The Rehearsal Studio

CHUTZPAH on Behalf of Main Street (sort of)

2009-07-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Once again I seem to find myself with the problem of facing a good Chutzpah of the Week award candidate at the beginning of the week. Admittedly, I may well be under the influence of Saturday's premiere performance of To Big to Fail by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which I described as "a parable about paying more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street;" but a report by James Lamont for this morning's Financial Times surprised me by covering an opposition between Main Street and Wall Street where I had not considered finding one. Here is the basic story:

The newly elected Indian government on Monday launched a big spending national budget that boosted infrastructure spending and protected farmers, but was deeply unpopular with investors, who hammered Indian stocks.

Fearing the budget would further stretch the fiscal deficit, investors pulled out of shares listed on the Sensex which staged a sharp retreat from early gains, falling as much as 6 per cent to 14,017.37 in afternoon trading.

In other words, under the leadership of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, India plans to go ahead with a recovery plan that pays more attention to the needs of its citizens than to the needs of its financial sector. Standing up to the financial sector in this way requires a strong sense of chutzpah; and given that the market is already pushing back against Mukherjee, I figure he needs all the support he can get. To emphasize the drama of the situation, Lamont even observed that the Sensex dropped 600 points over the period of Mukherjee's address to the Indian Parliament about his plan. Nevertheless, Mukherjee hung in there with one critical sentence:

As we begin this five-year journey, the road ahead will not be easy.

Needless to say, it is not easy to "stay the course" (to revive that old Ronald Regan cliché) of a five-year plan; but, perhaps this is where that matter of patience with the rich and mighty is so important. Recall that the year began with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo receiving a Chutzpah of the Week award (also presented early in the week) for losing patience with the rich and mighty. Mukherjee has chosen a different journey. It took chutzpah to make the choice, and it will take chutzpah to sustain that choice. I give him the Chutzpah of the Week award in the hope that other countries will take note of how he has decided to place the needs of his citizens above those of his country's financiers.

Diplomacy and Espionage

2009-07-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of buzz this morning around the story of the newly appointed head of MI6 having his "cover blown" by his wife's Facebook site. Even CNET News got on the bandwagon (probably because of the Facebook role), although the bandwagon-rider was Chris Matyszczyk, who is only a member of the CNET Blog Network and whose Technically Incorrect blog must often be taken with several grains of salt. Nevertheless, Matyszczyk is usually good at seeding his posts with relevant and useful hyperlinks. Had he not posted with the attention-grabbing headline "Wife exposes chief spy's personal life on Facebook," I probably would not have read beyond my Google Reader summary; but the post itself made it easier for me to address the source material from Mail Online, the Web site for the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail of London. So here is the basic story in the words of Mail reporter Jason Lewis:

The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details on the Facebook website.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all Britain's spying operations abroad.

But his wife's entries on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, who their friends are and where they spend their holidays.

Amazingly, she had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of the site's 200million users who chose to be in the open-access 'London' network - regardless of where in the world they actually were.

There are fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder may have compromised the safety of Sir John's family and friends.

Lady Shelley Sawers' extraordinary lapse exposed the couple's friendships with senior diplomats and well-known actors, including Moir Leslie, who plays a leading character in The Archers. And it revealed that the intelligence chief's brother-in-law - who holidayed with him last month - is an associate of the controversial Right-wing historian David Irving.

Immediately after The Mail on Sunday alerted the Foreign Office to the astonishing misjudgment, all trace of the material – which could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists - was removed from the internet.

The move suggests that MI6 or the Foreign Office, which is also responsible for the GCHQ electronic eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, had not vetted what sort of information Sir John and his family were distributing over the internet.

This is the sort of story that hits the road and immediately runs off madly in all directions. However, the direction that tends to interest me the most is the one that goes up the managerial food chain. Apparently, the BBC shared my interest according to the following report on what happened when Foreign Secretary David Miliband was approached for comment:

But Mr Miliband told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme: "Are you leading the news with that?

"The fact that there's a picture that the head of the MI6 goes swimming - wow, that really is exciting.

'No state secret'

"It is not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks, for goodness sake let's grow up.

"He is an outstanding professional who will do a really good job in an outstanding organisation."

However, there is a bit of context that was given relatively little attention, being buried far below the (metaphorical) fold on the Web pages for both the Mail and the BBC. This is the matter of Sawers' current position, accounted for in the Mail by the usual sensational rhetoric:

Sir John Sawers, currently Britain's Ambassador to the United Nations, where he sits on the highly sensitive Security Council, began his working life in MI6 but has spent the past 20 years building a career as a diplomat rather than a spy.

For me this raises two issues of diplomacy, one historical and one pragmatic. The pragmatic one is that a diplomat is a public figure. A little bit of knowledge about the man under the suit (even in Speedo trunks) could (not necessarily always, though) add a "human touch" when trying to communicate with those reluctant to do so. There is something to be said about laying your cards on the table when those cards are not about how many guns you have in your arsenal. This could have value even in the course of those "highly sensitive" conversations that take place in the Security Council (whose meetings are open to the public).

The historical perspective is a darker one, though. It came to me through an acquaintance I made within the intelligence community. This person happened to observe some scanning I had been doing, and we fell into a conversation about favorite reading matter. One of my candidates was a paper from Past and Present by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton entitled "'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy." This had been written in preparation for a more extended study of reading practices during the Renaissance. Harvey was a leading academic of the late sixteenth century with established credentials from both Cambridge and Oxford; and he served members of the Elizabethan court in a capacity that today we would call "consulting." One of his "clients" was Philip Sidney, who served the Queen as a diplomat on several occasions and would turn to Harvey (and his knowledge of Livy) for "useful background" prior to setting off on his diplomatic missions. The important part of the conversation that took place about this paper was my being reminded that anyone dispatched by Queen Elizabeth I on a "diplomatic mission" was also expected to do "intelligence gathering" while "on site." If the Mail had wanted to sensationalize Sawers' career, a better strategy would have been to play up this "history of confluence" between diplomacy and espionage, rather than dwelling on the sensitivity of Security Council deliberations!

Personally, I am enjoying the coincidence of reading this news this morning after having watched Burn After Reading on HBO last night. This may be the ultimate comedy-of-errors narrative about Homeland Security operations, as well as an analysis of just how arbitrary life can be. There is no consistency over whether the smart prevail over the dumb (or the other way around) or whether virtue triumphs over vice (or, again, the other way around). Thus, the real punch line comes when a CIA officer is being debriefed by his boss about all the confusing events that have unfolded. Being a good boss, he tells the subordinate to treat the whole affair as a learning experience. IMDb selected as a "memorable quote" the exchange that ensues:

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

Thus, we should be asking both the Sawers family and Miliband if they have learned what not to do again. The most obvious lesson is:

Don't put anything on the Internet unless you want the entire world to see it.

I suspect that many reading this will find that "lesson" an "insight into the obvious" (as we used to say at MIT). The problem is that it is not obvious to large swaths of the population; and those swaths include some very highly-placed people, who can impact the fate of the world! Thus, the real value of this affair is that we have now learned a good cautionary tale to throw back at the next Internet evangelist who is trying to promote a more Wiki-based approach to governance!

A Parable of Economic Crisis

2009-07-05T06:45:00.000-07:00

The concept of parable has been around and in practice at least since the days of Aesop. It tends to serve two purposes. The first is to shine a new light on a confusing and problematic situation, thus making it more comprehensible. This is usually a matter of explaining things in terms of those listening to the parable, rather than in the terms of the situation itself, which tend to be the source of confusion in the first place. The second is to use the light of understanding to indicate a path towards resolving the problems brought on by the situation. The parable is the stock-in-trade of the agitprop vehicle of didactic drama and its subsequent influence on Bertolt Brecht's approach to epic theatre.

