Lyrics Ain’t What They Used To Be!

Cover of how do I find you (courtesy of Verismo Communications)

As promised about 24 hours ago, I have revisited how do I find you, the cycle of seventeen songs, each with music by a different composer, which constituted the program that mezzo Sasha Cooke presented at Davies Symphony Hall this past Sunday evening. This time I listened to the program’s MP3 album, currently available for download from an Amazon.com Web page. Because the download includes the booklet with the texts of the poems, I used that version as my source for following the songs, rather than the program book I had used at Davies.

Yesterday I had observed that the semantics and rhetoric of each poem were so powerful that it was difficult to focus on the music. This time I had, at least to some extent, the opportunity to prioritize listening without having to observe the modest but powerful physical dramatics in Cooke’s delivery. Sadly, I came away feeling, once again, that the music itself was not particularly compelling, leaving me to wonder whether art song may have receded to the status of a distant historical artifact.

When we think of how art song thrived during the nineteenth century, we should probably begin by recognizing that reading poetry was more popular than it was before new media of sight and sound began to undermine the priority of reading over the course of the twentieth century. Those attending performances of art song two centuries ago were probably familiar with the writings of the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Rückert, and the folk poetry collected in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. During the early twentieth century, those poets tended to recede behind the more popular appeal of lyricists such as Ira Gershwin and particularly Cole Porter, who summed up the shift in priorities in a single couplet:

Good authors too who once knew better words

Now only use four-letter words writing prose

To be fair, there were composers that knew how to take on prose without compromising either their own creative skills or those of the source text. In many ways Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” remains a powerful point of reference, even though it was composed over half a century ago. During the second half of the last century, Stephen Sondheim established himself through his skill for capturing compelling narrative through just the right interactions between music and words.These days it seems as if the standards set by the twentieth century have lost their impact just as much as those from the nineteenth.

Of course, I doubt that any of the seventeen composers that contributed to how do I find you had any thoughts of being compared to Sondheim or Barber, let alone Franz Schubert or Hugo Wolf. For that matter, my guess is that the enthusiastically positive impressions of most of the Davies audience were probably triggered by Cooke’s dramatic talents, which covered an impressively wide span of dispositions over the course of her recital. However, those talents were physical and, therefore, visual. Those listening to the recording of how do I find you are limited to words printed on a page and those rhetorical techniques that depend only on listening.

As I observed yesterday, the impact of those techniques was directed by the relevance of the texts being set to music. Those texts, in turn, established relevance through denotations and/or connotations that reflect on the human condition during the hard times of a pandemic. Personally, my own dispositions during these times have benefitted considerably from Danny Clay’s Music for Hard Times. Clay himself described his score as “a series of composed ‘calming exercises.’” Those exercises were realized through the combination of a recording of performances by The Living Earth Show, the duo of percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews, with the projection of an ambient film created by Jon Fischer. Mind you, this is an unabashedly personal reaction, based on a preference for connotation, rather than denotation. (If I want denotation, I get it by reading The New York Review of Books!)

So, while I have added how do I find you to my library, I am not sure that I shall be revisiting it very often.

What are the Percepts When we Listen to Music?

As a result of some exchanges with Stephen Malinowski that followed up on my piece last Sunday about his visualizations of two of the “Razumovsky” quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, I realized that I was scratching the surface of a landscape of far deeper issues pertaining to the acts of listening to music. However, this also revived earlier thoughts suggesting that the landscape itself could be divided into different regions, each of which could then be “mined” in efforts to understand the nature of listening. As I had mentioned this past July, when I was discussing the writings of James Tenney, one possible way to organize those regions was to appeal to the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric to serve as a foundation of “first principles.”

That said, however, there was a potential shortcoming to such a foundation. One might say that all three of the trivium disciplines are concerned with utterances. More often than not, those utterances are conveyed through text; but, even when they arise through viva voce delivery, those disciplines still treat what has been uttered as static objects. In other words those disciplines are concerned with what, for some time, I was calling “noun-based thinking.” On the other hand one of the key points I tried to make in my critique of Tenney’s efforts was that “the experience of listening to the ‘music-in-itself,’ [is] an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.” (Tenney had been using Immanuel Kant as his point of departure!) Thus, there may be a fallacy residing in my choice of headline, because the very concept of a percept is noun-based. Making music, on the other hand, entails in-the-moment verb-based activities; and the listener’s response to those activities is just as verb-based.

If we are to think about how a specific performance of a specific piece of music can be realized as a “real-time” animation for which the performance itself provides the sound-track, then I think a case can be made that logic, grammar, and rhetoric provide “first principles” for the real-time visual experience as much as they do for the experience of listening just to the music being performed. Being able to identify those principles, on the other hand, is no easy matter. In the first place the very concept of a “sentential utterance,” which provides the foundation for all three trivium disciplines, is no longer “noun-based.” Nevertheless, there are clearly structural aspects to just about any “musical utterance,” which suggests that we should be able to appeal to basic principles of grammar (without deep-ending on parts of speech and sentence diagrams) to provide a foundation for identifying both the structures themselves and how they are used.

From this point of view, I continue to believe, as I first speculated back in 2007, that the very idea of structure allows us to sort out the embellishing from the embellished. Those who are more experienced in music theory and analysis probably recognize that this approach to sorting can be found in the theoretic writings of Heinrich Schenker, and those that are serious in their Schenker studies will probably be quick to point out that Schenkerian analysis owes much to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (an essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments) provides a systematic and extensive study of ornamentation. In other words, principles of grammar serve to sort out the embellishing from the embellished (sometimes taking into account the possibility that an embellishment may, itself, be embellished) just as the syntax of a language allows us to sort out the basic nouns and verbs from the adjectives and adverbs that modify them.

