A Questionable Birthday Present for Wikipedia

Today the Opinion section of the Al Jazeera Web site ran an article with the primary headline “Learning to trust the internet again” followed by the secondary headline “Wikipedia can serve as a model to combat disinformation and distrust online.” Given the recent beating that the very concept of truth has been taking, not only in the domain of politics but also, more recently, in that of health care, one might think that this article would be a breath of fresh air. Then the reader may proceed below those headlines to discover that the author of the article was Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia twenty years ago. So the article amounts to a “birthday party” for Wikipedia with Wales as the Master of Ceremonies.

Those who read this site regularly know that Wikipedia has been a valuable tool for me. Where music history is concerned, the best resource in English remains what is now The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is now available through the Oxford Music Online Web site. However, that site is not available without charge for general public access. My own ability to use it comes from the fact that I can get into the site once the San Francisco Public Library Web site has validated the identification code on my library card. As a result, I almost never provide hyperlinks into the Oxford site, since I prefer not to lead my readers into a paywall.

Instead, I provide hyperlinks into Wikipedia. When it comes to nuts-and-bolts data about composer biographies and lists of their compositions, I have rarely been disappointed. Indeed, in accounts of more arcane topics, such as the diversity of tuning systems, I have been just as satisfied; and, where ethnomusicology is concerned, it would not surprise me if Wikipedia was a better source than Oxford. My guess is that these assets of Wikipedia are due to a great abundance of contributors, probably consisting of graduate students and junior faculty members, that have been writing such content for other reasons and then appreciate being able to upload it to a site for the benefit of others. As one reads the Al Jazeera article, one quickly realizes that this is the world that Wales wanted Wikipedia to sustain.

However, it is important to acknowledge what Wales took (and continues to take) to be Wikipedia’s greatest asset:

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and that means that hundreds of thousands of people are also involved in the integrity of protecting the knowledge that we find on it.

While this may be true of the global community of music scholars, we all know that they amount to a rather small minority of the community of “citizen editors” that sustain Wales’ project. The fact is that, as recently as 2008, Wales’ ideal vision was taking a serious beating.

In February of that year, Mary Spicuzza wrote an article for SF Weekly, which was published in print as “Wikipidiots” and can still be found archived on the SF Weekly Web site under the title “Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco.” By way of endorsement, I wrote an article of my own on this site in which I offered my own take on Wales’ idealization of “citizen editors:”

While it is true that Plato tried to enhance the readability of his dialogs by providing his “characters” with (often contentious) personalities, I doubt that he would have appreciated the extent to which the discussion of entries in a would-be encyclopedia that has become a major Internet resource has assumed all the personality traits of WWE Friday Night Smackdown!

Hopefully, at least some of my readers were able to observe that my hyperlink pointed to a Wikipedia page!

To be fair, things have improved since then; so I have no desire to rain on Wikimania 2021, Wales’ “all-virtual celebration” of the efforts of all those writers and editors that contributed content on a strictly voluntary basis. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that the current century has emerged as one in which marketing has prevailed over truth in ways that those of my own generation could not have imagined, let alone anticipated. Wales’ ideal is one of “a collaborative movement of knowledge seekers;” but, in the “real world,” the very concept of “informed action” is on life-support and has been for longer that we would like to admit. So, while I can thank Wales with providing me with a tool that has become essential to my current work, I am more than a little skeptical that his ideals will be realized.

Naive and Sentimental Musical Sensemaking

Readers who have followed this site for some time know that I have a tendency to fall back on the noun “sensemaking” when talking about the nature of listening to music. While this word is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (although the hyphenated version “sense-making” is), it had been adopted by several of my former research colleagues to address the rising problem of being able to extract “useful meaning” from very large bodies of data. The Oxford definition of the hyphenated version does little more than echo the two component words; but, if we look back about half a century, we find that Friedrich Hayek was dealing with the same issue when addressing sensory data, rather than databases. The term he introduced was “sensory order,” the biological drive to find order in what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals.

from the Amazon.com Web page for Comparing Notes

With that as context, I found it hard to resist reading the book Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music by Adam Ockelford. Ockelford is Professor of Music at Roehampton University (in England). He also directs the university’s Applied Music Research Centre. He occasionally makes reference to his doctoral studies in music, suggesting that he got his advanced degree in music. However, much of his research has involved the acquisition of musical skills among young people with sensory or cognitive disadvantages. His practices thus keep one foot in music and the other in psychology.

