, however, this anniversary is important enough to have its own Web site, from which we can learn that the concerts were organized by Charles Tolliver (on February 26) and Jason Moran (on February 27). The Tolliver performance is now available through the NPR Web site, courtesy of WNYC. As of this writing, the Moran performance does not appear to be similarly available.

The recording of the original concert was produced by Orrin Keepnews for Riverside and is therefore in the CD collection, Thelonious Monk: The Complete Riverside Recordings. It is worth noting that the concert actually began with a quartet with Charlie Rouse on tenor, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. After three numbers ("In Walked Bud," "Blue Monk," and "Rhythm-a-ning") they were joined by Donald Byrd (trumpet), Eddie Bert (trombone), Robert Northern (French horn), Phil Woods (alto), Pepper Adams (baritone), and Jay McAlister (tuba). As the NPR broadcast observed, the result was a somewhat uncanny exercise in orchestrating Monk's very piano sound, not the sort of thing one expects of an arrangement but clearly what Monk had in mind. The only problem with this morning's broadcast is that one did not hear enough of the actual music, so it is good that one can turn to other sources to appreciate what really makes this anniversary significant.

Better Late than Never

Almost exactly a year and a month ago, I wrote a post entitled "The Best Movie We May Never See," based on a review I had read through my Variety RSS feed. The topic of this post was The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), a joint project directed and written by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath. It is probably worth reproducing what the Variety review wrote about Phrasavath:

Back in Laos, Phrasavath's father had worked for the CIA choosing targets inside the country for U.S. bombing runs. Following the fall of the CIA-backed Royal Lao Army to the Communist Pathet Lao in 1975, the Phrasavaths became personae non grata, with Thavi's father being shipped off to a re-education camp and his mother fleeing the country with eight of her 10 children in tow.

After a brief period in Thailand, the family applies for asylum in the U.S. and lands on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where their vision of a gold-paved promised land quickly gives way to the harsh realities of poverty, street gangs and a cramped tenement apartment shared with a Cambodian family of six.

In the time since I wrote my post, the film received an Oscar nomination for best documentary; and it is now finally ready for theatrical release, having opened in both San Francisco and Berkeley yesterday. Here is how Jonathan Curiel introduced his review in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle:

There are a smattering of commercially successful films - feature or documentary - that can truly be called riveting works of humanism. Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" and Errol Morris' "The Fog of War" are two that come to mind. They may soon be joined by "The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)," which was an Oscar nominee for best documentary and is now, in theatrical release, making its way across the United States.

As I previously wrote, this project interested me for two reasons. First of all, living in Singapore provided me with a wealth of opportunities to understand the context and impact of the Vietnam War far better than I could from any of the books and films (both documentary and fictitious) that emerged from that period of American history. Secondly, and more specifically, it was clear from the Variety account that, while this film was a documentary, it was also very much a narrative about consequences, that concept that I keep exploring but seems to be in the blind spot of contemporary American culture. My guess is that the theatrical run for this film will be neither long nor profitable, but hopefully it will serve as a precursor to distribution through DVD and cable. At least it is no longer consigned to that limbo that the "logic of money and power in Hollywood" usually provides for such films.

Keeping Bad Company?

The Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams' Doctor Atomic, which I have tried to examine from a variety of points of view, most recently by comparing my own thoughts with those of Daniel Mendelsohn's in The New York Review, has now been transferred to the English National Opera (ENO). I have now read two reviews from London, Rupert Christiansen's account in the Telegraph and that of Richard Fairman for the Financial Times. Also, to add to my own reflective mix, I finally got around to watching my DVR recording of The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, shown on the PBS American Experience series.

The word from across the pond is not particularly glowing (which may not be the best metaphor for an opera whose climax is the Trinity test of the atomic bomb). Christiansen was able to write from a position of familiarity with the opera:

When I first heard John Adams's third full-scale opera Doctor Atomic at its 2005 première in San Francisco, I called it "a moving and compelling work of moral, as well as musical, grandeur". I'm not going to eat my words, exactly, but a second hearing – ironically, in a production superior to San Francisco's – leaves me less convinced.

Fairman also tried to search out positive spin but found it only in the wisdom of the production-sharing arrangement that the ENO has formed with the Met:

This is the first time that Doctor Atomic, premiered in 2005, has been seen in the UK, and it is the third in a series of co-productions between English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. At a difficult time for funding, ENO must be glad to have the alliance and not only because the previous two productions – Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly and the highly original staging of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha – have been so successful.

As it turns out, Doctor Atomic is barely an opera at all, which is its number-one problem.

Christiansen also provided some useful background, part of which was actually new to me:

The opera tells the story of the last phase of the 1945 atom-bomb test at Los Alamos, and specifically focuses on the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, a sensitive, spiritual, liberal man who was nevertheless prepared to develop a weapon of mass destruction. In early planning, Doctor Atomic was also going to deal with Oppenheimer's remorse after Hiroshima and his run-in with McCarthyism. But, after Adams fell out with the original librettist Alice Goodman, Peter Sellars (who also directed the San Francisco production) created a script that makes what seem to me two crucial errors – the text was assembled from actual historical documents, bumped up with poetry associated with the characters in question; and the opera is brought to an end with the first test explosion.

This makes for a peculiarly inert plot, with all the corny "countdown" tension of a rotten episode of Star Trek – will the weather clear in time? Will the darn bomb actually work? –­ and dramatis personae who remain flat figures, lumbered with unshaped words that they seem to recite rather than embody. What Sellars has assembled may be scrupulously fair to all parties and the deeper "for" and "against" ramifications of the issue, but it doesn't come alive as theatre.

Adams has also been left to grapple with some very clunky text, which he fails to animate into a flow of meaningful melody – tracts of the vocal writing are so dull that they have no business being music at all.

The new part for me was that bit about Adams falling out with Goodman. In the events I had attended prior to the premiere of Doctor Atomic, this was quietly covered up with word that Goodman had a conflict with "other commitments." However, if there was actually a behind-the-scenes narrative about the coming apart of the "dynamic trio" behind the "ripped from the headlines" operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, then that narrative may be worth considering in terms of how Doctor Atomic finally emerged.

Both Christiansen and Fairman felt that the libretto of Doctor Atomic was the weakest link in its "production chain;" and they both provided basically the same justification for their respective opinions. In my own reaction to Mendelsohn's review, I also recognized that there was not much to the libretto; and, on further reflection, I would now invoke Gérard Genette's three component parts of "narrative reality:"

1. What you want to say (usually called the "story")
2. How you structure your text to say it (for which I like to apply Seymour Chatman's term "discourse")
3. How you deliver that text (which Genette calls the "narrating")

From that point of view, I would say that, in the case of the first two operas, there had been so much media attention that the libretto could be more concerned with meditating on the underlying story, rather than narrating it. Mendelsohn thus cited Adams describing Klinghoffer "as being more like a Bach oratorio or Passion than like a conventional opera" (Mendelsohn's words). One may also approach Oppenheimer in a similar way. On the one hand the story of the Manhattan Project keeps getting retold each time more of the related documents are declassified, while, as the American Experience film demonstrated, the character of Oppenheimer himself continues to intrigue. That latter factor is probably why San Francisco Opera Director Pamela Rosenberg first approached Adams for her "Faust Project," even if the real Faust story only began to emerge, in the words of an earlier documentary, "the day after Trinity" (which, as Christiansen observed, is where this particular opera ends).

However, I have a greater problem with Christiansen's observation about the resulting libretto, which is that, in my own personal opinion, the texts of both Nixon and Klinghoffer are far "clunkier" than that of Doctor Atomic. The latter opera intersperses the mundanity of source documents with some really fine poetry; and, for many who have seen this opera, Adams' setting of John Donne's fourteenth sonnet ("Batter my heart") is one of the high points. Goodman's texts, on the other hand, not only fail to rise above the mundane but practically celebrate their failure to do so. The results are not only clunky but the worst kind of tendentious. Were the underlying stories not so interesting, it would be easy to dismiss both Nixon and Klinghoffer as pretentious wasting of time.

Now Fairman was equally unhappy with the libretto, calling it an "artsy patchwork of texts," which would probably indicate that he felt the selection of Donne was out of place, even if he then went on to approve of how Adams had set that text. This got me to thinking that Adams seems to have run up a history of finding himself in bad company, at least where operas are concerned. Even when the text is a good one, he had to contend with the context that Sellars had provided for it; and I think that Fairman has a point that, although the Doctor Atomic text can rise above the mundane, it still has to contend with a pretentiously "artsy" context that is entirely Sellars' doing. This has a lot to do with why I side with Christiansen's preference for Penny Woolcock's staging over Sellars' original conception and why I invested so much of my own text in defending Woolcock against Mendelsohn's assessment of her efforts. Going back to Genette's framework, I feel very strongly that one cannot meditate upon a story that one does not understand; and, for all of his summoning of source documentation, there was too much evidence that Sellars just did not understand the story at the heart of this opera. Most important is that Sellars missed out on the critical tensions in Oppenheimer's life, which lay at the heart of the new Trials documentary (whose very choice of title oriented the viewer towards those tensions). I even went so far as to argue that, where grand opera is concerned, those personal tensions often carry far more weight than the story line of the plot itself. Unfortunately, Sellars was not able to carry that weight in Nixon; and he was even less up to the task in Doctor Atomic.

When thinking of the partnerships that Adams has formed in these operas, I find myself reminded of Duke Frederick's admonishment to Orlando after the wrestling match in the second scene of the first act of William Shakespeare's As You Like It:

I would thou hadst told me of another father.

When I consider the sensitivity that Adams has brought to setting not only Donne but also Walt Whitman (as in "The Wound Dresser"), I regret that he cannot tell me of "other parents" for his operas. He clearly understands how the nature of character can be revealed through music, and he deserves better partners to provide him with characters that can be so revealed.

Health Care and Uncertainty

Having dwelled on the question for about a week, I have decided that I shall try to apply my own "author's voice" to what is likely to be an unfolding narrative of my own health care. When I alluded to this topic last Saturday, I only suggested the key points leading up to my current position in the flow of this narrative. I shall now try to review these points more concretely and systematically.

During my annual physical in the fall of 2002, my primary care physician detected a rise in the level of the prostate specific antigen (PSA) in my blood. He said that the value was right on the edge of being serious; but, because the level had been so much lower in past blood tests (from 1.5 to 4.5), he recommended that I see a urologist. The urologist basically agreed with my primary care physician's assessment and scheduled a biopsy, whose results revealed prostate cancer. (For those interested in such details, the Gleason grade in left and right prostate was 3-4.) He recommended the surgical procedure of a radical prostatectomy (during which he would also repair hernias on both sides, which he had detected during his examination); and, as I wrote last Saturday, I began to prepare myself with background knowledge from both objective and subjective sources.

During the surgery, the prostate, its seminal vesicles, and the bilateral pelvic lymph nodes were removed and sent to Pathology for evaluation. That evaluation concluded that there was little evidence that the cancer had spread: "safe" margins in the prostate itself and no detected cancer in the other removed items. To confirm that the surgery had been successful, I was instructed to have a PSA blood test every three months. I did this for two years, after which PSA continued to be checked annually. The value was always "negligible," which usually meant less than 0.1, reflecting the specificity of the analytic equipment.

The first change in this routine surfaced during my annual physical this past October, when the PSA came in at 0.1 (without the less-than sign). My primary care physician decided this required a second measurement, and a month later PSA was up to 0.2. This is when I made arrangements to consult a urologist once again. He recommended that I schedule an ultrasound examination preceded by another blood test; so he would have an up-to-date PSA measurement at the time of the ultrasound. The blood test was performed at the very end of January, prior to the ultrasound at the beginning of February. This time the level was 0.17 (but the measurement equipment was from a different laboratory than the one used for previous measurements). The ultrasound revealed a small region in the (former) prostate area that was "different" from the neighboring tissue (with no clear interpretation of what it actually was).

My urologist decided that radiation would be the wisest course of action and made arrangements for me to see a radiologist. That session took place last Friday, and the ultimate recommendation was that I should go ahead with treatment. Everyone in the session (the radiologist was assisted by two residents) kept stressing how small the affected area was, but they all agreed that this made it all the easier to deal with that area with low risk. This will involve (as I recall) about 38 daily sessions (Monday through Friday), each of which lasts about half an hour. This is preceded by a fair amount of preparation and planning in the interest of making the application of radiation as focused as possible. My urologist has to inject some markers that delimit the border of the tissue needing treatment, basically using the same sort of equipment that was employed for my biopsy (but going the other way). These markers are detectable by CAT scanning. Once the markers are in place, they schedule a CAT scan and develop a "map" for directing the radiation beam. The side effects are supposed to be minimal; so I shall probably be able to walk to my treatments (which takes less than half an hour from where I live). Because of all of the prerequisite planning, I am not sure when the actual treatment will begin; but that is where things now stand.

Being more specific about the side effects, they have to do with unanticipated tissue damage from the radiation source. Various sites along the urinary tract are in jeopardy but are rarely affected. The symptoms can go in either direction. Some damage leads to reduced urine flow, resulting from congestion that can be cleared by either medication or a catheterized balloon (like clogged blood vessels). The other extreme is incontinence. I have already filled out two questionnaires about my urination habits, and I expect that I shall receive many more of these in the course of the treatment.

I have to confess that I find the whole process pretty awesome. It gives me a sense of just how much radiation therapy has improved as the technicians have better ways to see what they are doing (so to speak). My biopsy procedure was tolerable but hardly enjoyable; and I cannot expect this "marking" process to be any better. However, that is the only invasive part of the whole experience. Obviously, I shall have to rethink how I plan my days during the treatment period; but that is not much of a problem. On the whole I feel pretty comfortable with the staff who will be involved in this whole episode, and that is what counts the most.

Given what I have been told, I do not anticipate that this procedure will interfere with my writing habits (just as it should not interfere with my preferred habit of getting around by walking). Nevertheless, there will obviously be various elements of the routine (such as the overall structure of my day) that will be impacted. True to my own beliefs, I shall do my best to provide an account that does justice to my objective, subjective, and social worlds in equal measure; but I am not quite sure how successful I shall be in dealing with myself as my primary subject matter!

Exploring the Harmonic Series

In writing about Sofia Gubaidulina's "The Light of the End," performed by the San Francisco Symphony last week, I made a comment to the effect that composers who have explored the sounds of natural harmonics often fall into the trap of what I called "aimless wandering;" and I realize that this may deserve some further explanation. The history of our Western music tradition is, among other things, a tradition of normative usage. This is already evident in the manuscripts collected by Edmond de Coussemaker, particularly those in his Scriptorum de Musica Medii aevi. One of my favorite examines is the "Ars Cantus Mensurabilis" of Magistri Franconis (Franco of Cologne), one of the first manuscripts to document the synchronization of the voices of polyphonic music through rhythmic patterns. Rather like a pioneer of knowledge engineering, Franco attempted to infer "rules of practice" from examples of how both he and those around him were "making" polyphonic music around the end of the thirteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century we had teachers like Arnold Schoenberg departing from the traditional pedagogy of the "rules" of harmony and species counterpoint to try to identify how every note of a composition served a "structural function," based on where it was situated in the score (structure) and how it served what I have called the composition's journey through time (function).

When one departs from the twelve-tone scale (particularly under equal-tempered tuning but, to some extent, also under other tuning systems), one also departs from a massive body of normative usage. What I meant by "aimless wandering" is that many composers interested in exploring natural harmonics can easily fall into the trap of just "noodling" (as one of my own composition teachers put it) up and down the harmonic series. (I offered Glenn Branca's third symphony as an example.) At the very end of "The Light of the End," Gubaidulina has a solo cello do this sort of thing, playing a series of arpeggios that rise from a fundamental, each one ascending to a slightly higher harmonic. To my ears, however, this was less a matter of "noodling" and more an effort to summarize the vocabulary of natural harmonics that had supported so much of the harmonic and contrapuntal structures we had been hearing since the beginning of the piece.

This morning I discovered, quite by accident, that there was a precedent to this "structural function" of arpeggiating through natural harmonics. It occurs at the end of the first movement ("Dialogo") of Benjamin Britten's C major sonata for cello and piano (Opus 65). The notes (no author cited) for my Etcetera CD of this sonata describe this "dialog" as a "wistful, oddly Brahmsian discussion of a rising or falling second, a nervous rhythmic tension being imparted by the piano's scalic thirds." Now I may be reading too much into how I heard this movement, but I came away feeling that the invocation of the harmonic series in the coda of this movement served as a reflection on the origins of those thirds and particularly the seconds. When it came to natural harmonics, we know from the open horn solo that begins and ends his Opus 31 serenade that Britten was too disciplined to give in to "noodling." The few upper harmonics that deviate the most from the equal-tempered scale frame an extremely visceral climax in that solo. Britten may not have been familiar with what Schoenberg was teaching about "structural function;" but this solo offers an excellent demonstration of the principle. I am thus willing to assume, with a relatively high level of confidence, that the arpeggiation of the harmonic series in his later cello sonata is guided by that same principle.

Was Gubaidulina influenced by Britten's precedent? Whether or not she had any direct relationship with Britten, there is a good chance that she was aware of performances by Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom Britten's sonata was composed. Indeed, Rostropovich was still alive and active when Gubaidulina was working on "The Light of the End;" so there is at least a remote possibility that she would have been honoring him by assigning a solo cello passage to the coda of her work and then recognizing another coda that had been composed for him. This is a rather tenuous chain of hypotheses; but, in the context of this blog, it is close enough for rehearsal practices!

The Audacity of Stonewalling

It would be nice if the people of Gaza could benefit from what Ron Fournier, Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press, called Barack Obama's "rhetorical pivot" last night, his transition "from selling fear to raising hopes." Fortunately, the people of the United States do not have to content with the ideological intransigence of the Israeli government the way the residents of Gaza do. During last month's hostilities, Israel escalated the level of fear in Gaza to such a height that, for the first time in the history of Israel's conflicts with its neighbors, the international community was calling for an investigation of war crimes. Now, with a cease fire at least temporarily in place, Israel seems to have adopted the policy that what cannot be achieved through fear can be attained through the annihilation of hope.

Hope does not have to be fired upon with big guns. Sometimes it is sufficient just to wear it down with petty matters. According to an Agence France-Presse report, John Kerry experienced the impact of such petty matters first hand during his visit to Gaza:

Last week, influential US Senator John Kerry witnessed first-hand the difficulties involved in delivering key supplies to Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since Hamas seized power in June 2007, and is struggling to recover from Israel's devastating 22-day war.

While touring Gaza, Kerry learned that truckloads of pasta were prevented from entering the Palestinian enclave and was told by UN officials that Israel lists rice as humanitarian aid but not pasta, the newspaper said.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak eventually allowed the shipment in following an intervention by Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who heads the US Senate's powerful Foreign Relations Committee.

According to this same report, our State Department is willing to go on the record in taking Israel to task over such pettiness. However, the signs are that Israeli will not let up on a tactic that they have a long reputation for using so well:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is pressing Israel to stop blocking aid to the besieged Gaza Strip and will raise the issue during a visit next week, an Israeli newspaper reported on Wednesday.

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell is expected to issue a strongly worded statement on the situation when he travels to Israel this week, Haaretz said.

"Israel is not making enough efforts to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza," the paper quoted US officials as telling their Israeli counterparts last week. "The US expects Israel to meet its commitments on this matter."