If grammar provides the tools for sorting out the embellishments from what they are embellishing, it may be fair to say that logic serves to identify what it is that is being embellished in the first place. Schenker did not seem to regard this issue as relevant. As far as he was concerned, the only construct “worthy” of embellishment in the first place was a basic I-V-I (tonic-dominant-tonic) cadence. Needless to say, this was far too restrictive an ideology, even before the first rumblings of atonality began to emerge from Vienna. My favorite example from one of the composers that Schenker favored comes from the orchestral introduction to Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XXI/2 oratorio The Creation, which is “faithful” to the key signature of C minor but manages to undermine any attempt to suggest a dominant-to-tonic cadence.

The point is that there are any number of constructs that can be applied to embellishment. Indeed, the final act of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck opera was described as a set of “variations.” What is varied changes from one scene to the next. The act begins with the conventional approach to variations on a theme, but this is followed by a set of variations on a single note. There is then a set of variations on a rhythm. The fourth scene consists of variations on a single chord, and it is followed by an instrumental interlude of variations on the key of D minor. The final scene is then organized as variations of a rhythm consisting only of quavers (eighth notes). Thus, I would argue that it is through logic that one understands part-whole relationships, which may be based on a wide variety of different approaches to embellishment.

This brings us up to role of rhetoric. This is the discipline that it most closely linked to performance. One might say that, when composers like Haydn and Berg choose to go down a rabbit hole of complex grammatical structures, it is up to the performers to make the result accessible to attentive listeners. In Aristotle’s time rhetoric was all about suasion, getting those listening to a speech to accept what a speaker is saying, whether it is a compelling call to action or simply expressing a point of view to be shared. If there is any level of suasion in the performance of music, it probably comes down to just convincing the audience to pay attention to the music one is performing. That task of convincing is probably best appreciated in the performance of opera, where seizing and maintaining audience attention is usually shared by both the conductor and the stage director.

Note that, in the above paragraphs, one could approach matters of both grammar and logic using “noun-based” terminology. However, because rhetoric is more concerned with performing the results of grammar and logic, it is an activity, rather than a construct. This touches on the fallacy that lurks in how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe chose to dramatize the Faust narrative. The contract says that, when Faust declares that a moment is so wonderful that he wishes it to be suspended in time, Mephistopheles will them claim Faust’s soul. The fallacy is that, when a moment is suspended it time, it no longer exists!

Apparently, Goethe forgot any of his past studies of Augustine of Hippo. Anyone that wishes to think about the nature of time would do well to “go back to the basics” of Augustine’s Confessions. I refer specifically to the following passage (in the translation by Henry Chadwick):

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future.  Perhaps it would be exact to say:  there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come.

This clearly had an impact on Edmund Husserl, since his lectures on time-consciousness explicitly discussed that “present of things past” (which he called “retention”) and the “present of things to come” (which he called “protention”). I doubt that anyone would disagree that both retention and protention are actively “in play” when one engages in attentive listening; but just as important is how those engaged in the act of performance can impact awareness of retention and protention among those listeners.

This allows me now to loop back to my thoughts about the strategies Malinowski engages in creating his visualizations. The mere fact that a visualization is conceived as what amounts to a horizontally-scrolling pattern implies that the viewer always has on the screen representations of not only “things present” but also “things past” and “things to come.” For that matter, as one becomes acquainted with the patterns of the visualization, one may recognize connections between “things to come” and “things past” more readily than if one is only aware of the sounds themselves.

This then raises a challenging question: How do performers deal with those matters of listener awareness in the absence of such “visual aids?”

James Tenney’s 1990 Darmstadt Lecture

The next article I encountered in my traversal of the chapters in the James Tenney anthology From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory is entitled simply “Darmstadt Lecture.” The lecture was delivered on July 26, 1990, when Tenney was one of the many composers attending that year’s Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt (international summer schools for new music at Darmstadt). I gathered from the first sentence of this article that much of the activity involved attendees presenting lectures to their fellow attendees; but, apparently, titles for the lectures were not required.

Tenney began by suggesting the title “Problems of Harmony (II),” the number indicating that Arnold Schoenberg had written a paper with the same title (without a number), which he presented as a lecture on January 20, 1927. (Given that date, it is clear that both the title and the presentation were in German.) Tenney then explained that the plural referred a variety of “smaller problems,” addressing different aspects of the overall topic. Those “subproblems” were, in the order discussed: the historical, the role of theory, the phenomenological, the psychoacoustic, the semantic, and the compositional.

My first reaction was that this fit neatly into “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” the title of a famous paper by cognitive psychologist George Armitage Miller about how many different “items” you could hold in your head at any given time. However, much as I admired Miller and always enjoyed listening to him lecture, I realized that I was much more at home with the ancient tradition of division into three parts. That realization reminded me of the first time I tried to write something serious about the performance of music on this site, in which I explained why I had a tendency to be skeptical of recitals given by competition winners.

My overall framework followed the “rule of three” but in an unlikely manner. The foundation for my argument was the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. I treated each of these as a “dimension” along which I could describe both my listening experiences and my negative response to those experiences. That article was written in March of 2007, and well over a decade later I continue to appeal to either parts of that framework or its entirety when taking on problems of both describing and evaluating listening experiences.

Tenney’s lecture, on the other hand, was the product of a composer, rather than a listener. Nevertheless, each of the problems he reviewed amounted to a problem that would confront anyone trying to describe a piece of music, whether it involved the nature of how the music would be performed or the nature of the experience from the perspective of a listener. As Tenney worked his way through the first five problems, I found myself sometimes nodding in agreement, sometimes feeling is if a lightbulb had gone on above my head, and seldom with a Spock-like arched eyebrow.

However, when Tenney came to composition as a problem unto itself, I felt as if either or both of us had hit a brick wall. Rather than talking about composition as a particularly unique subclass of human behavior in general, Tenney devoted almost all of his attention to the concept of a “harmonic space.” His punch line then turned out to be that the activity of composition could be described in terms of “activity in harmonic space” (emphasis in the source text).

