Only the good parts
Maybe you’ve avoided Wagner operas - and, in particular, the Ring cycle - because the plots seem silly and the singers plant themselves in the middle of the stage and sing steadily without moving much for extraordinarily long periods of time.
What if someone put together all the exciting and moving bits in one piece? It would be like kicking the record player so the the needle jumped to the good parts.
That’s what I saw tonight at Carnegie Hall, with the NY Philharmonic’s performance of Lorin Maazel’s The Ring Without Words. Maazel conducted without a score. He seemed agile, distinguished, and magisterial - a fine combination for a conductor, and an even better combination for a conductor leading his own work. He had a tremendous brass section, several harps, and a fabulous percussion team in front of him. (I was drawn tonight to the cymbal player, who managed to convey several different levels of cymbal fervor with confident accuracy and beautiful sound.) And strings - the front desk players were all shining tonight.
“It was fun” doesn’t really convey how this evening went, but it *was* fun. Here is Maazel’s description:
I was intrigued by the challenge: could a symphonic synthesis of the Ring reveal the essentials of its code? I bolted the following list of criteria to my drawing board:
ONE: The synthesis must be free-flowing (no stops) and chronological, beginning with the first note of Rheingold and finishing with the last chord of Götterdämmerung.
TWO: The transitions must be harmonically and periodically justifiable, the pacing contrasts commensurate with the length of the work.
THREE: Most all of the music originally written for orchestra without voice must be used, adding those sections with a vocal line essential to a synthesis and only where the line is either doubled by an orchestral instrument, “imaginable” or, in the rare instance, when it can be reproduced by an instrument.
FOUR: Every note must be Wagner’s own.
Say you’re bored by baseball. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see just the highlights, seamlessly flowing from one to the next? You would like this piece.
The warm applause seemed to be in thanks for Maazel’s entire career as well as for this particular piece. My companions were very impressed that a 78-year-old had carried off the performance without a score. Ah, that’s nothing for him - he had his debut at nine, with the Interlochen orchestra at the 1939 World’s Fair. I’ve seen a picture of him at that age that I wish I could show you, but I can’t find it online. Just imagine a very intense and mature boy; now imagine a tan, fit, confident conductor. He is having a good life, it seems, and he’s given us all the good parts.
Freedom to Connect — remarks today.
Many thanks to David Isenberg for inviting me to speak today. Here is a copy of my notes for today’s talk.
Life is short, so I have put on the screen an image of a clock whose hands are close to midnight.
It’s always good to have a sense of urgency, both in movies and in talks like this one. And to face the big questions.
Here’s one: What makes a life significant? There’s an essay by William James with this title that I look back to. James says that some inner ideal is necessary - and that the ideal should be a product of the intellect somehow, and be the subject of conscious reflection, and be novel rather than everyday.
An ideal by itself doesn’t make a life significant. It has to be joined with active will - courage - endurance.
These kinds of ideals, and that kind of will, are present in each of us, and in the people we deal with (no matter what company they work for). And so it is never a good idea to have disdain for the person you meet based on his/her affiliation; that person probably has ideals of his/her own, and a significant life.
Here’s another image of that clock whose hands are close to midnight. My father’s life is slowly drawing to a close, not this month, not next month, but someday. When I visit we listen to music together - Mahler’s 10th symphony, or Beethoven piano sonatas, or Bach organ pieces. He is a composer, and for him the ideal is music - pure human expression.
So I’d like to try to draw together (1) music as an ideal and (2) the great subjects of this conference, while making my short talk as human as possible. There is nothing more human than music; every culture has it.
The key questions on which people here often focus are prompted by the fact that access to the logical architecture that is the internet is now provided in this country by very large companies that we broadly call “network operators.”
It’s well known that there is inadequate competition for network access, but it’s also pretty clear that there is no single provider of these services in the U.S.
Instead, we have a condition of oligopoly. This means that there are few sellers of this access, and all of them act while considering the profits of their industry as a whole. Any one firm may cut its prices slightly, and all the other firms will likely follow, but we will never see real price competition, or price wars, because that would destroy this industry.
There are two unspoken conventions that exist: never use price as a weapon, and ensure that there are significant barriers to entry for new competitors. So the prices they charge don’t reflect the ebb and flow of user demand. Also, the access products of these oligopolists are not completely substitutable - their bundles are not exactly alike. Nonetheless, even oligopolists want to extend their market share, and so we see a great deal of emphasis on persuasion and advertising to make users choose their product.
These actors have enormous market power, different in degree only from that of a true monopolist. It is the same kind of power.
What do we do about this? Well, an antitrust remedy probably would not work; we would be indicting the entire fabric of the U.S. economy, which relies on many sets of oligopolistic players. And these particular network operators are not colluding in classic antitrust fashion; instead, they are merely acting with the interests of the entire industry in mind. Their prices are different enough to withstand antitrust scrutiny; they adhere to the letter of the law.
