The Excitement Factor (previously August, 2008)

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

From Creator to Listener

Since I was born in 1946, roughly the first 54 years of my life took place during the second half of the twentieth century. Much of my time during that period was devoted to making music in one way or another. For the most part this involved playing clarinet and alto saxophone in various ensembles and singing in others (beginning as a second tenor and dropping into baritone as I grew older). I first began to venture into improvising after my parents bought a piano and I was never particularly interested in what I was given for piano lessons. It was only towards the end of my high school years that I encountered a community orchestra in which I played first clarinet, whose conductor encouraged my improvisation efforts, many of which then involved my working with the other clarinetist in the ensemble playing piano, rather than clarinet.

It was only after I began my graduate studies in mathematics (which eventually led to an early doctoral dissertation in computer science) that I shifted my attempts at creativity from musical instruments to tape recorders. My mentor was the composer Ezra Sims, who had no significant academic credentials. I met him as a result of the fact that I was spending more time reviewing dance performances than listening to (or trying to create) music. It was through Sims that I first worked up both the discipline and the competence to create something worthy of the attention of others. My efforts attracted the attention of choreographer Cliff Keuter, whom I then joined on a trip to Tel Aviv, when I created a tape composition for a piece that he created for the Bat-Dor Dance Company entitled “Fall Gently on Thy Head.” At that time I had just finished writing my doctoral dissertation and was able to “take a break” while it was being typed prior to my giving my defense.

After that, computer science pretty much put any efforts in music into the background. My “professional life” began at the Technion in Haifa (which I had visited during my Bat-Dor gig), followed by a lengthier Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, I made the move into research laboratory appointments, first in the private sector with General Research Corporation in Santa Barbara, followed by Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut (involving several engaging business trips to Europe), and then at the Information Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California, in Marina del Rey. After that, I joined the “Xerox family,” first at the newly-formed “outpost” for Fuji Xerox in Palo Alto and then at the better-known PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). During that entire span, I managed to inject a moderate number of publications in music theory among the more “professional” papers that I had published.

Nevertheless, my writing about music had more to do with “theory” than with “practice.” It was only after my retirement that I had both the time and the resources to satisfying my appetite for concerts and recitals. Indeed, once my wife and I moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco, we found ourselves living within a matter of a view blocks from the major Civic Center venues for performances. My own “turning point” took place in the spring of 2007 after a San Francisco Symphony performance of Finnish music, which I had attended one afternoon with a former PARC colleague. After reading Joshua Kosman’s column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I could not resist the urge to document an “alternative opinion,” which showed up on this site on April 1, 2007.

Umberto Eco (from a Tourist With a Typewriter Web page)

As Umberto Eco wrote about The Name of the Rose, he wrote the novel because “I wanted to kill a monk.” He then proceeded from that declaration to liken killing a monk to eating potato chips. Drawing upon a familiar advertising phrase, he observed, “You can’t kill just one.” So it was that responding to an opinion about the performance of music in the Chronicle turned out to be something I could not do only once. Since that time, the only thing that has changed is that I no longer write “responses.” For the most part, I experience a performance at the same time as my fellow critics; and I make it a point to document my own opinions before taking the time to read any others.

This April will mark the eighteenth anniversary of my first serious effort. (Eighteen happens to be a lucky number in Judaism, but atheists do not have lucky numbers!) In retrospect, I feel that I have enjoyed more satisfaction over that period than I did from any one my “professional” undertakings. Mind you, it was as a “professional” that I was able to create a “financial cushion” that would support the “retirement gig” that I created for myself; and, while I was working at each of those sites, the assets prevailed over the liabilities. Now, however, the only liability is sitting through a performance and feeling that I had rather be somewhere else; and, fortunately, those occasions have turned out to be pretty rare!

Thom Blum’s New Album of “Soundworks”

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)

A little over a month ago, Thom Blum released his latest album through Bandcamp. House Music is a relatively modest offering of six short compositions. He calls these “soundworks.” However, from a historical point of view, this involves an approach to recorded sounds that emerged from the compositional practices of Pierre Schaeffer in the early Forties. Schaeffer himself described the results of his efforts as musique concrète.

