The Literal and the Figurative

Thanks to my Vienna feed reader, I just encountered an Al Jazeera article that could not have been better timed after the latest Saturday Night Live. Elon Musk used his opening monologue to talk about his use of Twitter. He admitted that he tended to write a mixture of powerful insights with utter balderdash, leaving it up to viewers to decided whether he knew which was which. That seems the best context for the following sentence I just read from Al Jazeera:

Musk said on Twitter in April that SpaceX was going to put a “literal Dogecoin on the literal moon”.

This was his way of saying that Dogecoin would pay for a SpaceX moon shot scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

Needless to say, there is nothing “literal” about any cryptocurrency. It is just another artifact whose value is determined strictly by trading practices. (Those practices were exercised in “real time” during that Saturday Night Live broadcast, when the trading value of Dogecoin took a serious drop after one of Musk’s throw-away jokes.) Mind you, whatever efforts there may be to impose standards, the value of anything traded is inevitably figurative, which is why retirement plans tend to go for conservative investment strategies. Nevertheless, even the most cautious investors cannot be fully protected against the bad judgement of other investors!

Storyville Panders to the Audiophiles

The Storyville album of the Teddy Wilson Trio entitled Revisits the Goodman Years has been available on compact disc for almost a decade. Nevertheless, the Copenhagen-based label decided, about a month ago, to revive the album with a vinyl release. As far as I can tell, most of the information that appeals to serious jazz listeners has been omitted from the product. Furthermore, because of the limits of vinyl, six of the tracks that concluded the CD release are not available on the vinyl version.

The most important elision is the membership of the trio. Over the course of his career as a jazz pianist, Wilson had a wide number of trio partners, resulting in any number of different approaches to interplay. Revisits the Goodman Years was recorded at a studio in Copenhagen in 1980. Wilson was joined by drummer Ed Thigpen, who had made Denmark his home. The bass player was Jesper Lundgaard, better known in Europe than on this side of the pond; but definitely a talent not to be ignored.

This makes for a stimulating account of tunes that were popular in the thirties. However, the stimulation comes from the polished technique and inventiveness of all three of the players. All that really matters is a basic sense of what the instrumentalists are doing and whether the piano was satisfactorily tuned for the occasion. More accurately, the substance of listening has more to do with what the mind does with the auditory stimuli than how well those stimuli compare against the ones that first went into the recording microphones.

In that context I have little sympathy for Storyville deciding to “go vinyl.” While most of us around the world continue to shelter-in-place, all that matters is that the loudspeakers, headphones, or earbuds give sufficient account of what the performers are trying to do. That is all anyone needs for serious music appreciation, and I shall leave audiophilia for those too shallow to think of better things to do with their money!

Uninformed Thoughts about the Nasdaq Index

I have gotten into the habit of using the Apple Stocks app to track significant indices in the United States, Europe, and Asia on a daily basis. (I review my own portfolios on a monthly basis based on statements provided by my broker.) As I write this, the Nasdaq index is at 117.33. This is the highest it has been since the index peaked at 118.67 on February 4!

Let's not kid ourselves. No stock index is a measure of "value." At best the level of an index can be taken as a level of confidence or, perhaps more specifically, willingness to trade. Why should that willingness be higher for the Nasdaq portfolio than it is for the S&P 500? Since I am not in any way an expert on these matter, my best conjecture is that Nasdaq holdings represent businesses that can function with much, if not all, of the employees working from home. Nasdaq reflects companies that "push bits," one way or another, rather than build houses or manage grocery stores.

In other words, while it might be easy to promote Nasdaq as a sign of recovery, the basis for computing the index value may not be a statistically significant indicator of the health of the overall economy.

Is Failed Crisis Management Evil?

Once again I feel a need to comment on an article that just appeared on the Al Jazeera English Web site:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-banality-evil-200505075710643.html

This article draws upon the concept of the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by Hanna Arendt in her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. The authors of the article, Catherine Rottenberg and Nira Yuval Davis, explain Arendt’s terminology as follows:

She invoked the term to describe how Eichmann, a key bureaucratic functionary of the Nazi party, carried out his technocratic duties without questioning their purpose.

I find it somewhat ironic that this perspective can be traced as least as far back as the Crucifixion, at which one of the last “words” of Jesus was “they know not what they do,” suggesting that those killing him could still deserve forgiveness.

Rottenberg and Davis then try to make the case that the banality of evil can also take place “through the carrying out of bureaucratic tasks in an incompetent and negligent way.” For me this recalled the old joke that, if stupidity were a crime, it would be impossible to build enough prisons for the criminals. Even so, I think that Jesus was a bit too forgiving of those that “know not what they do,” particularly when they have embraced ignorance as a matter of conscious choice. In this case the conscious choice is one of viewing market value as the only relevant social value, relying only on the numerical calculations that determined market value without allowing for any other factors, many (most?) of which are not quantitative, to enter the calculus.

Max Weber saw the problem with such prioritizing. He argued that it would bring about two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom. The first of these should be clear enough: The very meaning of “value” as been so distorted that we have become a world population for which no other value is realistically conceivable. One may then recognize loss of freedom at least at the level of no longer having the freedom to think for ourselves about what we value. Even deeper is the issue that only those that command significant financial resources are free to make choices about what factors impact the world in which we live, whether that world is suffering a plague or just losing its icecaps.

