It's Just Food!

I have been reading Stephen Hough's Cadenza blog (on the London Telegraph Web site) with great interest. He has provided me with some very useful insights into the work practices of a performing musician, but recently he has taken on the question of what a touring performer is to do when there is a threat of pandemic. Today, however, he raised the bar from matters of world travel to the more personal profession of faith. His observation was actually a reflection on the last major medical crisis, the SARS threat of 2003. Here is the key sentence from his post:

One item reported there [in Toronto] at the time caught my attention: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto had banned the reception of Holy Communion under both kinds [wafer and wine] in all its churches to help prevent the spread of the disease.

This struck me as a fascinating instance of a head-on collision between the respective worlds of the literal and the figurative. The very concept of Communion is one of sharing, not just of the wafer and wine but also of the physical space in which one receives the Host in the company of one's fellow Catholics. This is symbolism of the highest order. Meanwhile, in a physical world having to confront the spread of a poorly understood disease, the first precaution towards the transmission of infection is the limitation of sharing as much as is practically possible. Thus, the highest Catholic authorities of Toronto basically acknowledged that the Communion rite really did involve eating and drinking ordinary food, rather than the body and blood of Christ. (Since the New Testament is "just literature" for me, my reading of the source text is that Jesus was knowingly speaking figuratively at the Last Supper, basically riffing his own embellishments on the ritual of the Passover Seder in yet another, frustrated as usual, effort to keep his disciples on message!)

A key element in my ongoing criticism of faith-based thinking is the extent to which faith impedes our ability to interpret a semiotic sign in any reading other than the most literal one. Where health is concerned, I tend to regard the basic precepts of Christian Science (which I recently discovered had been accepted by Sergei Prokofiev) as the reductio ad absurdum of such faith-based thinking. Were it to be simply a question of personal conviction, then I would be willing to grant each individual his/her own choice of life style. Where pandemic is concerned, however, we are talking about public health on a global scale, which raises the painful question of what one does when one's faith may be detrimental to others. In many ways we see a similar conflict taking place over policy decisions about the environmental crisis. However, where issues like global warming are concerned, we see catastrophe ahead at a distance of years; we now face the possibility that swine flu may be on our doorstep before this day has ended.

The problem is that the very concept of the public good has been so subordinated to the concept of individual liberties, not just by the abuses of the Bush Administration but by the rampant culture of globalization, that we no longer live in a culture that can respond to a health crisis of pandemic scale. In the context of faith-based thinking, this may not be the sort of "whimper" that the "Reverend" Thomas Stearns Eliot had in mind. However, stagnation of action towards the public good in the face of crisis certainly has a whimpering quality to it.

"Hammerklavier" Therapy

Last week I wrote that "both the third and fourth movements of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 106 (the "Hammerklavier" piano sonata) require just about the right duration" to see me through one of my radiation treatments. This morning I discovered that my spare recording of Friedrich Gulda playing the fourth movement is almost a perfect fit; and, hyped up on two cups of coffee (to satisfy the "moderately filled bladder" requirement), I found it to be quite a trip. This was a refreshing contrast to the performance that András Schiff had given in the penultimate recital of his cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. The technician started the track for this movement before leaving the treatment room, and during the Largo I was afraid that he had not set the volume loud enough. However, with the crescendo building up to the beginning of the Allegro risoluto, I realized that I did not have to worry; and, in my restrained position where the only active part of me was my brain, I began to get my first hints of just how Beethoven had made this fugue work. I could probably listen to this one movement for the duration of my treatment cycle, but I suspect that would drive the technicians crazy! So I shall probably turn to the final movements of Opera 110 and 111 for variety!

"… she doesn't have a lot to say"

Sometimes life imitates art in unexpected ways and with even less expected models. Consider the opening couplet by John Lennon and Paul McCartney for the 1969 Beatles' song "Her Majesty:"

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl
But she doesn't have a lot to say

According to Peter Hunt, Royal correspondent for BBC News, Her Majesty may not have much to say; but she has found a new way to say it:

The Queen has taken the highly unusual step, for her, of sending a message via e-mail.

It has gone to 23 young people from across the world, who've written blogs about their lives and their experiences of the Commonwealth - which is celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Back in 1976, the Queen was a trendsetter. She became the first monarch to send an e-mail during a visit to an army base. She was demonstrating a technology in its infancy.

Personally, I am as interested in the Queen's interest in reading and responding to blogs as I am in her decision to use electronic mail, particularly in light of her past history with that technology. According to Hunt, the 23 bloggers received:

… an e-mail from Buckingham Palace. It is headlined, "A Message from Her Majesty the Queen" and it is signed, "Elizabeth R".

The Queen writes that she has read their accounts with interest. She goes on: "Today, we celebrate the values and aspirations of the Commonwealth which have sustained our family of nations throughout its history and which I hope will equally inspire generations to come."

As Lennon and McCartney wrote, Her Majesty didn't have a lot to say; but it was still an interesting way to say something on the sixtieth anniversary of the Commonwealth. Hunt added one further interesting observation:

The e-mail address used will pretty quickly disappear into the ether. Was it, one wonders, queen.elizabeth@royal.gov.uk?

The implication seems to be that any of these bloggers trying to respond are likely to be frustrated. On the other hand there has yet to be word on how many of those messages were received. Would an address like the one Hunt suggested be caught by my spam filter? What did the Subject line say, I wonder? If I had seen the header, would I have expected to read yet another message about a frozen bank account containing several million pounds sterling?

More Agony than Ecstasy

I finished reading Simon Morrison's The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years today. (Spending more time in medical waiting rooms has given me more time to read, even if it sometimes eats into my writing time!) It was not an easy read. The author tended to waver between chronological and topical organization, meaning that some items got repeated, while others were introduced out of chronological order. Furthermore, there were over 60 pages of notes. That kind of thoroughness never reads particularly quickly. Nevertheless, as Joseph Stalin becomes a more and more distant historical figure, I feel it becomes more and more necessary for us to appreciate the full force of the impact that he had on Russians trying to be creative artists under his rule. Indeed, when we consider some of the recent revivals of Stalin nostalgia in today's Russia, that kind of appreciation is absolutely vital. As Morrison tells the story, Sergei Prokofiev decided to return to Russia figuring that his career would advance more rapidly without having to contend with competition from the likes of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky. As a result, he ended up contending with a monstrous bureaucracy based on the ideological necessity of micromanaging his slightest effort. (There is a section in the final chapter entitled "Kutuzov's Three Measures," dealing with Prokofiev arguing about three measures in Part II of War and Peace, never produced in his lifetime, at a time when he was so close to death that his doctors tried to keep him from composing at all.)

We tend not to think about such abusive management practices in any context other than a comic strip like Dilbert or a situation comedy like Better off Ted. However, this kind of reality reminds me of a story I once heard at a conference. A researcher who was interested in Jung-style personality types decided to use the historical record to approximate the personality types of many of the famous leaders in history. That researcher then questioned a sample of managers in an effort to determine whether they shared any consensus on the personality type of the ideal CEO. It turns out that there was a consensus; and, when the researcher compared this consensus type against his database of "historical" personality types, he found that the leader with the best match to that consensus was Stalin. This anecdote made for a good laugh at the conference, but it was the kind of laugh that concealed a much darker truth. There are many ways to understand what life under Stalin was like. Those who prefer music to politics and history might find Morrison's account of Prokofiev in Soviet Russia to be an accessible path to that understanding.

Norman Mailer's Diagnosis of Mind Rot Revisited

Almost two years ago I wrote an "appreciation" post about the writer Michael Tolkin in which I used some of Tolkin's comments to reflect on one of Norman Mailer's last public appearances, which had the good fortune to be captured on video by Book TV. That reflection tried to go down two paths. The first concerned the deterioration of our capacity for telling stories, which actually had its origin in a 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin. The second had to do with the deterioration of the stories themselves.

For several years my wife and I have pretty much avoided going to movie theaters (this in spite of the fact that there is an "independent cinema house" on the Plaza Level of the building where we live). As this blog should make clear, I have no trouble filling my time with "live" performances; and we decided that it made more sense to pay for a level of cable service that would provide us with movies that interested us, even if it meant waiting a few months to see them. Recently, however, I have discovered that we are watching fewer movies and more "extended series," not all of which are on the cable "pay" channels. This has led me to wonder whether this has to do with the capacity for telling stories or with the stories themselves.

About fifteen years ago, when I first started doing research into narrative, I took some time to play with one of those software products that claimed to help you write a screenplay. (This was somewhat in the vein of a study I had done about thirty-five years ago into what made Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "dice composer" work as well as it did.) I did not get much out of the screenplay software other than discover that this particular product was front-loaded with a heavy emphasis of character development. Before worrying about what the plot line would be, the user was required to build up a "cast of characters," sketching out each one in terms of both physical attributes and psychological motives. My guess was that the underlying philosophy was that, if you put a bunch of people together in a room, one of more stories will emerge from the interactions among their character attributes.

Whether or not I accept this philosophy, I find myself reflecting on just how impoverished the characters are that I encounter while reading reviews of films. I compare that with the rich character structures I have found in HBO projects such as John Adams, Generation Kill, and True Blood (choosing examples that run the gamut from the historical through the contemporary to the fantastic). This is not to say that network television has avoided such character structures; but character does not tend to sell soap. Thus we have a series like Southland, which is taking some interesting non-formulaic twists to members of the Los Angeles Police Force, offered to viewers to fill some blank space in the NBC schedule with little (if any) hope for renewal. On the other hand there is at least some buzz that ABC will renew Castle, which, while far lighter than Southland, has been taking some interesting approaches to departing from the formulaic in developing the regular characters.

Thus, if there has been a deterioration in the stories that are being told, regardless of the size of the screen, the problem may have something to do with a tendency to populate those stories with abstractions, rather than with the personalities who give life to those stories. Perhaps this is a narratological version of that Google-making-us-stupid problem that Nicholas Carr explored in the Atlantic Monthly. One approach to the sort of cognitive impairment that Carr tries to explore involves a preoccupation with getting answers without giving any attention to the reasoning behind those answers. This would be similar to focusing only on the destination of the plot-line, so to speak, without caring very much about how the line leads to that destination, let alone the extent to which that line moves at all through the motives (pun intended for those who can notice) of the characters. For all his superficial airs, even Rick Castle goes through life with a non-trivial set of motives; and the production team should be credited for establishing a connection between those motives and the adventures that unfold in each week's plot-line.

This is a phenomenon that I have examined in other settings. I have called it the "objectification of the subject" in past writing about both politics and business. Populating a story you tell with cardboard abstractions of personalities is no different from treating your political opponent or customer as an "abstract object," rather than a motivated individual. The consequences of trying to hide behind such abstractions probably rose to the most catastrophic level when we saw that strategy leading to the devastating mismanagement of the aftermath of Katrina. Yet for all the abundance of examples that caution us against such "objectification of the subject," we continue to practice it; and it continues to deteriorate not only the quality of our lives but the very stories we tell about those lives.

Continuing up Mount Haydn

Having completed the 33 discs of symphonies in the Brilliant Classics' Haydn Edition, I have now begun to move into new material. Somewhat to my surprise (because I have not undertaken a particularly thorough study of the Hoboken catalog), I discovered that there were only seven discs of concertos; and only the concertos for organ were numerous enough to require two discs. Nevertheless, I found this a fascinating part of the collection. As I wrote back in February, Joseph Haydn seemed to have cultivated a keen sense of sonority, appreciating subtle differences in the coloration provided by the different instruments at his disposal. Thus, while, as Menahem Pressler observed in a Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the piano part may have 75% of the notes in a Haydn piano trio, the "real action" in that trio emerges from the play of colors that take place in the interactions between that piano and the violin and cello. (I experienced a similar play of colors in a string trio by John Antes this past Thursday evening and speculated that this attention to coloration may have been due to Haydn's influence.) Thus, the instrumental diversity across a relatively small number of concertos may have been a result of Haydn's wish to explore the colors of several different instruments, each acting in a solo capacity, in preference to the more intense study of the concerto form itself, which we find in the piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. What I found most interesting was that Haydn had written five concertos for the lira organizzata, a rather peculiar combination of a portative organ with a string drone, often called a hurdy-gurdy. These were actually performed in a chamber setting of two violins, two "altos" (divided in this recording between a viola and a viola da gamba), one "basse" (played here on cello), and two horns; but the flavor is rather similar to the organ concertos.

