“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.

The Excitement Factor (previously August, 2008)

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence?

I probably still have some friends and/or acquaintances out there that know a thing or two about the life I led before I focused this site on writing about the performance of music. Since I spent most of my time at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between the beginning of my junior year as an undergraduate until the approval of my doctoral thesis, my thoughts about that discipline are more than abundant. Nevertheless, I have tried to hold my metaphorical tongue about that background when writing about the performing arts. I had no trouble doing so until this past Sunday, when the pink Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle devoted two articles and four pages to the topic, along with a headline on the cover: “AI is opening new horizons in music. Computer systems are pulling off previously impossible innovations.”

I have enough experience to assert with a fair amount of confidence that, since my student days, the very idea of what artificial intelligence was has been abused as much as it has been used, if not more so. I would therefore like to attempt a “reality check” to “clear the air” about how the concept was conceived and what has happened to it since then. When I was a student, there was only one book on the topic, Computers and Thought, a generous anthology of previously published articles edited by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, both at the University of California at Berkeley at the time. (Feigenbaum would go on to launch the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University.)

The anthology began with an essay by Alan M. Turing entitled “Computing machinery and intelligence,” which was published in the October, 1950 issue of the journal Mind. The title of the second section header was “Is It Possible for Computing Machines to Think?” The very first word of the first paragraph in that section was “No!” Nevertheless, he did not dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence research if one could set at least one realistic goal. The goal he proposed was this: “to construct computer programs which exhibit behavior that we call ‘intelligent behavior’ when we observe it in human beings.” In other words, software might not be able to “make it;” but there might still be some value in software that could “fake it!”

Well over half a century has passed since Turing’s words were published. During that period, there gradually grew a faction that was less interested in pursuing the challenging questions behind artificial intelligence and more interested in “selling the brand.” By now that salesmanship has confined research to pursue challenging questions about intelligence to a very small corner, almost impossible to find in the thick fog of what amounts to little more that hucksterism delivered in frequently elegant and often opaque language.

Now, to be fair, technology has been responsible for a plethora of changes in how the performing arts are now practiced. Unfortunately, there are no end of promoters that like to hang the term “artificial intelligence” on many of those changes without even the slightest idea of how to justify the claim. As a result, the old adage “There’s a sucker born every minute,” usually attributed to P. T. Barnum, may have devolved into “There’s a sucker born every microsecond!”

Sadly, we now live in an age in which it is almost impossible to tell the difference between credible claims and sheer balderdash. My guess is that neither of the Chronicle writers were particularly well-versed on what technology can and cannot do (and whether what it can do has anything to do with “intelligence”). The good news is that the eyes of most Chronicle readers glaze over from any encounter with technology. Nevertheless, in my current capacity, I fear I shall have to be on guard when I encounter a contemporary performance (even one by a writer) that, beneath the surface, turns out to be little more than one of those nineteenth-century medicine shows!

A Questionable Birthday Present for Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memorializing Robert Silvers

As a reader of The New York Review for more decades than I recall, I did not have to be reminded of the significant role that Robert Silvers played in editing the content of that "paper," as he called it. Indeed, I had mixed feeling about reading all the memorial encomiums in the latest issue, even when they were by some of my favorite contributors. Nevertheless, one sentence by Zadie Smith struck me as worth singling out of attention:

He [Silvers] was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least it came at the price of a readable sentence.

This may be the best diagnosis of the current backlash against expertise that I have encountered thus far. Yes, Michael Gove was probably on to something when he declared, "We've had enough of experts;" but, like many who make such sweeping generalizations, he could not distinguish the baby from the bathwater. Rather, he was incorrectly generalizing expertise as the work of a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts," as Anna Russell put it in making fun of rabid Wagner fans. Indeed, the last time I invoked Russell's turn of phrase was in a reaction to a full-page advertisement by the Harvard University Press (in The New York Review, no less) touting the number of "experts" they had published.

On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the feeling that, while I believe in the "readable sentence" as much as Silvers and Smith do/did, it is hard to avoid feeling that it is an endangered species. Ultimately, it is being driven to extinction by the proliferation of tweets, suggesting that the Darwinian process may be as applicable to mindsets as it is to organisms. Put another way, we now live in a world in which our very resources of information, broadcast media as well as the Internet, no longer required the "readable sentence" as a useful too for communication. Indeed, those who even care about "readable sentences" are probably, themselves, doomed to extinction over the next decade or so. How else are we to explain the dangerous expressions of extremism that we encounter wherever we choose to look, even at the ballot box?

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!

