Taking Issue with Alex Ross (or Jed Pearl)

Yesterday I finished reading “The Cults of Wagner,” the review that Jed Perl wrote about Alex Ross’ book Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music for The New York Review of Books. Given that the book runs to 769 pages, Perl covered a lot of ground in his article. I would even say that his coverage was thorough enough that I can probably pass of reading the book itself. That said, there is one point where I would like to take issue; and, to be fair, I am not sure whether the issue is with Ross or Perl.

It concerns a single sentence:

What Ross believes, simply put, is that since life is disorderly, then art must be disorderly, too.

Given the argument that Perl develops across the paragraph that concludes with this sentence, I am inclined to believe that he has provided an accurate account of one of Ross’ beliefs. Regardless of the source, however, I am not sure there is much meaning in the premise that “art must be disorderly.” Indeed, I am not sure that there is much sense that can be derived from attempts to hang adjectives and adverbs on the noun “art.” In other words I have my doubts that art is anything and that it would be more appropriate to say that art provides grounds for experience. For those wondering, the answer is that this is not an original idea; rather it is one I picked up from John Dewey, specifically from the book Art as Experience.

What, then, is the “experiencing of art?” I would suggest that it is not that different from any other form of experience. The function of “mind” is basically to provide order to all the disorder that bombards us through stimuli. William James called this the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals, which “mind” then tries to register as configurations of objects (often succeeding in unexpected ways that lead to phenomena such as optical illusions). No two minds need necessarily conceive of the same objects; but, at a much higher cognitive level, we have language to negotiate any disagreements. So it is that Ross turns to language to bring order to the disorderly stimuli created during a performance of Richard Wagner’s music and Perl does the same with the disorderly stimuli created while reading Ross’ book.

For some time I have been interested in those processes that enable bringing order to disorder. As I have written in the past, one of my primary sources has been a book by Friedrich Hayek entitled The Sensory Order, which seems to have had a serious impact on two researchers that have influenced me significantly: Marvin Minsky for his work on artificial intelligence and Gerald Edelman for his efforts to model what he called perceptual categorization. My guess is that neither Ross nor Perl have gone down either of these paths. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the “experiencing of art” has more to do with the biological substrate of experience itself than it does with any properties of “art itself,” philosophical, biological, or otherwise.

This is not an injunction to advocate writing about making music or listening to it in terms of a biological substrate. Nevertheless, to go back to William James, both making music and listening are instances of experience. Unless we can anchor our thoughts to viable (if not necessarily valid) hypotheses about “how we experience,” we might as well just be juggling symbolic structures (such as the sentences we write) the same way we do when we try to solve a crossword puzzle!

Another Division into Three Worlds

One of the major repercussions of my personal efforts to make sense of the writings of Jürgen Habermas has been my ongoing effort to recognize distinctions between the objective, subjective, and social worlds and to avoid cross-world confusions. With my more recent reading of Friedrich Hayek's The Sensory Order, I now also find myself thinking in terms of distinctions between the physical and phenomenal worlds. However, when I was recently reviewing for a friend some past work I had done in geology, I realized that this was only a portion of another more general three-world view, which Hayek actually recognized in The Sensory Order but never pursued in any great depth. Hayek recognized that the "sensory order" we impose on our phenomenal world is a product of observation; but he also appreciated that our capacity for observation is often enhanced by measuring instruments, such as a telescope or microscope. I wish to argue that, as our technologies for building such measuring instruments has grown more sophisticated, measurement itself has achieved the status of a "world" of its own that mediates between the physical and phenomenal worlds.

This is, by no means, an original insight. In retrospect I would have to say that I was first exposed to it through one of the programs in Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man series on PBS, which was followed not much later by a Nova program entitled "Through Animal Eyes." In both cases the point was the same, observation depends on equipment, whether that equipment is biological or mechanical.

I suspect that one of the reasons I am now thinking in these terms is that it is relevant to the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico. I have given this problem considerable thought, because some of the best years of my career as a researcher took place at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I was there as part of a team that was basically concerned with providing Schlumberger with better software, and the specifications for that software had a lot to do with the way in which Schlumberger ran its business. The "core competency" (as we say now) of Schlumberger was measurement technology; and the value of that competency to the oil business still cannot be overestimated. After all the most important part of the oil business concerns what is below the surface of the earth, which makes it even more removed from our capacity for observation than much of what we see through telescopes and microscopes. The Schlumberger brothers began processes of invention that I assume continue to the present day that involved harnessing principles of electromagnetism, radiation, acoustics, and other disciplines of modern physics to develop instrumentation that would tell us what was underground. Some of that equipment could be used to identify where you wanted to try to drill a well, but most of it involved measuring devices dropped into the bore of the well as part of the drilling process.

