Reflecting on Some Words of John Cage

Earlier this year, when it was still possible to wander around San Francisco without worrying about others or even having any particular goal in mind, my wife and I made one of our visits to the City Lights Bookstore. I always enter that place thinking that I am not going to do anything other than browse, but I always seem to leave with a new acquisition. On this particular occasion I finally succumbed to purchasing The Selected Letters of John Cage, which my wife had been persuading me to buy simply because my name was in the index.

Since then I have been taking my time in progressing through the book. However, COVID-19 has allowed me to spend more time on it, simply because I feel it necessary to focus on doing productive things. More recently, I have been following the dates of the letters more closely to see which of them address circumstances I knew or had involved my (usually modest) contribution. One of my favorites had to do with Cage complaining about how hard it had been, when he was at the University of Illinois, to have a computer program that would implement his coin-tossing procedure for consulting the I Ching. To hear him tell the story, it took months before the program had been "debugged" enough to be useful.

I was there to hear that story. When the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was visiting Boston on one of their tours, I arranged for both Cage and Gordon Mumma to give a seminar in the Technology Square building that housed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. When Cage gave his punch line about the amount to time it took to get a working program, one of my colleagues left the lecture hall and went upstairs to the room that housed our PDP-6 computer. By the time the talk had concluded, my friend had created the program and gave Cage a page of its output!

Today I encountered a letter written many years after that incident. It included a sentence that probably would have rolled through my mind at the time:

Music has to do with mind, opening it again and again + more and more.

Back in 1979, when the letter was written, I would have simply filed it away as the usual injunction that we should be as open to electronic synthesis, chance techniques, and microtonality as we usually are to composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johann Sebastian Bach. These days, however, I realize that the scope of this injunction extends far beyond the immediate present.

In 1979 I tended to revel in my dislikes as much as I waxed enthusiastically over my likes. For example, as a result of my fanatical interest in the music of Gustav Mahler, I found it easy to dismiss Anton Bruckner with my personal motto that "Bruckner tried where Mahler succeeded." Similarly, I had little regard for any opera written after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and before Alban Berg.

Back when I was writing about dance performances, my mentor emphasized that my first goal should be to provide an objective account of the experiences. If there were any "column inches" remaining for my article, only then could I take the liberty to express my opinion. When I first began to shift my attention to writing about the performance of music on this site, those words returned to me. I realized that I had an obligation to provide description, even if I was writing about compositions that I had disliked or simply chosen to ignore on grounds of insignificance.

I take this as a turning point in how I approached the task of listening itself. I realized that the very task of listening to a new performance, even one of music that I felt had been performed to death, was a matter of opening the mind. These days I do not have to worry about whether or not I have enough "column inches" to voice my own opinions. However, that obligation to describe has done more than I can imagine to the ways in which I have refined my listening practices. My guess is that Cage could have cared less if that process of opening provided me with a new way to approach on old Beethoven favorite; but, as is always the case, the principle is more important than the substance that has been selected for both description and subsequent exercises of judgment!

Tenney’s Rigorous Balance of Chance and Choice

Those who have been following my discussion of the articles by James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory should, by this time, appreciate how much rigor can be found in Tenney’s efforts, whether they are directed toward musical composition or toward imaginative reconceptions of practices that have come to be called “music theory.” When it comes to composition, there is a good chance that Tenney was inspired by John Cage, who could also be meticulously rigorous when called upon to explain the method behind the creation of one of his compositions. What is interesting about Cage is that, while many of those methods were based on a foundation of using a chance technique (such as the ritual for selecting passages to read from the I Ching), there could be prolific diversity in how that technique would be applied. The Silence anthology has two short articles about such applications, one published in 1952 and the other in 1957; and from these we may appreciate how the creation of method was as important to Cage as the creation of the music itself.

Cage’s approach would have an impact on other composers. The best known of these is probably Pierre Boulez. In 1958 Die Reihe published an article by György Ligeti that provided a deep dive into the creation of one of Boulez’ particularly challenging compositions. The title of the article was “Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia” (Pierre Boulez, decision and automatism in “Structure Ia”); and evidence of Cage’s impact on Boulez is not hard to find. (The article appeared in the English-language edition of Die Reihe in 1960.)

As Ligeti’s title makes clear, much of the composition process is “automatic,” although it might be better to call it “algorithmic.” The connotations of the latter adjective allow us to appreciate that one cannot have an algorithm before first identifying input data, output data, and the relations that connect them. These are the issues that Ligeti addresses in the “decision” portion of his article.

Tenney’s article “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is very much cut from the same cloth that served Cage and Boulez. However, where Boulez was concerned with serial techniques that could be applied to the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale, Tenney was more interested in exploring the pitches of the natural overtone series. He decided to do this by dividing the semitone into six equal micro-intervals, providing him with an equal-tempered gamut that would enable better approximations to upper harmonics, which could be represented terms of smaller “chromatic shifts” from the traditional pitch classes. (The reader should now appreciate why Tenney’s piece was scored for six harps; each harp had a different “micro-shift” in the pitch of its strings.)