That sort of background should, by all rights, have made this book both fascinating and valuable reading. For my part, however, I was profoundly dissatisfied; and that dissatisfaction can be traced back to the second word of Ockelford’s title. At the end of the day, he has little to say about anything other than those marks on paper that all practicing musicians are expected to be able to decode. What that as his foundation, he dwells on that tiresome question of what music actually is, how it “works” (whatever that means), and, ultimately, how we “make sense” when it comes to either performing the music or listening to it. Only at the beginning of his final chapter does he cite sociomusicologist Christopher Small’s contention that music is not some kind of “thing” but, rather, “an activity, something that people do.”

My decision to devote personal time to writing about music owes much to my ability to spend a fair amount of time hanging out at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), which is only about half a dozen blocks from where I was living. Through my own experiences in higher education, I have come to a naive but probably useful conclusion about where who learns what. In universities we learn about theories about music; in conservatories we learn about how music is practiced.

Universities occupy their curricula with things, to such an extent that one might almost say that education can be reduced to a knapsack of noun phrases. Ockelford’s noun phrases come from a wide variety of sources, almost all of which have to do with academic publications that may or may not signify to anyone beyond other academics. The grammatical infrastructure of the conservatory education, on the other hand, is build on verb phrases. One emerges (hopefully) with refined skills for doing, often without necessarily verbalizing (or, for that matter thinking about) what one is doing.

In his academic context it is understandable that Ockelford cannot get his head out of all those notes on staff paper. He has some clever ideas (which he calls his “zygonic conjecture”) about a foundation based on replications and transformations of patterns; but these are just familiar concepts dressed up in a new notation. As a doctoral student I was taking the same sort of approach to music in my thesis, except that my patterns were modules of computer code and the transformations resulted from parameters passed to those modules.

As a result of observing master classes at SFCM, I came to appreciate just how limited my perspective had been. Apparently, Ockelford has yet to encounter that revelation. Nevertheless, to be fair, shifting attention from nouns to verbs is no easy matter. Even the very idea of how one describes grammar for verbs has major qualitative differences from the almost computer-like formality of noun grammar. However, Ockelford never seems to accept that sensemaking cannot be anything other than an ongoing process. Like sound itself, if you try to freeze it in a single moment of time, it all vanishes.

When I read Ockelford’s title, I approached his book in the hope that someone had finally come up with, if not an underlying theory, at least a usable roadmap for negotiating the complexities of verb-based thinking. Instead, I encountered that very noun-based song-and-dance that I have been trying to escape for at least a decade. My guess is that those music-makers who really “get” the verb-based activity of their work are too occupied with the work itself to waste any time theorizing about it.

Post-Truth Invades My Turf

It has been a while since I went on a rant about Jonah Lehrer. The last time I indulged was when I decided to take on an excerpt from his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. The result was a post to this site entitled  “Performing Precise Research with Blunt Instruments.”

I suppose that one of the symptoms of the post-truth era is that you cannot keep a sloppy researcher down. This afternoon I found myself reading the “Igor Stravinsky” chapter from Lehrer’s more recent book, Proust was a Neuroscientist. This turned out to include an analysis [sic] of Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring;” and, by the second page of the chapter, I was already fuming over the inaccuracies and misconceptions in Lehrer’s efforts to try to describe the riot that took place when this ballet was first performed. His basic point was that, in the due course of time, mind usually figures out how to make sense of what first strikes it as disturbing noise; but Stravinsky himself made that point much better in his Poetics of Music lecture. (Lehrer even quotes a significant excerpt from that lecture. He credits Stravinsky but neglects to mention the source.)

Truth be told, however, I am less annoyed with Lehrer than I am with Google. This morning I was trying to track down the source of a Stravinsky comment that I have frequently cited:

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Basically, Google kept pointing me at Web pages that were full of clever quotations, none of which offered up anything about source (or, for that matter, context). A PDF file of Lehrer’s chapter was one of the few search hits that promised to provide useful background. However, as may be guessed from the above, Lehrer was no better at crediting the “duck” source than he was in acknowledging Poetics of Music.