So what other actions could we take? Perhaps we have been too stuck on the competitive model. We have been too convinced that other companies will constrain these network operators to act in socially appropriate ways.
We need to think differently, and this is where both music and John Kenneth Galbraith come in.
He pointed out that although in the competitive world we think that other lateral competitors will ensure that action of market-dominant actors will ensure that behavior is socially desirable, instead in this oligopolist world restraint on private power comes from the opposite side of the market. From retailers of the “product” (here, internet access is the “product,” so retailers are ISPs) or consumers or users of that product. His name for this constraining power was “countervailing power.”
So let’s explore countervailing power. Could it come from retailers?
No, not really. In the network operator’s world, they are sufficiently vertically integrated, and have been sufficiently assisted by regulation in this vertical integration, that the retail level of ISP no longer exists.
So where should such countervailing power come from to protect all of us from oligopolist providers?
Whatever direction we end up going, be it structural separation or a nondiscrimination rule enshrined in a statute, we will need the countervailing power of users/consumers.
User power needs to be organized in response to the network operators’ power. It needs to be aggregated and made visible. Without it, we’ll have no votes, no policy changes, and the oligopolists will be able to continue to act with unfettered discretion.
We can be as smart as we want to be, but without user power we will have nothing.
How do we gather together this user power? We need to have users tell their own stories — not about technology, not about gadgets, but about how their own ideals have been joined to action (facilitated, made possible) by access to the internet. Each of us has these ideals. Our challenge is to show the world how access to the internet has made significant lives even more significant.
And here is the music tie-in - Galbraith, our friend with the countervailing power, always led the singing on New Year’s Eve.
Again, life is short. And because it is, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow I want to have asked you to do some local act on OneWebDay. OWD came out of a meeting much like this one. It came from Isenberg, Weinberger, and Searls as well as me. We’re now in the third year of OWD. It’s out of character for me to be working on this. It’s a simple idea, a soft idea, an idea that takes a lot of sales - and I am terrible at sales. I’m not naturally suited to leading a movement, and I am unsure of everything except the idea that people are basically good. Which is why I need your help.
The idea behind OneWebDay is that it is an Earth Day for the internet. We are trying to create a global constituency that cares about the future of the internet. We’re emphasizing the positive impact of the internet on human lives, and reflecting on the threats to the internet around the world (censorship, controllers of different kinds) and what we can do about them. It is a day for local concerns to be paramount, but there are events around the world and online.
Each talk can have only one idea in it, and here is the point of this talk. We need to create countervailing power, and that power will come through users. OneWebDay gives us a chance to build the countervailing force that is needed. We are lucky to have our work and our lives so intertwined; and in our short lives, there is a great debate about the future of the internet going on. The key source of countervailing power that has not yet been called on yet - called to itself - is a kind of human music. I am asking you to assist in drawing out those stories.
Vertical integration and Bartók
Someone recently handed me a CD of a piano transcription of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. (The recording, by Gyorgy Sandor, is available through Amazon.) Sandor himself completed the transcription after Bartók’s death — he was a friend of Bartók’s and a champion of his music.
I listened to the recording last night and it was splendid - revelatory, spare, motoric, all-Bartók.
The same person who handed me the CD asked me today why the piano transcription isn’t more famous. I had less than no idea (see viola jokes) and so I asked a very experienced retired pianist. He had no idea either. But here is his guess:
“Sandor probably held onto the sheet music. I’ve never heard of this transcription.”
So it may be a vertical integration problem. Sandor, who died in 2005, was the performer of this music, the source of the final version of the transcription (Bartók did quite a bit before he died in 1945, but Sandor finished it off), and, in the end, its gatekeeper - and as a result pianists just don’t know about it.
But now you do. If you’re a pianist, spread the word.
Interlude
One of the many good things about having a voice of my own on this page is that I can break patterns of my own making.
It’s time for a music post.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours remembering my life before there was email and before I had heard of the internet. I’ve been lucky over the last three weeks to play chamber music in four very different semi-public contexts, and the third of these events was last night. Probably stemming from Somewhere In Time (a very romantic movie that came out when I was in high school), I had the idea that if I really thought of myself as a musician I would indeed be one, if only for the period of time that the concert was going on.
(This was only a semi-silly notion - I discovered during the second semi-public musical event that trying to play a concert 45 minutes after I stopped teaching a very serious class about online surveillance wasn’t a great idea. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been. I just wasn’t quite with the program - I was still in surveillance-land rather than in Beethoven-land.)
So I tried a kind of inner time-travel experiment. I remembered people that I played with in high school, college, summer festivals, music school, and afterwards. I remembered conductors and teachers - what they looked like, what their voices sounded like - and I did my best to remember what it felt like to play without constraint. My mind slipped again and again - without realizing it, I’d be thinking about the Verizon announcement this week or about CALEA. No kidding. But I’d nudge myself back to some performance 25 years or more ago, some musical event that was satisfying, fun, and deeply felt.