I have now begun the section of music for voice and orchestra, where, thanks to the Berliner Philharmoniker, I discovered a significant sin of omission. Around the time that I was first exploring their Digital Concert Hall, I noticed that Nikolaus Harnoncourt was conducting a concert performance of Haydn's three-act opera Orlando Paladino. I figured I would hold off on watching this concert until I had a copy of the libretto, which I assumed would be included in the Haydn Edition on the accompanying CD-ROM. This led me to consult the Hoboken catalog, where I discovered that there were thirteen operas listed, none of which were included in the Brilliant Classics collection! In the course of poking around further in the catalog, I also discovered that there were eleven keyboard concertos, only three of which were included in the "Brilliant" collection. This is when I discovered that the word Gesamtwerk never appears anywhere on the box enclosing these 150 discs; and since the Collectors' Choice entry did not include a track listing, there was no way for me to recognize that this was not going to be a complete "edition," the way all previous editions were. (So much for my thoughts about why Haydn wrote so few concertos!) This raises the question of whether or not Brilliant Classics is planning to release a second volume of its Haydn Edition in the interest of thoroughness. Since, as I have previously written, Brilliant Classics has decided to avoid direct communication with their customers, I doubt there is any way in which I shall be able to find an answer to this question other than by waiting to see what happens in the future!

An Acoustic Masquerade

I had an interesting conversation with a former colleague, who is well-versed in the physics of sound production, in conjunction with covering Vignettes: Covered Wagon Woman by Alan Louis Smith for Examiner.com last night. We often have discussions about how specific instruments achieve particular effects. I try to point these out to her, explain the process in my own words, and then try to fish around for a physical justification of why the sound comes out the way it does. Most recently, I have been particularly interested in passages for string instruments written in harmonics, trying to home in on why I recently called that sound "other-worldly" in one of my Examiner.com reviews.

The sound came up in the "vignette" about an encounter with a Sioux encampment. In this case Smith had explained that, for this particular piece, he had been inspired by Sioux flute music. Now I am not sure just how Smith heard that music, but he interpreted it by having the cello play in harmonics. This became a point of departure for my intermission discussion with my former colleague. It occurred to me that the process of playing a harmonic, touching the string lightly at a nodal point, rather than pressing it against the fingerboard, probably limits the overtone structure of the resulting sound. In other words this is a good way to hear the fundamental and not much else. Similarly, the sort of wooden flute that Smith may have heard in conjunction with Sioux music could have had similar limitations in overtones. Thus, to some extent, the cello was "masquerading" as a wooden flute from Sioux civilization; or, as Smith put it, the cello could "impart the flavor of the native instrument."

This led me to think about the opening of Dmitri Shostakovich's Opus 67 piano trio in E minor. That passage also features a cello playing in harmonics; and, given what we know about Shostakovich's life (and the difficulties we have encountered in knowing it), we might think that, if anyone wanted to resort to masquerade, it would be Shostakovich. Thus, as I had speculated that there might be an autobiographical element to his Opus 87 preludes and fugues from 1950 and 1951, there might be a similar element in Opus 67, which was composed in the far darker year of 1944 and would probably be even more concealed! Such speculations can easily deteriorate into mere parlor tricks, but it is still tempting to think that much of Shostakovich's music may be based on codes that still need to be broken.

Another Aspect of the Treatment

I had a meeting with my radiologist after today's treatment. It turns out that I shall be seeing him once a week, usually on Wednesdays. I gather that the primary purpose of these meetings will be for him to check on side effects. He told me that side effects tend to surface after three weeks. Mostly they have to do with "urgent and uncontrollable" needs to use the bathroom. He told me that my risk is low because the area being treated is so small, and I had been warned about this before the treatment began. I suppose I should appreciate his being thorough about this!

My Own Private Reality

I had not anticipated that my presenting Jimmy Wales with a Chutzpah of the Week award would attract very much attention. (The truth is that I am surprised when anything I write attracts attention!) However, by concentrating on Wikipedia as the focus for his chutzpah, I overlooked the Wikia part of the talk that he gave on Tuesday at ad:tech San Francisco. I must admit that, before that talk, I was not particularly familiar with the Wikia effort; and I am still not sure what to make of it. Here is the brief summary that introduces the Wikia entry on Wikipedia:

Wikia (formerly Wikicities) is a free web hosting service for wikis (or wiki farms) operated by Wikia, Inc., a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004.^[3]

Wikia targets communities, both those established offline and those with a purely online following. Wikia is free of charge for readers and editors and licenses user-provided text content under the GNU Free Documentation License or, in the case of Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia, a Creative Commons license (CC by-nc-sa). The wiki software used is MediaWiki.

Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, respectively the Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board chair of the Wikimedia Foundation.

This entry also cites the slogan of Wikia as being, "Creating Communities," although while listening to Wales talk about this service, I found myself thinking about another slogan that had been introduced by Huey Long, "Every man a king." Consider how Long elaborated on that slogan:

Every man a king, so there would be no such thing as a man or woman who did not have the necessities of life, who would not be dependent upon the whims and caprices and ipsi dixit of the financial martyrs for a living.

Giving this speech in 1934, the "martyrs" Long had in mind were those financial elites who had been hit hard by the Great Depression and who were now subjecting the more general population to their "whims and caprices" in the interest of economic recovery, a context that certainly rings familiar again today. However, the elites that Wales has in mind are those concerned with publication, his position appearing to be that anyone should be free to publish anything with little (if any) regard to the extent that publication has established itself as a profession with a strong foundation of normative practices (which Wales may want to dismiss as "whims and caprices").

What sort of "anything" does Wales have in mind? One answer to this question can be found, again, in the Wikipedia entry for Wikia:

Wikia covers a broad range of topics; almost any project is accepted, with the exception of ideas that compete with the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, which Wikia's founders are heavily involved in.^[12] In comparison with Wikipedia, Wikia hosts specialized wikis that offer more detailed or comprehensive content. Because Wikia is not an encyclopedia, subjects not qualifying for inclusion on Wikipedia due to lack of notability may be accepted on the respective Wikia wiki. For example, a minor character in a Star Wars film may have its own article on Wookieepedia, but only a brief mention on Wikipedia.^[13]

Lest we dismiss that last sentence as whimsy for the amusement of the reader, it is worth considering the example that Wales gave to the ad:tech audience. He began by projecting the image of the Wikipedia page for Genghis Khan as an example of what one expects from an encyclopedia. He then proceeded to riff about a great battle in which Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon were all combatants. It turns out that this battle took place in the world of Marvel Comics, and he promoted Wikia as the venue where anyone could learn about that battle.

Quite honestly, I was not quite sure what to make of this as an example. I have a great interest in mythology, particularly when it comes to the roles that myths have played in our efforts to make sense of the real world. However, I also have a clear sense of the difference between literal and figurative language, which usually establishes the boundary that separates myth from reality. In its effort to cover "a broad range of topics," is Wikia providing every man his own reality through some bizarre extrapolation of Long's vision?

I decided that one way to pursue this question would be to initiate a Google search on the phrase "Genghis Kahn" and the keywords "Alexander" and "Napoleon." Here are the first five hits:

The first two seem well enough grounded in reality. The third drifts into questions of casting for a movie, and the fourth brings us to the Marvel Comics Wikia site. We then return to the more humble world of a historical lecture delivered as a podcast. Presumably we can assume that anyone reading the excerpts provided with the search results will know that the Marvel site is concerned with fiction, but can we really make that assumption? Given some of the examples of writing I have recently encountered, I am not as confident in making that assumption as I would like to be!

My point is that there is much that can be gained from exploring questions grounded in the domain of fiction, as long as we recognize where that grounding resides. Having emerged from eight years of national policy grounded in faith-based thinking, I have become very sensitive about separating the world of fiction from the world of reality. I therefore worry that the technologies of Google and Wikia may be blurring the boundary that establishes that separation. This may not be the sort of cognitive impairment that Nicholas Carr had in mind when he posed the question "Is Google Making Us Stupid?;" but it still emerges as the basis for difficulty in everyday problems of getting on in the real world. I can imagine some who might argue that Google should start to sort their results to separate the worlds of fiction and reality; but such a separation requires a level of understanding based on semantics, rather than "lexical repertoire." When it comes to semantics, the technologies available to us may be promising but far from up to such a subtle task. The best course of action is to be more thoughtful in how we use our Internet-based tools; but Carr's point is that we may be losing our capacity for such thoughtfulness by virtue of relying on those tools. We should think about his claim … if we still have the capability and will to do so.

The First Dose

What can I say? I was in the same room in which they took the X-rays on Monday, lying still in exactly the same way. I was told it would take about fifteen minutes. I seem to recall Søren Kierkegaard joking that eternity scared him because he could not even sit in a dentist's waiting room until it was time for his appointment. Fortunately, there was a CD player in the room, which helped me to form "landmarks" for the passing of time. The content was a rather arbitrary mix. I remember hearing the second movement of Joaquín Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" while they were positioning me. This mysteriously morphed into the first movement of Antonín Dvořák's string serenade, and now I realize I cannot even remember what followed that excerpt! I asked if I could bring my own material. As I see it, both the third and fourth movements of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 106 (the "Hammerklavier" piano sonata) require just about the right duration; and it should be clear from my recent writing that I really need to be better acquainted with both of these movements! I just wonder if that kind of persistent listening will get on the nerves of the technical staff. The last thing I want to do is alienate them! Needless to say, if I can remember the music better than the treatment, this means that I emerged from my first dose with almost no sense of anything happening; so I shall probably reserve subsequent posts for any account of a cumulative effect, should it arise.

Ivan Hewitt's Thoughts on Lang Lang

Ivan Hewitt has now filed a London Telegraph review of Lang Lang performing Béla Bartók's second piano concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, and he set me to thinking about some of the things I have written about this pianist. Indeed, I almost felt as if Hewitt was addressing me directly with his opening paragraphs:

Critics are supposed to have open minds, so, as I waited for feted Chinese pianist to appear, I tried – not altogether successfully – to suppress the horrible memory of his Proms recital last year, when he turned some well-loved classical masterworks into caricatures.

As a wise colleague reminded me, it’s wrong to dismiss Lang Lang’s brand of barnstorming virtuosity out of hand. It was an accepted norm in piano performance until the early 20th century, when a puritanical notion of “fidelity to the text” took over, and any overt display of personality was frowned on.

This led me to reflect on Lang's appearance with the San Francisco Symphony this past December, when he was playing Frédéric Chopin's first (Opus 11) piano concerto in E minor. There is no question that Chopin is as susceptible to "barnstorming virtuosity" as Bartók is (if not more so); but I am not sure I would call my reaction to Lang's performance "puritanical." In the spirit of that "Happy Warrior," Al Smith, let's "look at the record." Here is what I wrote about Lang's Chopin:

Given that Chopin's concerto predates Tannhäuser by about fifteen years, we were certainly not about to continue the journey we had begun [with the Richard Wagner excerpts performed before the intermission]. Furthermore, the work is relatively early and not particularly representative of the composer's present or future skills. Extended forms were never his strong suit, nor was orchestral writing. He is best appreciated for the many ways he could apply a basic ternary form to solo piano writing. A pianist like Arthur Rubinstein, who not only commanded pretty much the entire Chopin canon but also kept coming up with new readings of the works in that canon, could mine his experience to give this concerto the convincing performance it deserves; but Lang seemed more interested in showmanship than understanding. There was almost a choreographed plan to all of his physical gestures of attentiveness during the orchestral sections, and it seemed as if more effort went into those physical gestures than into the musical gestures in the score. The result was a highly skilful act of audience manipulation based on nothing more than the compelling personality of the soloist.

