Aucoin Writes About “Lessons” from Boulez

Before we had to deal with the constraints of pandemic conditions, my wife and I would make regular visits to the City Lights Bookstore when we were in the North Beach area. Inevitably there would be something that attracted my attention strongly enough that I ended up purchasing it. On our most recent visit (hopefully not the last), my acquisition was Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures, transcriptions of lectures given by Pierre Boulez between 1976 and 1995 translated into English by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittal.

Like other purchases this book found its way to a pile where it has had to compete with other offerings vying for my attention. Because I have not touched the book since then, I was particularly interested in reading Matthew Aucoin’s review of it, which has just appeared in the latest (November 5) issue of The New York Review of Books. While I recognized Aucoin’s name as a composer, to the best of my knowledge, I have never had an opportunity to listen to his music; and I have been unable to find evidence of anything I have written about him. Given the clarity of his writing about the Boulez book and the acuity of his challenges to the contents of the book, I feel that I ought to learn more about his music.

I suppose my interest in Aucoin’s review derives from one of his strongest criticisms of the Boulez lectures. This has to do with the apparent conviction by Boulez that listening does not figure in the act of composition. To be fair, the index of the book has an entry for “listener/listening;” but it is just a reference to the entry for “perception,” which is broken down into a myriad of subcategories among which “listening” never appears. By now readers are probably aware that my own interests have involved arriving at a better understanding of the nature of listening as it is practiced by not only those making the music (both composers and performers) but also those on “audience side.”

If the nature of listening is not called out explicitly in Boulez’ lectures, he does seem to appreciate the significance of the concept of memory. Here is how Aucoin characterizes Boulez’ approach to writing about memory:

He defines active memory as a faculty not only of recall, but of presence and prediction: a performer must achieve a “global memory,” which consists of “recall-memory,” “monitoring-memory” (engagement with the present moment), and “prediction-memory.” Boulez compares this multidirectional memory to peripheral vision, without which we could not gain an accurate sense of an object’s position in space. The performer is like an Olympic skier, entirely alive to the present instant, yet also reliant on the momentum of past actions, and constantly scanning for obstacles ahead. Once a musician has fully absorbed a score, “a whole emerges in which memory can roam at will.” The score’s unidirectional temporal canvas becomes, in the hands of a master interpreter, a landscape within which the performer is free to rove, to discover.

What may be most interesting is that there is nothing particularly new here. Igor Stravinsky offered similar perspectives, acknowledging Henri Bergson as one of his inspiring sources. However, as Aucoin’s summary identifies, any understanding of memory must entail the nature of our awareness of the passing of time. Edmund Husserl gave a pioneering series of lectures on the subject of “time-consciousness;” and many of his insights were subsequently picked up by Martin Heidegger for his monumental Being and Time. What is more interesting, however, is that the “tripartite” nature of memory cited by Aucoin can be traced all the way back to the Confessions of Augustine. Sadly, the index to Music Lessons lacks entries for Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger; and my guess is that, for Boulez, Bergson was just one of many names that Stravinsky dropped in his own reflections about music.

Stravinsky appears often in Aucoin’s review. I was particularly taken by his account of a “weak misreading” of Stravinsky by Boulez. Aucoin elaborates this point as follows:

In his eyes, Stravinsky was “highly original” in his earlier pieces, which did not have obvious models—or at least not models that Boulez was familiar with—but his later experiments with extant European idioms, and especially his overtly neoclassical pieces, constitute an unforgivable regression.

The kicker here is the aside about Boulez’ familiarity. By now just about anyone interested in details about Stravinsky’s approach to composition knows that Russian folk music played a significant role in those “earlier pieces.” Here, again, we discover that the index to Music Lessons has no entry beginning with the word “Russian.” Trying to overlook Stravinsky’s Russian origins is a bit like trying to overlook the French influences on Erik Satie.

For the most part Aucoin tries to restrain himself from going on an invective rant. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was taken by one particularly observation:

There is nothing more boring than the spittle-spewing invective of a demagogue railing against ill-defined, possibly illusory enemies, and unfortunately this book seethes with such denunciations.

I suppose the value in this is that it allows for generalization. We all know that those attributes were aimed at Boulez, but I suspect that each of us has other targets in mind! More important is how, for better or worse, Aucoin guided my feelings about having this book. The “bottom line” is that I am not about to discard it; but I shall do my best to be judicious in how I allocate any attention to it!

“It’s still the same old story …”

Last night San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the first Insight Panel for its 2017–18 repertory season. The topic was Richard Strauss’ one-act opera “Elektra,” which will be given its first performance tomorrow night. The production is being shared with the National Theatre in Prague and the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, and the staging by Keith Warner was given its world premiere in Prague about a year ago.

Personally, I found that the most interesting part of last night’s discussion arose from the contribution by Anja Kühnhold, who is responsible for bringing Warner’s staging to San Francisco. After apologizing in advance for any problems with her English, she did an excellent job of accounting for the revisionist qualities of Warner’s concept. This included both shifting the context of the narrative to a museum and extensive use of video to supplement the action on the stage.

All this led to a generous amount of informative discussion on questions of dramatic interpretation, particularly when the drama is as intense has Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play of the same name, which was based substantially on Sophocles’ drama, also of the same name. This discussion continued into the Q&A session with the audience, when a gentleman who had attended the final dress rehearsal (one of the benefits of SFO membership) made note of his difficulty in following the synopsis. (The audience for open rehearsals is given a single sheet with cast information on one side and a synopsis of the plot on the other. English supertitles are displayed during the rehearsal.)

This observation left me surprised and a bit perplexed. The dark fate of the House of Atreus had been part of the “core curriculum” for the first semester of my freshman year. We did not read Sophocles, but we did read all three of the Oresteia plays by Aeschylus. For that matter, we also read the Odyssey. I remember how, after Odysseus killed all of Penelope’s would-be Suitors, their souls all made a mass entrance into the underworld. As they come pouring in, Agamemnon is sitting off to the side, musing the the virtues of having a faithful wife!

