Communism?

Donald Trump reacting to a protestor (from the Al Jazeera Web page for the event)

Last night President Donald Trump delivered a speech at an auto event in Michigan. A protester decided to try interrupting him, and Trump’s response was to call him a “communist.” The Al Jazeera account of this event cited the speech as a “criticism of what he described as the threat of communism facing the country.”

I take this as a sign that Trump is still living in the last century. He might benefit from one of his aides consulting Wikipedia (since he probably would not do it himself). As might be expected, “Communism” has its own Web page; and it is definitely up-to-date! Here are the sentences that put Trump’s reaction into question:

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many governments abolished Communist rule. Only a few nominally Communist governments remain, such as China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Except for North Korea, these have allowed more economic competition while maintaining one-party rule. Communism's decline has been attributed to economic inefficiency and to authoritarianism and bureaucracy within Communist governments.

If Trump can show any evidence that communism is still a threat, I would be happy to examine and comment on it!

There He Goes Again!

I am beginning to think that questioning the behavior of President Donald Trump feels a bit like eating potato chips: Once you get started, it’s hard to stop! In my case, I “got started” when John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, took the President to task for threatening judges for doing their jobs in upholding the legal system. This was followed by Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern reflecting on Trump’s arguments about rigged elections with a counter-argument that could not have been more informative: “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (photograph by Tierney L. Cross for Getty Images, from an article in The Jerusalem Post)

In that context, Trump’s speech last night reminded me of the only quote from Ronald Regan that I can relish: “There you go again!” Al Jazeera now has a Web page for the perfect reinforcement of McGovern’s position. Trump decided to fire all his guns at Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, accusing him of being sympathetic to Palestinians. To the best of my knowledge, Schumer is Jewish and probably appreciates the founding of Israel as a “Jewish state” about 80 years ago. However, I suspect that he also appreciates the virtue of a country trying to be on good terms with its immediate neighbors.

As some readers probably already know, my first full-time job after I received my doctoral degree involved teaching computer science at the Technion, often referred to as the “Israel Institute of Technology.” I taught there for two years; and, in spite of political and religious differences, Israel managed to stay on reasonable (if not good) terms with its immediate neighbors. So I have a pretty good idea of where Schumer stands. On the other hand, I am also troubled by the fact that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may not be as open-minded about Israel’s neighbors as Schumer has been.

Indeed, when Netanyahu visits the White House this coming Tuesday, a Reuters article in today’s Jerusalem Post suggests that Trump may use the occasion as a stick for beating on Schumer! All this reminds me of the lengths to which the Constitution made it a point to distinguish the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches in terms of what they could and could not do. Apparently, the preamble never explicitly made the point that all members of all three branches should familiarize themselves with those terms; and now we may be facing the consequences of such negligence.

The Latest “Guardian” Insight

Screen shot of Donald Trump’s televised address last night (photograph by Saul Loeb provided by UPI and Shutterstock, from a Guardian Web page)

For better or worse I find that it is difficult to avoid political news with particular attention to events in the District of Columbia. It has been almost exactly 24 hours since I found myself writing about how the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court reminded President Donald Trump that the Executive branch is not “in charge of everything.” This morning at least one member of the Legislative branch has added his voice, Democratic congressman Jim McGovern from Massachusetts. While Chief Justice Roberts distilled his position to a single sentence, McGovern chose to elaborate his argument in three:

Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled. You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.

Since Trump seems to have aspired to make his tenure a special one, McGovern seems to have found just the right semantics for “special!”

Those Who Ignore Santayana

My guess is that just about any reader willing to pay attention to the texts on this site is well acquainted with the aphorism, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” This is one of those examples of the text being more familiar than the source, the source being the philosopher George Santayana, whom I first encountered when writing a high school term paper about Bertrand Russell. This morning my memory was triggered while I was browsing through the Al Jazeera Web site and found a NewsFeed Web page with the headline “Schumer slams Trump over Iran war.” This is a video summarized by a single sentence:

‘A recipe for utter disaster.’ Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has slammed President Donald Trump’s handling of the war on Iran, accusing him of repeating past mistakes without a clear strategy.

