Sin of Omission?

Al Jazeera seems to be “on a roll” this morning when it comes to relations between the United States and the rest of the world. The latest “News” article has the subcategory “Occupied West Bank.” I would guess that most readers know that this refers to the territory between the Jordan River and the eastern boundary of Israel. It would not surprise me that many readers know about Israel’s attempts to occupy this territory. So it was that the Al Jazeera headline “Europe, Canada condemn Israeli plans for new West Bank settlement” came to my attention.

A Palestinian flag placed as a memorial for three Palestinians killed by Jewish settlers occupying West Bank territory near Ramallah (photograph by Zain Jaafar for Agence France-Presse)

Apparently, Israeli does not want Palestinians to settle anywhere west of the Jordan River. Put another way, they want the Palestinians to be “Jordan’s problem,” rather than theirs. Unless I am mistaken, however, I do not think that many (if any) Palestinians settled to the east of the Jordan. Does Israel think that problems of settlement will be resolved if the Palestinians “just went away?” That is a proposition that is at least absurd, and I would not blame any Palestinian to dismiss it as downright obscene!

Does Israel want to “get even” with the suffering of Jews in Europe during the last century? The Palestinians have every right to settle somewhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By all rights, such settling should take place with “good neighbor” relations. This leaves me wondering whether or not “good neighbor” can be translated into Hebrew!

The Theresienstadt Children’s Opera

screen shot from the video being discussed

This week (through July 12) Music of Remembrance (MOR) is presenting a streamed video of Hans Krása’s one-act children’s opera “Brundibár.” MOR is an organization with the mission of remembering the Holocaust through music with concert performances, educational programs, recordings, and commissions of new works. Krása originally composed “Brundibár” in 1938; but he took the score with him when he was interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The opera had been written explicitly to be performed by children, and the authorities allowed Krása to teach the music to the children held at that camp. Through this medium he was able to present an allegorical tale of a town in which the children are bullied by Brundibár, who is the local organ grinder. They succeed with assistance from a dog, a cat, and a bird (all vocal roles). It would have been clear to everyone in the camp that Brundibár was basically a thinly-veiled evocation of Adolf Hitler, who was actively extending the German borders when “Brundibár” was composed.

The opera was performed 55 times at Theresienstadt. The bitter irony behind this number is that the production kept needing recasting. Theresienstadt was a “transit center,” where Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria were held temporarily until they were delivered to the so-called “death camps.” Those assignments involved children, as well as their parents; so, as a result, there was an ongoing need to change the cast, bringing “children coming in” to replace “children going out.”

MOR first performed “Brundibár” in 2006, using an English-language libretto written by Tony Kushner. Kushner had originally provided the text for a children’s picture book based on the opera. The illustrations were provided by Maurice Sendak, and it was recognized by the Book Review section of The New York Times as one of the best illustrated books of 2003. That same year the Chicago Opera Theater performed the opera with Kushner’s libretto and staging and set designs by Sendak.

MOR revived its 2006 performance in 2014 with the Seattle Children’s Theater. That production was captured on the video that is currently being streamed through its own Web page. This occasion was particularly distinguished since, during the final chorus, the cast was joined by Ela Stein Weissberger, who sang the original role of the cat in Theresienstadt, participating in all 55 performances at the age of eleven. (Weissberger died in 2018 at the age of 87.)

This all made for a historically significant occasion, which could not have better served MOR intentions. Sadly, that old saw about good intentions applies to the finished product. By all rights Kushner’s English should have been able to manage more than satisfactorily without the aid of subtitles. However, between diction and vocal quality, many of the more critical lines in the plot development were garbled by either the soloists or the chorus. Similarly, there were too many incidents in the staging that tended to confuse, rather than advance, the overall flow of the narrative.

I suspect that some readers may accuse me of being a sourpuss unwilling to cut the kids some slack. I would direct those readers to my account of the opening of Chris Pratorius’ one-act opera “Xochitl and the Flowers,” which took place in November of 2016. Produced by Opera Parallèle through their Hands on Opera project with third graders in the Alvarado Elementary School Spanish Immersion Program, this was the perfect example of children’s opera as it was meant to be. Between just the right amount of staging by Brendan Hartnett and serious vocal preparation, no one in the audience had any trouble figuring out what was happening and what words were being sung by both the chorus and the soloists.