The fact is that the story of Agamemnon’s children avenging his murder by his wife is a very old one. (That brief moment in the Odyssey strongly suggests that bards were singing about it long before Aeschylus turned it into a play.) Its inclusion as “core curriculum content” suggests that the story is not only very old but also very enduring (as enduring as, for example, the murder of Abel by Cain). Why should a synopsis of Strauss’ opera (which would basically be a synopsis of Sophocles’ play) be difficult to follow?

These circumstances strongly tempt me to get back on my hobby-horse about how the Internet has created a society that is not only ignorant of history but also proud of that ignorance. However, I may be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The issue is not so much a neglect of the past as it is a focus on the immediate present that is so intense that there is no room for anything else. For better or worse, there is a prevailing mindset that cannot seem to deal with any past more distant than the latest text message or tweet; and anything that is retained in memory only lasts long enough to spur a reaction. After that is is “out of sight, out of mind.”

In that context I find myself looking forward to seeing just what Warner and Kühnhold have done with the idea of creating a staging based on a museum. After all, museums serve as vessels for memories, just as writing does. As vessels, they bring the distant past into the immediate present, simply by virtue of our inhabiting the space that they occupy.

We used to benefit from those vessels for their ability to fend off ignorance of history. When Hofmannsthal wrote his play, he was, in many respects, building a “German museum” for an ancient Greek narrative, so ancient that it predated the writing of the first dramas. Strauss reconceived that “museum concept” through the music of his opera. Why should not the staging of that opera take that “museum concept” to yet another level? If we cannot turn the prevailing tide of ignorance of history, perhaps we can at least revive a bit of interest in the nature of memory.

Performances, Recordings, and Karajan

Given that I am now back on track in trying to write about Warner Classics’ Karajan Official Remastered Edition, one of my friends offered to loan me her copy of Richard Osborne’s book Conversations with Von Karajan. I accepted the offer, because I cannot recall having had any opportunity to read or listen to Karajan’s own account of how he approached his work. I also decided to read Osborne’s introduction, “Von Karajan: Profile of a Musician,” in the hope that I might encounter some objective third-party observations that might balance some of my own relatively jaundiced assessments.

One aspect of that essay particularly caught my attention, because it deals with an issue about which I have expressed some rather strong opinions in the past. This is the question of the value of recordings when compared with the experience of being physically present at a performance. Thus, my attention turned from casual to focused when I encountered the following sentence in Osborne’s essay:

When [Robert] Chesterman [in a CBC radio interview] put to Karajan the proposition that concert-hall sound was naturally superior to recorded sound, Karajan replied, ‘For whom?’

Karajan’s point was that even the best of concert halls have acoustical problems. So someone sitting in one of those problematic locations would probably be better off listening to a well-engineered recording. Osborne himself followed up with a comment about the “wretched … acoustics in large areas of the Royal Albert Hall,” suggesting that anyone who was actually interested in the performance of one of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts would do better to stay at home and listen to the radio broadcast.

I have to say that I am sympathetic with both Karajan and Osborne on this matter. For that matter, I find that my personal attitudes towards audience behavior seem to be getting grumpier as I progress from season to season; and I have to remind myself that, whatever the setting may be, odds are that only a small percentage of the turnout is actually there in the hall for the sake of attentive listening. Furthermore, I have to confess that my comments to the effect that capture technology still cannot achieve the bandwidth that listeners can accommodate may be too casual. I am not sure that I have actually seen an estimate of the reception bandwidth of the human ear, and my guess is that it varies from one subject to another.

Nevertheless, there are limits to my sympathy. There still remains the fact that a recording is a document of a performance; and I would argue that it is still the case that the document is distinct from the performance itself. Most important is that the document has a permanence that the performance lacks. Many would treat this as an asset, but it is worth considering the possibility of a downside. This has to to with the fact that individuals tend to listen to their recordings multiple times, rather than just once. This may be a good thing to the extent that the listener discovers new details with each successive listening experience. However, there is also the risk that multiple listening experiences will “burn” that specific performance into memory, inclining the listener to reject the possibility of a performance that takes a different approach to interpretation.

The other potential shortcoming of an audio recording is simply that it is limited to audio. One does not attend a performance with one’s eyes shut. Even if one is not explicitly aware, there are any number of visual cues that impact the listening experience. Admittedly, the impact of those cues depends heavily on the physical setting and where one happens to be seated in that setting; but, for just about any genre of music, watching music being made is a “richer” experience than simply listening.

Karajan understood this, and this is probably why he involved himself directly in film and video recordings of his performances. It is also why, on this site, I have consistently sung the praises of Jordan Whitelaw. Whitelaw appreciated the distinction between merely hearing and attentive listening, and he understood how visual input could influence the latter. The result was a long series of video documents of performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a Public Television program called Evening at Symphony. Since I have not yet seen any of Karajan’s video documents, I shall not try to compare him to Whitelaw but simply emphasize that there is much to be gained from appreciating that we listen with our eyes, as well as our ears.

Indre Viskontas Augments her SFCM Faculty Artist Series Recital with Thoughts About Brains

Last night’s Faculty Artist Series performance in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) was actually a lecture-demonstration by Indre Viskontas. The program sheet listed her as “soprano and neuroscientist,” the latter due to her doctoral degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California at Los Angeles. Viskontas made a case for the relevance of knowledge of the brain in our efforts to understand the nature of music in both behavioral and artifactual terms, using her own vocal performances to reinforce that case. She was joined by the members of the Telegraph Quartet (violinists Joseph Maile and Eric Chin, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw), Stephanie Payne on bass, and Keisuke Nakagoshi on piano.

It goes without saying that, over the course of two hours with a generous amount of time allowed for the performance of music, Viskontas could only scratch the surface of her neuroscience expertise. She chose to focus primarily on time and memory; and, while confined to that surface level, she could still offer up a few clues about brain physiology that offered more than a few strong hints as to just how complex this subject matter is. Nevertheless, my own academic background conditioned me to the conviction that the best lectures are the ones that raise good questions. So, rather than stick to Viskontas’ path, I am hoping I can convey a better sense of last night’s experience by raising some reflections on the content.