In other words I was less concerned with any "overt display of personality" than I was with whether or not I was being very scrupulously manipulated (which I happen to dislike most intensely). Going back to any one of the several recordings I have of Rubinstein playing this concerto, I realize that I was being too generous to Lang in trying to be apologetic about Chopin. Either Lang didn't "get it" or didn't want to "get it," neither of which (but particularly the latter) is particularly forgivable in my book. My reading of Hewitt's review gave me the impression that Lang got some (but definitely not all) of the Bartók concerto; and, since I happen to enjoy this particular concerto with considerable relish and enthusiasm, I suspect I would have been less generous than Hewitt in any review I would have written. In the spirit of the Examiner.com piece I wrote yesterday about the Laurel Ensemble, the fundamental issue is not about "fidelity to the text;" rather, it is about a far more amorphous concept of authenticity, which involves not only the text but also a context that includes the composer, the "setting" of the composition, and possibly even the musicians with whom one shares the stage. However generous Lang may be with his time where would-be pianists are concerned, the question of his authenticity continues to bother me; and I hope it will be resolved sooner rather than later.

Wiki CHUTZPAH

I see that I have yet to give a Chutzpah of the Week award to either Wikipedia or Jimmy Wales; and, while it is still early in the week, I was sufficiently "inspired" by Wales' keynote address to ad:tech San Francisco this morning (entitled "Wikipedia, Wikia and the Future of Consumer Generated Media") that I figured I would strike while the iron was hot. I grant that my reasoning is somewhat arcane, but part of the fun of these awards is that I can be playful with them from time to time. My thoughts about the award were triggered by Wales' decision to begin with a 1962 quote from Charles Van Doren on the need for radical rethinking of the concept of an encyclopedia. Van Doren was with Encyclopædia Britannica at the time, and Wales obviously relished the fact that Britannica never picked up Van Doren's gauntlet in any serious way (thus allowing Wales to claim that he was the first to do so).

Preoccupied as I have always been with our culture's lack of interest in (if not downright ignorance of) history, I found myself wondering if anyone in the ad:tech San Francisco audience knew who Van Doren was or how he became involved with Encyclopædia Britannica. I decided to see what Wikipedia had to say about the guy. There at the top of the entry was this photograph of one of his appearances in the quiz show Twenty One (he's the one on the far right), when his winning streak was ended by opponent Vivienne Nearing (on the left, with host Jack Barry in the middle):

The capsule summary that begins the entry is:

Charles Lincoln Van Doren (born February 12, 1926), a noted American intellectual, writer, and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. He confessed before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the show Twenty One.

This is a man best known for his involvement with one of the first major scandals on the business-of-entertainment side of commercial television. At the time the scandal broke, Van Doren had even been offered a three-year contract with NBC to serve as "cultural correspondent." At a time when politicians were using the noun "egghead" in ridicule, NBC had his on a way to make money off of a full-fledged intellectual! The Wikipedia entry then outlines the road that led to Encyclopædia Britannica (and beyond):

Van Doren was dropped from NBC and resigned from his post of assistant professor at Columbia University. But his life after the scandal proved anything but broken; as television historian Robert Metz wrote (in CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye), "Fortunately, ours is a forgiving society, and Van Doren proved strong in the face of adversity." He became an editor at Praeger Books and a pseudonymous (at first) writer, before becoming an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the author of several books, of which the simplified text, A History of Knowledge may be his best known. He also co-authored How to Read a Book, with philosopher Mortimer J. Adler [actually an updated edition of a book Adler had previously written on his own].

Currently, Van Doren is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut, Torrington branch.

As I understand it, Adler was one of the few willing to offer him a helping hand after he had been tainted by scandal.

So, even if Van Doren's remark about radicalizing the encyclopedia may have been appropriate, did Wales really have to choose him as a source? My guess is that, with a little bit of poking around (even around Wikipedia), he could have found a spokesperson whose reputation would not raise red flags of credibility. Alternatively, he could had assumed (probably correctly) that, even with the film that Robert Redford made, no one recalled or cared about Van Doren's past. Indeed, Wales might well have been rubbing his audience's collective faces with their cultural amnesia (which would involve far less work than search out a better source). That would definitely have been a clear instance of chutzpah; but, even if such an aggressive motive was absent, there is enough outrageousness about this act to justify giving it the Chutzpah of the Week award.

More Preparation

I seem to have jumped the gun last week in claiming that my radiation treatment would begin today. All they did today was take two X-rays, presumably to provide additional data to supplement the CAT scan image of the position of my gold markers. They also used the occasion to introduce me to the room where my treatment would take place (which is where the X-rays were taken), as well as the control room. The treatment itself will begin on Wednesday; and they were even kind enough to schedule my visits (each of which is supposed to take about twenty minutes) to minimize any conflicts with the Noontime Concerts™ events I am now trying to cover regularly on Examiner.com. I was amused to find myself looking up at a "sky ceiling," dark blue with an array of little white lights at least vaguely conforming to some of the constellations. I suppose this was intended to offset the "clinical sterility" of the rest of the room; but so many of the places I have worked had that "clinical sterility" that I found that particular ambience comforting rather than disquieting. Actually, the positive feedback I received that registered the most was the news that I would not have to use the changing room; I can just uncover the affected area in the treatment room. I was not given a specific date for the end of the treatment; but I was told that it would be completed by June 17 (taking care of the question of whether or not I would have to reschedule my next dental examination).

"… what will you do when the Communists take over?"

Last February, while examining the problems of mismanagement in the face of major disasters in China, I reviewed an old joke about Leonid Brezhnev concerning the displacement of Communism by consumerism. Viewed from the other end of the telescope here in the United States, we continue to experience the failure of attempts to reform a health care system overcome by consumerism on the grounds that any reform brings a threat of "socialism." However, regardless of the political labels that get thrown around, the bottom-line question for any governmental policy is whether or not the public good is being adequately served. From this point of view, a brief Reuters report from Beijing, filed last night, deserves to be read in its entirety:

Chinese children with AIDS, especially from rural families, are going without treatment because their families are too poor to afford it, despite a government policy of free treatment, an activist group said on Monday.

Some families don't even know AIDS treatment programs exist, it said.

"China has made great progress in the fight against AIDS, but far too many children are getting the wrong AIDS treatment," said Sara Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst, which issued the report.

As many as 10,000 Chinese children may be HIV-positive, most because of botched blood transfusions or transmission from their mothers. They are concentrated in central Henan province, where the blood supply was contaminated in the 1990s, or in Yunnan province in the southwest, a hub for drug trafficking.

In 2005, 9,000 cases of children contracting HIV from their mothers were reported. Many children with AIDS die before the age of five, often undiagnosed.

Some live too far from hospitals and others have been turned away from hospitals and schools that fear contagion from AIDS patients.

China guarantees free drug treatment for AIDS, but many poor families cannot afford the associated fees or treatment for other diseases which may strike the weakened children.

The government provides generic versions of four drugs for front-line treatment, but many patients have developed resistance.

Asia Catalyst called for the Chinese government to "fill in the gaps" by extending coverage for additional medical costs, and providing cheaper second-line drugs.

One may ask rhetorically where the "public good" resides in this story. On the other hand we may also ask whether we can raise the it-can't-happen-here flag when the same question is applied to our own country's approach to "managed health care" (where the scare quotes apply primarily to that adjective "managed"). It is, to say the least, chilling to contemplate that, when it comes to what I have previously called "the reduce-the-surplus-population philosophy of Ebenezer Scrooge," the public health policies of China and the United States are closer than we may have wished to imagine.

Beginning the Ascent of Mount Haydn

I realize that I have not yet written anything about my listening experiences with Brilliant Classics' recently-released Haydn Edition, other than announcing that I placed an order with Collectors' Choice about a month ago. There are several reasons for this, mostly of the I've-been-busy variety. Here at The Rehearsal Studio I found myself putting a fair amount of time into the events surrounding last Wednesday's "debut" of The YouTube Symphony Orchestra (scare quotes to indicate the uncertainty as to whether this ensemble will ever perform again and, if so, with the same personnel) at Carnegie Hall. Since I continue to be more interested in "live" performance than in recordings, it seemed important that this instance of out-of-the-box-thinking about performance be examined; and, given its connection to Internet technology, the blogosphere struck me as the most appropriate platform.

Meanwhile, my "beat" at Examiner.com has given me an opportunity to spend more time on "live" performance than I had been spending in the past. I have no regrets about this reassignment of priorities. Indeed, it has opened the door to many interesting paths of inquiry, some of which I have already begun to explore on this blog.

However, I have also been holding back on the Haydn Edition because I already had the first 33 discs. I purchased them when Brilliant Classics released them separately as a collection of the complete symphonies. I am now in the process of revisiting these discs, particularly to make sure that they are all in good shape, given Brilliant's track record for quality control. This is not to suggest that I am finding these initial discs a slog. I have no problem with being reminded of just how fresh and innovative Joseph Haydn could be in the symphonies he composed. The Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra brings just the right level of freshness to their sound; and conductor Adam Fischer recognizes all those innovations and gives them all the attention they deserve. Nevertheless, it will not be until I complete this particular phase that I shall be moving on to entirely new material.

The one problem I am likely to face involves navigating this collection. The standard index for Haydn's compositions if Anthony van Hoboken's catalog. Unfortunately, this is not provided in a usable form in H. C. Robbins Landon's five-volume Haydn: Chronicle and Works; and the only on-line version I have managed to find (thanks to the Wikipedia entry for Hoboken-Verzeichnis) is in French. Negotiating the French should not be too much of a problem, but unfortunately this site lacks a search tool! However, at the very least it should help me home in on specific dates, which can then point me to the proper volumes in the Robbins Landon collection (which is organized strictly chronologically).

More problematic will be finding a specific piece of music among the 150 CDs in this collection. The other anthologies came with a CD-ROM that had PDF pages for the contents of each disc. These pages would be organized into separate files, but they could be tracked through the Windows search tool. The Haydn Collection offers nothing other than a rather skimpy essay (in five languages, all in the same file) and the texts of the songs and oratorios. While the previous collections were "research-friendly," this one definitely is not! I may therefore have to start rolling some of my own tools to assist me in any future plans to write about Haydn.

This raises one final interesting point. Here on this blog there are only 23 posts with the "Haydn" label; and, since I began writing for Examiner.com, I have reviewed only one concert at which one of his works (a string quartet) was performed. Furthermore, many of my posts here have more to do with Haydn's relationship to other composers (such as Ludwig van Beethoven) than with his own compositions! Is Haydn suffering undue neglect? If so, will the Haydn Collection do anything to inspire a new wave of interest? If it cannot support the casual browsing of the curious listener (which it does not appear to do), then it might not help cultivate a "customer demand" for more Haydn on concert programs. Given how much I admire this composer, I would find that a great disappointment.

Another Take on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra

Writing for the Financial Times yesterday, Andrew Clark seemed to share my position that the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is best viewed as an experiment that may inform us about the future of classical music. Indeed, writing from London, where "Thousands of people of all ages thronged the [Southbank] arts centre to hear Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra under its charismatic 28-year-old conductor, Gustavo Dudamel," he also seemed to reflect my view of the Venezuelan El Systema program as a comparable experiment. He then added one more data point:

Coincidentally, the gifted Chinese pianist Lang Lang, 26, is also in London. As a taster for his upcoming Barbican concerts he is leading a piano extravaganza this Sunday, during which he will coach hundreds of pianists of all ages and abilities – minimum qualification: aspiration – in the language of the keyboard.

