Hire Learning.
NewMusicBox, October 17, 2011.

In which Critic-at-Large Moe and I regard the Boston Symphony’s new-music mug as half empty.

New England’s Prospect: Looking Backward. Juventas, Guerilla Opera, and Longy’s Septemberfest.
NewMusicBox, September 28, 2011.

Seven League Boots. The Boston new-music trail.
NewMusicBox, September 15, 2011.

It was this year, ten years on, that I noticed that my vague skepticism regarding commemorations of the 9/11 attacks had become unusually acute. I am habitually skeptical, which is both virtue and fault; and I’ve always had a little bit of skepticism about all kinds of such public memorials. In America especially, large public commemorations like the annual remembrance of 9/11 are, to use a metaphor appropriate to the country’s history, land grabs of a sort, a staking out of mental/emotional/political territory. For a long time, the almost instantly customary observance of 9/11 has made me think of two quotations. One (which I already had quoted on 9/11 a couple years ago) is from Willa Cather’s My Ántonia:

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

Mr. Shimerda, a presumed suicide, had been buried—as superstition dictated—at a crossroads, but instead of the grave being lost to traffic, it is almost as if the world itself shifts its grid to allow the spot to remain claimed. I like to think that Cather, who grew up as the country was taking stock of its post-Civil-War self, was both acknowledging and gently rebuking the frenzy of memorials to the war, especially the proliferation of Civil War cemeteries. In her study This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust summed up the cemeteries this way:

The establishment of national and Confederate cemeteries created the Civil War Dead as a category, as a collective that represented something more and something different from the many thousands of individual deaths that it comprised. It also separated the Dead from the memories of living individuals mourning their own very particular losses. The Civil War Dead became both powerful and immortal, no longer individual men but instead a force that would shape American public life for at least a century to come.

Mr. Shimerda’s grave both insists on its own very individual circumstance and rights, but also wryly comments on the 19th-century American colonization of real estate, both figurative and literal, by the dead.

The other quote is pithier, a Garry Wills description of Richard Nixon on the campaign trail in 1968:

[T]he entire American topography is either graveyard, for him, or minefield—ground he must walk delicately, revenant amid the tombstones, whistling in histrionic unconcern.

Nixon grew up in an era when the country was becoming increasingly obsessed with its heritage, the topography becoming more and more crowded with its own past. The anniversary of 9/11 is, too, graveyard and minefield—the only difference being that the whistling must be uncontroversially solemn.

So that’s my usual vague skepticism. But this year, I found myself skeptical specifically about the musical content of the plethora of 9/11 ceremonies to the point where I really started to wonder about the purpose of such music. There is an interesting disconnect that happens between music and commemoration; it comes, I think, between such events’ tendency towards ignorationes elenchi and certain merelogical assumptions about musical qualities. Aristotle included ignoratio elenchi among the rhetorical fallacies he classified in his guide De sophisticis elenchis; it has come to mean any sort of red-herring irrelevant argument, but Aristotle’s use of the term was a little more precise; he used it to mean an argument which, “though it is valid, only appears to be appropriate to the thing in question.” Mereology is the logical study of parts vs. wholes; the particular problem that I think applies here is whether a given quality of music—”musical integrity,” say—is part of the music itself, or whether it is the music that is part of a larger idea of musical integrity.

The conflict was made patently clear in the recent kerfuffle over the originally-proposed cover to the Nonesuch release of Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11. The original image—a news photograph showing United Flight 175 about to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center, the colors manipulated to a sepia-toned grime—caused fairly widespread reaction: it was in poor taste; it was unduly sensationalistic; it was, at best, irritatingly obvious. The subsequent defense of the first cover by Nonesuch president Robert Hurwitz brought Aristotle’s category into play by (mostly) insisting that the music itself was an honest response, that Reich was a great artist, and that to object to the choice of cover was to put Reich’s integrity into question. Again: Hurwitz was defending the cover by, instead, defending the music. (It only appears to be appropriate to the thing in question.) That’s a classic ignoratio elenchi—and, moreover, one based on the assumption that musical integrity is a larger quality than the piece of music itself, one that also encompasses its physical packaging and marketing.

