The Bee and the Travelling Salesman

According to an article that appeared yesterday on the Web site for The Guardian, a bee can solve the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP).  Here is a more specific account of that claim:

Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.

The insects learn to fly the shortest route between flowers discovered in random order, effectively solving the "travelling salesman problem" , said scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The conundrum involves finding the shortest route that allows a travelling salesman to call at all the locations he has to visit. Computers solve the problem by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the one that is shortest.

Bees manage to reach the same solution using a brain the size of a grass seed.

Dr Nigel Raine, from Royal Holloway's school of biological sciences, said: "Foraging bees solve travelling salesman problems every day. They visit flowers at multiple locations and, because bees use lots of energy to fly, they find a route which keeps flying to a minimum."

Using computer-controlled artificial flowers to test bee behaviour, his wanted to know whether the insects would follow a simple route defined by the order in which they found the flowers, or look for the shortest route.

After exploring the location of the flowers, the bees quickly learned to fly the best route for saving time and energy.

If this is to be more than sensationalist journalism (if one believes that mathematics can ever be a topic for sensationalist journalism), however, there are a few questions that we cannot allow to get swept under the rug.  If this is, indeed, a question of learning, what is the nature of the learning process and how long does it take?  Related to this question of efficiency is the question of how many flowers were in the controlled experiment, which might imply that a bee has only so much channel capacity for planning its route.  (This would make sense under the assumption that there is only so much nectar that the bee can harvest on a single trip.)

The problem is that the lead sentence is about as misleading as it is attractive.  Evidence that bees may be good at route planning within their own behavioral constraints does not warrant the conclusion that they “can solve complex mathematical problems.”  Solving the TSP in its full generality is just not a part of what bees do, particularly when we may not yet have a good idea how many flowers a bee can visit in a single trip.  To reason from the example given in the Wikipedia entry for the TSP, if a bee can visit fifteen flowers, then the number of possible routes from which it would have to select the shortest is 43,589,145,600.  If Raine ran his test on fifteen flowers, then I might be willing to take notice, even if the bee could not come up with a closed-form solution for the general case!

As I recently observed, even a comedian like Ricky Gervais would immediately recognize that this has more to do with Wittgenstein’s Lion than with the mathematics of complexity.  In the spirit of Wittgenstein’s assertion that we could not understand what a lion would have to say, even if that lion had some version of what we would call speech, the bee would be no more capable of describing its “flight planning” than a centipede would in describing how it coordinates its legs.  Indeed, the very concept of “planning” is probably alien to both of these scenarios.  We invoke the concept because we believe it is necessary;  but James Gibson rejected that premise in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, where he considered the related problem of how birds seem to follow their migratory paths with great consistency.

According to the Guardian story, Raine’s results have been accepted for publication.  They are due to appear this week in The American Naturalist.  I suggest that anyone curious enough to read this document begin by checking if Gibson is in the bibliography.  If he is missing, then I would worry that Raine may have been a bit too myopic in both his methods and his conclusions.

Putting the Machine in its Proper Place

The New York Review scored a real coup in getting Gary Kasparov as their reviewer for the MIT Press book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky. Having retained the position of top-ranked chess player in the world until his retirement from professional chess in 2005, Kasparov can provide the practitioner's perspective on his losses to the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer; and, as co-founder of The Other Russia, the one pro-democracy coalition that seems to receive coverage for its opposition to Vladimir Putin, Kasparov is also a man with the wisdom to choose his words with great care and effective impact. Indeed, Kasparov may be so cautious with his words that one suspects that he has been kinder to Rasskin-Gutman than the author deserves, since the most important point of his review is that those who try to reduce chess to a mathematical problem that can be solved always seem to miss out on the subtle roles that practice plays when the game is actually played.

Chess was originally appealing to the artificial intelligence community because of its complexity. I suppose there was a tendency to believe that, if one could master the complexity of the number of possible chess games, one could apply the same strategy to mastering the complexity of neural interconnections. From that proposition followed the corollary that, if one mastered the complexity neural interconnections, one could model consciousness itself. Those who dared to argue that consciousness might involve something more than neural material were dismissed as monists wedded to belief in some unquantifiable interaction between mind and body. If the body was involved at all, it was only in the stimulation of individual neurons; and, if one could master complexity, then those stimuli would eventually work their way into an effectively operating model of consciousness.

The key point of Kasparov's review, however, is that, while Deep Blue may have demonstrated that a mathematical model could master chess better than the best human player, one could not (in either the near or distant future) deduce from the operation of Deep Blue a model of human consciousness. To demonstrate this point, he does not try to investigate the capabilities and limitations of the mathematics behind the Deep Blue program. Instead, he cites an experiment in the domain of what used to be called "man-machine systems." He cited an experiment (which, he observes gently, was totally ignored in Rasskin-Gutman's book) in "freestyle" chess. The "freedom of style" was that, while the competition was for humans, a game could be played by a team consisting of multiple players and/or computers. In other words a "player" was not necessarily an individual but rather a "pooling of expertise," where that expertise could reside in humans and/or algorithms. Kasparov summarized the result of this experiment with the following proposition:

Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

In other words the "secret sauce" of a "winning combination" resided in the quality of the process that accounted for what the human did, not only in making moves but in interacting with the machine element(s) of the team. To invoke the sort of terminology I have tried to explore in my own research, the essence of monism does not lie in noun-based relationships between components of body and "components" (if they exist) of mind; rather, it lies in verb-based relationships between what the body does and what the mind does (which may include communicating with resources such as machines and other minds).

Kasparov sees this proposition as the explanation of why any mathematical model of chess that never gets beyond the combinatorics of the combinations of moves will never be an effective model of the practices of an expert chess player. He says the following:

Where so many of these [mathematical] investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.

Note, just to draw on one of my other favorite topics, that those three sentences would make just as much sense if one were to substitute the word "piano" (or any other instrument) for "chess." Note, also, that Kasparov stresses a tight coupling between learning and doing. One may seek out descriptions for what one and others have done; and those descriptions are, themselves, tightly coupled to the processes of doing (one of the insights we encounter in Plato's "Theaetetus"). However, as John Dewey argued, what we learn is necessarily connected to what we do; and a database of those descriptions will never be an adequate substitute for the actual doing.

Thus, Kasparov's proposition should be taken as a plea for a paradigm shift among those committed to research in artificial intelligence. The shift involves setting aside the Holy Grail of the autonomously intelligent machine in favor of the less glamorous pursuit of more effective problem solving and decision making through man-machine interactions. This would involve departing from exhaustive efforts to model problems and situations in favor of the "solving" and "making" verbs applied to problems and decisions. To draw, once again, upon the trivium, logic should no longer be allowed to play with all the marbles. Verb-based thinking will require an intense understanding of the richness of verb grammar and of the action-based foundations of the application of rhetoric (which cannot be ignored when considering how minds interact). Unfortunately, such understanding can only build on a far richer educational foundation than the one we currently have; so it is highly unlikely that anyone with any clout in our current culture will take Kasparov's plea seriously.

On-the-Job Learning the Microsoft Way

We now accept as axiomatic that proposition that, whatever your job may be (assuming you have one), you will have to be learning new things about how to do it while working at it. Microsoft has decided to take a proactive approach to this proposition when it comes to learning more about the features of productivity software; and, since this is a Microsoft effort, that means learning how to use Office software more productively. Here is their basic approach as reported by Ina Fried for her Beyond Binary column on the CNET News Web site:

I'm not sure it's exactly the approach I would take, but Redmond has decided to make a game out of what I find to be one of the most significant annoyances in Microsoft's Office--finding the command one is looking for.