Clinton has relayed messages to Israel about the aid issue in the past week, and senior aides have made it clear the question would be central to her visit to Israel on Tuesday.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Ygal Palmor said he was unaware of any such messages and the prime minister's office said it would not comment "as long as there is no official US statement" on the issue.

Out of fairness, it is worth reporting that, on the basis of a story filed for McClatchy Newspapers by Dion Nissenbaum, the Israeli government is just as capable of applying this stonewalling tactic to its own citizens, as well as to others. This will give little comfort to the people of Gaza, but it may give our own State Department a better idea of the opposition they will continue to face. In most circles this would just be more examples of chutzpah from the culture that gave birth to the noun. However, my own feeling about giving Chutzpah awards is that they provide an opportunity for rewarding the outrageously positive and giving the negative the ridicule it deserves. When international discourse turns to talk of war crimes, we must recognize that this particular situation has progressed beyond ridicule. Israel has eroded the semantics of "chutzpah" with that same pettiness with which they are eroding the hope of the Gazan people and of those trying to assistant them with humanitarian aid.

Much of the Old Testament can be read as a chronicle of how "God's chosen people" tried to convince God that (s)he made the wrong choice. As Ronald Regan might have said about current Israeli tactics, "There they go again." Do the Israeli people really want to be represented by such a government?

Nigerians Learn from Bernie Madoff

Nigerian efforts towards fraud through electronic mail are now so commonplace that they are more a source of humor than victimization. (The "Annual Nigerian EMail Conference" is now in its third year!) However, fraud is still a serious problem; and this morning's BBC NEWS Web site has a report on just how serious it can get:

Justice Secretary Jack Straw has been the victim of Nigerian fraudsters who sent out hundreds of e-mails in his name asking for money.

The e-mails claimed he had lost his wallet on charity work in Africa and needed 3,500 US dollars to get home.

Messages headed the Right Hon Jack Straw MP were sent to council bosses, government chiefs and others.

The fraudsters are thought to have hacked into computers at Mr Straw's Blackburn constituency office.

Mr Straw has confirmed the e-mails had been sent to a "significant number of people" in his address book but he said there were no security issues as it was his Blackburn e-mail address rather than his ministerial account that was targeted.

I would like to suggest that this new "advance" into fraud be called "the Madoff effect." Bernard Madoff could not have perpetrated his fraud of epic proportions without working from a solid base of personal trust. This trust had as much to do with how he was viewed in specific social circles as it had to do with his professional reputation. Straw was a victim of those who appreciated the level of trust that he had established and could mine his address book for those who trusted him the most. What the fraudsters overlooked, however, was that their targets knew Straw well enough to ring him up (presumably on his cell phone) and ask if he really needed that help!

Admittedly, this strategy would probably not have saved Madoff's victims from their current predicament. Clearly, the most important question was, "Will my investment really return those promised results?" Unfortunately, the only person they could ask was Madoff himself; so they had to fall back on relying on their trust in him. Straw avoided his own victimization because the trust of his friends included checking up on him.

In Search of Both News and Opinion

It is now official: Dennis Ross has returned to the staff of the State Department. Drawing upon their wire services, Al Jazeera English reported this story as follows:

Dennis Ross, a foreign policy veteran, has been appointed special adviser to Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, on the Gulf region, the US state department has announced.

Ross, a veteran of Arab-Israeli negotiations when Clinton's husband, Bill Clinton, was president, will advise on Iran, the broader Middle East region and southwest Asia.

I found it interesting that any comment on this appointment in the Al Jazeera English account came only from State Department spokesman Robert Wood. As I observed in January, Ross' time in the Middle East was far from the brightest part of his resume; and I speculated that his book, Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World, was an attempt to theorize about the setbacks he experienced there. I am all for anyone with both the courage and smarts to learn from his/her mistakes; and, if Statecraft really is a document of lessons learned, then I suspect it is good to see that it aligns nicely with other opinions on how we should be approaching relations with Iran, such as those that Thomas Powers wrote in The New York Review this past summer.

Still, I found it interesting that Al Jazeera English should back-pedal on just what Ross' setbacks in the Middle East were, particularly since I tend to rely on them as a source for alternatives to conventional wisdom about American foreign policy in the Muslim world (the major reason why they are firmly ensconced on my "What I Read" list). For a more critical perspective on Ross, I had to rely on this morning's news summary at the beginning of Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!:

The State Department has made official its appointment of Dennis Ross as special adviser on developing strategy toward Iran. During his previous stint as US envoy to the Middle East, Ross was widely criticized for backing Israeli settlement expansion and refusing to address Palestinian grievances.

To the extent that this low point in Ross' career might impact Iran's decision to work with him as an honest broker, why did Al Jazeera English omit it from any background material in their report? One possible answer may be that they are trying to raise their level of appeal to American audiences, and this possibility was addressed earlier this morning in a report that David Folkenflik prepared for Morning Edition on NPR. The headline of the print version on the NPR Web site was:

Al-Jazeera English Struggles For U.S. Audience

I followed this story with great interest, since I have never been shy about declaring my preference for Al Jazeera English; and, from time to time, I watch their broadcasts through their Web site (the Internet being the only medium through which I can watch them in San Francisco). I have even used this blog to document my frustrated attempts to persuade Comcast to allocate a channel for them (just as they still will not allocate a channel for a 24-hour BBC World Service television feed). Folkenflik's report offered some insight regarding my frustrations:

While actual ratings are hard to come by, Al-Jazeera English can be watched in more than 130 million households worldwide and is increasingly part of an international conversation, as its staff reports on and for people all across the globe. Executives say they hope to drum up public awareness and appetite here with an advertising campaign and a Web site: IwantAJE.com.

Among journalists, Al-Jazeera English has won some respect. Tony Maddox, vice president and managing director of CNN International, says his staff closely monitors Al-Jazeera English, along with the BBC and Sky News.

"They were serious in intent, and they've invested in a very sizable international infrastructure," Maddox said, "So their presence has been felt from an editorial point of view and certainly, within the industry, there's a significant awareness of them."

Yet there has been little hunger expressed by viewers — and therefore little pressure on cable and satellite TV providers to carry Al-Jazeera English.

Officials at the nation's two largest cable providers have signaled that nothing is in the works. "Our customers consistently tell us they want more movies, sports, music and TV show choices," Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Allen wrote in an e-mail. Note that there was no mention of international news, especially from Doha.

I see no reason to dispute Allen's claim; but it gives me a deeper appreciation for living under a government that is willing to recognizing the rights of the minority, even when the voice of the majority may steer most decisions. Of course our founding fathers did not view access to different approaches to reporting the news as "inalienable;" but that may be because they were used to so many different sources for reading the news that they just took that particular "right" for granted. How could the founding fathers anticipate that the view of the news media as a "public trust" would eventually degenerate into a business in the same mold as manufacturing, where balance sheets always prevail over the need to provide the citizens of a democracy with information?

IwantAJE.com is clearly a move inspired by the impact that "I want my MTV" had on promoting one of the earliest cable channels. This kind of sloganeering still works ("It's Not TV. It's HBO"); but it tends to work for the sort of content that Allen enumerated in speaking for Comcast. It is hard to imagine a news provider benefitting from that kind of strategy. For better or worse, Comcast customers may well be more interested in personalities than in the content delivered by those personalities. The American networks know this and play it for all it is worth. Al Jazeera English may want to consider doing the same.

For example, while we were living in Singapore, both my wife and I got to enjoy Riz Kahn as a news reader for CNN International. He had an excellent sense of delivery embedded in a style that encouraged confidence. He now has his own "in-depth" program on Al Jazeera English; and my guess is that he would make an excellent guest on the American talk show circuit. This would be more than presenting himself as a prime conversationalist with Charlie Rose or on NewsHour. It means (shudder) sitting down with Oprah and winning over her confidence! It is hard to imagine Comcast holding to its current position if Oprah decides that she wants her AJE!

Worthy Chutzpah from Sean Penn

I have never been particularly big on the Academy Awards. However, by happy accident, my wife and I managed to catch Sean Penn's acceptance speech (having just finished watching Taking Chance, recorded Saturday night on our VTR). The London Telegraph provided one of the better accounts of this event:

Stars on their way to the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles had to pass a group of Christian demonstrators outside who protested against gay marriage and attacked the memory of the late Heath Ledger, a favourite target of militant anti-gay protesters since his role in Brokeback Mountain.

Penn won the best actor award for Milk, in which he played politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

The actor opened his acceptance speech with the words: "You commie, homo-loving sons of guns," to laughter from the audience.

Referring to the protest, he said: "For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone."

If the Academy's annual Awards ceremony seems to be calculated to be so banal as to avoid any hint of chutzpah, Sean Penn is the sort of guy who can be counted on to shake their tree. Given those protesters on the street, he definitely picked the right setting in which to do so. Given his reputation, I figured it would only be a matter of time before he received a Chutzpah of the Week award. I realize there is always a risk of granting this award so early in the week, but think how good it will look alongside his new Oscar!

The Brave New Language of International Journalism (SIC?)

Apparently, yesterday's adoption of Variety-speak by Reuters was no mere flash in the pan. On the basis of one of the morning headlines from Tokyo, is would appear that "finmin" is now accepted terminology (at least in headlines, if not in the reports themselves):

Japan Finmin Yosano seen well-placed to be next PM

This could, of course, be the work of a new headline writer, possibly a "refugee" from Variety, as I had suggested yesterday. If so, then there is now a question of whether headlines go through the same degree of stylistic editing as does the content of the news stories. Back when I was writing for Boston After Dark, my editor wrote the headlines for my pieces; and I do not recall anyone acting as her editor. So there is some chance that this latest bit of terminological innovation has not been reviewed by either peers or superiors. (What would Gus Haynes say?)

My own reaction seems to be one of dwelling on the verb "creep" and its associated noun form. As its Wikipedia entry observed, the term "mission creep" "was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to many different fields, mainly the growth of bureaucracies." This feels like the beginning of some form of mission creep along the terminological front of the fields of journalism (just to work the military metaphor for all it is worth), leaving me to wonder how Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, who first coined the term, would think about it. I am also reminded of the term "creeping socialism," promulgated in the Fifties by conservatives who were convinced that Reds were hiding under all of our beds, just waiting to wipe out our government and turn us all into slaves of Stalinism. Jean Shepherd came up with the perfect retaliation to this propaganda blitz when he coined the phrase "creeping meatballism" for an article published in 1957 in Mad Magazine. (Those wondering what I meant yesterday with that swipe about the days when Mad was funny can get an idea of what I meant by following the hyperlink for this article.)

Shepherd probably had the right idea. Certainly the military metaphor of mission creep seems to be out of place for a profession that now seems to consist almost entirely of the walking wounded; and it is hard to associate a word like "finmin" with the efforts of today's conservatives to revive the spirit of creeping socialism. This word is neither more nor less than a meatball in our midst, not a particularly spicy one but one very much in the spirit of how Archie Bunker used to apply "meatball" as a sobriquet (a usage now approved by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). That just gives me the creeps.

Influence (or not) Without (or with) Anxiety

If I was at a disadvantage for hearing Sofia Gubaidulina's "The Light of the End" only once (that one time being last night at Davies Symphony Hall), that disadvantage was somewhat compensated by my hearing her "Repentance" as the first work on the program of this afternoon's Chamber Music Series concert at Davies. This work was first performed in 2007 and is very much a continuation of what I called her "exploration of the dialectic between the traditional sonorities of equal-tempered tuning and those of musical instruments' natural harmonics." In this case, however, rather than working with the rich palette of a large orchestra, she focused on a much smaller ensemble, which still had rich timbrous possibilities. The work was originally scored for a solo cello (dedicated to the cellist Ivan Monighetti) accompanied by a guitar quartet. The program notes quoted Gubaidulina's description of the work in her own words as:

… a constant striving to perceive the mystery of consonant sounds in the chords of harmonics played by the guitars [which] turns out, each time [through a series of variations], to be unattainable. And we return, against and again, to dark coloration. Only at the end—in the fifth variation, that is—the confessional expression of the cello's cantilena results in the genuinely radiant sound of harmonics in the soprano guitar. It is as if the force of this expression had rescued a spirit striving for the light from the dark of Plato's cave.

For this performance Gubaidulina rescored the work so that the cello was accompanied by three guitars and a double bass. It is hard to speculate how these sounds would have compared with those of the original scoring; but, from the way in which she received the performers at the conclusion of the work, it seemed apparent that she was more than satisfied with the sound. (Indeed, she seemed more interested in letting the performers know about her satisfaction than in turning around to acknowledge the enthusiastic audience response.)

In many ways the tension of that underlying dialectical opposition is more evident in the more transparent texture of this chamber setting than it was in the rich orchestral textures of "The Light of the End." Also, chamber music tends to give off an air of more personal commitment, since every individual voice is far more exposed; and with that commitment came an abundance of one-to-one and one-to-many communicative actions. This was particularly apparent in the relationship between lead guitarist David Tanenbaum and the other two guitars (Thomas Viloteau and Elliot Simpson) and the bass (Scott Pingel). They were all there to engage both with and against cellist Peter Wyrick's solo lines; and the resulting web of communication was one of the most fascinating I have experienced in any chamber music performance.

The score itself also inspired a rich repertoire of memories on my part, leading me to wonder which, if any, of them may have been part of Gubaidulina's own influences. Most interesting was the extent to which those chord progressions played by the guitars constituted a reflection (somewhere along the spectrum between solemn and playful) on the chorales of the "Fratres" compositions by Arvo Pärt. The writing for bass, on the other hand, led me to wonder whether or not, during her years of music education in Russia, Gubaidulina might have secreted away a stash of Charles Mingus recordings. More unlikely, but still worth speculating, is that the ensemble guitar work at its wildest displayed the same sort of abandon that I have heard only in the rhythmic energies of Harry Partch (and, as was the case with Partch's music, seeing the guitars negotiate those passages was just as satisfying as listening to them). Thus, I now seem to be creating a place for Gubaidulina in my own "memory palace" of personal listening experiences; and I hope that it will not be long before I return to that chamber of the palace.

If Gubaidulina saw pain in that dialectical opposition behind her current compositional efforts, there was another kind of pain in Bedřich Smetana's first string quartet in E minor, composed in 1876 with the descriptive title "Z mého života" (From My Life). Smetana had gone deaf in 1874; and this quartet is very much a document of both the folk music that influenced him and his own characteristic interpretations of those influences, which, in the final movement, is abruptly interrupted by a high E in the first violin. According to Smetana, that was the precise frequency of the tinnitus that preceded the onset of his deafness. When one hears this work for the first time, as I did last May at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, even if one has read a description of this work's "program," one does not know what to expect. Once one has heard it, however, the anticipation of that E haunts all the wistful nostalgia of the first three movements like a ghost. When it comes, it attacks the spirit of the listener in a manner that I, for one, find far more devastating than, for example, the hammer blows of Gustav Mahler's sixth symphony that symbolize his own personal catastrophes. There is thus a need to pace the performance of the tragic blow that will fall in the final movement; and this particular quartet of San Francisco Symphony members (violins Sarn Oliver and Mariko Smiley, viola Yun Jie Liu, and cello Margaret Tait) knew exactly what that pace should be.

After the intermission another quartet (violins Nadya Tichman and Suzanne Leon, viola Adam Smyla, and cello Michael Grebanier) performed the sixth of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 18 string quartets (in B-flat major). This work also has a title, "La Malinconia" (Melancholy), which refers to the Adagio that begins the final movement at later interrupts the Allegretto quasi allegro section. Thayer offers no clues as to whether or not this melancholy was grounded in a personal experience, but the spirit of this work provided an excellent complement to Gubaidulina's sense of pain in the dialectic she chose to explore and Smetana's decision to document the pain of his own personal tragedy. I should also point out that the rendering of this particular melancholy by this particular quartet was quite effective, especially coming right on the heels of the slightly off-kilter rhythms of the third Scherzo movement, which almost serves as an omen that the affability of the first two movements is about to be dispersed. Yet, if each work on the program was under the same sort of dark clouds that have been bringing rain to San Francisco for all of this day, the performances of all three of the works provided the brilliance of the sun we were not able to see. Once again, this has proved to be an exciting city for the chamber music it offers.

The Audacity of Sticking it to the Rich

In yesterday's address President Barack Obama finally demonstrated that he can summon some "audacity of hope" in trying to get the United States out of its current economic crisis. As Jackie Calmes reported for The New York Times, he used the occasion to preview the budget proposal that he will release on Thursday. The most important part of the preview concerned the extent to which the rich and mighty will be asked (obliged?) to carry much of the weight of getting our country out of debt:

The president will propose to tax the investment income of hedge fund and private equity partners at ordinary income tax rates, which are now as high as 35 percent and could return to 39.6 percent under his plans, instead of at the capital gains rate, which is 15 percent at most.

Senior Democrats in Congress joined with Republicans in 2007 to oppose that increase. But with Wall Street discredited and lucrative executive compensation a political target, the provision could prove more popular among lawmakers.

Mr. Obama will also call for letting the Bush tax cuts on income, dividends and capital gains lapse after 2010 for individuals who make more than $250,000 a year. But while the top rate for income would rise to 39.6 percent, the top rate for capital gains and dividends would be 20 percent.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama called for immediately repealing those tax cuts. He decided instead to keep them in place through 2010, as scheduled, reflecting the widespread belief that raising taxes further depresses economic activity.

On his National Affairs blog for Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson called this "Change We Can Believe In." I prefer to think of it as "the audacity of sticking it to the rich;" but I can understand Dickenson's preference. Even Rolling Stone must be beholden to the rich and mighty in at least a couple of ways. Put another way, it is about time for someone with a higher pay grade, so to speak, to stand with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in declaring (in the language of the Jerusalem Bible translation of the Book of Revelation) that the time for patience with the rich and mighty is over. As Calmes observed, Obama is sure to get some (more than a little, I am sure) pushback from the Congress; but this may be the perfect time to remind every member of Congress just who elected him/her and why he/she was chosen. This is a chance for Main Street to demonstrate that its voice can be stronger than Wall Street's; and I, for one, would welcome Main Street rising to that occasion.

From VARIETY to Reuters?

If I am to believe Matthew Garrahan's report for the Financial Times, then Variety is under threat from the blogosphere. Does that mean that Variety writers are beginning to jump ship; and, if so, are they jumping to Reuters? Even more interesting, are they jumping to the International news desk, rather than the Entertainment department? I ask these peculiar questions because I have to wonder who came up with the following headline for a report about an economic summit taking place in Thailand on the island of Phuket:

Asian finmins agree deal on currency swaps

The abbreviation of "financial ministers" to "finmins" is the closest I have ever come to Variety-speak from a purportedly serious news source. (Truth be told, the only place I ever encountered Variety-speak at all outside of Variety itself was in Mad Magazine; and that was back in the days, as my contemporaries are still fond of saying, when Mad was funny!) I know I have a habit of picking on Reuters when gathering examples of the mainstream media at their silliest, but how this particular headline came to be strikes me as an interesting question about current editorial practices. Enquiring minds want to know!