The common theme in his report seems to be that the future of classical music depends on current and future generations coming to concert halls with the same (if not more) enthusiasm, attention, and (of course) purchasing power that their ancestors brought. This puts him in the same league as Southbank's Head of Music, Marshall Marcus, who needs to be as concerned about his customer base as he is about the quality of product being offered to those customers.

I cite this in the context of my post yesterday in which I accused the YouTube platform itself as being "no way to listen to a concert." There are others concerned with how the concert can come to the audience, as an alternative to the traditional practice of the audience coming to the concert; and, as I wrote yesterday, the Digital Concert Hall created for the Berliner Philharmoniker is probably the best example of thinking outside of that traditional box. However, I agree with Clark (and probably Marcus) that the future of classical music will only be as good as the desire that people will have to be a "live" audience at a "live" performance; and, whatever the Web 2.0 evangelists may promise, the virtual world will never do justice to that kind of physical experience. Yesterday I experienced another strategy for audience-building when Jonathan Biss gave a preview event for a recital he will be giving this evening at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. The event took place in the modest setting of the Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street in the Mission District; and I see this of a way in which the concert can come to the audience without resorting to the virtual world.

The point is that, between the examples that Clark cites and the Biss event (sponsored by San Francisco Performances, which is also hosting tonight's recital) there are any number of audience-building strategies that can be pursued and targeted as much at the future as at the present. Different strategies will work in different settings, while the virtual world will continue to provide opportunities for interested audiences to build up experiences that make them better listeners. The fact that such strategies are surfacing (and succeeding) at all is likely to be more important than whether or not YouTube is doing justice to virtual attendance of last Wednesday's Carnegie Hall event.

YouTube: No Way to Listen to a Concert

I had an ulterior motive behind wanting to watch the entire Carnegie Hall concert given by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra: Two of the works on the program were "previews," in a sense, of the concerts that Michael Tilson Thomas will be conducting with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall on May 20, 22, 23. One of these amounted to a "sneak peek" at an excerpt from Mason Bates' "The B-Sides," which will be receiving its world premiere at these concerts. The other was to hear Yuja Wang play the second movement of Sergei Prokofiev's Opus 16, his second piano concerto in G minor, which she would be playing entirely at these same concerts. So, when Alex Ross posted the links to the videos of the two portions of the concert on his The Rest is Noise blog, I felt obliged to view at least this material before writing any sort of preview piece for my Examiner.com gig; and, if I was going to watch those portions, why not watch the whole thing?

Why not, indeed? Well, it turns out that there is one perfectly good reason. YouTube technology was designed for the brief snippets that users are expected to upload, which usually do not last more than five minutes. At least that was the case before YouTube recently introduced full-length movies and television programs. Now my guess is that, even with this increase in both volume and duration of content, the snippets will probably continue to do well enough. So, for example, I had no problem watching the "Global Mash Up" of Tan Dun's first (of how many?) "Internet Symphony" (without which I might not have had as interesting a Chutzpah of the Week award). On the other hand the first half of the "concert video" from Carnegie Hall had a duration of 59:32, which is to say longer than the actual content of an hour-long television episode; and the second half ran 1:25:30, which puts it in the league of many feature films.

So what happens when YouTube tries to stream this kind of content to a home in San Francisco with a DSL modem? The answer is simple enough: It isn't pretty! To be more blunt, it no longer counts as music. You cannot listen to Brahms with frequent (almost periodic interruptions) for the player to catch up with the streamer. To paraphrase that old religious saying: the content is so large, and my buffer is so small! Efforts to pause and even back up a bit to give the buffer room for growth were to no avail. Now it would not surprise me if John Cage would have been pleased to hear a performance of his music interrupted by such silences determined entirely by chance, but I wonder how Bates would feel about large portions of cyberspace getting their first taste of his music in this manner!

To relate this to a more satisfying recent experience, the YouTube viewing environment is not the Digital Concert Hall created for the Berliner Philharmoniker. Most important is that the Digital Concert Hall allows you to select the quality of the signal you are receiving. Low quality works just fine for home use; and, if the image lacks the sharpness of full high-definition resolution (which I found very impressive when I had the bandwidth to receive it), at least the music is never interrupted. (Well … hardly ever, in the words of W. S. Gilbert!) YouTube tried to finesse the quality-of-service problem by keeping the durations (and usually the quality of the video signal) down. However, on the basis of the experiences I just had with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra content, I would say that none of the selections are likely to survive intact for most of the folks trying to watch the stuff.

So it turns out that, at least in the current technology domain, my fear of short-attention-span concerts may be even greater than I had anticipated. Even the festivity of the Carnegie Hall occasion itself, regardless of the music performances, could not be held up adequately by the existing YouTube platform. Put another way, what worked at least passably for the auditioning process turned out to be counterproductive for those who crossed the bridge from auditioning to performing. So, for better or worse, it seems that we have learned at least one thing from the YouTube Symphony Orchestra experiment; and I suspect that this lesson will be of great interest to folks like Marshall Marcus over at the Southbank Centre. Whether or not the lesson registers over in the YouTube division of Google will probably depend on whether viewers interested in seeing the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels (currently one of the "Spotlight Videos") have a similar experience to which they react in a similar way!

On the Legitimacy of Hamas

We now have a new data point on the question that many (including the United States as a matter of policy) continue to raise over whether or not Hamas should participate in discussions over the question of peace in the Middle East. In the past I have made it a point to draw upon sources such as Al Jazeera English to try to maintain a balanced view of the issues at stake, but now it appears that the Financial Times may be joining the ranks of those seeking out useful data points. Tobias Buck has just filed a report for the Financial Times from Birzeit University, which he describes (fairly, in my opinion) as "the closest thing to a Palestinian Harvard – a place of academic excellence and a training ground for the future Palestinian elite." The occasion was the annual elections to the university's student parliament, which external observers have tried to use as a barometer of current Palestinian political thinking.

Buck's account of the sort of electioneering that preceded the actual voting is worth considering as a prologue:

First came hundreds of supporters of Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian group, lined up military-style in neat rows, and strictly separated into columns of men and women. Holding aloft a sea of bright green banners, the young Islamists chanted “Allahu akbar” (Allah is great) as they entered the University’s main square. Behind them marched an even larger contingent of students supporting the rival Fatah movement, waving yellow flags and chanting praise for Yasser Arafat, the former Palestinian leader.

This tells us something about both numbers and sentiment, particularly when it comes to the contrast of the secular and what, under the Bush Administration, I continued to call the "faith-based." This "prologue" was the gathering for the pre-election debate, a practice that resonates nicely with our own electoral practices. From here we can cut to the results:

Fatah went into the elections with a comfortable five-seat lead in the student parliament. A day after the debate, with the votes of almost 7,000 students counted, the secular movement came out on top once again – but its lead was cut. Of the 51 seats, Fatah now holds 24 and Hamas 22 – confirming the expectation that the Gaza war would boost the Islamists’ support.

At the very least this would appear to undermine those who continue to argue that Hamas cannot claim to be the duly-elected representative of the population of Gaza. If anything these results underscore the hypocrisy of our previous "faith-based" President in rejecting the election of a "faith-based" party, whose faith does not sit particularly well with his own. Worse yet, it seems to indicate that, where faith is involved, our past Administration seemed all too willing to equate disagreement over faith with terrorism by justifying the failure to recognize Hamas on the grounds that they were a "terrorist organization." So, if almost half of the 7000 students who voted in their election at the Palestinians' most prestigious university see Hamas as a political party, rather than a terrorist organization, when will the United States come around to recognizing that they may have a point?

Crouching Tiger, Hidden CHUTZPAH

It may just be that the buzz from last night's performance by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (which even echoed on Truthdig) is still rattling around inside my skull; but I have decided that there is enough chutzpah in taking a five-minute romp and hanging the name of "Eroica" on it (even without then subjecting it to a mash up) to merit an award. After all, the set of variations that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote that now carry this name take as much time as most of the symphonies of his contemporaries (which is about half the duration of the "Eroica" symphony). So, since the "chutzpah ceiling" for artistic accomplishment was broken last week, I have no hesitation in granting the Chutzpah of the Week award for this week to Tan Dun, who has found his own path to outrageousness that is definitely on a par with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. While there is no "extra credit" for an act of chutzpah, Tan should also be recognized for doing unto Beethoven a deed worthy of what the ukulele ensemble did to Richard Wagner!

"Where does the project go from here?"

That question that Marshall Marcus, Head of Music for the Southbank Centre, raised when the BBC interviewed him about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra was foremost in my mind this morning as I read Anthony Tommasini's review of their performance last night at Carnegie Hall on the New York Times Web site. Responsible critic that he is, Tommasini treated this concert like any other and, as usual, made some interesting judgment calls. After having read James Oestreich's account of the first day of rehearsals on Monday, I felt that Tommasini's overall assessment of "Quite well" was a promising one. However, like Marcus, I am more interested in last night's concert as an experiment with potential of informing us about the "future of classical music." Of course one should not speculate on the future without recognizing Paul Saffo's caveat: "The future always arrives late and in unexpected ways." So, rather than playing futurist games, I think it might be useful to point out some of the potential indicators, without going out on any limbs about just what may be indicated.

The first indicator was actually the color photograph of the interior of Carnegie Hall, take by Chad Batka for The New York Times, which preceded Tommasini's text. One could barely discern the hall itself amid the flood of color slides projected on just about any available surface. The performers on the stage were only some of the contributing elements of a multimedia extravaganza. This immediately raised a question: If the performers were sharing (competing?) with an abundance of supplementary media, would the act of listening still be primary to this particular concert experience? As Tommasini observed:

There were so many spotlights and projectors in the hall that pianissimo passages in the music had to compete with the whirring sounds of ventilating fans.

That question was further reinforced with Tommasini's report that the three-hour program for the evening "was a potpourri, just movements and excerpts from 15 wildly diverse works." Was this a rejection of the traditional listening experience in favor of a "pops" style aimed at shorter attention spans? Tommasini seemed to be pondering the same question in his account of Yuja Wang's solo appearance:

It was exasperating, however, to hear Yuja Wang, a brilliant young pianist, dash off a rippling account of the perpetual-motion Scherzo from Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. If the program had been differently conceived, she and the orchestra might have played the entire work, which is not that long. Instead, she played a showpiece solo encore, a stunningly difficult but empty-headed arrangement of the “Flight of the Bumble Bee.”

According to Associated Press Writer Martin Steinberg's account, there were further exasperations for those expecting a traditional concert experience:

The Internet generation of performers attracted a youthful crowd that had no reason to feel shy. The staid decorum was suspended for the three-hour concert, which featured 15 short pieces. Thomas sat on the podium at one point, watching pianist Yuja Wang fly through the "Flight of the Bumble Bee." Images of musical notes, geometric patterns and of the players were projected on the walls and ceiling, and the audience was encouraged to bring video cameras.

More representative of the event may have been the composition that Tan Dun created for this occasion, described by Tommasini as follows:

Tan Dun conducted the premiere of a piece written for the occasion, his Internet Symphony No. 1, “Eroica.” This five-minute crowd-pleaser takes riffs from Beethoven’s “Eroica” and folds them into a score teaming with clanking percussion, corny brass chorales, and perky passages that sounded as if Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon had somehow encountered the Lone Ranger.

Thanks to Claire Prentice's review for the London Telegraph, I discovered that a preview "mash up" performance of this work had already been uploaded to the YouTube site (and available for viewing at the beginning of Prentice's article). While I am, as a rule, not particularly big on "mash ups" (since I tend to see them as undermining live performance), I have to admit that this one was pretty effective; and it may even be that this composition works better as a well-crafted video object than as a concert performance. However, this was a video object, clearly a product of someone highly skilled in video editing who may or may not have had experience in performing music. The fact that it was so effective then raised the question of whether the "YouTube" part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra may have emerged as more important than the "Symphony Orchestra" part.