I prefer not to pass judgment on whether those that have brought about loss of meaning and loss of value are evil. In this sort of a mess, nothing will be gained from finger-pointing. On the other hand, we might do well to recall what was written in our Declaration of Independence after the one sentence that so many of us know by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It that context, perhaps we should view to prioritization of financial resources as an act of usurpation against those self-evident truths. By all rights, such Government could be overthrown by the electoral processes already in place; but, as we have seen over the last decade, the “meaning” of those processes is yet another manifestation of Weber’s loss-of-meaning syndrome.

That particular loss may well lie at the heart the mess in which we are stuck, and it remains to be seem if there are enough people that still respect valid meaning with the power to get the population as a whole out of that mess.

A Necessary Departure from the Usual

When this site was first created, it involved examination of many issues other than those involving the performance of music. Over the last few years I have narrowed my focus, simply to keep my plate from getting too full. Nevertheless, I feel that the following opinion piece is one that deserves all the circulation it can get:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/free-market-deepen-coronavirus-crisis-200408122743522.html

Mind you, there is probably nothing in this article that cannot be found in the writings of Max Weber; but this particularly piece has the advantage of being less opaque!

Calling Out the Real Humbug of the Season

Whatever Charles Dickens may have written about the matter, December is definitely the month of the humbug. Sadly, in writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens may have unknowingly contributed to the proliferation of that humbug. Thus, while the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge may have made for a comforting moral tale, in the context of a society in which the value of currency was rising above the less monetary “social” values (such as peace on earth and good will towards men), the tale itself was, itself, a humbug that never really confronted the social priorities beginning to prevail during the middle of the nineteenth century. One wonders what Dickens would have felt had he been around to see that, by the time of the middle of the twentieth century, A Christmas Carol had become a “media cash cow,” providing no end of ways in which different commercial interests were able to cash in on not only the narrative itself but the characters at play in that narrative. Indeed, the commercialization of Christmas was such a successful enterprise that it had little trouble spinning off into other faiths, not only in the United States but also in any number of other countries around the world.

Over half a century ago, Stan Freberg used his radio broadcasts to call out commercialization at its most venal in “Green Chri$tma$,” a sketch in which Scrooge was reborn as the head of an advertising agency. The sketch included parodies including “Deck the Halls with Advertising,” and, my personal preference, “We wish you a Merry Christmas/and please buy our beer!” Freberg died on April 7, 2015; and, for my money, his message is as relevant as ever. Indeed, the devaluation of anything other than currency just keeps getting worse.

Indeed, every year at this time, marketing bombards as many people as it can to promote the proposition that the “holiday spirit” is about spending money and little else. Naturally, the music business plays a major role in milking this cash cow, resulting in an annual flood of “holiday spirit” music. These are products that are less interested in listening and more interesting in promoting the spirit of spending; and no end of seriously talented musicians find themselves recruited in the manufacture of those products.

This raises the question of whether or not the Libera choral group should be examined as a product of exploitation. The ensemble consists of children from South London between the ages of 7 and 16, and they have already become a significant presence in the recording industry. Indeed, by my count, the recently released Christmas Carols with Libera is the group’s third Christmas album; so, as they say in marketing, we are dealing with “serious product.”

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording begin discussed

To be clear, the members of Libera are more than competent in their musical practices; and I certainly do not want to be called out for suggesting that making music at a young age is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I am sure that every member of Libera will come away with an impressive skill set for choral singing if not for vocal solos as well. Nevertheless, it is hard to find anything nice to say about Christmas Carols with Libera because the chorus itself is reduced to a “sideshow” in what might be called a Carnival of Commercialization. My guess is that the guiding forces behind this album (including the design for the front cover shown above) are more interested in how many buttons can be pushed by feel-good arrangements, whose only message is, “How much money are you spending on loved ones this month?” In other words, what is merely drivel when albums like these are released during the other eleven months becomes positively venal during the month of December.

It would be nice to mount a just-say-no-campaign that simply switches off media offerings that have nothing other than marketing in mind. However, I am afraid that a recording like Christmas Carols with Libera would have to be included in that mass rejection, not for the selections of the music but for the disturbingly manipulative techniques behind the presentation of that music. These practices probably do not descend to anything as serious as abuse; but it would be naive to deny that some level of exploitation, however mild, lies behind the production of this album.

Max Weber in Bedford Falls

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House to take in the second of the two Thanksgiving weekend performances of Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life presented by the San Francisco Opera. This time I could enjoy my subscription vantage point, which allows me to divide my time between the activity on stage and the activity in the orchestra pit. Nevertheless, this turned out to be an occasion when the narrative held the focus of my attention, whether it was being reinforced by Leonard Foglia’s staging or by Heggie’s setting of Gene Scheer’s libretto.