With regard to her primary focus, she casually dropped the observation that you cannot have memory without time. Such an assertion can be an effective stimulus to speculation, but I would like to be a bit of a stickler for terminology. While there are any number of schools of thought of the question of just what memory is (most of which tend to agree that human memory definitely is not like computer memory), time is nothing more than a basic physical property. If you are going to say that you cannot have memory without time, you may as well also say that you cannot have life itself without time, let alone planets orbiting around a star (or the swinging of a pendulum, for those reluctant to leave the planet).

Most likely, Viskontas was using “time” as an abbreviation for “time-consciousness.” This is a far trickier concept, sufficiently tricky that, with reinforcement from my own reading experiences, I would differ with the ordering she proposed. Those who have been following this site for at least a year know that my personal thoughts about mind (not to be confused with brain) have been strongly influenced by an admittedly speculative book by Friedrich Hayek entitled The Sensory Order. While the book has never had wide appeal, it has influenced several major thinkers.

The title of the book could easily have been inspired by William James’ famous assertion that our sensory organs bombard the brain with a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” To the extent that brain is the organ of mind, it has the job of bringing order to that sensory confusion. Hayek’s book speculated on how a physical (albeit biological) object could achieve that task; and he developed a sort of “gradus ad parnassum” that began with a fundamental ability to form perceptual categories and escalated through a series of steps to what the cognitive science community now calls consciousness.

Now categorization clearly depends on time. It amounts to establishing, one way or another, some kind of similarity between stimuli experienced now and stimuli experienced then. Thus, Hayek’s path initially ascends from the ability to form categories to the ability, at some relatively primitive level, to retain them; and this is where the word “memory” enters his vocabulary. On the other hand time-consciousness (i.e. explicit awareness of the distinction between “now” and “then”) does not arise until later in Hayek’s plan. So, while it may be not be possible to have memory without time, it is possible to have memory without explicit consciousness of how time passes.

(This is probably a good time to state that one of those “major thinkers” influenced by Hayek was Gerald Edelman. Edelman’s book The Remembered Present amounts to efforts to find physiological evidence in support of Hayek’s speculations. The book never makes an airtight case, but suggests that Hayek may have been on to more of substance than even he may have dreamed. On the other hand, Edelman’s title resonates with one of Viskontas’ key observations: Because the brain needs time to process the signals it receives, “now” is always the result of processing a “then!” Another thinker influenced by Hayek, by the way, was artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, who also happened to be my doctoral thesis advisor!)

I feel it is important to establish a firm perspective around the concept of time-consciousness, because this probably provides the foundation for how mind kicks in when one is either making or listening to music. For example, Viskontas’ first round of remarks converged on the fundamental property of awareness of a pulse. This was illustrated by having the Telegraph Quartet perform three of the movements (omitting the Menuetto) from the fifth of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 18 string quartets (written in the key of A major). Viskontas’ observations made this a fascinating experience, because one could begin to appreciate how the definition of that pulse would pass from one quartet player to another as Beethoven developed his ideas.

All that was overlooked was the skill with which, for rhetorical purposes, Beethoven could abandon that pulse. Beethoven’s interest in full-stop silences goes all the way back to the three Opus 2 piano sonatas he dedicated to Joseph Haydn. Indeed, his interest in the rhetorical impact of those silences can probably be traced back to many of Haydn’s own compositions. In the first of the Opus 18 quartets (in the key of F major), the Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato movement is a high-wire act that pits the presence of pulse against its absence; and it offers some of the earliest signs of rhetorical techniques that would mature significantly by the time of the “late period.”

The weaker side of the evening came with the vocal selections. This included songs by Gabriel Fauré and Ernest Chausson in French and Aaron Copland in English. What was problematic is the need to add linguistic semantics to the mix when considering what the brain is doing with such repertoire. Language capacity was very high up Hayek’s ladder, high enough that he passed over much of it in silence. Fortunately, this was music that could be taken on its own terms, particularly Noah Luna’s string quartet arrangements of the four Copland settings of poems by Emily Dickinson. If he has arranged the entire cycle of twelve of these Copland songs, then here’s hoping that they will all get presented in recital in the near future.

Paul Dresher’s “Schick Machine” Begins its Run at Z Space

Last night Z Space hosted the first of four performances of Schick Machine, a music theater production that, while only about an hour in duration, is awe-inspiring in both its concept and the realization of that concept. A synthesis of monodrama and recital, the piece was created for percussion virtuoso Steven Schick under commissions from Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs. The creative team involved Schick collaborating with composer and artistic director Paul Dresher, writer and stage director Rinde Eckert, instrument inventor Daniel Schmidt, mechanical sound artist Matt Heckert, and lighting and visual designer Tom Ontiveros.

Eckert’s note for the program book suggests that the narrative behind the monodrama was inspired by Labyrinths, the New Directions anthology of both stories and poems by Jorge Luis Borges. The stories have uncanny brevity. In a few pages Borges could summon up a logical paradox or absurdity, play with it, and then pull the rug out from under the reader, often through a self-mocking conclusion. New Directions probably chose the title because Borges could pack innumerable twists and turns into even his shortest tales.

Such twists and turns became an inspiration for Eckert. As he put it, reading Borges was “when Lazlo Klangfarben came to mind, or rather Steve Schick as a man unable to remember Steve Schick who has named himself Lazlo Klangfarben, but still has all of Steve Schick’s memories. Klangfarben, as opposed to Steve Schick, is an inventor. His latest brainchild is something he calls the Schick Machine, after a percussionist whose name he dimly recalls.”

Over many years of collaboration with Dresher, Eckert has created a variety of characters with fragile, and often frightening, mental states. Schick Machine is probably his most convoluted creation to date. The “machine” is not so much a moving device created for some work process. Rather, it is an entire environment that fills the Z Space stage with a panoply of objects capable of producing sounds when struck, rubbed, pushed, or simply allowed to resonate. Indeed, to go back to Eckert’s inspiration, the stage itself is a labyrinth of such objects within which Schick, the percussionist dimly recalled by Klangfarben, engages his music-making practices, probably involving a combination of “scored” activities and improvised ones. Off to the side of this environment, Dresher sits at a table with a laptop running Max/MSP software, primarily to capture samples of Schick’s performances and direct them to the Meyer speakers mounted above the stage, thus creating an environment in which Schick is playing with the accompaniment of his own memories.