Mind you, expertise in history is not necessarily a prerequisite for holding any political office, particularly one selected by the electoral process; but these days, whether I am reading about the news or watching accounts on television, I keep feeling that I have already “seen the movie” and know that the ending is seldom a happy one.

Politics and Early Electronic Music at SFCM

Yesterday afternoon, the Ann Getty Center at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) hosted the first full-length workshop production of a new opera entitled Madame Theremin. The music was composed by Kennedy Verrett working with a libretto by George M. Kopp; and an instrumental ensemble, which included pianist Kymry Esainko, was conducted by Mary Chun. The opera was set in New York City in 1938 over the course of a single night. It had two acts, allowing the audience a ten-minute intermission.

Leon Theremin playing one of his instruments, which he called the Termenvox (photograph by Corbis Bettmann, December, 1927, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

The title refers to Lavinia Williams (Ariel Emma), a Black ballet dancer that married Leon Theremin (Eric Levintow), the inventor of an electronic musical instrument named after him. Patrick Blackwell sang the role of the Black movie star Nobel Washington, a character “loosely based” on Paul Robeson. The narrative is framed by episodes in Theremin’s apartment with much of the “action” taking place in an around the Waldorf Astoria New York hotel.

The libretto abounds with political narrative at a time where even the slightest sympathy for Soviet ideology could be taken as traitorous. Ironically, Theremin was at risk in Russia for his anti-Soviet ideology. He eventually ended up in one of Stalin’s gulags, survived, and went on to provide the Soviet authorities with sophisticated spyware. He only returned to his musical interests when Mikhail Gorbachev began to rise to power, bringing on the policy of glasnost. Towards the end of his life, he revisited the United States in 1991, where he was reunited with former pupil Clara Rockmore, who had promoted his instrument in our country.

Communism?

If I am not mistaken, the first time I encountered the word “communism” in this century was when Donald Trump gave his recent speech at Mount Rushmore. [added 7/9, 7:40 a.m.: It turns out this this was just the tip of an iceberg. This morning I encountered a NewsFeed article for Al Jazeera written by Soraya Lennie. The text for this article states, “Donald Trump has denounced communism more than 80 times in the past two weeks.”] I learned this through an Analysis article in The Guardian, which I encountered this morning. If anything, I find it ironic that Russia’s Vladimir Putin carries the same title as Donald Trump: President! This is not to say that governance in Russia is the same as it is here in the United States, but it serves as a reminder that we need to be careful about the words we choose and the semantics behind those words. Indeed, the very concept of diplomacy usually comes down to a battle of words and disagreements over semantics.

Georges Clemenceau (from his goodreads Web page)

This all reflects on the best known quotation of Georges Clemenceau from the last century: “War is too important to be left to the generals.” One might just as well substitute “heads of state” for “generals.” Disagreements can only be resolved through individuals with a solid command on knowing what they are talking about. Sadly, those individuals are few and far between. They are rarely heads of state and are more likely to serve as advisors. Nevertheless, disagreements can only be resolved through knowledge; and the real problem is finding the right individuals to enable such resolutions.

In that context, I have to confess that I cannot name any names, because, to be perfectly frank, I cannot think of any as I write this!

Lamplighters to Take on British Politics

One of the fairies in the poster design for the coming performance of Iolanthe

Last year Lamplighters Music Theatre concluded its 2024–25 season in August. Presumably, this means that this coming July will mark the end of the 2025–26 season. Last year H.M.S. Pinafore was set aboard a British naval vessel (hence the title). This year the scene will shift to a forest populated by a plethora of fairies, enough to take full command of the opening chorus! Those readers familiar with canon will probably assume (correctly) that the operetta to be performed is Iolanthe.

As usual, Arthur Sullivan provided music for a topsy-turvy narrative by W. S. Gilbert. This culminates in a confrontation between all those fairies and the members of the House of Lords of the British Parliament. I have to confess that this is my favorite operetta in the canon, because so many jokes are fired off fast and furious. Indeed, the text for the song known as “The Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare” (to be performed by Chris Uzelac) is so abundant with those jokes that laughing at one may mask hearing the one immediately following!