That focus was directed primarily on how the narrative served a socioeconomic precept I had cited at the end of my previous account of the opening-night performance. I considered the possibility that the narrative may be viewed almost like a “lesson play” (in the spirit of Bertolt Brecht) on the opposing views of the banker Mr. Potter (sung by baritone Rod Gilfry) and the protagonist George Bailey (sung by tenor William Burden). As I put it, the lesson goes back to “Max Weber’s contention that any society in which the only value is monetary value is a seriously flawed social institution.” Over the course of his writing, Weber took this principle in two directions, one involved with loss of freedom and the other with loss of meaning. (Jürgen Habermas would subsequently explore these two losses at greater length in his Theory of Communicative Action.)

As the narrative of It’s a Wonderful Life unfolds, there are any number of indicators of how freedom may be in jeopardy. Potter is revealed to be not only a banker but also a slumlord. The Bailey Building and Loan, founded by George’s father and then taken over by George after his father’s death, becomes a symbol of freedom those those less well-off. It manages as an organization in which the community provides money to help the community, using the underlying capital to build affordable houses. When “Angel Second Class” Clara (soprano Golda Schultz) gives George a vision of a world in which he had not yet been born, freedom has fallen victim to that jeopardy. Potter not only owns the town but also its citizens, whom he holds in a “virtual slavery.”

Loss of meaning, on the other hand, has less to do with the narrative itself and how different generations end up reading it. My own thoughts were triggered this morning when I saw a sign in my condominium complex that referred to “our neighbors.” It triggered a sinking feeling that the very meaning of the noun “neighbor” no longer had much currency when confronted with a mentality that is cripplingly limited to Facebook friends.

Those thoughts then turned to the two critical plot-turns in the opera narrative. The first takes place during the crash of 1929, when Bailey and his new wife Mary (soprano Andriana Chuchman) take the money intended for their honeymoon and distribute it among the depositors of the Building and Loan. That act is then reflected with those same townspeople give their money to Bailey upon learning that the Building and Loan had suffered an unexplained loss of $8000.

The Bailey family, Mary (Andriana Chuchman), George (William Burden), and Uncle Billy (Keith Jameson) with the money given my the neighbors to make up for the lost $8000 (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

This triggered reflection on those currently prevailing mentalities. I realized that there was now a generation that would react to these episodes by asking “Why didn’t they just set up a GoFundMe page?” That struck me as the essence of a mentality of individuals whose focus on Facebook friends had essentially sapped the meaning out of the noun “neighbor.” In our present day loss of meaning is no longer a threat considered by Weber and Habermas; it is a stark reality.

Heggie’s opera, of course, is not a lecture in socioeconomic theory. It is not even a PBS “Socioeconomics for Dummies” television series! Nevertheless, it is a source of reflection on who we are and what we have become; and, through the imaginative uses of abstraction in Foglia’s staging, it is probably an even greater source of reflection than Frank Capra’s film of the same name had been. Sadly, while those of my generation still seem to appreciate and value such opportunities for reflection, there is a younger brave new world out there for which the concept of “reflection” has joined that of “neighbor” in having lost the essence of its meaning.

Opera cannot change the world, but my second viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life left me wishing that it could.

From Feel-Good Movie to Feel-Good Opera

“Second class” Clara (Golda Schultz) surrounded by “first class” angels (Sarah Cambidge, Amitai Pati, Ashley Dixon and Christian Pursell) (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera presented the first performance of the final opera of its Fall season, Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life. The production was the product of a three-way partnership shared with the Houston Grand Opera (which premiered the opera on December 2, 2016) and the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (which presented the opera in November of 2017). As might be guessed, the opera is based on Frank Capra’s film of the same name, which shows up consistently on those greatest-films-ever-made lists, and the short story on which the film was based, “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern.

In many ways this is a production that has Hollywood written all over it. Furthermore, it is not ashamed to say so, since the opening orchestral prelude is played against a projection that looks as if the opening credits of a film are about to roll. Nevertheless, once that screen is raised, we are definitely in the richly three-dimensional world of opera, rather than that of a flat projection. The set design by Robert Brill for Leonard Foglia’s staging is consistently imaginative, complete with four “first class” angels flying (with only a bit of suspension of disbelief) around “second class” Clara, whose aspiration for promotion gives the narrative its backbone. Down on earth Brill worked with a minimum of objects transformed primarily through projection. One might say that he established illusion in three dimensions as Hollywood production teams did in support of two-dimensional moving images.

While the result did not involve the proverbial Hollywood “cast of thousands,” the number of character names in the program book was much larger than most encountered in the opera world, running to 30 entries, not counting the chorus of townspeople. Indeed, the only thing that seemed to be missing was a basic synopsis of the plot that usually appears in the program book opposite the cast listing. For this opera that text was reduced to a single paragraph that basically sets up the reader for the action that is about to unfold on stage. Presumably, it was assumed that everyone knew the plot from Capra’s movie; and, for those who are not familiar with the film, the plot summary provided on its Wikipedia page is followed by Gene Sheer’s libretto for the opera surprisingly consistently.