I should note, as an aside, that, through my informal studies with the composer Ezra Sims, I devoted most of my non-thesis-based time to creating tape recordings of such works. My most successful results were for modern dance works created by Cliff Keuter, and one of them even resulted in my traveling to Israel. Keuter had been commissioned to create a new work for the Bat-Dor Dance Company, and this was his second creation for which I provided the music.

Both of those pieces were roughly twenty minutes in duration. The longest track on House Music, on the other hand, is slightly over ten minutes. The other five tracks may best be described as musical vignettes. Presumably, all six of the compositions involved working with everyday sounds in the composer’s house.

He was particularly interested in the drone he could create based on the sound of his steam-heat radiator. (My own “first contact” with the genre was the result of my setting up a microphone while my brother and I cleaned the dishes after a Thanksgiving dinner. Many years later I would discover that Paul Lansky had done something similar for a piece called “Table’s Clear.”)

From a personal point of view, I have to say that I prefer Blum’s brevity to the lengthier undertakings of Lansky’s efforts and my own. There is something admirable in the ability to create an impression and then let it pass after it has been apprehended. It has been quite some time since I have revisited any of my early recordings; but, after appreciating Blum’s rhetoric, I fear that I might now be embarrassed by them!

The Naxos Roy Harris Project

Back in June of 2002, Naxos launched a projected cycle of recordings to account for the thirteen symphonies composed by Roy Harris, which would be released under their American Classics rubric. I had not given this twentieth-century American composer much thought for some time. However, I am currently reading those chapters from Virgil Thomson’s American Music Since 1910 that were included in the second Library of America collection of his writings, edited (like the first) by Tim Page. In the chapter entitled “Looking Backward,” Thomson cited Harris’ “eloquent Third Symphony.”

Back in my student days there seemed to be a general consensus that this symphony was a veritable icon of twentieth-century music. My own composition teacher, Ezra Sims, swore by it; and I treasured my Desto vinyl album of a performance by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Hendel. Sadly, that album never seemed to migrate to the CD medium; so, when I gave up all my vinyls due to lack of space in my current San Francisco condominium, I pretty much lost touch with the symphony. In the years since settling in San Francisco, I was never reminded in any way about that symphony or, for that matter, any other Harris composition. It took Thomson to shake that particular tree.

So it was that I discovered the Naxos project. One might have guessed that the cycle would begin with Harris’ third symphony. However, it did not appear until the second album was released in March of 2006. On that album it was coupled with the fourth, given the title “Folksong Symphony.” True to that name, the music was scored for orchestra and chorus, meaning that, in five of the seven movements, the songs were actually sung. There were also two instrumental interludes providing what were called “dance tunes.”

The performers on this album consisted of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus. They were conducted by Marin Alsop. The fourth symphony reflects back on a time when folk singing was more popular, but there were a generous number of imaginative twists in Harris’ arrangements. As a result, the fourth symphony left the listener with a deeper impression than was registered by the third. To the best of my recollections, Hendel’s reading of this symphony took the orchestral genre and endowed it with just the right balance of grit and moxie, neither of which established much of a presence in Alsop’s reading. This should not surprise anyone with a sense of history. After completing a Master’s degree in violin at Juilliard in 1978, Alsop entered a world that had definitely moved beyond Thomson’s mindset.

The first album, on the other hand, came across as rather remote from the enthusiastic Americana of the fourth symphony. Theodore Kuchar conducted the Ukraine National Symphony Orchestra in performances of the seventh and ninth symphonies, separated by a meditative interlude entitled “Epilogue to Profiles in Courage - J.F.K.” The three movements of the ninth symphony are named after phrases excerpted from the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. The seventh, on the other hand, is another one-movement symphony. Kuchar was born in New York City, less than seven years younger than Alsop. He is of Ukrainian descent, which explains his having become Principal Guest Conductor of that Ukrainian ensemble. Like Alsop, however, his mindset is too detached from the spirit behind Harris’ music.