The signals provided by those instruments could be called "observables" only through some stretch of the imagination. One could not, at an intuitive level, "see" what was there through the mediation of this equipment. Thus a major part of the oil business revolved around the analysis of measurement data for interpretations that told you things like where the oil was and what you would have to do to bring it to the surface. In Hayek's terms this means that analysts had to bring "sensory order" to the abundance of data provided by the measuring equipment. In theory that order could be grounded in the physical theory of how the equipment worked. To put it simplistically, the underlying physics would explain everything. Unfortunately, this was not necessarily the case for a variety of reasons. Some of the measurements were based on statistical sampling, and you did not always know whether or not the samples were representative. In other cases the behavior of the equipment might depend on physical properties of the earth that had not been anticipated. Thus, there was an inevitable disconnect between the physical world and the "measurement world."

This was probably the setting in which I first learned that not everything could be reduced to understanding the equipment. Sometimes you also had to understand the behavior of those responsible for doing the interpretation itself. It was how I discovered workplace anthropology before realizing that it was an intellectual discipline. The good news is that my decision to shift the focus of my research from the "measurement objects" to the "interpreting subjects" was, for the most part, well received by those subjects. These were guys who enjoyed talking about what they did, primarily because it was the most reliable means through which their skills could be passed to the next generation of interpreters. As far as they were concerned, talking to me was no different than talking to a new kid on site; and I still thank them for the most memorable years of my career in computer research.

None of this is meant in any way to apologize for what happened in the Gulf of Mexico on BP's watch. I was never an expert on safety procedures, but I knew how important they were. Nevertheless, I think it is important to recognize that it is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, to identify definitively what actually happened down where the drilling was taking place, let alone what is happening now. Anything that will ever be offered as "observation" will always be mediated by equipment; and not all interpretations of the signals from that equipment are necessarily "perfectly reliable" (whatever that may mean). Uncertainty is part of the job, and any investigation into what actually happened can only address whether or not BP was taking appropriate actions in the face of that uncertainty. Knowing what I know about our government, I have a hard time believing that either our Executive or Legislative branch has the resources to make such a judgment; and I can only hope that they will at least be able to draw upon the expertise of those more familiar with this aspect of the oil business.

Shostakovich's Move from Chopin to Bach

After all of my interest last month in the Opus 34 set of 24 preludes for piano that Dmitri Shostakovich completed in 1933, which had been arranged as a duet for cello and piano by Lera Auerbach and performed by cellist Alisa Weilerstein with Auerbach on piano, I found myself thinking again of Shostakovich's much later (Opus 87) collection of 24 prelude/fugue couplings. Presumably, the Opus 34 preludes could be taken as a reflection on the Opus 28 set of 24 preludes by Frédéric Chopin; but one of the points that emerged from the comments that Auerbach offered prior to performance involved her interest in seeking out structure in a collection based on a straightforward traversal of the circle of fifths through major and minor keys. Whether or not Shostakovich had intended such a structure, the Auerbach/Weilerstein performance gave at least a suggestion of a narrative arc that carried the listener from one prelude to the next, thus transcending "Winston Churchill's one-thing-after-another characterization of history" that tends to bring down too many pianists who wish to perform the Chopin preludes as an integrated set.

By the time Shostakovich began work on Opus 87, he had endured a series of devastating life experiences that would probably be beyond the comprehension of any listener today. Most important is that in 1933 he had not yet come to the attention of Joseph Stalin. Between 1933 and 1950, when he began work on Opus 87, he had been denounced twice by the Soviet bureaucracy, both times for "formalism" and, on the first occasion, the vulgar depiction of sexual congress in his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District opera. (Leave it to the Soviets to attack an artist for being both too abstract and too concrete at the same time!) If that were not enough for any individual to sustain, this period also included the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, including the siege of Leningrad, which had inspired two of his most gut-wrenching compositions, the Opus 65 eighth symphony in C minor and the Opus 67 piano trio in E minor.

By 1950, however, his reputation had been at least partially restored; and, as its Wikipedia entry explains, Opus 87 was an unexpected consequence of a listening experience resulting from "official business:"

After the Second World War, Dmitri Shostakovich was Russia's most prominent composer. Although out of favour with the Soviet Communist Party, he was still sent abroad as a cultural ambassador. One such trip was to Leipzig in 1950 for a music festival marking the bicentennial of J. S. Bach's death.

As part of the festival, Shostakovich was asked to sit on the judging panel for the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. One of the entrants in the competition was the 26-year-old Tatiana Nikolayeva from Moscow. Though not required by competition regulations, she had come prepared to play any of the 48 preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier on request. She won the gold medal.

