“Dangerous” may be Worse Than “Stupid”

Back in November of 2013, I departed from my focus on the performing arts to reflect on the technology that allows me to do what I do. On November 13 of that year, I wrote an article entitled “Is Google Making the Next Generation Stupid?,” which was my own reflection of an article that Nicholas Carr had written for Atlantic Monthly entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” While I doubt that things have improved very much since then, I fear that we are now up against a more critical question, which probably goes beyond the repercussions of Google searches: “Is the Internet making the world a more dangerous place?”

This question was motived by an article I read this morning on the Web site for The Guardian. To be fair, I know nothing about Ben Makuch, the author of this article, given the headline “Rise in vigilante attacks in US highlight growing online DIY terrorism resources.” As readers can probably expect, there is a connection to the Internet behind this threat. This was made explicit by The 5-Eyes, described in the article as “an intelligence sharing alliance between the spy and law enforcement agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US.” The following paragraph extracted two sentences from the report to summarize the threat:

Violent extremist content is more accessible, more digestible and more impactful than ever before. Violent extremist individuals and groups share material which individuals often consume as part of their radicalisation process.

It goes without saying that such sharing is most easily achieved through electronic mail.

A classroom scene from the opera Innocence (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Mind you, I would not be able to provide background material for the articles I write about music without the Internet as a resource. Furthermore, I would hate to be labeled as a “person of interest” just because I happened to write about Innocence, Kaija Saariaho’s opera about a “violent shooting incident, which took place at an international high school.” Nevertheless, I find it hard not to worry about the extent to which accounts of violence can beget further violence, rather than deter such activities.

If the Internet has become a dangerous place, then I fear that there is little more that I can to other than to be vigilant about the dangers. I suppose that my own efforts are guided by the immortal words of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: “There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.” As a writer, I have no problems being guided by common sense; but none of us that put our efforts into writing can second-guess the reactions of our readers.

On the Entropy of Stupidity

This morning ZDNet published an informative article by Steve Ranger entitled "Encryption: In the battle between maths and politics there is only one winner." This is a piece that offers an impressive amount of information concerned with the technology of encryption; but, sadly, it is one of those pieces that embodies Anna Russell's description of having been written by a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts." The problem is that, where politicians are concerned, expertise is rarely, if ever, the deciding factor.

The result is that Ranger got his headline wrong, simply because he does not appreciate what politics can do. Perhaps because he is based in the United Kingdom, he may not have heard of the powers of our country's state legislators. Ultimately, they have turned out to be even less enlightened than those Papal Inquisitors who defied Galileo. Having gone to high school in a suburb of Philadelphia, I could easily see the absurdity of the Scopes Monkey Trial; but long after that trial had become distant history, there was at least one state legislature that passed a law declaring pi to be equal to 22/7; and I seem to recall another that declared it equal to 3!

Because those who have devoted themselves to the value of mathematics and science as tools see truth as an objective concept, they tend to disregard the relevance of social factors. Thus, while social theorists have no trouble seeing reality as a social construct, mathematicians find such a proposition to be thoroughly absurd. Ironically, those of us who look beyond the objective can persist in believing that reality can be a social construct with the same certainty that Galileo persisted in believing that the earth moved!

None of this should trouble mathematicians to any great degree, because, so the most part, the social world does not care what they do. As long as calculations that deal with mortgages and taxes (for example) work out reliably, there is no reason to worry about what a theorem of abstract algebra does or does not tell us. Encryption, on the other hand, is very much a product of the objective truths of abstract algebra; and it is very unlikely that the sorts of politicians who like to monkey around with the value of pi are likely to get very far in a book like Cryptography for Dummies. (One wonders how far they would get with the Hacking for Dummies volume!)

So, yes, in Ranger's "battle," there is, indeed, only one winner. However, that winner is "political reality," rather than "objective reality." The more serious question is not who the winner is but how we, as a society, can live with the power of politics to trump objectivity, even when serious issues, such as the many uses of digital technology, are involved.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s Just-so-Stories about Current Music-Making

At the beginning of this past February, University of California Press released the book Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. The first thing a visitor to the Amazon.com Web page for this book is likely to see will probably be the following sentence:

Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era.