The visual impact of the stage is as stunning as the percussion performance. Size matters, whether in the form of an enormous colored circle of organ pipes (orange for C natural, yellow for the “white keys,” and brown for the “black keys”), a koto whose length takes half the stage, or a four-foot spinning disc mounted off-center and looking as if it will fly off its axle at any moment. There are also many metallic and wood ranks of organ pipes, provided courtesy of the Sonoma Community Center; they are played by a rotating metal cylinder with bolts sticking out of it, a latter-day version of how the mechanical organs of Mozart's day were programmed. Then, there are the more familiar objects, such as hoops and a tea kettle that whistles when the water boils. Finally, there are a variety of metal and wood items that look as if they would not be out of place in an orchestral percussion setting.

Steven Schick in performance (image courtesy of the Paul Dresher Ensemble)

Within this rich environment Schick ambles around, occasionally checking blueprints and frequently looking as if he is haunted by some sense of foreboding or malaise. At least that is the way he appears until he starts being a percussionist. Then everything converges into a highly focused personality whose sharp sense of rhythm enables intricate exercise of the dual semantics of “play,” both musical and ludic. The “message” (scare quotes added for caution) seems to be that, however plagued a mental state may be, identity may still be found in the act of making music.

Schick Machine will be given three more performances at Z Space. They will take place today both in the afternoon and the evening and tomorrow (Sunday) in the afternoon. Following each performance the audience is invited to the stage for closer inspection of the instruments. Tickets may be purchased online from an OvationTix event page.

A Must-Read for the Election Year

I have long believed that you learn more about the world by tracking who is advertising what than from any of the more conventional sources of polls and analyses. It is therefore worth noting that the current (September 29) issue of The New York Review has a full-page advertisement placed by Princeton University Press. That, in itself, is not unusual for this particular periodical; but only one book is being advertised, Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit. For those with weakened memories (perhaps in the manner Nicolas Carr discussed when arguing that Google is making us stupid), following the hyperlink on the book's title will reveal that it first appeared in January of 2005 and quickly rose to the top of the bestseller list maintained by The New York Times. The only thing that suggests that this is a recent advertisement, rather than a time warp going back over a decade, is the note at the bottom that this title is being marketed as an e-book.

Larger that the image of the book itself, the ad presents a single quote from the text:

Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

This is clearly a message for today. Princeton University Press has decided to use advertising as a means of entering the discourse over the coming election. The only problem is that they are preaching to the choir. Indeed, however penetrating that single sentence may be, its association with Princeton University Press will probably blunt its impact where its lesson is most needed. Nevertheless, when we consider what we must now endure in what passes for news about the election campaign, it is nice to read such a refreshing now that we no longer have Stephen Colbert reminding us about truthiness!

Using Hypermedia to Write about Music Performances

This morning I found myself allowed to observe an exchange between a colleague and one of his readers. The reader had expressed a desire that my colleague could have augmented his text with sound files, which is a question dear to my own heart. How can any of us do a satisfactory job of writing about a listening experience without providing the reader with appropriate listening matter?

To be fair, technology is not on the side of those of us doing the writing. The authoring tool I had at my disposal when I was writing for Examiner.com basically allowed me to incorporate one image and embed one video from YouTube. These would be placed at the top of the article, and that was that. The tool I use to write this particular article is a bit better. I can embed both images and video at the most appropriate location in the text, but the only way I can incorporate audio is if it happens to be the soundtrack of a video.

Charles Rosen was in a somewhat more advantageous position when he was writing for The New York Review of Books. The editors created what amounted to a blogging site for their authors; and on December 28, 2011, Rosen contributed an article entitled “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time.” This amounted to a review of a recital given in honor of Carter’s 103rd birthday at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Rosen embedded four audio excerpts from the concert into this article. However, he could only do this because the 92nd Street Y had opened an account of SoundCloud, where audio files may be shared in a manner similar to the sharing of video on YouTube. Unfortunately, the hyperlinks that Rosen created for his article no longer work (although there is a link to an MP3 file taken from another recital at the very end of the article, which, as of this writing, is still functional). The good news, however, is that the Web page of the excerpts that Rosen cited are still on the SoundCloud site. Thus, while this is a step in the right direction, it also demonstrates that we have a long way to go in using real-time media to make a case when writing about a performance.

Most important is the question of intellectual property. The resource that Rosen used had been created by the producers of the recital, which reinforces the announcement most of us know by heart prior to any concert, making it clear that we should not be using our personal devices to capture any portion of the performance. (I rather like the kind explanation that Kathy Barr gives before every Old First Concerts recital, in which she explains that holding up a video capture device blocks the view of others.) The fact is that those of us charged with writing about a performance do not have the right to create examples with media capture technology, nor should we. After all, time spent fussing with equipment takes away from paying attention to the performance!

However, even when a third party provides “authorized” media, there are still problems in how those media can be used effectively. Once again I must raise the issue that what we are doing as writers is tightly coupled to an experience that depends heavily, if not entirely, on the flow of time; and what we commit to any document can never be anything but static. The best way to appreciate this distinction is to consider what happens when the static medium is not present. Having had to sit through more lectures about music than I can enumerate, first in classrooms and later at conferences, I am struck by how often it is the case that the lecturer will play a recording and then talk over it, saying things like “Now!” just before the particular moment in which (s)he wants us to pay attention to that recording. (Even with all that support, there will still be cases in which listener may not be sure what was brought to his/her attention.)

The point is that capture and reproduction will never be enough. If one wishes to explain a time-based experience, then one must do it by creating another time-based experience. This means that we have to stop typing at our keyboards and learn the craft of audio and video editing suites. Writing as an old dog that is willing to learn new tricks, I must still confess that all this turns the effort of documenting into a substantial project, My work habits are such that I want to do my writing about an experience while that experience is still fresh in my mind. If I spend too much time assembling my media support, that freshness may wear off; and I may find myself losing my grip on the argument I wished to make in the first place.