In terms of method, Tenney was far more rigorous than either Cage or Boulez. His expertise in higher mathematics allowed him to make rigorous specifications of subtle variations. This was most evident in his effort to extrapolate principles of harmony into the domain of his 72-pitch equal-tempered gamut. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that almost every reader of this article will come away with absolutely no sense of what it would be like to listen to the results.

(Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to listen to a tape that Tenney played of an excerpt from a performance of Changes. I had as much trouble making sense of my listening experience than I had encountered during my “first contact” with “Structure Ia!” I gather that there is now a performing version six guitars, taking the same approach to chromatic tuning; but I missed out on an opportunity to listen to that music played at the Center for New Music.)

It would be easy to dismiss Tenney’s project as “much ado about not very much.” The fact is that it is very difficult to establish the relationship between Tenney-the-composer and Tenney-the-listener. That relationship was always much clearer in Cage’s work: There was none! Cage simply created the “sonorous materials” for a listening experience; and the listener was free to make of those materials whatever (s)he wished.

Tenney, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated by a desire to explore how one could work with pitches based on the overtone series through techniques consistent with pre-existing knowledge of counterpoint and harmony. Those who have followed this site for some time know that he is far from the only composer to be so motivated. The two composers that have probably received the most attention in my writing have been Ben Johnston and, more recently, Harry Partch. Of these three, Partch has struck me as the one that gave the most thought to the sorts of listening experiences that would arise from his techniques. In that context Tenney occupies the space at the other extreme of the pendulum swing, a claim that I shall be happy to withdraw if convinced by sufficient experience in listening to Tenney’s music, rather than reading about his approaches to composition!

Will the World Economic Forum Have a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment?

The television channel for BBC World Service News has begun to run self-promoting advertisements about its coverage of this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. This year’s gathering will begin on January 17 and will last for four days, meaning that it will probably conclude around the time that Donald Trump will be taking the Oath of Office for President of the United States on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Those who have followed this site for several years known that it has pulled no punches in writing about this event in the past. In 2014 it went as far as to compare Davos with Prince Prospero’s fortified castle from Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death;” but Davos seems to be far more insulated from harsh (if not deadly) realities than Prospero’s castle. Even when the Forum invites the likes of Joe Stiglitz, it has been clear that the gulf between inviting a participant and paying attention to him/her continues to entail an unscalable width.

Still, one has to wonder how the rich and mighty have been so successful at maintaining their oblivion. Will their gambits continue to work in an age when Great Britain voted to secede from the European Union and the United States voted Trump to succeed Barack Obama as President of the United States? Think of the mileage the Brexit leader Michael Gove got out of his declaration that his followers “have had enough of experts.”

Davos has traditionally been the venue in which the rich and mighty get to drink from the deep pool of expertise and then go forth with their policies refreshed. The reality, however, it that, being all-too-human, they only listen to observations that reinforce opinions and strategies that they already have, which is why someone like Stiglitz can only survive by realizing that he is fighting a losing battle.

So the question to ask is whether or not those “wise men of Davos” can sustain a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment and recognize why so many people around the world chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the motto, “Good riddance, 2016?” Do they view Gove and Trump as nothing more than “outlier” points on whatever multidimensional landscape currently feeds their econometric models? Alternatively, has the “echo chamber” effect of social media combined with fallacious attempts to extract knowledge from Google snippets so numbed their capacity for decision-making that they do not even realize that the “wise men” epithet can only be read sarcastically? My guess is that Davos will continue to provide the cloud of ignorance that has nurtured its denizens for many years. The raison d’être behind the venue’s isolation may well be that it supports deep thinking by insulating attendees from the hassles of day-to-day life; but history has taught us that it is just another echo chamber where world leaders in both business and politics can reassure each other that they are all making wise decisions without worrying about how well those decisions mesh with down-to-earth reality.

Ignoring Consequences Continues to be Dangerous!

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books includes a scathing article bu Geoffrey Wheatcroft entitled "Tony Blair's Eternal Shame: The Report." The report in question is the so-called Chilcot, whose proper title is The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, the review of the motives and consequences associated with Great Britain entering the war in Iraq as a partner of the United States. The report was prepared by a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This is a massive document, 6275 pages distributed across twelve volumes. However, as Wheatcroft observes, it should suffice for most to read the "62,000-word executive summary." To the extent that Wheatcroft's article amounts to a summary of that "executive summary," even that may be hard to take.

As might be guessed from the title, Wheatcroft's major target in former Prime Minister Blair. While he does not call
Blair's relationship with George W. Bush an "unholy alliance," it is clear that he was straining very hard to avoid that phrase. (He does, on the other, rather neatly deflate that concept of a "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom as little more than a deceptive myth.)

The summary of Wheatcroft's summary comes with his concluding assessment of Blair:

And yet in the end Tony Blair isn't a messiah or a madman or a monster. He's a complete and utter mediocrity. He might have made an adequate prime minister in ordinary days, but in our strange and testing times he was hopelessly out of his depth. Now we are left with the consequences.