This turns out to be a prescient symptom of what anyone who commits to reading this book is likely to identify sooner rather than later, a plethora of inaccuracies that most likely are the product of the deadly embrace of poor writing and poor editing. Using that Web page as a point of departure, the inquiring mind will quickly discover that Seth Brodsky’s book From 1989 or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious jumped that gun by about a week or two, which might be attributed to statistical insignificance, were it not for the fact that Brodsky’s book was also published by University of California Press! However, those interested in a wider margin will find it in Jonathan Kramer’s Postmodern Music Postmodern Listening, which was first released in hardcover by Bloomsbury Academic in August of 2016. Furthermore, most of the book had been written before Kramer died in 2004 and the task fell to Robert Carl to edit a readable text.

None of this should be surprising when one considers Rutherford-Johnson’s primary thesis, which is that the prodigious innovations of technology that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the emergence of a “music culture” heavily dominated by the marketplace. Note that Rutherford-Johnson never explicitly mentions that the “fall” of his title refers to the Berlin Wall. Indeed, he never really says very much about any fall. I ran a few spot checks with some young people who are just beginning to try to rev up a career in music. I showed them the cover of the book and asked if they could make the connection between the year 1989 and the word “fall” in the title. None of them could.

That thoroughly unscientific test discloses an issue about the dominant marketplace that Rutherford-Johnson never considers. Jürgen Habermas’ magisterial The Theory of Communicative Action includes a lengthy chapter in which the author pulls together a “diagnosis of the times” based on multiple sources of the writings of Max Weber. His analysis concludes that a capitalist society whose value system is based only on market value is fated to suffer two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom.

This is an insight that reaches far beyond the study of social science as an academic discipline. One has only to read Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original to appreciate how much freedom Monk lost after he signed with Columbia. As to loss of meaning, Rutherford-Johnson’s book can easily stand as a case study.

Referring again to the Amazon Web page, we read that “Rutherford-Johnson is a London-based music journalist and critic.” From this we can assume that he has written and probably continues to write about music in great abundance. However, the text of this book seems to indicate that his writing is, for the most part, based on artifacts. Those artifacts may very well include both audio and video recordings, as well as scores and other text documents by and about the composers covered in his book. However, there are few, if any signs, that he has ever written about the immediate experience of listening to a performance of any of the works covered in this book.

I do not make this accusation lightly. Thanks to performing groups like the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and a generous number of venues in this city which one may visit to go out on the “bleeding edge” of adventurous music making, I discovered that I had attended performances of more of the works discussed in this book than I had expected. In almost every one of those cases, I found it hard to believe that Rutherford-Johnson had enjoyed the benefit of a similar experience, leading me to believe that he was relying more on text sources (inevitably written for promotional purposes) than on the actual acts of listening. This left me questioning what he said about any of the composers examined in this book, hence my conclusion about loss of meaning.

Unfortunately, one does not have to dive deep into the repertoire of performances to find evidence of sloppy editing. My favorite blooper comes in the final chapter when Rutherford-Johnson confuses Florestan, the alter ego of Robert Schumann, with the heroic political prisoner in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio. One would have thought that anyone used to editing texts about classical music would have been able to spot this a mile away. Guess not.

Most likely this book as an unfortunate case of an author biting off more than he could chew. It would be interesting to see a collection of his published reviews. I would hope that he has the chops to provide coherent and readable accounts of his own first-person experiences. Trying to translate those experiences into some kind of hypothesis about a new world order, on the other hand, is definitely not in his wheelhouse.

Robert Taylor and Silicon Valley Myopia

Reading Steven Musil's obituary for Robert Taylor on the CNET Web site was a sobering experiences. Having worked on the fringes of the Internet even before that label was hung on it and having followed activities at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center dating from not long after the place was founded, Taylor's name was familiar to me, even if I never crossed paths with him. Ironically, though, when I finally found myself working in Palo Alto, it seemed almost as if he had fallen off the map.

For example, it seems as if Douglas Engelbart always managed to secure himself some turn in the ongoing buzz, even if that turf was relatively narrow. On the other hand, even though I was one of the early adapters of the Alta Vista search engine, it never occurred to me to associate it with Taylor. In many ways Taylor was the quintessential victim of Silicon Valley myopia. Silicon Valley would never have been what it was without Taylor's contributions. Nevertheless, there was a period about twenty years ago marked by an outpouring of papers about "the Silicon Valley phenomenon;" and Taylor's name never showed up in them.

I suspect one of the reasons that news of Taylor's death triggered my thoughts is that it has a remote connection to the book I am currently reading, Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989. I realize that one of the reasons I am so unhappy with the book is that, regardless of how well or poorly it is written, its thesis drives me up the wall. Put as succinctly as possible, the author seems to be making the case that, where music-making practices are concerned, promotion will trump achievement every time. (Yes, I chose that noun deliberately, because there is probably a corollary applicable to politics!)