In January of 2010 Alsop made her second Harris recording for Naxos, this time with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The major offering on this album was the sixth symphony, entitled “Gettysburg.” It began with a bucolic portrait of this Pennsylvania borough before launching into an intense account of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The symphony then advances to the famous address delivered by Abraham Lincoln, concluding with a movement entitled “Affirmation,” presumably acknowledging “lessons learned” from the Civil War and Lincoln’s address. Thematically, the symphony emerged from a short piece entitled “Acceleration,” which concludes the album. However, it is preceded by Harris’ fifth symphony, which was composed during World War II.

As of this writing, Naxos has not yet accounted for any more of Harris’ symphonies. One could be forgiven for assuming that none of the recordings made much of a splash. Given that Alsop never seemed to warm up to Harris’ spirit, however out of fashion that spirit may be, one can appreciate why Naxos has not been more proactive in advancing their project. Meanwhile, in September of 2010 Naxos released an American Classics release of Geoffrey Burleson playing Harris’ complete piano music. Much of the content was inspired by Harris’ wife Johana. Burleson brings just the right touch to music that is highly affectionate without taking itself too seriously. Those curious about this composer’s music may find more satisfaction in the brevity of his piano compositions than in any of the more “inflated” orchestral offerings.

Biddulph’s Tertis Survey has Better Choices

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

It is perhaps somewhat ironic that, after a considerable “famine of neglect” of the viola, Biddulph Recordings should release two Critics’ Choices for Viola collections on the same day (October 14) last year. The three-CD collection devoted to William Primrose was discussed on this site two days ago. However, while Primrose came to be fairly well-known thanks to his presence on many RCA albums, the English violist Lionel Tertis tends to be familiar to other violists and not many others. Thus, at the very least, the release of Lionel Tertis: Critics’ Choices for Viola provides one path toward making this violist better known among the current crop of music lovers.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that this release drew my attention specifically because I already knew about Tertis. I first became aware of him in the early Seventies, when my composition teacher, Ezra Sims, had me listen to his recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 364 sinfonia concertante in E-flat major. I must confess that, at that time, I had not yet honed the necessary skills for really listening to Mozart; but Sims’ believed almost religiously that this was the only album of K. 364 worthy of attention.

Thus, while I had been more than a little skeptical of the “critics’ choices” made for the Primrose collection, I was eager to listen to the 1933 recording of K. 364 with what I felt was a better-informed “mind behind the ears.” This was the final selection on the three CDs in the Biddulph release, but it made the journey through the entire collection a trip well worth taking. Tertis was joined by violinist Albert Sammons and led by conductor Hamilton Harty on the podium of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO).

(I was a bit perplexed by the orchestra. Harty was best known for conducting the Hallé Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, while the LPO was a much newer ensemble set up by Thomas Beecham and the young Malcolm Sargent. However, the recording of K. 364 has enjoyed several releases, all of which seem to credit the LPO as the ensemble.)

To be fair, I should confess that I enjoy the recording that Primrose made for RCA with Jascha Heifetz and the RCA Symphony Orchestra conducted by Izler Solomon. Furthermore, the LPO performance may raise some eyebrows among the congregation of the “historically informed.” As Tully Potter observes in the booklet for the Biddulph release, “Purists need to be warned that Tertis jettisons Mozart’s cadenzas and in the first movement substitutes one based on a concoction by Joseph Hellmesberger the Elder. He also make other emendations.” Given the liberties that Mozart is said to have taken in the cadenzas for his own keyboard concertos, my guess is that, had his ghost been present at this recording session, it probably would have sided with Hellmesberger, rather than those “purists!”

Over the course of the entire Biddulph collection, however, what seems most interesting is how many of the selections involve the viola playing music originally written for either violin or cello. The latter is more understandable, since the viola strings are tuned to the same pitches as those of the cello, only an octave higher. Thus it is no surprise to find violists playing the suites that Johann Sebastian Bach composed for solo cello, since the demands on fingering and bowing are basically the same for both instruments.