Inspired by the competition and impressed by Nikolayeva's playing, Shostakovich returned to Moscow and started composing his own cycle of 24 preludes and fugues. Shostakovich worked fairly quickly, taking only three days on average to write each piece. As each was completed he would ask Nikolayeva to come and visit him in his Moscow apartment where he would play her the latest piece.

The complete work was written between 10 October 1950 and 25 February 1951. Once finished, Shostakovich dedicated the work to Nikolayeva, who undertook the public premiere in Leningrad on 23 December 1952.

From a musical point of view, what I find most interesting its that Shostakovich's attention had shifted from Chopin to Bach, whose own attention was more pedagogic than virtuosic. Thus, one is less likely to find an overall structure to the collection; nor is there any reason to assume that Shostakovich had intended one. Nevertheless, the Opus 34 preludes clearly reflect Shostakovich's base of experiences and influences in 1933; and I continue to believe that Opus 87 is even more explicitly autobiographical, even if that autobiography is highly encrypted. We know from, for example, accounts of his pupil Sofia Gubaidulina, that, while Bach could confine pedagogy to matters of execution and invention, Shostakovich realized that pupils needed to be informed of certain harsh "social realities," even if it meant concealing that information in a coded language.

Ironically, while Opus 87 is therefore a fascinating collection, I find that I have had few contacts with it. Indeed, my only contact has been with a performance of the final prelude and fugue in the set (in D minor) given at a recital a little over a year ago. On the other hand, as a result of that experience, I managed to discover a set of free downloads of the complete set of preludes and fugues, recorded from a recital given by Denis Plutalov at Watson Hall of the North Carolina School of the Arts on May 23, 2005; and I continue to relish having this collection at my disposal. At some time in the future, I may even work up the courage to try playing some of these works for myself, assuming that I have the will to do so after my current encounter with Alexander Scriabin's Opus 11 collection of 24 (Chopin-inspired) preludes!

Back to Scriabin?

My four-hand partner and neighbor informed me that she would be away for a couple of weeks on a European vacation, and we talked about what I would be playing from the solo repertoire in her absence. I mentioned that, since a selection of short pieces by Alexander Scriabin would occupy a major segment of the recital that Yuja Wang would be giving here on April 22, I figured it was time for me to resume my work on his Opus 11 preludes. I suppose I should not have been surprised at the reaction of a wide-eyed stare; but I have no problem owning up to the sad truth that I do not play Scriabin particularly well. I just happen to be very curious about what makes his music tick, and this seemed like a good way to prepare for a listening experience in the near future.

I first started looking at Opus 11 several years ago, back when my Baldwin grand was my refuge from Silicon Valley life. Opus 11 is a collection of 24 preludes. Like most collections with that head-count, it traverses all of the chromatic keys in both major and minor, using the circle-of-fifths ordering that we find in Frédéric Chopin's collection. Like the Chopin collection, but unlike those of Dmitri Shostakovich and Lera Auerbach, Scriabin's Opus 11 does not appear to have any overall structure. It is just a traversal of the 24 possible keys, and it may not have even been composed with the pedagogical intentions that occupied Johann Sebastian Bach. The only structure that Scriabin defines is that the collection is broken down into four parts, each consisting of six preludes.

Regardless of Scriabin's intentions, however, even trying to play the Opus 11 preludes is a major learning experience. Having engaged with the first three parts in Palo Alto, I decided to begin this morning with the E-flat major prelude, the nineteenth in the set and the first of the final part. This was definitely not music to jump in and play. While the time signature is 2/4, the basic pulse is ten beats to the measure, written as pairs of five sixteenth notes under a common beam. These however are offset by one of these sixteenth beats, so the set begins one sixteenth before the bar line. The accompanying line then breaks down into conventional divisions of the beat into two or three, with the occasional appearance of a division into five (still offset from the underlying pulse by a single beat).

Having been challenged by my Santa Barbara piano teach to take a stab at the fourth movement of Charles Ives' first piano sonata, I have seen passages far more rhythmically eccentric that Opus 11, Number 19. The pages of my Ives score are saturated with vertical lines in pencil, which guided my awareness of what was supposed to align with what; and I expect that I shall approach this Scriabin prelude the same way. This time, however, I am doing so as another facet in my agenda for becoming a better listener, which means that I shall also be spending time consulting my recording of Michael Ponti playing these preludes. If I can figure out how things tick in theory, there is still the question of whether or not I can hear them tick the same way in performance; and that is why I am doing this to prepare for Wang's piano recital. It is not that she will be playing this particular prelude. (It is not on the version of the program I currently have.) Rather, this rhythmic structure of this E-flat major prelude is part of the more general grammar behind Scriabin's "utterances," at least in his writing for solo piano. I think of it as a bit of aural calisthenics to prepare for the selections that will be on Wang's program.