Eventually I realized that the source could well have been one of Stravinsky’s conversations with Robert Craft. So adding Craft to the Google search got me to Stephen Walsh’s book, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971. An Amazon search got me to just the right page, which provided far more context for those sentences than I had dared imagine. Unfortunately, while I could get the chapter number and the footnote number, I could not read the footnote itself. (Thanks, Amazon!) Fortunately, the book is in the San Francisco Public Library; so I should be able to settle the source question tomorrow morning!

Back to Beethoven

One of the nice things about this time of year is that I do not have to worry about a queue of recordings that require listening attention sooner rather than later. The result is that I have a chance to take stock of the entire collection, which has now grown to a size that makes the task almost impossible. One result is that it may seem to some almost banal that, given such “freedom of listening” opportunities, my choices should take me back to Ludwig van Beethoven, particularly since Beethoven did not figure at all in my recent articles about memorable concerts and recordings.

It goes without saying that there was no shortage of exposure to Beethoven in this year’s listening experiences. However, I think that what may be important is not that Beethoven is a composer “for all of eternity,” as the monument-worshippers would have us believe. Rather, as the best of both seasoned and emerging performers tend to recognize (and, more importantly, to communicate to listeners), Beethoven remains a composer “for the immediate present.” This is because, like many (if not most) of the composers that are still part of our “world of listening,” regardless of distance in the past, the music itself still admits of “present-based” interpretation, rather than nostalgia for the past. It is too often forgotten that, in Beethoven’s own day, that immediate present was all that mattered; but that was clearly the case whenever Beethoven himself was involved in performance, even after his hearing began to deteriorate.

Looking back on my own listening experiences, I realize that, even as a student, when it was almost impossible to get me to pay attention to anything other than marks on paper, I had been fascinated when one of the earliest collections of all the Beethoven piano sonatas came out when the Musical Heritage Society released the recordings made by Friedrich Gulda. It did not take me long to learn that Gulda was playing as significant a role in European jazz as he was in the classical repertoire. This may be one reason why, decades later, I had no problems encountering recordings of Keith Jarrett playing both Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Preservation may be a major priority as far as marks on score pages (in both manuscript and published forms) are concerned. However, when one is talking about creating a listening experience for an audience sitting on the other side of the proscenium, preservation is far from a primary issue. If anything, it tends to get in the way of the performer thinking for himself/herself about just what sort of experience (s)he wants his/her listeners to have. Isn’t that the primary essence (if not substance) of “music appreciation?”

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.

Orchestra Strikes in the Age of “Citizen Journalism”

Following the news about the current strike by the members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) reminded me of what it was like being a writer covering concert performances during the last such strike in my home town of San Francisco. That was an occasion when my colleagues and I found ourselves as loose ends, committed to covering concerts that we knew were not going to happen through the writing both previews and reviews. On March 13, 2013, contract negotiations for the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) reached an impasse that led to the musicians going out on strike. As the city’s primary outlet for print journalism, the San Francisco Chronicle did a reasonably admirable job of trying to collect the “basic facts” and align them with how they were being interpreted from both labor and management points of view. Those of us working through the Internet were not so lucky. SFS was quite industrious when it came to putting out press releases. However, because the Communications Department was part of the “back office,” the dispatches we received carried only a single point of view. On the other hand the musicians themselves had to be cautious about saying too much to anyone for fear of jeopardizing any interactions that were still struggling to take place.

In politics this comes down to what is sometimes called “owning the narrative.” When one side of a negotiation dominates access to the media, it can be very difficult for the other side to establish that it, too, has a narrative. The one thing that we in San Francisco knew was that the musicians did not want to disappoint their audiences. As a result they arranged to commit their own time to giving performances in venues other than Davies Symphony Hall, and writers like myself and some of my colleagues could pitch in to get out the word about when and where such performances would be taking place.

A little over three and a half years have elapsed since the SFS strike was settled after about half a month of time on strike. For those of us viewing the PSO strike from the other side of the country, it would appear that narrative ownership has achieved a more balanced state. PSO has a blog site, but it does not take the objective reader long to realize that the narratives on this blog are coming from management. In this case, however, there is also now a site called Musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Within that site there is a STRIKE UPDATE division, which provides the musicians with the opportunity to present the narratives that they “own.” This means that readers “on the outside” can examine the numbers that have been released on the PSO blog and then read an item-by-item rebuttal from the musicians.