Nevertheless, there is nothing “out of place” in the sonorities one experiences when Tertis’ takes on the cello lines for the two significant piano trios in the collection, Franz Schubert’s first (D. 898) in B-flat major and Felix Mendelssohn’s second (Opus 66) in C minor. Sammons is again the violinist, joined this time by pianists Ethel Hobday for the Schubert and William Murdoch (no connection to the fictional Toronto detective) for the Mendelssohn. On the other hand Tertis rises to a higher challenge in taking on Edvard Grieg’s Opus 45 (third) violin sonata in C minor, but his performance is consistently convincing. The same can be said for Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 21 violin sonata in C-sharp minor and Frederick Delius’ second violin sonata. Only for that last sonata did Tertis have to prepare his own arrangements, rather than simply reading from the violin part.

As in the Primrose collection, there are a generous number of shorter selections, most of which probably served as encore pieces. However, it is in the multi-movement offerings that the attentive listener can best appreciate Tertis’ musicianship. There are other recordings available, including several released by Biddulph. Nevertheless, this new Critics’ Choice collection probably provides the best approach to getting to know the significance of this twentieth-century violist.

Ezra Sims Discusses his Approach to Microtonality

January 30, 2015 saw the death of composer Ezra Sims only a few weeks after his 87th birthday. Sims’ Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the pioneers in the field of microtonal composition.” His earliest venues into this domain involved dividing the semitone into either two or three equal parts.

When I first met him I was working on EUTERPE, a parallel-processing programming language for representing and performing music with up to six voices in counterpoint based on ideas proposed to me by my thesis advisor Marvin Minsky. When I invited Sims to use this system, he asked about whether I could accommodate his divisions of the semitone. With an appreciation for the lowest common denominator, I told him that I could divide the semitone into six steps, making for an equal-tempered octave with 72 distinct pitches. That division of the octave became the basis for Sims’ subsequent work.

This past week Frog Peak Music, the publisher of Sims’ music, released an anthology of papers Sims had written discussing his approaches to microtonality. The collection was edited by Johanne Heraty under the title How Long Should a Man’s Legs Be? I should observe by way of a disclaimer that both EUTERPE and I show up among the papers that Heraty collected for this publication, so I cannot approach this book with the objectivity that I bring to other books that I discuss.

This is not the first time that I have discussed Sims’ subdivision of the octave on this site. The last time was in July of 2017, when my head was full of thoughts about just intonation and the impact of integer ratios on both composing and listening. Sims’ approach could be described as “just intonation on steroids.” Rather than confine himself to the intervals defined in the harmonic series by the third and fifth overtones (perfect fifth and major third, respectively), Sims wished to explore the more remote overtones. Dividing the semitone into six micro-intervals (and inventing accidentals to represent those subdivisions introduced pitches that more closely approximated a larger number of those overtones.

Where Sims was concerned that involved experimenting with the use of the seventh and eleventh overtones. Those experiments were not matters of mathematical abstraction. Sims had become acquainted with vocal styles that “pull away” from equal-tempered intervals. He conjectured that they were “pulling” in the direction of natural overtones, so to speak; and his efforts as a composer allowed him to explore that conjecture. As a result, most of this book involves discussing both the conjectures and where they led him, often with extended analyses of passages from his own scores.

I have to say that I was a bit amused to read that the thirteenth harmonic was the first interval he felt he wanted to avoid. It is, indeed, a somewhat disturbing sound. However, it is familiar at least to those who know Benjamin Britten’s Opus 31 serenade, where that natural harmonic is inserted into the opening horn solo. Nevertheless, I would probably agree with Sims that, while the thirteenth harmonic is good for “shock value,” it may not have a place in efforts to explore harmony and counterpoint among the upper harmonics! (On the other hand, back in the distant past, the tritone was declared to be the Devil’s Interval!)

The only disadvantage of this book is that it is text-only. Fortunately, recordings are available of several of the compositions that are discussed over the course of Sims’ essays. I have to confess that it took a while for my ears to adjust to Sims’ approaches to microtonality, particularly where melody is concerned. The ear may accommodate chords based on natural harmonics; but melodic lines always run the risk of devolving into what one of my teachers liked to call “slimy chromaticism.” Sims tried to avoid that kind of chromaticism by developing his own diatonic scale with limited chromatics inserted between the diatonic pitches. (An analysis of that scale worked its way into one of the chapters in my doctoral thesis.)