Perhaps it was because of his connection to the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that Taylor did not have to obsess over promotion. However, one consequence of his work was that there were more people trying to get a slice of the funding pie while the pie itself did not grow accordingly. Of course where music is concerned, there was not much pie in the first place; but it does seem that the world the Internet made is one in which the idea of fair compensation has atrophied to a level that makes it barely recognizable. So one can appreciate that promotion may be more important than it once was, but it is hard to avoid anticipating a reduction ad absurdum when promotion is so important that it can be achieved even when one does not have anything to promote!

SFS to Give a Benefit Concert for the Bay Area LGBTQ Community

Next month the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, will be making its next East Coast tour. That tour was to have included two concerts in North Carolina. However, as was reported last December, these plans were made before the North Carolina state legislature passed into law a bill informally known as “HB2,” whose full title 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 has come to be known more casually as the “bathroom bill,” since it dictates that the use of such facilities is determined by birth certificate, rather than any more personal sense of gender identity.

Reaction outside of the state of North Carolina was heavily negative and included the National Basketball Association pulling the 2017 All-Star Game out of the city of Charlotte. This past December is when SFS officially decided to join the protest by cancelling the two performances scheduled to begin the tour at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. This means that SFS will be able to push back the date of its departure from San Francisco; and it will use the available time to present Symphony Pride, a benefit concert in support of the Bay Area LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) community.

The program has been prepared to acknowledge the impact of LGBTQ composers both on the Broadway stage and in the concert hall. Audra McDonald will appear as guest artist singing show tunes by Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, John Kander (working with lyricist Fred Ebb), and others. McDonald will also serve as narrator in a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” Other composers whose works will be performed will be Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Meredith Monk, and John Cage. The program will conclude with the concluding movement of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, which was scheduled to be performed in its entirety at one of the Chapel Hill concerts.

This concert will take place on Tuesday, April 4, beginning at 8 p.m. Tickets are available in the Second Tier for $25, and a few seats are still available in the Orchestra for $50. They may be purchased online through the event page for this program on the SFS Web site, by calling 415-864-6000, or by visiting the Box Office in Davies Symphony Hall, whose entrance is on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Trio 3 Performs as a Trio on Their Latest Intakt Release

This Friday Intakt Records will release Visiting Texture, its latest recording of the adventurous group that calls itself Trio 3. As usual, Amazon.com has already created the Web page for this item and is processing pre-orders. The group’s members were three of the most adventurous jazz musicians during the second half of the last century. I first wrote about them on Examiner.com; but, since that article has been “purged” from the Web, I feel it appropriate to review their credentials again.

The saxophonist is Oliver Lake, a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet, known not only for its pursuit of African jazz but also for shaking up the rhythms of funk with the influences of free jazz. The drummer is Andrew Cyrille, no stranger to free jazz, particularly through his extended work with Cecil Taylor. Finally, bass is taken by Reggie Workman, a former member of the John Coltrane Quartet, who participated in the Impulse! recordings Africa/Brass and Impressions. Workman also worked with Lake on the 1993 Black Saint recording Edge-ing.

Curiously, this is the first studio recording the group has made as a trio. My first encounter with them was the album Refraction – Breakin’ Glass, which they recorded with pianist Jason Moran and was released in August of 2013. Then, in August of 2014, Intakt released Wiring, on which they worked with another pianist, Vijay Iyer. I previously described both of these sessions as “intergenerational;” and they both made for very absorbing listening.

Like the past albums, the tracks on this album reflect a fair amount of collaboration in making the music. Leadership is shared across all three members; and one of the tracks, “Composite,” cites all three of them as composers. However, one of the tracks, “A Girl Named Rainbow,” is an Ornette Coleman composition. Lake never worked with Coleman, but there are signs throughout this album that he was a keen listener. This is not to say that this is an example of Lake flattering through imitation, but it might be fair to say that Coleman’s aggressive blowing was more of an influence on Lake than was Coltrane’s somewhat more cerebral approach.