Introduced on Tuesday, "Ribbon Hero" is aimed at turning into a game the often frustrating task of finding commands on Office's Ribbon toolbar, which debuted as part of Office 2007.

In a blog post, Office program manager (and self-described casual games enthusiast) Jennifer Michelstein said Microsoft was trying to see if the company could tap into the trend of using games as a means of training.

"We set out to understand whether elements of game play (things like scoring points, competing with friends, and earning achievements) could motivate people to explore more of the app, learn new features, and ultimately become more productive," Michelstein wrote. "Could we do it in a way that fit well into the regular Office workflow, without being too much of a distraction?"

Ultimately, Microsoft decided to put it out there and see.

Users can earn points in Ribbon Hero in one of two ways. The first way is just by using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and using commands. A small number of points are awarded for basic commands, while more complex features earn more points. A second way to earn points is to complete various challenges. It also taps a Facebook connection to let users share their score and see how they stack up against their friends.

Many years ago I floated the hypothesis that there were three ways a "knowledge worker" could learn new things about a software product:

1. Through the "help" facilities of the software itself, possibly augmented with hyperlinks to Web sites providing FAQ information.
2. By getting in touch with a human being at a call center.
3. Through conversations with colleagues about what they were doing.

That last item was a corollary of a discovery made within Xerox that their repair technicians learn a lot of things that were not "in the book" by exchanging war stories about problems they solved over casual conversation (and perhaps some beer) at the end of a long and hard day. The point is that people can be a great resource for learning, and people you know are better than those impersonal call center voices that spend most of the time reading from a prepared script!

Apparently, Microsoft does not see it this way. They figure that the learning process should focus as much as possible on a man-machine relationship. If that relationship can be facilitated by having the user play a game, that just reinforces their position that time spent with the machine will always be more productive than time spent with one's colleagues. My own position is that workplaces are creating enough alienation already. The last thing they need is more software to increase that sense of alienation!

More Disconnected Dots

It has often observed that one reason why metaphors communicate so effectively is that they have extremely strong staying power. That certainly seems to be the case with the application of the connect-the-dots metaphor to missed opportunities to detect terrorists threats. Having resurrected that metaphor for the failed Christmas Day attack, it has now wended its way into the post hoc analysis of Major Nidal Malik Hasan's shooting of 13 people at Fort Hood. In presenting the results of this investigation, its leader, Retired Admiral Vernon Clark declared:

There is not a well-integrated means to gather, evaluate, and disseminate the wide range of indicators that could signal an insider threat.

On the surface this says nothing we have not already heard; or, to put things in a slightly more negative way, it says that we are still not analyzing these situations in search of lessons learned from which new action plans may emerge. Indeed, according to those wire services that Al Jazeera English was using, the most direct language seems to have come from one member of Clark's committee, former Army Secretary Togo West:

What we want is commanders' awareness of what's happening in their units and what's happening with their people.

As I read this, West decided to take a stand on the prevailing rhetoric over whether or not the problem was one of a human or systemic failure by making it clear that the failure was human. It all comes down to what is part of those commanders' job description, meaning that, either the job description needs to be updated to reflect the conditions or those commanders' superiors need to be more vigilant about whether or not their subordinates are doing their jobs properly.

Taken in these blunter terms, West made a really strong statement. Indeed, it may have been so strong that Clark did not want to make it part of the "official executive summary." Thus, I think it is worth considering that it may have taken a fair amount of chutzpah for West to have made the statement at all, particularly if his position is more action-oriented than that of the executive summary. In the face of this analysis being yet another potential example of a willful disregard of even relatively recent history, I have decided that we should accept the "chutzpah value" of West's statement and single him out for the Chutzpah of the Week award.

Alone with the Beauty?

I suspect that one of the major downsides in following that "Monk-Amram" path of finding the beauty in a performance of music and disregarding "the rest of it" is that the trip down that path can be a lonely one.  Not only does it tend to involve going against the grain that everyone else has established (as in the source anecdote of Monk finding beauty in country music records);  but also, simply because it is a matter of search, it can be a time-consuming and difficult process that involves more than a spontaneous reaction to "how the spirit moves you."  I came to appreciate the loneliness of going against the grain this morning as other reviews of Tuesday evening's performance of Franz Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin (D. 795) by baritone Nathan Gunn, accompanied by his wife Julie, have begun to surface.  All those "elements that rankled me" that I deliberately chose to disregard seem to have been selected for focal attention in both the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Classical Voice!

Now, in all fairness, it is not an easy matter to disregard spontaneous reactions, particularly when those reactions follow normative practices.  I suspect that such an ability to go against the spontaneous was what made Thelonious Monk as brilliant a composer as he was, but on the other hand there is the risk that departing from the beaten path can lead you off a cliff.  There is also the question of whether one wishes to commit to taking a more time-consuming approach if one feels that there are better things that can be done with that time.  Ultimately, the only lesson to be learned from this diversity of approaches is that both serious listening and the task of describing the resulting experience involve hard work that rewards only those willing to commit to doing that work.  Furthermore, the reward may be nothing more than the personal satisfaction at having understood an order in a situation that others have dismissed as confusion.

"naive extrapolation and collective magical thinking"

To continue the theme of our (cultural?) inability to learn from past mistakes, I think it is important to remember that we learn in order to get on successfully in a world that initially strikes us as the "blooming, buzzing confusion" described in Chapter XIII of William James' The Principles of Psychology. From this point of view, we are best informed by that sentence in Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn: "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood." Ever since James we have tried to deal with how our mind deals with confusion by seeking patterns through which it may "understand," in Miller's sense of the word, an order that must be present.

An excellent example of such pattern-seeking behavior may be found in the column John Kay wrote yesterday for the Financial Times under the title "The Cause of our Crises has not Gone Away." Given where the column was published, one quickly recognizes that the "crises" he has in mind are economic, rather than matters of ethics or "homeland security." The logical strategy of his article involved situating current conditions in a historical context and then seeking out patterns in that broader historical view. His results are, to say the least, striking:

The credit crunch of 2007-08 was the third phase of a larger and longer financial crisis. The first phase was the emerging market defaults of the 1990s. The second was the new economy boom and bust at the turn of the century. The third was the collapse of markets for structured debt products, which had grown so rapidly in the five years up to 2007.

The manifestation of the problem in each phase was different – first emerging markets, then stock markets, then debt. But the mechanics were essentially the same. Financial institutions identified a genuine economic change – the assimilation of some poor countries into the global economy, the opportunities offered to business by new information technology, and the development of opportunities to manage risk and maturity mismatch more effectively through markets. Competition to sell products led to wild exaggeration of the pace and scope of these trends. The resulting herd enthusiasm led to mispricing – particularly in asset markets, which yielded large, and largely illusory, profits, of which a substantial fraction was paid to employees.