This surprised me for any number of reasons. One of the most important involved the close and friendly relationship that Tenney had with John Cage. (Tenney may be the first composer to appreciate and accept what Cage was doing since the early days when Cage and Pierre Boulez were correspondents.) The conclusion of Tenney’s lecture led me to wonder whether he had encountered Erik Satie’s (in?)famous dictum that “music is what happens at concerts.” Cage clearly embraced that assertion and never seemed to run out of innovative ways to exercise it.

Tenney, on the other hand, always seems to have fallen back on “marks on paper,” whether the medium was a score page, a mathematical proposition, or a line of code in a FORTRAN program. To be fair, it would not surprise me if those were also the three “frames of mind” found in every other participant of that year’s summer school. We are getting close to the 30th anniversary of that particular summer school, and I feel a need to ask whether we have advanced or regressed.

I would like to believe that no-one writes code in FORTRAN any more; and it has been quite some time since I have encountered anything requiring me to resuscitate my previous education in higher mathematics. The good news is that I still encounter a fascinating diversity when it comes to the sorts of marks on paper that pass from composer to performer. I take this as a significant departure from the need for “academic reinforcement” when one sets about to make music. The marks on paper have declared their independence from “academic constructs;” and I have yet to regret where that independence is leading us!

Michael Schade’s Time Machine for CMSF

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) presented the second concert in its 2018 season. The featured artist was tenor Michael Schade, for whom the visit was somewhat of a homecoming, since he is an alumnus of the Merola Opera Program from the summer of 1990. He was joined by violinist Livia Sohn, as well as pianist Kevin Murphy, in the presentation of an evening that had some of the flavor of a Schubertiade.

However, if Schade’s intention had been to reflect on the past, his focus was directed about one hundred, rather than two hundred, years ago. He prepared a program intended to reflect on past performances by the Irish tenor John McCormack and the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler, “channeled,” for the occasion, by Schade and Sohn, respectively. This was a time when listening habits had not yet been dominated by the recording industry. Nevertheless, it was an age of ticket-buying customers, in contrast to the intimate gathering of friends that would constitute of Schubertiade; and both McCormack and Kreisler were some of the “hottest items” at the box office.

John McCormack singing to an audience of over 5,000 at the Hippodrome in New York during the 1915–16 season (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mind you, both McCormack and Kreisler made recordings; and they both benefited from the wider audiences that recordings afforded. Nevertheless, they were both performers for whom making music took place before an audience, rather than in a studio in front of a microphone. I am no expert on McCormack’s repertoire; but it would probably be fair to say that Schade’s selection of arias and art songs by George Frederic Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, and Richard Strauss, along with a few traditional selections, provided a fair representation. On the Kreisler side, Sohn played three of his arrangements but none of his original compositions. She also presented arrangements by Jenő Hubay, Jascha Heifetz, Leopold Auer, and David Loeb. Curiously, almost all of her selections involved operatic music.

Between the two of them, Schade was the one who better captured the spirit of the occasion. He consistently showed as much respect for the texts being set as for the composers setting them. He also selected an excellent choice of offerings, in all of which the music captured and reinforced the semantic and rhetorical spirits of the text, rather than simply and slavishly trying to follow some strophic pattern. These were poetic offerings that made the poetry worth reading as part of the listening experience.

Sohn’s performances were more problematic. Her intonation never seemed to align with Murphy’s piano, and things were no better when she was performing with Schade. Given the context of the program, she had to confront the demands of a generous number of virtuoso challenges; and she knew how to rise to those challenges without suggesting that she was concerned about overcoming them. Nevertheless, she never revealed any of that sense of rhetoric that Schade conveyed so well, even though, as readers of this site probably know by now, rhetoric is as significant a factor in instrumental music as it is in settings of text.

As a result, by the time the program had concluded, one sensed that any effort to revive a century-old spirit had never been able to rise above the level of mild entertainment, after which no particular moments were left resonating in memory.

Blumenstock’s Program of Venetian Delights

Last night in Herbst Theatre, violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock led the members of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in the second program of the group’s 37th season. She prepared a program entitled Vivaldi in Venice. Since only one composition by Antonio Vivaldi was performed, the evening had much more to do with musical life in Venice during Vivaldi’s lifetime than with that one composer.

Of the eight composers whose music was performed, only three were actually Venetians: Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, and Giuseppe Tartini. Four of them were visitors: Pietro Locatelli, Francesco Maria Veracini, George Frideric Handel, and Johann Georg Pisendel, who studied with Vivaldi while in Venice. The evening concluded with three selected instrumental movements from the opera Le carnaval de Venise by the Parisian André Campra, who does not appear to have left France over the course of his long and prosperous life.

People still tend to haul out the old joke that Vivaldi wrote the same violin concerto 230 times; and, from a structural point of view, one might be forgiven for suggesting that there was a formulaic nature to the pieces performed last night. That’s a bit like saying there is something formulaic to the vast number of songs written by Cole Porter. It is important to remember that, during the period that bridges the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, music was primarily about the art and craft of engaging performance. Sheets of paper filled with notation were there to give the performer a point of departure; but the music itself had to do with how a performer could put a personal stamp on that notation, regardless of who put the marks on the paper in the first place.

What made last night so stimulating was not the familiarity of any of the pieces being played or even a prevailing sense of family resemblance. Rather it was Blumenstock’s personal qualities as a performer par excellence. She has an approach to playing the violin that can make even the most routine phrase sound interesting; and, when that phrase repeats, no matter how many times, she knows how to unfold an overall structure that endows each iteration with its own source of interest. Those who attended her pre-concert talk discovered that those skills are not limited to music. She could recite poetry with the same performance qualities that she brings to her violin work.

Much of this, of course, derives from her solid command of technique. However, that skill set is consistently reinforced by an equally solid command of rhetorical skills. It is through rhetoric that she can make even the most familiar passages sound fresh and alive (and she could do that with excerpts from poetry as effectively as she could with passages of music). Even across the scope of the full program of eight composers, she always knew how to pull unexpected rabbits out of her hat. The result was a generous supply of music (much of which may well have been unfamiliar to most of the audience) that consistently radiated with a spontaneity that kept the attentive listener on the edge of his/her seat.