9/11 is hardly unique among periodic memorial commemorations for being fertile ground for this sort of sophistry, essentially a good-intentions defense with the volume turned significantly up. Good intentions are nobler than the truly cynical would have us believe; but, in such cases, the mereology of good intentions can get pretty murky, leading to conclusions that are equal parts depressing and alarming. Here is where Hurwitz’s ignoratio elenchi led him:

Whether or not a work offends people is a question that artists have had to contend with from time immemorial, and I hope that, in our quick-to-respond, politically correct world, artists will not let fear of a Twitter campaign prevent them from standing up for what they believe in. Artists with whom we have worked through the years… have made extremely strong political statements through their compositions, songs, and recordings, or for the causes to which they have dedicated themselves. Many have taken a lot of heat for doing just that. What message does this send out to younger artists who might have something to say that makes people uncomfortable? That they’d better be careful not to offend anyone?

As best I can tell, this is that paragraph’s logical essence: in order to preserve artists’ right to offend people, it is necessary that no one ever get offended. Such is the logical conclusion of commemoration-based ignorationes elenchi. The landscape of 9/11 remembrance is strewn with eggshells; what’s amazing is how many of them have been deliberately strewn.

One might ask what, exactly, music can contribute to a commemoration, what part it contributes to the whole of an actual memorial event itself. The best I can come up with is its potency as a blank slate, as a screen onto which each listener can project their own emotional narrative. The New York Philharmonic is marking this year’s 9/11 anniversary with Mahler’s Second Symphony, which is not an uninteresting choice (for one thing, it confirms the success of Leonard Bernstein’s campaign to make Mahler the unofficial composer of American neurosis), but one surmises that Mahler got the call mainly (and oddly) because something like John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (which the Philharmonic commissioned, after all) is too specific in its programmatic qualities, too likely to interfere with commemoration’s role as a benign, neutral canvas. (Likewise, one of the reasons that Music After seems like such an exception to most 9/11 musical commemorations is that, unusually, it curates strong individual voices in such quantity that it kind of erases the gap between specificity and assembly, the quiet insistence of Mr. Shimerda’s grave refracted onto a variety of tiny plots.)

Besides, the very nature of music, in a way, conflicts with this kind of commemoration. Monuments are supposed to be permanent reminders; music, though, is about remembering and forgetting, permanence and impermanence, palpability and insubstantiality. Half of it fits the occasion; but the other half is constantly, gently cancelling out the first half. To mark an occasion permanently appended with the phrase “never forget” with an art form that is essentially temporal, essentially fleeting, only works if one doesn’t listen too closely.

One of the rather minor occasions that 9/11 has crowded out of its memorial territory is the birthday (well, the baptism day, the closest thing we have) of William Boyce. This Sunday also happens to be Boyce’s tercentenary—he was baptized on September 11, 1711. Boyce was one of the most accomplished English composers of the 18th century, Master of the King’s Musick to Georges II and III, organist at the Chapel Royal; but he is mostly forgotten now, except for a few church anthems and some occasionally-revived symphonies. But I like to think Boyce had at least a little sense of the uneasy fit between music and monumental commemoration. He composed what was at the time a fairly well-known setting of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Lisle’s poem “The Power of Music,” which turns the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice on its Offenbach-like head: the denizens of the Underworld are astonished not only that Orpheus should brave the journey, but that he should do so in search of his wife, of all people. Deciding that hell lacks “torments sufficient” for Orpheus’s temerity, Pluto decides that the only proper punishment is to give him back his wife—that is, until Orpheus’s lyre works its spell, and Pluto changes his mind:

But pity succeeding soon vanquish’d his heart,
And pleas’d with his playing so well,
He took her again, in reward of his art;
Such power had music in hell.

Boyce does the jest the honor of an elegant melancholy—

http://www.matthewguerrieri.com/sounds/player.swf

—a wistful acknowledgement, maybe, that music is forever slipping away, dodging the well-defined roles we would have it play.

It’s in that spirit that one could categorize one of the only really appropriate musical memorials I’ve ever found. It’s Frederic Rzewski’s ”A Life,” a short piano sketch written the day after John Cage died. It’s gnomic and quirky in a recognizably Cagean way, but there’s also a tribute hidden in the playing, one that only emerges at the right tempo:


It’s a conspiratorial joke—in conventional performance practice, one shared only between the composer, the performer and, somewhere (if you happen to believe in that sort of thing) the dedicatee. But it’s also built into the most essential feature of music, it’s fleeting temporality. It risks the wit of mixing the idea of a memorial with music’s constant but constantly evanescent immediacy. Perhaps in contrast to a lot of commemorative music, it knows exactly what it is, what all music is: a tenuous breath, an inscription carved on the surface of a running stream.