I say “surprisingly” because much of conventional opera tends to involve a rather skeletal plot line which serves as a prop to support a series of offerings (remember, “opera” is the plural of “opus”) for virtuoso arias, duets, and ensemble pieces. While Heggie’s score offers a few such moments in which attention turns to the “inner voice” of the singer’s character, rather than the plot, for the most part the music serves the ongoing flow of the narrative, playing (of course) a far more significant role than that of the “background music” that Dimitri Tiomkin composed for Capra’s film. (Yes, the score for the movie was written by the composer who is probably best known for the music he wrote for High Noon.)

A consequence of Heggie’s approach is that, with only a few exceptions, one is less aware of individual vocalists than one is of the pace at which the narrative unfolds. In this respect the score is a bit problematic by virtue of the fact that the entire first act almost amounts to a one-hour prologue that will endow significance to what will unfold in the second act. As a result, those unfamiliar with the film may wonder during the intermission whether or not this whole trip was necessary; but the second act responds to that question with a solid affirmative.

There are, of course, characters that stand out over the course of the narrative, all of whom were well served by the vocalists portraying them. Tenor William Burden clearly knew better than to try to channel Jimmy Stewart in the leading role of George Bailey. Nevertheless, through a delivery that was consistently solid but not sentimental, he knew how to capture the spirit of a “Capra Everyman” and present that spirit in musical terms. Equally down-to-earth was soprano Andriana Chuchman, making her SFO debut in the role of Mary Hatch, who eventually marries George. Indeed, the two of them made a “salt of the earth” couple, as believable on the opera stage as Stewart and Donna Reed had been on the screen.

Clara, on the other hand, was a transformation of the film’s Clarence, given a wistful embodiment through Henry Travers. Heggie decided to capture Clara’s otherworldliness with the most challenging vocal work in the opera, melismatic writing that practically defies close attention while soaring up into the stratosphere. The part was sung consistently adeptly by soprano Golda Schultz during the scenes in Heaven, while, as an “observer” on earth, her contributions to the musical texture were more subdued.

Then, of course, there is then underlying political theme of the scenario. George is the manager of a Building and Loan (an organization that used to be called a Savings Bank or a Savings and Loan Society). The deposits it received from its patrons go into a fund that is used to lend money for those building or buying homes. The interest on those loans is then fed back into the accounts of the depositors. Such institutions were vital to those in the middle class pursuing the “American dream” of having their own homes.

In opposition to the Building and Loan is the traditional “big bank,” more interested in advancing the wealth of its employers and external investors than that of its customers. The force of such a bank is embodied by Mr. Potter (sung convincingly by baritone Rod Gilfry), whose duo scenes with Bailey turn into a lesson supporting Max Weber’s contention that any society in which the only value is monetary value is a seriously flawed social institution. Those scenes are likely to resonate powerfully with many in the audience. As one of my news feeds put it, these are days in which even stories that are not about Donald Trump are about Donald Trump!

Whether or not Director Foglia was thinking about Trump in the course of his work is left as an exercise for the viewer.

Choral Music from Karajan’s Berlin Period

The twelfth of the thirteen box sets that comprise Warner Classics’ Karajan Official Remastered Edition returns to the subject matter of the very first box but has advanced about a quarter century in time. The title of the box is Herbert von Karajan: Choral Music 1972–1976, which distinguishes it from the time span between 1947 and 1958 in the first box. There are only three compositions performed on the five CDs in this box, two of which had also appeared in the first box. In chronological order of composition these are Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 123 Missa Solemnis and Johannes Brahms’ Opus 45, A German Requiem.

Readers may recall that, in the first box, the Brahms selection came from the first public concert that Karajan gave after the ban imposed due to his Nazi membership was lifted. That concert took place on October 28, 1947. The recording in the twelfth box, on the other hand, was the result of a series of recording sessions with the Berlin Philharmonic (rather than the Vienna Philharmonic), which took place in both September and October of 1976. However, on both of these occasions, the choral resources were those of the Wiener Singverein, which is also the choir for Beethoven’s Opus 123.

The only other selection in the twelfth box is Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XXI/3 oratorio, The Seasons. For these recording sessions, made in November of 1972, Karajan drew upon the choral resources of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. While both of these boxes offered up an impressive array of vocal soloists, it is clear that, at both of these periods in his career, Karajan was at the top of his game when working with the resources of a large choir and a large orchestra.

This brings us to the factor that matters the most in the twelfth box and pervades most of the span of Karajan’s Berlin recordings. This is the factor of advances in recording technology, which enabled the capture of a far wider dynamic range than had been available to Karajan during his years with the Philharmonia Orchestra in England. That breadth of dynamic levels is evident particularly in the Beethoven and Brahms selections. One might almost say that it is evident with a vengeance.

The question that I continue to wrestle with, however (and I have been wrestling with it for over half a decade), is whether “higher fidelity” in reproduction makes a significant difference. When we sit in a concert hall, we appreciate a listening experience that takes in both the intensity associated with barely audible sounds and the intimidating fury of full-out fortissimo. However, most of us do not have living rooms that are up to accommodating that wide breadth of dynamic levels; and, for better or worse, too many of us are now listening to music through earbuds, rather than loudspeakers judiciously placed in a suitably-sized room. For that matter the first time I went to a complete performance of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung) in Seattle, I met a woman who had driven up from the Bay Area. Along the way she had been stopped for speeding while listening to the “Ride of the Valkyries” in her car!