This leads to the conclusion that, flawed as they may be, words are still the preferred medium, even when we are charged with accounting for a time-based experience. There is no “method” that serves all of us. After all, there is as much diversity in the “experiencing” as there is in the experience itself. The bottom line is that our own memories are the most valuable resource when it comes to documenting a time-based experience. For my own part I have my own techniques for trying to “reconstruct the past” before I begin writing; but I have no reason to assume that any of my colleagues have techniques that are even remotely similar to my own. Nevertheless, we all do what we can, always well aware that some of those experiences are much harder to document than others!

Steven Schick will Bring Paul Dresher’s Exploratory Music Theater Production to Z Space

Schick Machine is an ambitious music theater production commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs. First performed in Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium in March of 2009, the full-evening work was the result of close collaboration among composer Paul Dresher, writer and director Rinde Eckert, percussion virtuoso Steven Schick, instrument inventor Daniel Schmidt, mechanical sound artist Matt Heckert, and lighting and visual designer Tom Ontiveros. The objective was to present performances on newly invented musical instruments within the setting of a theatrical narrative.

The protagonist of the narrative is Lázló Klangfarben, whose part is played (in multiple senses of the word) by Schick. A narrator explains that the name is a pseudonym; and the last name is the German word for “sound color.” Klangfarben is an inventor whose mental state is probably about five bottles short of a six-pack. His skills as an inventor have locked him securely in the objective world of Immanuel Kant’s “pure reason.” Indeed, he is so securely locked that he can no longer remember his real name. The plot behind Eckert’s narrative involves Klangfarben recovering and making peace with his true identify, a process that involves memories of his wife, his mother, and his grandfather.

In many respects this is basically a quest narrative of the sort that Vladimir Propp analyzed in his book Morphology of the Folktale, whose core ideas would find their way into Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and George Lucas’ original conception of the narrative behind his Star Wars movies. Every quest involves a journey that can be physical, metaphorical, or both. In this case the journey amounts to one from the perfect determinism of Klangfarben’s objective world into the far less determined subjective world in which his true identity resides. In the performance of Schick Machine, that journey takes place in a space in which Klangfarben encounters both tiny noise-making objects and the huge invented instruments and sound sculptures created by Schmidt and Heckert:

Steven Schick as Lázló Klangfarben in his environment of invented instruments and sound sculptures (courtesy of Z Space)

Those latter have been given poetic names, such as the Peacock (which is a deconstructed pipe organ), the Hurdy Grande, the Tumbler, and the Field of Flowers. However, while most quest folktales end with the “hero” achieving his goal, Eckert has chosen to be more ambiguous about where Klangfarben has arrived at the conclusion of his journey.

Next month the Paul Dresher Ensemble will present a four-performance run of Schick Machine. Performances will be at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 23, and Saturday, September 24, and at 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 24, and Sunday, September 25. They will take place on the Main Stage at Z Space, whose open design will be conducive to constructing the elaborate environment in which Klangfarben’s quest takes place. Adult tickets for the evening performances will be $25 and $20 for the matinee performances. The senior rate will be $20 for the evening performances and $15 for the matinees. The student rate is $12.50 in the evening and $10 at the matinees. Tickets for all performances may be purchased through hyperlinks on an OvationTix event page. Assistance in ordering tickets may be obtained by calling OvationTix customer service at the toll-free number 866-811-4111. Customer service hours (Pacific Time) are from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

"Until the Real Thing Comes Along"

Anyone of my generation, who spent time of the East Coast and had strong feelings about Chinese food, probably had a chance to sample the food in Philadelphia's Chinatown. Those who were lucky got to do so at a restaurant with a chef who know about fish lo mein (yú lo mein). In contrast to most lo mein dishes, this was a delicate affair in which flakes of fish (probably steamed or lightly braised) intermingled with ginger, spring onions, and a bit of lemon peel, all on a bed of soft but slim lo mein noodles. I was fortunate enough to discover this the summer after my freshman year, when I had an internship with graduate students in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. We used to go to one particular restaurant (South China) about once a week for this treat; and I continued to do so when I would return to visit my family in later years.

By the time I was teaching at Penn, South China was no longer serving fish lo mein. However, Computer Science departments tend to be inhabited by adventurous and enterprising graduate students. One of them figured out where the chef had moved, and I got to resume my culinary habit. Unfortunately, my later travels took me away from Philadelphia for several decades, which is how I discovered just how unique fish lo mein was. Even when I was working in Singapore, the very idea of such a dish would raise eyebrows. Things were no better when I moved from Singapore to Palo Alto.

Then I got to attend a conference in Philadelphia. I happened to be held at a new hotel built on top of the old Reading Terminal Market. That was a treat in itself, but it also put me only a few blocks away from Chinatown. My first night in Philadelphia I combed every street there in search of a chef who knew about fish lo mein. Unfortunately, when I finally found someone who knew what I was describing, he said, "I remember that chef! He died several years ago!"

About two decades have past since then, and I may finally have found a viable alternative. Several restaurants in Chinatown now serve a noodles dish with ginger and spring onion. The first time I tried it, I asked the waiter if the chef could add some fish the next time and basically got a dirty look. Today I found a place that did not give me a dirty look; and, while what I ate was not the "real thing" of personal memory, it will probably be the closest I can get. I figured I had a good chance because the name of the place is Kam Lock Seafood Restaurant; and they knew just how to do the right thing with the fish, even if the pieces were larger than those I used to get in Philadelphia. the balance of flavors, on the other had, was about as close to memory as I could expect. So, for those who may have had to endure the same "Philadelphia withdrawal" in their Chinese food diet, Kam Lock is on 834 Washington Street (just west of Grand Street) in San Francisco Chinatown; and it is open from 11 AM to 9:30 PM seven days a week!