This production will be given only two evening performances, at 7 p.m. on Fridays July 10 and July 17. The remaining performances will begin at 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 11, Sunday, July 12, Saturday, July 18, and Sunday, July 19. Staging will be by Ted Zoldan, and Jennifer Ashworth will conduct. The venue will be located at the ODC Theatre in the Mission at 3153 17th Street on the southwest corner of Shotwell Street. Ticket prices are $95, $85, $75, and $35. All tickets may be purchased through a single ODC Web page with hyperlinks for each of the performances. The Box Office can also be reached through electronic mail at boxoffice@odc.dance, and the telephone number is 415-549-8534.

Diplomacy under Threat

Apparently, Donald Trump has become so frustrated with his attempts to advance his policy in the Middle East that he ended up showing his true colors:

https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/4/5/trump-threatens-iran-in-expletive-filled-social-media-post

Screen shot from Al Jazeera video 

Does "Meaning" Mean Anything Anymore?

I have decided that, regardless of what is actually happening in the world, the Republican Party has decided to declare war on the word “meaning;” and what frightens me is that they may be winning:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/rubio-tells-al-jazeera-strait-of-hormuz-will-reopen-one-way-or-another 

The Commander-in-Chief reveals his priorities

 

Donald Trump displaying his priorities 

https://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/trump-interrupts-a-cabinet-meeting-dealing-with-22153824.php

… and, as far as I am concerned, we have every cause to be skeptical, if not afraid! 

Another Reason to Choose the UK over Trump

 

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer (from an article in The Guardian demanding that Donald Trump apologize for his “insulting and frankly appalling” remarks about British troops in Afghanistan)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/23/donald-trump-outrage-nato-troops-avoided-afghanistan-frontline

Do We Need the UK to Keep Trump in Check?

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer opposing Donald Trump’s plans for Greenland (photograph provided by the United Kingdom’s House of Commons)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/21/starmer-criticises-trump-pressure-over-greenland

Glad to be on the West Coast!

The better part of my life was spent along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in a region that, for at least a time, was known as “Megalopolis.” This amounted to a span that began in the north in the greater Boston area and extended down to the District of Columbia. One of the things I appreciated was that I could get to performing arts events across the entirety of that span through a single rail service.

The renamed arts center in the District of Columbia (photograph by Brendan Smialowski, provided by AFP and Getty Images, from an article in The Guardian)

That included attending concerts at the Kennedy Center and still being able to catch a train home that night. As a result, this morning I found myself more than a little depressed over the fact that the venue had become a political football. This is because Chuck Redd, who had been scheduled to give a Christmas Eve performance at that venue chose to cancel. His reason was that the venue had been renamed to The Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

As might be expected, this did not go down well with the President of the Center, Richard Grenell. In a letter to Redd, he wrote:

Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution.

Grenell continued that he would seek one million dollars in damages for a “political stunt.”

Personally, I feel that there is a great danger in politicization undermining the performing arts. It is one thing to reflect on episodes from the past through music, both vocal and instrumental; but taking on the “immediate present” is a delicate matter. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with this gambit came from a movie, rather than anything musical. Back in May of 2009, I wrote about the Adam Sandler movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, whose plot I summarized as follows:

We are on a (fictitious) street in New York that has been divided into an Israeli side and a Palestinian side, both represented by small, but at least moderately prosperous, businesses; and all of those businesses are being forced out by a (not-so-fictitious) character clearly modeled on Donald Trump.

This was long before Trump made his move into politics and had his television program The Apprentice; and, at the time, I found the humor pleasantly innocuous.

These days it feels as if nothing is innocuous any more. Every event, of course, has consequences. However, it seems as if the consequences tend to get more dire, suggesting that no event can be dismissed as casual any more. As a result, the risk of having to deal with a million dollars worth of legal damages no longer seems like an extreme outlier. For all I know, even writing this can have consequences, which is why I have tried to establish as neutral a position as I can manage!