If MOR is to pursue its “mission of remembering the Holocaust through music,” it owe it to audiences to bring more attentive discipline to the music being performed.

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!

Compelling Voices of Disenfranchisement at Herbst

While the self-indulgent were indulging themselves with Fleet Week and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (not to mention, for the sake of fairness, the War Memorial Opera House and Davies Symphony Hall), Herbst Theatre was hosting the world premiere of the one-hour spoken-word chamber opera “Echoes,” composed by Danny Clay and given a staged performance directed by Sean San José. The piece was created to launch the new Hear Now and Then Series produced for the 38th season of San Francisco Performances. The text sources came from Youth Speaks, an organization that encourages pre-college students to get actively involved in writing and performing poetry through programs held during the school day, in after-school hours, and on weekends.

Preparation of the libretto was curated by Tassiana Willis, one of the inaugural Emerging Arts Fellows at Youth Speaks, whose texts were combined with those of four other poet-performers, Gabriel Cortez, A. M. Smiley, Aimee Suzara, and Michael Wayne Turner III. The libretto also included texts by Tongo Eisen-Martin and Enrique Garcia Naranjo; and one of the poems was delivered by San José himself. Finally, Turner’s compelling delivery of “The Young Dead Soldiers,” by the late American poet Archibald MacLeish, played a major role in establishing context for the abundance of last night’s poetry of the living.

Clay conceived a highly imaginative score to establish the context for this wealth of poetry. The background for that context incorporated field recordings most likely taken from the streets of San Francisco (most of which were probably about as far from the comfort zone of the self-indulgent as one might imagine). The performing musicians on stage included the Kronos Quartet of violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang and The Living Earth Show duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. Every now and then Clay’s tapes seemed either to echo or to reinforce the instrumental work, suggesting that his field work may have included rehearsals of his score.

There are probably several ways to interpret the opera’s title. My personal inclination is that these are all echoes from streets in San Francisco that receive little awareness or attention from that self-indulgent class I keep citing, particularly those members of the class who inhabit comfortable offices in City Hall. Those echoes first emerge as reflections of poems created by those chosen by fate to live on those streets. The poems were then themselves echoed through the performances staged by San José, and the semantic implications emerging from those performances were then reflected through the musical contexts established by Clay’s score. If that is not enough to account for the plural form of the noun in the title, I don’t know what is!

In such a context it would be fair to say that words consistently tended to prevail over music. San José coached some thoroughly compelling and passionate readings from the Youth Speaks crew. That intensity even extended to the MacLeish poem, which is now engraved on polished stone in the new Memorial Court that now occupies the space between the Opera House and the Veterans Building. Under San José’s direction, Youth Speaks exercised the talent of seizing and holding attention to every word, if not every phrase-demarcating pause.

Clay wisely decided not to compete with this intensity. Almost all of the music written for Kronos involved relatively mournful chord progressions repeated with the persistence of incantation. (Before the poets took the stage, Clay also exercised a bit of deconstruction with this context, having fragments of the individual lines of those chord progressions played as solos.) The Living Earth Show, on the other hand, was there to provide “high-intensity punctuation marks” between the readings. Much of this involved explosive percussion work, so forceful that it seemed as if Andrews was just miming his guitar work. There were also some more subtle punctuations, but what was most important was Clay’s skill in having the music speak for itself without giving any sense of competing with the words.

All of this went down excellently before a clearly highly appreciative audience. The objective may have been to speak truth to power, but power usually depends on a skill for judiciously turning a deaf ear. So it may very well be that “Echoes” never advanced beyond preaching to the choir. Even so, times are so bad these days that even the choir needs a bit of reinforcement from time to time. Ideally, this is a show that should be taken on the road, but on a road that will deliver the message to those most in need of getting it by virtue of their power to take meaningful action.

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?

Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

San Francisco Symphony Takes a Stand on Discrimination in North Carolina

The full title of the bill informally known as “HB2,” which was passed into law by the North Carolina state legislature this past March, is “An Act to Provide for Single-sex Multiple Occupancy Bathroom and Changing Facilities in Schools and Public Agencies and to Create Statewide Consistency in Regulation of Employment and Public Accommodations.” This is a relatively long-winded way of stating that the use of such facilities is determined by birth certificate, rather than any more general and subjective criteria for gender identity. Those who supported the bill call it “common sense;” but the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) community sees it as the epitome of the very kind of discrimination they have been opposing for decades.

An impressive amount of support has rallied behind that community, at least outside the state of North Carolina. The NBA, NCAA, and NFL, as well as ESPN, have all spoken out against it. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver took his case directly to the state’s governor; and, when it was clear that no changes to the law were in its future, Silver officially pulled the 2017 NBA All-Star Game out of Charlotte. Along similar lines, many film production companies have cancelled plans to shoot films in North Carolina, and documentary producer Michael Moore even announced that his next movie, Where to Invade Next, would not be licensed to theaters in North Carolina. Cancellations of performances have cut across all the different genres of music. The act of cancellation may be one of the few things that Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, and Itzhak Perlman all have in common.

Today the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) officially joined those voices of opposition. This coming April SFS has scheduled a tour to the East Coast, which will include two performances at Carnegie Hall on April 7 and 8. This was to be preceded by two concerts at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill on April 5 and 6, but those two planned performances have now been cancelled. Executive Director Brent Assink made the case for the cancellation as follows:

This decision is not a reflection of our regard for Carolina Performing Arts, which is a valued artistic partner, but a response to the North Carolina state legislature’s decision to enact HB2.  We would have loved to perform at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a community that in many ways is consonant with our own San Francisco Bay Area.  But we also feel we must join our city, our state, the NBA, NCAA, and the many artists, organizations, and businesses who have chosen to not visit or contribute economically to North Carolina until legislation denying protection for the LGBT community has been overturned. The San Francisco Symphony, its Board of Governors, and Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas wholeheartedly support this decision, as they support all those striving for equality and inclusiveness in their community and beyond.

Ironically, the university has never enforced HB2 as a matter of policy; but this amounts to their being an enclave of civil rights in a state that has escalated discrimination from a personal matter to a state law. While the response from outside the state has been one of economic boycott, the impact has yet to make much difference. Perhaps the legislators of North Carolina have decided that, if South Africa could hang tough on apartheid in the face of such boycotts for many decades, they can follow the same model. If they do so, they can always fall back on the argument that they are acting on the will of those who voted them into office. Sadly, those voters probably do not care very much if SFS decides not to visit the state; but, for what it is worth, they probably feel the same way about Springsteen.

The Golden Gate Symphony will Present an “Intercultural Exchange”

The Golden Gate Symphony emerged out of the growth of the San Francisco Sinfonietta, which was founded by Urs Leonhardt Steiner in 1994. The ensemble expanded into the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra & Chorus in 2014. Steiner continues to serve as the group’s conductor, whose mission continues to be to provide access to classical music at the community level. Next month will begin with the performance of a program entitled Sent-Down Youth: An Intercultural Exchange, conceived in memory of one of the major episodes in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

The “sent-down youth” movement involved an episode from the Cultural Revolution that is still largely unknown in the Western world. The movement consisted of an imposed migration of nearly twenty million urban youth to the countryside in order to be “re-educated” by the peasants. These “sent-down” youth endured over a decade of hardship, separated from their families. By the time they returned, they were no longer youth.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of this movement, the program Sent-Down Youth will present a rare performance of Ask the Sky and the Earth. Conceived by composer Tony Fok and librettist Wei Su, who met as sent-down youth, the piece is an oratorio-cantata originally created in 2008 for chorus and piano and subsequently orchestrated by Fok. The piece will be sung in its original Mandarin language with an intercultural chorus and orchestra of more than 200 performers, including soloists Yi Triplett (soprano), Lisa van der Ploeg (alto), John Ownes and Shine Zhao (tenors), and Alex Ip (bass-baritone). The program will also include the world premiere of the choral composition “Remembering for Atonement,” based on a text by Viktoriya Neverov-Krstic. Following the intermission, the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra will play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 68 (“Pastoral”) symphony in F major.

