Keeping Up with a Large Collection of Recordings

My history of maintaining a collection of recorded music goes all the way back to my secondary school days, when my parents still had some of their music on 78 RPM discs. When I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman, my primarily recreation time was spent at the campus radio station (whose call letters, at that time, were WTBS for Technology Broadcasting System). When I saw the breadth of music in the station’s collection, I was happier than a pig in you-know-what.

Since that time I have been growing my own library, which has followed me to all of my post-doctoral jobs, first in Israel and subsequently on the East and West Coasts, respectively. Over the decades I have had to expand space for my albums over several different cabinets, now in two different rooms in my current condominium unit. In order to maintain a viable framework of organization, I have relied on the Schwann Catalog, which provided a useful indexing system for the many different genres in my collection, primarily classical and jazz.

Sadly, Schwann went into bankruptcy in 2002. As a result, my primary index remains the Winter 1998–99 release of Schwann Opus for classical music and the Spring 1996 Schwann Spectrum for the rest. (I also have the 1995 “Master edition Number 2” of The Gramophone Classical Catalogue, but it has been quite a while since I consulted it.) There are, of course, any number of recent recordings that do not appear in any of those sources; but I have yet to have a problem with fitting them into the indexing system.

There is an old joke about the man who shows off his extensive library of books to anyone visiting him. The usual question put to him is, “Have you read them all?” I have no problem owning up to the fact that the unread books on my shelves outnumber those I have read. Nevertheless, whenever I encounter a new recording (usually by download these days), I make it a point to listen to it as soon as possible to make sure that there are no defects in any of the tracks. Where the downloads are concerned, I also make it a point to burn a physical copy for backup (along with the backup facility I have through my computer’s Time Machine software).

Gregor Piatigorsky (and his cello) on the cover of the booklet for the Sony box set of his recordings

While Schwann has provided me with the necessary framework, there are still times when search may be challenging. If the content is digital, I have no problems relying on Apple Music. The major problem is dealing with the physical, particularly box sets, such as the Sony release of all the RCA and Columbia albums of recordings made by cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. For the most part, I have been able to rely on Discogs to provide a Web page that indexes the contents of a box set. However, these tend to be abbreviated, meaning that specific details (such as titles of short pieces) are lacking. More often than not, however, I can usually find a way to feed a Google search to lead me in the right direction!

Inevitably, however, the “search space” will continue to grow; and all I can do is hope that my digital resources will allow me to keep up with it!

James Tenney’s Formal Thoughts about Form

In “Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” written between 1969 and 1970 and the sixth essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, James Tenney returns to matters of phenomenology after accounting for his computer-based research activities that took place between 1961 and 1966. This is a relatively short essay that, more than anything else, reminded me of a caustic remark made by Arnold Schoenberg in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

The good news is that Tenney avoids making Leibowitz’ mistakes. He is fully aware that the prize on which he must keep his eyes is that of music (as opposed to, for example, music theory).

Mind you, he resorts to philosophy-speak to establish this point:

Actually, the “thing-in-itself” doesn’t even exist in music apart from our perception of it. All that may be said to “exist” are various partial manifestations or symbolic representations of it, and even these must be mediated by perception.

However, we are on a slippery slope here. There is, of course, the problem that “thing” is a notoriously vague weasel-word (Does “Ding an sich” sound classier just because that is what Immanuel Kant wrote?); but, even more problematic is that fact that it is a noun.

The wording of Tenney’s next sentence seems to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs:

So it is really the form of the musical experience that must be dealt with.

Nevertheless, as the essay proceeds, one finds that Tenney’s argument is linked to the fact that “experience” is also a noun, suggesting the premise that the attribute of form only applies to noun-based constructs. That slippery slope seems to be pulling us into a pit in which terms that we use comfortably, such as “perfect cadence” or “recapitulation” have more to do with “forms” perceived on score pages than with the experience of listening to the “music-in-itself,” an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest studies of perception dealt with the “processing” of visual stimuli. That processing involved how the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals registered by the retina (as William James put it) are ultimately registered by mind as configurations of objects. However, the operative phrase in that last sentence is “registered by mind.” Perception is in the mind of the perceiver, so to speak; and mind is always in the midst of processing, whether or not the stimulus is static.