Given that I received my doctorate in September of 1971, this collection awakened many fond memories. However, that last sentence should make it clear that my ears have been exposed to Sims’ compositional techniques for roughly half a century. I doubt that many readers can enjoy such extensive experience. Thus, I would personally recommend acquiring some familiarity with recorded performances of Sims’ music before turning to what he chose to write about that music. Such a reader will be better equipped with points of reference when Sims goes into the details of what he did and why he did it.

On Listening to Integer Ratios

Like just about everyone of my generation in the United States and Europe, I grew up thinking that music was made from the twelve pitches in the chromatic scale best known through the white and black keys on a conventional piano keyboard. Thus, when, for my senior thesis, I implemented software that could play music in six independent voices, tuning was simply a matter of representing the frequency of the lowest possible note and then doing successive multiplications by the twelfth root of two for all of the other notes. (To be fair, this was a time when representation of irrational numbers required so-called “floating point” representation, which was not particularly precise. Thus, what I really did was compute the twelve pitches of a single octave and then multiply those numbers by two over and over to account for the higher octaves.)

My advisor, Marvin Minsky, then pointed out that I could augment this representation with enough of the constructs of a programming language to achieve Turing completeness. In other words I would have a programming language as powerful as any other programming language that had these extra “instructions” that sounded notes at given times for given durations. The question of how expressive that language could be from a musical point of view, rather than a computational one, became the basis for my doctoral research, conducted, again, under Minsky’s supervision. (In some ways this could be seen as a predecessor of MIDI, but Minsky was never one to get into battles over prior art!)

However, if I was going to study musical expressiveness, I knew that I could not base my research on my own feeble efforts as a composer. Fortunately, I came to know the composer Ezra Sims, who initially did not want to have anything to do with my ideas. This was because he had been composing with both quarter tones and third tones and basically wanted nothing to do with the traditional chromatic scale.

My response came immediately: What if I divided the semitone into six equal subintervals? Three of them would make a quarter tone and two of them would make a third tone. This was no big deal for my software. 72 successive multiplications of the 72nd root of two was no more difficult than twelve multiplications by the twelfth root of two. Furthermore, in the programming language itself, the “letters” of the pitches translated into integers; and the accidentals involved addition or subtraction. All that was necessary was an additional set of symbols to handle different sizes of additions and subtractions.

I quickly discovered that Sims’ interest in these microtones arose from his desire to achieve closer approximations to the pitches in the natural overtone series. With that objective in mind, I started doing some calculations of my own. If the octave was divided into 72 equal parts, how close could one get to the integer ratios of those overtones? Where the perfect fifth was concerned (the 3:2 ratio), the answer was, “Very close indeed” (within two cents). (A cent is the ratio of the 1200th root of two, meaning that 100 cents is the interval of a semitone, hence the name.)

Furthermore, the actual note was the same as the one on the conventional piano keyboard dividing the octave into only twelve equal parts. Where the major third (the 5:4 ratio) is concerned, however, the difference is 13.7 cents, meaning that you get a better approximation by knocking down the third step of the “white key” major scale by just one of those intervals defined by the 72nd root of two. As you then ascend to the higher overtones, things just get worse.

There have been, of course, composers that deliberately exploited how worse they got. My favorite example is in the horn solo that begins and concludes Benjamin Britten’s Opus 31 serenade, which was written to be played on a “natural” instrument (i.e. without valves). There are a lot of perfect fifths from the tonic to the dominant (as is so often the case in horn music); but, near the end of the solo, the fifth is approached from above by a note that is disturbingly different from either a semitone or a whole tone. That is because it is the thirteenth harmonic.

(The last time the San Francisco Symphony played this piece, one of my colleagues wanted to know why Robert Ward was having trouble with his solo. I replied, “He wasn’t having trouble. He was playing it the way Britten wanted!”)