Naturally Harmonic

I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that much of the history of Western music has been involved with the evolution of tuning systems to deal with the tension between the "naturally occurring" intervals of the harmonic series and the need for a more manageable collection of pitches and intervals (which is not necessarily a subset of the "natural" set). Joseph Yasser's Theory of Evolving Tonality begins his own model with the pentatonic scale (as in the pitches of the black keys on a piano keyboard), demonstrating how its pitches emerge from the first five perfect fifths in the harmonic series (if we begin on C, that would be C-G-D-A-E). In other words our first effort at a "scale" emerged from a sequence of 2:3 ratios.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Most importantly, it overlooks the emergence of the tonic-dominant relation that has dominated almost all of Western harmonic theory. That relation is the inverse of the 2:3 ratio, which, mathematically, would be a 3:4 ratio; but that ratio never emerges as you keep piling on more perfect fifths. From a mathematical point of view, the problem is that there is no pair of non-zero integers, n and m, such that 3ⁿ = 2^m. In slightly more mystical language, you can always "depart" from your fundamental pitch to a fifth; but, if you keep going on that path, you can never return to that fundamental. To the extent that much of musical structure can be approached through the metaphor of a journey, the physical fact that you can never return is problematic.

By the eighteenth century those who made instruments, particularly keyboard instruments, came to deal with this problem through equal-tempered tuning. The octave would be divided into equal intervals, each of which was based on the same ratio of 1:2^(1/12) (the twelfth root of two). Mathematically, this meant that a "journey" of twelve of these intervals would take you back to the simplest harmonic ratio of a pitch to its octave, 1:2. It also meant that all of the natural intervals of the harmonic series based on integer ratios (i.e. rational numbers) could only be approximated by the irrational ratios of 1:2^(1/12), 1:2^(2/12), 1:2^(3/12), 1:2^(4/12), 1:2^(5/12), 1:2^(6/12), 1:2^(7/12), 1:2^(8/12), 1:2^(9/12), 1:2^(10/12), and 1:2^(11/12). Since the adoption of equal-tempered tuning, music history has seen the efforts of several composers to return to the natural harmonic series for both harmony and counterpoint.

This week Kurt Masur introduced to the San Francisco Symphony and its audiences one of the most recent of these efforts, "The Light of the End," which Sofia Gubaidulina completed in 2003. Masur conducted the premier of this work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; so he was, in may ways, the best person to bring it now to San Francisco. In his program notes for this work, Thomas May spoke of the intervals of the harmonic series as "deviations from conventional tuning," meaning that we perceive them as "out of tune." This is, to a great extent, true and is even reinforced by the psychological theory of categorical perception. However, since the rise of electronic and other experimental musics following the Second World War, we have been exposed to a wide variety of synthesized sounds; and many of those sounds have returned to their roots (pun somewhat intended) in the harmonic series. We are thus less susceptible to those out-of-tune judgments induced by categorical perception than we were around fifty years ago.

From this new vantage point, we can listen to Gubaidulina's score for what it is, an exploration of the dialectic between the traditional sonorities of equal-tempered tuning and those of musical instruments' natural harmonics. In Gubaidulina's personal aesthetic there is pain in this dialectical opposition; and there is no doubt that "The Light of the End" reveals that pain through considerable tension in both harmonic and contrapuntal constructs. However, listening to it is also a marvelous exploratory experience. It invites the same sense of wonder that John Cage had summoned in his most famous experiment based on the hypothesis that one could make a composition of those sounds that occurred naturally while one sat in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. However, while Cage's innovation reflected a let-it-be philosophy, Gubaidulina's is one of meticulous construction with an extremely broad palette of sonorities. It is also well informed by what Arnold Schoenberg called the "structural functions" of harmony and counterpoint. This is important because much of the pioneering work with such "deviant" intervals, whether in La Monte Young's "Well-Tuned Piano" performances or Glenn Branca's third ("Gloria") symphony (subtitled "Music for the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series"), has been little more than the sort of "aimless wandering" I recently attributed to Giuseppe Verdi. "The Light of the End" is very much a journey along which both harmony and counterpoint are steadily at work to move the mind behind the ear in a forward direction.

Needless to say, this is a process that is as complex as it is tense. So I can account for little more than the superficial impressions of a first immediate exposure. I suspect that I would have done well to attend all three performances this week, but I hope that it will not be a long wait before I have another opportunity to hear this piece. It has certainly benefitted from having Masur as a champion, but I hope that other conductors will soon follow Masur's lead. (I could make a pun about picking up his baton, but Masur now conducts without one.)

One might think that Anton Bruckner's fourth symphony ("Romantic" in E-flat major) would be an odd work to pair with "The Light of the End." However, in its own way this particular symphony is its own "Gloria" (as Branca had put it) to the 2:3 and 3:4 harmonic ratios. Horns figure significantly throughout the entire symphony; and much of their language is kept at a relatively fundamental intervallic level, at least until the full brass section erupts in the harmonic richness of the third movement's "hunting scene." This is not a particularly sophisticated piece of music; but, as I have written about Olivier Messiaen, the music is a product of a highly devout sense of faith. Thus, matters such as those "structural functions" of harmony and counterpoint (not to mention overall form) are secondary to Bruckner's invocation of a devotional spirit. Successful performance thus depends on being able to summon that sense of devotion without succumbing to self-indulgence. Masur achieved this through a sure sense of pace. Bruckner may have preferred meditation to journey; but Masur knew how to bring out the journey in this symphony and advance us through its four movements, even when the discourse of those movements was at its most repetitive.

As a result the entire evening amounted to a sustained meditation on natural phenomena. This made for a rare experience of aesthetic explorations grounded in philosophical assurances. This is hardly the stuff for a steady diet of concert-going; but, when it comes around, it becomes far more memorable than we can anticipate.

The Subjectivity of Sickness

In his Preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote that "animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness." I take this to mean that, while any study of the nature of disease may be consigned to a canton of the objective world, the experience of sickness is very much a phenomenon of at least the subjective world and possibly the social world. I suppose I was first aware of this when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, for which my urologist recommended a radical prostatectomy. He provided me with an abundance of background reading, which both my wife and I found very helpful, but far more valuable was the knowledge that the husband of one of my colleagues had experienced this surgery. This knowledge led to several conversations, along with the opportunity to read the diary he kept associated with the whole surgical experience. I read this after our initial conversation, which allowed me to read it for "voice," rather than just information; and it was that "sense of voice" that was missing in the reading matter provided and recommended by my urologist.

These days, when it comes to sickness, there appears to be no shortage of "voice" on the Internet (nor, for that matter, is there a shortage of more objective information). Indeed, the critical observations of Dr. Aric Sigman, which I recently cited, may have much to do with the extent to which such "voice" is present in the virtual world in reality or only in appearance. Since the BBC story I cited only summarized one of Sigman's professional publications, I cannot use it to assess fairly any thoughts Sigman may have about "voice." However, anyone who reads fiction has no trouble recognizing that "voice" is a "constructed reality," which almost always has more to do with constructions by the reader, rather than the writer. Thus, in the course of some preliminary text analysis research based on the content of message boards maintained by HealthBoard.com, I had little trouble in endowing most of what I read with "voice" and keeping that "voice" consistent across contributions by the same user. Still, my analysis required my own detachment from the text, regardless of whether that text was making Goffman-like "moves" in the objective, subjective, or social world.

I am now, once again, confronted with my own sickness. After several years of a negligible presence of the prostate specific antigen (PSA) in my blood (indicating the absence of prostate cancer after the surgery), that PSA number has escalated; and I have begun conversing again within my own social network. My friend who kept the diary asked if I would be blogging about my condition and the likelihood that I would now be undergoing radiation therapy. My initial reaction was that I would not do so. My explanation was that I view these posts as invitations for conversation extended to a potentially wide audience consisting almost entirely of people I do not know. While I have no trouble doing this in areas like the performing arts, politics, and philosophy, my personal health is another matter; and I think the distinction has to do with my restricting my "author's voice" to readers already familiar with my speaking voice. Whether or not this is a rational decision (or even whether I hold to it, since this post is already stretching it) remains to be seen. My guess is that however much my experiences over the next few months inform me about sickness, they will probably inform me about my own writing practices.

Rebranding Chutzpah

If anyone thought we have run out of jokes about lipstick on a pit bull, Tom Engelhardt's latest post to The Notion, one of the blogs managed by The Nation, has reminded us that even the meanest pit bull is not beyond submitting to an extreme makeover:

The name search took a year, while the company became persona non grata in Iraq, but now it's a reality. The notorious Blackwater Worldwide has officially rebranded itself Xe. According to a company memo, "Xe will be a one-stop shopping source for world class services in the fields of security, stability, aviation, training and logistics."

It's pronounced "Zee," by the way, and it's also, oddly enough, the symbol for Xenon, a colorless, odorless noble gas found in trace amounts in the Earth's atmosphere. If only Blackwater and its ilk in the hire-a-gun private security business were found, under whatever names, in mere trace amounts in American foreign and military policy. But no such luck.

We really did not need further evidence that people (even the ones who write checks for the United States Government) think more about brand names than about the product bearing the name. This is not even necessarily a case of cynicism, just a matter of good marketing practices. Nevertheless, given the reputation that this particular "product" has accrued over the last eight years, there still has to be an element of chutzpah behind the reasoning that changing the name will be sufficient to restore the reputation. Thus, to help them furnish the new offices that are sure to go with their new name, the senior management of Xe will receive this week's Chutzpah of the Week award, which can be displayed proudly to all prospective customers!

The "Trout" Sound

"Sound" seems to be the major topic this week at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. That was certainly the case when Menahem Pressler conducted his Master Class on Tuesday; and it was also the focus of attention in the all-Debussy Master Class led by Paul Roberts yesterday afternoon. Still, this is probably the subtlest of the "physical features" of any musical experience; and that subtlety continues to elude even the most sophisticated recording equipment. Therefore, it was a real delight to discover some real gems of "sound itself" in Pressler's Chamber Music Masters concert at the Conservatory.

Franz Schubert's A major piano quintet (D. 667, the "Trout") may well be one of the most-recorded pieces of chamber music. It attracts attention not only for its set of variations on the song for which it is named but also for its unconventional orchestration: piano, violin, viola, cello, and bass. One does not hear the double bass very often in chamber music; and, between the insensitivity of audio equipment and a tendency of the engineers to focus on the piano (which really does not need any reinforcement), most people with recordings of this quintet would be hard pressed to say they hear the bass at all. In terms of the overall structure of the composition with regard to both harmony and counterpoint, one might almost call the bass part an obbligato, as I did with the string parts in the Haydn trio Pressler coached on Tuesday. As with those string parts, the "obligatory" role of the bass is to introduce an element of color that is all but absent from the chamber music repertoire but would have been familiar in Schubert's time. I am referring to the tendency to use the bass as the "continuo" for more popular dance forms, played for entertainment, usually by a small string ensemble. The bass provides a solo voice that serves as the harmonic foundation in a sound significantly differentiated from the rest of the ensemble, not just by register but by its characteristic claim on the "real estate" of the audio spectrum.

Naturally, this effect only "works" if the bass is audible; and this can be a problem in "live" performance as well as in recordings. However, it was clear from Pressler's Master Class that balance was very much on his mind this week; and the result was what may well be the most satisfying performance of the "Trout" I have ever heard. Pressler, faculty violinist Ian Swensen, and three students found their balance with the opening chord and kept it through the burst of energy concluding the final Allegro guisto movement. The result, even with the obbligato nature of the bass, was that effect of an intimate conversation, which always pleases me in a performance and which is more a matter of course in jazz (where the bass tends to get more respect, particularly with the legacy of bass masters such as Charles Mingus).

The Schubert quintet was preceded by Johannes Brahms' first piano trio, the Opus 8 in B major. As the low opus number indicates, the work was published in his early twenties; but it was almost entirely overhauled 35 years later. In a letter to Clara Schumann while working on the revision, Brahms described the original version as "wild" and a source of "childish amusement;" and Brahms listeners are usually familiar with his tendency to sprawl, particularly in his earlier works. By the time of this revision, Brahms was beginning to explore the design and expressiveness of his far more compact piano compositions; and their is a tightness and focus to the later version that is now performed. There is also now an Adagio that almost foreshadows his later exploration of the intermezzo form, not only structurally but also as an expression of a particular kind of stillness that reflects back to several of the high points of Schubert's vocal, chamber, and solo piano music. Once again, balance of was of the essence, particularly in this third movement and in the final Allegro in which an initially nebulous statement of thematic material gradually acquires more and more focus until the entire trio ends in crystal clarity.

In many respects Schubert and Brahms are the two "monuments" that begin and conclude the chamber music repertoire of the nineteenth century. As a result their works are familiar to most attendees of chamber music recitals. Nevertheless, each of the compositions in both repertoires can always be approached in new ways, leading us down new paths of discovery in works we thought we knew. Pressler revealed those paths for both of these composers at the Conservatory last night.

Cultural Confusion

Having lived in Singapore, I have a great interest Asian music and how it is perceived and experienced through Western ears. I have written about this phenomenon with respect to both Stewart Wallace, in his opera, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Andrew Imbrie's interest in Korean instruments. During Paul Roberts' Master Class this afternoon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I was reminded that Claude Debussy provided another pair of ears fascinated by the perception of Asian music. However, Roberts' efforts to convey the nature of Debussy's perceptions reminded me of the extent to which Western perceptions at the beginning of the twentieth century were far less "clinical" (if not acute) than they were at the beginning of the twenty-first.

The music in question is "Pagodes," the first of Debussy's set of three Estampes. As a point of reference, consider the introductory paragraph for the Wikipedia entry for "Pagoda:"

A pagoda is the general term in the English language for a tiered tower with multiple eaves common in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Some pagodas are used as Taoist houses of worship. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most commonly Buddhist, and were often located in or near temples. This term may refer to other religious structures in some countries. In Myanmar and Thailand, "pagoda" usually means the same as stupa or chaitya, while in Vietnam, "pagoda" is a more generic term referring to a place of worship. The modern pagoda is an evolution of the Ancient Indian stupa, a tomb-like structure where sacred relics could be kept safe and venerated.^[1] The architectural structure of the stupa has spread across Asia, taking on many diverse forms as details specific to different regions are incorporated into the overall design.

The casual ear might mistake this composition for an effort on Debussy's part to depict some kind of Chinese landscape; but, as Roberts correctly observed, the musical influence is that of gamelan, which is strictly Indonesian. Thus, if one wanted to be pedantically accurate, the landscape would be one of stupas, rather than pagodas. Unfortunately, there would also be a problem of just where this landscape would be. The work begins with the gradual insinuation of the multiple layers of gamelan sound, which would be entirely appropriate for the terrain around the Prambanan temple in central Java. (This is actually where I had one of my earliest experiences of gamelan, listening to the ensemble that accompanied a performance by the Ramayana Dance Troupe on the temple grounds.) However, as Debussy builds his music to a climax, he also suddenly moves us to the neighboring island of Bali, known for its more sharply defined (and usually louder) sounds. In other words, when it came to non-Western music, Debussy was as much of a dilettante as was the fictitious foil he created for his critical writing, Monsieur Croche!

Sympathy for the Judges

The time has come to filter out those who will be selected to perform in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, at least according to a report for the London Telegraph by Matt Warman:

Watching television on the internet is about so much more than simply viewing different programmes: the medium allows for ever-increasing levels of interactivity. Even so, online video site YouTube’s attempt to form a full symphony orchestra via the submissions of its users has been remarkably ambitious. But more than 3,000 videos have been received since the competition was announced last year, coming from countries from Azerbaijan to Venezuela. Now 200 finalists have been selected, and the site is in the final days of voting for the winners. Five of those finalists are from Britain and all their video submissions are available to view on the YouTube.com/symphony channel.

To vote, users simply need to visit the site and click the thumbs up or thumbs down next to each clip – the winners will be announced on 2 March, and will be invited to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall in a “collaborative summit for classical music” in April.

Skeptical as I may be of this whole project, I figured that, given some of my remarks about competition winners, I owed it to myself to put myself in the judges' shoes for a change, since, at the end of the day, their votes are about as binary as those cast by YouTube viewers. This was, by no means, a pleasant matter, particularly since I could not figure out how to get down to those five finalists from Britain and therefore had to wade through a fair amount of material. I now appreciate the extent to which judges listen for the slightest defect as an opportunity to vote for rejection. I do not like it, but I understand it. As I once suggested to my brother, who plays English horn in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the sad truth is that the supply of performing musicians painfully exceeds the demand; so we need all the filters we can get, however harsh they may be. Still, I am sure that there are those who are Internet-savvy enough to game this system. We have no idea who will make the final cut and even less idea of whether or not they will actually come together to make an orchestra of even satisfactory quality. From the other point of view, listening to all of these performers on You Tube was a damned sight better than watching stupid pet tricks (although one of the competitors should be accepted simply for succeeding in combining the two genres)!

Beyond Cyberchondria

Someone over at the BBC seems to have a "nose for news" concerned with the hazardous impact of Internet technology of the quality of health care. Last December the topic was "cyberchondria," introduced with the following introductory summary:

Health information online is breeding a generation of cyberchondriacs - people who needlessly fear the worst diagnosis after surfing the net, say researchers.

Today's report is based on a publication in a professional journal, which argues that virtual worlds differ from the physical world in ways that may jeopardize individual health:

People's health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims.

Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart.

Dr Sigman makes his warning in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.

A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects, he suggests.

He also says that evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.

This, he claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.

Since this is a news report, it does little more than summarize the key points from Sigman's publication:

Dr Sigman says that there is research that suggests the number of hours people spend interacting face-to-face has fallen dramatically since 1987, as the use of electronic media has increased.

And he claims that interacting "in person" has an effect on the body that is not seen when e-mails are written.

"When we are 'really' with people different things happen," he said.

"It's probably an evolutionary mechanism that recognises the benefits of us being together geographically.

"Much of it isn't understood, but there does seem to be a difference between 'real presence' and the virtual variety."

Dr Sigman also argues using electronic media undermines people's social skills and their ability to read body language.

The extent to which these claims are supported can only be determined by reading the full paper; and it raises the interesting question as to whether or not the referees for this particular journal included practicing clinicians, who might have their own experiences on how communication differs when one moves from the physical to the virtual world. When I tried to interpret the "cyberchondria" phenomenon, I did so by trying to address the nature of the conversations that take place over the topic of personal health, whether with professionals or with personal friends and acquaintances. It is unclear from the BBC account whether Sigman recognizes that what he calls "interaction" is necessary for effective communication but probably not sufficient. However, even if his publication raises more questions than it answers, it will probably be worth reviewing, particularly among those who recognize the problems of current health care practices and the serious need for reform in the entire system.

News Organizations and their Blog Networks

These days just about every major news organization that manages a Web site also manages a team of bloggers. In some cases those blogs provide a sort of appendix to the published editorial page, providing staff writers with an opportunity to write longer and more frequent contributions. In other cases these bloggers are recruited from outside of the staff, often with little (if any) compensation, motivated primarily by the benefit of appearing on a site that attracts a large number of readers. In the CNET organization this is called the CNET Blog Network; and, since news related blog posts show up on my CNET News.com RSS feed, I would say that they make good on the promise of drawing large numbers of readers to their bloggers.

This morning an RSS headline (viewed through Google Reader) attracted me to an article on Chris Soghoian's Surveillance State blog. However, before I get into the relationship between Soghoian and CNET, I want to observe that a statement about the (lack of relationship) between him and CNET appears twice on his blog page:

Christopher Soghoian delves into the areas of security, privacy, technology policy and cyber-law. He is a student fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society , and is a PhD candidate at Indiana University's School of Informatics. His academic work and contact information can be found by visiting www.dubfire.net/chris/. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

I would take this as a model statement of both the Blog Network itself that the sort of bloggers who participate in it, everything nicely above-board and apparently important enough to CNET to be stated twice on the same page.