The best example of such ongoing processing may be found in the response to the stimuli of the Necker cube. This is a line drawing of a cube in which it is possible to interpret two different squares as the front face of the cube. The Wikipedia page for this optical illusion illustrates that ambiguity of interpretation as follows:

What is important is that the ambiguity is dynamic. Mind can flip back and forth between those two interpretations, even though the stimuli themselves never change.

When we shift from visual to auditory stimuli, the dynamic nature of perception is further confounded. We are no longer trying to reduce the process of vision to a “scene analysis” consisting of a configuration of static objects. Rather, the sensemaking that emerges over the course of listening involves ongoing dynamic interpretations of stimuli that are, themselves, dynamic. To push that theatrical metaphor, one is not only occupied with the “scene” but also with the “actions (physical and verbal) of the “actors performing” in that “scene.” Mind is no more occupied with trying interpret musical stimuli in terms of static marks on score pages than it is with trying to reconstruct the text of the script while experiencing the play being performed on the stage.

To be fair, the very nature of the noun “form” carries connotations of a static object. The significance of the Necker cube, however, is that, even when the stimuli are static, mind is never anything less than an ongoing dynamic process that terminates only with death. To be fair, when Tenney wrote this essay, there were not very many cognitive scientists dealing with the dynamics of brain that enable what we call “mind;” and, on the philosophical side of the coin, very little had been documented to go beyond Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness other than Martin Heidegger’s proposition that “being” was a verb-based phenomenon, rather than a noun-based one.

As we learn more about brain dynamics, we are less inclined to reduce listening to the noun-based foundations of scene analysis. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of listening to music remains elusive. Those actually making the music probably have some advantage, since they experience the in-the-moment nature of relating what they are doing to what they are hearing. However, when it comes to describing those experiences, they are probably no better at it than those of us trying to account for the “audience perspective” of those same experiences.

I often refer to this site as my “laboratory notebook” for my efforts to understand better just what such description entails. (I also frequently call going to concerts my “field work.”) Whether or not I have yet learned anything of significant value from the pages of that notebook remains to be seen!

Tenney’s First Venture into Phenomenology

The largest single essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of the writings of music theorist and composer James Tenney, is “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form.” This was originally written as Tenney’s Master’s thesis at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, which he completed in 1961. It received relatively little circulation until it was published (along with the follow-up essay “META Meta + Hodos”) by Frog Peak Music in 1992. For its current publication Larry Polansky, one of the four editors of From Scratch, incorporated Tenney’s own corrections and revisions to the Frog Peak publication.

To call Tenney’s thesis groundbreaking would be a bit of an understatement. In 1961 only a few of the writings of Edmund Husserl, one of the major sources for phenomenological study, had been translated from German into English. Because any act of listening, including listening to music, is time-dependent, the most important Husserl source is probably Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (lectures on the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time), which was published in 1928, based on Martin Heidegger editing notes taken from those lectures. This would be translated into English as the book On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) (whose title provides the dates of Husserl’s lectures). The translator was J. B. Brough, and his book was first published in 1928. Here in the United States Indiana University Press published a new translation by James S. Churchill in 1964, and that now tends to be the source most readily available.

While Tenney never loses sight of the fact that sound is a time-dependent construct, he tends to avoid the extent to which listening must, of necessity, be a time-dependent action. Thus, while his essay postulates the need for “sounds and sound-configurations” (his italics) to serve as his “primary units” of study, he tends to avoid the issue of how perceiving those units requires time-consciousness. Indeed, the deeper he gets into his study, the more he seems inclined to seek out foundations in the symbolic constructs used to notate music than in any effort to account for (to paraphrase the title from a famous study about the physiology of vision) “what the listener’s ear tells the listener’s brain” (see below for citation).

As a result, a curious reader today (who would probably have already stoked his/her curiosity by reading David Lewin’s “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception”) will probably be disappointed that a “verb-based” behavior like listening is overlooked in favor of acts of interpreting configurations of static symbols (as in marks on pieces of paper that are then interpreted by performers). An apologist might suggest that Tenney had the misfortune of hanging out with the wrong crowd at the University of Illinois; but, on the basis of my own educational experiences, I would suggest that, in those years prior to 1960, it is unclear that one would be able to find “the right crowd” at any American university (and, perhaps, any university where English is the primary language).

These days I tend to suggest that those more interested in listening than in notations would do well to consult The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology by Friedrich Hayek. Yes, this is the same Hayek whose approach to economics has won the hearts and minds of conservatives around the world; and, to be fair, he was very up-front about calling The Sensory Order a speculative book. Nevertheless, his speculation led him to try to think about perception as a process, rather than some kind of mathematical mapping that would correlate the firing of a configuration of neurons with some “concept of an object.”