Given this risk that the virtual world of YouTube could well drown out the physical world of Carnegie Hall, it is important to note that Michael Tilson Thomas used his opening remarks to his physical audience as a sort of exercise in expectation management:

We're meeting a lot of different worlds, the real time world, the online world and the experience of getting acquainted. For us it's been something between a classical music summit conference (and) scout jamboree combined with speed dating.

Perhaps ultimately the whole event had more to do with that "experience of getting acquainted" than with more the more substantive matters of musical performance that Tommasini found lacking; but just what kind of acquaintance was forming? I wonder if the summit conference may have actually been the most significant of Thomas' metaphors. Taken as a whole, the most important element of the experiment may have been the encounter of the YouTube world of performing through video clips with the more traditional world of the immediacy of musical performance "in the flesh." As is usually the case at a summit conference, there were both confrontations and compromises; but, in spite of Tommasini's misgivings, it seems as if there were more substantive deliverables last night than we tend to expect at summit gatherings of world leaders and diplomats.

It may well be that none of these observations will contribute very much to Marcus' primary question. Indeed, there is the risk that, as an experimental approach towards the "future of classical music," this project may not go anywhere. Having used its YouTube property to get this particular dog to walk on its hind legs, Google may decide that it has had enough of this project and go off in search of "the next cool thing." Since he wears a manager's hat, Marcus' major concern is with how the presentation of classical music events will be supported in the future. My guess is that he read Tommasini's account (and possible Steinberg's) with great interest; but he is probably still agonizing over what it will take to keep institutions like his Southbank Centre going, maintaining their reputation for high standards in a time of economic hardship. The greatest disappointment would be that we have emerged from this bold experiment with some exciting memories but with no lessons learned.

From the Folks Who Tried to Make a Business out of Misunderstanding Service

It has been a while since researchers at IBM Almaden Services Research tried to reduce service to a science. Whether or not this was a desperate attempt to cast the provision of service in the same mold as the manufacturing of goods, complete with a passionate revival of "the worst excesses of Frederick Taylor's 'principles of scientific management,'" this led to little more than a fundamental truth that had undone many well-intentioned projects in decision support, the basic precept that effectiveness is not the same as efficiency, along with the corollary that businesses succeed more through effectiveness than through efficiency. Unfortunately, according to a Business Tech news report by Larry Dignan for CNET News, IBM still does not get it:

IBM is outlining a vision--and of course a new services unit to go with it--that takes a little time to grok.

Big Blue speaks about the "information journey," about fact-based enterprises, and about nudging out gut calls in everyday management for decisions based on hard, cold facts. When you boil it all down, Big Blue is talking about providing a bag of algorithms that will automate many of your business decisions.

When it is a matter of a research agenda, mistakes fuel the engine that drives our motivation to learn new stuff. When it is a matter of business, this kind of misconception becomes downright scary. Even Dignan, who is as representative of the objective world as any good CNET correspondent, could recognize that the very concept of a "fact-based enterprise" was suspect. Whether or not Dignan realized it, it takes little more than a superficial reading of Immanuel Kant to run you into the brick wall of how few "facts" there are in the world we experience (the so-called "analytic" truths, like adding zero to a number does not change that number). Unfortunately, training for business management does not seem to include reading Kant these days; and the result is a dangerously naive view of the subtle complexities of the business world. IBM has now discovered a business opportunity in that naïveté, and they may yet cash in on it. Unfortunately, just about everyone trying to run their business effectively (as opposed to efficiently) will likely be victims of this endeavor. That includes everyone reading this post, since we all are customers of at least one of these businesses; and we shall be the first to feel their pain when things start to go wrong!

Reality Checking the YouTube Symphony Orchestra

This morning's broadcast of Newshour on BBC World Service Radio ran a report on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra that served as a useful complement to the dispatches that James Oestreich has been filing for the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times. Unfortunately, there was no text version of this report; so I had to resort to the streaming audio version to take some notes and make sure I got my facts right. Most of the report involved an interview with Marshall Marcus, Head of Music for the Southbank Centre, one of the most important organizations for concert activity in London. Since Marcus was presumably giving the interview in London, it is important to recognize that he is not currently "on site" in New York, armed with a ticket to tonight's YouTube Symphony Orchestra performance in Carnegie Hall. Thus, he kept his remarks focused (in spite of prodding by the BBC announcer to do otherwise) on the idea of this orchestra, rather than on specific achievements, such as the rehearsals that Oestreich has covered or tonight's concert, which presumably will draw a large number of music critics.

Marcus made it clear that the only way to think about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is as an experiment (which, I am happy to say, is a point I have been trying to emphasize ever since the project was launched). Questions about whether or not the ensemble is any good or whether they turn out to be the best (or worst) thing to have happened in Carnegie Hall miss out on the experimental premise. As Marcus put it, the critical question is, "Where does the project go from here?" When the Venezuelan government launched El Systema, the Venezuelan program that provided free music tuition and an instrument to every girl and boy, no matter how poor, 34 years ago, that was an experiment. Marcus cited it, as well he should, since the most visible product of that experiment, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, is currently a big hit at the Royal Festival Hall, which happens to be one of the major venues of the Southbank Centre; but he stressed that this orchestra did not become an international attraction overnight.

When I first wrote about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project, I concluded:

… I am still glad that [conductor Michael Tilson] Thomas is not afraid to try new things. As a rule, we learn more from the experiments that do not turn out the way we anticipated. The future of classical music may depend on such persistent experimentation.

Oestreich's blog posts may have already revealed one of the unanticipated consequences of the experiment, which is that there are at least some well-intentioned amateurs (among those "happy and eager faces on the 'Meet the YouTube Symphony Orchestra' YouTube video") who have now received a serious reality check during Monday's rehearsals. Even if that reality check thoroughly blows away any thoughts they may have entertained about making a career as an orchestra musician, it will probably have a positive effect on the listening skills they bring to subsequent visits to orchestra performances. Given that any "future of classical music" will depend on having a strong and supportive base of listeners, we may emerge from tonight's final stage of the current experiment with a new approach to building that listener base, rather than a new approach to forming an orchestra.

San Francisco Talent at Work in New York

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra has been constituted and scheduled to perform in Carnegie Hall tomorrow night. Today James Oestreich filed a post on the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times covering Monday's rehearsal activities. Those who saw all the happy and eager faces on the "Meet the YouTube Symphony Orchestra" YouTube video (linked to Oestreich's Monday post) may wonder, on the basis of Oestreich's account, if they are still happy and eager. They certainly must know by now what a stickler for detail Michael Tilson Thomas is; and he seems to have brought some of his best guns with him from San Francisco, who also do not skimp on the stickling! I have my own nit to pick with Oestreich, though. While it was probably fair to refer to Edwin Outwater as "a Thomas protégé" conductor, working with the percussionists to prepare Lou Harrison's "Canticle No. 3," describing Paulson as only the principal bassoonist of the San Francisco Symphony sort of short-changed his credentials. He is also Music Director of Symphony Parnassus and was therefore as capable as Outwater (if not more so) in leading and working with the winds to prepare movements from Antonín Dvořák's wind serenade. The road to Carnegie Hall seems to be paved with some of the best conducting talent that San Francisco has to offer, and it might be nice if at least one New Yorker showed them all a bit more respect!

The Bush Legacy Endures

When The Wire invoked the metaphor of a "new day" for a radical reformist shift in the power structure of the Baltimore Municipal Government, the ensuing narrative wasted no time in undoing that metaphor. As an assiduous student of the poetic wisdom of such narratives, I have subsequently taken a very jaundiced view of that metaphor, most recently with regard to our State Department (for which, incidentally, I have also appropriated the bowl of shit metaphor from The Wire). However, while the new Administration of Barack Obama may be making positive advances on our country's reputation in the global arena, there remains an Augean pile of dirty laundry left behind by George W. Bush on the domestic front; and our current economic mess is just the stuff at the top of the heap. Buried deep in that pile remains the disgrace of Hurricane Katrina. Not only may that be the blackest blot on the Bush escutcheon (particularly since it involves other members of the family); but also it is a "gift that keeps on giving" (or taking away, as the case may be), even as there are those today still trying to clean up the mess.

One of the more interesting clean-up efforts involves a claim made by six New Orleans homeowners that, in the words of Jon Wiener's recent post to The Notion, one of the blog sites for The Nation, the Army Corps of Engineers "failed to heed environmental laws in building and maintaining the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shortcut for large ships between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans during Katrina." Federal Judge Stanwood Duval will rule on this claim in a trial scheduled to begin on April 20. This will not be an easy case for the Judge; but it will be made more difficult by the possibility that the "well of evidence" has been poisoned. Worse yet, the poisoning can probably be traced back to the influence (if not direct actions) of the Bush Administration.

This is the basic story as Wiener reported it:

Louisiana State University is firing a leading hurricane scientist who was scheduled to testify as an expert witness in a case against the Army Corps of Engineers for their pre-Katrina work in New Orleans. Ivor van Heerden, who had been deputy director of LSU's Hurricane Center, says the school's former president, previously a Bush appointee, had earlier threatened to fire him if he testified.

Tenure exists, we are told, to protect the expression of views that are unpopular with the powerful. This is another case where the person who needed the protection of tenure didn't have it. LSU was able to fire van Heerden because he is an untenured Associate Research Professor.

Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."

When van Heerden was first asked to testify in spring 2007, he said in an interview Sunday with Harry Shearer on KCRW's "Le Show," LSU's then-president, Sean O'Keefe, told plaintiffs' attorneys that if van Heerden testified against the Corps he would be fired. O'Keefe had been appointed to high offices by both Presidents Bush – George W. Bush named him head of NASA in 2001, and George H. W. Bush had named him acting Secretary of the Air Force in 1992.

According to van Heerden, the LSU president said that "nobody from LSU was going to embarrass the Bush administration or upset the major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts."

The second clause in that final quote is the real reminder of the extent to which the legacy of the Bush Administration is still with us. Whether or not this emerges as an embarrassment, the more important victims are those "major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts;" and that is why New Orleans remains stuck in all that mud created by Katrina. The good news, however, is that van Heerden may still get his day in court. Whether or not he is an "expert witness," he can still be called to testify as a "fact witness;" so claims such as those van Heerden published in his book, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why during Hurricane Katrina – the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist, may still be presented as evidentiary "facts" and subjected to cross-examination like any other such evidentiary facts. This trial may thus provide an excellent opportunity for van Heerden to rehearse his presentation, because he is likely to present it again in a second trial, which will decide, as Wiener put it, "a massive class action suit seeking hundreds of millions in damages from the Corps." The people of New Orleans will thus be facing quite a few days in court over the coming months. Let's hope that the decisions turn out in their favor.

Through the Scanner

Following up on my April 4 dispatch, today was the day of my CAT scan based on the placement of the gold markers (which will apparently just stay there, probably lasting longer than I shall). I think this was my first CAT scan (although I had an MRI after I dislocated my shoulder). I was very impressed with how streamlined everything was and how little I had to prepare. Prior to going in, I only had to replace pants and shorts with pajama bottoms. Even the shoes remained until I got on the platform. The scan itself covered such a small area that it did not require being absolutely still for very long. Ironically, the book I had brought for the waiting room was Simon Morrison's The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years; so I found myself with the second movement of his fifth symphony rushing madly through my head during the procedure, almost defying me to do something like beat my foot. Nevertheless, my inner calm won out over this particular obeisance to Joseph Stalin. (It is only Dmitri Shostakovich's fifth symphony that sends me into an uncontrollable fit of giggles.)

