Keeping up with the “Bleeding Edge”

Some readers may have noticed that no articles were added to this site yesterday. Mind you, my Saturday article accounted for two new albums of performances by Roland Kirk, which provided me with more than enough to keep me occupied; but, since they were to be released on the same day (this coming Friday), I saw no reason to deal with them separately. So, if I took a break on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, I could feel that it was a “day of rest” well earned!

This morning’s source of inspiration, Samuel Beckett (photograph by Roger Pic, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on a Wikimedia Commons Web page, released into the public domain by the photographer)

That rest actually helped “charge” me for this morning. This week’s Bleeding Edge accounted for eleven events distributed over five different venues. Mind you, when I have to account for so much information, I am always glad to have an imaginary Zen monk sitting on my shoulder to remind me of the meaning of “patience!” A more concrete reminder comes from a passage in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.

Fortunately, I can enjoy the fact that my account of the week’s activities did not emerge as an “impossible heap!”

On the other hand, I am struck by the fact that the first half of this month is often the busiest time of the year. Everyone seems to be preparing for a celebration involving a generous amount of preparation. Most of those celebrations involve sacred events, but I suspect that the secular side has at least a few priorities of its own! So the fact that it took me longer than usual to write this morning’s article may just be another instance of why this time of year is so busy. All that really matters to me is that all of this morning’s efforts have led to the desire to take a break for a mid-morning snack!

“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.

From Creator to Listener

Since I was born in 1946, roughly the first 54 years of my life took place during the second half of the twentieth century. Much of my time during that period was devoted to making music in one way or another. For the most part this involved playing clarinet and alto saxophone in various ensembles and singing in others (beginning as a second tenor and dropping into baritone as I grew older). I first began to venture into improvising after my parents bought a piano and I was never particularly interested in what I was given for piano lessons. It was only towards the end of my high school years that I encountered a community orchestra in which I played first clarinet, whose conductor encouraged my improvisation efforts, many of which then involved my working with the other clarinetist in the ensemble playing piano, rather than clarinet.

It was only after I began my graduate studies in mathematics (which eventually led to an early doctoral dissertation in computer science) that I shifted my attempts at creativity from musical instruments to tape recorders. My mentor was the composer Ezra Sims, who had no significant academic credentials. I met him as a result of the fact that I was spending more time reviewing dance performances than listening to (or trying to create) music. It was through Sims that I first worked up both the discipline and the competence to create something worthy of the attention of others. My efforts attracted the attention of choreographer Cliff Keuter, whom I then joined on a trip to Tel Aviv, when I created a tape composition for a piece that he created for the Bat-Dor Dance Company entitled “Fall Gently on Thy Head.” At that time I had just finished writing my doctoral dissertation and was able to “take a break” while it was being typed prior to my giving my defense.

After that, computer science pretty much put any efforts in music into the background. My “professional life” began at the Technion in Haifa (which I had visited during my Bat-Dor gig), followed by a lengthier Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, I made the move into research laboratory appointments, first in the private sector with General Research Corporation in Santa Barbara, followed by Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut (involving several engaging business trips to Europe), and then at the Information Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California, in Marina del Rey. After that, I joined the “Xerox family,” first at the newly-formed “outpost” for Fuji Xerox in Palo Alto and then at the better-known PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). During that entire span, I managed to inject a moderate number of publications in music theory among the more “professional” papers that I had published.

Nevertheless, my writing about music had more to do with “theory” than with “practice.” It was only after my retirement that I had both the time and the resources to satisfying my appetite for concerts and recitals. Indeed, once my wife and I moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco, we found ourselves living within a matter of a view blocks from the major Civic Center venues for performances. My own “turning point” took place in the spring of 2007 after a San Francisco Symphony performance of Finnish music, which I had attended one afternoon with a former PARC colleague. After reading Joshua Kosman’s column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I could not resist the urge to document an “alternative opinion,” which showed up on this site on April 1, 2007.

Umberto Eco (from a Tourist With a Typewriter Web page)

As Umberto Eco wrote about The Name of the Rose, he wrote the novel because “I wanted to kill a monk.” He then proceeded from that declaration to liken killing a monk to eating potato chips. Drawing upon a familiar advertising phrase, he observed, “You can’t kill just one.” So it was that responding to an opinion about the performance of music in the Chronicle turned out to be something I could not do only once. Since that time, the only thing that has changed is that I no longer write “responses.” For the most part, I experience a performance at the same time as my fellow critics; and I make it a point to document my own opinions before taking the time to read any others.