The point is, to reword that old joke about bad behavior, what happens in the concert hall/opera house, should stay in the concert hall/opera house. Recordings can prepare us to have fuller experiences in those settings; but, when it comes to experiencing all the virtues of performance itself, no recording will ever cut that proverbial mustard. As a result, what matters most about the recordings in this box is whether they will play a role in our becoming better-informed listeners in any concert hall/opera house. My feeling about Karajan is definitely affirmative when it comes to both the Beethoven and the Brahms selections.

About Haydn, however, I feel less confident. I do not think this should reflect on the fact that the chorus is different. Rather, it involves Karajan’s efforts to endow Haydn with the same “majesty” one encounters in his approaches to both Beethoven and Brahms. After all The Seasons is a secular work, and its texts have more do to with entertaining aspects of life on earth than on any sacred matters. Having heard performances of Haydn in more intimate settings, I have little patience with Karajan’s approach to The Seasons, which tends to put everything Haydn has done under a magnifying glass that is totally unnecessary.

To be fair, however, the idea of a “historically-informed performance” had not really enjoyed extended public favor in 1972. My personal opinion is that the world had to wait for the arrival of CD technology before public opinion could begin to appreciate the virtues of that alternative approach. By the time that technology had become commonplace, Karajan was too set in his ways to worry about changing them.

There is an old joke that still gets repeated from time to time about an encounter between Wanda Landowska and Pablo Casals. Suffice it to say that the two of them had radical disagreement over the value of a historical perspective. It is said that Landowska ended one of their arguments by saying, “Very well, Pablo, you play Bach your way; and I’ll play it his.” Karajan may not be conducting according to “Haydn’s way;” but one should be able to understand “Karajan’s way” well enough to recognize what he felt were its virtues.

The Resurrection of HP Will Not Be Televised

I just finished Stephen Shankland’s CNET report of his interview with Ron Coughlin, who runs the Personal Systems Group at HP, the computer and printer business that split off from Hewlett-Packard in 2015. Coughlin believes that personal computers are still a hot item and that HP is bringing a plethora of innovations to that market. He may be right, but his optimism does not necessarily provide grounds for feeling bullish about HP.

The problem is one of a legacy that goes all the way back to the days when William Redington Hewlett and David Packard were still actively involved in their company’s future. Hewlett-Packard was originally a hardware company. It designed and produced an impressive variety of devices that changed the nature of work in the technology sector. However, these were devices that were designed by engineers for use by other engineers.

As a result, for example, the idea that a digital computer could be “personal” was never part of the HP mindset. The same could be said for the idea that the value in a personal computer had more to do with its software than with its hardware. Thus, in the early days of HP’s venture into digital technology, they may have set a world record for some of the most user-hostile interfaces on the market. Apparently, this legacy does not signify in Coughlin’s mindset. Do a text search on Shankland’s article; and you will discover that the word “interface” never appears.

For those of us for whom computers dominate over the working environment, the future is far from the rosy one that Coughlin anticipates. That is because the software we are using keeps getting progressively worse. This is not just a problem of protection against malware. It is also a matter of basic functionality.

For example, part of my work involves using a Web-based “B2B” (business-to-business) download service. Most downloads are large and are therefore delivered as compressed files that need to be “unzipped” after they have been downloaded. This past summer, many of us using this service discovered that we were getting defective ZIP files that could not be decompressed. Over the course of several months, some of us participated in a variety of test cases, none of which showed signs of much progress. Then, one day, my Inbox had a message that asked if I had tried using Chrome. Sure enough, the Chrome browser downloaded perfectly sound ZIP files while both Firefox and Safari were fumbling the ball!

More recently, I have been making heavier use of audio streaming. For this I need to explain that I use a MacBook Pro, whose lid is kept closed while I work from an HDMI feed to a wide-screen display with “entertainment quality” speakers. Many of my audio resources require Flash, which is software that I try to avoid as much as possible. As a result, I have a setup in which only Safari permits the use of Flash from the sources I need. After the latest Flash “upgrade” (scare quotes intended) I discovered that the audio was no longer coming from my display but, instead, was squeaking out from under the lid of the MacBook! This time I was prepared; and, sure enough, things worked properly once I used Chrome instead of Safari!

I suppose we could turn this into a story about how Google will take over the world. I suspect that Google may have the best talent pool of software engineers in the technology sector, but I do not think that this is necessarily a matter of malicious intent. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that the basic skills behind writing, testing, and releasing software have all been condemned to SNAFU status. Furthermore, we are so dependent on the technology that, as E. M. Forster predicted in “The Machine Stops,” we basically self-adapt to accommodate every degradation of the services we require. This happens not only at our desks but also in the face-to-face purchases we make, whether on a checkout line or at a food truck.

As the title of Forster’s short story suggests, things eventually come to a head with an across-the-board failing of all service technologies. This does not lead to mass chaos, because people have been so numbed by their dependence that they cannot even think about what to do next. In terms of contemporary culture, Forster assumes a mass of aimless zombies, rather than an angry mob with torches and pitchforks! Was he successful in seeing the future, and are we it?

