Two Thomases

This post has nothing directly about music, but my mandate, "classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy..." is pretty broad. I'm titling it "Two Thomases" because both names came up in a dinner party last night. There was an old British tv comedy called "The Two Ronnies."

The first Thomas is Thomas Sowell who recently retired after a long career as an economist, writer and educator. The photo accompanying the Wikipedia article is very, very old, so:

He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, which means he is loosely in the "Chicago School of Economics" as opposed to being a Keynesian or, you know, a socialist. He is eighty-eight years old and just recently retired, though he is still a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written a host of books of which perhaps the most generally useful is his Basic Economics, which is as clear-headed and sensible discussion as one could hope to find. In the new edition of the work, there are some new chapters one of which talks about why there are such great economic inequalities in the world:

Any study of international economic activities inevitably encounters the fact of vast differences among nations in their incomes and wealth. In the early nineteenth century, for example, there were four Balkan countries where the average income per capita was only one-fourth that in the industrialized countries of Western Europe.{ 847} Two centuries later, there were still economic differences of a similar magnitude between the countries of Western Europe and various countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Albania, Moldova, Ukraine and Kosovo were each less than one-fourth of the per capita GDP of Holland, Switzerland, or Denmark— and less than one-fifth of the per capita GDP of Norway.{ 848} Similar disparities are common in Asia, where the per capita GDP of China is less than one-fourth that of Japan,{ 849} while that of India is barely more than ten percent of the per capita GDP of Japan. The per capita GDP of sub-Saharan Africa is less than ten percent of the per capita GDP of the nations of the Euro zone.{ 850} Many find such disparities both puzzling and troubling, especially when contemplating the fate of people born in such dire poverty that their chances of a fulfilling life seem very remote. Among the many explanations that have been offered for this painful situation, there are some that are more emotionally satisfying or politically popular than others. But a more fundamental question might be: Was there ever any realistic chance that the nations of the world would have had similar prospects of economic development? Innumerable factors go into economic development. For all the possible combinations and permutations of these factors to work out in such a way as to produce even approximately equal results for all countries around the world would be a staggering coincidence. We can, however, examine some of these factors, in order to get some insight into some of the causes of these differences. 

Sowell, Thomas. Basic Economics (pp. 527-528). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The book has no graphs and no highly technical discussion, just a good introduction to economics from a common sense viewpoint. Sowell has written a lot of other books on cultural and social issues as well so you might have a look around.

The other Thomas is an utterly different kind of person. Thomas Merton I became acquainted with a few decades ago, partly through the influence of a religious friend of mine.

I got the idea for writing this post because I was surprised to find that no-one at my dinner party had ever heard of Thomas Merton--and they were all, to some extent, religious people. If you read the Wikipedia article, as you should, you will find that Merton was one of the great spiritual figures of the 20th century. In 1948 he published a memoir of his path to the faith, The Seven Storey Mountain. I found it a fascinating read, though it that was long ago and I should probably re-read it. Merton spent most of his life as a Trappist monk whose vocation was, basically, to write books. Ones that I read and found interesting include The Wisdom of the Desert in which he delves into the Christian desert fathers of the 4th century and finds some interesting parallels with Zen masters!

I hope you take a bit of time and look into either or both of this writers as they are likely both worth the effort.

Occupy Music!

I saw this just too late for the Friday Miscellanea, but it is worth a post of its own. Here is an example of ideology in music. Not a good ideology, of course. You might run up against a paywall, but if you do, just google the title: "Turning Wonky Economic Graphs into Chamber Music." The idea was to put on a concert where composers composed new music using economic data on income equality:

Perhaps the most data-driven work on the program is Ms. Harting’s, drawn from a graph created by the Economic Policy Institute, using data generated by Messrs. Pinketty and Saez.

The data, which come from the period 1979 to 2007, show income growth for the bottom 90% staying relatively stagnant, sometimes even dropping into negative territory, before hitting 5% in the final year. The line representing the top 1% of households, meanwhile, ends up 224%.