What I had either forgotten or did not realize was that things were not over after the scan was completed. The laboratory technician then marked my skin with aiming points for the gold markers using a Sharpie. After that another technician came in to fix a more permanent tattoo at each point. I wonder whether this would be a tattoo parlor experience (such as the one that forced one of Tara's personality changes); but it just involved a lot of ink and a relatively small pin to get the ink under the skin. This particularly technician would count to three before poking me, which I found easier to take than tensing up for the unexpected.

As promised, none of this took any energy out of me. I had no trouble walking home (although I decided to stop for ramen in Japantown). The next stage is for the radiation treatment itself to begin, my first visit will be a week from today. After that I shall find myself with a new daily schedule.

Another Nail in the Coffin of Browsing

I was never a "regular" at the Joseph Patelson Music House in Manhattan, described today by Daniel Wakin in The New York Times as "an 1879 carriage house that sits a baton’s throw across 56th Street from the Carnegie Hall stage door." When I was living in Stamford, Connecticut and spending just about all of my spare time in New York, there were many alternatives to Patelson's for buying sheet music and scores. Most of them were excellently stocked and usually better organized. Every now and then, however, I would check in on the bins of used sheet music near the front door of Patelson's and would usually come away with at least one gem of a discovery. I had plenty of places to go to make a specific purchase, but Patelson's was my first choice when all I wanted to do was browse.

Wakin wrote his piece to mourn the closing of Patelson's, which is due to occur before the end of this month. In this age of e-commerce, I suspect few are surprised; but this particular closing reminded me that it is not only the specialty stores for books and music that are dying but also the physical pleasure of browsing in such shops. Software can make recommendations, and it may even introduce us to useful social networks. However, these are no substitutes for browsing, which is just not a priority among those who deploy and promote e-commerce technology. This is not to deny the value of the technology. I am helpless without it, but only when I have a specific need for a book or recording that cannot wait for some fortuitous encounter with it on a store shelf in the future. As far as browsing goes, my current quarters have so little space for books that I make far fewer purchases and therefore almost never browse any more.

However, browsing also had educational value when I was a student. It was an exercise in discovery, combining keen observation with enduring patience. I suspect I can still go back to the Bibliography in my doctoral thesis and pick out the items that I discovered through browsing. It is hard for me to imagine scholarship without browsing; yet, as just about every phase of education becomes more Web-based, I have to recognize that browsing is liable to vanish from student practices. This may not engender the sort of stupidity that Nicholas Carr had attributed to Google usage, but I suspect that it will lead to a more impoverished student experience. It is hard to anticipate the consequences of such impoverishment, but it is unlikely that they will be beneficial.

The Real Thing Beats the Parody

Last summer I went on a rant over why the efforts of The Drowsy Chaperone to parody the good-old-fashioned Broadway musical had turned out so dismally. Last night, watching the penultimate production of High Spirits, a musical adaptation of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, I realized that a sincere effort to revive one of the old chestnuts can trump just about any contemporary attempt to parody the source. 42nd Street Moon, the company that has devoted itself to such revivals, actually called their production a "staged concert," which certainly made for truth in advertising. There was no room for an orchestra pit in the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco; so all the music was supplied by a pianist and wind player (flute, clarinet, alto sax) at the back of the stage (with the surface of the piano sometimes serving as part of the set). There was no short-changing of costumes; but both sets and properties where clearly products of some ingenious made-do thinking. All the secondary roles were double-cast; and, as might be suspected, there was no overwhelming chorus or dance ensemble.

Truth be told, the musical was not much of a success. On the other hand it was competing with the likes of Hello, Dolly!, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof; and, while the book was faithful enough to Coward's wit to earn his approval, 1964 was a time when such wit was out of fashion. Furthermore, efforts to make the original script a bit more up-to-date now sound even more dated than the original. Nevertheless, this was a musical that honored Coward, rather than parodying him; and that sense of honor shone through in the modestly-produced effort by 42nd Street Moon. I suppose the sincerity of the effort had a lot to do with the energy that all of the performers put into their work, not to mention the channeling of that energy into an overall sense of pace that had been so sorely lacking in the Broadway touring company that brought The Drowsy Chaperone to San Francisco.

Sincerity is probably the secret sauce of 42nd Street Moon. Their mission seems to be to haul out old musicals, most of which have been forgotten (many for what seemed like good reason). With their modest resources, they then serve up these chestnuts for retrospective delectation. I have now seen two of their productions. I can remember nothing about the first other than it having been by Cole Porter with one character clearly played by Jimmy Durante in the original. However, if the details were not memorable, the experience at the time was delightful; and it was easy to recall that delight while experiencing it again last night. If nothing else the 42nd Street Moon repertoire makes for a refreshing complement to the Gilbert and Sullivan canon.

Poetic Wisdom in Practice

One of my ongoing themes on this blog has been the effort to make sense out of just what eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico was trying to communicate when he introduced the concept of "poetic wisdom." For example, when I examined the reductio ad absurdum argument behind the film Citizen Verdict, I wrote that it "stands as an excellent, if unpleasant, example of how 'poetic wisdom' can engender reflection on our own humanity." Most recently such reflection has been engendered by the publication of Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood. This book is basically a transcript of the Massey Lectures, which Atwood delivered over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in November of 2008. This was most likely a project of her own choosing, in which, as John Gray put it in reviewing the book for The New York Review, she examined "the role of ideas of debt in religion, literature, and society." She could thus put aside any pretentions of economic theory, eschewing any abstractions of exchange for more concrete practices covered by those three domains. Gray could thus summarize the book as follows:

Atwood's project is to show how human thought has been deeply shaped by notions of debt. It will be objected that she is merely spinning out an extended metaphor suggesting analogies between debt and noneconomic phenomena that are only vaguely analogous. In fact, she is advancing the contrary and more interesting claim that economic activities involving borrowing and lending are metaphorical extensions of an underlying human sense of indebtedness. Beliefs about debt are not shadows cast by processes of market exchange. They are presupposed throughout much of human activity. Economic life invokes a sense of order in human affairs, widely dispersed throughout society.

Thus, it is not a question of whether or not, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson claimed in their 1980 book, we "live by" metaphors. Rather, poetic wisdom arises from (probably among other factors) an ability to treat a metaphor as a two-way street, rather than as an arrow that points from the literal to the figurative. Put another way, the very concept of debt emerges from the need for a new abstract "literary category" required for making sense of the literal mundanity of those human affairs. Through this reversal of the metaphorical arrow, Atwood reminds us that economics is not an objective mathematical science but a "messy" social science in which there will always arise new complexities in need of sensemaking. The fact that it has taken the current crisis to begin to shake us out of our addiction to objectivity is a sign of just how much we needed that shaking.

Atwood's effort is thus an admirable one, but will it be an effective one? I have been known to joke that poetic justice can only be found in poetry. Atwood has delivered a clear message to those who have been charged with the responsibility of healing our current economic wounds. Will they get that message, or will all their powers of reason shut down at the slightest suggestion that figurative language is coming into play? Stephen Jay Gould used to joke that cognitive scientists interested in whether or not non-human animals exhibited linguistic behavior spent too much time reading other cognitive scientists and not enough time studying animal trainers. The problem is that economists tend to assume that only other economists are worth reading, but that assumption puts those of us who will have to live with their decisions "out of the loop." Atwood tried to bring "the rest of us" into that loop; but she is probably too far removed from the loop herself to succeed in her attempt.

Learning More about Shostakovich

Last week when I wrote about Jannie Lo's piano recital on Examiner.com, I discovered how little I knew about the piano music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Lo had concluded her recital with the last (D minor) of his Opus 87 prelude-and-fugue couplings; and, to my chagrin, I discovered that the only piano music I really knew came from the William Kapell recordings of a few of the Opus 34 preludes. Since those preludes were composed in 1932 and 1933, while Opus 87 was composed in 1950 and 1951, they did not make for particularly good preparatory listening.

Fortunately, I can thank Wikipedia for helping me to broaden my listening experience. Opus 87 has its own Wikipedia entry, which, while being up-front about needing a lot more work, is already endowed with some valuable hyperlinks. One is the earsense Web site, which offers rather thorough analytic material, including an index of the fugue subjects. However, for listening experience (particularly in this time of economic hardship), nothing can beat the free downloads of the complete set of preludes and fugues, recorded from a recital given by Denis Plutalov at Watson Hall of the North Carolina School of the Arts on May 23, 2005. I have only made it through the first 21 of the prelude/fugue pairs; but I have found them all to be capable (even if the volume is a bit low). Each pair has its own mp3 file, except for number 23 (F major), where the prelude and fugue have separate files. I had not previously heard of Plutalov, but I found many of the recorded performances he has made available to be fascinating. Among other selections, I plan to listen to his performance of Ferruccio Busoni's transcription of "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung. First, however, I need to bring my head into greater familiarity with late Shostakovich!

Wagnerian CHUTZPAH

This will not be the first time I have given a Chutzpah of the Week award based on an "Arts Page" story (that happened last July, on the fourth, no less); and, strictly speaking, the basis for this award did not take place this week. Rather, the award is based on a peripheral item in the recently announced schedule for this summer's BBC Promenade Concerts, as reported by Dave Itzkoff on the ArtsBeat blog for The New York Times. It is a reminder that, no matter how depressed we get from our daily "news of fresh disasters" (as Beyond the Fringe put it in the skit about the Second World War), British eccentricity will never fail to raise our spirits. In this case the agents of British eccentricity I have in mind (and therefore the recipients of the Chutzpah of the Week award) are the members of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, specifically for their decision to include a transcription of the "Vorspiel" to the third act of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (known more familiarly as "The Ride of the Valkyries") in their repertoire. This ensemble of six ukuleles and bass guitar (based on the YouTube video included with Itzkoff's post) may well have equaled (or bettered) Elizabeth Poston's arrangements of Tchaikovsky for the Dolmetsch Ensemble of recorders (with additional percussion and organ, the latter performed by Poston herself) for The Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival of 1958. Furthermore, there seem to be at least two vocalists in the group; so we can anticipate that "Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! Heiaha!" has been included in the transcription. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain may never be a serious Grammy contender, but they can take pride in being the first musical performers to receive a Chutzpah of the Week Award!

Organized Crime or Organized Alarmism?

Darren Waters, Technology Editor for the BBC News Web site, released a story this morning on spam and other malware, drawing upon a recent report released by Microsoft and follow-up interviews. The bottom line of the report is that for every thousand "clean" computers in the world, there are 8.6 that are in some way "infected." The report also claims that over 97% of all electronic mail messages may be classified as spam. This provides a sharp contrast with the analysis by Message Labs, which, according to senior analyst Paul Woods, concluded that 81% of electronic mail was spam. Either number is unpleasantly high, providing an excellent object lesson in the sorts of consequences that technology evangelists never seem to have time to consider.

Having often pursued Udi Manber's metaphor that spam detection and spam generation are locked in an "arms race," I have concluded that the best a user can do is keep the computer's software up to date, armed with the latest malware detection and prevention code. In this light one may wonder whether or not the publicizing of the Microsoft report was undertaken in an effort to encourage users to be more conscientious about such matters. Thus, Waters included the following quote from Ed Gibson, chief cyber security advisor at Microsoft:

If you don't update your software you are not just a hazard to yourself, you are hazard to others because you can be part of a botnet [if your computer is hijacked].

This reminded me of a favorite motto from the Sixties:

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

Unfortunately, that message did not survive the Sixties very well. These days people seem to prefer a more warped version:

If you are not part of the solution, you can make the problem so bad that someone else will finally get around to fixing it.

This almost casts malware producers as latter-day Robin Hoods, more interested in exposing vulnerabilities (particularly in Microsoft software) than in highway robbery.