Performances, Recordings, and Karajan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signal and Noise from Music Choice

I used to be a faithful subscriber to Sirius/XM as one of the more reliable sources of music for serious listeners. Unfortunately, the prevailing climate of property development here in San Francisco put an end to that. For about a year (at least), I have had to live with the fact that there is no longer a clear path along which I have been able to receive an effective signal from a Sirius/XM satellite. As a result I discovered the Music Choice service that I can receive as part of my Comcast service.

The good news is that this service provides channels that offer an impressive variety of both classical and jazz recordings, and the classical selections have turned out to offer a fascinating journey of discovery. The bad news is that the listener is not always sure just what it is that his/she is discovering. There is an abbreviated display of composer, title, and performers, which definitely provides more content than my old XM receiver; and, for my money, I prefer those displays to the babble of announcers that do not seem to know that all much about what they are playing.

Unfortunately, many of those displays have serious noise problems. Thus, one will read the name of an orchestra conductor while listening to solo piano music. On the other hand, when the music is orchestral, one may read the name of an ensemble that did not even exist when the conductor was alive!

This system is obviously driven by a data base. The problem is that the data base has been "fed" by a process that has no check for data accuracy. Given the size of the library available to Music Choice, one can appreciate their need for efficiency; but efficiency in the absence of accuracy does not count for very much!

For the most part this is little more than an annoyance; and, like those depicted in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," we live in a world in which we tolerate annoyance, because we no longer have the technical skills to remedy it. Nevertheless, one has to wonder just how many other instances there are as disinformation being presented as legitimate content for no reason other than the premise that fact-checking costs too much and takes too long to do correctly. Meanwhile, my network connectivity is such that it may be worth checking on whether I can receive Sirius channels through an app on my television or Blu-ray player; but can I count on them to provide more reliable content?

Attacca Quartet Explores Music by Michael Ippolito on their New Album

This Friday Azica Records will release its second album of performances by the Attacca Quartet, whose members are violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee. As usual, the album has already been assigned a Web page on Amazon.com, which has been set up to process pre-orders. The title of the album is Songlines; and it consists of four compositions by Michael Ippolito, all of which are less than ten years old.

Azica’s first recording of Attacca came out in March of 2013. Its title (following the case conventions on the cover) was fellow traveler: the complete string quartet works of JOHN ADAMS. While Adams himself has endorsed Attacca’s performance of his music, I must confess to finding it a bit disconcerting to encounter the adjective “complete” applied to a composer who is still alive (particularly when the age of that composer is so close to my own)! Furthermore, if we take “string quartet works” to include music involving string quartet and orchestra, then the album overlooks “Absolute Jest,” which was first performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet performing with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) conducted by SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. (It would have been simpler, and more accurate, to say just “string quartets!”)

Nevertheless, it is worth dwelling on the “fellow traveler” part of the title, since Songlines seems to have been a product of such fellow travelers. Last year Attacca was named Quartet in Residence at Texas State University of Music, where Ippolito is currently Assistant Professor of Composition. So, at the very least, Ippolito and Attacca are “fellow travelers” in academic life. Nevertheless, all of the compositions on this album predate the arrival of Attacca at Texas State in 2016. (The group was formed in 2003 when all four members were students at the Juilliard School.)

This recording was my “first contact” with both the ensemble and the composer. I feel necessary to begin with a sort of disclaimer when it comes to the general topic of new music for string quartet. Those who follow this repertoire probably know that San Francisco is the “home base” of the Kronos Quartet; but it is also a city that enjoys a generous number of more recently-formed quartets that share Kronos’ interest in exploring and presenting new repertoire, often motivated by commission. To highlight two particularly appropriate examples, Friction Quartet celebrated its fifth anniversary this past September; and the Thalea String Quartet, which is currently quartet-in-residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was featured as a “next generation” string quartet during KRONOS FESTIVAL 2017 at the beginning of this month.

This posed a difficulty when it came to listening to Ippolito’s music. The problem was that all five of the selections on this album suggested that the composer had been listening to too many Kronos recordings. This is probably a warped perception. However, it highlights the fact that, while there is, indeed, far more diversity to the string quartet repertoire than Kronos has covered, it was unclear that Ippolito had established a a voice that is distinctively his own in this genre. His biographical statement in the accompanying booklet suggests that he has cultivated a substantial catalog that includes orchestral writing, as well as chamber music; but, even across this single album, there is a sense that he has not explored very far beyond the bounds of a relatively limited comfort zone.

To be fair, this may be an occupational hazard in the world the Internet has made. Results of creativity are often subjected to almost immediate distribution on a global scale, meaning that just about anyone interested in “new music” has opportunities to explore far more than (s)he can handle. The downside to all this is that we run the risk of becoming a society in which the superficiality of “consumption” tends to trump the slower-paced culture of attentive listening. It used to be that universities provided sanctuary from market-based thinking that cares about little more than efficient production to satisfy consumption; but the “inconvenient truth” is that a university run by such market-based thinking often ends up questioning whether or not a music department provides “value for money.” In such desperate times my personal feelings about Ippolito’s work as a composer seem to pale against more serious questions concerned with whether or not our society is willing to view him as productive member.