Epic theatre is alive and well in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe is one of his proudest vehicles. It is thus no surprise that this summer's production should use parables to take on the complexities and perplexities of the current economic crisis, delivered with outrageous humor and spectacle (and very little mime). The result, given its first performance (as always) on the Fourth of July, is Too Big to Fail; and it succeeds delightfully where just about all punditry gets bemired in its own rhetoric. In the past there has been a tendency for Mime Troupe productions to follow the Brechtian tradition of going on too long; but Too Big to Fail is one of the tightest of their productions that I have seen (and I have now lost count). Somewhat in the narrative framework of The Odyssey, parables about our economic crisis are delivered through one story of a great journey and another of what is happening back at the hero's home. Seemingly disconnected events, usually in the form of facile jokes, always get woven into the fabric of a bigger picture and never take too long to do so. When it threatens to get too involved in its own complexity, the narrative mocks itself and quickly returns to the direct delivery of parable.

After a repeat performance this afternoon in Dolores Park, the San Francisco Mime Troupe goes on the road, taking Too Big to Fail to a variety of venues around the Bay Area until the end of September. They have posted a Web page with their full schedule. Most of the performances are free, which means that there is a serious effort to "pass the hat" at the end of the show. This is important since, according to their statistics, those post-performance donations account for 22% of their budget. The schedule also identifies those performances that require tickets, along with information for obtaining them.

Too Big to Fail is basically a parable about paying more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street. The message just gets through more effectively that it has done from other sources. Perhaps that it because of the second role that the parables play. We come away with a better sense of what we can actually do to restore the focus of economic behavior to its rightful place. Power to the Mime Troupe!

Self-Hinderance?

2009-07-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

While HBO's new Hung series may be doling out a long-overdue dose of satire to self-help hucksters, it would appear that, according to a recent BBC NEWS story, those hucksters may actually be taking a bad situation and making it worse. The report summarizes a Canadian study published in Psychological Science as follows:

The researchers, from the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick, asked people with high and low self-esteem to say "I am a lovable person."

They then measured the participants' moods and their feelings about themselves.

In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not.

However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly.

The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves.

They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.

Writing in the journal, the researchers suggest that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as "I accept myself completely," can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem.

Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts.

If people are instructed to focus exclusively on positive thoughts, negative thoughts might be especially discouraging.

I have always been suspicious of self-help gurus (a suspicion that continues to be aggravated whenever one of them appears on Public Television during Pledge Week); but this study led me to recognize that the whole self-help movement is yet another front on what, in previous writing, I have called the "War against Reality." In the past I have concentrated on strategies for denying reality; but the self-help evangelists are actually a bizarre extension of that Enlightenment scientistic utopia in which the individual can control everything, not just the natural world but the subjective one as well. The fact that the low self-esteem subjects in the Canadian study were actually in a better mood when not trying to block out their negative thoughts may be a sign that accepting reality is preferable to either denying it or enduring the frustration of trying to control it. The study thus can be seen as reinforcing the narrative position of the Showtime series, United States of Tara, whose protagonist has decided that living with multiple-personality disorder is preferable to trying to beat the symptoms into submission through medication. Paddy Chayefsky took a similar approach in "Marty;" in that narrative, it is only after Marty comes to terms with all his negative qualities (passionately unloading them on his despairing mother) that he can finally strike up a conversation with a woman (who is, herself, very much a wallflower) and discover that he can form a relationship.

In a peculiar way it may well be that we deal with the unpleasant realities of our lives in the same way that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross postulated that we deal with the prospect of our respective deaths. As we are assaulted by those unpleasant realities, we go through the same five stages that form the basis for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' model:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Perhaps one way to interpret the Canadian study is that, by putting up barriers to acceptance, self-help gurus make things worse for those with low esteem whom they claim to be helping. PBS should take note of this. If all those Pledge Week Specials are actually making people feel worse about themselves, they are probably going to feel less inclined to make pledges!

Professors and Politicians in Vilnius

2009-07-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

Apparently, it is one thing for a Yale University Professor of History to explore parallels between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and quite another for politicians to acknowledge that professor's work. The professor in question is Timothy Snyder. The work is the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which is not scheduled for publication until October 2010. However, this past May 9 Snyder delivered a lecture in Vilnius on material that will be included in the book; and a text based on that lecture has appeared in the latest issue of The New York Review. I found that lecture sufficiently fascinating that it inspired a post I wrote this morning.

That post concerned using Snyder's material as a new lens for critiquing the evangelism of globalization and economic growth, particularly from evangelists such as Tom Friedman. However, according to a BBC NEWS report, there are Russian diplomats not interested in reflecting on Snyder's position:

Russian delegates have walked out of an OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] session in Vilnius after it voted for a remembrance day for the victims of both Nazism and Stalinism.

The pan-European security and democracy body passed a resolution equating the roles of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in starting World War II.

Moscow's delegation boycotted the vote after failing to have it withdrawn.

I suppose it is possible that neither Snyder's lecture nor the OSCE meeting would have taken place had Vilnius not been named European Capital of Culture of 2009; but it is a prime example of the sort of "bloodland" that Snyder is examining in his book. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Vilnius was seized by the Soviet Union on September 19, 1939, two days after it had invaded Poland from the east. When Hitler abrogated this Pact in June of 1941 and launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Vilnius quickly fell to the Nazis. After the Second World War Lithuania became a Soviet Socialist Republic, with Vilnius remaining as its capital. The city thus had the experience of "both German and Soviet armies passing through … twice, in attack and retreat" (as Snyder put it in describing Belarus and Ukraine). As its Wikipedia entry cites, Vilnius also played a major role in the history of Judaism:

A major scholar of Judaism and Kabbalah centered in Vilnius was the famous Rabbi Eliyahu Kremer, also known as the Vilna Gaon. His students have significant influence among Orthodox Jews in Israel and around the globe.

One of Snyder's points, however, is that there were both Christians and Jews in Vilnius who managed to survive the horrors of both Hitler and Stalin; and, perhaps in recognition of its "Capital of Culture" status, the OSCE saw fit to memorialize those who did not survive. Unfortunately, this did not play well with the representatives of a country that has been experiencing recent revivals of Stalin nostalgia as he becomes a more and more distant historical figure. I suspect that the irony of this situation will please the ghost of another controversial historical figure (this one from music history), who (again according to the Wikipedia entry) was honored by Vilnius back in 1995:

In 1995, the world's first bronze cast of Frank Zappa was installed in the Užupis district with the permission of the government.

Globalization and Genocide

2009-07-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

There are several dimensions to the "ignored reality" of the Holocaust examined by Timothy Snyder in his essay in the latest issue of The New York Review. Most important is his observation that "many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas," stressing that, for example, the factory-like procedures at camps like Auschwitz were only a part (and a relatively late one) of the tragic narrative of the Holocaust. Equally important is Snyder's effort to examine parallels between the mass killings under the Nazis and those in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, Snyder saves the real punch line of these parallels for the end of the article:

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic development. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

They did so in ways that seem appalling and obscene to us today, but which were sufficiently plausible to motivate large numbers of believers at the time. Food is no longer scarce, at least in the West; but other resources are, or will be soon. In the twenty-first century, we will face shortages of potable water, clean air, and affordable energy. Climate change may bring a renewed threat of hunger.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

For all my criticism of Tom Friedman's evangelical approach to globalization, I do not think I would accuse him of fostering "privileged development." On the other hand it is not difficult to read his evangelism in terms of "economic autarky;" and, from that point of view, I suspect that Friedman can be accused of wearing blinders that block out the connection between economic autarky and privileged development. Thus, we need to turn to Europeans to take that connection into account; and one of those Europeans appears to be Angela Merkel.

I make this assertion on the basis of a statement she made yesterday to the German parliament reported this morning on SPIEGEL ONLINE:

With a week to go before the next G-8 meeting in the Italian city of L'Aquila, Merkel told the German parliament in Berlin on Thursday that the forum was no longer sufficient to deal with the challenges ahead. "We are seeing that the world is growing together and that the problems that we face cannot be solved by the industrialized countries alone," she said.

Merkel now favors the G-20, a wider group of nations, including the fast-growing nations like China, Brazil and India. "I think the G-20 should be the format that, like an overarching roof, determines the future," she said.