Wearing his Microsoft hat, Gibson does not see it that way. According to Waters, Gibson attributes the high level of spam to "traditional organised crime figures moving away from exploiting software vulnerabilities and 'targeting the weak link that is you and me'." This is the first time I had come across an association of organized crime with malware (although, in the pre-Internet days, I remember an Esquire article suggesting that some of the more notorious phone hackers were finding support for their activities among the criminal element in Las Vegas). It set me to wondering whether or not Microsoft was invoking the Bush Administration's "Global War on Terror" strategy to raise public consciousness (through fear) about malware. At the very least, Gibson should be examining the question of how much money is actually being made through malware and then asking whether, by the standards of organized crime, it counts for more than "chump change." Put another way, if you are a sociopath, you do not need the support of an organized group to exercise your sociopathy on the Internet. The evangelists wax over how the Internet empowers everyone; and, like it or not, "everyone" includes the sociopaths among us!

I agree with Gibson that all computer users should be conscientious about keeping their equipment protected against malware. However, I do not think that Gibson will achieve this by playing the fear card, primarily because the Bush Administration did such a good job of devaluing the public perception of that card. Unfortunately, the only other way to check if users are taking care of their equipment is to monitor that equipment; and I can imagine that most users (probably myself included) would find that dangerously intrusive.

New York Myopia

This morning George Loomis filed a review from Brussels of the current production of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at La Monnaie for the Arts section of the Web site for The New York Times. Never mind that it trails the Financial Times review by Francis Carlin by about one and a half weeks or that it did not make it to the print edition. New Yorkers may want to be informed about opera outside New York, but the information does not have to be timely enough for planning a trip to Belgium! Still, the Times attitude towards Europe does not annoy me as much as its awareness of the rest of the United States. I wish some editor had caught the dismissive tone of the final paragraph of Loomis' dispatch:

Despite the success “Le Grand Macabre” has had in Europe, it generally has languished in America. La Monnaie’s staging is a co-production with the Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona), the English National Opera (London) and the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. It is a pity that an American opera house is not among them.

It may be that Ligeti isn't getting much respect in New York, but San Francisco has a long history of being very receptive to his work. That happens to include Le Grand Macabre, which received first-rate treatment from the San Francisco Opera in the fall of 2004 in a production shared with the Royal Danish Opera under the direction of Kasper Bech Holten with Michael Boder in the pit. (I posted a photograph on my old blog.) Ligeti has never "languished" in the Bay Area; and, if New York has yet to wake up and smell the spices of his Hungarian wit, they should not go around blaming the rest of the country!

Concluding the Beethoven Cycle

Writing about the conclusion of András Schiff's two-year eight-concert cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven on Examiner.com, I endorsed "Schiff's decision to pass on any encore." This was, in fact, the only one of the eight concerts performed without an encore; and it seemed as if Schiff had made scrupulous choices of encore material to facilitate reflection on those sonatas he had just performed in each program. Most recently, this involved following Opus 106 in B-flat major ("Hammerklavier") with Johann Sebastian Bach's BWV 903 "Chromatic" fantasia and fugue in D minor, after which he lightened things up a bit with "Eine kleine Gigue," Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 574 in G major, whose contrapuntal dexterity still made it good company for both Beethoven and Bach. During the enthusiastic and prolonged applause which greeted (as possibly jumped the gun on) the termination of the cycle, I found myself wondering what the encore would be and decided that the most appropriate selection would be the first movement of Opus 2, Number 1. Just as Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen concludes with the gold back where it was in the beginning (even if now formed into a ring), it seemed that the only suitable listening after the final chord of Opus 111 had faded into silence would be a return to how the whole process had begun.

I suppose there is an impish streak to this suggestion; but I think we can ask the question, "What next?," without reducing ourselves to insatiable consumerists. I think about this in the time I spend at the piano. When I find myself putting a lot of time into a piece of music that is definitely beyond the limits of my skills but still within range of my curiosity, I realize that I have to do something to "take it easy" once I accept that I have taken that impossible challenge as far as it will go; but, after a week of such "taking it easy," I find myself thinking about where my curiosity really wants to go next.

On the other hand, where listening is concerned, circumstance seems to have taken care of the what-next question in a timely fashion. Brilliant Classics, that champion of affordable Gesamtwerk collections, has now released their Haydn Edition and my order with Collectors' Choice (my preferred supplier) went into the works a little over a week ago. Consisting of 150 CDs, it will stand behind the 170-CD Mozart collection and the 155-CD Bach collection in terms of "content bulk," so to speak. More important, however, is that Joseph Haydn received the dedication of Beethoven's Opus 2 sonatas. Thus, having now traversed and reflected on the full scope of Beethoven's "piano sonata language" (so to speak), I feel as if I am now in a good position to think about origins; and Haydn offers an excellent point of departure for those thoughts.

I am not sure how the Haydn Edition will be structured; but I suspect that, like the other collections, the structure will not be strictly chronological. Once again, I shall probably invoke the metaphor of scaling a mountain as I work my way through the collection, dispatching posts here as I reach successive "base camps." Fortunately, I have a fair amount of Haydn listening under my belt, going far beyond the usual favorites; but it will be interesting to see the extent to which recent intense listening to Beethoven will influence the way I listen to this new collection when it arrives.

A Reflective Practitioner of Jazz

Most of what I have written about the reflective practice of making or listening to music has drawn upon the classical repertoire, primarily because this repertoire was the source of the data in Donald Schön's field work in this domain. Last night, however, I had the pleasure of listening to a true Jazz Master (authenticated by the NEA), who provided excellent (and stimulating) examples of reflection-in-action with regard to both performance and listening. The Master is Ahmad Jamal; and, as I wrote in my Examiner.com review, he is a composer who, like Ornette Coleman, seems to have latched on to Karlheinz Stockhausen's "moment" style of composition and made it his own. Using this review to think through this hypothesis was great fun, but I still have to be honest about the fact that it was little more than hypothesis.

However, I happened to share this hypothesis with the guys sitting with my in my box in Herbst Theatre. One of them went backstage after the show, asked Jamal if he had been listening to Stockhausen, and reported back to me through electronic mail. His quote of Jamal's reply was:

Yeah, and I been listening to everybody

Jamal then added:

Lately, I've been mostly listening to myself.

I took this as an affirmation of Jamal's fundamentally reflective approach to his practices of both making and listening to music (including his own).

This adds further fuel to my fire that any "theory of listening to music" must be grounded in Schön's principle of reflection-in-action. We can only "elevate ourselves from the sensory experience of hearing to the more cognitive nature of listening," as I wrote on Friday, if we can tap into the reflective nature of what we hear. This is why I often try to identify autobiographical elements in compositions, even those works as abstract as the preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich. Jamal, too, was autobiographical in his decision to perform the fifty-year-old "Poinciana," the work that is probably still most closely associated with his name. However, as I wrote in my review, rather than reviving memories of his fifty-year-old recording, he approached the tune "in a far more deconstructed way." Here is how I explained that point while, at the same time, establishing his connection to Stockhausen's "moment" style:

By assuming that we all remember "how it used to go," he can now extract individual "moments" from the tune, putting each one under a microscope, so to speak, and examining it from a variety of different angles before moving on to another "moment."

Thus, last night's performance was a synthesis of reflective listening and reflective performance. Listening to himself was an important element, but just as important was that he had a good strategy for selecting his listening matter! Perhaps this new insight into Jamal's reflection-in-action will reflect back on my ongoing effort to listen to Coleman's Free Jazz session!

From One Phase to the Next

My last post about my (possible) cancer treatment was entitled "Waiting." I was in a holding pattern prior to preparation for the placement of gold markers required for my CAT scan. The markers were (presumably properly) placed yesterday; and the CAT scan has been scheduled for April 13. This happens to be the day when I plan to cover my first San Francisco State recital for Examiner.com (thanks to an intriguing preview piece by Scott Fogelsong). However, the scan is scheduled for 10 AM; so I doubt that it will impact my alertness for an evening concert.

My anticipation that yesterday's procedure would resemble my prostate biopsy was reinforced by the preparatory information I was given, which basically covered both procedures in a single document. In terms of discomfort, I would say that the marker placement was not quite as bad as the biopsy. For the sake of thoroughness, I should point out that the enema taken a couple of hours earlier was not quite as effective as it was supposed to be, requiring the doctor to go in an finish the job with a cotton swab. That was probably the most unpleasant part, after which the procedure itself pretty much went according to plan. The only thing for which I was not prepared was a urinary leak after it was all over (and, unfortunately, after I had put on my shorts and jeans). A quick run to a bathroom provided some "damage control;" but I found myself preoccupied with tossing those items in the laundry once I got home. (Fortunately, my wife was on hand to drive me home; so I did not worry about walking, as I had originally planned to do.)

The incontinence had a disorienting effect. All I really wanted to do when I got home was lie down and rest. The rest of the day went quietly, followed by a normal dinner and a good night's sleep. Due to a warning against exercise for 24 hours after the procedure, I passed on my morning swim (which seems to be having a withdrawal effect on my mood). Otherwise, things are pretty much back to normal with no further intimations of incontinence (sorry Wordsworth)! This morning Outlook reminded me that I had not done my monthly C drive backup yesterday, but I would say having that as my only concern is a pretty good deal!

Keeping my Faith

Apparently, my new "beat" on Examiner.com has resulted in a new first for me (even in my advanced years): my first comment from an irate composer! Apparently, Steven Gerber did not like my observation that "exposure to Moondog greatly enhanced my own listening experience of [the world premiere of his composition] 'Music in Dark Times'" by the San Francisco Symphony last week. This is hardly the first time I have written a review that rubbed the subject the wrong way; but I found the reaction (as Spock was fond of saying while raising his eyebrow) "fascinating."

Writing about the listening experience itself has been one of my favorite topics on this blog. I continue to occupy myself with the puzzle of how we can all follow the injunction of Igor Stravinsky and elevate ourselves from the sensory experience of hearing to the more cognitive nature of listening. When this involves the experience of an entirely new composition, the puzzle becomes all the more challenging. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to recognize that present listening is always a product of past listening, meaning that, from a cognitive point of view, no new composition ever registers on a "clean slate mind," so to speak. Now I know that there are composers who can go on at great length about significant properties of their works, but I feel that it goes against the cognitive grain to try ever to examine any composition in isolation. Thus, any past listening experience, regardless of genre, that engages the mind during a present listening experience is going to have value, even if the value is one of posing a hypothesis that, upon further reflection, will be soundly refuted.

"Music in Dark Times" consisted of six relatively brief movements. In my own listening experiences, I realize that I have come across few composers whom I would approach (if not admire) as "architects of brevity." I am fascinated by the way in which John Zorn glorifies the short attention span without being judgmental about it either positively or negatively. Yesterday I tried to approach the problem of how we, as listeners, approach the short pieces of Anton Webern's Opus 5. I have also been trying to build up my listening experiences of György Kurtág, whose own influences seem to draw upon a rich appreciation of music history (and it would not surprise me in the least if Moondog was one of his influences). In the field of all those experiences, Moondog happened to rise to the top while I was listening to "Music in Dark Times;" and, if it became the seed for the sensemaking taking place as I listened to the music, then so much the better.

Nevertheless, I can see at least one way in which such an approach could irritate a composer. The basic premise is that, once a composition is presented to an audience, it no longer "belongs" to the composer. Each of us has a unique way of listening, and there will never be any guarantee that any listener will hear a composition the way the composer intended it to be heard. That is part of what makes all of us human, the subjective nature of cognitive interpretation of sensory impressions. The composition leaves the objective and subjective worlds of the composer's working environment and enters the social world, where it becomes part of a vast network of listeners and listenings, very much in the spirit of the social networks that Randall Collins postulated and investigated in The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. From such a point of view, it would seem natural for any composer to experience some sort of past-partum depression with such a departure; but, hopefully, at some point the composer can take pleasure in being the parent of a child that has now left the womb, so to speak.

This brings me to another aspect of Gerber's criticism. He chose to end his argument with the following proposition:

Critics really should study scores before writing reviews.