The nice thing about the collaborative work that Trio 3 has performed is that it shows a sincere interest in passing the torch. From that point of view, it is through Visiting Texture that listeners who were not around fifty years ago may get a better sense of what torch is being passed. I have no problem confessing that it is hard for me to listen to this group without feeling nostalgic, but readers of this site know that I worry a good deal about our becoming a culture that is willfully ignorant of history. The fact is that historical foundations are just as important in listening to jazz, particularly when it involves styles that were called “avant-garde” at one time or another, as they are in sorting out past centuries of the classical repertoire. I thus find myself strongly advocating this album in the name of “context-building” in the hope that at least some of my readers will recognize the value of that context!

Why I Continue to Watch BBC News Faithfully

I have been following BBC World Service News on television ever since the service was added as a (then) Comcast channel. Today I was reminded why. They concluded the half-hour news segment I just finished watching with a featured about President Donald Trump regularly spending his weekends at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The report explained that the resort had been the honeymoon site for Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, then adding, presumably as an example of equal prestige, that Charlie Sheen once attended a bat mitzvah there. Somehow, that second example reminded me that there will always be an England; and, when it comes to the rich and famous, the BBC will always have its unique set of priorities!

Hearing, Listening, and Ducks: Tracking Down the Source

Yesterday I wrote about my frustration with Google in trying to track down the source of an often cited quote by Igor Stravinsky:

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

This morning it occurred to be that a source of that frustration may have been my decision to use Google, rather than Google Scholar; but it turned out that this purported “scholarly tool” was even less useful than “mainstream” Google. As a result, my only recourse was to follow through on the promise I made to go over to the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) in search of Stephen Walsh’s book, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971. As is frequently the case with scholarship (at least as I was trained to practice it, realizing that it may well be pretty much a lost art by now), this turned out to be a good-news-bad-news affair. Fortunately, the good news significantly outweighed the bad.

Before getting into the specifics, however, I need to observe that being directed to Walsh’s book turned out to be a matter of dumb luck. For those who did not follow yesterday’s narrative, I only learned about it when I added “Craft” to the search keys for the online SFPL catalog, assuming that the text came from one of the many conversations that Stravinsky had with Robert Craft that were subsequently transcribed and published. In fact Craft had nothing to do in this particular case; but, because Walsh’s book is so thorough, Craft’s name appears in it with great frequency!

The text actually came about thanks to Deborah Ishlon, publicity director for Columbia Records. Columbia saw Stravinsky as a “property” and was determined to have him direct, or at least supervise, the recording of all of his compositions. This resulted in a fancy box of vinyls entitled Igor Stravinsky 1882–1971: The Edition (a rather arrogant subtitle, when you think of it, particularly since it was far from complete), which eventually found its way to a 22-CD collection. This was followed in October of 2015 by a 57-CD box set entitled Igor Stravinsky: The Complete Columbia Album Collection. Both of these were notorious for prioritizing the visual over the auditory; and there have been sources that have suggested that Columbia’s treatment of Stravinsky was pretty much on the same level as how the label handled Thelonious Monk … a road paved with good intentions that led you-know-where!

The good news was that Ishlon was also interested in capturing Stravinsky’s thoughts about making music. Thus, according to Walsh, she ended up tape recording a conversation of her own with Stravinsky (without any appearance of Robert Craft). Walsh observed that Stravinsky probably informed Ishlon in advance of the questions he wanted to answer. Nevertheless, Walsh was struck that the text consisted entirely of Stravinsky speaking English, in contrast to the Poetics of Music lectures he had given at Harvard, which had to be translated.

According to the footnote that Walsh provided, the transcript of Stravinsky’s encounter with Ishlon now resides at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (foundation) in Basle. It is unclear just how long this document is, but Walsh’s book reproduces six paragraphs. These are worth reading in their entirety, at least for my own benefit, if not for the curiosity of others:

To be a good listener you must acquire a musical culture, as in literature. You must be familiar with the history and development of music, you must listen. The person with the subscription ticket for concerts, he is not necessarily a musically cultured person. He is musical only because the music is performed in front of him. To receive music you have to open the ears and wait, not for Godot, but for the music; you must feel that it is something you need. Some let the ear be present and they make no effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

The larger the audience, the worse. I have never attached much importance to the collective mind and collective opinion. You can imagine what collective opinion looks like. Especially in America, they like to speak and work with masses. But music is not a moral activity, to render the masses more happy. Music cannot deal with such things. Music never was for the masses. I am not against masses. But please do not confuse the value of the music which is addressed from ear to ear with the value of music addressed from one ear to a million ears. That doesn’t mean for millions, but for each of the millions. Don’t make the mistake of merely multiplying.