Encountering Heidegger

I suspect that my decision to focus my reading on Being and Time, the translation by John Macquarie and Edward Robinson of Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, may raise some eyebrows. It may very well be one of the ways in which I am coming to terms with my age, figuring that I may be approaching a time when I may start to have difficulty processing that kind of writing. At the same time, somewhere in the back of my head, I heard the voice of my former advisor declaring that he could not trust anyone who could only read Heidegger in English translation. At least I appreciate his reasoning. Sein und Zeit was rich with made-up words; and I suspect that one could write a fascinating thesis on the hypothesis that many, if not most, of the key ideas in the book may have emerged out of Heidegger's enjoyment in playing with words at the lexical level and then seeing what the semantic implications were. Still my advisor was taking a dig at a former colleague, who may have deserved the attack but probably should still have his name withheld.

Nevertheless, I feel I owe it to myself to see just what Heidegger was getting at (or trying to get at) in the massive (and incomplete) project. My reasons go back over a decade to when I was still part of the Silicon Valley research community and everyone was in thrall with the idea of "knowledge" (as opposed to "artificial intelligence") as an object of research, all in the interest of a domain that called itself "knowledge management." At the time I was working for a guy who felt that the future would lie in solving the problem he called "corporate memory" (also sometimes known as "institutional memory"). Put in the simplest terms, the problem was one of how the knowledge of an individual could outlive that individual (or at least that individual's tenure with the firm).

Unfortunately, I found myself following up on perspectives that made it clear that this "memory problem" was not one that could be solved by building bigger databases or better interfaces to those databases. The bottom line was that "knowledge" was not noun-based. Having knowledge did not mean having artifacts, even digital artifacts, that your rivals did not have. Rather, it was verb-based. Having knowledge was a shallow proposition. Knowledge only revealed itself through what we did.

I suppose that is why this research continued to interest me even after I broke my ties with Silicon Valley. It did not take long to surface in my thoughts about music, particularly my decision to prioritize the verb-based perspective of making music over the noun-based perspective that tries to reduce the study of music to the study of artifacts, such as score pages. Once, when I was trying to explain myself to a recent graduate from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I said that everyone in Silicon Valley lived in a world of nouns and adjectives, while musicians can only live in a world of verbs. To my surprise, his eyes did not glaze over; and they even lit up a bit.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time before I would have to confront what Heidegger had to say about such things. After all, it does not take long for him to put up the precept that talking about "being" means talking about the word itself as a progressive verb rather than part of a noun form (as in "human being"). All this emerges in relative (at least for Heidegger) clarity long before he brings time into his approach to inquiry.

Fortunately, I can be patient about it, sometimes advancing only a few paragraphs at a time but without ever feeling as if I were in a hurry. This was the way I used to deal with things when I was still trying to bring the ideas behind my doctoral thesis into focus, and I was fortunate in having advisors who did not pressure me to rush things. Corporate research is not like that, nor, for that matter, is academic research, which is more beholden to funding sources than to intellectual inquiry. All I need to do is keep my own cerebral matter in shape and hope that I can maintain these practices for a few more good years, even if it is just for the pleasure of clarifying matters to myself.

New Results in the Study of Memory

It is unclear what to make of this morning's report on memory research filed by BBC News Science Reporter Jonathan Webb. It was definitely helpful that Maria Wimber, the University of Birmingham research whose results were being discussed, went to some length to emphasize that human memory did not follow the store-and-retrieve paradigm of computer memory. When she talked about memory "traces," she seemed to suggested that these were "trails" left by a dynamic process, possibly the way that indentations in the snow indicate not just a path that had been trod but even further details, such as the pace at which that path was traversed. Nevertheless, we must also recognize that the experiment that was discussed in Webb's article, involving recall of photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, was more than a little artificial. Understanding the making of music is probably a more useful domain in which we may come to understand the dynamics of memory, but it is likely to take some time before we can collect data for such a complex setting.

Swimming in Repertoire

One of the unforeseen consequences of my having made the move from IT research into writing about music is that I seem to have built up a voracious appetite for repertoire. As I learned from reading Leonard Slatkin's memoir, Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, such activity is one of the cornerstones of a conservatory education, at least at places like Juilliard, which Slatkin attended. It presumes that a comprehensive knowledge of music requires the broadest possible account of what has been documented, preferably coupled with devoting time to both recordings and performances to account for what has been made from those documents.

The good news is that I can pursue this activity through both attending as many performances as my schedule (and personal endurance) will allow and following up on opportunities to write about recordings. As of the beginning of March, I shall have been writing for Examiner.com for six years. That was preceded by building up my writing chops through several years of blogging, initially casual and progressively more and more serious. I have thus been evolving out of the state of a "passive consumer" for about a decade, perhaps to the point that repertoire now constitutes the medium of my existence, rather the way in which water does for a fish.

Every now and then someone will ask me how I retain it all. The fact is that I don't; and, at my advanced age, I am less and less likely to do so as time passes. I sometimes joke that I now depend on Google when my memory is failing, meaning that I write as much as I can "into" Examiner.com simply to make sure that Google will help me when I need it.

On the other hand I still make it a point not to take notes during a performance. Paying attention to writing down something means you are not paying attention to your auditory channels, and I simply will not abide by that latter option. Besides, human memory is not a file cabinet. It is an ongoing process of recollection. Just looking at a printed p program seems to be enough to set the wheels of that process in motion. What it yields provides the substance of what I write, and anything that does not emerge from that process was probably not worth writing about anyway.

I thus find myself in a somewhat complex and possibly tenuous relationship with both knowledge and memory. Exercise is as fundamental to maintaining that relationship as physical exercise is in maintaining the health and fitness of my body. (Because the latter is not particularly demanding on mind, I often use it as an occasion to begin to rehearse the thoughts that will find their way into writing.)

Does this protect me against lapses of memory when I need to recall something? Not at all. However, I think it does help me to sharpen my skills as a writer, even when mind is not always up to summoning up the specific memories I need or want.