As a result, I try to do my best to avoid politicization. Describing performances is a major undertaking in itself. Invoking opinion to reflect on those descriptions is often even more challenging. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy acts of performance, whether they take place on the stages of venues only a few blocks from where I live or on the television screen. Most of those acts have nothing to do with politics, for which I am sincerely grateful!

More Than Eyebrow Raising!

Having already taken a jab at governance earlier this morning, I feel a bit cautious when it involves going further out on that limb. Nevertheless, prevailing conditions are such that I find it difficult to ignore them. By way of disclaimer, I should let readers know that, when I read the news every morning, one of my primary feeds comes from the Al Jazeera Web site. I was not surprised that my cable service did not provide me with a channel for this television network. However, that service offers an abundance of “Apps,” one of which happens to be YouTube; and YouTube has no trouble directing me to a livestream from Al Jazeera English.

When I began writing this, my first source was an Al Jazeera’s Web page. It presented a video approximately twenty minutes in duration about Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The final sentence of the text summary describes Hegseth’s professional efforts as “part of a long-running mission to end diversity measures and push forward a Christian nationalist agenda in the US armed forces.”

As an atheist, this disturbs me. Mind you, I have only been an atheist for about the last 40 years, roughly half of my life. Before that, I was Jewish, which is probably just as well, since the only job I could land after completing my doctoral degree was at the Technion in Israel! I lasted about two years, after which I moved on to teach computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. However, it was after I moved over to the private sector to work at Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut, that I first acknowledged my commitment to atheism!

It is that commitment that rubs even the least suggestion of “a Christian nationalist agenda” the wrong way. As a secondary student, I was taught to appreciate the virtues of the “melting pot” metaphor for the United States. To be fair, however, it has been decades since I have encountered that epithet. So I would not be surprised if Secretary Hegseth was not familiar with it!

Of course, things were not going that all smoothly when I completed my doctoral studies in 1967. Many of my friends talked about leaving the country, and some of them actually did! As I observed, I ended up being one of them. In retrospect I would say that the Technion helped me cultivate my teaching skills, which I could deploy with greater confidence when I took my first job in the United States.

Police and emergency services deployed after today’s attack in Manchester, England (photograph by Peter Byrne of the Press Association, provided by Associated Press, included in the New York Times account of the event)

Ironically, as I am writing this, BBC News is broadcasting an account of an attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England. The entire half-hour was focused only on that city. My guess is that, as I am writing this, the White House staff is scrambling to put together a response by our President. Ironically, our Federal government is in the midst of a shutdown, leading me wonder whether there is much that the Executive branch (or, for that matter, the Legislative one) can do, or even say, that would be productive.

Having now gotten this state of affairs off my chest, I must remind myself that my skillset for dealing with such affairs is sparse unto an extreme. I am at my most productive when I focus on writing about music. Regardless of how things currently are, I should sign off on other speculations!

Make America Sick Again?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/21/supreme-court-trump-research-dei

Nationalism: Here and in the Middle East

Some “unkempt thoughts” departing from music:

It was in high school that I first encountered the concept of “nationalism.” My American History teacher distilled it to a single sentence: “My country, right or wrong; but always my country.” I used to think back on those days during the Watergate hearings, wondering if my teacher’s commitment to nationalism was as strong as it was a few decades earlier.

I was reminded about that myopic commitment this morning when I encountered the following headline on a BBC Web page: “Biden says ICC war crimes arrest warrant 'outrageous’.” Apparently, our President’s “right or wrong” commitment to Israel is as strong his commitment to his own country. As the BBC article observes, that commitment isolates our country not only from the International Criminal Court (ICC) but also from a fair number of European countries.

My first job after leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with my doctoral degree took me to the Technion in Haifa, whose “secondary” name was “Israel Institute of Technology.” From an academic point of view, it was a smooth move; and I had no trouble preparing material for the classes I taught. (My knowledge of Hebrew never came up to snuff, but none of my students minded my lecturing in English while my teaching assistants provided hand-outs in Hebrew!) Nevertheless, my encounters with both Israelis and ex-pats, not only in Haifa but also in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, were, to put it politely, “mixed.”