The headline that attracted me was:

Recovery.gov shuns transparency, blocks Google

Given the extent to which I have been interested in (and often critical of) the relationship between the new Obama Administration and the Internet, this headline was hard to resist, since it offered at least a hint of hypocrisy in what had appeared to be a major differentiating feature of the changes that Barack Obama had promised to bring to the White House. The primary support for the claim in the headline appears in the following excerpt from the blog post:

Although the site is advertised as proof of the president's commitment to transparency, its technical design seems to betray that spirit. Most importantly, the site currently blocks all requests by search engines, which would ordinarily download and index each page to make the information more accessible to the Web-searching public.

The site's robots.txt file has just a few lines of text:

# Deny all search bots, web spiders
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Although the White House Web team did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the single-line comment at the top of the file indicates that the blocking of search engines is no accident but rather a statement of policy.

Now two points about this report caught my attention on strictly journalistic grounds. The first was the reminder that blog posts and similar products of what Timothy Egan, in his blog for The New York Times (for which he used to work and has now retired), called "Web info-slingers" do not constitute journalism (a case that Egan made compellingly in his "Save the Press" blog post). As such, we, as readers, have no idea whether or not bloggers trying to get a response from the subject of a post are aware of, let alone practice, the standard procedures of journalism. Thus, the final sentence of that excerpt cannot be read as a source of legitimate content. It may be well-intentioned; but it is also gratuitous.

However, that sentence does bring us over the bridge to the relationship between the CNET Blog Network and the (presumably) professional journalists on the CNET staff. This bridge was crossed by a thread of comments from readers with experience in Web design. The thread was initiated by the following anonymous comment:

When I have been working on a new website, I have configured the robots.txt file to disallow indexing. Then when it is ready to go production, I change the file to allow indexing. It is always my fear that I will forget to change this. I wonder if this task got forgotten? Has anyone contacted the recovery.gov web master to confirm that this was their intention?

This was followed by a comment of agreement from "jon_abad," who took the question of appropriate practice to the next level:

I would hope that a news organization like Cnet would bother to ask the White House's web folks for a comment in order to determine if the spider blocking in robots.txt was on purpose as opposed to just posting conjecture.

Alas, I fear this comment is "a consummation/Devoutly to be wished." I have read enough contributions to the CNET Blog Network to recognize that CNET takes a minimal approach to editing their bloggers (probably somewhat along the lines of the approach that Wikipedia takes to its contributors). However, in this case the question arises as to whether or not anyone on the CNET news staff takes the time to read what those bloggers write. The content of this post deserves the treatment of serious journalism to determine whether this is really a "story with legs" or an alarmist reaction to standard Web design practice.

The Haydn Sound

A long day in Palo Alto yesterday left me with little energy for the Master Class that Menahem Pressler gave last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but I could not resist giving the event the best try I could muster. That effort sustained me through little more than the first performance, which was of the first movement of Joseph Haydn's A flat major piano trio (Hoboken XV/14); but there was much to be gained from this experience, most of which had to do with Pressler emphasizing the need for a light touch at the piano to keep the instrument from dominating the violin and cello. This is a problem which I have discussed in the past, which is the tendency of any chamber music for piano and strings to sound like a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra." As Pressler observed, Haydn complicates this situation with a piano part that has about 75% of the notes (leading to the joke, which only a pianist would dare tell, that this would justify the pianist getting 75% of the fee); and this set me to thinking about just what it was that Haydn had in mind in conceiving of such a piano trio in the first place.

It is clear that Haydn was not thinking in terms of a concerto form; but it might not be too far-fetched to assume that he was thinking of a piano sonata which happened to have two obbligato parts for a violin and a cello. What would the role of those parts be that would make them so "obligatory?" My hypothesis is that, if we consider how closely those parts follow the voices in the piano part, they serve to endow the very sound of those voices with an instrumental "coloration" that the piano cannot provide. This seemed to be the sort of goal Pressler was trying to achieve by getting the pianist to play softer and the violinist to play louder, particularly in one passage in which the violin had to parallel a rather delicate embellishing passage in the piano part. (I found it interesting, by the way, that Pressler never addressed the cellist in this session, even though my own feeling was that the cello is also primarily there for a different shade of that "coloration.")

Unfortunately, this approach raises another problem, which is one of my personal favorites. This problem involves the difference between balancing contemporary instruments and those which are "period" instruments appropriate to Haydn's time. This particular trio is dated 1790, which puts it between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 537 ("Coronation") piano concerto and his final (K. 595) B flat major concerto. Thus, one may assume that Haydn would have had in mind the sonority of a fortepiano similar to the one that Philip Bolt built based on one of Mozart's own instruments (which Malcolm Bilson has used for many of his concerts and recordings); and the strings would likewise have the sonorities of the instruments of that same time (such as those which the English Baroque Soloists used in accompanying the Bilson recordings of the Mozart "concerto canon"). This would mean a fortepiano with a far more rapid decay time that would be far easier to balance with a weaker violin and cello, both of which would have "softer" timbres, as well as overall amplitude. In other words, if Haydn's was going for particular effects of instrumental coloration in this particular trio, then this may be one of those compositions that is far better served by period instruments and may even be too frustratingly challenging to performers of more modern instruments. I make this claim knowing full well that Pressler and his Beaux Arts Trio had a great love of the Haydn trio repertoire; but this may be one of those cases where my interest in what I have called "accountability to the music itself" has more to do with sonority than with any logical or grammatical properties of the notated score.

Politics and Representation

In a speech given at Munich University in 1918, Max Weber asserted that "politics" "means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state." As a social theorist, Weber was interested in the strategies for "striving to share power;" but he knew that the practice of politics had much more to do with how that power came to be distributed. One wonders how he would react to the current struggle to conclude a budget for the state of California in a setting in which 20,000 employees of the state (all of them, presumably, voters) may well lose their jobs in the absence of such a budget that would provide their salaries. However, these employees, however large their numbers may be, do not signify in those structures of power that are either distributed or shared in the Legislative and Executive branches of the state government. Thus, the primary concern in State Senate deliberations is not employment but the Republican share of the power system; and that share seems to be based on a single ideological precept, which is the inherent evil of taxation. The power of this ideology was felt by all of us when we woke up this morning to word of its impact on the Republican Senators themselves. Here is how Wyatt Buchanan and Matthew Yi reported the news (at 2:28 this morning) for the San Francisco Chronicle:

A state budget deal to close a $41 billion shortfall has been put further into question early this morning after Senate Republicans ousted their leader who had helped negotiate the long-awaited plan with other top lawmakers in California.

The unusual action occurred as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers tried for a fourth night in a row to persuade at least one more Republican senator to cast the deciding vote on the budget, a move officials said is necessary for the state to avoid insolvency.

Speaking to reporters outside his office, the ousted Minority Leader Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, said, "It's a shame it ended like this."

Cogdill was one of the four legislative leaders who negotiated the emergency budget deal with the governor. Their compromise budget package, reached after three months of negotiations, contained nearly $16 billion in program cuts, $11 billion in borrowing and $14.4 billion in tax increases. The most contentious debate has been over the proposed tax hikes.

Republicans selected Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta (Riverside County) as their new Minority leader. Hollingsworth is part of the conservative wing of the Senate Republican caucus and he has been adamantly against raising any taxes.

If ever there were a time to appreciate President John Adams' aversion to the concept of political parties, this would be it. Even Weber recognized that the definition and management of a political party had nothing to do with the extent to which those in office represented those who elected them. Rather, it had to do with the distribution of power within the party itself and the tendency of a single "boss" to manage that distribution of power:

The boss has no firm political ‘principles’; he is completely unprincipled in attitude and asks merely: What will capture votes?

In a discussion of partisanship on last night's NewsHour on PBS, one analyst observed that, in the early days of the Clinton Administration, Newt Gingrich was so focused on establishing Republican control of the House of Representatives that he forbade Republican Representatives from continuing their regular tennis games with colleagues from across the aisle. Cross-party socialization has long provided paths to the sharing of power that satisfied all involved parties; but Gingrich was concerned only with redistributing that power. Now we are seeing similar thinking in play in the California Senate, going all the way down to who will serve as minority leader. Ultimately, the real losers in this power game are the people of California, who are discovering that their elected representatives are beholden to forces more powerful than the voters. Rather, they are, as Weber put it (even though he was talking about England), victims of a "dictatorship resting on the exploitation of mass emotionality." The only thing sadder than the current budgetary impasse in California is that Gingrich has left a legacy in which all of our country's voters are victims of that same "exploitation of mass emotionality." President Barack Obama is may trying hard to get our national culture beyond such vulnerability; but it is clear that he has not yet made very much progress, whether in California or in any other part of the country.

Friends, Enemies, and Consequences

It is fortunate that yesterday's underwater collision between French and British nuclear-armed submarines caused very little physical damage. More significant is that the accident has provided an object lesson in the consequences of technological innovation, and I sincerely hope that the lesson will be a useful one. As anyone who follows war movies goes, being detected by the enemy is one of the greatest risks to any submarine, since, once detected, the submarine is vulnerable to any number of deterrent strategies. Thus naval architecture technology has gone to great innovative efforts to build submarines that cannot be detected, just as aeronautical engineering has faced a similar problem in developing their stealth technology. Where submarines are concerned, one of the best ways to tell the difference between a submarine and a whale is by the noise it makes. On dry land we like to use the simile "quiet as a mouse;" but the goal of submarine technology is to be quiet as a whale. Actually, Herve Morin, France's defense minister, put it even more dramatically when he told Canal+ radio (as reported by Reuters and published in the Financial Times) that both submarines involved in the collision "make less noise than a shrimp."

From a strictly technological point of view, that makes for a pretty awesome solution to a challenging problem. The consequence, however, was that, while these submarines could not be detected by their enemies, they also could not be detected by their allies. In Caroline Wyatt's BBC report, which I saw yesterday afternoon on television, the British Ministry of Defence let it be known that, while they regarded the disposition of their submarines to be a highly confidential matter, any information about the North Atlantic Ocean was shared with the United States Department of Defense, presumably by virtue of their shared membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, in spite of any jokes about who George W. Bush thought his friends were, my guess is that most people think that France is also one of our allies and one of our NATO partners, thus overlooking the historical fact that France left the NATO command structure in 1966! According to the Reuters story in the Financial Times, France "is expected to rejoin the [NATO] alliance fully this year but will keep its nuclear forces independent." Thus, it will be up to Britain and France to make their own arrangements (if any) on how to keep their "invisible" submarines from future collisions.

The more important object lesson, however, is that, as most Zen masters know, solving one problem always creates at least one new problem. This raises the intriguing question of whether or not it may be better to live with a problem than to eliminate it. In this particular case a reasoned answer to that question would involve access to highly classified information that I could never even dream of seeing, but the question arises in more mundane situations as well. In many ways the new Showtime series, United States of Tara, is a narrative about a family that has decided to live with an extremely challenging problem (Tara's multiple-personality disorder). As the episodes have unfolded, we have learned that Tara had been on medication to suppress the emergence of her "alters" in times of stress; but she and her husband eventually decided that she would be more of a whole person without that medication. In other words her problem had a solution; but, in this particular narrative situation, the characters decided that living with the problem was better than living with the consequences of that solution. As the narrative unfolds, we learn more about why this decision was made as we learn more about those characters' personal value systems; and the omniscient narrator of the episodes has been scrupulous about avoiding any explicit evaluation of those value systems. (Obviously, as the narrative unfolds, we all, as "readers," will be able to reflect on those value systems through our interpretation of the ensuing events.)

This is not just a new way of looking at H. L. Mencken's precept that a clear and simple solution to a complex problem is inevitably wrong. Rather, it is a cautionary reminder that "right" solutions are just as likely to have unanticipated consequences and the wrong ones are. The submarine collision in the North Atlantic was a serious reminder (and hardly the first) to governmental defense organizations around the world to give serious thought to consequences before rushing to deploy solutions. Meanwhile, United States of Tara offers the provocative suggestion that there are times when living with the problem may be preferable to living with the consequences of the solution (and those who continue to feel that commercial cable television networks deal only in frivolity can consult a darker side of the same proposition in the new novel Pharmakon, by Dirk Wittenborn, which the author discusses today on the Web site for the London Telegraph).

Fitting the Voice to the Space

The last time I reviewed a performance in the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series (run under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center), I discussed the problem of a singer who had not been particularly successful in scaling her operatic voice down to the intimacy of a recital setting. In yesterday's concert in this same series at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, baritone Quinn Kelsey had no such problem with scale. There is no questioning the strength of his voice, wonderfully demonstrated this past fall both in the role of Marcello in the San Francisco Opera La Bohème and as the baritone solo in the San Francisco Symphony performance of Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony. Yesterday, however, he demonstrated that he was just as comfortable with smaller-scale settings, although he did not choose to diminish his interest in the dramatic in his selections for his program.

Three languages were represented by this program: English, German, and Russian. I do not know enough Russian to account for his diction in that language; but his English and German had the sort of splendid clarity that draws the ear to the words themselves, even when, as was the case with the selections by George Frideric Handel, the texts themselves left much to be desired (and probably had not occupied much of the composer's attention). Still, Handel could take texts that were, at best, "borderline ridiculous," such as John Gay's libretto for Acis and Galatea and Newburgh Hamilton's for Samson, and serve them up with a thoroughly sublime treatment. Kelsey clearly favored Handel's side of the story, using the energy of his settings to begin his recital with a dynamic opening.

From this point of departure he could turn to far better words in the hands of a composer with a keen sense of English poetry. The composer was Gerald Finzi, whom I know best from his settings of the poems of Thomas Hardy. Kelsey's selections, however, were from Let us Garlands Bring, whose texts are by William Shakespeare. I used to hear these from time to time back when XM Radio had their Vox channel, but I could not always follow the words on the recordings they broadcast. The combination of Kelsey's clarity and the texts in the program revealed the merits of Finzi's ear for setting Shakespeare, as well-tuned as that of any actor or director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Finzi also had a nice trick of rendering nonsense syllables ("hey ding a ding a ding") in double-time, rather than letting them weigh down the import of the text that they embellish.

Finzi's faithful setting of Shakespeare's well-crafted way with words was followed by Mahler's hyperemotional setting of his own texts for his four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. This is the young Mahler getting his act together (particularly since material from his cycle later emerged in two of the movements of his first symphony); and we are back in the domain of texts in dire need of rescuing by the music. Kelsey approached this as the mini-opera captured by the narrative that cuts across the four poems in the cycle. He also had no trouble letting us know that the protagonist of this opera is more than a little deranged at the very beginning of the first poem, after which the path is all down a precipitous slope. The standard opera repertoire rarely gives the baritone a chance for a mad scene, but the young Mahler did a good job of compensating for this lacuna! Kelsey had the dramatic sense to keep the overwrought texts from carrying him over the edge, but he was also not afraid to unleash some raw emotions to give those texts the impact they deserved.

In this performance particular credit must also be given to accompanist Peter Grunberg. This cycle fares much better in its orchestral setting, but Grunberg clearly had a keen ear for that setting. He knew how to bring out the most important details even when limited by his piano keyboard, and the result was a performance as effective as any orchestral performance I have heard.

The intermission was followed by a different kind of song cycle, the Songs and Dances of Death by Modest Mussorgsky. This is the first time I have heard these four songs in a recital, although I worked on some of them when accompanying a baritone friend of mine back in Los Angeles. There is a bit of a pun in the title, since Death appears as a character in each of these songs. Thus, they are not so much about Death as they are performed by him. The author of the texts, Arseny Arkadyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, was clearly very sympathetic to this Death-as-character; and Mussorgsky captured this sympathy in what are four decidedly different emotional settings. Once again this was an opportunity for Kelsey to exercise his dramatic training through opera, endowing each of the songs with the uplifting spirit behind the texts. It was the sort of performance that makes one wish this cycle was heard more often.

The encore, on the other hand, has been heard so much that it is always right on the brink of cliché. It was "Some Enchanted Evening," from Richard Rodgers' score for the musical South Pacific. People who know this show only from the film and subsequent revivals may not know that this song was originally written for Ezio Pinza, who, in his time, may well have been the quintessential Don Giovanni. It would be unfair to expect that Kelsey would be channeling Pinza in this encore; but he endowed this song with the straight reading of a respectful baritone with little care for its inferiority to the standard repertoire. This made for a good encore choice. However sympathetic a character Death may have been, this selection provided a touching way to relieve the hall of his presence.

Adventures in New Listening

Considering the scope of my listening experience, it is very rare that I come across a program that covers a period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in which I am familiar with only one composition. Even more curious is when that one composition is one with which I have become only recently acquainted, Amy Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet in F sharp minor. However, this particular program came from last night's Graduate Viola Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and my entire knowledge of the Beach quintet comes from two performances (one professional, one student) that I previously heard at the Conservatory. Furthermore, some of the oddity of the evening was blunted by the fact that the Beach performance was actually a repeat of the student performance I heard last November. There is little I can add to my past writing about both the composition and the students who performed it, other than the obvious observation that this is a work that deserves to be performed more frequently. The only thing that may bear repeating is that, probably only by virtue of my own listening experience, performances of this quintet continue to tweak my memories of Edward Elgar's piano quintet. However, Elgar wrote his quintet in 1919, about a dozen years after Beach completed hers; and it is hard to imagine his having been influenced by it. Had he, for example, visited the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, we would have known about this from some biographical account; but there does not appear to be any evidence of his having been in North America. Indeed, Elgar's most serious connection to the United States probably came from Yehudi Menuhin, who recorded Elgar's violin concerto with Elgar conducting. However, Menuhin was born in 1916; and, for all his reputation as a child prodigy, it is hard to imagine his having influenced Elgar's composition work in 1919, even in the extremely unlikely event that he had heard Beach's music while still in utero! (For the record, while Menuhin was raised in San Francisco, he was born in New York.)

Returning from this digression, however, the most important aspect of last night's recital was the framing of the entire program. It began with two miniatures for viola and piano by a composer sitting in the audience (Sahba Aminikia) and concluded with the Opus 1 (a string quartet in D major) by a composer (Josif Andriasov) who died in 2000 but was represented by a thorough set of program notes by his musicologist widow (Marta Andriasova-Kudryashova). Both of these composers received their initial music education in Russia, Aminikia at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and Andriasov at the Peter I. Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory. Andriasov was born in Moscow to an Armenian family, while Aminikia was born in Tehran. While the two composers were separated by half a century, they both vividly illustrated Robert Mann's precept that a composer is best understood in terms of the music to which he has been exposed; and, in this case, there could well have been a common exposure that could be traced back to origins along the banks of the Caspian Sea. Both compositions captured a certain "Armenian spirit," which is probably best associated with Aram Khachaturian but was displayed in a more "earthy" rendering than Khachaturian ever delivered. Indeed, Aminikia seemed more interested in capturing the sound qualities of these folk sources, rather than the tunes themselves, which would put him closer to Béla Bartók than to Khachaturian. Furthermore, Aminikia is currently a graduate student in composition at the Conservatory; and this was the first performance of his miniatures. So this was probably a case of one student composing for another and probably working closely together on this emphasis on the nature of the sound itself.