This April will mark the eighteenth anniversary of my first serious effort. (Eighteen happens to be a lucky number in Judaism, but atheists do not have lucky numbers!) In retrospect, I feel that I have enjoyed more satisfaction over that period than I did from any one my “professional” undertakings. Mind you, it was as a “professional” that I was able to create a “financial cushion” that would support the “retirement gig” that I created for myself; and, while I was working at each of those sites, the assets prevailed over the liabilities. Now, however, the only liability is sitting through a performance and feeling that I had rather be somewhere else; and, fortunately, those occasions have turned out to be pretty rare!

Reflections on Gia Kourlas’ Reflections on Ballet

I just finished reading an online article by Gia Kourlas for The New York Times entitled “Can Ballet Come Alive Online?” The article will appear in print on Sunday; but, since it was about the “virtual seasons” of the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, I figured that reading the article online was consistent with all of my recent online viewing of ballet performances. Sadly, I discovered that very little of the article actually had to do with ballet and that most of the point Kourlas was making had to do with the way in which online presentation provided affordances for supplementary material, material that one does not necessarily encounter in a program book.

By the end of the article, I realized that Kourlas had almost entirely prioritized individual dancers, leaving little room to say anything about choreography. Now, to be fair, I have known balletomanes that are primarily fanatical about specific dancers, often with little thought to what they are dancing. Indeed, I have known them all the way back to when I first started writing about ballet during my graduate student years in the late Sixties. The balletomanes will always be with us; but, as those that have followed my own approach to writing about the dance should know by now, I believe, as I have always believed, that the choreography comes first. What Kourlas wrote about choreography in her article amounted to more than a hill of beans, but not by much.

I suppose that what motivates me to write about ballet in the first place is the capacity for imaginative relationships between structure and movement. The ballet that received the most attention in Kourlas’ article was George Balanchine’s “Diamonds.” Some of her descriptive prose was spot on the money, but it seemed consistently to dwell on breathtaking moments.

On the other hand, I just did a text search for “Tchaikovsky” in Kourlas’ article. It appeared once when she was quoting Sara Mearns, the pas de deux female soloist in “Diamonds.” Here is Kourlas’ text:

She [Suzanne Farrell, for whom Balanchine created that part] also told them [Mearns and her partner Russell Janzen] not to try to be as big as Tchaikovsky. “You’re not going to win,” Ms. Mearns said, recalling her words.

I found this more than a little perplexing, particularly in light of the fact that Balanchine had “repurposed” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score to serve his own ends, allowing the pas de deux to serve as a spinal cord around which the individual movements of his Opus 29 (“Polish”) symphony were structured.

This is why, in my own account of “Diamonds,” I invested most of my writing in describing and justifying that underlying structure. (I also made note that Balanchine’s structure had almost nothing to do with the way Tchaikovsky had structured his Opus 29.) Once I had achieved a satisfactory description, I felt that the choreographed movement could take care of itself, writing about little more than the centrality of how Mearns and Janzen interpreted that pas de deux. That fact is that writing about movement is no easy matter, because movement is so ephemeral. So much so that one almost expects it to vary from one performance to another. Only the structural framework remains the same from one performance to the next.

I suppose I am most motivated to write about the movement when I have more than one instance of it. If I had been writing about several performances of “Diamonds,” it would have been clear that, for the most part, the differences would be in how movement is approached and executed and what gives each performance its own individuality. However, such an approach to writing needs a structural foundation as a point of departure. Since “Diamonds” was streaming for about half a week, I figured that the best thing I could to was provide those planning to view a later streaming with the necessary foundation; and that foundation had everything to do with structure, rather than movement!

Elizabeth Hardwick on the Computer

The latest issue of The New York Review has a “preview” of the introduction that Darryl Pinckney wrote for The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, which will be published by New York Review Book this coming October 17. One sentence about Hardwick leapt out at me:

She blamed the computer for finishing a lot of books that ought not to have been.