This is fine as far as it goes; but, as any number of philosophers (going all the way back to Socrates) have observed, “understanding” is almost never just a matter of “having the facts.” There are any number of reasons why opposing sides should be developing different narratives; and they cannot be reduced to trivial distinctions between haves and have-nots. The problem is that a fair amount of expertise is required to read either side of the story, not only for its “facts” but also for the implications and consequences that arise if those facts are accepted. Asking someone whose primary interest is in listening to the performance of music in a concert setting to untangle the knots of conflicting narratives is about as absurd as asking a labor negotiator to sit in for the striking concertmaster.

We are thus faced with the classical problem of an Internet that allows us to see more and understand less. Put another way, we, as detached observers, may have more resources that we can consult; but that does not imply that we know what to do with them. All we can do is watch from a distance and try to make sense of it all, possibly with input from those better informed than we are who also happen to have a certain degree of objective detachment. In other words, things are not much different from the way they are when the news sources are trying to report a delicate hostage negotiation. In this case, however, the hostages are the concert-going public.

Is There an Analogy between Listening to Music and Reading a Text?

Having already turned to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics in trying to address the problem of listening to music as a real-time process, I find it may be necessary to address the question of why a hermeneutic stance may be useful at all. After all, hermeneutics is basically about the act of understanding difficult texts. Originally, those texts were sacred; but, with the rise of the Enlightenment, the study extended to secular domains, such as literary, historical, and legal texts. The hermeneutic discipline, in turn, chose to tease out subtle differences in terms that we tend to take for granted when we use them informally, terms such as “expression,” “interpretation,” and “eloquence.”

When we shift our attention to music, we should have no trouble thinking of any artifact of music notation as a text. We may then ask whether or not any of the techniques or results of hermeneutic study will tell us anything about the connection between notation and performance on one side and the relationship between performance and listening on the other. One way to begin would be to try to unpack the different terms that Gadamer used in his approach to the understanding of texts.

He seems to treat “interpretation” as the most fundamental of those terms. This may be taken as a “semantic decoding” of the text, approaching the text as a representation of underlying ideas. Similarly, there is an underlying decoding of music notation, which amounts to translating a basic set of symbols into a schedule of auditory events, so to speak. Of course not all symbols admit of simple decoding. Even the position of a note on a staff has some degree of variation with regard to intonation unless one is playing an instrument, such as a piano or organ, that does not allow for that variation.

One thus advances from the decoding of symbols to what Gadamer called “everything that we have to get behind.” In other words there is the flow of events that can be traced to notation itself; but then there are other flows of events that are, in one way or another, the results of “personalization.” “Expression” is Gadamer’s way of trying to get at the mindset behind the text, treating the text as a bridge between the mindset of the author and the mindset of the reader. In music the author is the composer, and the reader is the performer. However, the performer can also bring “eloquence,” which amounts to an alternative to expression. Ultimately, it is through eloquence that the performer then builds a bridge of his/her own to the listener.

This may be one way to approach what may be one of Gadamer’s key observations:

Rather, all reading involves application, so that a person reading a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends. He belongs to the text that he is reading.

Through the act of expression, the performer arrives at a point at which (s)he “belongs” to the notation at the foundation of the music being performed. However, that is not the end of the story, because it is through the act of eloquence that the listener may then belong to those phenomena perceived through the act of listening.

Granted, this strays pretty far from the familiar path that we usually encounter when addressing the “sensemaking” of symbol systems. Rather, it may be a path that explicitly recognizes the need for the performer to find a subjective layer behind the notated music and the need for the listener to find a social layer behind the actions of the performer. From that point of view, Gadamer has proposed an approach to hermeneutics that both teases out just what those layers are and then tries to find the right way to characterize how they interact.

Communion

This past Monday I tried to cast the problem of “understanding processes while they are processing” in the framework of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach to the discipline of hermeneutics. I appealed to Gadamer’s evocation of the concept of communion to describe the relationship between an individual sitting in the audience and the performance being played before him/her. Gadamer had developed this “secular” approach to communion with respect to a dramatic performance; but there is no reason to avoid translating it to a musical setting.

From that point of view, I would like to consider a particular sentence I encountered in Truth and Method:

Our line of thought prevents us from dividing the hermeneutic problem in terms of the subjectivity of the interpreter and the objectivity of the meaning to be understood.