Zuckerberg Goes Head-to-Head with Aristotle

One of my favorite topics, outside of the domain of music, on this site has been Max Weber’s proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. My own effort to keep loss of meaning at bay has involved a concerted effort to read texts that require sustained cogitation, rather than simple “consumption” based on a “bottom line.” This is the sort of reading that sticks with you long after you put the book or article down; and experience has taught me that it often involves interaction with the physical medium (not only annotation but also leafing back and forth through the pages to recall what one thinks one has previously read). Thus, it is not reading that fares very well on a computer screen, whether we are talking about a monitor or a desk or the surface of a tablet.

Not too long ago I posted a “progress report” on my efforts to work my way through the “Nicomachean Ethics” of Aristotle. I am still at it, but I have just embarked on a domain that has already started my reflecting on the fact that I have begun to spend more time on Facebook since the demise of Examiner.com. It turns out that Aristotle devotes two entire books (the eighth and ninth) of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to friendship; and in the revised Oxford translation edited by Jonathan Barnes and published by Princeton University Press (in the Bollingen Series), this comes to about 27 pages. In other words there is a lot more to friendship than creating a social network by clicking a Friend button!

To some extent I might be accused of trivializing Facebook by writing that last sentence. However, I prefer to look through the other end of the telescope: By its very nature, friendship is a highly complicated dimension of human interaction that, by its very approach to interface, has been trivialized by Facebook to a degree that the noun has been almost entirely stripped of meaning. This may seem like an extreme position to make over a rather innocuous piece of software. However, it is basically yet another instance of a precept expressed by H. L. Mencken that I cannot cite too often:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

It is through clarity and simplicity that Facebook has managed to build up such a large user community, but size signifies only in matters of marketing rather than the complexities of social interaction that occupied so much of Aristotle’s thought. One might almost argue that a Presidential election came down to choosing between a candidate that was not afraid to confront complexity and one that had a clear and simple answer for everything without caring very much whether or not that answer would be effective if put into practice.

Nevertheless the nature of meaning has not yet been entirely lost. The good news is that there is still a body of individuals out there, however small their numbers may be, that are not afraid of big books and complex arguments that do not always result in easy resolutions. We may have to keep a low profile for the next four years; but, as long as we continue to express ourselves through media that exceed the prevailing attention span, we have a fighting chance of keeping at our business. We just have to view that low profile as a safety measure, rather than a sign of weakness.

Why They Still Hate Us

Today's Al Jazeera Web site has a Talk to Al Jazeera article that is positively cringe-inducing, if not worse. It amounts to a transcript of an interview with Secretary of State John Kerrry and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. The ostensible topic concerned current conditions in Syria and the impact of ISIL. However, as the old cliché goes, context is everything. In this case the context was defined by the seventh Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which was recently held in Silicon Valley and included a visit by President Barack Obama almost exactly a week ago.

The interview quickly devolved into a sort of cheer-leading session around the premise that entrepreneurship was the key to solving all of Syria's problems, as well as the threats of expansion by ISIL. Here we had two men with pasts rich in the domain of foreign relations; and the only message that seemed to matter was that what was good for business would naturally be good for Syria and the well-being of the Middle East. Back when posts occurred more regularly on this site, one of those posts included the phrase "innovation propaganda" in its title. Back then Jonestown Kool-Aid was one of my favorite metaphors. I knew that we have yet to get over that poison, but I had not anticipated that anyone with the serious responsibilities of Secretary of State would be drinking the stuff.

Another favorite trope from the past on this site was Max Weber's proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. When our country has lost the capacity to establish a dispassionately clear-eyed view of what is going on in the rest of the world, particularly when it involves violent hostilities and refugees, that should be taken as a sure sign that not only has meaning been lost but it is not even missed. Is it any wonder then that so much of the rest of the world now views us with suspicion, if not fear and loathing?

Will We Survive in a World Without Work?

I see that life is once again trying to imitate art with an international project to alter the trajectory of any asteroid that might crash into our planet. Since anything is possible in a space of infinite possibilities, these researchers have, supposedly, done some mathematics to determine a "mean time to Armageddon" (to cite the title of the movie behind this project). We could then compare that duration with the mean time to the time when life would be unlivable on this planet through either failure to control the dangers of climate change or, worse yet, failure to provide conditions for a life worth living.

Think about that latter option. The idea of gainful employment for all was already being dismantled through the joint efforts of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Long after Regan was out of office, his former economic adviser David Stockman was declaring on National Public Radio the end of salaried employment. Everyone whole be doing piecework. Stockman did not say anything about how living from one job to the next was fraught with insecurity, not to mention the possibility of financial support when health care was involved.

Yet Stockman's prognostication seems to have been an accurate call. Today's generation of youth still believe that they will not be able to compete in the job market without a college education. Yet they cannot reconcile that proposition with the likelihood that such an education will leave them with a debt that, thanks to the changes in the world of work, may not be paid off over the course of a lifetime.