This reminded me of a more humorous essay that Calvin Trillin wrote for The Nation when the phrase “word processor” was just entering our working vocabulary. Trilling wrote about his first experience with this software, marveling at how many more words he was processing compared with his past work with paper and pencil or at a typewriter. Those of us who could appreciate Trillin’s characteristic tone agreed that this would be one of those cases in which a tool for office efficiency could have unexpected consequences (not necessarily desirable) in other settings.

To be fair, I do all of my writing from a keyboard sitting in front of a computer screen. Nevertheless, I both understand and sympathize with the joint stance taken by Trillin and Hardwick. Indeed, I once had to review a book in which a large section of content had been copied and pasted, the result being that this extended passage appeared in exactly the same way in two different chapters. For that matter, even when word processing software was just moving out of research laboratories into the commercial sector, I was already suffering from reading doctoral theses that could be boiled down to only a few pages but, thanks to “word processing,” had been inflated to 100-page tomes.

Hardwick could be a notorious grumbler; and one of her favorite grumbles was, “Nobody knows how to write any more.” She died in 2007, by which time she probably realized the extremes to which that grumble could now be taken. Still, Pinckney’s recollection was a gentle nudge for me to consider my own habits.

The name “The Rehearsal Studio” was originally coined with more than the performing arts in mind. I saw it as an opportunity to “rehearse” the many ideas what were knocking around in my consciousness in anticipation that those ideas might eventually find their way into a book. Since then I have prepared any number of different chapter outlines for what that book might be, never making very much progress in fleshing any of the outlines into readable prose. Given the extent to which the very reputation of the book and the service it can provide has degraded, even over the lifetime of this site, I no longer feel bad about my procrastination.

These days I focus on writing about in-the-moment experiences with the intention of rendering in words my own in-the-moment impressions. Once those impressions have been established in my mind, I know how much background I need to provide to translate them from private feelings to public assertions. I have discovered that, over the years of doing this sort of thing, the practice has become relatively easy to me, even to the point that I can often frame an entire presentation during the half-hour swim I take shortly after waking every morning.

Mind you, I shall be the first to admit that I wish an editor were “in the loop.” I am sure that Hardwick would have been merciless in taking apart anything I have written. I would like to think, however, that she would then direct me on a path towards building things up again. On the other hand my own grumble still prevails: In an age in which content is limited by a cell phone screen, almost no one has the patience for anything that strives to be an essay. (Hell, I’m not sure that the current generation even has the patience to follow a shaggy dog story!)

Probably I should just fess up and acknowledge the recreational value of what I do. It may amount to little more than making mud pies at the beach, but probably less than I would have liked. Still, Alfred North Whitehead once told Suzanne Langer that the joy of making mud pies comes from sharing them, in which case putting them out to share seems like the best thing I can do!

Opening an Old Wound

Over the last few weeks I have been working my way incrementally through Andrew Rossi’s documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, having saved it on my xfinity box after recording it from a Starz channel. The film was released for public distribution in 2011, and I suppose I was drawn to viewing it after having derived so much pleasure from observing the work practices in the film Obit. Life on Deadline, which was also set at the Times. Nevertheless, the films could not have been more different. While Obit. follows the ups and downs of a small team of writers, who come across as being very good at their jobs because they work very hard at it, Page One is an uncompromising examination of a business (not just a single newspaper) on life support. Towards the end we see David Carr addressing a conference of journalists, telling them that the fact that they are still around is an achievement unto itself.

I was writing about journalism and the changes in its work practices long before The Rehearsal Studio was launched. One of the tags I had created for my old Yahoo! blog, Reflections Beyond Technology, was “news;” and I was already worrying about the extent to which the Internet had become a platform for “fake news” as early as 2006. This was a time when I was reading Truthdig regularly, and it provided me with a quote from Joe Conason that is as relevant today as it was when I first read it:

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happened yesterday and can’t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy.

This was a painful reminder that the mess we are in is not the fault of the Internet. Rather, it is part of a bigger picture that meant so much to Max Weber, who recognized that a society whose only value is market value faced the two-horned prospect of loss of meaning and loss of freedom.

From an idealized point of view, newspapers provided a base of activity for professionals whose primary expertise could be found in making sense out of what happened in the world on any given day. Unfortunately, when advertising ceased to be a source of sustaining revenue for newspapers, making sense was no longer a priority. Indeed, all priorities were lowered with the rise of simply being able to have enough cash on hand to pay the bills. In such a setting, meaning no longer has priority; and the noble effort of making sense out of a confusing world, which is captured admirably in the narrative threads that are woven together in Page One, is more likely to be punished than rewarded.