No audiences are good anywhere, but the major level, the best musical level, is that of the Germans. They have a higher level of listeners because of their musical history and musical culture. You can think how it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The people who listened to music were much more learned; music was for them a language which they knew well. They knew not only by passive listening but by active playing. Everybody played—harpsichords, organs, flutes, violins. They had the habit of music played with their own hands, not only by ears. Now we hear music by the gramophone. This gives maybe more people a connection with music, but the result is not the same because the passive is not the active.

Accustomcy to music is a fact with which we have to count. We think that very difficult works like all the last works of Beethoven are better understood now. No, people are simply more accustomed to them. It isn’t that they understand better. People are not shocked by dissonances. Otherwise, why should we write them? And shocking really means striking. To be merely shocking is vulgar. It could not be the legal goal merely to be shocking. Music should be striking.

A composer thinks about the audience, but not primarily. If you think about audience, you don’t think about your work. You think about a reaction which will come from certain things. If the audience is yourself, that is quite different. To be yourself the audience is difficult; it is difficult to multiply yourself. To become an audience by imaginary multiplication does not give you new value.

Where is music going? How can we see the direction? Even going very high we can see very little. The higher we go, the less we see, because we are far away. If we are very close we see only a part of the mountain. We can judge about some facts. But to draw a conclusion is another thing. We can never be absolutely right.

That pretty much covers the good news side of the day’s efforts.

However, Walsh’s footnote also specified that a “substantial excerpt” of this text was included in Memories and Commentaries, a book published by Faber and Faber in 2002 that lists both Stravinsky and Craft as authors (in that order). This is basically a “greatest hits” volume of material that had first appeared in the five books that Craft compiled based on his conversations with Stravinsky: Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1958), Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), Dialogues (1982), and Themes and Conclusion (1972). Note that the title Memories and Commentaries appears twice, each identified by a different abbreviation in Walsh’s bibliography. The abbreviation in Walsh’s footnote refers to the 2002 edition, but the page number he provides makes no sense. Unfortunately, that was the volume I found on the shelf at the San Francisco Public Library. I now have the card catalog number for the 1960 volume and will have to make another trip to find it (hopefully without having to walk through the rain)! Meanwhile, having the larger body of text that was excerpted for inclusion in Memories and Commentaries is definitely a step in the right direction!

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.

Veretski Pass Offers up the Jewish Side of the Holiday Season

Seasonal programming in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church continued last night with Veretski Pass making their third appearance. This is a trio that brings the husband-and-wife couple of Joshua Horowitz and Cookie Segelstein together with Stuart Brotman. The program listed each of them as playing multiple instruments. However, Segelstein seemed to stick with her violin for the entire evening, while Horowitz played only a chromatic button accordion. Brotman took all the bass work with a basy, basically a cello tuned like a bass that can be fitted with a strap, allowing the performer to play while standing.

The group is named after a pass through the Carpathian Mountains located near the western border of the Ukraine. Their music draws upon the shtetl culture of towns and villages that served as centers of Jewish life across Central and Eastern Europe but failed to survive the Second World War. This brings to mind the klezmer style; but, as Segelstein said when Veretski Pass gave its first (I think) Old First Concerts performance, “This is not your grandmother’s klezmer. It is her grandmother’s klezmer.” The Veretski Pass repertoire is the product of considerable ethnomusicological field work and analysis; but, in spite of those academic credentials, the performances are consistently energetic and passionately enthusiastic.

Much of last night’s program was based on the group’s most recent recording, Poyln: a Gilgul (which translates as “Poland: A Metamorphosis”), which was released by Golden Horn Records a little over a year ago. While Segelstein provided some background about the music and its relationship to Jewish culture, she did not make announcements about specific compositions. One reason was probably because each individual performance amounted to a suite of a variety of different tunes, often arising through some very abrupt shifts and frequent endings that felt as if they were breaking off in midstream. Segelstein explained that such a performance practice was not “authentic.” Particularly when the music was for dancing, a single tune could go on at great length; and satisfying the dancers was more important that the musicians’ seeking out new paths for invention. In other words the very setting of Old First was “inauthentic,” simply because this was not sit-still-and-listen music.

Nevertheless, listening to a recording like Poyln definitely gets the juices flowing, even if one is not at some festive ceremony or in a dance hall. Listening to the musicians themselves has an even stronger impact, because the listener is now “in the thick” of the spontaneity of music-making. Unlike the Village Road Trio, which played at the Hotel Rex this past Wednesday evening and involves similar instrumentation, the Veretski Pass musicians do not play from any form of “charts.” The only paper on stage was for the crib sheets Segelstein used to discuss the background for the music they played. One might also say that Veretski Pass’ repertoire is “music of the flesh,” raw in its sonorous qualities, rather than the more formal (even if still lively) “music of the spirit” that emerged when composers like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály repurposed the results of their ethnomusicological field studies into music for concert settings.