Eighteenth-century Venice may never have had it so good.

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Have the Brutes Won?

Back on February 22, 2015, this site warned that "political discourse" had become as much of an oxymoron as "central intelligence" (the punch line to an article entitled "Dignifying Stupidity with a Response"). If I had a time machine, I would probably use it to revisit myself on that date for the pleasure to delivering that old line, "You ain't seen nuttin' yet!" One capable of detaching enough to view this whole situation from a sober distance can probably conclude that, where voters are concerned (not only in the United States but in just about any country in which elections are held), powerful rhetoric as reduced the strength of logic to less than zero (negative because there are now sufficiently large blocs among the electorate who see logic as a sign of a path to be avoided, hence Michael Gove's declaration that voters "have had enough of experts").

In this context, an Opinion piece by Jeff Sparrow posted this morning on the Al Jazeera Web site is a depressing sign of just how bad things have become. Taking Keith Olbermann as a case in point, Sparrow makes the case that the left is now resorting to the same pandering techniques that worked so well for Donald Trump. (He calls this technique "anti-Trump Trumpism.") As might be expected, he does not approve of this phenomenon, recalling the old adage that fighting fire with fire just gets more things burnt. Unfortunately, Sparrow never tried to take on Gove's claim or its implications, the most important of which is that rationality no longer has any currency.

Can rationality be restored? Barack Obama believe that this can be achieved at a grass-roots level. Start with small like-minded communities; and eventually they will grow. I would like to embrace his optimism. Perhaps I have to, because irrationality has become such a global phenomenon that seeking refuge is no longer an option.

Nevertheless, I still seem to be able to turn to cynicism when no other refuge is available. In that vein I need to share my reflection on the photograph that headed Sparrow's article:

This is an anti-Trump protest held in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The enlarged image on Al Jazeera will show that the concrete stela behind the letter "C" has the name "Bulfinch." That is there to commemorate Charles Bulfinch, the architect who designed the State House. Today Bullfinch is much less known than his son Thomas, whose last name became closely associated with the collection of myths of different cultures. The cynic in me is tempted to give this photograph the caption "Bulfinch's Mythology!"

Gabriela Martinez’ Debut Album with Delos is Delightfully Diverse

Almost two weeks ago Delos released its first album featuring solo performances by Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez. The advance material (reproduced on the Amazon.com Web page) describes her as the “Brilliant young Venezuelan pianist,” which gives me a bit of pause, since my first encounter with her was in July of 2007. The occasion was one of the summer concerts offered by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall, which SFS had designated as “bloggers’ night.” I was just beginning to write seriously about music, and this was an opportunity for not only free admission to an SFS concert but also the circulation of my writing among a new set of readers. The evening included both the concert itself and a question-and-answer session with Martinez after the concert had concluded.

Her selection that night was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. To put this in historical perspective, the performance took place about ten years after the release of Shine, an account (disputed by some) of David Helfgott’s efforts to learn Opus 30 and the unfortunate aftermath of those efforts. This film was clearly on the mind of many of the bloggers that attended the Q&A session, which is why the question quickly came up as to how much time it had taken Martinez to prepare the concerto. When she replied that it took about two months, one could hear gasps across Davies punctuated by dropping jaws. I ended up writing a piece in which I used a little bit of elementary information theory to make the case that too many minds had been sadly addled by the Shine narrative.

Fortunately, Martinez’ new album is more about the diversity of her music-making skills than it is about debunking fictions fabricated in the name of entertainment. The title of the album is Amplified Soul, which is also the title of one of the tracks, a piece she commissioned from Dan Visconti, which is receiving its recording debut. Just short of five minutes in duration, this is music that appears to explore reverberations within the body of the piano and therefore requires what appears to be some rather detailed attention to which dampers are raised at which times. The title probably refers to the fact that, because the amplitudes of reverberating strings are much lower than those struck by the hammers, amplification is required to appreciate the full effect of the process. While the sorts of effects that Visconti appears to exploit are easily captured in the setting of a recording studio, there are likely to be technical challenges that will arise should Martinez decide to play this piece in recital.

Curiously, similar attention to reverberation also arises in the other recent work on the album, Mason Bates’ “White Lies for Lomax.” “Lomax” is, of course, Alan Lomax, the pioneering ethnomusicologist who devoted so much of his life to collecting and documenting the many different forms of folk music encountered across the continental United States. Bates describes the thematic material as “wisps of distant blues fragments,” adding that these fragments “are hardly honest recreations of the blues.” This explains the “Lies” part of the title. Bates does not say anything (at least in the booklet notes) about the “White” part. While this may have been his way of blunting the significance of his “dishonesty,” it is worth recognizing that Lomax was white, as is Bates, while the blues has its roots among African Americans living in the Deep South, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, there is some suggestion that Bates acknowledges distorting his source material and may even be calling out some of his predecessors, such as Aaron Copland or even George Gershwin, for doing the same, probably in the interest of appealing to what Amiri Baraka, back when he was writing as LeRoi Jones, called the middle-brow tastes of white critics.

The more traditional works on the album cover the period from the very end of the eighteenth century to the very beginning of the twentieth. The latest of these is Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 3, a set of twelve variations in B-flat minor that he composed for Artur Rubinstein. Somewhat earlier is the first (also in B-flat minor) of the set of six Moments musicaux (Opus 16), which Rachmaninoff composed in 1896. However, the album begins at the opposite extreme with the third (in D major) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 10 sonatas, which he composed in Vienna in 1798 at a time when his reputation was just beginning to rise.

Taken as a whole, this is an album in which each of the compositions has its own distinctive rhetorical stance. Martinez is clearly comfortable with finding and delivering that stance in each of her interpretations. She has definitely come a long way since my first encounter with her almost a decade ago. I might even acknowledge that the use of the adjective “brilliant” in that advance work is justified. However, given my personal sense of my own aging over these last ten years, I have to wonder how much longer she will be presented as “young!”