Of course, I’m only writing this post because it worked. For just a few minutes, yesterday and then again today, I did feel like someone who plays an instrument (rather than someone who plays at playing an instrument). It was genuinely fun.
As you may remember, there’s a terrifying moment in Somewhere In Time when our hero (who has successfully transported himself to 1912) suddenly sees a modern-day coin that got left behind in a pocket of the rented 1912-era pants in which he time-traveled. He stares at it, instantly vertiginous, and sweats ferociously as his memories of his own era overtake him. Blam - he’s out of 1912.
So my secret trick yesterday and today was to close the laptop and pretend it didn’t exist. There’s a lot of email pouring in these days, most of it list-mail, and much of it interesting to me. But the laptop doesn’t fit with the inner time-travel.
Musicophilia
That’s the name of a worthwhile new book by Oliver Sacks. Do you hear music in your mind, even when you don’t choose to? I do, all the time, and so does Dr. Sacks. He’s wondering why:
I see my room, my furniture every day, but they do not re-present themselves as ‘pictures in the mind.’ Nor do I hear imaginary dog barks or traffic noises in the background of my mind, or smell aromas of imaginary meals cooking, even through I am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind, but with nothing like the richness and range of my spontaneous musical imagery. Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it — its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions…..[Aliens landing on Earth would be] stupefied [if] they realized that, even in the absence of external sources, most of us are incessantly playing music in our heads.
Two great loves
The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music.
I’ll be forever grateful to oboist and impresario James Roe for cluing me in - Alex Ross has a wonderful blog. He’s the music critic of the New Yorker, and to be linked to on his blog is like getting a nod from BoingBoing. Bigger than big. Huge.
I think I discovered pianist Jeremy Denk’s blog, Think Denk, on my own, but maybe James should get credit for that, too. It’s splendid. Here’s an excerpt from this summer:
Classical music is so often the victim of a haughty love. Or a nerdy one. The other night, after a concert, I was talking with a young man whose enthusiasm was tremendous but whose every expression of this enthusiasm disheartened me in the extreme. He explained to me, smiling, all the reasons why he refers to the various Beethoven Sonatas in various ways … for instance, never “Les Adieux,” but always “Lebewohl,” since “THE goodbye,” he claimed, doesn’t make sense; “Waldstein” is permissible because it is a dedication; he confessed to using “Appassionata,” somewhat guiltily, but it’s OK because it’s Italian (?); but never, EVER, would he use the term “Moonlight” Sonata. I thought to myself, looking in his sincere, sweet eyes, aglow with these distinctions, that this person loves the same music I do, he’s my target audience, I can give something over to him, possibly, pass on some of my love … but at the same time this conversation about titles made me feel like jumping out the window. Probably I was reacting this way because I saw my teen self in his face … I sincerely hope he is not reading this blog entry, but if he is, what apology can I offer: I’m sorry you made me feel like jumping out the window???
Haughty love is worse than nerdy love, though, and it spreads through the apparatus of the classical world, sometimes through maestros pontificating and glorifying on PBS specials, sometimes through critics who adore to condescend, etc. etc. Everyone is guilty; I am terribly guilty; there are so many lurking clichés. All so well-intentioned, like a benevolent squadron of embalmers. So hard to speak of our music in the present tense!
[From a post called Grocery Stores Of the Mind.]
Now I feel all happy and insider-engaged to report Alex Ross has written about Jeremy Denk’s blog, and many other online classical music landscapes, in a superb article in the New Yorker. Lots of people are writing beautifully about classical music in the present tense on the web — Ross says that “Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace.” Bloggers chime in on all possible classical subjects, concerts are immediately uploaded, performers tell us what it’s like to perform - endless.
It’s wonderful. All the haughty love that Denk talks about, all the mysterioso hiding-away-in-amber qualities of this culture (the things that make people call it “classified” music), all that distance melts away online. Classical music is engaging, human, immediate, and often charming, just like the online world as a whole.
Try some of the sources in Ross’s article. See Michael Tilson Thomas educating people about how this music is put together. See all the artists showing you their work, and the groupies blogging wildly about what happened at the opera tonight. This is a lucky, fruitful time for classical music.
Context
Thanks to Fred von Lohmann for pointing to this post from Ian Rogers of Yahoo!.
Cheap and great music is better than free and lousy, context is everything, and the recording industry has missed all possible online boats for the last eight years. That’s Rogers’s message.
First the labels sued Napster instead of selling their content to their users in the format the users wanted: MP3 files that any device can use. In 1999, Rogers thought that was dumb. “Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.” Then the labels DRM’d everything and tried every form of control they could engineer. Now, with Amazon’s MP3 download service, users finally have what they want: MP3 files that any device can use.