Eventually, at the end of each phase, reality impinged. The activities that once seemed so profitable – funding the financial systems of emerging economies, promoting start-up internet businesses, trading in structured debt products – turned out, in fact, to have been a source of losses. Lenders had to make write-offs, most of the new economy stocks proved valueless and many structured products became unmarketable. Governments, and particularly the US government, reacted on each occasion by pumping money into the financial system in the hope of staving off wider collapse, with some degree of success. At the end of each phase, regulators and financial institutions declared that lessons had been learnt. While measures were implemented which, if they had been introduced five years earlier, might have prevented the most recent crisis from taking the particular form it did, these responses addressed the particular problem that had just occurred, rather than the underlying generic problems of skewed incentives and dysfunctional institutional structures.

The public support of markets provided on each occasion the fuel needed to stoke the next crisis. Each boom and bust is larger than the last. Since the alleviating action is also larger, the pattern is one of cycles of increasing amplitude.

There are two important conclusions to draw from these findings. The first is that, informed by a historical view, Kay concluded that the pattern resides not in the structure of the crises themselves but in "mechanics" that were repeated from one crisis to the next. The second is that each iteration of those "mechanics" leads to a crisis whose amplitude is greater than its predecessor.

Kay's conclusion is likely to aggravate just about everyone trying to make a living in the financial sector, with the possible exception of those who sail under the flag of what I have called "the Grameen School of thought," whose fundamental premise is that the financial sector should be based on a non-profit business model. His final sentence packs a real wallop:

In the name of free markets, we created a monster that threatens to destroy the very free markets we extol.

The nature of that monster is best captured by his brief speculation on how the next crisis might surface:

I do not know what the epicentre of the next crisis will be, except that it is unlikely to involve structured debt products. I do know that unless human nature changes or there is fundamental change in the structure of the financial services industry – equally improbable – there will be another manifestation once again based on naive extrapolation and collective magical thinking.

In other words the entire financial sector rests on a foundation of illusion; and, while Niall Ferguson argued that case that such illusion was a necessary prerequisite for progress, Robert Skidelsky saw it as a sign of regress in the development of a society more ingenious at making money than at making things. To bring this distinction to Main Street, the very fact that our financial institutions have, for all intents and purposes, "recovered" from the crisis while the resulting unemployment crisis shows no similar signs of recovery can be attributed to the proposition that ours is no longer a country with a significant commitment to "making things." Furthermore, we cannot expect either the Executive or Legislative branches of government to confront this problem, because ours is an age in which those who make money have radically more influence than those who make things. From this point of view, the financial sector may very well barrel its way into its next crisis before the rest of the country has recovered from the present one!

Putting Brahms in Perspective

One of the things that the packaging of the Deutsche Grammophon Complete Edition box of the music of Johannes Brahms has revealed to me is just how little music Brahms composed for orchestra. There are only five CDs in the Orchestral Works section, which comes down to the two early serenades, the four symphonies, and two concert overtures. Then there is the orchestral version of the Opus 56a Haydn variations (which, in spite of alphabetic ordering, has always struck me as a post hoc reflection of the Opus 56b two-piano version) and the WoO 1 Hungarian dances (which were probably preceded by the four-hand piano version). There are then three CDs to cover the two piano concertos, the violin concerto, and the "double" (violin and cello) concerto, bringing the count up to eight. Finally, there are three CDs of Works for Chorus and Orchestra, one for the German Requiem and two for shorter works, the most familiar probably being the Opus 53 rhapsody for contralto, male chorus, and orchestra. In other words there is an orchestral presence on only eleven of the 46 CDs in the Deutsche Grammophon box.

This "census" reminded me of what I basically already knew, which is that Brahms' two "strong suits" were the keyboard and the voice. There are nine CDs in the Piano and Organ Works section, only one of which is for organ, while another two are allocated primarily for the four-hand and two-piano works; but the piano plays a major role in the canon of chamber music, which fills eleven CDs. Similarly, the piano accompaniments for many (most?) of the song settings (another eleven CDs, covering both the Lieder and Vocal Ensembles collections) stand in their own right as impressive keyboard writing. That leaves only the four Choral Works CDs, most of which are a capella or relatively modestly accompanied (the outstanding exception being the Opus 17 songs for female chorus, two horns, and harp).

From the point of view of a struggling amateur, I also have discovered that, while there are certainly works that make heavy virtuoso demands, once you figure out how to get your hands around them, the notes tend to be pretty much "keyboard friendly." I have had similar experiences with Robert Schumann (who, for all we know, brought out that side of Brahms) and Joseph Haydn (whose influence is easily detected). This contrasts sharply with my efforts to wrestle down Ludwig van Beethoven (even if the struggle is eventually rewarding) and my ongoing frustrations with Frédéric Chopin, whom, for the most part, I prefer to leave to others. Franz Schubert occupies a middle ground between Beethoven and Brahms; but then I have always enjoyed the anecdote about a Schubertiad at which he could not play the fugue from his own "Wanderer" fantasy! Franz Liszt is another matter. I had a teacher in Santa Barbara who encouraged me to go after Liszt in order to get beyond the usual pedagogical conventions, rather in the spirit behind Simon Rattle's efforts to get the orchestra of San Francisco Conservatory students to get beyond their conventions when performing Richard Wagner. On the other hand Liszt's arrangement of Beethoven's first symphony is, in many ways, far more "keyboard friendly" than many of Beethoven's own piano compositions. After Brahms, of course, the rules of the game start to go through all sorts of changes; so any discussion of "keyboard friendly" music in the twentieth century should be held off for another post!

Second Edition?

It was during the sesquicentennial celebration of the birth of Johannes Brahms that my interest in his music began to escalate from the serious to the exhaustive. At the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, the Guarneri Quartet joined forces with the trio of Joseph Kalichstein, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson to perform a series of programs that covered all of the chamber music that Brahms composed for piano and strings. My wife-to-be Linda and I attended every one of those concerts (even inviting my parents up from Philadelphia for one of them); and I still remember how revelatory each evening was for me.

That was a time when I did a lot of browsing in the many Manhattan record shops that had interesting collections of classical music. On one of our "dates," Linda saw a Deutsche Grammophon box marked Brahms Edition containing all of his songs performed by soprano Jessye Norman and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, all accompanied on piano by Daniel Barenboim. We were both crazy about Norman; so there was no question of adding this to my collection, even if I was not the most enthusiastic Barenboim follower. (I would later play the track of "Von ewiger Liebe," Opus 43, Number 1, at our wedding.) Over the following months I picked up several more of the Brahms Edition boxes, all of which had vocal content: the Vocal Ensembles collection, the Choral Works, and the Works for Chorus and Orchestra. As I have previously written, we grew particularly fond of Giuseppe Sinopoli's approach to the German Requiem in that last collection.

With the move into the era of compact discs, it seemed as if the masters of many of my favorite Deutsche Grammophon recordings had been condemned to languish in the archival vaults. This included all of the Brahms Edition material, which may have been set aside under the assumption that demand would not be particularly high in the absence of any major anniversary celebration. After a couple of decades of waiting (and living with the decision to get rid of all of my vinyls when we "downsized" to our condominium in San Francisco), I eventually decided to satisfy my Gesamtwerk approach to listening to Brahms with the Brilliant Classics' collection of his complete works, using this blog to document several impressions of its assets and liabilities. Recently Deutsche Grammophon finally released their own Complete Edition box, and I looked forward to reviving my memories of those vinyls that were eventually played to death. I even wrote about that anticipation in conjunction with reexamining Sinopoli's Requiem performance in light of all the negative things I had been reading about him.