As my own writing progressed, I found myself less and less inclined to rail against a world in which meaning no longer had any currency. I suppose that music provided me with an escape hatch. I could deal with matters of meaning and sensemaking in a domain that had a limited audience, but it was an audience that still took those matters seriously.

Mind you, it is not as if the performing arts have elevated themselves above the dominating forces of market value. They have to worry about paying the bills just like the rest of us; but, as long as I can thank the Social Security Administration for my being able to pay my own bills, I can continue to keep my own attention focused on performance itself. Given Carr’s prioritization on the value of still being around to do one’s job, I suppose I should be thankful for what I have!

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Missing the Encore

Anyone reading Joshua Kosman’s account of Mahan Esfahani’s harpsichord recital in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle who tried to compare it with the piece I wrote yesterday morning will probably quickly notice that I said nothing about Esfahani taking an encore. The fact is that I was not there! As I wrote in my final paragraph, I had expected a 75-minute program that would be followed by a Q&A session with the audience. Instead the program ran about two hours, after which I was so saturated with thoughts about what Esfahani had done that I was already worrying about how I would cram them into my account of the concert. As a rule I tend not to report on what arises during a Q&A, so I afforded myself the luxury of an early and hasty exit.

From Kosman’s article I gather that Esfahani took me to task in absentia in what Kosman described as “a move that’s far less charming than he seemed to think.” According to the friend that joined me for the concert and remained, I seem to have missed “the only known music for harpsichord by Benjamin Britten” (quoting from the electronic mail my friend sent), preceded by Esfahani’s explanation of how this music crossed his path. This sort of agreed with Kosman’s description of “a newly discovered snippet from the Britten archive, an arrangement of a work by the English Renaissance composer William Lawes” (taking it for granted that anything from the Britten archive would have been by Britten).

Do I regret missing this? I certainly do, primarily because I have tended to enjoy the thoroughness of my knowledge of Britten’s compositions. I even played the piano accompaniment for a few of his arrangements of songs by Henry Purcell back when a baritone colleague and I would set aside one lunch hour a week to explore the art song repertoire. Most likely I would also have been interested in any backstory for this piece, even though Kosman concluded with the observation that the performance “took less time to play than to introduce.” On the other hand, I suspect that what I did write was already testing the patience of many of my readers; and the last thing I needed after going on at such length was an afterthought on a topic for which I was not that well prepared!

Thus, while I do regret missing the encore, I am not taking it very hard. The bottom line is that, now that I have put my thoughts in order and documented them, my only curiosity involves whether or not Esfahani reacted to them, rather than to my “temerity to slip out quietly,” as Kosman put it. Esfahani is one of those performers whose work can set the mind going off on all sorts of tangents. My guess is that he has one or two tangents of his own. Perhaps I shall even learn about them one of these days and take them as an opportunity to “compare and contrast.” Meanwhile, nothing that has happened today has blunted the enthusiasm that I tried to document yesterday morning!

Using Hypermedia to Write about Music Performances

This morning I found myself allowed to observe an exchange between a colleague and one of his readers. The reader had expressed a desire that my colleague could have augmented his text with sound files, which is a question dear to my own heart. How can any of us do a satisfactory job of writing about a listening experience without providing the reader with appropriate listening matter?

To be fair, technology is not on the side of those of us doing the writing. The authoring tool I had at my disposal when I was writing for Examiner.com basically allowed me to incorporate one image and embed one video from YouTube. These would be placed at the top of the article, and that was that. The tool I use to write this particular article is a bit better. I can embed both images and video at the most appropriate location in the text, but the only way I can incorporate audio is if it happens to be the soundtrack of a video.

Charles Rosen was in a somewhat more advantageous position when he was writing for The New York Review of Books. The editors created what amounted to a blogging site for their authors; and on December 28, 2011, Rosen contributed an article entitled “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time.” This amounted to a review of a recital given in honor of Carter’s 103rd birthday at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Rosen embedded four audio excerpts from the concert into this article. However, he could only do this because the 92nd Street Y had opened an account of SoundCloud, where audio files may be shared in a manner similar to the sharing of video on YouTube. Unfortunately, the hyperlinks that Rosen created for his article no longer work (although there is a link to an MP3 file taken from another recital at the very end of the article, which, as of this writing, is still functional). The good news, however, is that the Web page of the excerpts that Rosen cited are still on the SoundCloud site. Thus, while this is a step in the right direction, it also demonstrates that we have a long way to go in using real-time media to make a case when writing about a performance.