These are the words of a world leader who recognizes that there will always be a threat of economic autarky and is prepared to counter that threat by avoiding economic planning by elite bodies that lack adequate concern for those countries not already "developed" according to standards set by the industrialized countries. Of course, compared with the membership of the United Nations, the G-20 is also a rather elite body; but she has taken a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, it will be up to leaders whose sense of history is more tragic than that of any American "players" to take further steps to recognize that the economic well-being of the world at large is not necessarily strictly a matter of growth, rapid or otherwise. Well-being also includes security from threats of harm, such as terrorism. Until those with both the potential and the motivation to threaten can engage in meaningful discussion about economic futures, even the G-20 will not be able to address economic well-being from a position that will matter most to the rest of the world.

Preludes, Fugues, Wittgenstein, and Autobiography

2009-07-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

My effort to explore my hypothesis about the autobiographical nature of the second volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier among members of the San Francisco Symphony Social Network ran into some interesting confusions. I figured that, since this is my "rehearsal studio," I should use it to reconsider what I was trying to say in the hope of saying it more clearly (if not more convincingly). My invocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to have led others down a dark alley concerned with the nature of "family resemblances" among all of the fugues in this collection (and similarly for the preludes); and I realized that talking about "family resemblance" at all may have been a distracting red herring.

More important than classifying these artifacts is the distinction between the artifacts themselves and the practices through which those artifacts are produced. (For example, I find it particularly relevant that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists "fugue" as having a verb form as well as a noun form. The latter denotes the practice of producing an artifact that is an instance of the former.) The "autobiographical" nature of the second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier has more to do with those preludes and fugues being reflections on past practices that it does with whether or not preludes or fugues constitute legitimate ontological categories. This was the primary message I was trying to get across when I first posed the "Preludes and Fugues as Autobiography" hypothesis. This can now be reflected back on how Wittgenstein used the concept of "game" (which I had cited when I posed my hypothesis) to illustrate what he meant by "family resemblance." What we choose to call a game has little to do with any attributes of the game itself and far more to do with how it figures into our understanding of the practice of "play." From this point of view, every composition has within it the power to inform us about the practices of the composer (which may then inform us about the composer's past experiences, both musical and extra-musical, thus endowing the artifact with a capacity for "autobiographical communication"). The challenge facing us as listeners is to be so informed! It is no easy matter; but, as Igor Stravinsky would have put it, our capacity to rise to that challenge is what distinguishes us from the ducks!

CHUTZPAH with Military Rhetoric

2009-07-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

One of the best ways to win a Chutzpah of the Week award is by speaking truth to power, and speaking truth to military power requires a special kind of chutzpah. National Security Advisor James L. Jones seems to have that chutzpah when it comes to military planning in Afghanistan; and, given our history of getting ourselves into inextricable messes, this is definitely chutzpah in the right place at the right time. Not surprisingly, the story behind this chutzpah was filed by Bob Woodward for this morning's Washington Post. Here is his account of the basic act:

National security adviser James L. Jones told U.S. military commanders here last week that the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels here flat for now, and focus instead on carrying out the previously approved strategy of increased economic development, improved governance and participation by the Afghan military and civilians in the conflict.

The message seems designed to cap expectations that more troops might be coming, though the administration has not ruled out additional deployments in the future. Jones was carrying out directions from President Obama, who said recently, "My strong view is that we are not going to succeed simply by piling on more and more troops."

"This will not be won by the military alone," Jones said in an interview during his trip. "We tried that for six years." He also said: "The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development. If that is not done right, there are not enough troops in the world to succeed."

Jones delivered his message after a 30-minute briefing by Marine Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, who commands 9,000 Marines here, nearly half the new deployments Obama has sent to Afghanistan.

However, as we read on in Woodward's account, we discover that this is a case where the chutzpah resided not only in the enough-is-enough cake but also in that cake's rhetorical icing. As could be expected, Nicholson was ready to push back against Jones' message and try to open the door to further troop escalations. However, as Woodward reported, Jones was ready with push-back of his own:

During the briefing, Nicholson had told Jones that he was "a little light," more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. "We don't have enough force to go everywhere," Nicholson said.

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. "At a table much like this," Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, "the president's principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan." The principals -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair -- made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson's Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, "oops," we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

"They then said, 'If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,' " Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?"

Nicholson and his colonels -- all or nearly all veterans of Iraq -- seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

Jones, speaking with great emphasis to this group of Iraq veterans, said Afghanistan is not Iraq. "We are not going to build that empire again," he said flatly.

Jones knew that he would have to use rhetoric that would get the attention of the brass in the room, and he had the chutzpah to deliver just the right rhetoric to do the trick. Jones has definitely earned his Chutzpah of the Week award; let us now hope that the Administration he represents does not back down from this position!

The External Musical World in Knowledge and Practice

2009-06-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

A blog post by Jesse Limbacher, submitted to the San Francisco Symphony Social Network with the provocative title "Why Music?," sent me back to review one of my own posts, entitled "Our Knowledge of the Musical World," only to discover that I had written it exactly one year ago. I had chosen my title as somewhat of an homage to Bertrand Russell's book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method of Philosophy. However, such an homage may have been misplaced, since I am not sure it make sense to think about music as strictly an "external world" set of phenomena; and I suspect that Limbacher's post piqued my attention, at least in part, because it was trying to take such an "external world" stance. This seems to be leading me down two paths, one concerned with the nature of the musical world and the other concerned with whether or not it makes sense to talk about having knowledge of it.

I would have to review Russell's book to confirm this, but I am pretty sure that he used the phrase "external world" to denote "external to self." This is a very Cartesian approach, which Daniel Dennett came to call the "Cartesian Theater" perspective. The Wikipedia entry for Cartesian Theater includes the following excerpt from Dennett's book, Consciousness Explained:

Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of "presentation" in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of. [...] Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But [...] the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us — laypeople and scientists alike — even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.

The theorists Dennett has in mind are those who view reality as constructed, rather than presented to the senses; and Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann made a strong case that such construction is a social process, rather than simply a product of stimuli "processed by an individual self." Since I have tried to make the case that the performance of music resides as much in the social world of engagement among performers as it does in the objective world of technique and the subjective world of interpretation, I support Dennett's rejection of Cartesian materialism and recognize that it may be more appropriate to talk about "constructed musical reality" than about the "musical world."

So, does it make sense to talk about our having "knowledge" of this "constructed musical reality?" I suppose the intuitive answer to this question would be, "Why not?" However, as Russell liked to observe, we should only use words when we know what they mean; and "knowledge" has been a difficult case that goes all the way back to Plato's "Theaetetus." About half a year ago, I summarized this particular dialog as follows:

It begins with the quest for a definition of knowledge. Each time Theaetetus proposes a definition, Socrates elegantly unravels it. Thus, in the final paragraphs of the dialogue Socrates as much as says that, while they did not achieve their goal, the journey towards that goal was still worth making.

For me the most interesting part of that journey involved the discovery that talking about knowledge led to deep exploration of three others equally challenging concepts: being, description, and memory. Think of these concepts in terms of three primary questions:

What is?
How do we account for what is when talking with others?
How do our past experiences with what it impact our present behavior?

I would not suggest that these questions are any easier than the question of defining knowledge. However, I would argue that such simple reductive formulations give us a better start down a path of inquiry than more abstract questions about the nature of knowledge. Besides, I have already spent a fair amount of time knocking my head over the question of description in music to recognize that I am not yet ready to ramp up to a higher level of abstraction; and I have not even scratched the surface when it comes to questions about being and memory! One thing I suspect, though, is that my inquiry will have less to do with Russell's deeply cherished scientific method and more to do with social theory!

Worth the Pound?

2009-06-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

What price royalty? Back in the days of Beyond the Fringe, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore took a light-hearted approach to this question in the "Royal Box" sketch. This is the one in which Moore goes to the same theater every night and pays for a seat from which he can see the Royal Box, figuring that, sooner or later, he will get to see the Royal Family sitting there. The punch line comes with the following exchange:

Cook: Do you really mean to say to spend fifteen shillings every night just on the off-chance you may catch a glimpse of the Royal Family?

Moore: Well, they're not worth the pound.