I suppose I shall not know whether or not this is time well spent until at attend the recital itself. For all I know, the matter will not be settled even after I have heard her Scriabin performances. On the other hand, like chicken soup, the effort does no harm; and it has certainly thrust me into an alternative method for learning to listen to piano music.

Uneducated Thinking about Education?

The cover of the Insight Section of today's San Francisco Chronicle poses a question that should be on everyone's mind:

Which route to a better education?

This makes it a bit depressing that, upon opening the Section the first thing you read are these paragraphs by Ze'ev Wurman and Sandra Stotsky:

In February, the national press reported on a pilot program that will give high school sophomores in eight states a chance to earn a diploma and head straight to credit-bearing math and English courses at a state college. To do so, they will have to take special course work and can try to pass academic tests known as board exams as early as grade 10.

The idea of a grade 10 diploma is the latest brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, the originator of the unsuccessful school-to-work initiative in the 1990s. The project is funded by the Gates Foundation, which has abandoned its initiative to create small high schools as a way to get more low-achieving students through high school.

The good news is that Wurman and Stotsky use this as an introduction to a well-reasoned set of arguments as to why this course-change by the Gates Foundation is a profoundly bad idea. However, having very recently seen a Book TV program of Ian Mitroff talking about bad decision-making practices, I think it is worth examining why this course-change came to pass in the first place.

The fact is that the Gates Foundation's Plan A was a really great idea. As one who continues to subscribe to John Dewey's principle that education is all about experience, I believe that any effort directed at creating conditions through which more students (particularly those low achievers) can experience more and better engagements with good teachers will take us in the right direction along that "route to a better education." The problem, of course, is that implementing Plan A is extremely difficult; and, even worse, the difficulty arises from so many reasons that one can barely enumerate them. What this means is that the implementation of Plan A cannot be addressed through the objective methodology of defining a goal and preparing a step-by-step plan for getting from current conditions to the "goal state."

This is where Mitroff enters the picture. Among the points he made in his talk was his assertion that bad decisions can arise when one makes perfectly good decisions to address a framing of a problem that poorly represents the problem itself. In his talk Mitroff illustrated this in his analysis of how the effort to reform health care was gradually but steadily derailed. Unfortunately, reforming education will quickly run into as many snags as reforming health care, even to the point that some of them are likely to be the same snags. Mitroff further argues that the only way in which a problem can be properly framed is that the frame itself gets subjected to a critical examination conducted by a group of individuals equipped to argue cohesively opposing points of view. In all probability the shift to Plan B was a result of reframing education reform, and it is a perfect example of a thoroughly inadequate reframing. Was this a matter of a failure to apply that critical examination when it was most needed? Unfortunately, the individuals required to perform such an examination tend to acquire their skills through quality education, which means that, as our educational systems deteriorate, so do the capacities of those empowered to decide the future of those systems. Ultimately, we are stuck in a downward spiral; and no amount of persuasive opinion pieces in the newspapers are likely to reverse the course of that spiral.

Irony is Alive and Well and Living in Las Vegas

It is more than a little ironic that a city sustained by the business of getting other people to lose their assets willingly should host a panel discussion on maintaining property rights. It is even more ironic that, since wanting to lose money requires a certain detachment of the intellect, the property rights being discussed were those of intellectual property. However, that is the sort of thing that happens when a large trade show comes to Las Vegas and a bunch of high-profile people discover that audiences would rather listen to their opinions than feed hungry slot machines.

To be less elliptical, consider a portion of Marguerite Reardon's coverage today from CTIA 2010 for CNET Reviews:

[James] Cameron [director of the film Avatar, for those who have been under a rock for the last few months] joined Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, CNBC Anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra for a discussion at the CTIA 2010 tradeshow Thursday morning. The group, assembled at the wireless industry's largest gathering in the U.S., discussed a range of topics from Internet piracy to using Twitter to promote free speech to Net Neutrality to Google's exit from the Chinese market.

But the most interesting part of the discussion centered around Cameron's thoughts on digital piracy and how new technologies, such as high-definition 3D video, can create new experiences for viewers and drive demand.

He said the music industry made a critical mistake by trying to stop piracy instead of innovating to give consumers new experiences that the industry could use to generate more money.

"The music industry saw it coming, they tried to stop it, and they got rolled over," he said. "Then they started suing everybody. And now it is what it is."