Since Wheatcroft is British, he kept his attention focused primarily on Blair. Whether or not that description holds just as well for George W. Bush is our business, not his. Nevertheless, I have to emphasize that the most powerful word in that quotation is the last one.

I have long held that we have become a culture that has tried to banish the word "consequences" from our working vocabulary. The last time I expressed this explicitly was in March of 2015. The idea emerged in my writing through observations that everyone seemed to be eager to jump into new technologies without thinking through the implications that technology might have for "unanticipated use." In other words we think only about the cool things we shall be able to do, assuming that they are also good things, totally overlooking the possibilities that "the next new thing" may serve more nefarious purposes we never bothered to consider. By all rights the aftermath of our adventures in Iraq should have been a wake-up call to us all to think about consequences before taking action, yet in today's immediate present, it would seem that few are bothering to think about how the vote they case in November (or the decision they make not to vote) is likely to have consequences on the same magnitude of those examined by Wheatcroft.

Not Quite Fiddling

Fifteen minutes ago Julia Jacobo filed a report for ABC News to the effect that the massive fireworks display involving the entire length of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai went on as planned while the fire at the Address Downtown Hotel, within eyesight of Burj Khalifa, which was consuming an entire side of the hotel, was only 65% contained. Jacobo's report did not state who made the decision that "the show must go on." Presumably the decision reflected someone's priorities, but whose priorities?

Rating the Freshness of Food Purchases

I have to say that I have been relatively pleased with the alliance formed between KGO-TV (the ABC affiliate for the Bay Area) and Consumer Reports, particularly since the latter seems to have dropped the "lifetime" subscription as a reward for a donation I made many decades ago (reminding me a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Nevertheless, I have always been skeptical about Consumer Reports articles about food and nutrition, since they would often base their findings on attributes that different from the criteria stressed by other concerned organizations, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Therefore, I have to question the value of today's report on the quality of fresh produce at different outlets. Regardless of the criteria behind the evaluations, the entire path that brings an item of produce to a customer's shopping bag is long, involved, and totally local. Thus, I have to wonder if, when a particular store is listed in operating out of a large number of states, the resulting rating is an averaging over all of those states or the result of examining only a few (or even one) of them. Even more problematic is that the ratings may have depended in when the outlets were evaluated, since it is not hard to imagine conditions changing radically from one week (or day) to the next.

These days my biggest concerns with inventory, fresh or processed, is how decisions are made. It is not hard to imagine that the large chains now relegate all such decisions to software. They all have had problems making ends meet since the economic downturn, meaning that they have all had to downsize, meaning that they probably let go of a good deal of "expert knowledge," letting some fast-talking consultant convince them that the knowledge would be "preserved" in the software. Indeed, I think we all have cause for concern that the expertise of a human evaluator may be out of the loop for just about any purchase of food made anywhere, with the possible exception of farmers' markets. Furthermore, I suspect that Google-informed consumers have less intuitive knowledge about when the food they buy may be contaminated or just spoiled. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether this all amounts to a skillfully calculated plot to "reduce the surplus population!"

Discovering My Own Point of View

As I continue to work my way through the new Library of America collection of Herald Tribune articles by Virgil Thomson, I encountered a paragraph that really resonated with me:

The intellectual audience wants culture with its music, wants information, historical perspectives, enlarged horizons. It demands of program makers constant experiment and a huge variety. It is far more interested in repertory, as a matter of fact, than in execution. It tends to envisage the whole of music as a vast library in which everything is available, or should be. The strictly musical audience and the mass public are more easily satisfied. They think of the concert life as a sort of boarding house where you take what is offered and don’t reach. Their good nature is easily abused by managements and other organizing agencies. The intellectuals are more demanding and refuse to be spoon fed. That is why, as a musician, I value the intellectual element in audiences.

Every now and then I encounter some push-back over the fact that I do not spend enough time writing about execution because I tend to dwell heavily on the music itself, usually in terms of its relation to the overall repertoire. I suppose that makes me an intellectual in Thomson's book; but that means that I value his punch line. I also think that the distinction that Thomson draws is the one I have previously tried to make between examining and criticism.

If I am to read him correctly, Thomson seems to work from the point of view that critical judgement is, and should be, grounded in evidence of execution, which may explain why, as I have previously observed, his own judgment tends to take its departure from what is printed on the score pages and, whenever possible, nothing else. However, he also seems to suggest that, even without recourse to score pages, the mass public has a basic toolbox to facilitate exercising their own judgement. I might suggest that those who are skillful at using their own tools might constitute that particular class that I have previously called the "enthusiasts." The problem is that those managements about which Thomson writes tend to know both the assets and the limitations of those tools, which is why Thomson raises the problem of abuse.

Thomson wrote the above paragraph for publication on January 22, 1950. I state that date because the article itself deserves a bit of historical perspective. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938; but it was originally created to root out uncover Nazis, rather than undercover Communists. After the Second World War, however, the target shifted.