Thus, when the Deutsche Grammophon box arrived, the first thing I did was review the "table of contents" booklet. It was neatly organized in sections that corresponded to the individual boxes of vinyls that had originally been released, but I was surprised to discover that the Sinopoli Requiem was not there. It had been replaced by a performance conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, while all the other Sinopoli recordings from the original box were included. Checking the recording details, I discovered that this "substitute" was recorded in 1987, roughly five years after all of the Sinopoli recordings for the vinyl box had been made (and four years after the sesquicentennial year). Was this a reaction to all of Sinopoli's negative press receptions? That seemed unlikely, since Deutsche Grammophon had already released the complete recordings that Sinopoli had made with the Philharmonia Orchestra of the music of Gustav Mahler.

Further investigation revealed that the CD version was, indeed, a "second edition" of the original vinyl product. All of the Herbert von Karajan recordings of the symphonies and Haydn variations made with the Berlin Philharmonic had been recorded in 1987 and 1989; and the recordings of the piano sonatas were made in 1996! Were those replacing the recordings that Krystian Zimerman had made in 1979 and 1982 that had been released as their own 2-CD set? When a book goes into a second edition, there is usually at least a rough account of what has changed and what motivated those changes. However, the Compete Edition booklet provides no information other than the lists of all the tracks and the recording details. Is there a story behind the decision that the second edition should revise the content of the initial project?

Jazz Masters (The NEA Version)

The eight recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2010 Jazz Masters Awards have now been announced:

1. Kenny Barron
2. George Avakian
3. Annie Ross
4. Yusef Lateef
5. Muhal Richard Abrams
6. Bobby Hutcherson
7. Bill Holman
8. Cedar Walton

If nothing else this list reinforces the judgment of those who planned the SFJAZZ Spring Season, since Bobby Hutcherson performed with McCoy Tyner about a month ago at the Palace of Fine Arts and Kenny Barron's trio appeared last night at Herbst Theatre. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of these selections that leave me lukewarm at best.

I suspect that my discontent is strongest when it comes to Avakian. Since he is a producer, rather than a performer, his award is for "jazz advocacy," primarily for his efforts to promote jazz through Columbia Records. My own opinions, however, have run towards the conclusion that, to paraphrase an old saw, with an advocate like Columbia, jazz had no need of enemies. Last August I went so far as to call the Columbia enterprise a "necessary evil," concerned more with "making jazz 'intellectually respectable' to those who would not be inclined to listen," rather than doing justice to serious jazz listeners and those who were at their best when performing for such listeners. Miles Davis was the primary case in point. There is no questioning the value of many of the sides he recorded for Columbia; but, in the overall progress of his career, it seemed is if there came a time when the "Columbia product" began to take priority over Miles' performances. Yes, Miles was adventurous enough to pursue directions not usually associated with jazz; but it seemed as if each of those adventures resulted in a new domain of sameness, rather than a preference for experiments, not all of which would necessarily work out as planned.

Ironically, a similar problem of sameness seemed to occupy Barron's performance last night. As I wrote in my account for Examiner.com, his approach to Dizzy Gillespie's "Bebop" was on the brink of "easy listening," if not over that brink. What sense of adventure there was for the serious listener seemed to come mostly from bassist Kyoshi Kitagawa, and even Jonathan Blake's drum work was relatively tame. This leaves me wondering whether, at least by NEA standards, a "jazz master" is one whose work has "arrived at the innocuous," more suitable as comfortable background than as provocative foreground. This would be depressing since it suggests, if not implies, that any jazz for serious listening is now more suitable for the museum than it is for the performance stage.

Out of the Scottish Woods

My traversal of the Brilliant Classics Haydn Edition has now taken me through all of those Scottish and Welsh songs collected by the "irrepressible" George Thomson, as well as the Scottish collections of William Whyte and William Napier. Fortunately, this trip through the Scottish woods emerged on a field of three CDs of Joseph Haydn's original song compositions, which aligned relatively nicely with my Henle Verlag Lieder volume and included a couple of songs with Italian texts that Henle had either excluded or neglected. More important is that, as with the case with the Brahms collection, these particular CDs restored to my library the content of some vinyl records I had given up with the move to San Francisco. These were the Haydn song recordings made by soprano Elly Ameling, accompanied by Jörg Demus. Back when most of my concert-going took place in New York, I was a big Ameling fan. I had already acquired the CD version of the recordings she had made of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart songs, so I was glad to have her Haydn collection restored to complement the Mozart collection.

I have now moved on to the string quartets. As had been the case with the cantatas in the Bach Edition, these are somewhat peculiarly ordered; and a quick perusal of the Hoboken catalog revealed that the collection is not quite complete. Now the omission of the Opus 3 quartets is understandable, since it has now been established that these were composed by Roman Hofstetter. On the other hand the two quartets missing from the Opus 2 collection are the ones originally composed as divertimenti that included two horn parts; and the entire Hoboken volume (II) of divertimenti that do not include the piano has been omitted from the Brilliant collection, which I take to be as great a disappointment as the omissions from Hoboken's concerto volume (VII).

Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in the quartets that have been included. As is the case with the symphonies, we have an abundance of examples of how Haydn could exercise his wit with this particular combination of instruments. (Hoboken III/38, published as Opus 33, Number 2, is sometimes known as the "Joke" quartet.) Furthermore, these performances by the Buchberger Quartet do an excellent job of bringing out that sense of instrumental coloration, which I wrote about last February when I took issue with how Menahem Pressler had approached one of Haydn's piano trios in his Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Haydn is a great favorite among music theorists because his sense of invention could be so imaginative; but, if we press our noses to close to the score pages, it is too easy to miss out on just how extraordinary Haydn could be in the actual sounds emerging from his instruments. It should therefore be no surprise that this keen sense of auditory experience was a key element in this week's San Francisco Symphony performance of Haydn's B-flat major sinfonia concertante (Hoboken I/105); and I would give conductor Bernard Labadie far more than ample credit for shaping that auditory experience. As I have already written, this is also one of the virtues of the performances of the symphonies by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra under Adam Fischer; so, whatever its "sins of omission" may be in the collection Brilliant has assembled, this Haydn Edition is turning out to be an excellent sample through which we can come to understand the virtues of Haydn through his sounds as well as his notes.

Dis-Grace-ful Chutzpah

This morning I found myself writing in as negative a tone as I have ever used on Examiner.com in reviewing last night's Handel Fireworks Celebration at Grace Cathedral, the final program in the current season of the American Bach Soloists. I tried to make it clear that I found no dissatisfaction with any of the performers in the American Bach Soloists, and anyone who reads me regularly knows that I am hardly one to find dissatisfaction with the music of George Frideric Handel. No, the target of my nattering negativity (as Spiro Agnew would have put it), was Grace Cathedral itself and the extent to which its physical setting undermined one's efforts to listen (in Igor Stravinsky's sense of the word, as distinguished from mere physiological hearing) to the wonderful Handel music that had been compiled for the evening's program. Checking my archives, I realized that the last time I had been so concerned that the very nature of listening to music was being threatened was when the London Telegraph ran a story about research indicating that digital music could well be detrimental to our capacities for such listening.