Philharmonia Baroque Begins 2016–17 Season with Stunningly Imaginative Beethoven

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Philharmonia Baroque gave the first San Francisco performance in its 2016–17 season. Led by Waverley Fund Music Director Nicholas McGegan, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra opened the season with the one concert devoted to music of the nineteenth century. The title of the program was All Beethoven; and the program consisted solely of one piano concerto, Opus 37 (the third) in C minor, and one symphony, the Opus 68 (“Pastoral”) symphony in F major. The concerto soloist was Robert Levin, playing a fortepiano made by G. Hendrich Guggenberger in Naples some time around 1820. Those wishing to pick historical nits will be quick to point out that Opus 37 was completed in 1802, but that would bypass Ludwig van Beethoven’s dissatisfaction with just about every piano that came his way.

Levin made a few introductory remarks before the concerto performance began. He described Beethoven as a “triple threat,” having by 1802 established his reputation not only as a composer and a pianist but also as an improviser. This observation served to reinforce Levin’s announcement that he would engage spontaneous improvisation of his own at those points in the score when it was appropriate. This promised to be an evening during which the concept of “making music” would involve far more than following the marks on the score pages. However, “appropriate” applied to more than just those points in the score (usually marked by a fermata) in which the performer was required to play a cadenza. Opus 37 has one of Beethoven’s longer concerto introductions; and Levin was already “out of the gate” on the opening beat, interpreting the notated bass line as a continuo for his left hand while improvising upper voices with his right that were consisted with the orchestral writing.

All this endowed the first half of last night’s concert with an electrifying approach to spontaneity in which the practice of making music depended on in-the-moment activities. To be fair, those familiar with the recording that Levin made of this concerto with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique, would have recognized some of the tropes in Levin’s improvisation. Those wishing to accuse Levin of “mere repurposing” need to recall what Brahms said to a critic accusing him of appropriating one of Beethoven’s tropes, “Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel” (every jackass notices that)! Ever since the Homeric bards, tropes have been vital to improvisation; and even the wildest bebop improvisers all had personalized toolkits of tropes.

What matters is how those tropes are engaged, and Levin drew upon his own toolkit with vigorous enthusiasm. If he was channeling Beethoven, he was channelling the full breadth of that “triple threat,” exploring the rhetorical nooks and crannies of what had been committed to notation while bringing expressive shape to each notated phrase. However, the clarity with which this foundation was established then provided the platform for the spontaneity of improvisation, and there was no shortage of sparks flying from Levin’s spontaneity. At the same time, his chemistry with McGegan was impeccable, which mean that he did not have to resort to the usual “trill cues” to signal when he was ready to go back to the notation. (There was, however, one moment when Levin used his left hand to cue the orchestra.) The result was a thoroughly engaging account of a concerto that is all too often dismissed as too heavy-handed when played with more contemporary resources.

In that context one could also appreciate an element of spontaneity that McGegan brought to his account of the Opus 68 symphony. This was not so much a matter of inventive improvisation as it was one of exploiting the transparency that arises when every instrument has its own distinctive sonorities and the overall sound is less of a richly lush texture and more an intimate discussion among a relatively large number of voices. As one might guess, those somewhat alien sounds do much to heighten the drama of the fourth-movement depiction of a thunderstorm. However, more important is that much of the symphony involves give-and-take gestures of motifs that practically bounce across different loci in the layout of the ensemble; and those gestures are far clearly when they involve shifts in sonority.

Fortunately, McGegan chose the layout in which first and second violins face each other for both selections on the program. This facilitates the give-and-take gestures within the string section. However, the technique is far more extensive; and, thanks to McGegan’s approach to layout, it did not take long for the attentive listener to relish just how spatial an account of this symphony could be. Opus 68 is a selection that tends to be far more familiar to concert-goers that Opus 37, due in no small part to its programmatic structure. Nevertheless, there is far more to the music than the program; and McGegan could not have been more skilled at bringing out the musical qualities without overlooking the programmatic ones. Thus, Opus 68 emerged with its own brand of spontaneity, making a perfect complement to the spontaneity of the Opus 37 concerto.

Finally, Levin followed his concerto performance with a brief encore. He played the last (seventh) of the Opus 33 set of bagatelles. I overheard someone in the audience invoking the named “Waldstein” in describing it. The bagatelle has an emphasis on repetition (definitely pushed to almost comical absurdity) that one finds in the opening of the Opus 53 sonata in C major that bears the Waldstein name. However, Opus 33 was composed in 1802, not long after the Opus 37 concerto; and the Opus 53 sonata was composed in 1803. It was as if Beethoven first had a frolic with almost excessive repetition and then refashioned it with a more serious rhetorical stance. In bagatelle form the music was all unfettered wit, and Levin’s knack for spontaneity served his account of that wit splendidly.

Thalea String Quartet Presents a Fascinating Journey from Light into Darkness

Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the first SFCM quartet-in-residence, the Thalea String Quartet, gave a full recital. The members of this ensemble are violinists Christopher Whitley and Kumiko Sakamoto, violist Luis Bellorin, and cellist Bridget Pasker; and those who attended the debut of Eric Dudley conducting the Conservatory Orchestra during Kick-Off Weekend already at a foretaste of the scope of their talents. That evening these four musicians were leaders of the four string sections, and Dudley provided them with the opportunity to play as a string quartet during the second variation in the final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. Bellorin introduced last night’s program by suggesting that they had chosen compositions that featured interactions among the four players; but their capacity for interaction during the Beethoven symphony was sufficiently compelling that Dudley could set down his baton.