One result was that many keen intellects, particularly those studying the history of the United States, were writing about the many ways in which our country did not live up to the ideals it had set for itself. These articles were not necessarily accusatory, since many of the writers made no secret that the real world never lives up to the ideal world. Unfortunately, the nature of this critical thinking tended to be associated with advocating Communism; and, to be fair, there certainly was a contingent of writers who had been Party members. However HUAC went after the whole body of those intellectuals with the four-legs-good-two-legs-bad logic of George Orwell's Animal Farm, leading to a rise in anti-intellectualism that would ultimately be studied by Richard Hofstadter.

That rise was already in progress when Thomson wrote the above paragraph. However, those thoughts were simply a continuation of precepts he had been writing about half a decade earlier. My guess is that in 1950 he could not foresee just how much damage HUAC would do; and, since we have never really recovered from that damage, I have to wonder how many of today's readers would prefer to bite Thomson's finger of such regards, rather than looking where he is pointing.

The Dirty Little Secret about Analytics

John Cage used to talk frequently about how he would consult the I Ching to make choices for him when composing music. What I remember most is when he said that the I Ching never made a bad decision. If a decision turned out to be problematic (leading, for example, to music that was impossible for a single performer to play), then Cage took this as an indication that he had formulated his question poorly.

This is not just an anecdote about avant-garde practices. It may also tell us something about what happens when Microsoft, Google, and Apple all decide that they need "market share" in the health care industry. This is just the latest data point in the litany of evidence as to why health care is in such a sorry state because industry and business groups feel it is necessary to see to the "health" of their revenue streams by telling expertly-trained doctors and nurses how to treat patients. These days it is all about getting everyone to invest in wearables that will automatically transmit all necessary "health care data" to some cloud site where the resulting data base can enjoy all the benefits of being massaged by the best analytic software that can be dreamed up by analysts (most of whom, of course, are business analysts, rather than health care practitioners).

The thing is that such a data base is ultimately no different from the I Ching. The quality of the answer you get depends on the quality of the question you ask. This is particularly true in non-routine situations. Good doctors know when they are stumped, but they also know that they are stumped because they have not yet figured out the right question to ask. The best ones persist until they finally land on that right question.

The problem is that we live (for over half a century now) in a world in which the judgment of an algorithm is always taken as superior to human judgment. Indeed, we are so addicted to that believe that we cannot conceive of an alternative. This latest phase in the industrialization of health care is yet another step in pushing the most valuable expertise of practitioners out of the system. In other words the price of a higher revenue stream will be a lot more sick people, many of whom will probably turn out to be incurable.

In a Democracy, You Make Your Decisions Your Way, Not Ours!

Having just finished Mark Danner's "Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now" in the latest issue of The New York Review, I suspect I am a bit overly sensitive to the delusions of those who think that the United States has some kind of "manifest destiny" to spread its way of life around the world, whether it involves the prioritization of consumerism or our particular approach to a "democratic government." (That latter actually reminds me over Voltaire's witty observation about the Holy Roman Empire. In the current state of affairs, one might say that what we have right now is far from democratic and probably just as far from being a government!) It will therefore be interesting to see how our philosophy of our-way-is-the-only-way will fare now that the Libyan National Assembly has voted that the foundation of all legislation and state institutions will be Sharia Law. The impact of this decision on the rights of those who do not necessarily embrace the faith of Islam remains to be seen, as is the question of whether or not the United States will decide that interference in a decision made by the National Assembly is none of our business.

A Serious Category Error

There was an interview on BBC World Service radio a couple of days ago, which seems to have been conceived to provide some enlightenment over what seems to be a monotonically increasing number of instances of public unrest over discontent with government decisions and actions. I was unable to catch the name of the interviewee, but he made one casual remark about the fact that most countries in the developing world did not really "get" the idea of democracy or the concept of free markets. By lumping these two concepts in a single sentence, he seemed to be implying that the two were related.

I would argue the opposite, which is that they are at cross-purposes. The ideal of participatory democracy is one in which all voices are equal, which means that all decisions are subjected to "the wisdom of the crowd." Cooler heads going all the way back to Socrates (at least as he was depicted by Plato) recognized that this system has some key flaws, which is why most successful efforts at a constitutional government have tried to address those flaws without abandoning the concept of general public participation.

On the other hand, the free market mentality is not about a level playing field. Rather, it is about a worldview that equates wealth with power and encourages a brutal Hobbesian approach to the acquisition of wealth. Within this model, the power of wealth may then be applied to manipulate the public, thus undermining the principles that motivated the formation of a constitutional government. The current state of affairs in our own country would suggest that the power of wealth has succeeded in rendering just about every aspect of government ineffectual to the point of irrelevance.

When we try to tell the rest of the world that we live in a democracy, we are really only talking about a flimsy cardboard stage prop erected to conceal that we now live under a plutocracy.

From the String Quartet to Representative Government

I just finished reading a fascinating reprint from Administrative Science Quarterly that basically examined the behavior of a string quartet as a model for an "intense work group" (the sort of group that might, for example, be involved in making high-level policy decisions for a large organization). The paper ended with the requisite "lessons learned" section, suggesting that such work groups did, indeed, have something to learn from the work practices of string quartets (at least the successful ones). The sentence that really stuck with me from this section of the paper was the following:

When facing conflict, groups might (a) leave hot topics alone to give everyone a chance to cool off (Pruitt, 1981; Ury, Brett, and Goldberg, 1988); (b) never settle for majority rule which, at a minimum, engenders minority dissatisfaction; and (c) know each other well enough to know what can't be said, i.e., ignore unavoidable dissimilarities and let policies evolve without raising issues explicitly.