How is it, then, that an ensemble as capable as the American Bach Soloists could find themselves in such a listener-hostile setting (and, according to the program, will be returning to that setting for a performance of Messiah next season)? Given how seriously the performers seem to take their work, my guess is that this venue was selected by one or more managers or promoters, under the assumption that the prospect of hearing (word chosen to reflect Stravinsky's distinction) music in Grace Cathedral will attract (and, for that matter, can hold) a larger audience than would a more modest sanctuary or a more secular venue. This may well be the case. We have all had experiences with audiences more interesting in making a display of their approval (or disapproval) than in actually listening to the target of that display. (I sometimes think that the entire history of grand opera could be written around the sociology of such audiences.) Furthermore, since these are hard economic times, I can appreciate why the bean-counters end up speaking with a louder voice than the music-lovers; but bean-counters are almost always interested in nothing more than short-term gain. The long-term risk is that they may be cultivating an audience whose capacity for listening becomes as damaged as that of the experimental subjects discussed in that Telegraph report. After all, if, as I have argued, the only way to learn how to listen to music is to experience music performances, then such performances that compromise the ability to listen at all may end up doing more harm than good.

Unfortunately, I lack the stirring rhetoric of the "Communist Manifesto" to enjoin music-lovers of the world to unite against these bean-counters. Indeed, at a time when just about any performing arts organization is trying to get by on an overly-tight budget, it is hard for me to even suggest that casting negative votes with one's pocketbook is a good idea. We do not want this economic crisis to turn into a Social Darwinist instrument that will "select out" performing ensembles on the basis of their ability to "survive." On the other hand, since all of us have limited budgets, too, we can make it a point to spend our money on the most beneficial experiences we can find and then hope (against hope?) that such acts of personal choice may lead to greater availability of such experiences.

There is, however, one bit of "negative reinforcement" that I can apply in a somewhat playful spirit; and that is my Chutzpah of the Week award. As I see it, implementing decisions that are good for the balance sheets without being good for the audiences, particularly when the audiences have no say in the matter, is as good an instance of negative-connotation chutzpah as any. Thus, this week's award will be assigned to those members of the operations team of the American Bach Soloists in the (probably desperate) hope that their counterparts in the management of other quality ensembles will get the message!

Beginning the Ascent of Mount Haydn

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naming Students

Those who have begun to read my contributions to SF Concerts Examiner may have noticed that I have now referred to two San Francisco Conservatory students by name: Hye Yeong Min for her participation in a Schubertiad program arranged by Paul Hersh and Madison Emery Smith for her Graduate Recital, as well as her promotion of that recital. I have written about the practice of identifying students by name, most recently a little less than a year ago when a review of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto on San Francisco Classical Voice "provoked a controversial exchange of comments over whether student performers should be reviewed (or, for that matter, named)." I still feel strongly enough about my original position that I shall take the liberty of repeating it:

Regular readers may have noticed a tendency on my part to refer by name only to professional musicians, as opposed to students, such as those at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, or adult amateurs. This may be a reflection on my personal experience. One of things I remember about being a student, particularly a graduate student, was the way in which it seemed to grant me the ability to experiment "from a safe place." Education is very much a matter of exploration, and one cannot be a successful explorer by going down paths that have already been beaten smooth. Forging a new path, however, always carries an element of risk; and in the "real world" some of those risks could entail dire changes in the rest of your life if they are not approached with considered caution.

In other words an educational institution affords the opportunity to protect its students from the risk of serious consequences while encouraging them to be adventurous at the same time. As I see it, this idea of the "safe place" can be applied to just about any area a student wishes to pursue.
If I still believe this precept, why have I violated it twice before getting even half-way through this month? Smith was my first step down this slippery slope; and I took the step because initially I was writing about her effort to promote her recital, rather than about the recital itself. In the past I had seen single sheets of paper, possibly enhanced with a photograph, tacked up on a bulletin board; but I had never encountered as striking an announcement as the color post card Smith was circulating:

Having written about Smith's initiative as a publicist, it felt a little silly to write about the recital being publicized without mentioning her by name.
I shall also invoke the "silly" plea where Min is concerned. She was the only student participating in Hersh's Schubertiad. She was thus keeping company with two faculty members and one alumna, who was now running her own music school. Because the Schubertiad has traditionally been as much a social occasion as a musical one, it seemed appropriate to give the names and "credentials" of those occupying the "virtual drawing-room," thus casting the whole affair in a somewhat Proustian frame. If I had felt that Min's performance was out of place in her participation, I probably would have passed over any "roll call" in silence. However, this was Hersh's "drawing-room;" and she was one of the "friends" invited for the occasion. As I made clear in my review, she was definitely "up to" that occasion.
I am hoping that my effort to explain myself will provide some sort of "retaining mechanism" that will protect me from descending further down my slippery slope. I have observed that several Conservatory students now arrange to give performances beyond the protecting walls of the Conservatory. Out there in the "real world," people they do not know may be committing time and/or money to hear them perform. In that setting they have left the "safe place." I can write about them the same way I write about the performers I hear at Davies Symphony Hall; and, by all rights, I should write about them that way.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra

The launch of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra seems to have attracted considerable attention, not just in the San Francisco Chronicle (due to the involvement of Michael Tilson Thomas) but in just about every one of my RSS news feeds, international (because of the participation of the London Symphony Orchestra) as well as national. The vision of this endeavor is still only "loosely defined," as Joshua Kosman politely put it in his Chronicle article; but, beyond trying to summarize the first pass at implementation details, Kosman did well to point out what may be the most important underlying motive:

For Thomas, credited as the enterprise's artistic adviser, this is another installment in his efforts - as in the Symphony's "Keeping Score" project - to harness new technology in the service of music education.

This interested me far more than Tan Dun's contribution of "a four-minute collaborative piece" for the first event. Symphony orchestras are only going to survive if they can count on an audience base that is not only interested in their repertoire but also appreciative of the extent to which every concert educates in the art of listening. Having said that, I should observe that over the summer I wrote a blog post that made it clear that I was not a particularly big fan of Keeping Score, not to mention any number of posts skeptical of Web 2.0 evangelism. Nevertheless, I have discovered that YouTube is becoming an interesting vehicle for promoting piano recitalists; and I know at least a few concert-goers who seem to enjoy using YouTube to learn about those performers. Still, the fact that Tan's contribution will be only four minutes long points out YouTube's biggest shortcoming, which is that it is best at distributing performances of encore-length scale. I view this as a shortcoming because I think the major challenge that classical music faces involves getting future audiences to accept and then enjoy the longer attention space it requires. After all, one of Thomas' greatest contributions to the performance repertoire has been his understanding of the massive symphonies of Gustav Mahler; and my most recent experience at Davies Symphony Hall was his second performance of Mahler's eighth symphony with the San Francisco Symphony. I am pessimistic that YouTube will be able to deliver listening experiences on this scale and even more pessimistic that the "mashup" techniques described in Kosman's article will compensate for this difficulty. (Arch-conservative that I am, I find it hard to believe that any mashup can contribute to cultivating the attention span that is so integral to listening to classical music!) I also worry that the sound itself has a lot to do with the experience and that the Internet is not yet up to snuff in delivering the necessary sound quality. (Even the best audio reproducing technology cannot do justice to all the sounds in the Mahler eighth, and I have yet to be convinced that even those piano encore clips really do justice to the subtleties that can make or break a performance.)