Sims’ influence on my interest in the more remote overtones came back to me recently while I have been reading the new biography of Lou Harrison, Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell. I became more aware of Harrison’s own interest in just intonation tuning systems, in which all intervals are defined by integer ratios. I had known about this work ever since I had added the Etcetera Records release of Harrison’s music for guitar and percussion, which came out in 1990. (This album was a valuable resource for keeping me connected to my personal tastes in music during my years doing multimedia research in Singapore.)

The album indicated that guitarist John Schneider was playing an instrument called the “Well-Tempered Guitar.” It offered the advantage of interchangeable fingerboards invented by Tom Stone. One could thus design and use fret systems for different approaches to tuning. The booklet illustrated two of these fret systems, one for an approach to just intonation that Harrison had been exploring and another for “Pythagorean” tuning (just intonation in which all ratios involve only two and three).

Long after my return from Singapore, in 2001, the Other Minds festival commissioned a new guitar piece from Harrison. The composer was looking for an instrument that would have stronger sonorities than the guitars for which he had previously written pieces. The result was a new approach to the design of a metal-body tricone resonator guitar that become known as the National Steel guitar. The work that Harrison wrote was “Scenes from Nek Chand,” which would turn out to be his final composition. When Schneider released a recording on Mode collecting Harrison’s five suites for guitar, he was using both the well-tempered guitar of his Etcetera recording and the more recent National Steel instrument.

Since that time I have discovered that I have been putting a generous amount of time into listening to these alternative tunings, not to mention exploring the mathematics behind the interval ratios. I was reminded of both scientific and anecdotal evidence about listening. On the scientific side there is a phenomenon known as “categorical perception.” This is the tendency of mind to classify a pitch according to a familiar frame of reference (such as an equal-tempered piano), even if the pitch differs by some significant amount. (How much is “significant” is argued among those interested in this theory with great vigor.) I tend to believe that this is a phenomenon that does, indeed, work; but it only works until it doesn’t! For example, when Britten gradually brings in higher harmonics in his Opus 31, we tend to hear them as “piano” pitches until the thirteenth harmonic confronts us as something that “just does not fit.”

In contrast when I went to Israel for my first teaching job in 1971, I had with me the Columbia recording of the music of Harry Partch. Like Harrison, Partch had a great interest in just intonation; and he had designed his own scale system to accommodate it. I remember playing that recording for the wife of one of my colleagues, who had extensive training as a musician; and she just couldn’t take it. It was as if Partch’s music was an affront to all of the ear training skills that she had honed so well!

Where Harrison’s music is concerned, I find that my own listening comes down closer to the categorical perception side of these two extreme approaches. One reason for this may be that, at least where his guitar music is concerned, Harrison is more interested in melody than in harmony. (If you want to experience the impact of his tuning systems on harmony, his works for American Gamelan make stronger cases. In those performances one can experience the vibrancy of intervals that reveal their “ancestry” in the harmonic series.)

Nevertheless, I would not dismiss all this attention to alternative guitar designs as having been more trouble than they were worth. Harrison was as interested in playing music as he was in writing it. I do not know to what extent Harrison used alternative instrument designs to allow him to experiment with what could be expressed through just intonation. However, I know from the Alves-Campbell book that he retuned at least one of his own keyboard instruments. It would thus appear that, in his own work, there was a strong link between thinking about what he wanted and experiencing what he could do. In retrospect, I would say that Sims used my software with that same link in mind.

Perhaps this tells us something about how things tended to go off the rails in those early “experimental” days following the Second World War. This was a time when getting the technology to do anything constituted a major achievement, particularly when that “anything” was a product of “batch processing,” rather than real-time interaction. Those who became too wrapped up in technology lost touch with the premise that musicians needed to “play around” with their materials, just as their predecessors had done for millennia. These days, when I encounter musicians improvising with software, I figure that, even if I am not that convinced by the results, I am still glad that they have that capacity to “play around” in search of what they will do next.

Horatio Alger Comes to YouTube

The CNBC Web site has reprinted a story from The New York Times by Brian Stelter, which, at first blush, appears to be yet another effort to promote the brave new world of Web 2.0 as an opportunity for everyone to get rich:

Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living.