The fact is that, even before borders were finalized, Israel would do what Israel wanted to do. Mind you, this a time when (too) many Americans stereotyped Arabs as terrorists, even if they could not support their bias with evidence. Since my own efforts to promote a more balanced view tended to provoke most of the Israelis I worked with and knew socially, I kept my ideas to myself for the two years of my tenure with Technion.

My second job was at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was only then that I bought my first television and started to watch the news, rather than just reading the papers. During the last few decades of the last century, Benjamin Netanyahu was already ingratiating himself with the broadcast media in the United States. Whenever a conflict was being reported from the Middle East, he always seemed to be there to offer his perspective. The American newscasters never seemed to mind whether or not that perspective was consistent with that of Israel itself.

As a result, I am now not surprised that, when I hear Netanyahu, I have no trouble wondering if he is speaking for himself or for his country. Unfortunately, it seems that our President is not given to such wondering. It’s bad enough when an allegiance to nationalism blinds us to hard truths about our own country. However, when it also blinds us to hard truths presented by the ICC, I have to worry about whether we shall ever be capable of a broader perspective that will afford a less pleasant point of view.

Opera Parallèle to Conclude Season with Premiere

Next month Opera Parallèle will conclude its 2023–24 season with three performances of the West Coast premiere of Fellow Travelers. Greg Pierce developed the libretto for this opera by turning to the novel by Thomas Mallon with the same title. The music was composed by Gregory Spears. Cincinnati Opera presented the world premiere in 2016. This was followed by performances in New York during the 2018 Prototype Festival. Subsequent performances were presented by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Minnesota Opera, and the Boston Lyric Opera. Finally, the opera is making its way to the West Coast!

Back when the season was first announced, I cited a Wikipedia page to account for the opera’s title. The “capsule description” of “fellow traveler” is “a person who is intellectually sympathetic to the ideology of a political organization, and who co-operates in the organization's politics, without being a formal member of that organization.” In this case the ideology was Communism; and the “fellow travelers” were those sympathetic to the ideology without becoming “card-carrying members” of the Communist Party. Many of those sympathizers were accused of homosexuality, resulting in an anti-Communist movement known as the “Lavender Scare.”

Guest Conductor Jaymes Kirksey (from the Opera Parallèle Web page for Fellow Travelers)

Jaymes Kirksey will be Guest Conductor, leading the seventeen-piece Opera Parallèle Orchestra. Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel will provide the staging. The vocalists will include Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, Joseph Lattanzi, Victoria Lawal, Kurt Winterhalter, Elena Galván, Cara Gabrielson, Daniel Cilli, Matthew Worth, and Matthew Lovell, several of whom will be performing multiple roles. The most significant role to be called out by a familiar name is that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose part will be sung by Cilli. (Those of us that can look back on “Tail-Gunner Joe” without choking or spitting are getting fewer in number!)

Opera Parallèle will present three performances of Fellow Travelers. These will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, June 21, and Saturday, June 22, and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 23. The venue will be the Presidio Theatre at 99 Moraga Avenue, in the southwest corner of the Presidio. All tickets are being sold through a Presidio Theatre Web page. Prices range from $30 to $120. The Web page also includes a hyperlink for information about round trip bus tickets for $35 The opera will be performed in two acts separated by an intermission, with an overall run time of 135 minutes.

Old First Concerts: March, 2023

March is going to be a busy month at Old First Presbyterian Church. The pull-down menu for Concerts on the Old First Concerts (O1C) home page currently lists seven events for that month. This amounts to a more-than-generous share of diversity, suggesting that all readers are likely to find at least one of the offerings to be of interest. Furthermore, because we are still dealing with COVID recovery conditions, O1C will continue to allow both live streaming and seating in the Old First Presbyterian Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue. General admission tickets will be sold for $25 with reduced rates for seniors ($20) and students ($5). The suggested donation for those viewing the live stream is $20. Hyperlinks to the event pages (which include hyperlinks for streaming) will be attached to the date and time of the performances as follows:

Saturday, March 11, 8 p.m.: Pianist Gabriele Baldocci has prepared a solo piano recital of impressive diversity. He will begin with Franz Liszt’s transcription for solo piano of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony in C minor. Having seized listener attention, he will then play three United States premiere performances, the first of which will be his own bagatelle, composed in the key of G major. The other composers to be premiered will be David Winkler and Douglas Finch. The program will then continue with “Poem of the Bohemian” by Michael Glenn Williams and conclude with Baldocci improvising on Beethoven themes.