On a more serious note this morning the BBC released a report on the impact of Royal expenses (should that last word have been capitalized?) on the annual budget for the United Kingdom. The "bottom line" is that the Royal family costs the government £41.5 million, an increase of £1.5 million from last year's budget. This comes down to 69p for every person in the country, which means that they really are not worth the pound; but, in a time of serious economic hardship, they certainly cost far more than a pretty penny!

Missing the Opera

2009-06-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

In the terminology of Kenneth Burke, the underlying story of a narrative is basically a matter of motivated actions. More specifically, in the framework of Burke's pentad, acts are performed by agents, who have purposes. Every act takes place in some scene, and its performance may rely upon the instrumental assistance of agencies. However, scenes and agencies tend to supplement the basic questions of who does what and why.

One of the greatest hazards in revisionist productions, particularly when a war-horse grand opera is concerned, is that the secondary overwhelms the primary to a point where the primary becomes at best insignificant and at worst ludicrous. This is precisely the problem with Marta Domingo's staging of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata for the Los Angeles Opera, currently being performed by the San Francisco Opera. As she explained in a one-page "note" in the program book, she wanted to transplant the tragic tale of Violetta Valéry from the "world of the demimondaines" of late nineteenth-century Paris to the "world of the flappers" during the Roaring Twenties of the United States. This may make for good eye candy, but it tended to undermine the characterizations of the key agents (Violetta herself, her would-be-poet lover Alfredo Germont, and his bourgeois father Giorgio) and their underlying sense of purpose. That undermining may explain why, in reviewing this production for the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman saw it as a story about Giorgio in which Violetta played a supplementary role. By subordinating acts, agents, and purposes to matters of scene, Domingo offered a topsy-turvy discourse for the story.

The success of such a radical approach involves a "social contract" under which the audience is willing to accept the terms of the director. Because Dwayne Croft put so much of his own sense of character into his performance of Giorgio (as both actor and singer), we in the audience certainly had reasons to accept this contract. On the other hand the two party scenes, where the eye candy was at its richest, kept bumping over potholes of inconsistencies with the libretto, some of which were deftly (or not) paved over with rewordings in the projected titles. Ultimately, the most successful scene was the final act, in which (with the exception of a choreographic interruption that was as inept as it was inane) everything was stripped away other than the bed on which Violetta would expire. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that this was the act in which Anna Netrebko's Violetta and Charles Castronovo's Alfredo rose to the same vocal heights that Croft had established the first time he set foot on the stage. Working together (and with conductor Donald Runnicles), the three of them made magic out of music that can too easily fall into cliché; but why did we having to slog through so much muddle before finally encountering the operatic experience that made it all worth while?

This may come down to support for the argument that, in a time of economic austerity, it is necessary to go back to the basics. That means concentrating on the agents (as both actors and singers) and that "sense of purpose" without which the acts lose their meaning. The best way to avoid missing the opera altogether is to keep the primary in its primary position.

The Music Lives On

2009-06-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

I am not sure the BBC had any particular message in mind when they went into streets around the world to collect comments on the death of Michael Jackson. Whether it was their intention to show how thin a line separates appreciation from cultism, the remark that made the deepest (and most aggravating) impact on me came from a young American (probably too young to remember the Jackson Five), who declared the day of Jackson's death to be "the day the music stopped." From that point of view, while I cannot personally understand the extent to which this story as blocked out so many others, I am glad to see that the ABC News team came up with a variety of perspectives on how, as has always been the case so many times in the past, the music is showing healthy signs of outliving the musician.

Nevertheless, my initial aggravation was further provoked when I read the "This Week" column in the Sunday Datebook section of today's San Francisco Chronicle. The specific event announcement that piqued me concerned the appearance of Mose Allison and Bob Dorough at Yoshi's; and I knew there would be trouble when I saw that the event was listed under a "Comedy" header. Still, I was not prepared for the text that followed:

Even if you don't recognize the name Mose Allison, you're sure to recognize his music. Van Morrison, John Mayall, the Who, the Clash, Eric Clapton, the Yardbirds, Elvis Costello and others have covered his songs. The list goes on and one, and so does the beat. Allison has not stopped writing and performing since he moved to the Big Apple in 1949 to immerse himself in the emerging jazz scene.

Coming from a culture (and a campus radio station) that was playing Allison's own recordings before any of the names on that list had become public figures (which probably means back when they were listening to the same recordings), I found this presentation to be narrow-mindedly offensive; but I suspect that Allison is enough of a professional to realize that you have to take what you can get. Still, the culture of performance is rarely one of acknowledging your sources. If neither Eric Clapton nor the Rolling Stones were particularly conscientious about giving credit to Robert Johnson during their concerts, then I have to remind myself that Johann Sebastian Bach was not that better in the matter. If Bach had an impact on the "discovery" of Antonio Vivaldi and Dietrich Buxtehude by the recording industry, then this has served the interests of listeners around the world and is not that different from the influence that Clapton may have had on Columbia's decision to release all of the recordings that Johnson ever made on two compact discs. Nevertheless, Allison is still alive and still at it as both composer and performer; and I find it tragic that he should "live" only by virtue of those of a later generation who covered his material.

I suspect that this is nothing more than a sobering reminder that the history of music is no different than the history of nations. In both cases the past is necessarily viewed through the distorting lens of the present. George Bernard Shaw captured the latter situation with more wit at the end of his play, The Devil's Disciple. He delegated that wit to his characterization of General John Burgoyne, who knows that he will soon be leading his army to defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. When asked by his aide how history will judge both him and the British army, he replied (in Shaw's words):

History will tell lies, as usual.

Kurt Vonnegut would later add his own riff to Shaw's in his reflection on the "historical view" of the fire-bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five:

So it goes.

In the face of such inevitability of historiography, I wish Allison a good gig at Yoshi's!

"The Lord is my shepherd" … and He's Packin' Heat!

2009-06-28T07:40:00.001-07:00

I take some comfort in the ability of the BBC to give equal time to "news of the weird" coming from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. However, without trying to play up any nationalistic pride, when it comes to weirdness, I am willing to bet that Fundamentalist Christianity will always win over British eccentricity hands down. Consider the following report, which BBC NEWS filed last night based on a few of their American sources:

A pastor in the US state of Kentucky told his flock to bring handguns to church in what he said was an effort to promote safe gun ownership.

Pastor Ken Pagano told parishioners to bring their unloaded guns to New Bethel Church in Louisville for a service celebrating the right to bear arms.

He said he acted after church members voiced fears the Obama administration could tighten gun control laws.

When the service began, some 200 people were present, AP news agency said.

"We are wanting to send a message that there are legal, civil, intelligent and law-abiding citizens who also own guns," Mr Pagano told the congregation.

"If it were not for a deep-seated belief in the right to bear arms, this country would not be here today," he said.

The pastor also held a handgun raffle, as well as providing information on gun safety.

"I wish more churches did this, I wish more people did this," the Louisville Courier-Journal quoted one attendee, Doreen Rogers, as saying.

"For some reason, most people think that carrying guns is sinful. It's not. I think my life is worth protecting."

About 10 members of a private local militia also attended, the Courier-Journal said.

As the Jews who joined the melting pot of immigration during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century were fond of saying, "Only in America!"

From my own philosophical point of view, I can only wonder what text Pagano chose for his sermon at that particular service. I doubt that it had anything to do with beating swords into ploughshares. Similarly, anything about turning the other cheek would probably have been out of place. Perhaps he preached that the handgun was the latter-day slingshot with which his congregation of Davids would prevail over any threat of new Goliaths. I suppose the Lord really does work in mysterious ways!

Half-Way Through the Project

2009-06-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Symphony Hall, the "basic" classical music channel for the (now merged) XM/Sirius satellite radio service, chose an interesting way to celebrate this year's anniversary of the death of Joseph Haydn. They decided to use the year to traverse all of his numbered symphonies (omitting any of the "extras" in the Hoboken catalog). Since there are 104 numbered symphonies and 52 weeks in the year, this works out conveniently to playing two symphonies each week. Today Martin Goldsmith made it a special point to recognize that he was playing Symphony Number 52 (Hoboken I/52), emphasizing that this was one of the Sturm und Drang symphonies for which Haydn had selected the key of C minor; but the occasion was far more celebratory for having reached the exact midpoint than it was stormy or stressful.