Will I be able to keep this up indefinitely? I have no idea. Nevertheless, back when I was writing dance reviews as a student, I got to know Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. She kept at it to the very end. One night she wrote up the performance that she had just attended, went to bed, and died peacefully in her sleep.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Charles Simic's latest NYRBlog post provided a slightly disquieting example of a poet who could see the future:

That gravestone reminded me of something crazy the poet Mark Strand thought up many years ago, when he was broke and thinking up ways to make money. He told me excitedly one day that he had invented a new kind of gravestone that he hoped would interest cemeteries and carvers of gravestone inscriptions. It would include, in addition to the usual name, date, and epitaph, a slot where a coin could be inserted, that would activate a tape machine built into it, and play the deceased’s favorite songs, jokes, passages from scriptures, quotes by great men and speeches addressed to their fellow citizens, and whatever else they find worthy of preserving for posterity. Visitors to the cemetery would insert as many coins as required to play the recording (credit cards not yet being widely used) and the accumulated earnings would be divided equally between the keepers of the cemetery and the family of the deceased. This being the United States of America, small billboards advertising the exciting programs awaiting visitors to various cemeteries would be allowed along the highway, saying things like: “Give Your Misery A Little Class, Listen to a Poet” or “Die Laughing Listening to Stories of a Famous Brain Surgeon.”

One of the benefits of this invention, as he saw it, is that it would transform these notoriously gloomy and desolate places by attracting big crowds—not just of the relatives and acquaintances of the diseased, but also complete strangers seeking entertainment and the pearls of wisdom and musical selections of hundreds and hundreds of unknown men and women. Not only that, but all of us who are their descendants would spend the later years of our lives devouring books and listening to records, while compiling our own little anthologies of favorites.

I wonder if either Simic or Strand realizes how close this is to a viable reality. There has been a fair amount of debate over that happens to your Facebook site after you die. It seems as if Strand inadvertently (and anachronistically) provided a perfectly reasonable solution: Your Facebook site becomes your gravestone. Furthermore, since Facebook is always on the ball keeping that site populated with the latest advertising, visitors will not have to worry about dropping coins into a slot (even bitcoins). For that matter, if Strand had a bit of a lawyer's imagination to go along with his poetic inventiveness, he might even be able to claim prior art for the whole Facebook concept!

All of these visions, however, evade the question of whether or not any of this stuff is worth leaving for posterity in the first place.

The Penalty of Forgetting History

It is understandable that Apple would want to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Macintosh on January 24, 1984 in a big way. My guess is that more people today know about Ridley Scott's earthshaking "1984" commercial than they do about the original version of the Mac. They may even remember the slogan "Computing for the rest of us;" and therein lies the rub. To remind people of the anniversary is to remind them of that slogan; and bringing that slogan back into "primary consciousness" may well get more people to think about how much that slogan has been compromised, particularly over the tail end of that 30-year span.

Experimentation Reveals Evidence for Genetic Memory

James Gallagher, Health and Science Reporter for BBC News, filed a fascinating story on the BBC News Web site this morning. In experiments with mice, researches at Emory University appear to have discovered that aversion to a scent (in this case that of cherry blossoms) could result in modification of a specific section of DNA. This would result in offspring sharing that aversion without any past experience of it.

The concept of genetic memory has been a favorite topic in bull sessions about the relationship between environment and heredity. While this experiment involves a highly limited phenomenon is a small sample space, it is still a sign that this concept may be more than a vacuous fantasy. If the mechanism actually works, it can explain how the survival value of avoiding certain toxins can be passed down to future generations. We should be more careful about any phenomena that exist outside of the objective world, but it should not be long before writers of fiction decide to start playing with this concept!

I Can Haz Better Lerning?

BBC News Technology Reporter Carolyn Rice filed a story about how images of cute cats may have mnemonic value. Apparently, researchers have been investigating the hypothesis that memory retention is enhanced when what needs to be memorized is associated with a cute cat photograph. Here is a screen shot illustrating the principle being applied to learning Spanish:

Note the advertisement on the right.

The Representation Problem

Having finished Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel, I discovered that much of my discontent with the author's approach had be well articulated by John A. Sloboda in the Preface to his own book, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Indeed, the account of Patel's book that I wrote for Examiner.com began by enumerating the way Sloboda felt that the "scientific" study of music had deliberately overlooked valuable input from practicing musicians. As a result, I realized that Sloboda's book (whose Preface was written in July of 1983) might deserve a closer read, even if it predated so many of the recent insights from neuroscience.

As I leafed through my copy of this book, I realized that I had already read it once. Furthermore, I could tell from the paucity of marginal annotations that I had not read it with much sympathy or depth. Having returned to the first chapter of the book, entitled "Music as a Cognitive Skill," I now remember why I was so unsympathetic.

This book was written at a time when the study of cognition was, for the most part, reduced to the premise that thought was based on mental representations. The "cognitive program" was thus one of figuring out the nature of those representations and then understanding how they were formed and subsequently used. My Examiner.com piece included the following observation:

In other words, every time science comes up with a new way of looking at the physical world, there is a rush to seek out the value of that point of view in our efforts to understand both mind and music.

In this particular case the relevant perspective of science was that of symbolic representation, which has pretty much been the bread and butter of mathematics once mathematics extended its capacity beyond mere calculation. The very concept of a mental representation has its roots in those techniques that have represented the processes of logical reading in terms of symbol structures. Drawing upon the terminology of this discipline of mathematical logic, Marvin Minsky claimed that the premise of cognitive psychology was that thought was "propositional."

As an alternative, Minsky suggested that the nature of mind was dispositional, rather than propositional. In other words evidence of such mental concepts as "understanding" or "remembering" are not grounded in the presence of symbolic representations but in an individual's disposition to action, which is as likely to be unconscious as based on conscious motives. My past reading of Minsky remain with me, even to the point where I am "disposed" to consider the "spectrum of emotional dispositions" that "drive" a particular act of performing a piece of music.

It is understandable that Minsky's should be a "minority option" among those seeking a scientific approach to the nature of mind. The nice thing about symbolic propositions is that one can develop a variety of calculi for describing them and analyzing their properties. As I have said in the past, those symbolic constructs are "noun-based." Dispositions, on the other hand, are "verb-based." Not only do we have an impoverished toolbox for studying them; but also they did to defy analysis for the simple reason that they cannot "hold still" while we are trying to analyze them.