One of the key conclusions was the conflict was inevitable. However, good string quartets accept that inevitability as axiomatic and, as a result, are more interested in getting on with making music than with trying to resolve those conflicts.

It is hard to resist reading that quoted sentence without thinking of the currently crippled state of our government. After all, one of the reasons why the TEA Party has come as far as they have through what I recently called "politics by terrorism" is that their leaders appreciate the advantage of keeping hot topics as hot as possible and avoiding any efforts concerned only with cooling down the heat of the situation. Indeed, those steering the TEA Party probably know full well that their group will never assume a controlling majority but can still work the hell out of "minority dissatisfaction." Unfortunately, our President still embraces the virtues of rational efforts to resolve conflicts, not realizing that, from the very beginning, all the TEA Party ever wanted was to keep the government from "getting on with making music;" and they seem to have succeeded on an impressive scale.

"Intelligence does not Work That Way"

This morning's "state of play" report on the BBC News Web site, written just before our do-nothing Congress decides to do something when nothing would be preferable, included an interesting statement from White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough:

We've seen the video proof of the outcome of those attacks.

Now do we have a picture or do we have irrefutable beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence? This is not a court of law and intelligence does not work that way.

There is every reason to believe that ongoing "expert analysis" will confirm that the videos cited by McDonough show victims of some form of chemical warfare. The experts may even be more specific as to the chemicals themselves. They will not, however, say anything about how those attacks came to pass: Who deployed the weapons, and how did they get them to deploy.

It is because of that final point that I have to wonder if, in making that final sentence, McDonough knows anything about how intelligence does work. For example, neither judicial decisions nor the interpretation of intelligence evidence can be based strictly on abstract principles of logic. The concept of reasonable doubt was introduced in recognition of the inadequacy of pure logic. Any case made in court can never be anything more than a well-formulated hypothesis. It is up to subjectivity to then decide whether or not that hypothesis should be rejected on the basis of reasonable doubt..

Having had the opportunity to examine some training material for intelligence analysts, I can state that the way in which intelligence "works" is not that different. The most important difference is that, while in most courts, there are only two hypotheses at stake, those of the prosecution and the defense, respectively, intelligence analysis needs to take a broader point of view. Thus, in the face of a particularly hostile act, disciplined analysis is required to formulate as many viable hypotheses as the imagination will entertain and then consider all of them in the face of available evidence. There are even systematic techniques through which hypotheses can be "scored" with respect to the evidence. These techniques can just as easily lead to a search for more hypotheses (if no hypothesis is conclusively better than others) as to the selection of the most viable hypothesis.

This is a process that can be just as time-consuming as the analysis required to determine whether a particular location was the site of a chemical attack. It probably also involves more creative imagination (which, itself, can be time-consuming) in the interest of building a sufficiently large "space" of different hypotheses. My guess is that neither McDonough nor the members of the press he was briefing realize the extent to which this is how intelligence "works." However, if we end up barreling into Syria on the basis of ignorance, it would be better for the press to devote some attention to where that ignorance resides.

Tom Paxton is Still With Us

One of the more memorable songs to come out of the Sixties protest movement was Tom Paxton's "Daily News," a hilarious tribute to yellow journalism with the memorable phrase, "don't try to change my mind with facts." That could easily have been an alternative title for Paul Krugman's latest contribution to The New York Review of Books, whose actual title is "How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled." The reason I propose my alternative title is that, while the logic behind that case for austerity has, indeed, been pretty thoroughly decimated, those who espouse it have not yet been swayed from their position.

Krugman not only recognizes this sad truth but also offers an explanation for it:

Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning. 

When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process. When Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover to let the Depression run its course, so as to “purge the rottenness” from the system, he was offering advice that, however bad it was as economics, resonated psychologically with many people (and still does). 

By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that “we have magneto trouble”—i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem. Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is noteworthy—and revolutionary—for saying almost nothing about what happens in economic booms. Pre-Keynesian business cycle theorists loved to dwell on the lurid excesses that take place in good times, while having relatively little to say about exactly why these give rise to bad times or what you should do when they do. Keynes reversed this priority; almost all his focus was on how economies stay depressed, and what can be done to make them less depressed.

In other words people prefer to embrace a narrative with strong moral implications over a dispassionate analysis based on nothing more than mathematics. This should not be too surprising. Most people can follow a morality play far more easily than mathematical reasoning, and even those who know the math may still prefer the idea of judgment based on some form of divine judge over the outcome of a totally objective process. Look at how quick so many people are to dismiss the hard evidence of fossil records in order to reject the theories of Charles Darwin.