The "other end of the time-line," so to speak, was represented by the Opus 94 of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. What the program listed as a fantasy for viola and orchestra is probably what (according to Wikipedia) the British Library Integrated Catalogue calls his "Potpourri for Viola and Orchestra," based on "Il mio tesoro." Many of us gave our first serious listening to Hummel when Wynton Marsalis recorded his trumpet concerto, and this work made it clear that Hummel was a great admirer of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Its first movement seemed to take the first movement of the K. 385 ("Haffner") symphony and turn it on its head, while its second movement came off as a fantasy on the second movement of the K. 467 piano concerto. Thus, it was no surprise that Hummel would have also turned to Don Giovanni for inspiration; and, since the viola is the "tenor" of a string quartet, what better source than the most famous tenor aria from the opera? In many respects this work can be heard as a harbinger of the sort of salon music that would flourish throughout the nineteenth century, much of which involved such homages to the spirit of the preceding century.

Similarly, Max Bruch's Opus 85 romance for viola and orchestra may be heard as a reflection on Ludwig van Beethoven's two similarly-titled works for violin and orchestra (Opera 40 and 50); but Bruch's work is anything but a mere homage. Rather, it is likely the work of a composer who, like Johannes Brahms, had to live with the influence of Beethoven without succumbing to that influence. Bruch's result certainly exhibited a unique voice, which served the voice of the viola as well as his more popular works for violin and cello served those respective instruments.

Finally, after the Andriasov quartet the evening concluded with an encore. The string quartet returned to perform Astor Piazzolla's "Four for Tango," which he had composed for the Kronos Quartet in 1987. Piazzolla provided a sharp contrast to that "Caspian" sound that began and ended the formal program; but it also ended the evening with a playful gesture, which always makes for good programming!

The Public Value and the Public Trust

Matt Asay's latest Open Road column for CNET News is entitled "Google, the great destroyer of value?" His point of departure is, for better or worse, The Wall Street Journal:

In a recent series entitled "The Future of Newspapers," Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson made some provocative (but insightful) comments about the Web's effect on journalism and the newspaper business.

One comment in particular stands out:

Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it's terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.

Google Page Rank supposedly makes qualitative distinctions between content by measuring quantitative links to content, but in reality it doesn't work that way--not enough of the time, anyway.

This is interesting as far as it goes; but it is unclear that Asay took the nature of his source into account, which would have been a cardinal sin back in the days when print journalism still ruled. One problem with a publication like The Wall Street Journal is that it tends to focus entirely on the newspaper as a provider of content (which can, of course, be monetized), thus sacrificing the old-fashioned idea of the newspaper as a public trust. How, then, are we to interpret these remarks with respect to Google? We must begin with the premise that Google is not particularly interested in this matter of the public trust, and I have gone so far as to suggest that folks like Eric Schmidt neither know nor care about just what that concept is. Nevertheless, Google has been instrumental in eroding this aspect of newspaper publication, just as they have eroded the role of health care as another public trust. Now I am the first to admit that this concept of public trust had its origins in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it predates the concept of socialism (not to mention those who immediately raise red flags at the very hint of that concept). However, I find it interesting that, in the areas of both journalism and health care, it managed to survive many of the modernist innovations of the twentieth century, having a firm hold on our collective consciousness until Google rooted itself in our way of life. I do not expect that the sorts of responsibilities of public trust will return in my lifetime, but I fear that we shall be the worse for that lack.

On Giving and Taking Offense

I see from the BBC NEWS Web site that this is the twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie in response to the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. I was reminded of the extent to which landmarks in my own life story have been set by literature that gave offense. I was too young to appreciate the absurdity of the decision by the Free Library of Philadelphia to remove all copies of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover from all of their branches (including the Main Library). I later found a paperback copy of Sons and Lovers in my parents' bedroom and managed to make it one of my elective reading assignments in high school. I think my mother bought the book shortly after it have been made into a film. I did not see the film until many years later and found it a vivid demonstration of why some literature should not be subjected to cinematic treatment.

Then there was the Philadelphia ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. By this time I was making trips to New York on my own and relished buying the Grove Press Black Cat Edition there, wondering how much I should worry about concealing it when I got back to Philadelphia. I still have that copy, and I value it as much for the introductory material by Karl Shapiro (which I am still fond of citing) as for Miller's own text. However, as was the case with Lawrence, I valued the controversy for introducing me to the author, rather than the specific book. Once my curiosity about Miller had been whetted, I discovered other books that I found far more satisfying. For example, I now feel that he needed to get certain things out of his system in Tropic of Cancer, after which he was able to write Tropic of Capricorn, in which his fiction really soars. Reading Tropic of Capricorn for a second time was one of the activities that sustained me during my rather frustrating exile of teaching in Israel, as did my second reading of the essays in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (another source I enjoy citing). (The other book whose second reading was so valuable to me in Israel was William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.)

I found myself thinking about my expatriate reading habits when preparing to move to Singapore in 1991. A friend from my Los Angeles days was working at the laboratory at which I had just accepted an offer, and I remember talking to her about banned material. I told her that I owned a copy of The Satanic Verses, and she gave me a look that made it clear how absurd my concerns were. It turned out that the only thing that bothered Singaporean censors was questionable video content. Always interested in experimenting, however, I remember placing a mail order for a copy of the videotape of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The package arrived at my desk with no signs of inspection; and, more importantly, the shrink-wrap was still on the tape itself.

It may be that the Singapore government did not give much thought to books because reading was not particularly popular. There were plenty of bookstores, mostly chain outlets. However, only three sections in any of those shops had a broad selection of material: books for children, travel books, and cooking books. Even at the National University of Singapore, on whose campus my laboratory was located, one seldom heard the word "literature" uttered. Around the time I made the move to Silicon Valley, Tower Records had come to Singapore and became one of the few interesting sources of reading matter in the country.

I discovered just how interesting their collection was when I returned to Singapore several years later on a business trip that included a visit to the "Cyberjaya" project in Malaysia. This was one of those trips on which I finished the reading matter I had packed during my flight over the Pacific. My hotel was a short walk from Tower, so I was curious to see if their book department was still an interesting place. Much to my surprise, I found a copy of Interzone, a collection of the early writings of William S. Burroughs (including draft material for Naked Lunch), which James Grauerholz had compiled and edited for Viking. This turned out to be really heady stuff, the last thing I would have expected to find in Singapore. Indeed, I found much of the text so provocative that I felt it would be wise to keep the book locked in the safe in my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur!

I still have my copies of all of the books I have cited, the only exception being that my wife's copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover now represents Lawrence in our library, as does her copy of Sons and Lovers. So I no longer have photographs of the cast of the film version of that latter book; but, having seen the film, I do not particularly miss those photographs! The other books, however, remind me of how much both buying books and reading them has been an adventure for me. They also remind me that, however unread books there may be on our shelves, some books may deserve a second reading before others get their first. These days when I read all those opinion pieces on whether or not reading will eventually move to the digital domain, I remember the extent to which memories of my adventures in reading are revived every day by physical icons on different shelves around our home. Will reading in the digital domain still be an adventure; and, if we still have adventures, how will our memories of those adventures be maintained?

Meanwhile, in yet another defense of "live performance," I have discovered that I take far more pleasure in Book TV broadcasts of Rushdie talking about his work than I do in reading the work itself!

The People Voice from the People's Republic

Yesterday I tried to examine some of the "official" language that had begun to emerge in the wake of the devastating fire in Shanghai, primarily for the sake of comparing it with some of our own "official" language currently being invoked in the search for appropriate prosecution of those responsible for our economic crisis. Today, thanks to a report from Geoff Dyer of the Financial Times, I have discovered another "voice of reaction" from China, which is far more interesting than the "official" one:

Rather than being distressed at the part-destruction of one of Beijing’s landmarks, many young Chinese took pleasure in the humiliation of the national broadcaster. “Self-castration perfectly fits the image of CCTV which is the world’s number one eunuch media,” wrote widely read blogger Han Han.

CCTV is a broadcasting colossus, straddling 16 channels and bringing in over $2bn of revenues a year. Its annual New Year gala programme is watched by nearly 500m people.

Yet among the metropolitan Chinese who contribute to the country’s lively and ribald internet conversations, there is a deep well of disdain for the wooden style and propaganda of CCTV’s news programmes.

“CCTV is very broad-minded. They have focused so much on the fire in Australia that they obviously forget about the fire in their own backyard,” wrote blogger Caii after the incident was barely mentioned on the national broadcaster.

Internet chatrooms have been inundated with cartoons showing alien invaders attacking the CCTV buildings, while T-shirts are now on sale celebrating the blaze.

Wary of the potential backlash against CCTV, many publications were instructed by propaganda officials to use the version of events from the official Xinhua news agency.

Yet even the Xinhua story appeared to relish the travails of its cross-town rival. It quoted a fire official, Luo Yuan, who said that CCTV staff had ignored safety warnings from local police who had inspected the site. “We have video of the scene and remnants of the fireworks, which will serve as strong evidence in the investigation,” he was quoted as saying.

”There is barely anyone in the Chinese media who was not pleased to hear about the CCTV fire,” said one media industry insider who asked not to be named. ”The high-handed way the organisation dominates the media scene has made it universally hated, even by many of its own employees.”

Some of the schadenfreude is also down to the architecture. Made up of two sloping towers bolted together, Mr [Rem] Koolhaas’ design for the main building has won him the tag of genius from some architects but it is not loved by everyone in Beijing, where its many nicknames include “big underpants”.

Even though the larger building was untouched by the fire, some in the profession believe the blaze will become a symbol for the bursting bubble in brand-name architects.

This strikes me as an interesting sample of self-expression from "the people" who are beginning to wonder just what their "people's republic" has become. I have examined this situation in the past. Over a year ago, when the only voices concerned with a possible economic peril were consigned to the loony bin, I wrote a post on the rising trend of consumerism in China, suggesting that the very question of Chinese identity was going through a disruptive change. Let me reproduce a joke I invoked to try to make my point:

There is an old joke about Leonid Brezhnev at the height of his power in the Soviet Union. He invited his mother to visit and show her all the perquisites of his power: the dacha, the fleet of limousines, and all the luxury foods kept in his kitchen. After a few days of this grand tour, he said, "Well, mama, what to you think now of your little boy from Kamenskoe?" She looked back at him and said, "This is all very nice, my son; but what will you do when the Communists take over?"

Those who have "taken over" in China want to maintain all of the Maoist trappings of iron-fisted totalitarian control while enjoying all of the fruits of economic growth promised by the ideology of capitalism. Within this bipolar context, individual Chinese people have tried to celebrate wealth while respecting the "parental authority" of the government hierarchy. Today, however, that capitalist ideology is not cultivating those fruits; and China is feeling the same pinch that is being felt by the leading Western industrialized nations. As a result there is a new effort of people below that government hierarchy trying to make their voices heard; and those voices seem to have bought into my metaphor of the "stately capitalist mansion of Shanghai" in attacking not only CCTV but also the very life style embodied in that "mansion."

When one listens to "the voice of the people," rather than any government-based "official story," one quickly comes to realize than there is a tight coupling between the security of the economic framework and the effectiveness of governmental authority. This is why any strategy for recovery must not be confined to the "engines of the economy." Rather, it needs to address the broader scope of political economy, whether that scope rests on foundations of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. The neglect of that broader scope may have been a key factor in the tension between John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt during the worst days of the Great Depression. When Roosevelt accused Keynes of being more of "a mathematician rather than a political economist," this had less to do with Keynes' understanding of conditions and more to do with his willingness to recognize the context in which those conditions were embedded and the need for the President of the United States to take that context into account in any action he took. As the Greek poet Archilochus (best known today through Isaiah Berlin) would have put it, Keynes was a hedgehog who knew economics very well, while Roosevelt was a fox who knew many things about both government and economics, even if he did not know economics as well as Keynes.

This time around we have Barack Obama as a fox; and, like Roosevelt, his dealings with the hedgehogs have not always been a model of achieving understanding through communication. Nevertheless, he leads an Administration that shows far more appreciation of both communication and understanding than that of his predecessor (even when, where the economy is concerned, achieving understanding is a formidable task). The Chinese government, on the other hand, is based on a tradition that honors authority far more than understanding (or, to invoke the language of Anthony Giddens, prioritizes domination over signification). This is not a particularly healthy environment for either hedgehogs or foxes! Nevertheless, in Dyer's report we encounter both hedgehogs and foxes struggling to be heard; and what will the authoritarians do? In 1989, when China was just beginning to see the benefits from its first steps into a market economy, voices were raised over the more general question of political economy in Tiananmen Square; and the world witnessed the brutal response of authoritarianism. This time the benefits will be harder to find, and authoritarianism still rules. It is hard to imagine that Koolhaas’ "stately mansion" will be the only casualty of a "crisis in communication" that may be more serious for China than the current economic troubles.

Chutzpah for Public Health

Heather Knight contributed the following item to the "City Insider" column of this morning's San Francisco Chronicle:

Move over Lou Seal, there's another San Francisco mascot that will appear at parades, street fairs and other public events around the city over the coming year. It's the 6-foot-tall Healthy Penis.

Actually, there are three of them, and they'll make their reappearance at noon today at the corner of Castro and Market. The characters will appear with a fourth, much-less-attractive buddy, Phil the Syphilis Sore.

Controversial when they debuted in 2002, the characters became popular and appeared around the city until 2006 to encourage gay and bisexual men to get tested for syphilis.

Syphilis cases dropped over those years, and the penis costumes were borrowed by other cities to promote testing for sexually transmitted diseases. But now the Department of Public Health is bringing them back because syphilis cases are again on the rise, up 50 percent from 2007 to 2008.

Inside the costumes are public health staffers. "There is no lack of people who want to volunteer to wear a penis costume in public," said department spokeswoman Eileen Shields.

She said they'll be everywhere in the coming months. We think they should run in Bay to Breakers to test the new no-nudity rules. "I would give anything to see the police write-up on that," Shields said.

There are probably several layers of chutzpah surrounding this story. Even Knight needed a bit of chutzpah to serve up this story along with the morning eggs (particularly for those who take their eggs with sausage)! However, the Chutzpah of the Week award should go to the Department of Public Health, as a whole, for recognizing when they had a good way to get out the word on a serious disease and going back to that good way when there was clearly a need to do so. The Department may even be up for a second award if they make good on Shields' threat to challenge the "creeping puritanism" of the Bay to Breakers race!

The Energy Problem

This is not about carbon emissions and global warming. It is about music, and it emerged out of my ongoing attempts to come to terms with the problem of describing musical performance. It grows out of my efforts to think about a performance in terms of how the expenditure of energy is distributed over the duration of the performance and the extent to which that expenditure is a product of some explicit action strategy. It also grows out of an observation made over a year ago about how a performance of Max Bruch's first violin concerto (Opus 26 in G minor) depends so heavily on how the soloist plays his/her first note, a single sustained tone on an open string. My hypothesis is that the "micro-level" strategy for the distribution of energy over that single note may well lead to a "macro-level" strategy applicable to an entire composition.

The problem that arises at the micro-level is the hysteresis phenomenon commonly associated with how a magnetic flux (B) is induced by a magnetizing force (H), illustrated on the Encyclopædia Britannica Web site as follows:

As the upward arrow illustrates, when a magnetizing force is first applied, there is almost no change in the induced flux. It is only after the continued application of that force has accumulated to a certain level that the flux begins to change, after which it rises relatively quickly in response to additional force. In a similar way a violinist needs to accumulate some initial application of force before the string can vibrate at all, and it is only after that vibrating state is achieved that it makes sense to say that the expenditure of energy is explicitly under the control of the performer. This is particularly problematic if that initial energy level needs to be low (producing a sound of low amplitude), because that energy level may be too low to set the string vibrating at all. (For example, this is what makes the very opening of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin so problematic for both the conductor and the string section being conducted.) My point is that, before you can worry about the strategy for controlling the energy of your sound, you have to satisfy the precondition of having the sound at all, after which you need to quickly align the sound you have to the energy level of what you want.

That process of alignment is probably driven by some sense of expectation coming either strictly from the soloist or through some agreement between soloist and conductor. In other words there is this delicate matter of having a clear sense of what you want to hear, which must be reconciled with the (likely) possibility that the very first thing you hear (because of hysteresis) is not what you want and must therefore be corrected almost immediately. Furthermore, in the case of a concerto, that sound you want must eventually become part of a larger whole, integrating with the sound of the ensemble while maintaining its own identity. Thus, at the macro-level performance is very much a matter of ongoing alignment that involves not only the sound of your own instrument but the sound of the entire ensemble including your instrument.

This is a rather challenging set of actions to strategize, which is why practice and rehearsal are so important. To some extent your capacity to know what you want begins and the micro-level and gradually works its way up to the macro-level as you become more familiar with the "text" through practice and rehearsal. Here, too, there is probably a hysteresis effect. When the rehearsal process begins, progress is slow; and the "returns" are relatively small. However, eventually (sooner, rather than later, in most professional settings) the rate of progress improves, probably because the micro-level strategies that are applied in one setting turn out to be applicable throughout the entire composition. Put another way, after a certain amount of rehearsal one acquires a "repertoire of strategies," after which strategy escalates to a "meta-level." The good news is that most of the repertoire (like the Bruch concerto) is sufficiently familiar that one is already prepared with ideas about strategies even before the first efforts at performance; and, even when the music is not familiar, one will tend to draw upon personal performing experience to propose "trial strategies." If not all of those trials go according to plan, one can always compensate, which is usually far easier to achieve in the immediacy of rehearsal than the more daunting task of coming up with a new strategy from scratch.

Needless to say, this is all highly hypothetical. To some extent these very ideas are the product of micro-strategies trying to grow into macro-strategies. Such growth, however, is just another way to look at the results of rehearsal, which is why the ideas have been presented in this particular "Rehearsal Studio!"

From the Folks Who Made an Opera of Jerry Springer

Whatever the opinions of Richard Faiman may be, apparently it is not all bread-and-butter at the Royal Opera House. Shortly after reading his review of their current production of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, I encountered this report by Alastair Jamieson on the London Telegraph Web site regarding plans for a new opera about Anna Nicole Smith:

Her controversial relationships, court battles over the paternity of her children and the sudden death of her 20-year-old son will among the dramatic twists in a libretto written by the co-creator of Jerry Springer The Opera.

The anti-heroine is considered by artistic directors at the Covent Garden venue to be a relevant character in a tale of modern times. The project is part of the Royal Opera House policy of staging a new opera on the main stage approximately every two years, with recent premieres including Harrison Birtwistle's Minotaur, and Thomas Adès' The Tempest.

Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden's director of opera told The Guardian. "It is not going to be tawdry; it is going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad. In broad outline, it will tell the story of her life, the people who influenced her, her progress ... Clearly the story is about a woman who met an ancient gentleman in a wheelchair, but it's not going to be a straight narrative; choices have been made about significant moments, selecting which incidents in her life are to be built up."

The opera will be written by Mark-Anthony Turnage, one of the most celebrated names of British contemporary music, with the libretto provided by Richard Thomas.

Ms Padmore added: "It is not just a documentary about her, but a parable about celebrity and what it does to people. It can be moving, it can be funny and it tells universal truths about human frailty.

"It is a very sad story - a larger-than-life American story, as was Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It will be a slice of our times - of America in the pre-Obama days."

Needless to say, this will be a big gamble that will probably derive more from the apparent success of Jerry Springer The Opera than from any connection to any of the other operas named in this account. San Francisco probably knows Turnage best from the end of the last season of the San Francisco Symphony, when Benjamin Shwartz conducted his Three Asteroids, which I described in terms of "the world of Hollywood vulgarity" and the slogan for the Godzilla remake: SIZE MATTERS. Far be it from me to play up the extent to which this slogan may be applied to Anna Nicole (not to mention that The Fugs might have provided a more appropriate score for an opera project)!