Instead, Cameron said he has tried to innovate to give movie goers a reason to go to theater. And in creating a rich, "reinvigorated cinema experience," Cameron said he discovered that people are willing to pay money to experience the same content in different ways. Not only are they willing to pay $10 or more to see Avatar on the big screen in 3D, but they also will pay to own the DVD and to take it with them on their phone or portable device.

"People are discriminating about the experience," he said. "They want to own it, have it on a iPhone when they want it, and they want the social experience of going to the cinema. These are really different experiences. And I think they can all co-exist in the same eco-system."

Cameron said the fact that people are still going to the theater to see Avatar now nearly four months after it was released supports his conclusion. He said he has had several discussions with the movie studio trying to figure out when to release the DVD of the movie. Typically DVD's are released after the film has left movie theaters. But he said since people are still going to see the movie in the theater, they decided to release the DVD next month with the movie still playing in some cinemas. The movie will also be available soon on iTunes.

Consider how many times the word "experience" appears in the above text. Consider then my rant on Tuesday about "transmedia storytelling." Recall that the rant was grounded on an underlying failure to recognize the distinction between an act and an experience and combine that failure with Walter Benjamin's despair that "the art of storytelling is coming to an end."

Let's not kid ourselves. Avatar is all about having an experience. Even in a publication as elevated as The New York Review, Daniel Mendelsohn could barely conceal his ecstasy over the experience before getting down to the nuts and bolts of the narrative, at which time he made it clear that there were precious few (if any) nuts or bolts. If the art of storytelling is coming to an end, it is because storytellers who once knew better words have discovered that it is more profitable to build theme park rides, particularly now that you can "experience" the ride without going to a theme park. So perhaps Benjamin really did call it right; he just made the call three-quarters of a century too soon.

Of course the sorts of storytellers that Benjamin had in mind never had to grapple with concepts like "intellectual property" that would be vulnerable to piracy. Storytelling was supposed to be an act that united a community, rather than dividing it through fights over who got how big a slice from which pie. What mattered to Benjamin was not a product to be safeguarded but an activity to be encouraged; and, as I suggested earlier this month, these two concepts are in dialectical opposition.

Let me try to consider this from the position of one who believes that stories still have value. From that position I would argue that Cameron believes that the best way to protect the storyteller's "well wrought urn" from piracy (which presumes that the storyteller wants it protected) is to smash it to bits and replace it with a dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs "experience" that is extremely difficult to replicate. I am willing to honor his logic, but that does not mean that I have to stomach it. Fortunately, I am out there at a significant distance down the long tail. People who live by balance sheets neither know nor care how I spend that money that is not set aside for food, clothing, or shelter. The good news is that, for all of my remoteness, I still live in a city where I never have to worry about a lack of satisfying "experiences," many of which involve novel encounters. So it is easy for me to let Cameron continue to make his rather prosperous living by innovating virtual theme park rides, as least as long as his activities do not jeopardize my own!

Telling Stories or Selling Stuff (or are they the same)?

The title of the latest post to Daniel Terdiman's Geek Gestalt blog for CNET News is, at the very least, fascinating (at least in the Spock-raises-eyebrow sense): "Hollywood Scripting Getting a Multimedia Rewrite." The topic turns out to be an "increasingly popular concept" (in Terdiman's words) called "transmedia storytelling." It is unclear what constitutes popularity, but the metric seems to take into account several start-ups and a one-day symposium jointly hosted by the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and USC's Annenberg School of Communication and School of Cinematic Arts. If all this has happened relatively recently, then it is probably fair to say that the popularity of the concept is increasing; however, that may be one of the few concrete things one can say about transmedia storytelling before venturing into the usual Hollywood world of blue smoke and mirrors.

Begin with the question of whether those promoting the concept are doing anything more than coupling one of the oldest words in the practices of human nature with a made-up one with a root that reflects "the trade" and a prefix that makes it sound cooler than business. In trying to provide readers with an anchor to just what the phrase means, Terdiman turned to Jordan Weisman, the founder of one of the startups (Smith & Tinker), who said that transmedia is "when you are taking a single story and distributing components of that single story through a wide array of media. When you collect those pieces of the media, it tells the [whole] story...When [you have] a text message and a video clip on YouTube, and a toy, or even a movie, when those things add up to a larger single story, that's a transmedia experience."