Having dwelled on these negative points, I am still glad that Thomas is not afraid to try new things. As a rule, we learn more from the experiments that do not turn out the way we anticipated. The future of classical music may depend on such persistent experimentation. However, my own druthers lean more in the direction of further exploitation of HD broadcasting to movie houses. I believe that, in the spirit of the work of Jordan Whitelaw, proper video direction can contribute to the concert listening experience, just as Barbara Willis Sweete used video to enhance the experience of watching the Metropolitan Opera production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (again appealing to solutions that can deal with performances that require a sustained attention span). Thus, having been trained by Thomas to be a better Mahler listener, I would have paid the price of an HD Metropolitan Opera movie ticket to see any of the London Symphony Orchestra performances of the complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler during its 2007–2008 season, all conducted by Valery Gergiev, particularly if the video was directed in the spirit of Whitelaw and Sweete. YouTube may have its place, but classical music is most appealing at its grandest. If technology is to serve music education, it should not neglect that sense of grandeur that makes so many concerts so rewarding.

Good-Cop and Bad-Cop Violinists

This week I finished reading My First 79 Years, Isaac Stern's memoir written with (by?) Chaim Potok. It is not a book that I would recommend, particularly for anyone interested in accurate details. In the matter of detail, there just is not very much of it; and what there is emerges from a highly selective memory that appears to be very effective at filtering out much (most?) of what is unpleasant. For example the darkest section of the book probably involves the bad reviews of his first recital in New York, while the deterioration of his second marriage only gets mentioned in passing to explain why he is now recalling his divorce. Where accuracy is concerned, much of the problem is that Potok probably does not know much about music (compared, for example, with what he knows about kids' baseball games) or San Francisco (which matters to those of us living there); and neither Stern nor Knopf (who could have taken editorial responsibility) seemed to care very much about any simple fact-checking. The reader thus constantly trips over muddles of names, dates, and geography.

Nevertheless, these matters are secondary in light of why I came to look at this book in the first place. In order to satisfy my own desire to become a better listener, I am always interested in what practicing musicians have to say about listening. This interest emerged after reading David Schneider's memoir of his life in the violin sections (both) of the San Francisco Symphony and his citation of a remark by Igor Stravinsky that has had a lasting effect on my own writing. Since then I have dipped into writings by and about practicing musicians in both the classical and jazz worlds, bearing in mind that there is far more of this literature about soloists and leaders than there is about "worker bees" like Schneider; and just about everything I read in this area leaves me with at least one seriously memorable item.

This was not the case with My First 79 Years, which, alas, comes off like a haphazard collection of memories. Those memories are laid out for enumeration by the reader with little opportunity for reflection. We are thus left with the impression of a busy man always rushing from one performance to the next with little reflective insight into the "work" that goes behind preparing for and delivering those performances. We are treated to a list of new works that were composed for Stern with little to say about what it took to move from initial conception to effective performance. The closest we get to that kind of insight is the "confession" that he was never able to play Arnold Schoenberg's violin concerto, even though Leonard Bernstein encouraged him to work on it. Stern's claim that Bernstein called the concerto "Schumann with wrong notes" ultimately tells us more about listening than the rest of the sentence in which that citation appears: "but there was something in it to which I could not bond."

The fact is that those who perform music often "say what they want to say" through their performances and prefer to avoid getting hung up on words that they cannot command particularly well. (There is a perfect, albeit corny, example of this in the final scene of The Benny Goodman Story.) In Stern's case that performance often involved more than just his communion with his violin. I saw him "live" only once, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He was playing the violin concerto of Johannes Brahms with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the concert was scheduled on the night of a National Hockey League playoffs game between the Boston Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers. The concerto was the second half of the program; and, before Ormandy raised his baton to begin, Stern stepped forward to address the audience just to let them know the score of that game. This brought down the house with approving applause.

This is a fair memory of Stern that is consistent with the text of his memoir. He is a man who wanted to be "well liked" (perhaps in the connotation that Arthur Miller intended for that phrase in Death of a Salesman). He always wanted the approval of those around him, whether it involved making music, saving Carnegie Hall, or giving time to work with Wes Craven on Music of the Heart, his film about Roberta Guaspari and her string orchestra of disadvantaged Harlem kids. He probably also wanted the approval of the ghosts of the composers whose music he played; but flesh-and-blood approval was always more reliable and therefore more satisfying. There is thus a way in which the music itself is not necessarily the highest priority in his work, and this may explain why Stern's presence in my own CD collection of the violin repertoire is as sparse as it is.

By way of disclaimer, I should state that I really came to understand and love the violin repertoire when the RCA Heifetz Collection was released on CD. In terms of general relationships in the social world, one could almost view Jascha Heifetz as the "bad cop" beside Stern's "good cop." Where Stern always seemed to be generous and open, particularly with both potential students and general music lovers, Heifetz was austere, if not withdrawn. I never had a chance to seem him "live;" and my first exposure to him came from a joke about his life in Southern California:

A wealthy Beverly Hills matron approached Heifetz to play for an hour at a garden party she was holding. Heifetz quoted her a fee of $50,000. She replied, "Well that is far more money than I had planned on spending, but I hear that you are the best. I shall pay your fee but only on one condition: You are not to mingle with the guests." Heifetz replied, "In that case madam, my fee will be $25,000."

Looking through all the photographs that are included in The Heifetz Collection, it is hard to find one that captures the man smiling. The only one I can immediately recall is one taken with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and this may be an important clue about the Heifetz who "plays well with others." Stern was very much a soloist, a center of attention even when others were performing. I was first really aware of this when I saw the telecast of the "Fiddlers Three" benefit concert by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, when Zubin Mehta conducted Stern along with Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman. Zuckerman played viola to complement Stern's violin in a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 364 sinfonia concertante, and to this day I can still stay that it is the most unbalanced performance of the work I have ever heard. It was as if Stern was determined to one-up every "statement" that Zuckerman made; and the result reflected terribly on both soloists.

There is no doubt that Heifetz was also a commanding soloist; but I shall take the extreme position that every recorded performance of chamber music in The Heifetz Collection can be viewed, within the limitations of recording technology, as an example of what chamber music ought to be. For example, while the C Major string quintet of Franz Schubert (D. 956) can only achieve its true impact in the immediacy of performance, I can think of no better way for a novice listener to prepare for such a performance than by listening to the 1961 recording that Heifetz made with Israel Baker (second violin), William Primrose (viola), and cellists Piatigorsky and Gabor Rejto. Furthermore, those performances had an impact that extended beyond the recording studio: When I moved to Los Angeles in 1985, I discovered (to my surprise, I must admit) that the city had an abundance of opportunities to hear chamber music, supported by a dedicated and enthusiastic audience, which had probably emerged from the concerts that Heifetz and Piatigorsky used to arrange (long before Lincoln Center had formed its own Chamber Music Society, I might add). Heifetz may not have been one for mingling with the guests; but, in the performance of chamber music, he was always "one among equals." As a result, he succeeded in infecting the Los Angeles arts community with a sincere love for the opportunities to experience such "intimate conversations."

Therein may lie the real difference. Amiable and social Stern has almost flooded the concert scene with a new generation of "star power" soloists, many (most?, all?) of whom inevitably make for "good box office" wherever they appear. However, if Stern's legacy has been those new soloists, the legacy of Heifetz could be felt in a city whose audience was as receptive to chamber music as it was to symphony orchestras (if not more so). For all of the stories about his anti-social nature, Heifetz invited all who would listen to share in the intimacy of a chamber music performance; and I expect that this particular legacy has now propagated well beyond the Los Angeles city limits.