I rather like the way in which Goldsmith has set himself his own "Mount Haydn project." Both the peak and the ascent are far more modest than my own project, based on the Brilliant Classics Haydn Edition; but, while I forged ahead at a pace more concerned with checking the condition of all the CDs, Goldsmith found a good way to stretch his over the entire year. Interestingly enough, today's recording was the performance by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, conducted by Adam Fischer, from the collection of all the symphonies used by Brilliant for their larger package. Furthermore, in contrast to the frustrations I experienced with all those settings of folk songs that were not even of Haydn's own folk (so to speak) and the even larger mass of "politically motivated" baryton compositions, I have always felt that every symphony along Goldsmith's path of ascent is a rose worth stopping to smell, making the entire year a perfectly suitable time for his chosen journey. It therefore seems like the perfect time to congratulate Goldsmith for thinking up this particular plan and to recognize the significance of his milestone!

Pushers' CHUTZPAH

2009-06-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Chances are that not many readers will be familiar with the name of this week's Chutzpah of the Week award recipient unless, like myself, they use Reuters as one of their resources for financial news. The recipient's name is Joe Kinahan, and I selected him on the basis of a Reuters dispatch filed this morning by Leah Schnurr. The opening paragraphs of that dispatch should provide the basic grounds for my reasoning:

U.S. stocks faltered on Friday as weak oil futures pressured energy shares and a jump in the savings rate raised worries the economic recovery will not make much headway if consumers continue to be frugal.

Data showed that while consumer spending and income both rose in May as the government stimulus spread through the economy, much of the money was being socked away. Savings jumped to a record annual rate of $768.8 billion, the highest level since record keeping began in 1959.

"We need people to spend money in order to keep the economy humming," said Joe Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at online brokerage thinkorswim Group in Chicago. "The consumer has been the stalwart of the economy at this point, and we still need them to be."

Now I grant that Kinahan serves primarily as a symbol for a more abstract collective that relies upon the views he expressed in those two sentences, and I also grant that such collectives have received past awards. Nevertheless, I tend to prefer singling out an individual (as I did last week with Daniel Vasella, CEO of Novartis) when it is clear that the individual embodies the chutzpah of the collective, so to speak. In this case, however Kinahan embodies not so much his own employer (about as unfamiliar to most of us as his name) as a prevailing view that reminds us (as if we needed reminding) of how wide a gulf there is between the interests of Wall Street and those of Main Street.

Once again we need to revisit the hypothesis that Wall Street's all-important metric of consumer spending is basically an external manifestation of an addictive behavior. From that point of view, a return to frugality (brought on by a lack of money to spend or borrow) constitutes an effort to "kick the habit;" and we can view economic recovery in terms of recovery from that addiction. Put another way, both consumers and markets are striving to return to more "sane" conditions. Kinahan clearly does not see it that way. He would prefer that Main Street return to the old habits that played such a major factor in getting the world economy into its current mess; and, when considered from such a global perspective, his self-interested Wall Street Weltanschauung escalates to chutzpah-level proportions. Thus, he deserves the award; and I am far from troubled by the fact that he will be too selfish to share it with all the others he represents!

"But how will we know what to believe?"

2009-06-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

There are entirely too many one-liners in Ellen Goodman's latest Washington Post column, which has now been reproduced on Truthdig. They come not only from Goodman herself ("Twittering is just frittering.") but from her designated spokesperson for the "digital perspective," John Palfrey ("Bullets are more powerful than bytes."). Nevertheless, the message in this column is strong enough to rise above any "rhetorical noise," because it recognizes that "journalism in the Twitter era" (the title of Goodman's column) has to contend with a new "fog of war." This metaphor used to refer to the chaos of battle itself, its distorting influences on our basic capacities for perception, and the impact of those distortions on our abilities to make effective decisions. The new metaphor now refers to data sources, regardless of whether or not they may be distorted by that chaos of battle; the metaphor has become, as Goodman put it, a "downpour of texts and tweets." Within that downpour, it is as difficult to distinguish signal from noise at it was under the old metaphor to distinguish friend from foe.

Goodman uses this new metaphor to build a strong case that we need the disciplines of traditional journalism more than ever. More specifically, the extraction of signal from noise is a matter of validation, vetting, and editing. From Goodman's point of view, the current crisis in journalism comes down to the loss of valuable resources:

I don’t have to remind readers of newspaper woes, but in this imploding world, who will do the job of the mainstream media?

This is an indisputable point. However, if we are going to address questions of resources, we need to remember that time is as significant a resource as manpower. Goodman first really came to my attention a little over two years ago, when she wrote a column entitled "The Benefits of Slow Journalism." Even before Twitter was a gleam in some venture capitalist's eye, she realized that the Internet was more about speed than about reflection. Looking back on both that column and my "reflection" on it, I realize that those practices she advocated in her "post-Twitter" column, validation, vetting, and editing, are all highly reflective activities. If you are going to try to perform them at "Internet speed" (the primary target of Goodman's earlier column), you might as well not perform them at all.

For Goodman, the fundamental question is the one I incorporated in my title: "how will we know what to believe?" Pessimist that I am, however, I wonder if the real question is a darker one: Do we care whether or not we know what to believe? Instant gratification does not necessarily require validity as a prerequisite. It just has to provide the "buzz" of being right there "in the moment" when (to choose a poignant example-of-the-moment) a cell phone captured the shooting death of Neda Agha Soltan on video. Without any subsequent reflection, however, that buzz quickly deteriorates into trivialization; and those of us desperate to avoid such trivialization find ourselves in the same boat as Abraham Lincoln, asking questions about those who may have died in vain. I thus worry that Goodman's latest column may be that proverbial tree falling in a forest where no one can hear it. It definitely made a sound worth hearing; but, if that sound has not been perceived by those with the power to do something about it, it might as well not have been made at all.

Validating Music

2009-06-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in writing about the analytic approach of Heinrich Schenker, I declared that I did not accept his view of analysis as a means of "validating" a piece of music, equating the "validity" of the composition with the "success" of the analysis. What I had not realized, until I did some further digging, was that Donald Francis Tovey, whose methods of analysis were quite different, was as obsessed with "validity" as Schenker was. A paragraph of Tovey writing about Schoenberg, which led me to this conclusion, can be read in a comment I posted this morning to the San Francisco Symphony Social Network. I also realized that, beyond yesterday's comparison of Schenker's synchronic approach to Tovey's diachronic one, Tovey, being more of an English gentleman than a scholar, tended to resort to methods of rhetoric, in contrast to Schenker's efforts to make his points (not always successfully) through logic.

Consequently, any "emancipated dissonance" is "off the map" for both of these analysts. Thus, as far as Schenker was concerned, Arnold Schoenberg never existed, while Tovey was generous enough to acknowledge Schoenberg for his Gurrelieder (probably because it fit so nicely into his evolutionary view of music history). Perhaps one of the reasons for Joseph Kerman offering the prospect of "getting out of analysis" in the title of the essay that triggered this recent round of thoughts was concerned less with analysis itself and more with a tradition embraced by both Schenker and Tovey under which analysts were "gatekeepers of validity." Having established what we really need to escape, my favorite proposition, that we begin with the nature of listening, as opposed to structures in printed score pages, still seems like the best escape hatch. We may then examine the nature of listening through Gerald Edelman's biologically-based model of consciousness, which seems to have its origins in some of the final research undertaken by Friedrich Hayek. As I have observed, Edelman's approach "involves not only our capacity for forming perceptual categories but also the interplay of those categories that arise from 'sensation of the world' with categories based on 'sensation of self.'" We are thus as likely to find perceptual categories in our listening to Schoenberg's "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte" as we are to find them in those symphonies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven through which Schenker could demonstrate his methods so excellently. Furthermore, Schenker's self-appointed gatekeeper role is soundly thrashed by the subjective nature of those perceptual categories. To put it aphoristically, we hear what we hear because we hear it in terms of what we have heard. If Schenker's method "works" at all, it is because his Ursatz is nothing more than the barest abstraction of an authentic cadence, which most of us have heard for as long as we have been listening to music. However, experiences in listening to music composed after the Second World War have endowed us with a subjectivity that does not require authentic cadences as passionately as Schenker did. Perhaps, then, the goal of Kerman's title has some merit. We can get out of analysis (or at least the analytic practices that dominated music theory during the twentieth century). Each of us can do so by pulling him(her)self up with the bootstraps of his(her) own consciousness!