I have a bunch of nits to pick with this. First of all, I do not think it is pedantic to try to sort out the distinction between an act and an experience. You know you are in trouble when a purported definition begins with the word "when" (as opposed to a more grammatically legitimate copula). Usually it signals that you are going to get wrapped up in a bunch of impressions of how some "thing" is experienced that never manages to home in on just what that "thing" is. It's sort of like trying to define "controlled substance" as anything that makes you feel high. This says nothing about the substance itself, nor does it suggest any ways you can examine something to determine whether it is such a substance. The best you can do is give it to a respectably-sized statistical sample and observe the effects.

Thus, to continue the "controlled substance" metaphor, my guess is that those who are "pushing" this new (purported?) concept may not have given very much thought to the nature of storytelling beyond deciding that it has become too old-fashioned. There is no doubt that it is old. It is clearly older than any society's written culture; and it is old enough that Aristotle put a lot of effort into figuring out just what it is (the result being his "Poetics"). Does that mean that it has now become frayed around the edges and needs to be replaced and/or upgraded?

If we are seriously considering this question, then we would do well to remember that Walter Benjamin raised it in 1936 when, in the opening paragraph of his essay "The Storyteller," he posed the hypothesis that "the art of storytelling is coming to an end." The remainder of this essay digs into that distinction between act and experience with far more discipline than Terdiman's account, considering the experiences of those to wish to hear a story, the acts of those who tell stories, and the experiences that inform the stories they tell. Where (if anywhere) does the "transmedia experience" either enhance or transform the legacy of storytelling?

Benjamin's framework fits nicely into Aristotle's foundations. In its attempt to analyze what stories are and how they are told, "Poetics" begins with the premise that the act of storytelling is one of imitation. In Benjamin's terms an individual has an experience and fabricates an imitation of that experience in the form of a story, thus enabling those listening to the story to experience the imitation. This is an example of what the philosopher Noam Cook calls "making knowledge sharable;" the knowledge of the experience is made accessible to others as imitation through the medium of the story being told. Is transmedia storytelling an new approach to making knowledge sharable?

On the basis of Weisman's characterization, the "transmedia experience" seems a lot closer to solving a jigsaw puzzle than to listening to a storyteller, reading a book, or watching the dramatization of a story on stage, in a movie house, or on television. The result is that this idea of experience though imitation must necessarily take a back seat to collecting all of those "pieces of the media." The story is little more than an excuse to send you off on the treasure hunt of digging up all the pieces and then inspire you to assemble them.

This is a crucial distinction, because what do you think you encounter while you are off on that treasure hunt? This is where we understand why Hollywood has decided to buy into the concept: Going on a treasure hunt takes you to a whole new set of domains, each with its own strategies for luring your attention with advertising. (You think Odysseus had a rough time just dealing with Skylla and Charybdis? Brace yourself for another think coming!) In other words the transmedia experience is not so much about anything so lofty as eroding a theater's "fourth wall;" it is about eroding the walls of shopping malls by giving you opportunities to shop and purchase wherever you happen to go as part of your "experience!" Once again, it is Mel Brooks who saw the future; and, once we are all engaging in our transmedia experiences, The Schwartz (or, in our own vernacular, "merchandising") will be with us (whether we want it or not).

This takes us back to Benjamin. While I do not agree that the art of storytelling is coming to an end, I am willing to admit that there may be an increase in those less inclined to experience stories, regardless of the medium through which they are presented. To reflect on the example I explored yesterday, these are the people who prefer to spend their time watching the Home Shopping Network instead of watching episodes of The Wire (or, for that matter, Lost). There is no way that the Hollywood suits can deny the extent to which they are losing audiences through the new opportunities for shopping created by both television and the Internet. From this point of view, transmedia storytelling is nothing more than a Hail Mary pass at trying to recover those lost audiences. I know better than to try to predict whether or not this metaphorical pass will complete successfully, but at least I know where the goalposts are!

Keeping my Faith

Apparently, my new "beat" on Examiner.com has resulted in a new first for me (even in my advanced years): my first comment from an irate composer! Apparently, Steven Gerber did not like my observation that "exposure to Moondog greatly enhanced my own listening experience of [the world premiere of his composition] 'Music in Dark Times'" by the San Francisco Symphony last week. This is hardly the first time I have written a review that rubbed the subject the wrong way; but I found the reaction (as Spock was fond of saying while raising his eyebrow) "fascinating."

Writing about the listening experience itself has been one of my favorite topics on this blog. I continue to occupy myself with the puzzle of how we can all follow the injunction of Igor Stravinsky and elevate ourselves from the sensory experience of hearing to the more cognitive nature of listening. When this involves the experience of an entirely new composition, the puzzle becomes all the more challenging. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to recognize that present listening is always a product of past listening, meaning that, from a cognitive point of view, no new composition ever registers on a "clean slate mind," so to speak. Now I know that there are composers who can go on at great length about significant properties of their works, but I feel that it goes against the cognitive grain to try ever to examine any composition in isolation. Thus, any past listening experience, regardless of genre, that engages the mind during a present listening experience is going to have value, even if the value is one of posing a hypothesis that, upon further reflection, will be soundly refuted.