Post-Truth Invades My Turf

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zuckerberg Goes Head-to-Head with Aristotle

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Must-Read for the Election Year

I have long believed that you learn more about the world by tracking who is advertising what than from any of the more conventional sources of polls and analyses. It is therefore worth noting that the current (September 29) issue of The New York Review has a full-page advertisement placed by Princeton University Press. That, in itself, is not unusual for this particular periodical; but only one book is being advertised, Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit. For those with weakened memories (perhaps in the manner Nicolas Carr discussed when arguing that Google is making us stupid), following the hyperlink on the book's title will reveal that it first appeared in January of 2005 and quickly rose to the top of the bestseller list maintained by The New York Times. The only thing that suggests that this is a recent advertisement, rather than a time warp going back over a decade, is the note at the bottom that this title is being marketed as an e-book.

Larger that the image of the book itself, the ad presents a single quote from the text:

Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

This is clearly a message for today. Princeton University Press has decided to use advertising as a means of entering the discourse over the coming election. The only problem is that they are preaching to the choir. Indeed, however penetrating that single sentence may be, its association with Princeton University Press will probably blunt its impact where its lesson is most needed. Nevertheless, when we consider what we must now endure in what passes for news about the election campaign, it is nice to read such a refreshing now that we no longer have Stephen Colbert reminding us about truthiness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Not Just Infrastructure!

Elizabeth Drew's latest article for The New York Review of Books, "A Country Breaking Down," is a must-read piece, even for those who are already aware of the deterioration of infrastructure across the United States. As a writer whose primary domain is politics, Drew pulls no punches when it comes to presenting that deterioration as a consequence of a governmental system that, for all intents and purposes, is broken with little hope of repair in sight. (Even the supposedly neutral Judiciary branch has gone down the tubes as a result of the Supreme Court's preemptive strike against climate-control efforts.)

Nevertheless, the infrastructure problem is not just one of physical deterioration. It also involves the extent to which our government has decimated the public education system. The point is that the repair of infrastructure can only come about from the skills of workers who know how to repair them. While technology has improved the quality of the tools that can be used, it carries the corollary that skills must now be mental, as well as physical. Furthermore, it means that those involved with repairing the infrastructure need to be skilled managers of information regardless of the physical equipment they will be expected to operate.

This is where Nicholas Carr's chicken about Google making us stupid comes home to roost in full force. As I have previously observed, Google has made us, at the very least, downright lazy when it comes to reading and comprehending, simply because (and this is one of Carr's points), Google "predigests" content to make its search capability more efficient for users. The result is that many workers, desk workers as well as physical workers, understand the world only through how it is seen through some form of computer-based display. I was painfully aware of this yesterday when I discovered that the USPS Call Center could not tell me where a package that had been late in delivery was, simply because the Call Center agent's computer did not have access to that information. (It did not even have access to the location of postal facilities in San Francisco.) Until we can restore a work force that is capable of the most rudimentary forms of thinking through problems, neither project budgets nor an influx of powerful tools of all sizes will get us very far in restoring our country's infrastructure.

"… our pathetic native self"

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

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

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

Encountering Heidegger

I suspect that my decision to focus my reading on Being and Time, the translation by John Macquarie and Edward Robinson of Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, may raise some eyebrows. It may very well be one of the ways in which I am coming to terms with my age, figuring that I may be approaching a time when I may start to have difficulty processing that kind of writing. At the same time, somewhere in the back of my head, I heard the voice of my former advisor declaring that he could not trust anyone who could only read Heidegger in English translation. At least I appreciate his reasoning. Sein und Zeit was rich with made-up words; and I suspect that one could write a fascinating thesis on the hypothesis that many, if not most, of the key ideas in the book may have emerged out of Heidegger's enjoyment in playing with words at the lexical level and then seeing what the semantic implications were. Still my advisor was taking a dig at a former colleague, who may have deserved the attack but probably should still have his name withheld.

Nevertheless, I feel I owe it to myself to see just what Heidegger was getting at (or trying to get at) in the massive (and incomplete) project. My reasons go back over a decade to when I was still part of the Silicon Valley research community and everyone was in thrall with the idea of "knowledge" (as opposed to "artificial intelligence") as an object of research, all in the interest of a domain that called itself "knowledge management." At the time I was working for a guy who felt that the future would lie in solving the problem he called "corporate memory" (also sometimes known as "institutional memory"). Put in the simplest terms, the problem was one of how the knowledge of an individual could outlive that individual (or at least that individual's tenure with the firm).