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.

East Meets West at San Francisco Opera

Yesterday afternoon in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the third of six performances of the world premiere production of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber. Sheng was born in Shanghai in 1955 and only came to live in the United States in 1982. That means that he lived through the entirety of the Cultural Revolution. Once in the United States, Sheng was mentored by Leonard Bernstein; and another one of his teachers was Chou Wen-Chung, a protégé of Edgard Varèse and still a leading authority on the performance of Varèse’s music.

While Sheng’s recent influences have been Western, Dream of the Red Chamber is based on one of what are called the Four Great Classical Novels of China. It was written in the eighteenth century during the Qing Dynasty. Its author, Cao Xueqin, did not live to complete it, having died after completing 80 chapters. At this stage the book was already one of the longest novels in world literature; and it was completed when the publisher Gao E worked with Cheng Weiyuan to add another 40 chapters.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is its dual nature. On the surface it is a realistic account of how a well-to-do family tries to maintain and then loses its social status and wealth. The Red Chamber is that portion of a large mansion in which only women are allowed. On the other hand the first word of the title suggests a metaphysical dimension, questioning whether the management and loss of wealth may, in the grander scheme of things, be nothing more than a passing illusion.

Sheng’s opera, whose two acts require somewhat less than three hours of performance time (including an intermission), has a libretto (which Sheng wrote with David Henry Hwang) that clearly distills a single basic plot line from the vast scope of the original text. However, that narrative is framed by a Prologue and coda that honor the metaphysical perspective. This is no mean feat, but both the synopsis printed in the SFO program book and the projected titles provide a clear account of a narrative that abounds with passions and deceptions. Compared to the sorts of convoluted plots one finds in both bel canto and Wagnerian operas, there is a remarkable level of effectively basic storytelling in Sheng’s opera.

Given that the libretto itself was written in English, one might ask fairly whether this is an American opera or a Chinese opera. Sheng has said (several times in my personal experience) that he likes to regard himself as 100% American and 100% Chinese. That is actually a characteristically Oriental perspective. Back when I worked at a research laboratory funded by Fuji Xerox, one of my Japanese colleagues explained that there are Asian systems of logic that reject Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. This is the principle that any assertion must be either true or false; and there is no “in between” (middle). My colleague explained that there were Asian logics in which an assertion could be true, false, both true and false, or neither true nor false. In those non-Aristotelian terms, one can, indeed, be both 100% American and 100% Chinese; so Sheng was most likely interested in more than simply turning a clever phrase.

From a musical point of view, however, his score is very much a product of Western influences. While some of its grander sonorities may show signs of Bernstein’s mentorship, Sheng’s approaches to counterpoint involve far more elaborate textures; and the superposition of his pitches are rife with dissonant ambiguities when considered in terms of tonal harmony. Bernstein never got close to those unknown regions; but, by the same count, no one would mistake Sheng’s ambiguities from the approaches to dissonance taken by either Varese or Chou. On the other hand the acute listener would be forgiven for recognizing suggestions of other works of twentieth-century modernism that seem to pop up in Sheng’s rich textures. Possible examples may well be excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (which is also set in China) and some of the ideas of harmonic progression that Alban Berg deployed in his Lulu opera.

Beyond matters of overall texture, Sheng also confronts both performers and listeners with highly demanding vocal lines that have a strong preference for both very high registers and wide intervallic leaps. Most impressive in taking on these vocal demands was soprano Pureum Jo, making her SFO debut in the leading female role of Dai Yu, the flower transformed into a human form to consummate her 3000-year relationship with the stone that sustained her with water, brought to mortal life in the form of Bao Yu (tenor Yijie Shi, also making his SFO debut). Indeed, all the vocalists tended to be uniformly secure in negotiating Sheng’s highly elegant atonal arabesques, often conveying more through the music than they could to the phrases of text that, occasionally, would be distorted by musical phrasing that disrupted the semantic flow.