(Boyce score via.)

Reviewing the American Repertory Theater’s Porgy and Bess.
The Faster Times, September 3, 2011.

I was out of town and otherwise occupied last week, which meant that I missed Ethen Iverson’s reading list. His list of jazz books is now added to my own to-do list, seeing as how I’ve only managed about half of those. His classical list is also superb—I would also, off the top of my head (and avoiding biographies, as Ethan did), add Peter Conrad’s A Song of Love and Death (probably my favorite book on opera); Schoenberg’s Style and Idea collection (what can I say, I find Arnold good company); Pierre Bernac’s The Interpretation of French Song (dazzlingly deep, even if you disagree with it it, it’s the one book you have to specifically disagree with); and Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective (it seems like it should get old, yet it never, never does). Irwin Bazelon’s film music book (which Ethan mentions) is excellent and in-depth, but I find it kind of curiously bitchy regarding genre films; Christopher Palmer’s more fanboy-ish but, in its own way, equally thorough The Composer in Hollywood is, I find, a nice balance. And I was mildly surprised that the original Pitchfork list that inspired this exercise neglected Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom, still my favorite book on rock and roll, though to list it is to, admittedly, be forced to acknowledge that rock had pretty much run its course by the late 60s.

But I’m coming pretty late to this game, so I thought I’d mix it up a little. So, instead of music books, here’s a list (again, off the top of my head) of five books that aren’t about music but still, nonetheless, changed my musical thinking, directly or obliquely.

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. History that not only gives proper due to the minutiae of great historical endeavors, but knows and illustrates that such details are utterly inseparable from the prevailing historical context, even when the people involved are tunnel-vision unaware of that context—a notion permanently embedded in my view of music. Also: a demonstration of the poetic capacity of explaining even the most arcane technical niceties.
  
  
• Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes. I enjoyed this book long before I actually understood what Wills was doing with it. It’s not only about Nixon, but about the entire period of American history leading up to his presidency; Wills spends lots of time deconstructing and dismantling one book or study of that history after another. After enough time, I’ve realized that any book will yield contradictions if you make enough incisions in it, but that’s Wills’ point, I think: American history is best understood by laying its contradictions bare. It’s an idea that has served me well in getting my head around a piece of music on too many occasions to count.
  
  
• Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française. Really, anything by Michelet—any of the volumes of his Histoire de France, any of his quirky studies on various aspects of human nature and behavior. If you have the time, struggling (as I do) with a French dictionary handy is advisable—English translations of Michelet tend to be old, somewhat clunky, and incomplete. But even such second-hand Michelet is worth it—there’s nobody quite like him for breadth, for structure, for pacing. The most symphonic historian of all time.
  
  
• Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Adams had issues, to be sure—he was self-pitying, he was almost comically pessimistic, he was irrationally anti-Semitic (though more in real life than in his books). But he was, I think, the greatest American prose stylist of the 19th century. All of Adams is worth reading, but the History is Adams at his best—casually magisterial, intricately witty. To read Adams is to understand the relationship between complexity and freedom—the full Victorian profusion of his sentence structure, and his mastery of it, allows him to place the key point of each idea wherever he wants. He can lead with it; he can end with it; he can use it as a fulcrum between phrases, between clauses, between qualifications and demurrals. And, as a result, when Adams does drop in an utterance of Hemingway-esque pithiness, it jabs harder than Hemingway ever did. If you’ve ever wondered why my own sentences tend towards the convoluted, or why I harbor what might seem to be an inexplicable fondness for music others might consider dense and difficult, a big part of it is that my education included Adams’ Education.
  
  
• Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum. At first, I was going to go with The Role of the Reader, my favorite collection of Eco’s semiotic texts, but I think his novel has more deeply embedded itself into my musical thinking, particularly because I’m so obsessed with Romanticism and its continuing hangover. Eco makes black comedy out of the tendency of the myth to take on a life of its own, a mechanism that has not only become prevalent in music (not just classical) since the 1800s, but has pretty much driven it. The first step of coming to terms with post-Beethoven music history is to be able to simultaneously acknowledge both myth’s fictional status and its palpable, almost indelible persistence.