The "Organic" Metaphor

2009-06-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

Barnaby Thieme has been doing some interesting reading, and his decision to share that reading with the San Francisco Social Network has led me down a path I had not previously considered. His source is Joseph Kerman's essay, "How We Got into Analysis, And How to Get Out Again," which was included in a collection of Kerman's writings entitled Write All These Down. My own trigger was the following quote from Kerman:

Schoenberg's really decisive insight was to conceive of a way of continuing the great tradition while negating what everyone else to be at its very core, namely, tonality. He grasped the fact that what was central to the ideology was not the triad and tonality, as Schenker and Tovey believed, but organicism.

My immediate reaction was to consider whether Kerman's decision to place Heinrich Schenker and Donald Francis Tovey in the same sentence could be construed as chutzpah. However, since Kerman's essay appeared in 1980, it is not really in the running for a Chutzpah of the Week award; so I was willing to simply credit it as bold rhetoric. The problem is that it may also be misleading.

I have nothing against "organicism;" but we have to remember that any use of "organic" in the description of musical activities can only be metaphoric. Schenker used the metaphor explicitly. I am not sure I encountered the word actually being used by Tovey, but I can see the logic behind Kerman attributing it to him. The problem is that Schenker and Tovey construe the metaphor in radically different ways, and that is what makes Kerman's text misleading.

Let me begin with my understanding of Schenker's use of the word based on my readings of his texts in various English translations. Schenker's approach is to view a composition as if it were a living organism. His approach to analysis is one that validates that point of view from a "physiological" perspective. In other words the composition has a "structural anatomy," which provides the framework for how that composition "functions" (which, in turn, should inform how performance should present that "functioning"). I have no problem with this particular metaphorical approach to organicism, even if I am not sure I would engage it in my own writing about music.

Tovey, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with the physiology of a particular species as he is with how that species evolved. This is most evident in the "Music" entry that he prepared for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Tracing the history of music from the Ancient Greeks to the beginning of the twentieth century, he saw an evolutionary progression through which composers expand their compositions to work with longer and longer durations of time. The fact that Tovey's argument broke down when Arnold Schoenberg, along with his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, went "back to brevity" is irrelevant to Tovey's understanding of the metaphor. He was working with the data points he had, he put up a reasonably valid hypothesis, and developed an argument that paralleled an evolutionary process (without bring either genetics or natural selection into the picture).

This distinction between Schenker and Tovey revolves around a fundamental difference in thinking about time, which I have explored in previous writing about listening behavior. Schenker's approach is a synchronic one, based on nothing more than the properties of the composition being analyzed, while Tovey's approach is diachronic, placing every composition in the context of the overall flow of music history. Ironically, Tovey's case can be made through Schenkerian methods, since that management of longer durations of time is usually associated with an increase in the number of "layers" between the surface "foreground" structure and the Ursatz in the "background." However, an echt Schenkerian would examine each of Tovey's examples on a case-by-case basis, rather than seeking out a "metalogic" of how the foreground-background relationship changes over time.

Personally, I do not think we should be obliged to choose between synchronic and diachronic thinking. Pragmatist that I am, I believe we choose methods suitable to the nature of the questions whose answers we seek. Mind you, I do not approve of Schenker's approach as a means to determine whether or not a composition is "valid;" but, if we look beyond his rather dogmatic stance in such matters, we find some very useful tools for understanding the syntactic foundations of embellishment; and it is through those foundations that we can begin to make sense of Tovey's evolutionary perspective. In other words informed listening is a matter of seeking out the dialectical synthesis of the "natural" opposition of synchronic and diachronic. That, for me at least, is what analysis is; and, unlike Kerman, I have no desire to get out of it!

Gil Evans' Bartók Connection

2009-06-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

That passing reference to Gil Evans while writing about Porgy and Bess reminded me that it has been a while since I did some serious listening to Evans. On the Porgy and Bess album he had the chutzpah to supplement his arrangements of George Gershwin's music with an original composition of his own, "Gone," which is far more than a paraphrase of the music for Robbins' funeral scene in Scene 2 of Act 1 of the opera. This is symptomatic of the way in which Evans could turn the work of another composer into a new and original object. This was probably most evident in the way in which he reworked the second movement of Joaquín Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez," originally written for guitar and orchestra, for the Sketches of Spain album he prepared with Miles Davis. Less familiar may be "Song of our Country," recorded at the Sketches of Spain sessions but not released on the original Columbia vinyl. The title is the English translation of the subtitle of the second movement of the second of Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras suites ("O Canto de Nossa Terra"); and Villa-Lobos is far better served by Evans' treatment than he ever was by the overabundance of hack adaptations (anyone remember Johnny Mathis?) of the aria from the fifth Bachianas Brasileiras suite.

More surprising, however, is when Evans moved away from Spain and Brazil and turned to Béla Bartók. This is a more subtle (if not downright concealed) adaptation, since it resides in the introduction to his arrangement of the tune by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, "Wait Till You See Her." The source comes from the introduction to the first movement of Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra." Hopefully, one of these days some capable graduate student will get around to writing a thesis on Bartók's influence on jazz in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Given Evans' extensive literacy, finding that influence in his music is no surprise. More surprising may be accounts that John Coltrane used to practice by playing along with the opening measures of that same Bartók composition, which may well be where he got his idea for "Giant Steps." At the same time we find piano solos by Mose Allison with a strong Bartók influence (which I was able to confirm through a conversation with Allison "back in the day"). The middle of the twentieth century was an exciting time for both making and listening to music. Gil Evans was a champion of that time; and the recordings he influenced, both directly and indirectly, constitute a valuable legacy.

Orchestral Gershwin

2009-06-22T06:07:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like about my seat at the War Memorial Opera House for my San Francisco Opera subscription is the view it gives me of the orchestra pit. So much attention has been given to the staging and singing of the production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which opened on June 9, that I feel a bit of an obligation to play up the instrumental side of the action. Where orchestration is concerned, Gershwin was somewhat of a late bloomer. The worlds of Broadway and Hollywood imposed a "division of labor," where the composer came up with the tunes and an arranger took care of the scoring. Even "Rhapsody in Blue" was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. However, once Gershwin established his "concert hall credibility" with that composition, he began to work his own orchestral ideas, beginning with his F major piano concerto.

To some extent what I have previously called "the Ravel-Gershwin connection" may have been driven by Ravel's acute listening to Gershwin's sense of melody, harmony, and rhythm in both the rhapsody and the concerto and to Gershwin's development of similarly acute listening to Ravel's orchestration. The first impression one gets looking into the orchestra pit is the synthesis of concert hall and dance band elements, side by side. Most obvious is the use of a trap drum set to supplement the timpani and battery. Then there are the single-reed wind players, most of whom seem to divide time across clarinet, bass clarinet, and alto sax, making the score a bit of a journey through different wind sounds. This is definitely the work of a composer who no longer has to depend on an arranger, coming up with orchestrations through which even the most familiar of the tunes (and this opera has plenty of them) take on fresh coloration in which "classical" sounds cohabit comfortably with more jazzy elements.

From this point of view, I have to say that not enough attention has been given to conductor John DeMain. I first heard DeMain conduct when the 1976 Houston Grand Opera production of Porgy and Bess went on tour and came to Radio City Music Hall in New York. Even under those adverse conditions, he brought Gershwin's score to life, expressing with sparkling clarity how the journey of the opera's protagonists is very much a journey of the music itself. He commanded the same respect from the musical resources of the San Francisco Opera, finding at all times just the right pace to fit the progress of the journey to Francesca Zambello's compelling staging. Most important was the way in which he explored the richness of the music beyond those familiar tunes, territory overlooked in the jazz and pop worlds by just about everyone other than Gil Evans (in his arrangements for Miles Davis).