Most important is the question of intellectual property. The resource that Rosen used had been created by the producers of the recital, which reinforces the announcement most of us know by heart prior to any concert, making it clear that we should not be using our personal devices to capture any portion of the performance. (I rather like the kind explanation that Kathy Barr gives before every Old First Concerts recital, in which she explains that holding up a video capture device blocks the view of others.) The fact is that those of us charged with writing about a performance do not have the right to create examples with media capture technology, nor should we. After all, time spent fussing with equipment takes away from paying attention to the performance!

However, even when a third party provides “authorized” media, there are still problems in how those media can be used effectively. Once again I must raise the issue that what we are doing as writers is tightly coupled to an experience that depends heavily, if not entirely, on the flow of time; and what we commit to any document can never be anything but static. The best way to appreciate this distinction is to consider what happens when the static medium is not present. Having had to sit through more lectures about music than I can enumerate, first in classrooms and later at conferences, I am struck by how often it is the case that the lecturer will play a recording and then talk over it, saying things like “Now!” just before the particular moment in which (s)he wants us to pay attention to that recording. (Even with all that support, there will still be cases in which listener may not be sure what was brought to his/her attention.)

The point is that capture and reproduction will never be enough. If one wishes to explain a time-based experience, then one must do it by creating another time-based experience. This means that we have to stop typing at our keyboards and learn the craft of audio and video editing suites. Writing as an old dog that is willing to learn new tricks, I must still confess that all this turns the effort of documenting into a substantial project, My work habits are such that I want to do my writing about an experience while that experience is still fresh in my mind. If I spend too much time assembling my media support, that freshness may wear off; and I may find myself losing my grip on the argument I wished to make in the first place.

This leads to the conclusion that, flawed as they may be, words are still the preferred medium, even when we are charged with accounting for a time-based experience. There is no “method” that serves all of us. After all, there is as much diversity in the “experiencing” as there is in the experience itself. The bottom line is that our own memories are the most valuable resource when it comes to documenting a time-based experience. For my own part I have my own techniques for trying to “reconstruct the past” before I begin writing; but I have no reason to assume that any of my colleagues have techniques that are even remotely similar to my own. Nevertheless, we all do what we can, always well aware that some of those experiences are much harder to document than others!

"… 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.

An Unexpected Exercise in Archiving

Like the Lord, Examiner.com giveth and taketh away. Around the middle of this year, I was informed that everything I had written in 2009 had been "unpublished." This came without any warning and probably had only to do with the fact that those articles did not fit with the change in page formatting. (There may also have been a tacit assumption that anything written in 2009 no longer had any value.) The Content Director who was my point of contact suggested that I could just republish them in the new format, indicating when they had originally been published. This turned out to be a rather time-consuming process; and I abandoned it when one of those articles got unpublished again. Fortunately, it turned out that I had the rights to the content; and there would not be a problem with my creating my own archive. I have now used this blogging tool to do so; and the new "archive blog" was completed today. I may be the only reader, but at least I can use the search tool!

Self-Documenting without Self

Financial Times writer Gautam Malkani was apparently given permission to write an opinion piece about Benedict Cumberbatch's (probably futile) attempt to get those attending his performances in Hamlet to cease and desist from capturing him (through photographs and/or video) on their personal portable devices. Whether or not Malkani himself wrote the sub-headline, it is a useful enough summary to spare the reader from some of the verbal games he plays that do not contribute very much to advancing his argument, particularly if that argument is flawed in the first place. That sub-headline is:

If we did not digitally document our life, our ‘self’ might cease to exist

That is quite a claim; but, in all likelihood it is as specious as it is compelling.

The logical flaw lies in that verb "document." Digital devices do not document. They capture signals that would otherwise stimulate our visual (and sometimes auditory) sensory organs. In the latter case those signals are, for all intents and purposes, meaningless until mind imposes order on them through a process that I like to call "sensemaking," having picked up that word from former colleagues.