This concert will be given a single performance on Saturday, November 5, at 7:30 p.m. The venue will be the Basilica of Mission Dolores (Misión San Francisco de Asís), located in the Mission on the southwest corner of Dolores Street and 16th Street. Tickets are being sold for $35 with a $20 rate for seniors aged 65 and older and youth under the age of eighteen. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

"… our pathetic native self"

I just finished reading Janet Malcom's harsh review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of Ted Hughes, now available online prior to my receiving it in the next issue of The New York Review of Books. I was particularly pleased with her concluding paragraph, in which she dismissed the idea that a biography should be about what the subject was "really" like. Her punch line about that topic was:

If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.

This left me wondering if this was her way of venting about the current mass addiction to social media, suggesting that whose who indulge most heavily are actually the most pathetic. In an earlier age (about which these addicts are totally oblivious), the prevailing motto would have been "Get a life!" In the absence of an authoritative voice to utter that maxim, such addicts can think of nothing to do other what broadcast every detail of "native self" to the entire Internet, neither knowing nor caring about how pathetic that act of broadcasting is.

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?

Is ISIS a Product of the Failed Arab Spring?

I can appreciate the decision of the author of "The Mystery of ISIS," scheduled for the next issue of The New York Review of Books and currently available on their Web site, to remain anonymous. The article is rich with both historical background and analysis, yet it never draws any conclusions as to why ISIS should be recruiting so many followers on such a broad international scale. I would like to suggest that the author may have overlooked the role that may have been played by the Arab Spring, not so much in terms of any immediate impact that happened, fizzled, or backfired but with regard to the motivating forces behind protest. Those forces had so much in common that, as I observed in August of 2011, they could be found in Israel as well as its many Arab neighbors.

The writer that seems to have been most aware of those forces was Fareed Zakaria, whose analysis on the Time.com Web site argued that those who gathered in Tahrir Square were there because, regardless of how much education or training they had, they could not see a future for themselves in Egypt as it was in early 2011. Indeed, such a social context would suggest that the Arab Spring inspired not only Israeli youth but also the subsequent Occupy movement. Perhaps the most important consequence of globalization is that, practically everywhere in the world, there is now a generation of educated young people who see absolutely no prospects for a viable future. That future has been withheld from them by the tyrannical forces of an "economic elite," the top 1% of the tope 1%, if you will, that understands the world only in terms of balance sheets and returns on investment.

In any individual country this would be a desperate situation. On a global scale it is an invitation to catastrophe. Through skillful manipulation of the "consciousness industry," surpassing that of both the Nazis and the economic elite, ISIS has been able to circulate its message to those who feel, rightfully so, that there is nothing they can do to bring any satisfaction into their lives. Moralists can wax indignantly that ISIS should try to deceive so many vulnerable individuals, but do they give any thought as to why those individuals were so vulnerable in the first place?

Think about it. Through globalization the economic elite has create a world in which even the basic premises behind governance have gone onto the rocks, smashed by the domination of marketing over legislation and jurisprudence. "Rational man" may be justified in declaring that the efforts of ISIS to burn down the whole house and replace it with their caliphate are "barbaric;" but are they any more barbaric than they ways in which the "wise men [sic] of Davos" have all but obliterated the middle class in any economic society? The world may ultimately be divided between those who waste away out of their own helplessness and those who rally to ISIS for the simple reason that they have nothing better to do with themselves.

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.

When a Change for the Better Makes Things Worse

Today's Al Jazeera English Web site has an article by Dinouk Colombage about the formation of an orchestra of Sinhalese and Tamil children recently formed in Sri Lanka. Since the participating children are poor, the Venezuelan "El Sistema" was cited as a precedent. However, the title of the article was "Can music lead to social harmony in Sri Lanka?," suggesting that trying to ease tensions between Sinhalese and Tamil cultures was also a major issue. In that respect a more appropriate precedent might be Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which was formed to provide an opportunity for musicians of both Arab and Israeli backgrounds to come together for the sake of making music. (It should be noted for the record that this ensemble is based in Seville, rather than anywhere in the Middle East.)