Returning to Mount Beethoven

The replacement for my defective Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven has finally arrived, after a long wait, apparently due to the failure of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to process properly the material that Collectors' Choice had provided under their exchange agreement. If I had to make an educated guess (where, in this case, "educated" would honor John Dewey's definition as "informed by experience"), it would be that the package to be returned never made it out of San Francisco. This is, after all, a postal system that managed to lose my property tax bill one year, which is why I now have an Outlook reminder to check the City Web site by a certain date if the bill has not yet shown up in the mail. I gather from my wife that the Postal Service is offering more and more "do it yourself" services (like weighing packages and then allowing you to purchase the required postage, all at a single "work station"); but it is still the case that human hands are required to get an object from here to there. Given that we are obliged to take that word "service" seriously, this is a case of "service pathology" that is far more serious than the situation at my favorite target, the San Francisco Public Library, or my more recent complaints about the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Presumably the "quality of service" of the USPS falls under the jurisdiction of the Postal Regulatory Committee (PRC); but, if the PRC is paying as much attention to the USPS as they are to maintaining their Web site with timely and useful information, then anyone depending on the USPS for even part of the job of getting anything "from here to there" is likely to be in very deep yogurt! So much for ranting over an inordinately long wait!

Since the entire Beethoven collection had to be replaced due to a single defective disc (due to the decision of Brilliant Classics to avoid direct communication with a customer when this problem arises), I am now faced with the prospect of listening to all of the discs in the replacement package. Needless to say, I do not regard this as a hardship, particularly when this second attempt to ascend "Mount Beethoven" begins with recordings of the nine symphonies by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under the baton of Kurt Masur. I have a history of listing to "live" Masur performances that probably covers about 25 years and actually began with his leading the San Francisco Symphony in a truly "ear-opening" performance of Beethoven's Opus 60 fourth symphony. These recordings have given me the opportunity to experience the ways in which he can tease subtleties out of all nine of these familiar works and are therefore as important to my learning to listen as are my two collections of these symphonies performed by Wilhelm Furtwängler (along with a variety of individual recordings). I have not always been entirely satisfied with Masur, as was the case a few years ago when he came to San Francisco to conduct Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem;" but my disappointments have been heavily outweighed by performances that have been as informative as they were exciting, such as his performance of the second cello concerto by Alfred Schnittke. Thus, I continue to be more than satisfied that Masur was chosen to "represent the Beethoven symphonies" in this particular collection and have no problems with making another pass through this particular cycle.

Back to Bach

When it comes to learning to be a better listener to musical performances, August tends to be a pretty quiet month in San Francisco. Last year the high point of the month was a special "Bon Voyage" concert by the San Francisco Symphony, which provided a representative sample of the music they would be playing on their European tour. This year their travels do not appear to be taking them further than opening night at Carnegie Hall, which will take place after the opening night gala at Davies Symphony Hall. For my part this means that this is a time when I can work on honing my listening skills through some of the more interesting recordings I have in my collection. Having addressed this issue with respect to the jazz compositions of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, I have recently turned my attention to the more "classical" side of music experiences.

I used scare quotes in the preceding sentence because the current focus of my listening is Johann Sebastian Bach. However, while I now have the advantage of the Brilliant Classics Bach Edition and the Teldec Bach 2000 collection, both of which have made serious efforts to honor "authenticity" in the performance of this music, I have to confess that I have great interest in the recordings that Jascha Heifetz made in October of 1952 of the solo sonatas and partitas (BWV 1001 through 1006). This was a time when "authenticity" was not in the working vocabulary of very many (any?) working musicians, which means it was not on the radar of the emerging crop of students. When we think of Heifetz, we think of the nineteenth-century traditions of virtuosity; and we tend to listen to him as the pioneer who used recording technology to preserve those traditions for posterity. We also tend to think of the nineteenth-century as a time when the pure abstractions of Bach were trumped by the flamboyance of such virtuosity.

This is, at least, a partial distortion; and the best counterexample was Johannes Brahms. Brahms was an avid subscriber to the first serious effort to publish Bach's complete works, avid enough that he would eagerly devour each volume as it appeared and them anxiously await the next one. It would be unfair to say that Brahms was the first to recognize that there was more to Bach than abstraction; but he remains a prime example, since most (if not all) of his compositions deal with the need to strike the optimal balance between the intricate structures of form and the rhetorical impact of virtuosity. The same may be said of the Heifetz performances of the solo violin works. As I previously wrote, "Heifetz was a master of that refined stillness from which the most dynamic musical gestures could ensue;" and it was the dynamism of his virtuosity that draw so many to hear (if not listen to) him with anything along the gamut between satisfaction and awe. Yet through "that refined stillness" he also had the ability to let Bach be Bach, particularly when it came to sorting all those notes out into a simultaneity of two or more contrapuntal voices. In other words Bach was not a platform for showing off his talents. Rather the "Bach text" was of a voice that deserved serious listening; and Heifetz recognized that his role, as a performer, was to assist us in that often challenging transition from hearing to listening. Thus, in terms of what deserved to be preserved for posterity, those 1952 Bach sessions are just as important as the recorded documents we now have of performances from the flashier nineteenth-century traditions.

The Museum Versus the Artist

I write this in the spirit of some of my past posts (such "Branagh Versus Shakespeare" and "The Competition versus the Music"), in which I have tried to examine the opposition of forces that, by all rights, should be pulling in the same direction. In this case the artist is Dale Chihuly; and the museum is the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, currently providing (at a charge beyond normal admission) the exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young." A negative review in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kenneth Baker "polarized reader response as nothing else I have written for The Chronicle ever has," as Baker put it. Baker's "response to the response," so to speak, give a fair account of what provoked this polarization:

Quite a few people found the tone of my review ugly. I agree, which is why I reserve that tone for occasions, such as this one, when I see fraudulence or some other real public disservice afoot. As a practical matter, nothing I or any other critic can say will slow the juggernaut of Chihuly's success. In all likelihood, as experience suggests, such a damning review will bring more people, not fewer, to the exhibition.

In my own opinion Baker's "defense" of his position rests of sound principles, not unlike those I try to bring to my own writing about the performance of music:

In today's culture, people need not merely critics to tell them what art is, but also artists, curators, art historians, art dealers, collectors - and the viewers' own education and sensibility.

In the consensus as to the art status of a piece or a body of work, each such participant has something to contribute, and each type of contribution has to be valued differently.

The critic owes his readers not reassurance or even judgment, but a point of view, and thus, an example of how a point of view forms.

Hence, my practice of comparing one artist's works with those made by others. Art is made of connections - connections available to any informed observer - not just of materials and good intentions.

Personally, I rather enjoy what Chihuly does. I was delighted with an exhibition of his work that I saw in San Jose about ten years ago; and I have equally fond memories of a documentary about him that I saw on the (now defunct) Ovation channel. On the other hand, having now seen "Chihuly at the de Young," I rather wish that Baker had directed at least some of his ugly tone for the museum, rather than focusing entirely on the artist. As I see it, the real problem with this exhibit is that "the juggernaut of Chihuly's success," due at least in part to the promotional efforts of the de Young, have pretty much annihilated any chance of a visitor forming a point of view, whether or not that visitor has been informed (or misinformed) by any art critic.