To be fair, however, much of the text amounts to little more than relatively flat prose. This is surprisingly effective, however, perhaps because, beneath all the exorbitant trappings of the wealthy family at the heart of the opera’s narrative, there rests little more than the shallow banality of day-to-day matters. It might then be fair to say that the heart of this opera lies in the tension between the opulence of the setting, embodied as much in the orchestral writing as in the elaborate sets designed by Tim Yip, and the ordinariness of the mere mortals that play out the core narrative. Stan Lai appeared to appreciate this contrast in his approach to staging, while George Manahan, conducting the SFO Orchestra, was always there to match his musical resources to the visual splendor.

The result is that there is more than enough to enjoy in this intricate interplay of both musical and visual elements with a narrative that, itself, involves the interplay of the supernatural with the ordinariness of life on earth. Unlike some of the European “epic” operas, this is an experience that is likely to leave new impressions with each subsequent encounter. Six is a modest, but still reasonable, number of performances of this new work for a single season; but, on the longer scale of time, this is an opera that is likely to benefit as much (if not more) from subsequent reflection as from the immediacy of “first contact.”

Why They Still Hate Us

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

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

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

Trump's Damage has Already been Done

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

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

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

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

Speaking Truth to Power is no Guarantee that Power will Comprehend

This past Tuesday James Gleick put up a fascinating post on the NYR Daily blog. His title was "What Libraries Can (Still) Do;" and it amounted to a valuable analysis of how the resource of a public library could be qualitatively different from that of a computer connected to the Internet, emphasizing the positive value of that difference. He then signed off with a zinger of a punch line:

The masters of Internet commerce—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple—sometimes talk as though they’re building a new society, where knowledge is light-speed and fungible, but a marketplace is not a society.

This allowed him to hit squarely on the head a nail in desperate need of being hit. Unfortunately, that desperation has a lot to do with the prevailing ignorance among those "masters of Internet commerce." We have known for some time that the movers and shakers in the world of the Internet have been blithely ignorant of the social world. Many of them might even attribute their success to that ignorance. The bottom line is that they are so fixated on the marketplace that they believe that the very concept of society is outmoded, if not downright counterproductive. Thus, whenever social disruption rears its head, whether it involves death threats, identity theft, or just plain harassment, the "masters of Internet commerce" turn a blind eye and hold to their faith that the workings of the marketplace will take care of everything. Unfortunately, the result goes beyond the disappearance of society (and, along with it, any viable sense of the concept of governance) from the Internet. Because the Internet is so ubiquitous, society no longer signifies in the world at large except among terrorist groups for whom cultures that have neglected both society and governance can now be recognized as easy targets.

Follow the Money to the Man Cave

CNET News reporter Max Taves provided an interesting summary of venture capital investments that were concluded over the past week. I treat this as highly recommended reading matter. I further recommend that every reader review the entire list to look for any sort of common trends. My personal interpretation is that the current generation of venture capitalists is being drawn to self-indulgence in a big way. This is not just a shift from products that do useful things to services that allow the idle rich to be more idle. Rather, it seems to be a calculated response to analytical results suggesting that the fastest way to quick profit is through the exploitation of infantilism. Mind you, this amounts to a corollary of the principle that any form of consumerism involves the exploitation of the potential for infantile behavior. So it should be no surprise that, if you want to follow a venture capitalist's money, the path will probably lead you to the man cave.

Is Technology Innovation Oblivious to Crime?

Here in San Francisco the latest police blotter item involves a woman who managed to steal at least 76 Zipcars over the course of a six weeks. Zipcar was relatively early among those technology-driven innovations that would rid us of all the discomforts associated with car rental, particularly when short-term usage was all that was involved. It is hard from the only innovation to go south in equally innovative ways. Consider all the criminal activity (including assault, stalking, and theft) that has emerged from the "sharing economy" philosophy of drivers being compensated for sharing space in their cars. Of course ugly consequences are not unique to the present decade (he said, with vivid memory of the first time spam circulated on Usenet).

I recently attended a San Francisco Opera press conference at which I was able to prompt some comments about operas based on historical events out of director Francesca Zambello. I found the experience enlightening enough to write an article about it on my Examiner.com national site. Not one to mince words, Zambello unleashed a beautiful take-away quote:

History teaches us lessons; we just don’t always listen.

I am not saying that the technology sector is more deaf to history than any other major segment of our economic structure. Only a few years have elapsed; but my guess is that those obsessed with seeking out innovation in finance have long forgotten This Time Is Different, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. I suspect it all comes down to the fact that a cool new idea will always trump any lesson from history, particularly when the lesson brings bad news. It is more profitable to believe that you are making a change for the better, rather that providing human nature with new opportunities to make things worse.