I have great admiration for Barenboim's project. However, it is somewhat interesting to think about what has happened on a global scale since its formation in 1999. Over the course of about fifteen years, the world has experienced a radical increase in acts of inter-cultural violence; and there is no sign of the trend reversing. (I have made it a point not to single out any particular cultures in making that observation.) This has led be to entertain the conjecture that social harmony is bad for politics. This conjecture may be approached from the opposite direction by taking Max Weber as a point of departure: Politics is all about legitimizing the exercise of power. Thus, it is only natural that it is driven by opposing blocs, each of which seeks to hold more power than the others. As a result, we can find social harmony in an orchestra because making music involves getting beyond the idea that life is all about having more power than those around you. The problem is that both the members of the orchestra and those in the audience have to go back to the real world after the concert has concluded; and we now live in a real world in which "social harmony" is treated as an impediment to political maneuvering rather than as asset for society as a whole.

I'll Believe It When I See It

According to a report filed by Lyanne Melendez for ABC7 News, the city is finally going to face up to the traffic congestion problem. During rush hours violations such as double parking, delivery trucks, cars blocking intersections, and construction projects will be tickets and subjected to three-digit fines. Do I believe it? I am more inclined to believe commuter Pearline Hawkins, who told Melendez that they do not have enough people to do the necessary ticketing. The city claims we should give their new plan some time. Time for what? Do they have the budget to hire enough officers to give out tickets for all the violations that take place on a single day?

Unequal Justice When it Matters

Jed S. Rakoff's article in the latest issue of The New York Review, "Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied," a review of Brandon L. Garrett's Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations, provides a valuable critique of the concept of "deferred prosecution." However, given Rakoff's experience as a judge, I am not sure what to make of his comments when comparing deferred prosecution with a decision to take a case to a jury trial. The fact is that, when a large corporation is involved, whether the case is brought against the corporation itself or individual employees at just about any level in the organization chart, the corporation will have access to a far more generous supply of litigation expertise than either the government or individual(s) filing the case. The idea that the courtroom provides even a remote approximation to a level playing field is dangerously idealistic. The result is that those who are disadvantaged, financially or physically, by negligence or malice from a large corporation, will be even more disadvantaged in any attempt to seek justice and any contingent compensation for those damaged, let alone punishment for the guilty. Until we recognize that our justice system is as broken as all the other elements of our current governmental structure, we shall be at the mercy of those who appreciate just how much power their wealth entails.

No Chopin Anthology

Readers of my national Examiner.com site know that I have a particular interest in recorded anthologies. These often require considerable listening time to prepare for writing. However, that listening establishes a context that often provides a sharper view of any individual composition. Even after I have written my piece, many of these collection hold up to frequent repeat listening experience, as I continue to flesh out a broader perspective of music history that is as much auditory as literary.

Such readers will probably also have observed that I have yet to write about any major collection of music by Frédéric Chopin. The fact is that I do not have any such collection, nor am I particularly interested in seeking one out. For overall breadth in my understanding of Chopin, I have long relied on my collection of the complete recordings that Arthur Rubinstein made for RCA. His coverage of Chopin may not have been comprehensive, but I have made up for any missing pieces with other recordings. Furthermore, most of the major chunks of the Chopin repertoire were recorded more than once by Rubinstein; so this collection offers the luxury of multiple points of view, particularly where the major warhorses are concerned.

Meanwhile, I have plenty of other recordings by many different pianists, all of which properly prevent me from falling back on trying to assume that any of Rubinstein's recordings are, in any way, "ultimate authority" recordings!

On Self-Education Through the Internet

If we are to accept the wisdom of Henry Kett, whose 1814 publication The flowers of wit, or a choice collection of bon mots included the observation "that every man who is his own lawyer, has a fool for a client," what are we to make of Zach Sims? According to Joe Miller, reporting from Davos for BBC News, Sims dropped out of Columbia before completing his degree and, as a result, may hold no academic credentials higher than a high school diploma. Nevertheless, the attendees of the World Economic Forum appear to be in his thrall for the success of his creation Codeacademy. This is a three-year-old Web site that enables visitors to learn six popular languages at no charge. On the basis of the analytics for that site, Sims can apparently claim that he has 26 million students.