Sunday, March 12, 4 p.m.: The Ives Collective last performed at Old First at the end of last month. However, at that time, co-manager Susan Freier was unable to play second violin due to injury. She should be sufficiently recovered by next month to perform with her co-manager, cellist Stephen Harrison, and first violinist Kay Stern and violist Clio Tilton. The pianist for this program will be Keisuke Nakagoshi, and there will also be guest appearances by oboist Kyle Bruckmann and flautist Tod Brody. Bruckmann will perform the opening selection with Stern and Harrison, a trio composed in 1936 by Grażnya Bacewicz. Brody will then join the string quartet members in a performance of Amy Beach’s Opus 80, a set of variations on a theme first composed in 1916 and revised in 1920. For the second half of the program, Nakagoshi will join the quartet to play Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 81 quintet in A major.

Friday, March 17, 8 p.m.: The Lang/Rainwater Project is the duo of trombonist William Lang and pianist Anne Rainwater. Some readers may recall that Rainwater was one of the pianists to participate in the Piano Break series, presented under the auspices of the Ross McKee Foundation and live-streamed through a YouTube Web page during pandemic conditions in September of 2020. She will accompany Lang in a performance of Beach’s Opus 23 “Romance,” originally scored for violin and piano. The program will also include “All We Could See From the Window was Water” by Alex Temple and compositions by Eli Greenhoe and Arvo Pärt, whose specific works have not yet been announced.

Saturday, March 18, 7:30 p.m.: This will be the 70th Junior Bach Festival, an annual event involving performances of music by Johann Sebastian Bach by young soloists and ensembles; program details have not yet been finalized.

Sunday, March 19, 4 p.m.: Prayers for a Feverish Planet is the result of pianist Ann DuHamel putting out a call for scores asking composers to share their works about climate change. She has now accumulated over 300 movements for either solo piano or piano with electronics. The themes behind these compositions include water, grief/anxiety, shadows and light, time, human “progress,” trees, and hope. For this program DuHamel has selected works composed as early as 2002 and as late as 2020. The contributing composers will be (in order of performance) Erik Tapia, Karen Lemon, Frank Horvat, Laura Schwendinger, Chris Williams, Dario Duarte, Ian Dicke, Daniel Blinkhorn, Clifton Callender, Alex Burtzos, and Gunter Gaupp.

Soprano Heidi Moss (from the O1C event page)

Friday, March 24, 8 p.m.: Soprano Heidi Moss, violinist Joel Pattinson, cellist Peter Myers, and pianist Paul Schrage will join forces to present a program that invites the audience to reflect on the violence that occurred on September 11, 2001, as well as the twenty years of war that followed. The program will begin with a piano trio by Afghan composer Arson Fahim, who was born in 2000. This will be followed by Songs of Afghan Women, a song cycle by William Harvey inspired by the time he spent teaching violin and viola at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. The program will then conclude with “Aftermath,” which Ned Rorem composed as a reaction to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Sunday, March 26, 4 p.m.: This performance by the Bernal Hill Players will feature Martha Rodríguez-Salazar in flutes and vihuela, Annelise Zamula on saxophones and flute, Leah di Tullio on clarinets, Jennifer Peringer on piano and tablas, and Sharon Wayne on guitar. The title of the program will be Forces of Nature; and the selections will evoke moods both calm and stormy, with Italian volcanoes, Brazilian rainforests, Japanese seas, English forests, New York rain showers, French spring mornings, and California canyons. All of the works on the program were composed in either the twentieth century or the 21st. Two of them were written on commission by Bay Area composers.