This production was the perfect antidote for that bloodlessness that so disappointed me in last week's Tosca!

On Choosing Words Carefully

2009-06-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I placed a text under a strong magnifying glass; but, considering how volatile conditions currently are in Iran, I think it is worth examining Barack Obama's most recent statement this way. If he thinks he is pouring oil on troubled waters, then others may see him as setting a match to that oil. Let us consider his first (and most quoted) paragraph (using Robert Dreyfuss' most recent blog post for The Nation as my source):

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

This text starts out immediately on the wrong foot with its use of "must." This is nothing more than that great classic of Bush-speak, "ya gotta understand" (which I once called "the only rhetorical device Bush has mastered"), with less folksy phonology. It presumes that the speaker's point of view is the only valid one, and this shows a flagrant disregard for the message behind the subtitle of (now "banished") Dennis Ross' Statecraft book, which is the need "to restore America's standing in the world." The bottom line is that this one little word reveals that, when push comes to shove, we can fall back on the same might-makes-right reasoning of the Bush Administration that got us into so much trouble.

This injudicious use of the word "must" is followed by the equally suspect adjective "unjust." Like it or not, the Iranian government has a justice system. We may not like the way it works, and we are under no obligation to agree with it or support it. However, using the word "unjust" amounts to invalidating it; and, like it or not, we do not have grounds to do so.

This then takes us to the even more highly-charged adjective "universal." Presumably, this adjective was engaged because it appears in the title of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Unfortunately, subsequent debates and decisions emerging from the United Nations since then have demonstrated that there is far from "universal" agreement when it comes to taking the 30 articles of this Declaration seriously in practice. Thus, Obama would have done better to make his point on the basis of his grounds for support, referring to "rights granted by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights" without shoving the "universality" of those rights in the faces of those currently violating the Preamble (free speech) and Article 20 (assembly) of that Declaration.

As was the case when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was first elected, we would do well to recognize how little this disputed election has to do with the governance of Iran. Power still resides ultimately with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and the president is little more than an "interface" between the world of this religious leader and the world of other countries, whether their governments are secular or sacred. Khamenei has made it clear that those who protest are indisputably at fault and will thus be subjected to the consequences of their faulty actions. Those are currently the "rules of the game" in Iran. If we are going to even try to exercise statecraft, we cannot begin by denying that those rules exist. This puts most of the Western countries in a great bind. However, this may have been Khamenei's intent. He is testing us to see if (and how) we can negotiate from such a difficult position. This will be Obama's real test as to whether or not meaningful relations with Iran can be restored. Khamenei has created that test, and it is now up to Obama to figure out how to pass it.

Cinematic Free Association

2009-06-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I alluded to my plan to go over to the San Francisco Conservatory to observe a Master Class conducted by Kiri Te Kanawa. This was a donor's event held in conjunction with the annual Conservatory Gala, which meant, among other things, that I did not approach it as an Examiner.com event. Furthermore, since I am limited to observing the practice of music, rather than practicing it in any serious way, I approach occasions like these in terms of taking what I can get out of them. Thus, at the beginning of this season, I used a similar event, at which the "master teacher" was pianist Leon Fleisher, as a point of departure for raising a couple of questions about Fleisher's pedagogical approach. Needless to say, I never got any answers from Fleisher; but the questions "seeded" a couple of trains of thought that I subsequently followed.

This time around I had no questions to raise regarding Dame Te Kanawa's approach. As I have observed with other vocal master classes, she is particularly attentive to the need for the vocalist to treat the whole body as the "instrument;" and much of her guidance homed in on how to honor "the music itself" through proper physical management of that "instrument." Nevertheless, the context I ended up bringing with me to this class triggered a fascinating free association during one of the performances; and, because it is so often the case that we cannot control our contexts, I wanted to share this particular impression.

The trigger was provided by Kittinant Chinsamran, a bass-baritone who recently received a Post Graduate Diploma in vocal performance from the Conservatory and is now artist-in-residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts. He chose to perform the air "Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries" from George Frideric Handel's oratorio Alexander's Feast. This is the opening air of Part Two, Part One having ended with Alexander (the Great) getting a bit drowsy (and melancholy) from all the wine being served at his victory feast. Thus, the air is preceded by a tenor accompagnato to the text:

Now strike the golden lyre again,
A louder yet — and yet a louder strain!
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.

This is pretty much what the "Revenge" air does, invoking the memory of Alexander's soldiers:

… that in battle were slain,
And unbury'd, remain
Inglorious on the plain.

Timotheus invokes these spirits as:

… a ghastly band,
Each a torch in his hand!

Under most circumstances I would have simply accepted this as the sort of rhetoric one could expect in 1736 England; but it happened that, on the night before this event, my wife and I happened to see the Cinemax broadcast (saved on the VTR) of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. As a result I found myself thinking about how the visual imagination of Guillermo del Toro could be applied to Newburgh Hamilton's text (hardly a monument of English literature). This led to further thoughts about the decided Baroque element in del Toro's visual conceptions; and, if del Toro could capture imagery suitable for the rather mundane setting of a victory feast, what might he do with those Baroque operas in which the supernatural plays a much greater role?

The lesson from this experience seems to be that, while there is no doubt that "opera lives," that life draws as much from the context of our contemporary influences as it does from the merits of the "opera text" itself.

Chatting up New Talent

2009-06-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

As regular readers of Cindy Warner's SF Opera Examiner dispatches should know by now, Cindy was kind enough to invite me as a guest for an event to meet the 2009 artists who will be performing this summer under the auspices of the Merola Opera Program. Each of these artists was subjected to a brief interview; and Cindy did an excellent job of capturing their observations (along with providing a photograph of the "interrogation process"). These interviews were followed by informal conversation over food. I am not much of a conversationalist; but I did want to make a point of letting Eleazar Rodriguez know that I had seen (and enjoyed) several of his performances of opera scenes at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

However, given my personal theoretical interests in the nature of performance and the nature of communication that takes place both during a performance and in preparing for one, my real interest at this event was directed towards those selected to serve as apprentice coaches. I was particularly fortunate to get to chat with Miaomiao Wang, since her own "interrogation" involved questions about Chinese opera (or, as she corrected Sherri Greenawald, Beijing Opera), which bears far less resemblance to Western opera than a plate of Shanghai dumplings does to one of ravioli. Wang was still coming up to speed with her English, but I thoroughly enjoyed talking with her about her experiences in accompanying art song. As far as I am concerned, any pianist who has worked with recital singers to prepare Robert Schumann's two major song cycles, "Frauenliebe und Leben" (Opus 42) and "Dichterliebe" (Opus 48), is more than adequately prepared to take on the encounter between music and drama necessary to pull off an effective opera performance. My regret is that, since she does all of her work "behind the scenes," I shall not have the opportunity to see directly how she exercises her skills.

As Cindy reported, Stephanie Rhodes was given a better opportunity for "shop talk" in her interview and used that opportunity to talk about the materials with which she works, including both full orchestral scores and recordings of performances with full orchestra. All this resonated very nicely with my own thoughts about the relationship between notes and music, although I knew better than to belabor her with any of the Chomskyan theory to which I have subjected my readers! I did, however, inquire as to what her performance preferences were when not coaching opera and was not surprised to hear that, like so many other pianists, she aspired to perform Sergei Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto. If her ear for Rachmaninoff's orchestration is as keen as it is for the opera repertoire, then she has the makings of a soloist who will be fully and effectively engaged with her "accompanying voices."

As a product of too many music teachers too fond of saying "There are those who like music and those who like opera," I was more than delighted to encounter so much "musical intelligence" at this encounter with the "Merolini." This bodes well just as much for the future of opera as it does for the future of music. (It also puts my head in an interesting place as I am about to go over to the Conservatory for a Master Class to be conducted this afternoon by Kiri Te Kanawa!)