"Music in Dark Times" consisted of six relatively brief movements. In my own listening experiences, I realize that I have come across few composers whom I would approach (if not admire) as "architects of brevity." I am fascinated by the way in which John Zorn glorifies the short attention span without being judgmental about it either positively or negatively. Yesterday I tried to approach the problem of how we, as listeners, approach the short pieces of Anton Webern's Opus 5. I have also been trying to build up my listening experiences of György Kurtág, whose own influences seem to draw upon a rich appreciation of music history (and it would not surprise me in the least if Moondog was one of his influences). In the field of all those experiences, Moondog happened to rise to the top while I was listening to "Music in Dark Times;" and, if it became the seed for the sensemaking taking place as I listened to the music, then so much the better.

Nevertheless, I can see at least one way in which such an approach could irritate a composer. The basic premise is that, once a composition is presented to an audience, it no longer "belongs" to the composer. Each of us has a unique way of listening, and there will never be any guarantee that any listener will hear a composition the way the composer intended it to be heard. That is part of what makes all of us human, the subjective nature of cognitive interpretation of sensory impressions. The composition leaves the objective and subjective worlds of the composer's working environment and enters the social world, where it becomes part of a vast network of listeners and listenings, very much in the spirit of the social networks that Randall Collins postulated and investigated in The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. From such a point of view, it would seem natural for any composer to experience some sort of past-partum depression with such a departure; but, hopefully, at some point the composer can take pleasure in being the parent of a child that has now left the womb, so to speak.

This brings me to another aspect of Gerber's criticism. He chose to end his argument with the following proposition:

Critics really should study scores before writing reviews.

This statement seems to conflate criticism with music theory; and, while there are any number of occasions in which an understanding of music theory can inform the critic's task, the critic is writing for an audience of listeners (or would-be listeners), rather than a symposium of music theorists. There have been plenty of times when I have hauled out scores to test a particular hypothesis about listening that I have been trying to work. When the Internet provides me with scores that I do not already have in my collection, I may draw upon those resources, just as I currently do when consulting books; but, when I am just beginning to speculate about a hypothesis, I am not always going to go off on a data-gathering expedition, particularly when, as is the case in what I write for Examiner.com (as opposed to this blog), I feel a need to get my position expressed "with all deliberate speed." Sometimes we just have to play with the cards that have been dealt to us. If that leaves us with some loose ends, then we are all the better if we remember that they still need to be investigated in the future!

The Credentials Question

Since he entitled his book The Cult of the Amateur, we should not be surprised that Andrew Keen has a thing about qualifications and credentials and that, given his interest in the current Presidential campaign, he should now be casting his jaundiced eye upon candidate Sarah Palin. His latest sources of aggravation appear to be a piece by American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward, appearing in the latest issue of The Standard, which suggests that Palin may be the second coming of Harry Truman, and a Wall Street Journal column by Bret Stephens entitled "Palin and the Experience Canard," which also offers Truman as a model for her "small town inexperience" (probably Keen's words). Keen's rant quickly comes to a boil:

Why do well educated people in the most sophisticated and powerful place on earth pine for an inexperienced president? Hayward, for example, seems to think that there's something healthy about the fact that Truman didn't go to college -- even though the very foundations of America's meritocracy is built upon the idea of an openly competitive educational system. While Stephens tells us that "qualifications" don't matter much for a vice president because "the job is political."

What Keen appears to have missed is that those "very foundations of America's meritocracy" were grounded in demonstrated qualifications, rather than any set of approved credentials. Thus, I suspect that Keen would blanch at the suggestion that one could be a Full Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) without a doctoral degree, preferably matched by a significant thesis and a substantial publication record. Yet, during my undergraduate years at MIT, the Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department was Carlton Tucker, who never held a degree higher than Master of Science. On the other hand in his youth Tucker had been responsible for providing the entire state of Vermont with their telephone switching network. (At least that is how I recall the student lore, which probably included the "tall tale" element of his building that network single-handed.) Needless to say, this kind of qualification said nothing about how he would perform in a university classroom; but it was enough to get him into the academic system, after which he could (and did) build up further qualifications. Like Truman, Tucker was a man who rose on the strength of his accomplishments, rather than the framed sheepskin documents he could hang on his wall.