Unfortunately, I found myself following up on perspectives that made it clear that this "memory problem" was not one that could be solved by building bigger databases or better interfaces to those databases. The bottom line was that "knowledge" was not noun-based. Having knowledge did not mean having artifacts, even digital artifacts, that your rivals did not have. Rather, it was verb-based. Having knowledge was a shallow proposition. Knowledge only revealed itself through what we did.

I suppose that is why this research continued to interest me even after I broke my ties with Silicon Valley. It did not take long to surface in my thoughts about music, particularly my decision to prioritize the verb-based perspective of making music over the noun-based perspective that tries to reduce the study of music to the study of artifacts, such as score pages. Once, when I was trying to explain myself to a recent graduate from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I said that everyone in Silicon Valley lived in a world of nouns and adjectives, while musicians can only live in a world of verbs. To my surprise, his eyes did not glaze over; and they even lit up a bit.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time before I would have to confront what Heidegger had to say about such things. After all, it does not take long for him to put up the precept that talking about "being" means talking about the word itself as a progressive verb rather than part of a noun form (as in "human being"). All this emerges in relative (at least for Heidegger) clarity long before he brings time into his approach to inquiry.

Fortunately, I can be patient about it, sometimes advancing only a few paragraphs at a time but without ever feeling as if I were in a hurry. This was the way I used to deal with things when I was still trying to bring the ideas behind my doctoral thesis into focus, and I was fortunate in having advisors who did not pressure me to rush things. Corporate research is not like that, nor, for that matter, is academic research, which is more beholden to funding sources than to intellectual inquiry. All I need to do is keep my own cerebral matter in shape and hope that I can maintain these practices for a few more good years, even if it is just for the pleasure of clarifying matters to myself.

Nine Cheers for ABC News

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

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

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

Another Movie Adopts Truthiness

Apparently, Selma has now joined those movies I discussed a week ago that had comprised the historical record for the sake of telling a more audience-appealing story. The bad news is that such historical distortion is about the worst thing that could happen at a time when racial tensions are on the rise, particularly where law enforcement is involved. The good news is that Elizabeth Drew used a NYRBooks blog post to set the record straight, but the other bad news is that only those willing to take the time to read and think about her text are likely to benefit from it.

Bruised Egos

Yesterday I came across a particularly interesting passage by Virgil Thomson:

Well, criticism is often injurious; there is no question about that. Many a recitalist, receiving unfavorable reviews, finds it more difficult to secure further engagements than if the reports had been less critical. Minor careers have been ruined overnight that way. Major careers are rarely harmed by criticism, because major artists can take it. They don’t like to; but they have to; so they do. All the same, it is the big boys, the great big boys that nothing could harm, that squawk the loudest. I know, because I have been in the business for several years now.

The context behind this passage had to do with a biography of Serge Koussevitzky by Moses Smith. Kossevitzky had tried to stop the publication of the book because he found he injurious. (He did not claim that the book was libelous.) Basically, Thomson used his bully pulpit of the Herald Tribune to come to Smith's defense, primarily by arguing that injury was part of the trade, so to speak.

I have no idea how many of my colleagues (including the ones I do not know) give much thought to using injurious language in what they write. One friend once suggested that, whenever I am writing about someone (positively or negatively), I should try to assume the point of view of how that person will actually read what I write. Since I tend to write pieces longer than the ones that show up in print, this includes the question of how much attention that person will pay, just like any other reader.

One consequences is that, whenever possible, I try to begin by finding something positive to say. Sometimes I feel that, if I put enough attention on the positive, the negative will take care of itself. This may amount to a passive-aggressive approach to an observation made by the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu in trying to identify a cross-cultural universal:

There is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed: thus, not to salute someone is to treat him like a thing, an animal, or a woman.

Another strategy I use is to draw upon the positive as context for discussing the negative. This amounts to giving the performer(s) credit for getting things right part of the time and then speculating on why the technique could not carry over into the rest of the time. There are also occasions when, due to the novelty of the experience, I have not felt equipped to make the transition from perception to judgment. I actually tend to enjoy such situations, because they compel me to put all of my energy into description. I figure that, if I do my job well enough, then there is nothing wrong with my implying that the reader should then make up his/her own mind. After all, that is what any of my readers who take listening seriously are going to do in any case!

International Readers for my "National" Site

I have come to expect that the readership levels on my national Examiner.com site fall far short of those on my San Francisco site. Still, I track both of these site with Google Analytics. It gives me a certain sense of humility with regard to "national" readership; but, every now and then, it surprises me with bumps of interest on the national level. Of course the main thing that Google Analytics tells me about those who read the national site is that most of them are from the San Francisco Bay Area. For a while there is been a level of interest in New York that tends to follow, but never rises to the level of, Bay Area interest. This morning, however, I discovered that, while New York interest has fallen off, it is at the same level as interest coming from Berlin.