Krugman then observes that the only people who benefit from this irrational rejection of Keynes are (you guessed it) the rich. The austerity debate has provided the 1% with yet another way to stick it to the 99%. Furthermore, the assumption by the 1% that the Occupy movement would run out of steam seems to have come to fruition. So the rich will continue to live in a world of comfortable assets and benefits while the now-globalized world economy hurtles off a cliff, taking the rest of us down with it.

New Interfaces for Whom?

I just finished reading David Meyer’s analysis of the latest reorganization within Apple on ZDNet. His prediction at iOS and OS X will merge into a single operating system with a common user interface strikes me as a reasonably good educated guess. Furthermore, the promotion of Jony Ive from product design to the broader responsibility of human interfaces across all Apple products is a sign that this unification will be seen at the interface level, as well as the infrastructure. I would also agree with Meyer that these changes recognize a potential threat arising from Microsoft’s new commitment to touch-based products.

Still, I have to wonder just who will benefit from those changes that are potentially in the works. I have already written about the fact that those of us who still take “an analytic approach to both reading (as in long reports that often require multiple open windows to support fact-checking, testing, and related queries) and writing (as in responding to such reports with a comprehensive analysis)” are likely to be the losers in this mobile-based world of the future that has seized the attention of both Apple and Microsoft. I would also suggest that, beyond the basic acts of reading and writing, there are also basic issues of content management (once called file management), that have always been fundamental to any operating system. Whether the content is on your own device or off in some cloud, you still have to worry about both saving it and retrieving it; and interfaces should be designed to make those worries less bothersome. Finally, there is an even more fundamental issue of operating system design, which is the idea of managing multiple active processes for those “multiple open windows.” If I am trying to read anything of substance from a computer screen, I am likely to be writing at the same time. That is why I am such an advocate of the support for note-taking provided by Acrobat; but the notes I write usually require that I am running a Web browser (and probably also a tool for searching documents on my hard drive) at the same time. The notes I take may involve both pasting content from other sources or inserting useful hyperlinks. Such multitasking is not currently supported by iOS, nor would I want to do that kind of reading on a telephone. However, the corollary is that I cannot do it on an iPad either.

My fear is that we face a highly consumer-based approach to the next generation of technologies. This obviously plays well for the marketing folks, who can then dream up any number of scenarios of happy consumers for television commercials. However, it pushes those of us who have to do something other than consume, not only those of us who desperately cling to writing as a legitimate form of work but also all of those trying to run businesses confronted with day-to-day decision-making challenges that require hard-and-fast analytic thinking, into a distant background. It will be E. M. Forster’s world in which the machine satisfies all consumption needs but in which no one knows how the keep the machine running effectively; and it seems as if it is no longer in the interests of either Apple or Microsoft to consider the implications of such a future.

What “Choosing Chance” Really Meant to John Cage

I just finished a piece for Examiner.com about the latest concert given by sfSound to celebrate the centennial of his birth. (His 100th birthday will be on September 5.) All of the works on the program were instrumental; and most of them were composed by some deliberate chance procedure. (The most important exception was “Atlas Eclipticalis,” which was composed by tracing star charts onto staff paper.) I wrote about Cage’s motivation for “choosing chance” as follows:

Cage’s interest in chance was grounded in his desire to find an approach to remove the ego from the process of making music. As Cage would later observe in an interview with Roger Reynolds (published in the The Musical Quarterly in October of 1979), the ego was only responsible for deciding what questions to ask, which would then be answered by chance operations. If he wanted to reject the answers, so to speak, he could only do so by posing alternative questions.

This turned out to be a rather long piece, because there were such significant differences across the pieces being performed. So I chose to write about the Reynolds interview, rather than cite it. Nevertheless, in this more flexible forum, it seemed appropriate to reproduce just what it was that Cage said about chance:

It says in the I Ching that if you don’t accept the answer, that you have no right to ask again. I have never used chance operations to arrive at a preconceived goal. In other words, I’ve never been in the situation of not liking, and because I didn’t like, changing the answers I received. I have sometimes renounced the questions that I’ve asked. I have thrown away some work, seeing that it was trivial, since I had not found the proper questions. But I’ve never thrown away the answers to the questions that I’ve considered to be useful questions to ask.

I chose to reproduce this because it makes clear just how deliberate Cage was in his use of chance. Cunningham was the same way; and I strongly suspect that both of them sometimes (often?) had to revise the ways in which they framed their questions in the interests of coming up with results that were not impossible to perform. For that matter the philosophical goal of detaching the ego is also a deliberate act, and what this quote shows is that it was far from as aspiration to mindlessness!

Divided We Stand?

Jack Rakove, one of the most reliable sources when it comes to making sure that the words and deed of the Founding Fathers are taken in vain, has come up with in interest analysis of partisanship. This appeared in the Book, the online review site for The New Republic; and the book he was examining is Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States by Michael Lind. This is a book that tries to use the distinction of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian thinking as a framework for interpreting economic history.

Lind has apparently attracted many champions, one of whom is David Brooks in his capacity as columnist for The New York Times. As one who believes that any assertion made by Brooks should be taken with less than a grain of salt, this made me curious about both the book and Rakove’s review. When it turned out that Brooks accused Lind of not being Hamiltonian enough, I suspected that Rakove would take me on a delightfully informing ride.