The Right Man for the Times?

I rather liked the way in which Richard Fairman introduced his review of the current production of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House, particularly after yesterday's thoughts about this opera:

If times are going to be hard, opera companies need productions that will earn their keep. David McVicar’s production of Rigoletto at Covent Garden is proving a good investment – a straightforward staging with no controversial ideas and minimal sets, which probably does not take a lot of rehearsal.

In many ways this may be read as an endorsement of the way in which David Gockley has planned the 2009–10 season of the San Francisco Opera; and, through what may be a happy coincidence, it turns out that McVicar will be the director of the production of Il Trovatore (shared with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Metropolitan Opera) that will open the San Francisco season. Not only is this opera far from Verdi at his best; but also it will always labor under the ribbing it took from the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera (which will be honored, at least subconsciously) when the September 19 performance is simulcast in AT&T Park. The opera tends to fare best when it is given the sort of bread-and-butter treatment that McVicar has applied to his Rigoletto. By all rights, then, the production should carry us through any Marx Brothers absurdity associated with the Anvil Chorus to the third act, when we can enjoy a rousing "Di quella pira!"

Just Plain Stupid

The details behind the fire that destroyed the latest stately capitalist mansion of Shanghai before it could be occupied have now pretty much emerged in their entirety. If we are to believe the latest report from the BBC NEWS Web site (reproduced in its entirety for thoroughness), those details will provide grounds for prosecution:

Twelve people have been detained in connection with a fire that partly destroyed the unfinished headquarters of China's state broadcaster.

One of those being held is an official from China Central Television (CCTV), Xinhua state news agency confirmed.

CCTV has apologised for setting off powerful illegal firecrackers that are blamed for sparking the Beijing blaze.

A firefighter died after inhaling toxic fumes and several people were injured in the fire late on Monday.

The tragedy has angered some Chinese, for appearing to show how high-profile groups can bypass normal rules.

Officials from CCTV were using the new building - that housed the near-completed Mandarin Oriental hotel and a culture centre - as the backdrop for an illegal pyrotechnics display.

One or more fireworks hit the tower, which was still under construction so the sprinkler system was not switched on. The 33-storey block may now have to be scrapped.

Among those detained over the incident was Xu Wei, 50, who was in charge of construction at CCTV's new site.

The 12 are being held "on suspicion of creating a disturbance with dangerous materials", an official statement said.

Citing police, Xinhua news agency reported separately that three other CCTV employees and eight people the station hired to set off the fireworks were also under detention.

Authorities said previously the blaze was caused by fireworks that CCTV had illegally set off that were far more powerful than the public was allowed to buy.

It also ignored police orders against setting off the fireworks as part of Chinese lunar new year celebrations.

There are many things I like about the language of this text. That phrase about "how high-profile groups can bypass normal rules" seemed particularly appropriate, coming on the heels of the treatment that the eight banking CEOs received from the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. Indeed, had Committee Chairman Barney Frank encountered that phrase earlier in the day, it might have emerged in his remarks. After all, our government's instruments of accountability are far more transparent than those in China; and the banks represented by those CEOs have made an arrogant show of flaunting the efforts of the Government Accountability Office to monitor the bailout founds they had received. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has already begun to use the power of his office to make those banks pay for their arrogance. I suspect that most of the American public expects Frank and his colleagues to show just as much backbone, since they are probably far more furious with those banks than the Chinese are with CCTV.

I also like the way in which the Chinese authorities phrased the formal charges against the people they have detained. The language may be a bit restrained, but it seems accurate enough to sustain a case based on the available evidence. Besides, neither China nor the United States has the power to charge either individuals or institutions with the "crime" of being "just plain stupid," let alone as arrogant as those "Masters of the Universe" in the financial sector have been. Where China has a leg up on us may well be in the area of public humiliation. We took a crack at that with the "perp walks" of the last financial scandal; and it never really had much effect.

Nevertheless, I doubt that we shall come out of the latest round of Congressional hearings and deliberations with any sense that justice has been done; and I suspect that the Chinese will resign themselves to the fact that their normal rules will continue to be bypassed. Every now and then I find myself reminding my wife (whose Master's Degree is in English Literature) that we can only find poetic justice in poetry; so, if I am going to come to peace with my own frustrations, I probably need to turn to literature, rather than the news sources. This morning I was reminded of Malcolm Cowley's brilliant introduction to The Portable Faulkner. By way of a case study, he examined the novel Absalom, Absalom! (an interesting source for reflection on Lincoln's Birthday) and the role that Quentin Compson played as narrator of that tale:

… he tells a long and violent story that he regards as the essence of the Deep South, which is not so much a mere region as it is, in Quentin's mind, an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past.

That "legendary past" is, of course, a fiction, not just to Quentin but to all the Southerners in the tale he unfolds. China also has a "legendary past;" and, as in the Deep South, there remain deep tensions over the influence exerted by that past on life in the present. However, we may also wish to view our own financial institutions in the context of their legendary past, that past being the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when the wealthy first acquired the notion that they could be "Masters of the Universe." That metaphor of "an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past" applies quite nicely to today's "Wall Street aristocracy." They are just too immersed in their innovative strategies for circumventing regulation to realize it; and, because we fail to appreciate the power of their collective unconscious, we may never be able to awaken them from the nightmare of history that drives their never-ending lust for power and undermines that "sense of reality" without which we are unlike to recover from our current economic crisis.

Verdi's Aimless Wanderings

Listening to some of my recordings of Arturo Toscanini conducting Giuseppe Verdi this morning, my thoughts turned back to the metaphor I have been exploring of both music composition and performance being journeys through time. While I last considered this metaphor in the context of Ludwig van Beethoven's particularly prolonged slow movements, opera demands a journey through even more extended durations. My guess is that most opera lovers do not think of the performances they attend as journeys. Rather, they are showcases for a few star turns; and, if one is lucky, the plot line that connects those moments will not be totally ridiculous.

Nevertheless, even this rather superficial approach to listening requires that a composer pay some attention to pacing the appearance of those key moments; and I fear that, over the general repertoire of "grand opera," most of the composers do not do this very well. As seems to be the case with just about any other aspect of his work, Verdi is as likely to "get" the problem of pacing as he is to miss it. In the Verdi canon the opera best paced to placate star-hungry audiences may well be Rigoletto, where Verdi knew how to keep the audience waiting for "La donna è mobile" in the final act, knowing full well that this would be the cherry on top of the cake. (Note that this has nothing to do with the dramatic pacing of the libretto. Otello probably has the best overall pacing; but, however powerful Desdemona's delivery of "O Salce! Salce!" may be, the star performances peak in the second act with Iago's "Credo in un Dio crudel che m'ha creato.") On the other hand there are the operas in which it is tempting to go home by the time of the first intermission. Nabucco plays its best card with "Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate;" and even a mezzo with the best stage presence rarely escalates Eboli's "Nel giardin del bello" above the excitement just created by "Dio, che nell'alma infondere" in Don Carlo, regardless of which version is performed in which language.

This may be one reason why I seldom seek out Verdi performances. For better or worse I want to hold to my journey metaphor, rather than living in one moment (however impressive it may be) and then waiting for the next such moment to come along (assuming there is one). The good news is that, even when Verdi never seems to have given this matter that much thought, there are Verdi conductors who appreciate its value. It may even be that Toscanini knew how to pace Verdi properly because he also knew how to pace Richard Wagner, which is a far more demanding task. Similarly, among current opera conductors James Levine has a similarly broad perspective; and it sometimes seems as if his comprehension of any one composer ends up informing how he approaches any other composer. Thus, while I do not necessarily revert to the put-down that many of my music professors promoted that, "There are those who like music, and those who like opera," I would argue that those most skilled at performing music in a concert setting are likely to be best informed when approaching performance from the orchestra pit in an opera house.

Innovation in Education (and Without Technology!)

There is a tendency to assume that innovation is strictly a matter of deploying a new technology (unless you are in the financial sector, in which case it is a matter of coming up with a new way to circumvent existing regulations). However, if you are in a school district that cannot afford new technology (let alone find the time to train your teachers on how to get the most of it and then give them the time to revise curricula accordingly), the best way to innovate is to come up with new ways of doing things with the resources you have. This seems to be what Adams 50, a 10,000-student district in the metropolitan Denver area in the state of Colorado, has done. We can thank Amanda Paulson of the Christian Science Monitor for reporting this innovation to the rest of us, since I doubt that anyone on the Adams 50 teaching or administrative staff is likely to get an invitation to that naval-gazing innovation fest on Technology Entertainment, and Design (TED):

The change that's getting by far the most attention is the decision to do away with traditional grade levels – for kids younger than eighth grade, this first year, though the district plans to phase in the reform through high school a year at a time. Ultimately, there will be 10 multiage levels, rather than 12 grades, and students might be in different levels depending on the subject. They'll move up only as they demonstrate mastery of the material.

But Dr. Selleck and others are quick to emphasize that that's only one piece of a radically different, more student-centered, approach to learning – and that it's not the same as tracking, the currently out-of-favor system of grouping students by ability.

Students help craft own lesson plans
The district is training teachers to involve students in the lesson plan in a far greater way than before – the students articulate their goals and develop things such as a code of conduct as a classroom. And when children fall short of understanding the material, they keep working at it. The only "acceptable" score to move on to the next lesson is the equivalent of a "B" in normal grading – hopefully showing proficiency and giving kids a better foundation as they move on to more advanced concepts. Advocates sometimes describe it as flipping the traditional system around so that time, rather than mastery of material, is the variable.

While the idea of "standards-based education," as it's often known, has been around for a while, the only public district where it's been tried for any length of time is in Alaska, where the Chugach district – whose 250 students are scattered over 22,000 square miles – went from the lowest performing district in the state to Alaska's highest-performing quartile in five years in the 1990s, a shift the former superintendent, Richard DeLorenzo, attributes to the new philosophy.

Needless to say, there will be implementation problems, just as they are with any innovation. As Paulson pointed out, scheduling will probably be the biggest of them. Nevertheless, when we consider how little productive thinking has gone into our current educational crisis, we should give points to a school district with the moxie to take a radical (audacious?) approach to change they might be able to believe in. Let us wish them all the best and thank the Monitor for deciding that their story was newsworthy!

"The Schwartz be with You!" (you too, Harry Potter)

As anyone who has seen Spaceballs should remember, "The Schwartz" is the "mystical power" of merchandizing. However, while for Mel Brooks the power of The Schwartz was best invoked in movie theater lobbies and toy stores, the publisher of the Harry Potter books has decided to summon the spell of The Schwartz in elementary school classrooms. As Motoko Rich reported in today's New York Times, this is raising more than a few eyebrows:

Scholastic Inc., the children’s publisher of favorites like the Harry Potter, Goosebumps and Clifford series, may be best known for its books, but a consumer watchdog group accuses the company of using its classroom book clubs to push video games, jewelry kits and toy cars.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group based in Boston, said that it had reviewed monthly fliers distributed by Scholastic last year and found that one-third of the items sold in these brochures were either not books or books packaged with other items.

Based on a review of brochures in Scholastic’s Lucky Club for children in second and third grade, and its Arrow Club for fourth through sixth graders, the group said that 14 percent of the items were not books, while an additional 19 percent were books sold with other trinkets like stickers, posters and toys.

Susan Linn, director of the campaign, said she had received complaints from parents who were concerned that their children were being sold toys, games, makeup and other items under the guise of a literary book club that is promoted in classrooms.

“Marketing in schools is a privilege and not a right,” Ms. Linn said in an interview. “Scholastic is abusing that privilege.”

The campaign’s review identified products like the M&M’s Kart Racing Wii video game, the “American Idol” event planner and a Puppy Pals Origami Kit. But the brochures also included products like a set of Spiderwick Chronicles books that came with a poster, or “Mad About Math: Brain Busters Math Games,” a book of math puzzles that comes with a board game.

Last fall the campaign took credit for having persuaded Scholastic to discontinue selling picture books based on the overtly sexy Bratz dolls in any of its school book clubs or fairs this school year. At the time, Scholastic said its decision was influenced as much by dwindling sales as it was by the campaign’s push.

Rich also published excerpts from a response statement released by Judy Newman, president of Scholastic Book Clubs. However, it was interesting to see the ways in which Newman evaded the most direct of the accusations from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Indeed, to this reader the rhetoric was highly reminiscent of the tactics that cigarette companies used to engage each time another medical report emerged about the connection between smoking and cancer. Thus, while Newman argued that, whatever merchandizing strategies are being applied, the only important point is that kids are reading, Linn was ready with a counterargument:

The message that children get when books are marketed with other items is that a book in and of itself isn’t enough. And what it does is encourage children to choose books based not on the content but on what they get with it.

What is particularly disconcerting about this report is the implication that selling several highly successful series of books to the youngest audience of readers is not enough, at least to the Scholastic bean-counters. It has been a while since I have written about the "dangerous illusion" of "top-dog thinking;" but this story reminds us that, even in economic conditions where every business is struggling for survival, there still seems to be a drive to be at the top of the heap of survivors. Where Scholastic is concerned, such top-dog thinking apparently trumps the more laudable goal of cultivating literacy at the earliest possible age. From this point of view, our current crisis in education involves more than the dwindling budgets of the schools; it also entails the extent to which businesses that are supposed to serve those schools have chosen instead to foster that addiction to consumerism that has been such an effective distraction of student minds and so instrumental in the economic crisis now impacting those budgets.

The Literature (SIC) of Alarmism

Once again Peggy Noonan has been inhaling the fumes of Delphi to earn her keep as a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Apparently the name of her column is Declarations. I am not sure how this label came to pass. However, it is certainly the case that her text is dominated by sentences of the declarative type, which, unless I am mistaken, was also the favored type of the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle, however, was always wise enough to form ambiguous declarative sentences, which could offer at least one reading that turned out to be true. Noonan, on the other hand, tries to avoid ambiguity in her declarations and never seems to worry about whether or not they turn out to be true. Perhaps she assumes that each declaration will be true "in the long run," even if John Maynard Keynes recognized that this may be too far in the future to matter very much.

When last I sampled Noonan's prose, she was looking for Arthur Miller in airports and (without knowing it) finding Thomas Stearns Eliot. Last Friday she shifted her attention to reviving the faith-based mentality of the Bush Administration (whose stock seems to be doing better in Israel these days) by peddling the same kind of alarmist snake-oil that sustained so much of the rhetoric on which that Administration tried to rely:

Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded of what's important, and the greatest of these will be our faith, it's what is going to hold us together as a country.

Furthermore, she seems to have thrown her own polemic efforts behind raising the tone of such alarmism:

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of "perhaps hundreds of thousands" of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. "I think there is a high probability of such an attempt," he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, "I don't see how anyone can think that's not true."

I told her I'm certain it is true. And it didn't seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney's message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.

However, she also seems to know that these days the economy strikes more fear in the hearts of her readers than terrorism does:

The national conversation on the economy is frozen, and has been for a while. Republicans say tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Democrats say spend, new programs, more money. You can't spend enough for the Democratic base, or cut taxes enough for the Republican. But in a time when all the grown-ups of America know spending is going to bankrupt us and tax cuts without spending cuts is more of the medicine that's killing us, the same old arguments, which sound less like arguments than compulsive tics, only add to the public sense that no one is in charge.

The flaw in this kind of jeremiad is that it presumes that there ever was a "national conversation on the economy." Certainly, if we honor the spirit of Jürgen Habermas and view conversation as a socially-based "communicative action" through which individuals of differing viewpoint arrive at understanding, then we can take the paucity of understanding of current economic conditions as an indicator of the lack of successful conversation. This has been a long-standing problem where economics is concerned. There is a joke that probably goes back at least as far as the Truman Administration that, if you put three economists in a room, you will end up with six opinions. However, in the current crisis we are faced with a particularly complex system of mathematical models and decision-making processes, whose complexity, in at least some key instances, was deliberately designed to circumvent regulatory standards and practices. That very complexity inhibits conversation by fostering the assumption that understanding can no longer be attained and can only be relegated to some elite cadre of experts whom we feel we can trust. The best the rest of us can do is appreciate the scope of that complexity through the sorts of declarative sentences that someone like Jeff Madrick can provide us in the pages of The New York Review (most recently in the February 12 issue) without the benefit of Delphic fumes:

In response to the demand for mortgages by pension funds, investment managers, banks, hedge funds, and others across the globe, mortgages were easily granted; banks and mortgage brokers lowers the interest rates on mortgages charged to home buyers in order to attract more customers. It was principally the investor appetite for the mortgage-based securities that led to the mortgage-writing frenzy in the 2000s, not encouragement by the federal government to lend to low-income home buyers.

This is sobering stuff, but it is not the stuff of Noonan's polemics. Noonan would have us forget that we can be sensible adults (applying knowledge of how we got into the mess to find our way out of it) and revert to being those scared children that George W. Bush thought he could comfort. Will she succeed? We have already witnessed at least one faith-based foray into the heart of Wall Street; but this was probably an isolated incident. We may get a better indicator this evening at Barack Obama's first Presidential press conference. We should have plenty of evidence on which we can draw coming from both the sorts of questions put to him (Will Noonan be there?) and both the logic and rhetoric that Obama engages in his answers.

Beethoven's Extended Sense of Time

One of the reasons I continue to be interested in the "time-line" of the final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's E major (Opus 109) piano sonata is because, at a subjective level, it gives the impression of an journey through an extended duration of time. Because the tempo is a slow one (Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo in Opus 109), I have been particularly concerned with how both performer and listener can orient themselves throughout that duration. Furthermore, this movement is far from an isolated case. On my CD of performances by Egon Petri, the second movement of Beethoven's final piano sonata (Opus 111) is even longer by about four minutes; and this is a relatively familiar time scale in late Beethoven. Even before Opus 109, we have the Adagio sostenuto movement of Opus 106 ("Hammerklavier"). This is also the scale of the first three movements of the D minor (Opus 125) symphony ("Ode an die Freude"), whose Adagio molto e cantabile movement takes a more prolonged approach to the same double-variation form that Beethoven had introduced in his C minor (Opus 67) symphony and later pursued in his Opus 97 ("Archduke") piano trio. Then there are the late quartets (which were such an inspiration to Thomas Stearns Eliot), particularly the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart movement of Opus 132, whose temporal scale is practically that of an entire composition, rather than a single movement. On the other hand, in the string quartet canon, Beethoven is already beginning to approach this scale in the Molto adagio movement of the second of his Opus 59 ("Razumovsky") quartets.

One possibility is that Beethoven was seeking a rhetorical alternative to the "significant silence" technique he had engaged in so many of his earlier works. As I have previously observed, he could be both witty and serious in his use of silence; but, when he was being serious, the silence could serve almost as his effort to make time stand still. Perhaps, then, at some point in his personal development (possibly as a reaction against the suspension of time anticipated in the first part of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust, possibly in recognition of the limitations of his own body in his "Heiligenstadt moment"), he recognized that, by its very nature, time cannot come to a halt; and trying to invoke the cessation of time would be a futile pursuit. So he rechanneled his creator spiritus to explore the prolongation of time, rather than its suspension; and turned to different forms of adagio movements to provide the field for such exploration. He probably did not realize that this exploration would launch a "temporal arrow" through the nineteenth century, as subsequent composers would seek to sustain listener's attention over longer and longer periods of time (which Donald Francis Tovey saw as the "deep structure" of music history, at least when he was writing the entry on "Music" for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). I suspect that all that really mattered to Beethoven was that he realized (whatever Goethe may have suggested) that he would never encounter a moment of such satisfaction that he would wish time to cease over it; and, instead, he became an "eternal explorer." The nineteenth century clearly gained much from his explorations; and we can continue to gain from them today, even in more mundane areas such as the underlying behavioral nature of our own listening practices.