In other words the act of listening is one of interpretation; but we should not fall into the trap of assuming that listening to the performance of music is a matter of “deriving” some objective “meaning” out of our perceptual processes. After all, as was previously suggested, those doing the performing are most likely engaged simultaneously with the objective world of the symbol systems on the score pages, the subjectivity of bringing expressiveness to the “decoding” of those symbols, and the social world of “real-time engagement” with the other performing musicians. Listening is never a matter of just recognizing and sharing that process of decoding. Rather, it is one of assimilating the expressiveness being conveyed and “inhabiting” (to use the word from Monday’s article) the social world of the performers as something more than a detached observer. It is through the attempt to enter that social world, complete with its connections to the objective and subjective worlds, that communion is established. One might say that, through that communion, the listener escalates from being a mere observer to becoming an “involved” participant, even if that involvement takes place at a distance from the performers themselves. (There may be some connection between this approach to “involvement” and the concept of “care” that we find in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time; but that will require further exploration.)

Most of us are probably more familiar with this sense of physical involvement in settings of rock concerts and, for more limited audiences, the more spontaneous jazz improvisations. However, we can be just as involved when listening to music of any genre from any period of history. Indeed, that is one reason why I fall back so many times on the use of the concept of jamming when writing about performances of pre-Classical music. Sitting in the audience is not just a matter of listening to how musicians are interpreting a score. Rather, it is a matter of “bearing witness” to acts of making music; and communion arises which the scope of such witnessing takes in the objective, subjective, and social dimensions of those acts.

Understanding Processes While They are Processing

When it comes to understanding the nature of listening to music, acknowledging the differences between noun-based and verb-based thinking, as I did last week, is less than half the battle. It does little more than refine the statement of the problem, but it still provides a useful point of departure. The fact is that the very concept of understanding has a long and venerable history. Understanding the nature of understanding has its roots in how the practice of hermeneutics has changed over the centuries.

The original intention behind hermeneutics involved systematic approach to understanding the content of sacred texts. However, with the rise of Enlightenment thinking, the scope of the study broadened to all texts. Nevertheless, texts are artifacts. They can, literally or figuratively, be “held in place” and “examined” from many different “points of view.” Like my favorite metaphor of the elephant, they can even be “grasped” from many different locations, sometimes providing broadly varying data points that challenge the observer to assimilate them all. However, if we are to think about the performance of music as a phenomenon that extends beyond the symbols encoded on score pages, then we need to think about listening as a matter of trying to understand a process in the real-time flow of its very processing.

Hans-Georg Gadamer distinguished himself in writing about hermeneutics in Truth and Method by taking aesthetics as his point of departure. This allows him to pursue the fundamental nature of concept of play, thinking of the elephant-nature of that concept, a game from one point of view, the act of playing from another, and, more specifically, the process of enacting a drama from a third. He introduces the term “self-presentation” in referring to the relationship between the performers of and those in the audience. With almost religious rhetoric he suggests that there is a communion behind the individual sitting in the audience and the drama being enacted before him/her.

That sense of communion may be a fruitful metaphor to explore when one tries to take on how the attentive listener tries, as perhaps succeeds in the task of understanding the music being performed before him/her. There may be some means by which such a listener is capable of “inhabiting” (again in a metaphorical way) the music being performed, thus recognizing that the real-time cognitive processes are significantly different from those that emerge when one is manipulating the symbols on score pages. This may sound overly poetic, but sometimes ideas congeal out of serious efforts to make sense out of poetic vagueness!

Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

The grouping of beauty, goodness, and truth as three related “transcendental” qualities of being seems to have originated in the fifteenth century with Marco Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s “Philebus” dialogue. It then resurfaces throughout the history of philosophy, probably most notably in the three “critiques” of Immanuel Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason (truth), the Critique of Practical Reason (goodness), and the Critique of Judgment, whose first half focuses on aesthetics (beauty). This Kantian framework, in turn, may have provided the foundation for much of the thinking that can be found in Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. Since much of my thinking about music came out of trying to approach performance as a form of “communicative action,” it may be time to tie this together with yesterday’s thoughts about time.

Habermas’ approach begins by recognizing that communication is a particular instance of personal interaction and that all personal interactions are distributed across three independent “worlds,” the objective, the subjective, and the social. This tripartite division is basically another take on Ficino as handed down through Kant. The objective world is the world of “pure reason,” the subjective world is the world of personal “judgment,” and the social world is the world of “practical reason,” based on goodness for the benefit of all. Each of these worlds, in turn, provides its own approach to the verb-based nature of time. The objective world deals with the mathematics of time-based functions with particular attention to the nature of continuous functions and how they can be manipulated. The subjective world, on the other hand, deals with the passing of time as a psychological phenomenon. This is where we move into the domain of Gerald Edelman, most specifically his book The Remembered Present. The idea behind the title of that book is that “mind” has to “process” the “stimuli of the present.” That processing is not instantaneous; so, by the time the processing has been completed, what mind takes to be the present is actually a memory of what had been perceived in a very recent past.