“8 years. How much opportunity have we [the music industry] lost in those 8 years?” Rogers’s point is that “convenience wins, hubris loses.” And he’s not going to play along any more:
I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! [on the condition that Yahoo!] put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. . . I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience.
Rogers wants his whole industry to get into building context. The web has context - incredible information about the music - but iTunes is context-free. There’s a huge opportunity here to make it really easy to access the music and provide a rich context for it and people will pay for that. People will pay many many small amounts for this context:
Context is where the opportunity is and therefore where the innovation will be. The next five years [are] gonna be fun. I think we’re finally going to see some innovation in digital media.
It’s good to see progress here with the new Amazon service. Maybe the marketplace is working; maybe there’s a bright musical future out ahead. The price for music may go to (close to) zero, but the services that accompany that music will be worth paying (a little bit) for. Plus I loved hearing Rogers’s voice, experienced and frustrated.
The ham band
When I was in high school I remember going with a group to play a concert in an Elks lodge. The room was dusky and the building was a little broken down. There was a giant sign in the room where we played that read, “Keep America Strong. Ask A Young Man To Become An Elk.” The people there were boisterous and kindly.
Well, I think I’ve found the home of the telecommunications-Elks. It’s amateur radio. The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual is full of folksy, boisterous, exclamation-point-studded advice. You get the feeling that every ham is sincere and fun-loving:
Why don’t people just buy radios and transmit anyway [without a license]? . . . Because it’s quite apparent to hams who has and who hasn’t passed a license exam. You’ll find yourself attracting the attention of the Federal Communications Commission, but more importantly, you won’t fit in and you won’t have fun.
A long, friendly conversation is known in ham-dom as a “ragchew.” And this was my favorite part, about Morse code:
Many operators enjoy the rhythm and musicality of “the code,” as well. Aside from its utility as a communications protocol, it’s a skill like whistling or painting that you can enjoy for its own sake. Listening to a skilled Morse operator chatting away or relaying messages is quite a treat!
I have a very soft place in my heart for the Elks, and for the hams, and I very much enjoyed my day with the amateur radio manual. It all works out so smoothly - voltage, current, resistance, and power all relate, and you get to sit there imagining contacting other hams in state after state. “CQ CQ CQ, this is W1AW calling CQ!” the manual instructs, and I can’t wait until I get my own call sign.
A woman sitting a row behind me in the plane told me she was jealous of my studying the manual - she wants to get her amateur license too. She told me that she saw the latest Bruce Willis movie last night and that ham radio saved the day. “It was so exciting!” she said.
Keep America Strong. Ask A Young Person To Become A Ham.
Pause
Here’s a vignette for you:
When [Jacqueline du Pré] was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to perform!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!”
Artistry
Fifteen minutes before the film was supposed to start tonight, a slight trim man in a madras shirt bounded towards the front of the theater. I’d noticed the organ keyboard facing the audience before he came in, and I’d idly thought about people sitting through silent movies accompanied by virtuosos staring up at the screen. But then this guy came flying down the aisle and sat down on the bench, his back to the ten or so people scattered around the theater. It took him a long time to get the light to work above the organ - he fiddled with it patiently, and his confidence in its workings paid off when the light finally flickered on.
There must be a “swoop” stop on this particular theater organ. The first few notes he played were surprisingly tremulous (weird, wild vibrato) and replete with slides from one note to the next. Was he setting the mood for the Jane Austen movie that the ten scattered people were going to see? It was a sort of Hitchcock mood, if he was. Theremin in madras.
When I got here today it was blazing hot, and I really needed yet another pair of sunglasses in order to move around outside. The woman in the store who sold me the glasses (which I will lose in the next few days) said that what she really liked about Ann Arbor was the people and the absence of franchises.
This guy at the organ was definitely not a franchisee. He played “People Will Say We’re In Love” with tremendous religiousity, big plagal cadences. He played “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” with aplomb, and “Oklahoma” with the “swoop” setting in full flower. Big blasts of sound, starting from nothing.
It was real artistry. You could tell when he was getting to his big finish - Oklahoma blew around us, big baseball-stadium chords, and we wanted to burst into applause. That’s when the real organ-show started - he improvised with “You Must Remember This,” as the screen finally lit with images.
But it wasn’t time for the film just yet. He was improvising to the sponsors’ brands, staring up at the screen, riffing on You Must Remember This, as the Ann Arbor Improvement District (paraphrasing here, I don’t remember the sponsors’ names) expressed its silent support for this great theater that had brought us all together, in emptiness, with a guy in a madras shirt playing the organ as if his life depended on it.
He ended smoothly, the sponsors stopped rolling, and the film began. No previews. This time we were released to applaud, and he bounded back up the aisle, smiling just a little.