Documentation is a similar process by which we try to make sense out of bodies of objective data that confront us (which may include the images we have captured on our portable devices). In other words documentation is, in a sense, an attempt, usually through writing, to reproduce the results of sensemaking achieved by mind. This brings us to Malkani's scare quotes. Many researchers of the nature of consciousness, such as Gerald Edelman and his acknowledged predecessor Friedrich Hayek, have made compelling arguments that "self" is not only the "engine" of sensemaking but also its product. In other words, to use Malkani's turn of phrase, "self" exists as a result of how we make sense of the signals we capture. It is neither the process of capturing nor the signals themselves.

This allows us to turn Malkani's conclusion on its head. The more obsessed we get with capturing the signals around us, the less obliged we seem to feel to "make sense" of them, which is to say to "document" them. The reductio ad absurdum is that we shall become mindless drones, sucking up all of the signals around us but leaving interpretation to someone else (except that there is no "someone else"). Rather than compensating for dementia, an obsession with capture contributes to further erosion of the capacity for sensemaking. Welcome to the world of the "hollow men!"

Does Anyone Bother to Read What They Write?

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

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

Do My Readers Share My Tastes?

While I try very hard (even if I do not always succeed) to be equally fair to all styles of making music, I am inevitably pressed in conversation to name my preferences. These days I fall back on a simple formula: Anything before 1750 or after 1950. This morning's consultation of Google Analytics seems to suggest that the readership of my articles reflects that formula. The top item on my national site is a report of the latest uploads of videos from the San Francisco early music group Voices of Music. This is followed quite closely (at least in terms of statistical significance) by a report on two new albums of the piano music of Philip Glass that will be released later in the coming week. Needless to say, I did not hide my enthusiasm for writing either of these pieces; but I was pleased to see that such enthusiasm may have been infectious!

Swimming in Repertoire

One of the unforeseen consequences of my having made the move from IT research into writing about music is that I seem to have built up a voracious appetite for repertoire. As I learned from reading Leonard Slatkin's memoir, Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, such activity is one of the cornerstones of a conservatory education, at least at places like Juilliard, which Slatkin attended. It presumes that a comprehensive knowledge of music requires the broadest possible account of what has been documented, preferably coupled with devoting time to both recordings and performances to account for what has been made from those documents.

The good news is that I can pursue this activity through both attending as many performances as my schedule (and personal endurance) will allow and following up on opportunities to write about recordings. As of the beginning of March, I shall have been writing for Examiner.com for six years. That was preceded by building up my writing chops through several years of blogging, initially casual and progressively more and more serious. I have thus been evolving out of the state of a "passive consumer" for about a decade, perhaps to the point that repertoire now constitutes the medium of my existence, rather the way in which water does for a fish.

Every now and then someone will ask me how I retain it all. The fact is that I don't; and, at my advanced age, I am less and less likely to do so as time passes. I sometimes joke that I now depend on Google when my memory is failing, meaning that I write as much as I can "into" Examiner.com simply to make sure that Google will help me when I need it.

On the other hand I still make it a point not to take notes during a performance. Paying attention to writing down something means you are not paying attention to your auditory channels, and I simply will not abide by that latter option. Besides, human memory is not a file cabinet. It is an ongoing process of recollection. Just looking at a printed p program seems to be enough to set the wheels of that process in motion. What it yields provides the substance of what I write, and anything that does not emerge from that process was probably not worth writing about anyway.

I thus find myself in a somewhat complex and possibly tenuous relationship with both knowledge and memory. Exercise is as fundamental to maintaining that relationship as physical exercise is in maintaining the health and fitness of my body. (Because the latter is not particularly demanding on mind, I often use it as an occasion to begin to rehearse the thoughts that will find their way into writing.)

Does this protect me against lapses of memory when I need to recall something? Not at all. However, I think it does help me to sharpen my skills as a writer, even when mind is not always up to summoning up the specific memories I need or want.

Will I be able to keep this up indefinitely? I have no idea. Nevertheless, back when I was writing dance reviews as a student, I got to know Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. She kept at it to the very end. One night she wrote up the performance that she had just attended, went to bed, and died peacefully in her sleep.