The Nineteenth Century Confronts Science Fiction

While National Public Radio seems to think that the most important news from the NATO security conference in Munich is the presence of Vice President Joe Biden, Reuters reporters David Brunnstrom and Noah Barkin have chosen, instead, to focus on the dispute between Russia and the rest of Europe over the American plan for a missile defense shield. NATO seems to have pretty much bought into this plan with few, if any, reservations, probably because the United States has such a strong controlling influence over NATO. It is thus disconcerting that the Dutch Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, should apply his own rhetorical twist to American ideology, characterizing Russian objections to the shield as "a 19th century 'Great Game' idea of sphere of influence."

If Russia is, indeed, still playing the "Great Game" of the nineteenth century (whose board and pieces had supposedly been obliterated by the First World War), then the problem with the ideology behind the missile shield is that it has yet to mature beyond the realm of science fiction. One has to wonder to what extent the delegates in Munich are familiar with any of the background material, even in a form as rudimentary as the "Anti-ballistic missile" entry in Wikipedia. As one interested in both technological and literary analysis, I have always been struck by the extent to which the language applied to such ABM systems has always exceeded their performance in most test situations. Thus, in the early days it was all about "hitting a bullet with a bullet;" and, back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I was told by one of the "pioneers of computer science" that the ENIAC had been designed to compute where a missile would land before it got there (based on initial sample data acquired through radar). By the time Ronald Reagan was President and developing a taste for Kool-Aid served up by Edward Teller, the language had shifted to talk of "Star Wars," as if the future of defense would play out along the lines of the narratives envisioned by George Lucas. Now we are still in the wake of the neoconservative ideology that flourished under George W. Bush, invoking the more defensive metaphor of a shield (far less glamorous than the one that "Peleus' son Achilleus" carried to avenge the abduction of Helen). However, the metaphor is a bit inaccurate, since the technology is still one of hitting a bullet with a bullet; and, on the basis of the test results that manage to find their way into the public media, the marksmanship score for the current technology still leaves a lot to be desired.

One might go so far as to say that NATO is basing this part of its defense strategy on speculative thinking that is not that different from the sort of speculative thinking that was so prevalent on Wall Street before harsh reality revealed how little substance was behind the speculations. Lest we forget what Hillary Clinton said when testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the suitability of her appointment as Secretary of State, we should not let such ill-founded speculations interfere with our efforts to "build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries." We need to take this goal as seriously in our dealings with Russia as in any efforts we make in the Middle East, although, as I continue to observe, in both settings we should still live by Mr. Dooley's fundamental precept:

Trust everybody, but cut the cards.

NATO is as bemired in the same "Great Game" thinking that Scheffer attributed to Russia; and this just means that it is time for a new game. The trick will be to get everyone to agree on a fair one.

Conviction Trumps Ceremony

I know that he prefers the noun "audacity;" but I was glad to see that last night Barack Obama had the chutzpah to chuck his teleprompter speech in favor of some from-the-hip straight talk on implementing economic recovery. True, he did this before an audience of sympathetic Democrats; but, considering who those Democrats were, the need for an action-inspiring pep talk was far more important than any gratuitous partisan back-patting. Here as the specifics, as reported by Glenn Thrush and Patrick O'Connor for Politico:

A fired-up Barack Obama ditched his TelePrompter to rally House Democrats and rip Republican opponents of his recovery package Thursday night – at one point openly mocking the GOP for failing to follow through on promises of bipartisanship.

In what was the most pointedly partisan speech of his young presidency, Obama rejected Republican arguments that massive spending in the $819 billion stimulus bill that passed the House should be replaced by a new round of massive tax cuts.

“I welcome this debate, but we are not going to get relief by turning back to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin,” said President Obama – sounding more like Candidate Obama than at any time since he took the oath of office less than a month ago.

Obama, speaking to about 200 House Democrats at their annual retreat at the Kingsmill Resort and Spa, dismissed Republican attacks against the massive spending in the stimulus.

"What do you think a stimulus is?" Obama asked incredulously. "It’s spending — that's the whole point! Seriously.”

That little rhetorical flourish is the sort of thing that convinced me to vote for Obama in the first place. It is the voice of a man who will not give up his sense of reality, even when that reality is grim; nor will he tolerate any efforts to impose a smokescreen between that reality and his attempts to deal with it. Considering all the forces currently laboring against such a sense of reality, it is good to see that Obama has the conviction to recognize that economic distress is more important than political gamesmanship. That conviction, along with the style he engages to exhibit it, has earned him another Chutzpah of the Week award with a solid positive connotation. This brings his chutzpah count up to four, two negative from the campaign period, followed by two positive since the election. I can definitely believe in any change that involves a shift from negative to positive chutzpah!

Are There "Dangerous Hazards" to Description?

This morning I found myself dwelling on the claim I made yesterday that "impediments to effective description are dangerous hazards, rather than petty annoyances," wondering whether I was inflating the significance of that "challenge of description" because it happened to be the problem that was occupying so much of my own time. However, I think that the reason why I am putting so much time into this problem is that, as I progress through Philippe Hamon's Du Descriptif, I realize that his extended essay is long on examples and short on theory. Now one reason for this difficulty may be that, as Hamon observes, we spend a lot of our time engaged in description; so asking anyone to come up with a theory of description is a bit like that cliché of asking a fish to come up with a theory of water. Description is so deeply embedded in our communicative actions (not just our writing, let alone any "literary" writing) that it is difficult to reflect on either its process or its product (the two sides of the coin that anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu insists be given equal treatment). From a more positive point of view, however, it may be that description is the "degree zero" (to appropriate the language of Roland Barthes) of communication, a "ground level," so to speak, from which we must then face the sorts of foundational problems about communication itself that have occupied social theorists like Jürgen Habermas. As Hamon emphasizes, even the deictic act of pointing at something may be regarded as description, from which we may wish to suggest that, if description is the "degree zero" of communication, then deixis is probably the "ground zero" of description. To put this in less academic language, if we can understand the role that pointing plays in our descriptive actions, then we may better understand how description "works" in our communicative actions. However, this raises a secondary problem: If my own focus is on the description of time-dependent phenomena, such as performances of music, do we "point" when we communicate about those performances; and, if so, how do we do it?

The problem with this latter question is that the very nature of pointing presumes an object in space (although that object may change with the passage of time). The way I have tried to deal with this problem in the past has been to introduce some object in space that can mediate between the agent trying to do the pointing and the actual time-dependent phenomenon at which the agent is trying to point. An example of such a mediating object in space is the sort of graphic display of a function of time that I have applied to my efforts to communicate (descriptively) about a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 109 piano sonata. For convenience, here is a reproduction of the image I have used in the past:

This image is not only an object in space but also static, which further facilitates any pointing I may choose to do "through" it. I should also observe that, in some of my past research in computer-supported piano pedagogy, I have explored a variety of other approaches to such graphic displays, some of which are actually based on the music notation in the score being performed. Thus, if there is a need to point at that "ground zero" level of description, there is a good chance that the need can be satisfied through some mediating object in space that may even have the convenience feature of being static.

If there is such a need, however, why does it arise; how does pointing serve description? One possible answer is that we often point in the interest of comparison, trying to establish that some "this" is either very much like or very much different from some other "that." Thus, the above display represents a single recorded performance of the third movement of Beethoven's Opus 109. However, in a pedagogical setting, a teacher may wish to achieve a means by which the student comes to understand (in the sense of Habermas' theory of communicative action) how a recording of the student's performance differs from that of the teacher's performance (or, in the spirit of the Pablo Casals example that Bernard Greenhouse cited, the range of differences across several performances by the teacher). (Pointing would thus serve to achieve the goal of finding what Marvin Minsky, in his Society of Mind book, called "the difference that makes a difference.")

Another service that pointing may provide is that of reference to some other object or set of objects. Thus, the above image also provides a time-line that corresponds to the time-line of the recorded performance itself. One may thus associate a particular instance of high amplitude with the "clock time" at which it occurs, following a clock display while listening to the performance. In his earlier work on such displays, Robert Cogan would annotate the display with specific markers, which would indicate specific measure numbers or, for example, the beginning of the recapitulation section of the movement. Here is an earlier image that I prepared that included such annotations:

Thus, rather than comparing one performance to another, we use the display to associate features in the display with other features that we may wish to engage in the description we are trying to formulate. This means that there are at least two ways in which deixis contributes to the act of understanding a descriptive communicative action, but what is there to that communicative action beyond the contributions provided by appropriate acts of pointing?

Once again, I shall try dealing with this question by posing another question: What is it that makes description so foundational in the overall field of communicative action? I do not think we can fall back on the proposition that descriptive action is more objective than other communicative actions. Description can only be based on the subjectivity of the describing individual's capacity for perception. However, there may be some benefit in approaching this problem in terms of the "interfaces" that exist between objective, subjective, and social worlds. For example, one way to approach the study of phenomenology, particularly as someone like Edmund Husserl chose to pursue it, is in terms of the relations between the objective "signals" detected by sensory organs and the subjective "perceptions" arising in the consciousness of the perceiving individual. Communication, on the other hand, involves relations among the subjectivities of many individuals through behavior in the social world (as in George Herbert Mead's approach to "social behaviorism"). Thus, whatever those subjectivities may be, communication can only begin if we are capable of describing them; and that is what makes description the "ground zero" of communication.

Let me offer an example that comes not from my experience with listening to music but from my reading of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. When we awake from a dream, we are in an extremely personal "subjective state." If we try to reflect on that state (which we usually do), we try to relate it to the dream. In order to do this, we have to reconstruct the dream (which fits in nicely with Hamon's approach to characterizing description as a rewriting process, reconstructing in words something that exists in the physical world); and Freud calls the result of that reconstruction the "dream-work." This is important because, ultimately, he cannot analyze the dream itself but only our reconstruction of it, which is basically how the patient comes to describe the dream to the analyst. I often prefer to go so far as to drop the "re-" prefix. The "dream" may be nothing more than random neural activity that provokes the mind to construct some narrative, which then serves as the descriptive "dream-work" presented to the analyst. My point is that this approach to the "extreme subjectivity" of dreams may serve as a model for how, when we communicate in social settings, we deal with the rest of our subjective world. We deal with it through description, because that is the only "currency" we can exchange in the social world.

I shall now propose the speculative leap that we deal with the experiences of listening to music the same way in which we deal with our dreams. Listening to music shares with the dream world that same "extreme subjectivity;" but, where music is involved, we are less concerned with the analysis of our psyches and only interested in how we socialize with others by sharing our listening experiences. Furthermore, there may be little difference between the sort of socialization that takes place in the pedagogical settings of learning to be a better performer of music and the socializing that takes place among friends as they leave an auditorium in which they have experienced a musical performance. The critical word in that last sentence, however, is that "may." Perhaps my next step should be to look into whether or not there some Minsky-like "difference that makes a difference" between those two respective settings of dreams and listening to music!

A Hazardous Waste of Time

I suppose that a corollary to the harsh realities that Desmond Tutu tried to reveal to his audience at the World Economic Forum is that the rich and mighty really ought to have better things to do with their time than idle away half a week in Davos. Nevertheless, it does not appear that any actual damage was done there; and the risk of such damage was probably pretty low. Unfortunately, it is unclear that we can say the same about the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Long Beach this week, where matters of "cool" trump more dismal issues, such as economic crisis. The problem is that "cool" also tends to trump "common sense," which makes for a greater risk of damage.

While Bill Gates usually has a pretty solid grounding in common sense, at least where his philanthropic work is concerned, in the setting of TED he let the cool get the better of him. Here is how the BBC reported on his presentation there:

Mr Gates' stunt was to drive home the serious message of malaria prevention.

With the issue being high on the agenda of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the former software boss told the crowd in Long Beach, California "Not only poor people should experience this."

While he asked the audience "How do you stop a deadly disease that is spread by mosquitoes?", Mr Gates also noted that more money is spent finding a cure for baldness than eradicating malaria.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged nearly $170 million (£118m) to develop a vaccine for malaria.

During his presentation, Mr Gates released several mosquitoes into a startled crowd.

TED organisers confirmed the mosquitoes did not carry malaria but they did give the audience food for thought. It was described as "an amazing TED moment".

Meanwhile the insect release which was first reported on Twitter, the micro blogging service, lit up with comments.

Loic LeMeur of Seesmic tweeted "We're all leaving the room and getting sick."

"That's it, I'm not sitting up front anymore," tweeted Pierre Omidyar who founded eBay.

TED curator Chris Anderson quipped that when a video of the talk is posted on its website it would be headlined "Gates releases more bugs into the world."

The reason I raised the question of risk of damage is that mosquitoes can be responsible for allergic reactions, as well as malaria. Dr. Daniel More provided the following summary for a Web page on About.com:

More severe reactions -- rather than the typical itchy red bump experienced by most people as a result of a mosquito bite -- occur less commonly. These may result in blistering rashes, bruises, or large areas of swelling at the bite sites. People who experience extremely large areas of swelling after a mosquito bite (such as swelling of most of an arm or leg, for example) have been dubbed as having "Skeeter Syndrome."

In rare situations, some people may experience anaphylaxis after being bitten by mosquitoes. Other people may have experienced whole body urticaria and angioedema (hives and swelling), or worsening of asthma symptoms after being bitten. Typically, these symptoms occur within minutes after a mosquito bite, compared to Skeeter Syndrome, which may take hours to days to occur.

Did Gates know about these possible reactions when he was preparing his "amazing TED moment?" I decided to consider how I would deal with the question of how much I knew about mosquito bites, had I been brash enough to consider the sort of stunt he pulled. I found that typing "mosquito" into my Firefox search window induced it to suggest that I add the keyword "bites." I took that suggestion and fed the search to both Google and Live. The About.com page was the fifth entry on my Google results page, meaning that, for the window size I use, it was "above the fold." It was therefore the first result I checked, and that is how I found the above paragraphs. On my Live results page that same result ranked in tenth place, which would put it "below the fold" for just about any user. On the other hand the top of the page included a "Related searches" link to "mosquito bite allergy," where the About.com page was ranked third; but, even with that high rank, it was "below the fold" because of all the space at the top occupied by "Sponsored sites" links! So, if Gates had not known about possible allergic reactions to mosquito bites, it may well have been because Live didn't direct him to that information efficiently enough!

Last year I praised Gates for his efforts to bring a sense of reality to the World Economic Forum agenda in Davos. This year I did not see any reports of his being in Davos at all, and I would be happy to learn that he had decided to give that event a pass. However, I would have preferred it had he not checked his personal sense of reality at the door before going up on stage at TED!

The Challenge of Description

Stephen Hough's Piano Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was an impressive event for a variety of reasons. Most important was that it covered an extremely challenging sector of the piano repertoire, but also Hough drew upon a broad palette of personal experiences to summon the resources he needed to engage with his four students and coach them accordingly. For example, in coaching the first movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff's second (Opus 36 in B-flat minor) piano sonata, he drew heavily on what he had learned from his own close listening to the acoustic recordings that Rachmaninoff had made for RCA Victor. He also discussed the biographical setting in which Rachmaninoff revised the original (1913) version of this sonata in 1931 (using this as an opportunity to promote his preference for the original, since the student had prepared the 1931 version). Nevertheless, Hough also demonstrated (inadvertently) just how challenging the problem of description is where both executing and listening to music are concerned. Once one gets beyond those "self-evident truths" that I have been teasing out while reading Philippe Hamon's Du Descriptif, the terrain through which one makes descriptive "moves" (to invoke the terminology of Erving Goffman) is littered with mine fields; and most of those mines get planted when our language shifts from the literal to the figurative (as it has been doing in this very sentence). Thus, I hope Hough will forgive me if I point out two of those mines, even if neither turned out to be severely damaging. He encountered both of them when he ventured beyond his areas of personal expertise in the interest of metaphor and may have tripped over the true nature of the object being offered for comparison to the target of discussion.

The first mine was encountered when he tried to provide a "big picture" view of "what is going on" in the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's G major (Opus 58) piano concerto based on two levels of interplay. One involved the alternation between passages that were best played in a strictly measured manner and those that could be given a more "improvisatory" (Hough's word) treatment; the other involved the relationship between the solo part and the orchestral accompaniment. He described this latter interplay as having the spontaneity of jazz improvisation, where one performer would "throw something out" and another would "pick it up." (Those quotes may not be exact.) I am not sure how much experience Hough has had with listening to jazz; but it struck me that he was trying to evoke his personal misconception of "trading fours," a process in which jazz players alternate improvisations of a four-bar passage. Had Hough ever slogged through the almost 900 pages of Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz, he might have realized that trading fours is not altogether spontaneous. Rather, it tends to be at its best when it finds just the right balance between drawing upon disciplines that arise through extensive performing experiences and always looking for new ways to push the envelope enclosing those disciplines. The land mine itself, so to speak, was the assumption that Hough could talk about listening to jazz in the same way that he could already talk about the repertoire he performed.

Beyond the likely confusion in understanding the phenomenon he had chosen to evoke, there is a deeper question of whether or not an understanding of jazz practice can inform the performance of a particular classical composition. Joseph Kerman's view of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a radical, particularly where his piano concertos are concerned, at least hints that an understanding of the practice of jazz could inform the would-be Mozart soloist. While I do not necessarily believe that the same can be said of Beethoven, I still have to recognize that Friedrich Gulda, who has recorded the compete canon of both the sonatas and concertos of Beethoven, is clearly informed by his also being a jazz pianist. Thus, to apply Hough's process of close listening to Rachmaninoff's recordings, I could probably eventually be able to hear the connection in Gulda's recording of Opus 58; but I have yet to do so. However, because Hough has demonstrated his own listening skill, I would seriously (and enthusiastically) recommend these Gulda recordings to him!

The other mine was in the area of classical ballet (which I realize invokes a rather gory connotation). The occasion involved a student who had prepared four selections from Piotr Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker as arranged for solo piano by Mikhail Pletnev. Hough felt it was important to be aware of what was happening in the ballet, even if one was performing arrangements like these in a concert setting. I agree with this; and, as I have observed, I have seen so many Nutcracker productions that it is virtually impossible for me to listen to this music and not see dancers in my head (visions of sugar plum fairies, as it were), even when I am listening to an "extreme virtuoso" piano performance. Hough's mistake was to invoke what was in his head, which happened to be totally inconsistent with the music the student was playing!

The case in point was that two of the selections came from the second act pas de deux: the opening adagio and the ballerina (Sugar Plum Fairy) variation. Like just about every pas de deux in the classical Russian tradition, this is "pure dance," totally detached from both the setting and the narrative of whatever ballet happens to be on the program, meaning that all the things Hough said about the spectacular "candy-land" (my word) imagery of the second act are irrelevant (and sometimes dissolve off of the stage) when that pas de deux begins. Where Hough did get it right, however, was in his remark about how much Tchaikovsky could get out of a descending major scale, since the adagio music is little more than a set of variations on that scale with more and more voices piled on top of it as the variations progress. Where this is most interesting is where those added voices intertwine with the scale, ascending sinuously upward while the scale proceeds downward at a steady metered pace. This intertwining brings out Tchaikovsky's orchestration at its best, and Pletnev deftly captured it in his arrangement. However, the pianist has one hell of a time bringing it out with the clarity one would expect from an orchestra; and, while the student did a creditable job, I suspect he would have appreciated some coaching tips. Similarly, in the variation Hough recognized the need for the music to have an "affinity" (again, my word) with the steps; but I came away feeling he was sufficiently unfamiliar with this ballet to appreciate just how minimal those steps usually are, in such a way that even the slightest movement carries significance far beyond the physical effort behind it. Again, I agree with Hough that a knowledge that this was what one would be seeing on the stage could positively inform the musical performance; but the problem was that he did not really know what that particular "this" was for the musical selection.