Have we really managed to create a global society in which only the rich are likely to survive? If so, will they continue to survive if their only talent is one of pushing around bits that reinforce fictions of convenience about financial worth? People do not care very much about "asteroid Armageddon," because they do not see it happening during their lifetimes. We used to say the same thing about climate control; but those chickens seem to be coming to roost on the schedule predicted by scientists whose work was dismissed as "only a theory." Add to that a global social class in which the very idea of working hard for a secure decent wage is now obsolete; and the question of whether the planet is worth saving may be more than idle academic philosophy.

Not Quite Fiddling

Fifteen minutes ago Julia Jacobo filed a report for ABC News to the effect that the massive fireworks display involving the entire length of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai went on as planned while the fire at the Address Downtown Hotel, within eyesight of Burj Khalifa, which was consuming an entire side of the hotel, was only 65% contained. Jacobo's report did not state who made the decision that "the show must go on." Presumably the decision reflected someone's priorities, but whose priorities?

Rage Against the Technology

Those who get high on the Kool-Aid of disruptive technologies are usually too stoned to realize that, if not properly managed, disruption can result in an eruption of violence. This is what happened when 2800 Parisian taxi drivers went on strike to protest against UberPop. As one can read in Hugo Leenhardt's report for ABC News, things got really ugly; and, as is usually the case in war, the ugliness infected both sides. So, while Uber cars were vandalized, it appears that one Uber driver decided to deal with a cabbie blocking his way by running over the guy. What makes things all the more depressing is that the French government had already declared UberPop to be illegal, banned due to unfair competitive practices. As a result Paris has discovered something that any American city with a plethora of bike riders aggressively competing with motorists on city streets has known all along: A practice is only illegal if legality is sustained through enforcement. Clearly, such enforcement did not not take place "with all deliberate speed" in Paris. This led to the usual problem with vigilante justice: offended parties taking the law into their own hands, usually with violent results.

It is unclear that there is a way out of this mess. The fact is that technology evangelists have managed to disrupt the world of governance while pursuing an agenda that seems to have involved disrupting the world of work. The primary consequence is that all of us are living in a world in which goods are more likely to be defective and services are less likely to be reliable. It is hard to imagine our arriving at a closer approximation to the apocalyptic world that E. M. Forster envisaged in "The Machine Stops." Unfortunately, one of the services that has been disrupted beyond recognition is education. Thus, while in Forster's world people just got more tolerant of an increasing number of flaws, we now seem to be creating a new generation too stupid to realize that those flaws even exist.

Does Europe Remember Greenspan?

I see that both the French and German stock exchanges are doing very well this morning. As I write this, both are up more than 3.75%. This is obviously connected to the fact that the lead story on BBC World Service News was that a viable solution to the problem of Greek debt may actually be in sight. Mind you, the problem has not yet be solved; but stock markets live in the fictions of the future, rather than in the immediate present. This makes them prime targets for what Alan Greenspan once called "irrational exuberance." Those of us more interested in common sense, rather than good manners, might prefer to call it "grabbing at straws."

Recently Columbia University Press published a book entitled What Does Europe Want? The Union and Its Discontents. It is basically a "dialog through essays" between Slavoj Žižek can Srećko Horvat. However, of particularly interest if the Foreword written by Alexis Tsipras, listed only as "Greek politician, president of SYRIZA," since, at the time he wrote it, the idea of an election in Greece was not yet in sight, let alone a rise in public support for Tsipras' political party.

These are all voices that realize that "economic recovery" is a concept that may well serve the ultra-rich but is condemning just about everyone else to poverty even greater than what was suffered before the collapse of the last decade. One might go so far as to say that even talk about the wealth gap has been devalued. Nevertheless, there was one rather unconventional sign of hope in a less-publicized story that the BBC ran over the weekend. They managed to find a specialist in population dynamics that was bold enough to suggest that the extinction of the human species is not only possible but likely to occur sooner than anyone had dared consider. Considered as a system, the earth may take care of itself better than any mere humans can; and, if humans try to interfere with the earth, then they may well be outwitted by some simple mathematical principles!

Bobby Jindal's "Parlor Games"

Last night the Republicans held their Lincoln Day dinner in Des Moines. Chris Good was there covering the story for ABC News. Apparently he decided to confront Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal with the same question that managed to get Florida Governor Jeb Bush to fumble: Knowing what we now know, was the decision to go to war in Iraq a good idea? Jindal dodged the question, dismissing the consideration of such hypotheses as "parlor games." In doing so, he may have earned himself poster-child status in representing our prevailing culture that seems to lives by the motto "Ignorant of history and proud of it."

Put another way, Jindal appears to assign little value to a critical question:

How did we get where we are?

Whether "where we are" is particularly good or really bad (which seems to be the case at present); we need to deal with the present with some frame of reference other than "shit happens." If Jindal's were an isolated voice that could be ignored when cooler heads prevail, then his reinforcement of our willful ignorance of history could be dismissed as a statistical outlier. Unfortunately, he is more likely right there in the center of a statistical norm; and, if, as a culture, we dismiss as a "parlor game" the need to reflect on how we got ourselves into our present mess, then it is likely that the next mess will come soon and with even greater impact.