Music for Drum Exhibition at Wattis Institute

The Wattis Institute is currently presenting the third and final installment in an exhibition entitled Drum Listens to Heart. Since the end of October, the exhibition has been supplemented with a series of live music performances curated by Diego Villalobos. These have taken place at a variety of other venues, one of which is The Lab. Towards the end of this month, The Lab will host the last of these offerings, which will present two compositions.

The first of these is entitled “American Ledger No. 1,” which was composed by Raven Chacon in 2018. This is a free-form composition, whose score can be displayed as a flag, a wall, a blanket, a billboard, or a door. There is no explicit instrumentation other than the requirement that the music be performed by many players with sustaining and percussive instruments. Those instruments may include coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match. Andy Meyerson will serve as conductor, leading the players through the score.

Photograph of Marshall Trammell by Agatha Urbaniak (courtesy of The Lab)

The second offering will be the latest installment in Marshall Trammell’s Music Research Strategies project. The title of this installment is “Deep Phonology: Technique and Sound Become Visual and Transformative;” and it has been conceived as a community gathering, as well as a live performance. The participants will stage a collective reading of the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. The instrumentation will consist of a drum, which serves as a vernacular tool for acoustic study and social change.

This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 25. Regular readers probably know by now that The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street. The location is particularly good for those using public transportation, since that corner provides bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel as well as a BART station. [updated 2/23, 10:40 a.m.: Due to the continued cleanup of an oil leak, The Lab is still not safe for visitors.  The new venue for the performance will be CounterPulse at 80 Turk Street; and the performance  will begin at 7:30 p.m., rather than 8 p.m.] Doors will open at 7:30 p.m. General admission tickets are available for $15 and may be purchased online through a Withfriends Web page. Admission will be discounted or free for members. Students can purchase discounted tickets by sending electronic mail to thelabsf@thelab.org.

Is Facebook Asking the Right Questions?

I just finished reading a BBC News post entitled “Facebook reveals most-seen posts are inane questions, not politics.” The story itself begins as follows:

After being accused of spreading right-wing content, Facebook has revealed that its most-viewed posts include asking if sugar goes with spaghetti.

Its first-ever report on the contents of people's news feeds in the United States focuses on how many people see a post rather than any other measurement.

The good news is that, at the very least, this counts as an attempt to clear Facebook of any accusations that is has become an instrument for “politics by other means” (or, perhaps, the more activist proposition, “revolution by other means”). The bad news is that they may have engaged inadequate analytic techniques to arrive at questionable conclusions. The fact is that people were bombarded with “things to see” long before Facebook added to the bombardment.

We might do well to think of the mechanisms behind Facebook posts the same way we think about advertising. We are all used to the high volume of advertising that we encounter through television. (There are other sources, such as billboards and newspapers; but my guess is that television advertising draws more attention, simply because it can deploy more attention-grabbing techniques.) Furthermore, the advertising business is not just about drawing eyeballs. It is a matter of drawing the right eyeballs in the interest of getting “the mind behind the eyeballs” to take some desired action (usually buying something, whether you need it or not).

In that context the concept of “most-viewed posts” is a relatively meaningless metric; and rank-ordering the posts themselves according to that metric is even more meaningless. Indeed, even the question of passing a post to others may not be that significant. The more difficult question to deal with is whether acts of reading and sharing lead to actions being taken that have nothing to do directly with reading and sharing.

In other words Facebook needs to be addressed on the same turf as the question of whether the storming of the Capitol building was the result of deliberate incitement. This is a complex question that cannot be answered by simple bean-counting. It is not so much about “spreading the word” as it is about how persuasive those words are and if they are persuasive enough to lead to action.

My guess is that there are no analytical tools for identifying such persuasion, not among Facebook resources or anywhere else. Those in the business of advertising may have a richer qualitative understanding of human nature, but they probably know better than to reduce that understanding to quantitative metrics. The best we can do in the face of a possible crisis is ask, “How did we get into this mess?” Where the National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex is concerned, the House of Representatives tried to address this question. Whether or not any useful results will arise is still up for grabs.

Meanwhile, we should be as careful with Facebook’s accounts of its own analyses as we are in taking any television commercial to be verifiable truth.