This statement seems to conflate criticism with music theory; and, while there are any number of occasions in which an understanding of music theory can inform the critic's task, the critic is writing for an audience of listeners (or would-be listeners), rather than a symposium of music theorists. There have been plenty of times when I have hauled out scores to test a particular hypothesis about listening that I have been trying to work. When the Internet provides me with scores that I do not already have in my collection, I may draw upon those resources, just as I currently do when consulting books; but, when I am just beginning to speculate about a hypothesis, I am not always going to go off on a data-gathering expedition, particularly when, as is the case in what I write for Examiner.com (as opposed to this blog), I feel a need to get my position expressed "with all deliberate speed." Sometimes we just have to play with the cards that have been dealt to us. If that leaves us with some loose ends, then we are all the better if we remember that they still need to be investigated in the future!

The CHUTZPAH to Rage Against the Machine

It is part of the "nature of the beast" that Chutzpah of the Week awards tend to go to high-profile individuals in high-profile situations. Indeed, it is often that elevated status that boosts the merely remarkable to echt chutzpah (if the spirit of Yiddish will permit such a German incursion)! However, every now and then something will happen in the backyard (or, in this case, front yard) of an ordinary citizen; and he rises to the occasion with both the spirit and the action of chutzpah that could be a model for us all.

Paul Jacobs is such an ordinary citizen. He lives in the village of Broughton, a place unknown to most of us (with the possible exception of seriously thorough scholars of the Doomsday Book, in which it is recorded). You might say that his chutzpah would put Broughton on the map, were it not for the fact that his actions were intended to keep his little village off the map. At the very least it brought him to the attention of Andy Dolan, a reporter for the Daily Mail; and Dolan's story is now available on the Mail Online Web site.

It turns out that Broughton has a strong sense of community, and their community sentiment takes a rather angry view of Google Street View. As Dolan put it, they fear that "the images could be used by burglars to scout for suitable homes to raid;" and they were furious at the prospect of Google collecting such images and making them so easily available to just about anybody. The result was an impromptu protest against one of the camera-equipped cars Google had dispatched to collect such images. This is where Jacobs enters the story, according to Dolan:

Villager Paul Jacobs told how the impromptu protest unfolded on Wednesday when he spotted the car - which was unmarked but featured the tell-tale 360 degree-rotating camera fixed atop a pole on its roof - cruising slowly down his lane in the Buckinghamshire village.

He dashed outside, confronted the driver and told him that he was not allowed to continue before alerting police.

Mr Jacobs, 43, then knocked on his neighbour's doors and a crowd of mutinous residents surrounded the black Opal Astra forcing it to make a U-turn and quickly leave.

Furthermore, Dolan included a statement from the Thames Valley Police indicating that one of the protesters had the good citizenship sense to let them know what was happening:

A squad car was sent to Broughton at 10.20am on Wednesday to reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor.

A member of the public had called us to report that he, along with a number of others, were standing in the middle of the road preventing the car from moving forwards and taking photographs.

They felt his presence was an intrusion of their privacy. When police arrived at the scene, the car had moved on.

Here is a case where "nothing to see here" is a happy ending to what could have been a crime scene!

Needless to say, Google holds to the premise that they were doing nothing illegal. Their official reply, however, has its own ring of chutzpah to it:

Householders are entitled to request their property is removed from the site but only after the picture has appeared.

In other words Google recognizes your right to close your barn door but only after the horse has been stolen! That is enough to make Google a contender for this week's chutzpah award.

Nevertheless, I always prefer the positive connotation to the negative. Acting as a synthesis of the shepherd David and his first-namesake Paul Revere, Jacobs rallied his neighbors to stand up to an intrusion by the Goliath Google; and the village prevailed. As I said, this is chutzpah that can serve as a model for the rest of us; and I hand Jacobs his Chutzpah of the Week award with sincere delight.

Impatient Evaluation

From the time of his Inauguration, I have been fretting over whether or not our obsession with "Internet speed" would corrupt a fair assessment of Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. Even without the benefit of an Internet platform, Elizabeth Drew was there in the March 26 issue of The New York Review with an analysis of Obama's first thirty days, apparently as a reflection of our impatience to decide whether we made the right decision on Election Day (regardless of the choice we made in the privacy of our voting booth). While I appreciated much of what Drew had to say (and wrote as much), I was still concerned with this latest phase of our Internet-fomented culture of instant gratification.

This sense of urgency seems to have infected both the BBC and The New York Times in a big way. The BBC NEWS Web site has enlisted a team of correspondents, most of them based in the United States and all with substantial experience on this side of the pond, to maintain a "100 days diary," which they are posting on their site in ten-day installments. This is not strictly a day-by-day affair, since the most recent entry was posted on Monday (which happens to be Day 70, for those obsessed with keeping the count accurate). (Apparently, the diary is not following the President to London.)

For its part The New York Times has initiated a 100 Days Blog, which they introduced to their readers as follows:

As Barack Obama readies to take the office of president, which of his predecessors offers the best model for getting off on the right foot? The 100 Days blog seeks to answer just that question during Mr. Obama's first three months in office. Five presidential biographers will discuss the early days of five 20th-century presidents – Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – shedding new light on the struggles faced by those men entering the Oval Office and comparing their experiences with those Mr. Obama will face in his first 100 days.

Given my "conviction that history can always inform how we think about and act in the present," I appreciate this strategy and have the greatest respect for the team that the Times assembled. Nevertheless, even the best of historians run the risk that their areas of specialty may serve as blinders to some factors while focusing attention on others. This may have been the case with yesterday's post by Robert Dallek, "Can Obama Be a Majority of One?," based on his analysis of Lyndon Johnson. Here is the conclusion Dallek draws about Obama from this point of view:

Unlike L.B.J., he lacks long-time ties to Congressional leaders, which may be one reason his stimulus plan barely made it out of the Senate and many Democrats, including Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, are balking at the president’s proposed budget. In addition, the sort of mutual back-scratching Johnson relied on is out of vogue. Trading pork-barrel grants for Congressional votes is no longer seen as acceptable politics but as unsavory opportunism. Also, Mr. Obama has far thinner majorities than Johnson had and fewer moderate Republicans to woo. Finally, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and deficits running as far into the future as the eye can see are problems that did not burden Johnson’s reach for a Great Society.

These are all good points, but they miss out on one factor that may trump all others in trying to understand the strained relationship between Obama and the Congress. This is what I recently called the "Ghost of Chutzpah Past," the two negative Chutzpah of the Week awards he received for neglecting his "day job" in the Senate while campaigning for the Presidency. I would sympathize with any member of Congress (particularly the influential ones) who would read this as a connotation that Obama never viewed the Congress as anything more than a stepping stone to the White House. Of course he was hardly the first President to follow this path; but unlike previous Presidents, he never really spent enough time in either House of Congress to build up very much "social capital." Now this may just be an affirmation of Robert Putnam's thesis regarding the "devaluation" of social capital in contemporary American society. However, whatever the social theorists may propose, our Congress is very proud of its tradition; and Obama might do well to dig out the obscure text of the fourth act of Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift and reword it to read, "no fiend in hell can match the fury of a disappointed legislator." He might also consider that every initiative he takes to bring the White House closer to the general public (such as his recent Internet-facilitated "alternative" press conference) is likely to be taken as an affront by those who feel that, following the principles of our Constitution, they were elected to represent specific sectors of that general public. They might see the Constitutional principles of both representative government and separation of powers as being threatened by the Obama Administration's approach to governance. Such a state of affairs would be no healthier than that of past Administration attempts to impose an "Imperial Presidency."

There, perhaps, is where the problem resides with this myopic focus on these first 100 days. So far Dallek is the only historian to have raised the issue of past Imperial Presidencies, and his advocacy of Johnson neglects Johnson's own capacity for imperialist tendencies. Evaluation needs to take a broader view, but that broader view requires more data points from the present to weigh against all the data points handed down by history. The 100-day window may be an arbitrary one; but, at the very least, we should see just how many sample points have accumulated at its termination before hauling out all of our evaluative machinery. Obama himself keeps trying to tell us not to expect immediate change. It would be nice if the press respected this advice, even if the general public is too infantile to appreciate its value.

Schoenberg's Poetry

In his Master Class last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Robert Mann coached three of the best string students (all of whom I have heard in many enjoyable recitals) in the opening sections of Arnold Schoenberg's Opus 45 string trio. He began his comments with the observation that, while there are many capable performances of Schoenberg's music that are true to the notation, most of them fail to find the music behind that notation, so to speak (my phrase, not Mann's). He raised this point with the anecdote that Schoenberg had heard him perform his string quartets with his colleagues in the Julliard Quartet. While all the Quartet members asked Schoenberg to be as harsh in his criticism of their performance as possible, Schoenberg chose not to do so, instead expressing mild satisfaction.

Although Mann did not make this point directly, I wonder whether episodes like this one (if not this particular one) were behind that Schoenberg remark I have been recently invoking:

My music is not modern; it's just badly played.

Mann knew that the music was there in Schoenberg's notation or, to put it another way, that the notation reflected the music Schoenberg heard in his head. However, something impeded the Julliard Quartet from reflecting that music back out of the notation; and it seemed is if Mann's personal memory of that struggle motivated his approach to coaching this student trio. Unfortunately, it was clear that the coaching was also a struggle, except that this time the struggle involved what I have called "impediments to effective description," which, as I observed, are "dangerous hazards." Sometimes the challenges come at us from all sides, whether they involve structure (with or without Schoenberg's concept of "structural function"), sonority, the pace of the temporal flow (or "journey"), or even the slightest of rhetorical gestures; and we get tangled up in our communicative actions while trying to come to grips with all of these factors.

I thus found myself as interested in Mann's approach to coaching a performance of Schoenberg as I was in Schoenberg's music itself. I was reminded of Donald Schön's account of a master class over the first two sections of Franz Schubert's Opus 15 "Wanderer Fantasy," which he ultimately characterized as "multimedia." Mann seemed willing to draw upon any communication channel available, making him as much a performer as the students. One thing that struck me particularly, however, was his getting beyond the pitches to the phrasing of the rhythms. This reminded me of an essay that Virgil Thomson had written about John Cage for the April 23, 1970 issue of The New York Review, in which he remarked:

What the Schoenberg school actually used as a substitute for structure was the evocation of certain kinds of emotional drama familiar to them from the Romantic masters. This is why their music, though radical in its interval relations, is on the inside just like good old Vienna.

It struck me that, since Schoenberg had rewritten the rule book on interval relations, so to speak, the key to his evocative power lay in his rhythms; and those rhythms lie at the heart of our associations with "good old Vienna." (Can you think of Vienna without thinking of waltzes?)

Following this path I realized that one might approach Schoenberg's rhythms the way one approaches the rhythms of poetry. This is far from an original idea. I had encountered it in The Rhythmic Structure of Music by Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, in which they tried to reduce all rhythmic structure to the poetic feet of classical meter:

1. iamb ˘ ¯
2. anapest ˘ ˘ ¯
3. trochee ¯ ˘
4. dactyl ¯ ˘ ˘
5. amphibrach ˘ ¯ ˘

Unfortunately, Cooper and Meyer quickly immersed themselves in note-by-note classifications of short (˘) and long (¯) syllables, thus losing sight of vaguer qualities, such as the "flow" of these rhythmic patterns, which, like the flow of the Danube itself, had come to capture the essence of "good old Vienna."

Schoenberg had travelled quite a distance from "good old Vienna" by the time he wrote this trio. In fact he was living in Los Angeles; and the trio was intended as a chronicle (which he actually called "a humorous representation") of his experience with a severe heart attack. Nevertheless, that flow of rhythmic patterns (perhaps including that of the heart itself, even when going into and coming out of cardiac arrest) may still provide the key to how we communicate what is going on in this trio and how we, as listeners, can join with the performers in the question to find that music behind the notation.