This is all very well and good until we have to worry about “now” in a communicative setting. It was one thing to be even remotely aware that a subjective “now” is actually an objective “then;” but things become more complicated when we move into the social world. What happens when someone uses “now” as a cue to say, “It is time to press that button?” In many respects that is the ultimate simplification of what it means for a performing musician to follow a conductor’s beat.

However, the complexity of the social world becomes more evident when we think about a string quartet, rather than an orchestra. This is a group of four individuals that, somehow or another, have to establish a shared concept of how time is passing, maintaining that agreement through some form of ongoing monitoring. Indeed, music itself clearly resides in Habermas’ three worlds. The objective world is the world of notation with its associated rules of interpretation. However, an expressive interpretation of that notation requires a move into the subjective world; but that move only goes far enough to cover solo performance. As soon as more than one performer is involved, performance is firmly ensconced in the social world. Performance is thus a matter of how each individual juggles reasoning in the objective and subjective worlds in order to communicate effectively with the rest of the ensemble in the social world.

Sadly, while Habermas appreciated that there was more to linguistics than semantics and pragmatics, he does not seem to have had much background and/or interest in music. Thus, like Kant, all he can provide is a framework for thinking about the performance of music. Putting flesh onto that framework is the task that still needs to be done.

Who Serves Whom?

In the latest issue of The New York Review, David Cole, in his article "The New America: Little Privacy, Big Terror," makes the following statement:

When we carry our cell phone, use (or have downloaded) apps on those phones, browse websites, send e-mails or texts, drive in our cars, or make purchases with a credit card, we send digital information about our whereabouts, our association, our interests, and our needs and desires to the corporations that serve us.

It is that last phrase that gets to me. We may be customers or clients; but, thanks to all those opportunities that Cole outlines, it is no longer fair to say that any corporation "serves" is customer or client base. Simply by providing all those data, we now serve them. It is almost as if, by virtue of the data they acquire, corporations now, for all intents and purposes, own us and deliberately manipulate us to generate numbers that look good on balance sheets and stockholders' reports.

I should have seen this coming. Back when I was trying to pursue "knowledge management" as a legitimate domain for research, I was first exposed to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While the ideals of CRM looked good enough on paper, allowing me to address questions of how knowledge management might leverage CRM by providing more personalized interactions with customers, once I saw the technology in use, I realized that it was pointing in the opposite direction. As I put it in a post back in 2010, it was basically a technology for "desubjectivizing" customers, transforming them from agents acting according to their personal motivations into data points to feed banks of analytical software. While others were looking for technologies that would commoditize knowledge, the game was going to those who had figured out how to commoditize their own customers!

Advances [sic] in Communication

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

Does Anyone Bother to Read What They Write?

This comes from the "Top Stories" electronic mail sent out by the San Francisco Chronicle this morning:

One possible explanation is that, in our brave new world of communicating through cell phones with our thumbs, no one pays attention to spelling any more. Another is that, due to dire financial straits, the Chronicle decided that it would make sense to take proofreading out of the workflow.

HBO Becomes Part of its Own Story (again)

HBO seems to be running up an interesting track record when it comes from taking the news as a point of departure and then becoming the news. I suppose I was first aware of it when John Oliver ran a monologue about net neutrality that concluded by encouraging viewers to make their thoughts known to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), explaining how they could do so through the Internet. It was pretty simple, since the FCC had set of a site for collecting comments; and the viewer response to Oliver was massive enough to crash that site. More recently, The Jinx led to a revival of attempts to investigate the role of Robert Durst in several unsolved murder cases.