Points of View on Health Care

2009-06-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

I did something I almost never do: I "clicked through" on an advertisement placed on a Web page I was reading. This just happened to be a case where the connection seemed logical. The Web page was on Truthdig with the provocative title "Health Care Fail." This was in their Ear to the Ground section, where they report on what other sources are reporting, usually with a tempting introduction. In this case the introduction was as provocative as the title:

By one estimate, Sen. Max Baucus gets about $1,500 a day from the health industry. Who put this man in charge of health care reform? The senator’s latest innovation in compromise is to slash proposed insurance subsidies in a bid to get Republicans on board. And forget about a government-run insurance program.

Did the American people really fill the White House and both chambers of Congress with Democrats in order to placate Republicans?

The advertisement was placed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The "message" (with colors reproduced) was "When you need just the facts about HealthReform.org." Other than this message, the ad consisted of nothing more than the name of the Foundation and its logo. Since I was curious as to what their position was on health care reform, I figured it was worth taking the "click," which took me to the following statement (which is on the page one would find by entering HealthReform.org as a URL):

Health care is an economic as well as a social issue. In 2008, the United States spent more than $2 trillion on health care—nearly 17 percent of our entire economy. Meanwhile, 46 million people are uninsured. But extending coverage to the uninsured won't solve what's ailing the health-care system. Meaningful reform also requires improving quality, emphasizing prevention and reducing costs.

In order to read this statement in its proper context, we need to bear in mind just who Robert Wood Johnson was. It takes a few clicks to get there, but that information is provided on the Foundation's Web site. Here is the entirety of the description:

Robert Wood Johnson was one of the twentieth century's most innovative and colorful business leaders. He built Johnson and Johnson into a world-renowned company and gave new meaning to the need for corporations to serve the public interest. His generosity created one of the nation's most significant philanthropies dedicated to improve the health and health care of all Americans.

In other words this is the philanthropic arm of Johnson & Johnson, named for one of the two Johnsons. Does this reflect a bias in how the Foundation is committed to doing "good works?" There may be grounds for this being the case that I would like to explore.

I take, as my own point of departure, Arnold Relman's article in the latest issue of The New York Review, entitled, "The Health Reform We Need & Are Not Getting." In the spirit of the post I put up yesterday, Relman recognizes that the crux of the health care problem is all about the money. However, rather than going down the path I took yesterday concerned with who will pay out that money, Relman begins by asking why the expense is so great:

Health care in the US is about twice as expensive per capita as in other developed countries—nearly 17 percent of US GDP in 2008—and its costs are rising faster.

Relman's first explanation for this expense is basically one of a disconnect between supply and demand:

This difference is partly explained by a higher proportion of specialists in the US, who rely more than primary care physicians on expensive technical procedures for their livelihood, and in general are much more highly paid than primary care physicians—one reason why primary care doctors are now in short supply.

However, Relman saves the more significant differentiating factor for his final explanation:

Another very important but often overlooked reason for greater health expenditures in the US is that, more than in any other advanced country, large parts of the system are owned by investors. As a result, the entire system behaves like a profit-driven industry, as I described two years ago in my book A Second Opinion. The commercialization of our health system dates back only a few decades, but its consequences are profound. Investors now own about 20 percent of nonpublic general hospitals, almost all specialty hospitals, and most freestanding facilities for ambulatory patients, such as walk-in clinics, imaging centers, and ambulatory surgical centers. These medical care businesses, like other businesses, need profits to satisfy their investors, and for this purpose they use marketing and advertising, directed at physicians and the general public.

To remain competitive, many not-for-profit hospitals promote their bottom line just like their for-profit counterparts, vigorously advertising their facilities and services to the public. No other health care system is as focused on generating income as ours, and in no other country is medical care marketed and advertised so aggressively, as if it were just another commodity in trade. This increases health costs, while hospitals concentrate on the delivery of profitable, rather than effective, services. It also favors those who can pay over those who need medical care but can't afford it.

There is a lot of highly charged language in those two paragraphs, none of which puts a corporation like Johnson & Johnson in a particularly favorable light. Relman's perspective may also explain why the ostensibly philanthropic position statement by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation should recognize heath care as an economic issue before recognizing it as a social one.

This brings us back to the Truthdig article and its first sentence. As long as health care is an industry, rather than some form of public service or public trust, all of the stakeholders in that industry (and their numbers are legion beyond imagination) will rally to maintain that industry status. The sharp point of their sword has always been, and will probably continue to be, the demonization of the concept of socialized medicine. We are all seeing that demonization at work through advertising campaigns; and, as Truthdig has reminded us, it is also at work through high-stakes lobbying. Unfortunately, it is also at work through institutions that, on the surface, appear to be philanthropic organizations interested in the public good; but when such organizations come to our attention through strategically-placed keyword advertising, we should be suspicious.

Can the public good prevail in the face of such opposition? Yesterday I was reading one of the chapters in From Max Weber in which he cited a favorite proverb of his contemporaries:

Mind you, the devil is old; grow old to understand him.

Weber then interpreted this text as follows:

It means that if one wishes to settle with this devil, one must not take to flight before him as so many do nowadays. First of all, one has to see the devil's ways to the end in order to realize his power and his limitations.

The devil of health-care-as-industry is, indeed, old (at least as old as Johnson & Johnson). His ways are subtle, but it does not take much critical inquiry on our part to see them. The trick will be to see his limitations and use them (perhaps in the spirit of judo) to restore health care to its rightful status as public service.

Who is being Represented in the Health Care Debate?

2009-06-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

The question raised last month by Stanley Kutler in his contribution to Truthdig over whether or not "Congress is broken" ultimately comes down to who is being represented by the agents of our system of "representative government." Now, to be fair, that system, as Edmund Morgan observed in American Heroes, is more an ideal than a reality. As Russell Baker observed in reviewing this book for The New York Review, "Morgan makes a persuasive argument that all successful government must be based on a fiction." However, even if the "facts" of representation fall short of that "idealized fiction" ultimately codified by James Madison and his colleagues, the instantiation of the idea of itself, regardless of its "truth value," allows us to raise such questions as who is represented and how.

When the system is "working," we do not have to raise these questions. As I put it last month, "we delegate the responsibilities of making decisions and taking actions, rather than relegating those responsibilities to the 'wisdom' of our own crowd," where I installed a hyperlink to justify my use of scare quotes around that noun "wisdom." Where health care reform is concerned, however, Kutler definitely has a point: The system is not working. It is stuck in an enormous mud-pit of passionately held ideas expressed through inflammatory rhetoric, with little regard to any thoughts the electorate may have. Put another way, the pharmaceutical industry will always speak with a louder voice than even the most organized bloc of voters; and the American Medical Association can even go so far as to speak louder than those actually in the trenches of administering health care.

Now I do not pretend to know what the entire electorate of the United States thinks about health care reform; but today Victoria Colliver, Staff Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle reported the results of a Field Poll based on a sample of 1207 registered California voters. The graphic included with Colliver's story is worth reproducing:

This seems to indicate that the need for health care reform hits very close to a significant number of California homes; but it also indicates that, while there may be agreement that reform is necessary, there is considerable divisiveness over how to pay for it. Furthermore, Colliver's text demonstrates the extent to which that divisiveness involves partisan sympathies:

Sixty-six percent of Democrats polled said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure health coverage for every American, while 25 percent of Republicans agreed with that statement. Among nonpartisan voters, 54 percent agreed.

The problem, of course, is that such divisiveness could undermine any effort at reform, particularly when it is inflamed by the sort of media propaganda that undermined health care reform under Bill Clinton's Administration.

One sign that Congress may be as broken as Kutler claims it to be is that Congress is more interested in exploiting this divisiveness for political gain than in resolving it. If this is the case, then there may be little that President Barack Obama can do to repair that condition. However uplifting and persuasive his rhetoric may be, it may not be able to restore order to an entropy being roiled up by Republican and Democratic legislators in equal measure. In such a setting the only result to emerge from Capitol Hill will be reform in name only, presenting Obama with the same old pig, enhanced, if at all, with several layers of lipstick.