Personally, I think that this says more about the Davos attendees than it does about Sims ingenuity. In parallel to Kett's insight, one of my former students (best left unnamed) once declared, "Any idiot can program a computer … and many of them do." It would be fairer to call Codeacademy a valuable resource for skill acquisition, rather than a site for education. Yet it seems as if the rich and mighty at Davos are more inclined to see Sims and his approach as a harbinger for a new age of education. In this case, however, it is neither Sims nor anyone using his site who is the greater fool. The greatest fools are those gullible enough to pass off what Codeacademy does as education. However, since they have been immune to any number of other reality checks, I doubt that they will see the light in this situation.

The Hazard of Posturing

I am curious as to whether or not the Republican response to the State of the Union is going to try to assume some kind of high moral ground. This is one of those cases in which that kind of posturing can only end up defying logic. Still, the fate of any individual who tries to get up on a really high horse is that (s)he will eventually fall into a really high pile of horse manure.

Sweeping the Problem Under the Rug

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam, will apparently be co-chair of this year's World Economic Forum. On the surface this looks like she will have a bully pulpit to bring serious issues about world poverty to the attention of the rich and mighty. However, I have come to believe that, when the rich and mighty gather, they are interested in little more than becoming richer and mightier. Thus, while her pulpit may have a prominent location, she may discover that most, if not all, of the congregation has gathered in another chapel.

Consider a recent Oxfam statistic that merited an article on the BBC News Web site. The basic finding is that by 2016 the wealthiest 1% will control more than 50% of the world's wealth. In other words that 1% will be wealthier than the total of the remaining 99%. However, before gasping too deeply, we should consider the work of the BBC's own statistician, Anthony Reuben, who calculated how much wealth it takes to be part of that 1%. The answer is "just over half a million pounds." To put that in local terms, just about anyone owning a house in San Francisco will qualify.

The problem is that there is now a distinction between "rich" and "super-rich," which, thanks to the ability of the super-rich to control the media (and, as a corollary, world governments) is being conveniently ignored. What we might call "extreme wealth" is limited to a very narrow slice at the top of that 1% category. How narrow is that slice? This would require deeper statistical study than has yet been made public. My guess is that those in that slice know how narrow it is and also know that they have the power to maintain it, if not make it narrower. Do we really expect that they will apply any of that extreme wealth to evening out the overall distribution, perhaps to a point at which we no longer have to worry about statistics for extreme poverty?

Disorder Rules

Anne Applebaum's review of Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, a recent book by Karen Dawisha, in the latest issue of The New York Review is a must read for anyone who takes a look at BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Jonathan Marcus' analysis posted on the BBC News Web site today under the title "Putin problem gives Nato headache." On the surface it would seem as if Marcus and Dawisha are examining different aspects of Putin's career advancements; but this would be dangerous silo-based thinking. Consider what may be Marcus' key "punch line" observation:

Nonetheless, the Ukraine crisis has shown Mr Putin to be a master of making policy on the hoof, exploiting weaknesses; setting many hares running and following up those that seem to make the most headway.

As Applebaum's article makes clear, Dawisha is not interested in how Putin makes policy. On the contrary, Putin's actions can only be considered in terms of the acquisition of power and the use of power to manage and acquire resources. If Putin is a master of anything, it is his ability to sow disorder, thereby throwing just about every institution of governance (established or otherwise) into dithering helplessness. Applebaum provides several vivid examples of how Putin has put this talent into practice, including channeling resources to both left-wing and right-wing extremists in our own country, creating, for his own purposes, a legislative body incapable of making any decision.

Applebaum also notes that Dawisha is not the first to write about this dark side of Putin's behavior. Indeed, Dawisha is credited for recognizing all the sources that provided support for the points she makes in her book. Unfortunately, those who believe that the end of the Cold War provided circumstances for a "new world order" must now recognize just how deluded they were and come up with a better belief system before it is too late.