In interpreting those numbers, Ms. Harting said, her work begins with “slow-moving musical textures rubbing against each other, suggesting the tension of class antagonisms.” As the flute and violin climb upward, the vibraphone sounds an “aggressive, alarming” note. And that less-than-active cello? It symbolizes the bottom 90%, she said: “The cello is the worker.”

Just like other "musical" ideas using radio frequency emissions from distant stars or the tossing of coins or the skyline of a mountain range, this tends to demonstrate the creative poverty of the composers. I suppose the nastiest thing I could think of to say is that this sounds like exactly the kind of music that Stalin's henchmen were hoping to elicit from long-suffering Soviet composers. The "tension of class antagonisms" indeed!

Isn't it odd that the data they used stops in 2007? After all, the trends have gotten even worse since then. But that data would create a cognitive dissonance perhaps as someone who took office in 2008 was supposed to turn all this around. What was his name?

What would be a good musical coda for this post? How about a little Cornelius Cardew?

Two Russians Named Grigory

This is a bit peripheral to our primary interest here at the Music Salon, but so very interesting I wanted to put it up anyway. There is a very interesting fellow, a Russian mathematician, who may be the smartest person in the world. His name is Grigory Perelman.

Grigory Perelman

I recommend reading the whole Wikipedia article as it is fascinating. Some highlights:

In 1994, Perelman proved the Soul conjecture. In 2003, he proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture. This consequently solved in the affirmative the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology.

In August 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal^[1] for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow." Perelman declined to accept the award or to appear at the congress, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo."^[2] On 22 December 2006, the scientific journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.^[3]

On 18 March 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize^[4] for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he turned down the prize of one million dollars.^[5][6] He additionally turned down the prestigious prize of the European Mathematical Society.^[7]

Apparently he is working on another one of the problems that the Millennium Prize people have designated as deserving of an award. If he solves that one, that will be another embarassing moment for them if he turns it down as well.

I like this guy! He seems to have the crazy idea that higher mathematics really has nothing to do with either money or fame.

So who is the other Grigory? That would be Grigory Sokolov who is possibly the finest pianist alive, but who refuses to do commercial recordings (all the CDs available are from live concerts) and, when the US and the UK put in onerous new visa requirements for touring musicians, simply canceled his concerts in those countries. He seems to share Perelman's stance. The fine arts, like classical music, really have nothing to do with how many records you sell or how many concerts you give.

Here is Grigory Sokolov, showing us how it's done:

What is it with these Russians?

A Metaphor Gone Astray

I was reading a piece about economics in the New York Times and was brought to a halt by this, the final paragraph:

For the foreseeable future economic theory should be understood more on the model of music theory than Newtonian theory. The Fed chairman must, like a first violinist tuning the orchestra, have the rare ear to fine-tune complexity (probably a Keynesian ability to fine-tune at that). Like musicians’, economists’ expertise is still a matter of craft. They must avoid the hubris of thinking their theory is perfectly suited to the task, while employing it wisely enough to produce some harmony amid the cacophony.

I'm sure that seemed like a really clever metaphor to the writers, a couple of philosophers. There was a time when all persons who thought of themselves as intellectuals actually knew something about music. They probably had a piano at home and could read music. Maybe even knew a little music theory. But the way they word this metaphor reveals considerable ignorance about music and music theory.

There are three parts to this complex metaphor:

1. Economic theory is like music theory
2. Example: Keynsian manipulation of the economy is like the concertmaster's tuning of the orchestra
3. Example: if successful, this manipulation will result in harmony

The conceit that economic theory is more like music theory than Newtonian theory, i.e. that it is non-scientific is based on no more knowledge about music theory than that it is some sort of "craft", i.e. something like basket-weaving or water dowsing. Music theory is a fairly complex endeavor that involves quite a bit of predictive modeling, like a science, but when practiced at the highest levels also involves aesthetics and history.