Ultimately, the greatest damage done to the artist in this case is the inability of the museum to deal with its success in attracting a high volume of visitors. Visitors are herded like cattle into a confined space on the basis of assigned half-hour intervals. One barely has room to observe, let alone reflect on one's observations. Can anyone really expect a visitor to form a point of view in such a setting? Furthermore, since Chihuly's setting is glass, often in very large forms that still appear highly fragile, one is haunted by the possibility that one will become a bull in a china shop, a further inhibition to forming a point of view.

In fairness, however, I would probably argue that this particular exhibit is more symptom than disease, the real disease being the tendency of "institutions of culture" to alienate those who come with genuine curiosity. Such institutions are founded to offer a service; but, as I have, from time to time, observed about the "customer-facing" activities of the San Francisco Public Library, alienation rises when the "service business" goes pathological. There is something pathological about the way the de Young handles its visitors, particularly when they come in large numbers, which is, of course, the time when attitude towards their presence should be least alienating. Perhaps I am overly sensitive to this matter because it always seems as if the San Francisco Symphony has set a high standard for making the prospect of one of their concerts a highly inviting one. If they can do this sort of thing for a commitment to sit still for a couple of hours, why can't a major art museum be just as inviting?

Valery Gergiev in the Mahler Wars

Almost a year ago I wrote about Valery Gergiev's decision, as principle conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), to conduct the complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler during the 2007–2008 season. I wrote this under the title "The Coming Mahler Wars?," since San Francisco takes considerable pride in the performances of Mahler that Michael Tilson Thomas has brought to Davies Symphony Hall (and perhaps a bit more pride in his leading the San Francisco Symphony in the seventh of these symphonies as part of the 2007 Proms series). Thomas is also "Permanent Guest Conductor" of the LSO, which has a long-standing reputation for delivering excellent Mahler performances under a rather substantial number of batons. As a result I drew heavily upon my RSS feeds from the arts pages of the London press to find out what sort of reception Gergiev's project would receive as it evolved.

Still, reading is a poor substitute for listening; and, since the "carfare" to the Barbican (and St. Paul's for the eighth symphony) was more than I could manage, I was glad to see that a recording project was also involved with this particular cycle. The recordings seem to be coming out in the same order in which the symphonies were performed, beginning with the release of the sixth on April 8. Through the good graces of one of my neighbors, I have now had a chance to listen to this recording; and, at the very least, it made me regret not being there for the performance itself. As I am reminded every time I hear Mahler in Davies, there are just too many things happening on any page of a Mahler score to be rendered with any sense of fidelity by current (or future?) recording technology. Listening to a recording of Mahler can prospectively help you hone your listening skills before attending an actual performance, and a recording like this one might retrospectively awaken the memories of those who were actually there for Gergiev's Barbican performance. However, I have to wonder whether or not the recording has done justice to any of the performances, particularly in light of the "truth in advertising" question around the series of recordings being called "LSO Live" raised by David Bryson's review on the Amazon.com page for this CD.

This symphony is a real stake in the ground for conductor and orchestra alike. It pulls out all the stops that regulate heart-on-sleeve emotion and was probably the primary reason why Harold Schonberg could never get beyond dismissing Mahler as one "whose neuroses made Tchaikovsky's neuroses look healthy." If that kind of emotionality is going to work at all, it has to work at a visceral level; and, while Georg Solti was often criticized for relying too much on the skills of recording technicians and editors, he recognized that, in the synthetic environment of a recording, that visceral level sometimes demanded technical assistance. When he made the move from recording Mahler with the LSO to recording with the Chicago Symphony, the sixth was one of his first projects, recorded at the Krannert Centre of the University of Illinois in March and April of 1970, right after the recording sessions for the fifth. I cannot remember which recording was actually released first, but I do remember seeing the sixth on the shelves first and buying it. I had already been hooked on Mahler, had been medium-cool about Solti's London recordings, and became a devoted follower of Solti in Chicago by virtue of the recording of the sixth. If my change of heart was a result of technical tinkering, I cannot dismiss that tinkering because of the way it refined my ability to listen to "real performances" of Mahler.

This takes us back to Gergiev. As one can tell from the Amazon.com reviews, there are a variety of favorable adjectives that different listeners have applied to his recording of the sixth; but "visceral" is not one of them. The problem is that I have no way of knowing whether this lack comes from his actual performance (as was suggested by some of the reviewers present at the Barbican) or from a lack of that "technical tinkering," which, when properly applied, can provide at least some compensation for not actually "being there." Either way the recording is a disappointment, which has not left me particularly curious about the subsequent releases of the first (June 10) and the seventh (due for release on August 12). On the other hand much of that disappointment may have to do with the fact that, living so close to Davies Symphony Hall, I now take those "real performances" for granted and use recordings more for "background knowledge" and less for "serious listening." Thus, I am more interested in how the recordings I have will prepare me for listing to Thomas conduct Mahler's eighth symphony for a second time at Davies this coming November than I am in documents of a season that has passed in a city I was unable to visit!

More on Miles' "Second Quintet"

After having spent most of yesterday's post ranting about Columbia's "user hostile" production values, particularly where their vast library of recordings of Miles Davis is concerned, I feel a need to explain why, however unpleasant the Columbia product may be, the compilation of sessions of Miles' "second quintet" with Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), is what I called an "absolute 'must'" when it comes to learning to listen to jazz. It is not just the abundance of creative approaches that all five of these musicians take in their solos. It is also that, while Miles may be the leader (and probably would not have wanted to be regarded as anything other), when it came to the compositions and charts that were actually performed for these sessions, the regime was refreshingly democratic. In the six discs in the collection, all five of the quintet members get several substantial opportunities to assume the responsibility of composer. Thus, we find diversity not only in solo work (which is where we usually expect it in jazz) but also in the very logic, grammar, and rhetoric of the charts that provide the frameworks for those solos. In other words this was not a "standards" quintet or a "Miles" quintet; rather, it was a "polyglot" quintet, equally fluent in five compositional languages because of the intense intimacy that bound together these five musicians. This makes a marked contrast to John Coltrane's "Classic Quartet," whose language is "pure" Coltrane, applied to both standards and Coltrane originals.

This distinction may also address my concluding point yesterday about why Trane seems to get better radio coverage than Miles. As we build up our listening acquaintance with Trane, even if we do not do it diachronically, we "acquire his language," particularly in the rich diversity of his solos, which always see to have one more thought to add to the perspective. With Miles the "language acquisition problem" is far more challenging. One might say that his language kept changing faster than we can keep up with it, due in no small part to his decision to work in what I just called "polyglot" settings. Thus, it does not lend itself to casual radio listening, where a single performance will get included in a "set" with whatever the announcer seems to think makes for a suitable context. (Don't get me started on "shuffling!") There are, of course, certain "classics" that can hold up under such treatment, two of which, for better or worse, happen to be Columbia products: Sketches of Spain, which I cited yesterday (and, as I just discovered, even figured into an episode of Mad Men), and Kind of Blue. Radio broadcasters have no problems with these albums; but, when we get into those "second quintet" sessions, we are confronted head-on with the distinction that Igor Stravinsky liked to make between listening and hearing. This takes us far beyond the scope of what radio can do for us into a domain where all we have is our own ability to learn to listen to our own recordings (since we can no longer hear actual performances by that quintet). However, if we are serious about wanting to be better listeners, then we should not shirk from the challenge of venturing into that domain!