By the way, getting "into the academic system" at MIT was liberal in more ways than one. As I discovered in my freshman year, one did not need a high school diploma to matriculate there. There was actually a high school dropout down the hall in my dorm, who kept getting junk mail for programs offering a Graduate Equivalency Degree. I later discovered that one did not need a Bachelor's degree to enter graduate school, and I had a friend in the lab where I did my doctoral research whose only degree was his doctorate!

I found myself thinking about this matter this morning while reading a piece on the BBC NEWS Web site, which mentioned, in passing, that Tony Blair would be teaching a course on "faith and globalisation" (BBC spelling) at Yale. (What this remark was passing was the "news" that Blair would be appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the day before starting work at Yale.) Remembering Tucker, I decided to consult the Wikipedia entry for Blair to check out his academic qualifications. His academic career was not a particularly distinguished one, and his credentials were not much better. Nevertheless, Yale seems to have decided that his accomplishments were sufficient to justify his being appointed to teach a course there, even if his personal road to New Haven happens to take him through the sound stage for Comedy Central.

This is not to suggest that there is any merit to that argument that Palin could be the next Truman. Like just about everything else the media offers, that argument is a product of selective cherry-picking that does little more than tear the semantics of "experience" to shreds. What bothers me is that precious little time seems to be going into promoting Palin on the basis of those "demonstrated qualifications," which leads me to believe that they are not substantial enough to make for much of a promotion!

Haunted by his Own Punch-Line

Last January, when it felt as if all of the media were watching (and analyzing to death) what they had decided to label the first serious confrontation between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the Nevada primary, Obama made a bold decision for his final move. Addressing voters in Las Vegas, he adopted a genre very familiar to Las Vegas audiences of all stripes, what Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press called "a biting political standup routine." With my own passion for text analysis, I decided that one way to learn about Obama would be to deconstruct his jokes; but it had not occurred to me that one of those jokes might come back to haunt him. This is Pickler's account of the joke I had in mind:

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork _ something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, `What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, `Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"

"Folks, they don't tell you what they mean!" he said.

That punch-line kept echoing in my mind as I worked my way, paragraph by paragraph, through Kevin Connolly's analysis for BBC News of Clinton's speech last night to the Democratic National Convention. Ultimately, the analysis was about how difficult it was to figure out the meaning behind the words of that speech. Much of what Connolly wrote had to do with Clinton's history of saying what has to be said while phrasing her text in such a way as to indicate the presence of a subtext, without necessarily helping others identify just what that subtext is. She is very good at this sort of thing, and it is a talent that can be very good in negotiations. Writing about it in the business world back in 1984, Eric Eisenberg called it "strategic ambiguity."

One way of reading Obama's joke is as ridicule of strategic ambiguity. Playing to a crowd of "jes' plain folks" in Las Vegas (if that is not an oxymoron), he as much as said, "This whole idea of 'strategic ambiguity' is not for folks like you; and it is not for me." Whether or not it helped his final vote count is moot; but it seemed to have escaped most of the media flacks that this kind of man-of-the-people posturing was basically the same rhetorical strategy that was serving George W. Bush so well. Now my guess is that Obama knows and understands strategic ambiguity very well. He probably even knows how to use it, although it may well be that his skill in exercising it has not been stress-tested the way Clinton's skill has.

Thus, Obama may very well be choking on a punch-line that had originally been invoked to win a few votes. If he was not choking on it while Clinton was delivering her speech, then it would have taken little more than a few paragraphs at the end of Connolly's account to bring it back into his craw:

There is nothing she [Clinton] could have said that would have persuaded either Republicans, or Democrats who don't like her, that she was delivering a straightforward appeal on behalf of Obama without a subtext that suited her own agenda.

It somehow sums her up that she now finds herself in a position where, however hard she works for Mr Obama and however many speeches she makes, people will automatically note that if he wins this election and holds the White House for eight years, her presidential ambitions will be finished.

If he loses, she will start the next campaign as favourite to win the Democratic nomination, just as she did this time around.

It doesn't mean she wants a Republican win of course - she is a lifelong Democratic Party worker - it just means that once again everything that's written about Hillary Clinton will be complex and ambiguous.

Very few people know what Mrs Clinton really thinks, and they never say.

The only thing more ironic than this state of affairs is the point that Eisenberg originally tried to make about strategic ambiguity, that it is a powerful tool for defusing the most contentious disagreements. The contest for the Democratic nomination will be remembered as such a "contentious disagreement;" but Clinton could not ply her strategic ambiguity skill to turn the situation in her favor. Perhaps that tells her something about her style: If she could not make the tool work for her to win enough delegate support, could she have made it work in winning support for health care reform or resolving a crisis situation like the one that just erupted over Georgia?