Basically, he manages to kill two birds with one stone. First he offers his own take on economic history. Then, he not only demolishes the whole Hamilton-Jefferson dichotomy (along with partisan divisiveness) but also establishes that all of the Founding Fathers were smart enough to be empirical, rather than ideological. It would make no sense to ask what either Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson (or, for that matter, Benjamin Franklin or George Washington) would do in the face of our economic crisis. None of them would advocate any action without first assessing the situation in which their actions would be embedded. That assessment would necessitate wrestling out differences of opinion as to just what the situation actually was, something we seem to be very poor at by virtue of the extent to which we have allowed knowledge to become contaminated by divisive partisan ideology.

My guess is that any of the contributors to our original Constitution, if transported to the present day, would barely recognize the government in terms of what had originally be envisaged and ratified.

Casting a Vote of No Confidence

Yesterday, Elizabeth Drew put up a post to NYRBlog with the title “Election 2012” (followed by the subtitle “What the Polls Don’t Tell Us”). My guess is that we shall be seeing more and more of this title between now and Election Day, probably by many of the NBYRBlog contributors. The bulk of her post involved discussing the implications of the following premise:

In fact, upward of 98 percent of the voters have already decided, and so the ferocious battle will be over the small remaining number of undecided voters.

However, the most important observation came towards the end of the post, when she observed:

“Staying home” isn’t a passive act.

This has consequences of its own.

Even those who may have decided how they will vote may have misgivings. The problem is that there is no way to give a “vote of no confidence” to the current state of our government. There is no way in which voters cannot speak out against a system that has become too partisan to work for the benefit of the electorate. Indeed, the system is so broken that even the Judiciary Branch, which the Founding Fathers assumed would be above partisanship, has been dragged into the same mud that engulfs both the Legislative and Executive Branches.

Still, it may not be just a matter of staying home for lack of anything better to do. There is a good chance that the “ferocious battle” over 2% of the electorate will appeal to the need to express strong negative opinion. If you cannot raise enthusiasm among the electorate for voting for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, you can damned well get a lot of hot blood flowing by encouraging folks to vote against one of these candidates. So what we are likely to see is a massive advertising campaign designed to inculcate hate-based rabble-rousing; and all this will be supported by a media business that loves to do this sort of thing, since it tends to be a guaranteed formula for improving ratings numbers. Where this will lead will remains anyone’s guess; but it is reasonable to anticipate that, whoever wins the next election, the American people will be the losers.

Ivan Hewitt Revives the Lang Lang Question

In the wake of Lang Lang having performed all five of the piano concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Ivan Hewitt has used his column for the London Telegraph to review the disconnect between “his 15,000 adoring fans” and the less-than-enthusiastic critics.  Hewitt makes some good points, and I certainly think the column is worth reading.  However, this is a topic that exceeds the limitations of his column space;  so I would like to provide some supplementary thoughts that both support and question his position.

Let’s begin with the example he presents in Lang Lang’s defense:

Think back to the times when you’ve seen a performance of this concerto, or any concerto that calls on the notion of the heroic performer. Remember how the emphatic passages got much of their power from the look of the pianist’s raised forearms and his expression of stern invincibility. Or how the deliciously coloured flourishes of the slow movement were given an extra glow by the graceful flourish of the pianist’s fingers.

Now imagine another performance where the sounds emanating from the piano have exactly the same expressive force, but they’re played by the pianist with an air of studied neutrality, so you hardly notice his presence. Difficult, isn’t it? In fact I would say it’s impossible, and not just because performance always involves responding to the whole human being in front of us. It’s because a lot of music from Beethoven onwards absolutely requires self-assertive performance. To avoid it out of some misguided loyalty to classical music’s ''purity’’ robs the music of something essential.

The thing about the argument in that second paragraph is that it is not as impossible as Hewitt seems to think.  The fact is that I only had to consult my personal memory to summon up just what Hewitt wanted me to imagine.  Furthermore, the pianist in question was one of those “greats,” perhaps one that provided those critics attacking Lang Lang with just the sort of cudgel they needed.  The pianist was Alfred Brendel.  The occasion was a recital he had given at the California Institute of Technology.

When I had learned that Brendel would be performing Franz Schubert’s D. 960 B-flat major piano sonata, I made it a point to drive from Santa Barbara to Pasadena for the occasion.  The event turned out to be one of sobering disenchantment.  I do not know if I would call Brendel’s composure one of “studied neutrality;”  but there was no ignoring his air of detachment.  Indeed, he was so detached that I had to wonder if his mind was occupied only with getting out of the Caltech auditorium (if not getting out of California) while the rest of his body was on automatic pilot.  The whole affair left me wondering why Brendel had invested so much time in learning D. 960 in the first place.

In that context I would say that Lang Lang might be a useful antidote for those who have become besotted with Brendel’s particular approach to “purity.”  However, like any drug, that antidote should be taken with both moderation and discretion.  Clearly, I do not mind pianists (or any other musicians, for that matter) who view performance as a “whole body” experience;  but I draw the line when it seems as if the body is more important than the music.  This takes me back to the last time I used one of Hewitt’s columns as a platform for refining my own thoughts about Lang Lang.