There are any number of places in Tenney’s text in which he seems to be dipping his big toe in the waters of process. He even admits that his own construct for a “unit” of listening, his clang, must (in his words) “include both a ‘dynamic’ and a ‘static’ aspect.” However, he never lets the “waters of the dynamic” get more than ankle-deep, perhaps because he could not conceive of a useful symbolic representation of a dynamic phenomenon.

In other words it will be fair to say that anyone who has “gotten the message” of The Sensory Order is likely to read “Meta + Hodos” with a very skeptical eye. On the other hand I, for one, believe that one should read everything with a very skeptical eye. That is how we “learn things” (in the immortal words of Dwayne “King” Cassius Pride). Following the wisdom of Warren S. McCulloch (one of the author’s of the pioneering essay “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”), I am less inclined to bite Tenney’s finger than I am to see how the “finger” of “Meta + Hodos” may point to Tenney’s subsequent writings.

Living with the Mess

The discussion over Chris Hedges' latest Truthdig column, "America the Illiterate," has become a very contentious affair, messy enough to remind me, in one of my own comments, of James Thurber's cowboy who jumped on his horse and ran off wildly in all directions. This apparently encouraged a comment from "FENWICK" to invoke a more recent metaphor:

Why do these threads seem to always become a textual re-enactment of the premier appearance of Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen show? With piano stools and other furniture flying back and forth on the stage, Jerry played on with his golden blonde ringlets flying back and forth and around his like a wet mop. You could hardly hear him amidt the din.

The answer to FENWICK's question is that the Truthdig forum for comments is what Joyce Rothschild-Whitt called a "collectivist organization." One of the organizations that Rothschild-Whitt studied was a town meeting in New England; and, among other things, she observed that participants in such meetings tended to experience a high level of stress. However, her observations apply to the behavior of any group of vastly disparate interests that is trying to deliberate some significant matter. What most business schools (particularly the ones with a strong faith based not in some Divine Power but in information technology) fail to teach is that serious deliberation is a messy process; and the level of the mess increases with the number of people doing the deliberating. As the mess increases, it takes its toll on the psychological well-being of the participants; but those who take such deliberation seriously soldier on, because they know the outcome will be more effective than the results of any number-crunching "decision support technology!"

My guess is that this nature of deliberation has been around since the early days of Athenian democracy and that both Plato and Socrates were well aware of the messiness of it all. This is probably why the "Republic" preferred the philosopher-king as a "preemptive strike" against such messiness. Writing with a broader temporal perspective, Hegel came to the same conclusion in his Philosophy of History. As to my own opinion, given the choice between messiness and a philosopher-king, I go for the messiness; it is part of our very humanity, which is what I felt Hedges was disregarding when this discussion was first building up steam.

Theorizing about Theorizing

Efforts "to try to stay one step ahead of the next paradigm shift" should take into account the nature of not only the paradigms themselves but also the theories that emerge from those paradigms. In my ongoing effort to assign as much honor to worthy texts from the past as to the latest insights from the present, I find myself frequently returning to the work of Karl E. Weick. Given my proclivity for complementing our preoccupations with "noun-based thinking" with equal attention to "verb-based thinking," I have to respect anyone who shows enough sensitivity to wording to title a book The Social Psychology of Organizing; but I have even more respect when that author issues a second edition of this book that so barely resembles the first edition that only the final chapter has a title that resembles its initial counterpart. So, when I discover that Weick has written about the process of theorizing, even if that text is in a 1987 Handbook of Organizational Communication, I know I will not be disappointed if I give his text a serious reading.

One sign of the paradigm shift from physics-based to biology-based thinking is a move away from Cartesianism, which has probably been discussed most eloquently by Antonio Damasio. However, while Damasio's Descartes' Error was not published until 1994 and the kind of thinking behind the approaches taken by Damasio and Edelman only began to surface in Israel Rosenfield's 1988 The Invention of Memory, Weick was already in their camp with his anti-Cartesian view of theory formation, best summarized in a single sentence:

Evocative ideas need to be cultivated by theorists from the beginning because belief, not skepticism, precedes observation.