Music theory, unlike economics, is able to make accurate predictions. Well, not about the future! So it is not science in that sense. But about musical structures, yes, which is a feasible goal. Music theory has no mandate to predict what future composers might do. But it can tell us a lot about what composers have done. For example, here is a typical music theory prediction: every piece written by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven ends with a perfect authentic cadence. Music theory not only tells us this, but tells us why.

The authors made a rudimentary mistake in terminology when they said "a first violinist" tunes the orchestra. There are a whole bunch of first violinists in the orchestra, the leader of them, and of the orchestra as a whole, is the concertmaster. He comes on stage before the conductor and asks the principal oboist to sound an A. He then oversees the tuning of the orchestra by section. In the clip below, the winds go first, then the low strings and finally the high strings. He does not "tune the orchestra" in the sense required by the metaphor at all.

Finally, music theorists do not try to produce "harmony amid the cacophony". Instead, they try to explain how harmony works and, in some extreme cases, how the cacophony is either not as cacaphonous as it sounds or how it functions in the structure. Music theory tries to show how the music structure works and the aesthetic result. Actually, it has very little to do with either how economic theory works or how scientific theory works.

My recurring beef with scientific research into music is that it usually ignores the fact that we already have a highly developed theoretical way of approaching music, called music theory, that has been developed over the last thousand years. In comparison, these scientific studies seem clumsy and ignorant of how music really works.

Let's have a little orchestral music to close. Haydn, Symphony No. 104:

The Economics of Music Composition

This is a dissertation-sized topic that I would just like to sketch out briefly. How do composers support themselves? There are several different models. Up until around 1800 the only two ways of getting paid to compose music were to be supported by either the church or by the nobility. Guillaume Dufay (1397 - 1474) for example, was in the employ of the church from his early years and also was maistre de chapelle in Savoy. He was also employed by the Este family in Ferrara. Towards the end of his life he was canon of the Cathedral in Cambrai and also composed music for the court of Burgundy. His music was highly valued by the powers, both sacred and secular, of his time. From the Renaissance on, the nobility tended to become the most important patrons of composers and the church less so. The exception is J. S. Bach, who wrote most of his music for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, though he also had been employed by various courts. Haydn was composer to the Esterhazy family who were rich enough to have their own orchestra and opera house. Late in his life he retired from their service and became one of the first free-lance composers, travelling to London where he was acclaimed and made a fair amount of money from the public performance of his music. Beethoven lived on a mixture of income: piano lessons to the nobility, selling his music to various publishers, commissions from noble patrons and a stipend put together by several admirers, also noble. From then on, with the growth of the consumption of music by the middle-class, composers were less and less dependent on particular patrons and more on a larger group. Chopin, for example, played salon concerts in Paris and made a generous income from teaching piano privately. Rossini made a fortune from composing operas and retired at 37.

Claude Debussy, one of the most successful composers at the beginning of the 20th century, stitched together an income from public performances as both pianist and conductor, from publication of his music, and from writing music criticism. As the 20th century wore on, however, and as composers more and more drifted into a musical language that was more and more difficult for audiences to absorb, they came to depend on teaching, taking posts as professors of composition, and on commissions from institutions ultimately funded by governments. In Canada, for example, most composers are either employed by universities or conservatories to teach theory and composition, or survive on Canada Council grants and commissions. There is a network of Canadian Music Centres nationwide that contain libraries of scores by Canadian composers that may be loaned to performers.

From the 1970s, a few composers began to appeal to wider audiences, Philip Glass and Steve Reich in particular, and stayed out of academe by creating their own performing ensembles, winning commissions and making enough recordings to flourish as composers.

Now, in the 21st century, these models will continue, but we are likely to see new ones. The young American composer Nico Muhly, for example, has worked in collaboration with both Björk and Philip Glass. He manages to combine collaborations with popular musicians with commissions from classical ensembles.


One final note: for those of you who have wondered about the revisions of some of Stravinsky's early works decades later, perhaps the main reason for this was that, under the Soviet law of the time, the copyrights on these works were going to expire and this was a way of extending the copyright. Petrushka, written in 1911, was revised in 1947, largely for this reason.