Last night, however, Oliver raised the stakes to an unexpected height. His show had been off the air for a couple of weeks, and he had told viewers that this would be the case. Last night we found out why: Oliver had traveled to Russia to interview Edward Snowden on the issue of government surveillance. This turned out to be a major undertaking, and the show ran about fifteen minutes longer than usual. As had been the case with net neutrality, Oliver began with an extended monologue with his personal stamp of low humor aimed at bringing awareness to admittedly complex issues. There was also a fair amount of low humor in the Snowden segment, but not enough to mask when things got serious. Oliver even persistently argued that at least some of Snowden's actions could justifiably be called irresponsible, and he even managed to milk a reluctant acknowledgement from Snowden. Nevertheless, he let Snowden say his piece about the irresponsibility of current surveillance activities; and, to his credit, Snowden gave some rather good explanations for the why and how the National Security Agency could get away with doing what they did (and are probably still doing).

I suspect that the most important result of the show was that Oliver went a long way towards undermining the efforts of our government to demonize Snowden. It is clear that Snowden will never set foot in the United States as long as he runs the risk of being tried for treason and then executed. Nevertheless, his is a major voice in any debate that takes place over the complex relationship between security and privacy; and last night he demonstrated that he is given more to calm and rational speech than to the strident rants that have become so popular in our excuse for national discourse.

The net neutrality broadcast had particular impact because it ended with an action item. Last night there was also a need for action regarding a legislative stand on the content of the Patriot Act that must be reviewed by June 1. However, Oliver did not push for a write-in campaign, because it would be more difficult in this case. Therefore, the major impact of his broadcast may have been to demonstrate to the so-called "news" networks that neither Snowden's voice nor the issues he has raised can be ignored if we are to maintain even the pretense of a free society. Unfortunately, this is a matter of considerable complexity. Perhaps Oliver's next program should discuss how our country has allowed its educational system to deteriorate to a point that we no longer have the skilled minds to take on such complexity.

Nine Cheers for ABC News

It is unclear how much accuracy of content really matters in a State of the Union address. Those who hear what they wanted to hear are happy. Those who heard what they did not what to hear are unhappy. Whether or not what either side heard is actually accurate no longer seems to be part of the equation.

In such a time in which communication seems to serve little more than contention, ABC News should be cited for at least trying to subject Obama's text to serious fact checking. To do this they broke the text down into nine issues and assigned each issue to a separate fact checker, presumably one experienced enough to understand the bigger picture and assess how (if at all) what Obama said fits into that picture. Needless to say, a project of this scope is beyond anything ABC is likely to broadcast. (Given the current state of media in this country, it is probably beyond anything PBS is likely to broadcast.) Recognizing that this material is better given a close reading, rather than television viewing, ABC News then created a Web page for the full analysis, complete with hyperlinks to each of the nine issues.

BBC News has a good reputation for using their Web site to dig deeper into analyses that will not easily "fit" their broadcasting on either radio or television; and it is good to see that ABC News has made a noble attempt to adopt that practice.

Music is not Just about the Ears

One of my former colleagues reminded me today of the debate that still rages over what is the "best" bandwidth for recordings of music. I use the scare quotes because I persist in believe that, while recordings may help orient the mind when preparing to listen to an actual performance, no recording is a substitute for the experience of physical presence. To "review the bidding" on this argument, my current position comes down to two points. One is that any performance has a strong spatial factor. Even when it involves only one performer, there is still the relationship among performer, instrument, and physical setting in which the performances is taking place, all three elements of which play a role in how listening is experienced. The second is the issue of engagement. For multiple performers this involves the extent to which performance cannot take place without communicative actions among those performers. However, there are also factors of communicative actions between performer(s) and audience. Both of these points are abstracted out of the picture when a recording (even a "live" recording) is substituted for an actual performance. Arguing over whether or not a recording would benefit from wider bandwidth is a bit like arguing that the Taj Mahal could do with another window.

Fight Back Against the Politicians!

Election Day is near. So we have any number of volunteers manning telephones to tell you how you are supposed to vote. Unlike the better endowed commercial institutions, they cannot afford robocalls to invade your privacy. These are, believe it or not, flesh-and-blood individuals who think they are aiding the democratic system.

I have decided that the best way to deal with them it to teach them some manners. As soon as one of those hesitating voices says anything about what is on my ballot, I remind them that they should begin by asking:

Am I interrupting anything?

Obviously, this is not part of the script they have been given. Some are immediately flummoxed and hang up the phone (which may take away the personal gratification of you hanging up on them). Others, try to bull on ahead, in which case you can remind them of their lack of proper telephone etiquette. If they give them an argument, you can then tell them they just screwed up getting your vote. Basically, there are any number of ways to turn their invasion into your entertainment, which may be the only way to get those idiots on the right learning curve.