However, in addition to providing further opportunities to appreciate and enjoy such interaction at its finest, the program prepared for last night also had at least the suggestion of a narrative element. The beginning selection was Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/75 quartet in G major, the first of the Opus 76 quartets that he dedicated to József Erdődy, one of the Hungarian nobles close to Haydn’s patron Nikolaus Esterházy. This was followed by Anton Webern’s “Langsamer Satz,” one of the first works composed (in 1905) under Arnold Schoenberg’s supervision as a teacher. The program then concluded with Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 80 quartet in F minor, his intense reflection on the death of his sister Fanny. This amounted to a journey from Haydn’s playfulness through Webern’s deeper passions (the music was supposedly inspired by a long walk he took with the woman he would later marry) and culminating in tragic loss. This may not have led to high spirits at the end of the evening, but the journey was definitely a compelling one.

Thalea was clearly right at home with both the high spirits and the intimacy of Haydn’s quartet. By the time Haydn wrote his quartets for Erdődy, those close to the Esterházy court were well aware of the composer’s imaginative capacity for wit. They probably all smiled knowingly at the Menuetto movement, knowing full well that Haydn was thinking “I defy you to dance to this!” Regardless of the label Haydn assigned, this was a clear sign of the scherzo moving in to displace the minuet. On a broader scale that matters more is that each movement takes its own unique rhetorical stance, almost suggesting that this one quartet is a narrative unto itself. Thalea was as sensitive to those shifts in rhetoric as one could wish from a performance of this piece; and it definitely served them well as an attention-grabbing opening selection.

From that introduction the audience could be led into the more intense expressiveness of rhetoric during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. “Langsamer Satz” suggests that Webern was aware of the path that Schoenberg had traversed in his earlier work. Perhaps he had chosen to approach Schoenberg as a teacher because he saw him as a kindred spirit. Thus, without demeaning what Webern had submitted to his teacher, it is easy to imagine that it was written by a young man who had been very deeply impressed by his teacher’s Opus 4 string sextet, which he had entitled “Verklärte Nacht,” named after an intense poem by Richard Dehmel. One gets the impression that Webern understood how Schoenberg had deployed and resolved the ambiguities of dissonance in that piece of chamber music, and he was ready to present his master with some strategies of his own. However, as impressive as all of that underlying logic may be, Thalea’s performance internalized their grasp of it, focusing, instead, on presenting the audience listeners with the breadth of rhetorical stances that his relatively short piece assumes. The contrast with Haydn was unmistakeable, but so also was the more intimate sense of personality behind one of Webern’s earliest serious efforts.

However, that intimacy turned much darker during the second half of the program. The Opus 80 quartet was composed about four months after Fanny’s death on May 17, 1847. Mendelssohn gave it the title “Requiem for Fanny;” and it would be the last major piece that he composed. Less than two months later, he, too, would die.

From the listener’s point of view, this is music with an almost desperate sense of urgency that distinguishes it from Mendelssohn’s other minor-key compositions. Those who are not locked entirely in the classical repertoire and are willing to allow “enlightenment through anachronism” might even wish to associate this music with one of the recordings of Robert Johnson (the notorious bluesman who is said to have made a pact with the Devil). Johnson’s “Hellhound On My Trail” could not better describe the mood that pervades Mendelssohn’s Opus 80 quartet.

Thalea had no trouble unleashing the hellhounds in their approach to this quartet. If Haydn had composed a Menuetto that was not a minuet, Opus 80 has an Allegro assai that is a scherzo only in its ternary structure. Indeed, the syncopations of this movement are so disruptive that it took Thalea a bit of time to adapt the listener to what was transpiring:

from IMSLP (public domain)

What emerged was a ternary-form movement in which things only began to become clear with the final repetitions. By the time the entire quartet had run its course, it would not have been surprising to learn that many in the audience were as exhausted as the players. This was music of desperation, and Thalea should be recognized for not shying away from the raw qualities of its rhetorical stances.

Umberto Giordano’s Music of Irony

It is difficult to imagine any narrative of the French Revolution that would be void of irony. Indeed, I have to admire Simon Schama’s restraint. In his 900-page Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, he seems to have resisted the urge to paraphrase Winston Churchill and declare that the whole story of the French Revolution comes down to one damned irony after another. It is therefore no surprise that irony is rife throughout the libretto that Luigi Illica prepared for Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier. Watching the San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of this opera for the second time this afternoon, I could not help but marvel at the barrage of ironies that unfold over the course of the opera’s four acts. Indeed, Illica even went so far as to have Carlo Gérard (the servant who rises to political power after the Revolution) quote the journalist (and Royalist sympathizer) Jacques Mallet du Pan with the phrase that, in the spirit of Saturn, “the Revolution devours its children.”

This afternoon, however, I had the advantage of a seat that afforded an excellent view of both the SFO Orchestra and its conductor, Music Director Nicola Luisotti. I tend to be consistently impressed with the effectiveness of the chemistry that Luisotti establishes with the vocalists up on the stage. It is one thing to make sure that the musicians capture all of the rhetorical turns that support the narrative, even when the narrative is at its most preposterous (which it is not in this particular opera). Aligning the expressiveness of the musicians with that of the vocalists is quite another matter, particular when those vocalists also have to be taking marching orders from the stage director.

However, in this particular opera, one would be justified in asking whether or not Giordano appreciated just how much irony was in Illica’s text; and, if he did, what did he do about it? After this afternoon’s performance, I concluded that, for the most part, Giordano was busy frying other fish, meaning that he was willing to cede almost all conveyance of irony solely to the words. Nevertheless, there is at least one moment in which Giordano seems to have reinforced the irony established by the text. It concerns the spy known only as “The Incredible,” the sort of character that would provide the perfect model for a librettist committed to working on an opera about Joseph Stalin in which Lavrentiy Beria (Chief of the NKVD) would be one of the characters. There is an episode in which The Incredible (sung by tenor Joel Sorensen) explains to Gérard (baritone George Gagnidze) that Chénier (tenor Yonghoon Lee) can be used as “bait” to attract Maddalena di Coigny (soprano Anna Pirozzi), whom Gérard has loved since he was a servant in her mother’s château. This is the closest The Incredible comes to an extended aria; and it is a delicate little ditty (absent of all sinister intent) that bears a “family resemblance” to the gavotte danced at that château during the first act (which is interrupted by a chorus of starving peasants). In other words The Incredible’s aria has strong connotations of what-goes-around-comes-around; and capturing those connotations is music suggests that Giordano’s one attempt at irony succeeded admirably. Sadly, Stage Director David McVicar decided that the memory of the gavotte needed to be reinforced by having The Incredible prance around while singing. Fortunately, the music retained its sense of irony in spite of any visual interference!