I concluded my Examiner.com piece about Patel's book by suggesting that progress will only come with a paradigm shift. To be more specific, we need to be more scientific in dealing with that verb-based worldview. This will require a major departure from what is currently recognized as "normal science."

"Living Presence" No Longer

Readers of my San Francisco Examiner.com site know that I have been working my way through the second volume of Mercury Living Presence: The Collector's Edition. I took on this rather massive task because it was a real walk down Memory Lane for me. Those Mercury releases figured significantly in my vinyl collection; and, unless I am mistaken, I had more of those "Living Presence" recordings than I had from the RCA "Living Stereo" series. There were any number of recordings that dazzled me simply for the amount of sound they could produce. As a result, when I finally had the opportunity to listen to a recording of Samuel Barber conducting his Opus 23 Medea orchestral suite, my initial reaction was to ask why the sound was so feeble compared to the recording Howard Hanson had made with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra for Mercury.

That was then, as they say. While the relationship that Hanson had with Mercury was certainly groundbreaking for vinyl releases, it now seems relatively modest (to say the least) in comparison with what can now come off of a compact disc. To be fair to Hanson, however, I think it is still the case that one gets a better sense of how well Barber could work with orchestral resources from the 1959 Mercury recording than one can get from the 1950 recording of Barber himself. Furthermore, I would not be surprised to learn that Hanson's performance had been shaped by familiarity with Barber's at least in matters of tempo and phrasing. Whether or not this music deserves a new recording with more grandiose sonorities is, of course, a matter of listener tastes!

Time-Consciousness in the Performance of Music

This is definitely “rehearsal” material, having grown out of some casual conversations I have been conducting while in the midst of a rather heavy schedule of covering concerts.

The thoughts first emerged through a conversation with a friend who believes that teaching piano should pay as much attention to improvisation as it does to reading from the score page. This struck a particularly resonant cord in my own consciousness, because, while I spent a lot of time improvising as a kid, I was not particularly good at it then; and I am even worse at it now. As a result, I have developed a real interest in the extent to which Johann Sebastian Bach’s approach to pedagogy seems to be grounded in the assumption of a tight coupling (not that Bach would ever have used such a phrase) between proficiency in execution and proficiency in invention.

Since I still tend to be as interested in “wet brains” as I am in “abstract ideas” and since last year I was put off by what I felt was some really bad experiment design in an effort to identify, through brain scanning, areas of brain activity associated with both memorization of music and improvisation, I tried to relate this inadequate attempt to a firmer foundation of hypothesis generation. It occurred to me that questions concerned with both memorization and improvisation could only be framed in the context of some more general model of time-consciousness. This continues to be one of the most problematic concepts for those trying to get a handle on time-based thinking. Edmund Husserl wrote a whole book about it, but the problem has been nagging great minds going back at least to Augustine, not to mention Aristotle’s efforts to get a handle on memory.

In his book The Remembered Present, Gerald Edelman tries to approach time-consciousness through areas of the brain that he calls “organs of succession.” (For those wanting me to be more specific, these are the cerebellum, the hippocampus, and the basal ganglia.) In his model time-consciousness has much more to do with the ability of the mind to work with the concepts of “before” and “after” than with the more specific matters of duration, whether in the specific domain of clock time or in those of Henri Bergson’s more subjective model of subjectively “felt” time. (This actually suggests that Edelman and Augustine might have easily found a common ground for conversation.)

I would like to suggest that those who are good at improvisation depend very heavily on such organs of succession. In more simplistic language improvisation comes down to continually dealing with two questions:

1. What have I done?
2. What do I do next?

Now, while these questions are good to bear in mind when one is reading from a score page, from a strictly logical point of view, neither is absolutely necessary. Reading music can take place entirely “in the moment,” with no regard to either past or future. The eye is simply providing a stream of answers to only one question:

What do I do now?

This then suggests why Bach felt it was important for the student to acquire both sides of the coin, so to speak. One masters execution because, once you know the answer to the what-do-I-do-now question, you have to have the physical capacity to actually do it. On the other hand Bach’s approach to invention addresses the capacity for improvisation. That requires those before/after questions; and they cannot be satisfied unless your organs of succession have been “primed” to deal with them.

As I said at the beginning, these are admittedly “unkempt thoughts.” However, I figure that a “rehearsal studio” can double as a “laboratory notebook;” and such a notebook is more than a record of hypotheses, data, and analyses. It can also be a diary in which one lays out the “tracks for trains of thought,” so to speak, that direct one to those hypotheses that need to be further investigated.

The Debate that Wasn’t

Yesterday I took a rather jaundiced view of the debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney that was “about to be,” which received a comment preferring “to defer judgment until after the event.” Well, it is now “after the event.” As fate would have it, I have been reading another “after the event” article in the latest issue of The New York Review, Joseph Lelyveld’s reflections on the Democratic Convention. One sentence about television coverage continues to stick in my craw:

Though they tend to run as a herd, these toilers [the newscasters], reaching daily and hourly for fresh insights, save us from having to think for ourselves.

This was certainly as true “post-debate” as it was “post-convention;” but the fact is that the herd was not putting very much thinking into the process. Thus, it was unclear what they were doing for us.

The bottom line is that Mark Mardell’s bleak assessment, which I cited yesterday, could not have been better fulfilled. It is as if that collective herd is more interested in aspiring to be Roger Ebert, rather than (to choose a serious media journalist from the past) Edward R. Murrow. The babble is all about the “performance on the stage” rather than what was being performed, perhaps because the latter is a script that we all “know too well” (as Leporello puts it when Don Giovanni’s band strikes up “Non più andrai”). Even the headline on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle (dwarfed by the story about the Oakland Athletics, by the way) looked as if it belonged in the Datebook section.

The fact is that the most memorable moment from the debate may well have been the reference to Big Bird; that may tell us all we need to know about how the media outlets want us to prepare for the election.