It may have been unfair for me to focus on two events out of an entire highly satisfying evening. Perhaps it would have been better for me to choose the metaphor of a mattress with two peas under it, rather than a mine field. My purpose, however, was to deal with the challenge of the task of description, rather than with techniques of piano pedagogy and coaching; and, philosophically at least, I believe that impediments to effective description are dangerous hazards, rather than petty annoyances. As is often the case in research, this was a situation in which we may learn more when things go wrong than we do when they go right. I have no idea whether or not Hough was even aware of the mines I chose to select as my own focus of attention, let alone whether or not he would even regard them as hazardous. However, they turned out to be very useful in my own pursuits of logical inquiry; and I feel I understand them better for having taken the time to document them.

Beyond the Soup Kitchen

Bailout Bill probably does not have the resources of Denny's; but, in the spirit of Denny's revival of the Depression-era soup kitchen, he is attracting a line of people in need. Here is how Sima Kotecha explained the situation for the Newsbeat feature of the BBC:

Imagine getting £35 for doing absolutely nothing. Well in New York, a man is giving away stacks of cash to anyone who's prepared to stand in line for it.

The mystery man, who calls himself 'Bailout Bill', says in the middle of an economic crisis ordinary Americans who are struggling to make ends meet deserve a bailout.

In order to get the money people have to go the 'Bailout Booth' in the heart of Manhattan's Times Square.

It's a small cubicle, a couple of blocks away from the massive Virgin Megastore.

The minimum anyone can get is $50 (£35). The maximum is $5,000 (£3,513).

No matter who you are or what you do Bailout Bill guarantees that you'll get something if you just show up and tell your story.

Hundreds have already braved the freezing temperatures to get their free dosh. Some have stood in line for hours before getting to the front.

The Web site version of this story also includes a photograph of the line:

This photograph may not become as memorable as the image I provided to supplement the Denny's story, but it seems just as representative. It certainly gives an indication of those elements that need to be "braved."

It seems like only yesterday (actually last Thanksgiving) that I was trying to frame our understanding of the economic crisis through the principles of Slavoj Žižek:

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.

Well, circumstances seem to be unfolding a narrative for us. Unfortunately, it is a narrative of the Great Depression, which I suspect that just about anyone in a position of power is trying to treat as a "narrative that dare not speak its name." Those folks will engage the full power of their analytical weapons to keep the word "depression" out of the public vocabulary; but they cannot keep its narrative from unfolding on the streets, whether those streets are in front of a Denny's or in the middle of Times Square. Once again we may be at the mercy of an addiction. This time it is an addiction to theories that are out of touch with practice. The "narratives on the street" can provide the first step of a "twelve-step program" by owning up to the addiction itself. That loss of a sense of reality is not confined to the elite domain of the World Economic Forum, and it is time for our leadership to recover that sense, even if they have to go out on the streets to do so!

What Work is Worth $500,000?

Barack Obama has now tried to put his foot down forcefully on top of those aggravating compensation packages that seem to sustain the rich and mighty. Here is the report as Al Jazeera English pulled it from their wire sources:

Barack Obama, the US president, has said his government will impose a salary cap of $500,000 for senior executives at companies receiving federal economic bailout funds.

Obama also said the government would cap so-called golden parachute severance payments for executives leaving Wall Street firms receiving government aid.

"For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis isn't only in bad taste – it's bad strategy – and I will not tolerate it as president" Obama said on Wednesday at the White House.

This is definitely a step in the right direction; but, in light of my recent thoughts about reform, would this not be a good time to try to take stock of just what constitutes "a fair day's work" for one of those senior executives? I, for one, would be hard pressed to come up with a satisfactory formula that would translate a day's worth of effort in a Wall Street executive office into "a fair day's pay." Given the risk factors involved, I suspect that no such cut-and-dried formula exists; but can we not expect at least some useful guidelines from a sector of the economy that prefers to keep itself shrouded in mystery while our Government is trying to be more transparent? We shall not have effective economic reform without effective compensation reform; and the latter is likely to require a thousand-mile journey. Nevertheless, in the spirit of the Tao Teh Ching, Obama may have found the right step to begin that journey.

The Top Five List Nobody Wants

Dawn Kawamoto's latest Business Tech column for CNET News reinforces our general intuitions with some hard numbers:

U.S. job cuts announced in January soared to 241,749 across all industries, marking the largest monthly cut in the past seven years, according to a report released Wednesday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

This top five sectors in this report are the following:

1. Retail: 53,968
2. Industrial goods: 32,083
3. Computer industry: 22,330
4. Pharmaceuticals: 22,063
5. Aerospace-defense: 17,800

Note that, taken together, these sectors account for 148,244 of the cut jobs, which is a little more than 61% of the total. Nothing here is particularly surprising, and I suspect we shall encounter a variety of different readings of these numbers by purveyors of different economic theories. The statistic I personally would like to see is the percentage of layoffs in the sectors, particularly those in the top five. If we are going to have any serious conversations about reform (remote as that possibility may be), whether it be in theories of political economy or boots-on-the-ground economic practices, then we need to recognize that these numbers may augur changes in the "world of work" itself; and those percentages may be useful in reading the entrails, so to speak. Put another way, these numbers may reflect consequences anticipated by books such as Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop, so blithely ignored by what I once called "the evangelical hogwash of The New American Workplace, by James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III." There is no question that we need to return to a social order that provides a fair day's pay for a fair day's work; but, before we can do that, we shall have to clear our minds, which have been addled by the Kool-Aid of technology evangelism, and figure out just what "a fair day's work" is going to be in that social order.

"This line looks like those pictures of soup kitchen lines during the Depression."

To the extent that our culture has any understanding of history at all, that understanding tends to be grounded in images. The above photograph of a long line of people waiting to pass through a door, above which a sign reads "Free Soup Coffee & Doughnuts for the Unemployed," has become one of the iconic images of the Great Depression. This photograph is included as part of the History section of the Social Security Online Web site, where it is given the following caption:

During the Great Depression preceding the passage of the Social Security Act, "soup kitchens" provided the only meals some unemployed Americans had. This particular soup kitchen was sponsored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone.

For one day, at least, the spirit of Al Capone was revived by the Denny's chain of restaurants, although I doubt that he could have fathomed the scale of the event, let alone how the word was propagated. Covering the Bay Area side of this story for the San Francisco Chronicle, Steve Rubenstein provided the following background:

The promotion was promulgated the way many monumental events are decreed these days, via a Super Bowl commercial. By Tuesday morning, the word had spread like hotcakes. In downtown San Francisco, the line stretched from the front door on Mission Street, between Fourth and Fifth streets, to the corner of Fourth and up the block.

Nearby merchants complained. Three cops stood by. The restaurant manager ordered that a new line should be formed in the Jessie Street alley, and people in the second line thought they were in the first line, and a lot of frustrated people got more scrambled than their eggs.

Rather than soup, coffee, and doughnuts, Denny's gave away their Grand Slam breakfast of bacon and eggs. Coffee was not part of the deal (which upset some); but water was provided to everyone. Rubenstein quoted one of the men in line who caught the historical connection:

This line looks like those pictures of soup kitchen lines during the Depression.

Rubenstein also tried to account for the full scale of Denny's effort:

The South Carolina-based restaurant chain said it figured it might wind up giving away as many as 2 million meals at its 1,541 restaurants nationwide. There were lines reported in the snow in Pennsylvania and in early morning hours in Buffalo, N.Y., where the low temperature was 23 degrees.

Once again it seems appropriate to borrow shamelessly from Georges Clemenceau. The last time I did this was when I wrote "that my own health is too serious to be entrusted to a Health Maintenance Organization or any of the other similar institutions currently in place." This time the variation would argue that the economic crisis is far to serious to be entrusted to economists, particularly those sitting in comfortable chairs in climate-controlled offices from which they can leave for about an hour and go off to a satisfying lunch. It is all very well and good to track market indicators, currency exchange rates, and a host of complex formulas; but none of those provide an economic indicator as tangible and painful as those 2 million people lined up in 1,541 Denny's restaurants, many sustaining the impact of winter at its worst.

On Felix Mendelssohn's 200th Birthday

Joshua Kosman's background piece on Felix Mendelssohn provided excellent contextual reading for his 200th birthday today:

The history of music is replete with dazzling child prodigies, from Mozart to Erich Wolfgang Korngold to Little Stevie Wonder. None of them can hold a candle to the young Felix Mendelssohn.

The composer, whose 200th birthday falls on Tuesday, occupies an awkward middle ground in the musical pantheon now.

He's regarded unquestioningly as one of the classical masters, but not of the top rank. And although his music is a fairly regular presence in the concert hall, Mendelssohn's fame rests disproportionately on a small handful of mature works: the Violin Concerto first and foremost, along with the "Scottish" and "Italian" symphonies and, occasionally, the oratorios "Elijah" and "St. Paul."

But in one arena, at least, Mendelssohn's pre-eminence is indisputable: No teenager - and certainly no tweener - ever composed with a comparable blend of technical prowess, daring and imagination.

This week, Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra mark Mendelssohn's bicentennial with a program that includes the two pieces that constitute the teen composer's claim to greatness, the Octet for Strings and the Overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." To hear those pieces, even in partial form (only one movement of the Octet, alas, is on the program), is to be stunned at the precocity of the young artist.

Mendelssohn is rather sparsely represented in my CD collection; but that collection does include the octet, as well as the full complement of the music written for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The more mature side is represented by the violin concerto, but Elijah shows up only in my Kathleen Ferrier library. I also have a memory of the piano teacher with whom I worked in Santa Barbara. When I started working on the first set of Songs Without Words, she gently but persuasively suggested that my efforts should be focused elsewhere, which, as I recall, is when she first introduced me to the Années de Pèlerinage of Franz Liszt. (Vive la différence, as they say!)

My writing about Mendelssohn on this blog has been even more sparse. For the most part it has involved contextual references to useful background, rather than issues concerned with his music or how it is performed. The only time I dug into those latter issues with any substance was when Michael Tilson Thomas conceived of a San Francisco Symphony program that coupled the violin concerto with the music of Charles Ives. Since the concerto was both preceded and followed by Ives, I described the program as "a bit like serving up a High Tea cucumber sandwich between two massive slabs of thick black bread."

That simile may get at why Kosman places Mendelssohn below "the top rank." The elegance of his precocity never particularly matured. Rather, he just managed it with greater facility; but, in the context of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, that facility was more than a little anachronistic. Thus, within that context, his contributions to the revival of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach may have had a far greater impact than any of his compositions, even if that revival begat no end of misconceptions over how that music should be performed. Consequently, if I am to celebrate Mendelssohn at all today, it will probably be with a recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion, along with the gratitude that, had it not been for Mendelssohn, this paragon of the oratorio form might have been condemned to the ash-heap of history.

Psychotic Symptoms

While I have made it an ongoing point of accusing the World Economic Forum (WEF) of lacking any sense of reality, I am not sure I would go so far as to accuse either the organization or its founder, Klaus Schwab, of clinical psychosis. Nevertheless, those who were wondering when the current economic crisis might begin to induce psychotic symptoms, if not strong grounds for diagnosis of the malady itself, did not have to look much further than yesterday's Super Bowl broadcast. 25 years ago the very core of our consciousness about computers was rocked by the "1984" commercial announcing the coming of the Macintosh; but 2009 is the year in which we are likely to see the dark side of everyone's consciousness coming to the surface. The harbinger of that dark side was the launch of the CareerBuilder.com TV campaign through a Super Bowl commercial (whose YouTube rendering is now available at the CareerBuilder.com Web site).

Having just done an Amazon search for "CareerBuilder" in the book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich, I can affirm that, while the author never mentioned this business explicitly, it would be fair to say that each of her chapters casts a critical light on one or more of their practices. Having already insinuated themselves into the Yahoo! News stream (thus devaluing this particular Yahoo! service, since none of their offerings have anything to do with news), CareerBuilder.com decided to cast a wider net by paying the absurd price of entry for a Super Bowl advertising slot. They then reinforced their investment with a production budget that may well have yielded the most talked-about commercial since that first Macintosh announcement. However, if the underlying Macintosh message was designed to inspire proletarians (otherwise known as "the rest of us") that they could, indeed, lose their chains, the CareerBuilder.com message dashed any Marxist hope for a better day and offered little more than a universal venting through a primal scream. (Anyone who thinks I am using this reading as an excuse for promoting Marxist-style semiotics is invited to watch the YouTube video and test my hypothesis!) The loss of our chains has been replaced by the loss of that part of our minds that regulates behavior legitimized by the norms of our social setting.

In a way this invitation to "scream along" amounts to the "bait" part of Ehrenreich's argument. After you have had your mega-vent, go to CareerBuilder.com; and they will make it all better. That is when you encounter the "switch" (and I make this assertion on the basis of my own experience with their Web site, just as Ehrenreich drew upon personal experiences in writing her book). In a world in which the frustration of the unemployed is only aggravated by the technology-based depersonalization of the whole employment process, the world of the CareerBuilder.com comes precious close to that of the zombie-like audience starting at the Big Brother screen in that classic Macintosh commercial. CareerBuilder.com has homed in on the "brave new world" in which so much of the world's population is now stuck and is the most depressing possible alternative to the athletic young woman with the screen-smashing hammer. The fact that they had enough money in their till to finance their Super Bowl commercial should indicate that the "switch" part of their business model has been pretty successful, at least thus far. I hope Ehrenreich had a chance to see that commercial. She could probably follow up on Bait and Switch with a whole new book about it!

Cable Television: The New Frontier of Hacking?

The one time I went to a cable television trade show, the word of the week was "convergence." Anyone vulnerable to Comcast advertising (with AT&T is a close second place), knows that this was no mere act of speculative cheerleading. Comcast now wants to hook you up with an all-purpose package that will take care of your television viewing (including VTR and on-demand services), Internet connection, and good old-fashioned telephony (now voice-over-IP). This is all held together by "software glue," with the promise that the components will be come more and more interoperable (which is what makes it all "convergent"). Thus, you will be able to use your Internet connection to program your VTR, have the material you programmed streamed to your laptop, listen to your telephone's voice mail, and no end of other stuff on which you can spend money that you probably do not have right now.

Unfortunately, any veteran old enough to remember the early days of timesharing systems appreciates that there is no such thing as software that is invulnerable to hacking. It was true the first time a hacker gained unauthorized access to a timesharing system (and the data residing on that system); and it is still true today. Udi Manber's metaphorical view of the problem of spam filtering as an arms race also applies to the problem of defending both programs and data from unauthorized access and manipulation. As I read on the BBC NEWS Web site this morning, this point was driven home to Comcast with consequences that probably upset a lot of their customers. Comcast customers in Tucson, Arizona, were enjoying their cable feed of the Super Bowl broadcast by NBC-affiliate KVOA when they were disrupted by a typical act of prankish hacking as the program was interrupted by a video clip from some source other than KVOA:

The clip showed a woman unzipping a man's trousers, followed by a graphic act between the two.

"I just figured it was another commercial until I looked up," viewer Cora King told the Arizona Daily Star.

"Then he did his little dance with everything hanging out."

(It also says something about what we expect to see on television that this one viewer did not initially know she was being hacked.)

I report this only to reinforce one of my favorite themes. We tend to be so blown away by the evangelical promotions of new technologies, not to mention the business models that emerge around those technologies, that we willingly eschew any analytic thinking about the consequences entailed by either the technologies or the business models (or both). Furthermore, because not all undesirable consequences can be avoided with even the best analytic thinking, we need social institutions that can sustain those consequences when they arise. Traditionally, that aspect of the "public good" has been the responsibility of government, which is why it is so disconcerting that most technology evangelists have a view of government that is naive at best and Philistine at worst. Having just taken the World Economic Forum to task for their ongoing lack of any sense of reality, I take little comfort in a report that reveals that Comcast is in no better shape!

Can Government Provide an Alternative to Failed Businesses?

My wife and I had one of our (now regular) chats over dinner regarding the economy. From her commonsense point of view, any business that is on the brink of failure due to poor management should be allowed to fail, since those businesses are clearly not serving their customers very well (if at all). As readers may deduce from my recent posts about the rich and might of the World Economic Forum, I tend to support this logic, at least in theory; and, from that theoretical point of view, I believe that it is as applicable to the financial sector as it is to the automobile industry. The key difference between these two areas is that, where automobiles are concerned, there are plenty of alternatives to American products, ranging from buying from another country (Japan still providing the best product) to choosing public transportation over car ownership. In the financial sector, on the other hand, it seems as if greed has made scoundrels out of just about all alternatives; and, to make matters worse, the scoundrels are now consolidating, resulting in fewer options for the customer. Thus, however aggravated we may feel by all these practices that combine foolish decision making with arrogant confidence, we are really not in any position to "take our business elsewhere," because there really is no "elsewhere!"

According to a recent report on the BBC NEWS Web site, the government of the United Kingdom may be considering a possible "elsewhere" for their own population:

The government has confirmed that it is hoping to extend banking services at the Post Office, creating a so-called 'People's Bank'.

The Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), headed by Lord Mandelson, wants to broaden services at the 12,000 UK post offices.

Some observers believes the move may help to stimulate lending.

The report makes it clear that Mandelson's proposal is still very much in the "trial balloon" stage. There will be many hurdles to leap on the path to approving the proposal; and, should it be approved, even more hurdles on the path to implementation. However, since I experienced the Post Office Savings Bank in Singapore, I appreciate the logic behind this proposal; and anyone who knows enough to appreciate Barack Obama's invocation of the "legacy of history" should recognize that Mandelson is following in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton, who had been faced with a new country that had won its independence but lost most of its financial resources in the process. However, if Obama is indeed committed to "doing what it takes to maintain the flow of credit," then a little bit of Hamiltonian thinking might be worthy of consideration, even if it is ultimately not invoked. Let us hope that our President's economic team will take the trouble to monitor Mandelson's progress!

Speaking Truth to the Rich and Mighty

It was unclear from Tim Weber's wrap-up account of the World Economic Forum (WEF) filed from Davos for BBC NEWS whether or not Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the final speaker on the program. Nevertheless, Tutu may have hit on the most appropriate last words for the whole affair:

We spend billions on banks when we know that a fraction of this money could save all the children in the world.

I can think of no better conclusion for this five-day departure from any sense of reality by the rich and mighty. Tutu reminded both attendees and the world at large that, where the poor or concerned, the whole show is still run by faithful disciples of Marie Antoinette's let-them-eat-cake principles of wealth-sharing. Perhaps the harshness of the reality that Tutu brought to the stage in Davos was enough to shake WEF founder Klaus Schwab into acknowledging that "word that dare not speak its name" by recognizing the need for reform in the "final benediction" he delivered to his Davos guests. I, for one, would have preferred a more Catholic approach to closing this ceremony. In my (unauthorized) translation of the Latin text, the Priest concludes by declaring, "The Mass is over," to which the congregation replies, "Thank God!" Amen to that.