Does Context Matter in the Face of Controversy

I doubt there will be any disagreement about the controversial nature of the cover Newsweek designed to highlight their "What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women" article (reproduced, for those who have not seen it, on the an ABC7 Web page). It is also not surprising that there are readers calling the cover "obscene, sexist and contributing to sexism" (quoting from that same Web page). However, like the dog that did not bark in the night, it would appear that no one bothered to ask whether the cover was designed by a man or a woman and if the answer to that question would influence how it is judged. For better or worse, the image previews one position on the question raised by the article. If a woman designed it to make sure that readers recognize that particular side of the issue, should she be held to task for committing an "obscene" act; or is she just giving the mule a sharp blow to the head to get its attention?

Discovering My Own Point of View

As I continue to work my way through the new Library of America collection of Herald Tribune articles by Virgil Thomson, I encountered a paragraph that really resonated with me:

The intellectual audience wants culture with its music, wants information, historical perspectives, enlarged horizons. It demands of program makers constant experiment and a huge variety. It is far more interested in repertory, as a matter of fact, than in execution. It tends to envisage the whole of music as a vast library in which everything is available, or should be. The strictly musical audience and the mass public are more easily satisfied. They think of the concert life as a sort of boarding house where you take what is offered and don’t reach. Their good nature is easily abused by managements and other organizing agencies. The intellectuals are more demanding and refuse to be spoon fed. That is why, as a musician, I value the intellectual element in audiences.

Every now and then I encounter some push-back over the fact that I do not spend enough time writing about execution because I tend to dwell heavily on the music itself, usually in terms of its relation to the overall repertoire. I suppose that makes me an intellectual in Thomson's book; but that means that I value his punch line. I also think that the distinction that Thomson draws is the one I have previously tried to make between examining and criticism.

If I am to read him correctly, Thomson seems to work from the point of view that critical judgement is, and should be, grounded in evidence of execution, which may explain why, as I have previously observed, his own judgment tends to take its departure from what is printed on the score pages and, whenever possible, nothing else. However, he also seems to suggest that, even without recourse to score pages, the mass public has a basic toolbox to facilitate exercising their own judgement. I might suggest that those who are skillful at using their own tools might constitute that particular class that I have previously called the "enthusiasts." The problem is that those managements about which Thomson writes tend to know both the assets and the limitations of those tools, which is why Thomson raises the problem of abuse.

Thomson wrote the above paragraph for publication on January 22, 1950. I state that date because the article itself deserves a bit of historical perspective. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938; but it was originally created to root out uncover Nazis, rather than undercover Communists. After the Second World War, however, the target shifted.

One result was that many keen intellects, particularly those studying the history of the United States, were writing about the many ways in which our country did not live up to the ideals it had set for itself. These articles were not necessarily accusatory, since many of the writers made no secret that the real world never lives up to the ideal world. Unfortunately, the nature of this critical thinking tended to be associated with advocating Communism; and, to be fair, there certainly was a contingent of writers who had been Party members. However HUAC went after the whole body of those intellectuals with the four-legs-good-two-legs-bad logic of George Orwell's Animal Farm, leading to a rise in anti-intellectualism that would ultimately be studied by Richard Hofstadter.

That rise was already in progress when Thomson wrote the above paragraph. However, those thoughts were simply a continuation of precepts he had been writing about half a decade earlier. My guess is that in 1950 he could not foresee just how much damage HUAC would do; and, since we have never really recovered from that damage, I have to wonder how many of today's readers would prefer to bite Thomson's finger of such regards, rather than looking where he is pointing.

Cute Blooper in Summary

I have noticed that the summary texts for RSS feeds tend to be given little attention when the feeds are created. While there have been a variety of research projects concerned with summarizing text, they have been better at revealing what we do not know about text understanding, rather than achieving their goal. Still, I do not think we can blame some of the more egregious spelling errors on those summaries on software; and, every now and then, the human-in-the-loop makes the sort of mistake that used to find its way to the bottom of a column in The New Yorker.

Today's feed from BBC News had just such a mistake. It unintentionally created misunderstanding. However, the situation was cute enough to be relatively harmless. The summary text, in its entirety, read:

The Dalai Lama carries Werther's Originals, and more nuggets

This summarized an article entitled "10 things we didn't know last week;" so it was pretty clear that the "nuggets" were the other "nine things." However, as it was written, the text suggested that the Dalai Lama carries a variety of candies with him, only one of which was named by brand, leaving the reader curious about what the others were!