In other words, as appealing as Descartes' invocation of doubt may have sounded, the very act of perception cannot take place without a foundation of belief, a proposition that Edelman and his colleagues would later demonstrate in their computer simulations of "wet brain" behavior. Weick then explores the implications of his fundamental proposition:

If believing affects seeing, and if theories are significant beliefs that affect what we see, then theories should be adopted more to maximize what we will see than to summarize what we have already seen. Usually, what we have already seen merely confirms what we expected to see. To theorize better, theorists need to expect more in whatever they will observe.

The consequence of this approach stands as a fascinating inversion to our traditional view of scientific method. Rather than starting with a theory that explains the meaning of what we observe and then testing the "truth" of that theory against the data we collect, we start by assuming the "truth" of the theory and apply it to teasing out the "meaning" of the data.

Biology provides us with a wealth of opportunities to explore this strategy. To invoke Rosenfield's point of departure, however sophisticated we may be in observing our behaviors, we always seem to fall back on the "truth" of the phenomenon of memory, however vague we may be about what it actually is. (Indeed, we are probably better at demonstration that biological memory is not like computer memory than we are at coming up with a model of what biological memory is like.) The problems we face have to do with how we reconcile the data we collect, neurological, psychological, and social, with that "truth" of our understanding of memory. Our progress in addressing such problems has been slow and has involved many false starts (as we see from how much of the twentieth century was occupied with finding the engram); but the progress is there nonetheless.

My point is that both Descartes and the history of physics have impacted not only the way in which we observe the world but also the role of theory in our observing behavior. Previous paradigm shifts have not demanded that we elevate ourselves to the meta-level of theorizing about theorizing. This time around, however, the rules for "normal science" seem to be radically different; and the behavior of those who cling to the paradigm of physics with an almost desperate passion will be quite understandable when viewed through the lenses of psychology and sociology.

Living in the "Century of Biology"

I just got done reading the Freeman Dyson piece in the latest New York Review, based on lectures he gave in 2004. The opening sentence is: "It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology." The rest of the article explores scenarios that would support this proposition. However, while most of Dyson's scenarios involve eventual roles for biotechnology as the new paradigm for solving the world's problems (poverty being highest on his list), I think he missed out on the real paradigm shift that is likely to be at stake.

The key to that paradigm shift lies in the work of Carl Woese, whom he cites at the beginning of his article. The most important take-away from Woese's work is that the shift away from physics entails a shift away from the reductionist thinking of physics. This is all about trying to explain the complex in terms of combinations of simple constructs, whether it is the detonation of a massively deadly bomb in terms of the behavior of subatomic particles or the sort of strategic planning for an enterprise that tries to abstract the consequences of specific actions into costs and benefits. When Woese speculates on a "new biology," he is thinking about (in Dyson's words) "the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years" (which is to say under the paradigm of physics as "normal science"). It remains to be seen just how the paradigm can (or will) shift; but, when we view agricultural practices through the lenses that Dyson offers, the shift may be in the direction of the sort of "living systems" theory that resulted in a 1000-page book by James Grier Miller back in 1978. This is a paradigm for dealing with an entire ecology with lots of tight couplings (and lots of loose ones, too). Miller (not cited by Dyson) tries to develop a paradigm that can scale from the level of the cell to the level of what he called "the supranational system" (thus anticipating globalization); and two levels below that top level is where he situates the "organization" (where strategic decisions are made on the basis of the cold figures of cost-benefit analyses).

To try to invoke the complexity of living systems to get away from the positivist paradigm of physics-based reductionism may be little more than invoking a new wave of romanticism to counter Enlightenment thinking; but one of my own "rehearsal" objectives is to try to stay one step ahead of the next paradigm shift. Miller, Woese, and Dyson all seem to be thinking about the world at large, rather than the world of the laboratory bench; and it is comforting to see Dyson give so much attention to the problem of poverty, even if I do not agree with everything he says. Personally, I am more impressed by Joel Salatin, whose Polyface Farm experiment was documented in Michael Pollan's recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. This is a farm whose operations are based on "a deep understanding of ecology" (in the words of Tim Flannery's review of Pollan's book in The New York Review). Those of us in the more mundane world of enterprise information systems might do well to take a cue or two from such ecological thinking, even if it means going back to Miller's 1000 pages in search of lessons to help us in these times of great and troubling complexity!