Trump's Damage has Already been Done

It would appear that, regardless of whether Donald Trump becomes the Republican candidate for President next year, his divisive rhetoric has taken hold of the general population of the United States in more ways than we might imagine. His latest victim is Riverheads High School in Augusta County in the state of Virgina, a state that tends to be sympathetic to Republicans and seems to translating that sympathy into enthusiasm for Trump. Riverheads' mistake was to encourage an appreciation of cultural differences by exploring the role of calligraphy in sacred Islamic texts. This included an assignment to reproduce the calligraphy of the Islamic declaration of faith, known as the Shahada.

Copying is often a valuable pedagogical tool. An excellent example can be found in Bernard Greenhouse's description of his cello lessons with Pablo Casals, which began with a prolonged exercise during which Casals instructed Greenhouse to produce "an absolute copy" of his way of performing Johann Sebastian Bach's BWV 1008 solo cello suite in D minor. Similarly, there used to be a counterpoint teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music whose only student assignments involved copying out the music of Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina.

However, as far as the good citizens of Augusta County are concerned (perhaps only the Republicans among them) there is a big difference between reproducing music, written or heard, a reproducing an Islamic declaration of faith. As a result of the hysteria stirred up by Trump, one by think that citizens were afraid that mere exposure to a significant element of that faith (one might compare it to the representation of the cross in Christianity) might turn their children into terrorists. Sober-minded students of the life and practices of Adolf Hitler know that creating a mass feeling of fear is often the key to winning popular support; and Augusta County seems to provided a powerful data point in support of this proposition. Indeed, according to the report on the Al Jazeera Web site, the school decided to close early for the Christmas break after receiving threats of violence.

Perhaps we should credit Trump for knowing more about Islamic terrorist strategies than we might have guessed, since there seems to be a clear parallel in his strategy for winning the American public to his cause.

Advances [sic] in Communication

According to Professor Vyv Evans at Bangor University, the development of emoji as a language has now surpassed the past rate of Egyptian hieroglyphics, making it the "fastest growing language," at least in the United Kingdom. This preference for iconic abbreviations may actually be a logical advance over strings of letters (WTF), which tend to be necessary in order to work within the limits of Twitter messaging. Still today's BBC newsbeat report that an "I feel sick" icon is being developed in which the core smiley face may now be not only sad but also spewing green vomit should give us all pause. Could it be that our fixation over efficiency has now advanced to such a state that efficiency is necessary even in the communication of snark? Have we really lost the ability of language to be so colorful as to be interesting while insulting at the same time?

Overselling the Bach Solo Cello Suites

This morning I found myself returning the the DVD portion in the box The Complete EMI Recordings of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. This is the video version of the recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's six solo cello suites in the Abbey of la Madaleine in the town of Vézelay in the Burgundy region of France. These are definitely informative performances; and the opportunity to watch Rostropovich at work, rather than just listen to him, makes them all the more informative. Unfortunately, each suite is preceded by introductory commentary, which begins by assigning a title as follows:

1. BWV 1007 in G major: Lightness
2. BWV 1008 in D minor: Sorrow and Intensity
3. BWV 1009 in C major: Brilliance
4. BWV 1010 in E-flat major: Majesty and Opacity
5. BWV 1011 in C minor: Darkness
6. BWV 1012 in D major: Sunlight

I have no idea whether or not Rostropovich had any say in assigning these titles; and, if he did have a say, I have to wonder whether or not he took them seriously.

As I have written frequently on my Examiner.com site, I feel that the best way to approach any of Bach's solo instrumental compositions is to assume that he wrote them for pedagogical purposes. After all, between his children and his royal patrons (not to mention all those students in Leipzig), he probably had a lot of instructional duties on his plate; and, even when a particular piece may not originally have been intended for instruction, may have have subsequently used it that way (just as any number of teachers have done so since). In addition, when it comes to hypothesizing how Bach went about teaching, I tend to use the title page he provided for the two-part and three-part inventions, which were originally written into the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. In that text Bach made it clear that the inventions were intended not only to cultivate clarity of execution but also the imagination behind the "inventiones" (ideas) that would provide Bach's son (Friedemann) with "a strong foretaste of composition."

While we tend to think of such "inventiones" in terms of the creation and elaboration of thematic material, there is also a rhetorical element that escalates such themes from the abstract to the concrete. In Bach's sacred music we appreciate the role of rhetoric in terms of how the music is associated with sacred texts. Even an instrumental chorale prelude takes the text of the hymn providing the theme as a point of departure. However, for suites and partitas, the only point of reference comes from those movements named for dance forms; and it is unclear whether or not specific dances were intended to be associated with different moods. (Just because a sarabande is slow does not mean it needs to be solemn, any more than we should assume that a gigue is energetically cheerful. Think of how a trio or a double for one of those dances introduces a contrasting state of mind.)

My point is that Bach probably would not have approved of a priori assignments of nouns and/or adjectives to these movements. It would be up to the imagination of the performer to decided how such movements could be "described" and then conveyed to the listener. This may be appreciated when we compare the Rostropovich recordings with those made by Pablo Casals (also for EMI). Furthermore, for those who heard either (or both) of these musicians in performance, there is a good chance that the interpretations of those performances different from those on the recordings. Indeed, Casals even went as far as to tell at least one of his pupils (Bernard Greenhouse) that the study of Bach had to include the exploration of new ways of performing the music one had already learned.