Back in April of 2009, I wrote a post entitled “Ivan Hewitt’s Thoughts on Lang Lang,” which was a response to my first encounter with one of Hewitt’s well-reasoned defenses of Lang Lang.  In that post I recalled what I had written after my first encounter with Lang Lang, when I saw him perform Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 11 concerto in E minor (the first) with the San Francisco Symphony.  Here is how I described his priorities regarding body and music:

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.

As far as I am concerned, Lang Lang was as detached from Chopin’s music as Brendel had been from Schubert’s.  The only difference was that the two pianists conveyed their detachment in different ways, neither of which benefitted the music very much.  To be fair, however, both of these pianists had to contend with grueling touring schedules.  The fact is that no performer can be “on” every time (s)he comes out on stage in front of an audience;  and, much as I dislike the proposition, I fear that both pianists are more interested in how they present themselves in Carnegie Hall or the Barbican Centre than in any impression they make in any city in California, even one with the musical legacy of San Francisco.

Since I have been watching Luck with great interest, let me turn to the racetrack for a closing metaphor.  Buying a ticket to a concert is a bit like placing a bet on a horse.  You can draw upon no end of “stocks of knowledge” in seeking out a bet that is likely to give you the best payoff;  but all those data can never tell you just what the horse will do after its gate opens.  Thus, those of us who write about concerts are in the same boat as sports writers covering the race after it has happened.  We can describe;  and, from time to time, we may even be able to apply some form of diagnostic thinking to our respective descriptive tasks.  However, we have to be very careful about evaluating, since we rarely know just what factors will be most relevant to making a sound evaluative decision.

Somebody Likes Bradley Manning!

According to Lauren Indvik’s post to Mashable last night, Bradley Manning has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.  This should not be entirely surprising, since WikiLeaks received an institutional nomination last year.  Indivk took the trouble to provide a few words about the nominating process:

The names of 191 individuals and 43 organizations were submitted to the Norweigan [sic] Nobel Committee for consideration. Every year, the five-member Committee sends out thousands of letters to qualified individuals — lawmakers, university professors and other figures involved in the public sphere — calling for nominations. The lists of nominees are kept secret for 50 years, but some voting individuals choose to announce their nominations publicly.

This seems as good a process as any.  Lawmakers tend to have ideological agendas, but there seems to be plenty of room for other opinions.  The irony is that how the Nobel Committee makes a decision about Manning will probably have a lot to do with how his trial proceeds.  In other words the very government that has chosen to prosecute him may become a major data source when the Nobel Committee ponders what decision to make.

Local Knowledge Ignored Again?

Around the beginning of the year, the deli on the ground floor of the complex where I live went out of business.  It was a mom-and-pop operation that just could not make it in the sagging economy against the pressures imposed by the big chains selling the same stuff for less.  I had been willing to pay a bit more for my milk, just as a sign of support;  but the closing of their doors was no great problem.  It just meant that I had to walk a block up the street (that being Van Ness Avenue, it meant uphill, making for an addition to my exercise regimen) to Walgreens to get milk.

This morning I made that trip around 8:30 AM.  I discovered that the milk shelves were almost empty.  While checking out I asked when milk deliveries were made.  I was told that the milk came around 7 AM (before the doors opened);  but the clerk then added that it was only delivered every other day.  In other words, having created increased demand by forcing a small business to give up the ghost, the big business had yet to take measures to deal with the resulting need for increased supply.

Now, it is unclear which big business made this decision.  It could have been Walgreens’ failure to recognize how much milk was being sold, or it could have been Berkeley Farms failure to note that the shelves were getting emptier at delivery time.  Of course the supply shortage could be traced back to a broader milk shortage.  (Perhaps those happy cows of California are not as happy as we think.)  However, my guess is that word of a milk shortage would have made local, if not national, news sources (if not in the mainstream then in the free weeklies that come out on Wednesday mornings).

The more likely hypothesis is that order-and-fulfillment is now managed entirely by machines, working off of databases that, for all we know, have been relegated to some place in that cloud that is the newest fad of information technology management.  Put another way, technology is serving decision making, rather than decision support;  and, because that technology does not accommodate anything as sophisticated as local knowledge, all it knows about are the raw numbers that are collected and fed to the database.  Those numbers may eventually indicate a trend, which, in turn, may be interpreted as a need for increased supply.  On the other hand, they may not.  My own reaction is to do a bit more plan-ahead buying when my wife and I make our weekly run to Safeway, thus eliminating the need to walk the extra block to Walgreens most of the time.

In other words, by driving the mom-and-pop out of business, Walgreens may have gotten what they wanted.  However, by ignoring the local consequences of their action, their decision-making software has yet to take advantage of this newly-created situation.  In other words the machine fumbled the ball;  and, by the time the machine even figures out that the ball was lost, it will be irrecoverable because people can be resourceful enough to figure out what to do in such a situation better than machines can!