Structurational Cognition

Between my revisiting (once again) questions of "knowledge management" and finding myself in arguments about Noam Chomsky over at Truthdig, I realize that it may be time for me to return to more fundamental questions of the nature of cognition. This time around, however, I think I can now the enjoy the advantage of all the time I have put into reading Anthony Giddens and my efforts to feel more comfortable with his theory of structuration. This is a theory of how social systems can replicate themselves that is based on a dialectical relationship between the structural and behavioral properties of the system. This is an approach that Giddens himself acknowledges as being heavily informed by recent hermeneutic thinking. Hermeneutics had its origins in the decoding of obscure Biblical texts; but, over the last two centuries, it has expanded to encompass the more general body of texts. More recently, Paul Ricœur expanded even further to encompass actions, as well as texts; so it is not too much of a stretch to take a hermeneutic stance in thinking about general cognition.

The "Chomsky connection" comes from the question of whether cognitive behavior (in Chomsky's case the capacity for using language) can be grounded in structures, particularly structures that are innate in humans by virtue of their genetic makeup. One of Chomsky's early bursts of polemic was an attack on B. F. Skinner's book, Linguistic Behavior, which was grounded in the premise that all behaviors were conditioned by experiences and had nothing to do with any a priori structures in the "body" doing the experiencing. Giddens' dialectical stance toward the reproduction of social systems argues that neither of structure and behavior is in any way prior to the other. Rather, structuration is the ongoing process through which each induces change in the other. Giddens sees the structure of a social system as an organization of rules and resources. That structure provides a framework within which actors, both individually and in groups, cultivate and exercise "regular social practices." Those practices, however, can induce changes in the framework of rules and resources; and, by the same token, those changes can induce changes in the "regular social practices." So, in the spirit of dialectical synthesis, structure and behavior "feed" each other, rather than opposing each other.

Consider, now, how we exercise our capacity for cognition (a turn of phrase that I find far more apposite than "manage our knowledge"); and, since I came into this by reviewing Chomsky, let us concentrate on linguistic capacity. Chomsky is probably still the strongest card in the hand of structuralist positivism. When I heard him lecture at UCLA about twenty years ago, he made it clear that he believe that, sooner or later, all questions of semantics would eventually be reduced to questions about syntactic structures, the discipline he devoted most of his career to exploring (when he was not writing about politics). This amounted to a flat-our rejection of Wittgenstein's behavioral premise that we can only understand a word in the context of its use; and, to this day, the disciples of these two schools of thought continue to go at it head-to-head.

In the face of such a sharp opposition, one cannot resist the dialectical urge to seek out synthesis; and Giddens may be the one to point us in the right direction. Beginning from the "other side of the coin," so to speak, this time, we could say that Wittgenstein argues that we need to examine the "regular social practices" that arise through the ways in which we use language. To appropriate J. L. Austin's turn of phrase, we need to examine how we "do things with words;" and Habermas tried to extend that strategy to a more general view of social practice with his theory of "communicative action." However, as Giddens knew full well, one cannot talk about any practice without situating it in a structural framework; so the path that leads us from Wittgenstein through Austin into Habermas is one that gradually assembles such a framework of resources and rules that govern those resources. The framework we know best is the one we use to parse sentences, but these days it is hard to maintain Chomsky's strong conviction that syntactic structures can carry all the weight. Furthermore, the more we know about the plasticity of cortical behavior, the easier it is for us to accept Giddens' proposition that this framework is always changing in response to the practices that take place within in, which brings us back to the premise that changes in the framework also induce changes in the practices.

For those of us who live in the "real world" (or, perhaps worse, the "world of business"), the opposition of Chomsky and Wittgenstein may seem like an academic exercise; but the ongoing intrusion of the word "knowledge" in the way we now talk about work is another matter. This exercise does nothing more than reinforce yesterday's argument that using this word does not serve us very well, then I can take some satisfaction in the "journey" I have just conducted. I may not like it; but I am realistic enough to know that we all now live in a techno-centric world. Techno-centrism survives and sustains itself by focusing on structures, usually to the extent that we try to abstract our very "sense of reality" (appropriating this time from Isaiah Berlin) into structural representations. However, when we deep-end on those abstractions to the extent that we lose touch with the social practices, we run the risk of also abstracting away the human nature of the people who are supposed to be served by our technologies. If this means that we lose touch with what I have previously called "the human side of doing business," then it may be time to step back and ask why we are doing business at all or, to sound even more extreme, what right we have to lay claim to our own existence.