We're Totally Fed up (and what that connotes)

The latest article on Al Jazeera English about the current stagnation of our government has a really great photograph from Reuters that should not be missed. It shows people protesting the stalemate; and, like all good protesters, these happen to be making their points with placards. One of those placards has the text "We're Totally Fed up," distributed across three lines beginning, respectively with the capital letters W, T, and F. What makes this particularly amusing is that the photograph was taken from an angle that obscures the F, suggesting that the Reuters photographer knew full well the generally accepted meaning of WTF. I am not sure why Reuters chose to be discrete about this, particularly since, back in 2010, to my great delight, I reported that "WTF" had been granted a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps Al Jazeera English is more sensitive about these matters than the OED is, and what appeared on the Web page had to do with their own selection, rather than the photographer's.

Becoming Aware of Other Voices

Last week saw the launch of Al Jazeera America. To my surprise (and delight), Comcast assigned it the channel slot previously held by Current TV (which had been bought out by Al Jazeera). As a result, after several "dry" decades, I actually had the ability to choose between two channels, both of which showed the same attentive respect to the coverage of hard news that had once been the agenda of CNN.

The launch has had major impact on our home viewing habits. When everyone was covering the Senate Committee hearing on taking action against Syria, my wife and I chose Al Jazeera America. We felt that it would be the most likely source of both sides of opinions, and we were not disappointed. The same could be said of the discussion prior to Barack Obama's address on Tuesday evening.

Once again, American television viewers are getting the opportunity to listen to points of view other than those that the rich and mighty want us to hear. One result seems to be a renewal of reluctance to engage in another military exploit being given a more "legitimate" voice than it had received in the wake of 9/11 hysteria. Perhaps that is why Vladimir Putin chose to make his case directly to the American public through an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Regardless of how many people will actually read the piece (which was written with a well-honed sense of convincing rhetoric), the word is sure to circulate heavily that the Times took the trouble to run it today.

Whether this will make a change in what seem to be our culturally-embedded trigger-happy inclinations, it is a sign that at least a few media outlets are beginning to honor the fact that ours is not the only voice in any conversation with global repercussions.

As might be guessed, there seems to have been a general attack on Putin's article coming from a variety of different "establishment" representatives. I was most trouble to read, in a report on the BBC News Web site, that Leon Panetta went "on the record" by declaring that Putin was not in a position to lecture the American people about human rights. On the basis of this country's track record since we first ventured into Afghanistan, does Panetta really believe that Putin is any less qualified than any representative of our own government to take strong positions of human rights?

The Spirit that was Lost in the Ceremony

There was an abundance of impressive oratory at yesterday's ceremony to honor the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. As is often the case with oratory, much of it could not be easily accepted as sincere. I thus have to, once again, acknowledge the better judgment of BBC News in inviting Tavis Smiley to offer his impressions of the event. Smiley was interviewed by Katty Kay, who deserves considerable credity for letting him speak his piece with neither interruption nor effort to warp what he was saying.

The bottom line is that Smiley felt it was more important to address the principles that had guided the life of Martin Luther King, rather than to try to abstract everything down to the moment at which he delivered his "I have a dream" speech. Smiley asserted that those principles could be expressed in terms of three evils that needed to be overcome: racism, poverty, and militarism. In this respect it was important to consider how many of the speakers could both acknowledge how much progress had been made in getting beyond those evils of racism that dominated much of the United States in 1963 and recognize many of the ways in which racist attitudes were still a factor, particularly when it came to the practice of politics. To his credit, President Barack Obama was one of the speakers to take this realistic point of view.

However, that may be about the only credit he deserves for a lecture that took more time and had less to say than any of the speechifying that had preceded him. The question of poverty was, for all intents and purposes, ignored. Not to ignore it would have required recognizing that the overall economic divide was far wider now than it had been in 1963 and that the extent of poverty may be more devastating than it has ever been in the history of the United States.

The real dead moose on the table, however, was King's opposition to militarism. This got him into a lot of trouble with the United States government during his lifetime, because it meat that he was speaking out against the Vietnam War with the same eloquence that he was speaking out against racism. In this case, however, anyone who has been following the news with even half a mind knew full well why Obama would not touch this aspect of King's beliefs with a ten-foot pole. We all knew that, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he would be whisked back to the White House to resume deliberations on what actions the United States would take against Syria, with or without debating the matter before the United Nations.

Of all those who provided the first round of reactions to Obama's speech, Smiley was the first to talk about that dead moose; and those of us who continue to try to honor King's principles owe a great debt of gratitude to Kay and her production team for allowing Smiley to express his perspective with such convincing clarity and passion.

Extremism and Insurgency at the Opera

Was I the only one viewing The Gospel of Mary Magdalene yesterday afternoon at the San Francisco Opera who felt that the language used by the Romans to describe the followers of Yeshua (Jesus) sounded very much like the language our government has used to describe al-Qaeda?

Will Pope Francis' Call for Fiscal Reform Begin at Home?

Pope Francis has made a bold move in calling for reform of the global financial system. Words like "Money has to serve, not to rule" make for powerful rhetoric; but it is hard to believe that this rhetoric will convince in our secular age. More interesting, however, is that the Institute for Works of Religion, which manages the Vatican's bank, will be releasing its annual report for review by the general public. According to today's BBC News report, this is the first time the Vatican has opened its books for public examination. This will allow for public debate over just how much Vatican wealth can realistically be divested in the service of one of the Pope's first public assertions:

I would like a Church that is poor and is for the poor.

You Can't Keep a Good Businessman Down (or a bad one)

Yesterday, I tried to suggest, as tactfully as possible, that the attack at the finish line of the Boston Marathon was an act of terrorism (domestic or international) in reaction to the unfeeling oppression of homo economicus. I knew that homo economicus would not get the message. What I did not realize was the degree of tunnel vision induced by regarding "selling it" as the only legitimate focal point. Thus, like many, I was shocked to discover that a company called Epicurious used Twitter to try to convert grief over the loss and injury of human life into an opportunity to sell whole-grain cranberry scones. I used to think that the claim that market-based globalization had created a culture without a soul was simply rhetorical hyperbole. Apparently, it is closer to reality than I had feared.