Michael Buckley quit his day job in September. He says his online show is “silly,” but it helped pay off credit-card debt.

One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”

“But on YouTube,” he said, “I’ve had 100 million views. It’s crazy.”

However, those not lazy enough to read below the fold will discover that this is a story that goes deeper than the usual Internet evangelism:

Granted, building an audience online takes time. “I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime,” Mr. Buckley said — but, at least in some cases, it is paying off.

Mr. Buckley is one of the original members of YouTube’s partner program, which now includes thousands of participants, from basement video makers to big media companies. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, places advertisements within and around the partner videos and splits the revenues with the creators. “We wanted to turn these hobbies into businesses,” said Hunter Walk, a director of product management for the site, who called popular users like Mr. Buckley “unintentional media companies.”

YouTube declined to comment on how much money partners earned on average, partly because advertiser demand varies for different kinds of videos. But a spokesman, Aaron Zamost, said “hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.” At least a few are making a full-time living: Mr. Buckley said he was earning over $100,000 from YouTube advertisements.

The program is a partial solution to a nagging problem for YouTube. The site records 10 times the video views as any other video-sharing Web site in the United States, yet it has proven to be hard for Google to profit from, because a vast majority of the videos are posted by anonymous users who may or may not own the copyrights to the content they upload. While YouTube has halted much of the illegal video sharing on the site, it remains wary of placing advertisements against content without explicit permission from the owners. As a result, only about 3 percent of the videos on the site are supported by advertising.

But the company has high hopes for the partner program. Executives liken it to Google AdSense, the technology that revolutionized advertising and made it possible for publishers to place text advertisements next to their content.

Readers of this blog may have noticed that it has advertising placed through AdSense. I have even written on occasion about what AdSense has and has not done with my content. It certainly has not become a revenue source for me, which neither surprises nor angers me. I doubt that there is a particularly high demand for the sort of writing that I do; and I suspect that those who actually "get into" reading my content are doing so out of an interest that tends to ignore any advertising placement. I have even written about the fact that, for those who are trying to make a living from their blogging, the blogosphere has become a latter-day sweatshop. In addition, I have looked into the logic behind AdSense and discovered that it can do some very curious (if not amusing) things.

Buckley's case, however, is more serious than my own:

In a time of media industry layoffs, the revenue source — and the prospect of a one-person media company — may be especially appealing to users. But video producers like Lisa Donovan, who posts sketch comedy onto YouTube and attracted attention in the fall for parodies of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, do not make it sound easy. “For new users, it’s a lot of work,” Ms. Donovan said. “Everybody’s fighting to be seen online; you have to strategize and market yourself.”

Mr. Buckley, who majored in psychology in college and lives with his husband and four dogs in Connecticut, films his show from home. Each episode of “What the Buck?” is viewed an average of 200,000 times, and the more popular ones have reached up to three million people. He said that writing and recording five minutes’ worth of jokes about Britney Spears’s comeback tour and Miley Cyrus’s dancing abilities is not as easy as it looks. “I’ve really worked hard on honing my presentation and writing skills,” he said.

As his traffic and revenues grew, Mr. Buckley had “so many opportunities online that I couldn’t work anymore.” He quit his job at Live Nation, the music promoter, to focus full-time on the Web show.

The very fact that I use my own blog to "rehearse" means that I do not even pretend to be in the same league as Buckley. Buckley's story is less about making money through the Internet and more about an experienced professional who decided that he would be better off starting his own business. YouTube was just the "real estate" on which he could create and run his "storefront" operation. In many ways his story is not that different from the old Horatio Alger yarns about the capable young man (yes, they were sexist stories) who ascends the ladder of success on the strength of his own industriousness. Alternatively, Buckley is the embodiment of the words of a Chinese poem, whose source I have forgotten, incorporated into a cantata by the composer Ezra Sims:

Hard work succeeds, naturally.

My guess is that most of those who imbibe (or, for that matter, serve) Web 2.0 Kool-Aid have never heard of Horatio Alger and are not particularly interested in Chinese poetry!