I know that I have had overseas readers sprinkled around my Google Analytics data for some time. These often involve occasional surges in unlikely places, such as the Philippines. However, having lived in Singapore, I know how those living in area in which classical music does not received a lot of attention tend to read just about anything they can find on the topic. Berlin, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. I suspect that Berliners have plenty of sources to consult without having to worry about renegade views from San Francisco.

One possibility is that this bump is due to a recent piece I wrote about the harmonia mundi album of Ludwig van Beethoven's chamber music for cello and piano featuring Jean-Guihen Queyras on cello and Alexander Menikov on piano. I know that Melnikov has performed several times in the United States, even making it out to San Francisco; but I suspect that Queyras is still known here only through his recordings. On the other hand both of them are probably much better known among the music lovers in Berlin; so perhaps there is a "critical mass" of them curious about American impressions of how they perform as a duo!

Believe None of What you Read?

Something fishy may be going on in Robert F. Worth's article, "The Pillars of Arab Despotism," in the latest issue of The New York Review. This piece is, in part, a review of Juan Cole's latest book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East. Worth clearly does not buy Cole's arguments, but I have to wonder whether he is more interested in grinding axes, rather than defeating propositions. For one thing he describes Cole as "a prominent liberal blogger and scholar of the Middle East." Worth himself is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, writing his own book about the Arab Spring and its aftermath. This is a sufficiently reputable establishment that one wonders whether or not Cole's description was intended as a swipe at Cole for not having more legitimate credentials. Worth's biographical statement also describes him as "a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine." At the very least there is a distinctive odor of one writer whose work holds up through the editing process disparaging another who lives in the world of unedited blog posts.

This is the new world the Internet has made. Back when I was part of the evangelical promotion of "knowledge management," I remember that one of the slogans was, "We are drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge." Actually, we are drowning in opinions; and we lack any kind of "life preserver" for determining which of those opinions have any warranted substance.

Learning how to Say "No!" to Badly-Written Books

I suspect that there was never a time in my life that I thought I would be able to read all of the books in my collection. To some extent I could fall back on the excuse that some of them were there primarily for reference; and, the more time I spend writing, the more I find that I am using more of those books for that purpose. Nevertheless, there are some that do little more than gather dust; and I think about them more as I get older.

One result is that I have begun to provide myself with some guidelines for deciding when to say, "Enough is enough" during an unsatisfactory reading experience. Where fiction is concerned, I can generally fall back on criteria for flat-out poor writing technique. In the domain of non-fiction, however, I have to worry about whether, in the midst of bad (if not excruciatingly painful) writing, there is still the chance that I might learn something of value.

In this case I have decided to use that "value" criterion as a guideline. The issue is that any sentence or paragraph may be potentially valuable, but it is immediately devalued if it turns out that the author lacks the necessary authority (invoking a linguistic game that I unashamedly picked up from Michel Foucault). For example I recently faced a 1000-page book with considerable skepticism. However, after having read the author's Introduction, I felt that I appreciated the approach he was taking. This seemed reason enough to get over my skepticism.

Unfortunately (for the author, not for me), I found that, within 150 pages, he was basically going against the guidelines he had set for himself in that Introduction. I am trying to describe this situation carefully, because it comes close to saying that the author promised one think and delivered another. Euphemistically, this could be described as "false pretenses;" but the harsher noun "dishonesty" might be just as appropriate. Either way, I felt I had grounds for rejecting the author as a credible authority, which allowed me to free up time for reading other things with a clear conscience!

Stupid Readers

BBC News has posted an article about Facebook deciding to attach the label "[Satire]" to satirical news articles to avoid readers mistaking them for actual news stories. I realize that I may be mistaken, but I have decided to accept this as a genuine article, rather than a satirical one. My first reaction was to recall Orson Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, in which "news broadcasts" that were part of his dramatic conception were mistakenly taken for the real thing (even though the drama was preceded with a brief announcement about the technique). In other words, if people cannot accept something as fake after being told explicitly, "This is a fake," will a "[Satire]" label actually do any good? The bottom line is that people read selectively (when they read at all); and they believe what they want to believe, even when it involves misinterpreting (if not downright distorting) what they have read. While this may be taken as grist for Nicholas Carr's mill with his argument that Google is making us stupid, the fact is that people were reading the printed medium just as uncritically as they now do when they are reading from a computer screen. Let's not blame the Internet for a change and think more about why we now have an educational system that is so ineffective!