Is Anyone Talking to Hamas?

It is hard to tell if anything constitutes progress, even when it comes to declaring little more than a temporary ceasefire in Gaza. The latest report on the hostilities posted this morning on Al Jazeera English (a combination of wire sources and Al Jazeera's own reporters) suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry has not communicated directly with Hamas, going instead through his "counterparts" from Qatar and Turkey. That same article also quotes Haaretz, the closest thing to a "fair and balanced" (in the literal, rather than Fox, sense of those words) account of the news to be found in Israel, as saying that Kerry has presented a ceasefire proposal "to both sides," without saying whether this involved direct communication with Hamas or yet another instance of communicating through some third party.

I remember the first time there was a publicly direct meeting between Israeli and Arab leaders. Menachem Begin, regarded at the time as the most hawkish Prime Minster ever elected to that office in Israel, agreed to meet with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The meeting was hosted by President Jimmy Carter. Carter appreciated that differences can only be settled through face-to-face encounters. Is it worth asking whether Kerry, or any other member of the current Administration, has ever had a face-to-face meeting with a representative of Hamas? How about a telephone call? The BBC seems to have achieved both telephone calls on their radio service and face-to-face appearances on television. Is it the United States or Hamas (or both) that has decided to be averse to such an encounter?

A Surprising Endorsement

Regular readers, particularly of my Examiner.com articles, should know by now how often I appeal to the epithet that jazz is "chamber music by other means," occasionally alternating it with Duke Ellington's more universal proposition:

It's all music.

Today I discovered another source of support in a rather unlikely place. It appeared in an article entitled "Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship" in the second volume of the collected papers of Alfred Schutz. I have been drawn to Schutz for some time, particularly due to the phenomenological stance he takes to the study of those "social relationships." Thus, when I found a citation to a paper entitled "Making Music Together," simply knowing that Schutz was the other was enough motivation for me to find it and add it to my reading queue. Sure enough, in the process of developing his thoughts about what makes music-making a uniquely communicative experiences, I encountered the sentence:

And there is no difference in principle between the performance of a string quartet and the improvisations at a jam session of accomplished jazz players.

I have no idea to what extent Schutz himself was a practitioner when it came to making music, whether it involved performance, composition, or even my own struggles with using descriptive text to report on someone else's performance. Like the source of his inspiration, Edmund Husserl, his verbiage is often thick and elusive. He circles around his subject matter, almost like a shaman trying to psych it into submission, rather than taking a more classical Aristotelian approach to taking things apart and then reassembling them. One almost has to read him as an alternative approach to poetry (a reading strategy I have also applied to Ludwig Wittgenstein).

As a result, I suspect it will take a bit of time before I can adequately summarize just what I have been getting out of reading this essay. Ironically, the next paper in the collection is entitled "Mozart and the Philosophers." It goes without saying that this is the next one on my personal reading list! However, while reading Schutz can be an arduous journey, I have encountered enough his papers to accept that this was just how he wrote. There is nothing wrong with having to put in a bit of work before finally figuring out what a paper has been worth reading.

A Possible Insight from Genetics

The headline for an article by Helen Briggs, Health Editor for the BBC News Web site reads:

Same genes 'drive maths and reading ability'

In the body of the article, Briggs makes it clear that these results are far from conclusive. Nevertheless, they may provide a way for us to refine the questions we ask, even if the answers have yet to be resolved.

One way of looking at the results is to ask where there is commonality between the ability to read and reason with text and the ability to do the same with mathematics. Several years ago I did some tutoring; and I realized that, for this particular student, an equation was just a string a symbols whose only structure lay in the left-to-right ordering. The idea that it was necessary to "parse" the equation as part of understanding it (and, therefore, solving it) seemed to be absent. In a similar respect reading with understanding requires getting beyond the string of words to the recognition of how that string is structured.

Gerald Edelman recognized that there was a "cognitive leap" that had to be taken between the ability to identify objects and the ability to identify structural relationships among those objects. He called the first stage "perceptual categorization" and the second "presyntax." The idea that there may be genes associated with the capacity for presyntax suggests that we may also wish to ask whether or not there are also brain regions with a similar association. At the very least, scientists should be thinking about how to design experiments to explore this matter in greater depth. After all, the capacity for reading the symbols of text and mathematics should also apply to reading music notation!