Bobby Jindal's "Parlor Games"

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

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

How did we get where we are?

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

The Best and the Brightest May Not Be

Yesterday afternoon Tracy Seipel put up an article on the Web site for the San Jose Mercury News reporting that Stanford University is investigating allegations of cheating. This was apparently announced by University Provost John Etchemendy last Tuesday, but I assume that Seipel article was delayed to allow time to research conditions at other schools. Sure enough, the article also provides data points for Dartmouth College, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University. It also includes an account of a study by a Stanford Professor of Statistics showing that between 40% and 86% of students reported having cheated while at college. Personally, I find that a rather wide window for a statistical inference; but there may still be cause to believe that something is rotten in the groves of academe.

Two Etchemendy quotes are worth considering:

In violating academic integrity, they are cheating themselves of the very core of our mission -- the process of learning and discovery -- as well as risking severe consequences.

…

But with the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture, students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.

Regarding the first, I can only repeat what I have previously observed, that ours has become a culture that no longer includes the word "consequences" in its working vocabulary. As to the second, I would argue that technology has not fostered a "collaborative culture." Rather, it has fostered a culture of appropriation. This is a culture that involves little more than instant gratification for the individual. It used to be that begging, borrowing, and stealing were the alternatives to hard work in achieving such gratification. Now we can add searching with Google to the list, since the prevailing mantra seems to be that it is not stealing if you can find it on the Internet.

As a sidebar I have to say that reading Etchemendy's name tweaked some memories, but I could not bring them into focus. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue. His entry there reminded me that, with Jon Barwise (who died in 2000), he wrote the book, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity. That seems to color the current situation with just the right shade of irony.

Conferring on Extremism

As a refugee from the world of high technology research, I must confess that I have a rather jaundiced view of conferences. It has struck me that such events have always been, first and foremost, an excuse for travel. When the excuse was to parade recent activities, I came to accept it as tolerable and even set the standard that if, over the course of half a week away from my desk, I had encountered one result worthy of attention, then the trip was a good one.

More insidious, however, are those conferences that are concerned more with policy than with results. These are an excuse for little more than jawboning. They may conclude with an agenda of action items, but action rarely emerges from such an agenda. As a result I was far more than a little skeptical when I read about the White House hosting a special conference on terrorism.

Having read Marwan Bishara's editorial this morning on the Al Jazeera English Web site, I was glad to see that I was not alone in my thoughts. Bishara was perceptive enough to look beyond all the usual gratuitous observations that were uttered and turn, instead, to what was not said. Furthermore, I chose to concentrate his enumeration of "sins of omission" on the conference's host, President Barack Obama. Here is the basic summary of that enumeration:

Obama said nothing about how proxy and other western wars have created the fertile grounds for the type of extremism that has been evolving and spreading in the Arab and Muslim world.

How the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan coupled with US/Saudi intervention on the side of the mujahideen led to the creation of al-Qaeda.

Or, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, coupled with Iran's interference, prepared the ground for the creation and expansion of ISIL.

Nevertheless, I think there is a broader view, which first came on my radar during the early heady days of the Arab Spring. It is not enough to observe that the world, as a whole, has lapsed into a "forever war" mentality. We need to home in on how that mentality is being sustained.

What we learned from the protests that arose during the Arab Spring (protests that, it is important to observe, extended to include the educated young citizens of Israel) was that the current generation of youth, particularly those who have enjoyed a rich education, is desperately concerned that they have no future in the world as it is being run by its current leaders. While Corita Kent believed that war was not healthy for children and other living beings, that slender minority that controls the lion's share of the world's wealth sees great value in war, particularly as a solution to providing for those of the "other class," condemning them to be little more than "cannon fodder" for the many new generations of cannons that provide a major chuck of revenue to the moneyed class.

In also is amusing to see how, through control of the consciousness industry, that class has tried to cloak its elite status with a smoke screen. The recent report about the top 1% controlling more wealth than the remaining 99% overlooked just how much of that top 1% has almost no control at all. That upper tier needs to be narrowed down to 0.1%, if not 0.01% before we can really appreciate just how unevenly wealth has been distributed.

In my "other life" of writing about music, I have recently been listening to a new recording of the songs composed by Claude Debussy. This last of these songs, for a single unaccompanied voice, is a Christmas carol for homeless children. Debussy wrote this in 1915 when Europe was being torn apart by war. Who speaks for the homeless today?