One of my summer resolutions was to actually practice, which, given my seemingly hard-wired summer-vacation mental entrainment, is not an insignificant task. So Rhapsody in Blue has been sitting on the piano for a few weeks now—apt summer fare, I think. What I’ve been finding most interesting about the music this time around is how tricky it is, and the unusual way in which it’s tricky: Not so much technically—there’s certainly some finger-tangling passages, but on the whole, it’s hardly as forbidding as, say, Islamey—but temporally. Rhapsody in Blue is a piece in which it can be fiercely difficult to find the right tempo.

This is not for lack of indication; Gershwin has tempo markings all over the place, amply garnished with ritardandi and accelerandi and rubati both explicit and implicit. Here’s what you get on the first four pages alone:

Molto moderato (♩=80)
poco rit.
Moderato assai
tranquillo
poco scherzando
pochissimo rall.
a tempo
poco rall.
tranquillo
deciso
scherzando
Poco agitato

… and so forth. Out of 30 pages (this is in my very old, beat-up edition of the solo piano version) I count 23 that carry at least one indicated alteration of tempo. But the only metronome marking you get is that very first one. (And that seems to have been a late addition—the original manuscript of Ferde Grofé’s orchestration simply marks the beginning as “Slowly.”) Rhapsody in Blue is a piece that asks for near-constant tempo fluctuations, but puts the parameters of those fluctuations almost entirely in the hands of the performer.

It’s also a piece for which, thanks to recording technology, the acquiring of an extra-notational performance tradition has been more or less completely documented. Probably the most obvious alteration has been in the big Andantino melody, this one:


Gershwin’s 1924 recording with the Paul Whiteman orchestra takes all of this at the same tempo (as does, a little more loosely, Gershwin’s piano-roll rendition), which is what’s indicated, and which sounds weird to our ears, because the more common practice now is to double-time the last six bars of that phrase. That’s how Oscar Levant and Eugene Ormandy do it on their 1945 recording. It’s how Bernstein did it. It’s how just about everybody does it these days.

The thing is, in order to do that passage, and that section, without the double-time distortion, you have to hit a pretty precise mark, tempo-wise: it has to be fast enough that the last six bars don’t bog down (the Gershwin/Whiteman recording does plod a bit) but not so fast that the first two bars are trivialized. If you can hit that mark (about ♩=120, I’ve come to think, maybe a shade faster, though 126 seems a little too fast), it’s kind of a structural boon: you can take the next eight pages or so, all the way up through the following Agitato section, at essentially the same tempo. But then you’re more locked in than if you slide into the Andantino with Romantic languor, and then rubato the heck out of those six-bar consequent phrases. The performance practice that’s evolved, in other words, gives the performer more room to maneuver—and more room for error.

The question that I’ve been thinking about is: does such room to maneuver also make the performance more expressive? At about the same time I started wrestling with the varying speeds of Rhapsody in Blue, I read this review of a concert from this summer’s Sick Puppy festivities, and was struck by this description of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte:

I tend toward agreement with one of my seatmates, who described the experience as highly engaging intellectually, but emotionally remote.

I don’t wish to take the reviewer to task—I adore Stockhausen’s music, but I fully understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Still, I was intrigued by the phrase “emotionally remote,” since, to me, anyway, Kontakte is, if anything, emotionally in your face pretty much all the way through. (Here’s a recording to sample.) The emotions, though, are not those usually associated with musical expressiveness.

It might be useful to reference Robert Plutchik’s classification of emotions, in particular the way he divides emotions into opposite pairs. Musical expression tends to be those pairs on Plutchik’s N-S-E-W axes: joy and sadness, anger and fear—perusing this summation of recent research into emotional communication in musical performance, the bulk of empirical research has surrounded those types of emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love. My emotional experience of Kontakte, though, falls mostly onto one of Plutchik’s in-between axes: the tension between anticipation and surprise.

Here’s a typical section of the score to Kontakte:


There’s a bit of leeway in the performers’ staves, but it’s always in the context of those implacable numbers at the top of the score, the music’s running time, broken down to tenth-of-a-second accuracy. It’s both the source of Kontakte‘s emotional effect and the subversion of our accustomed perception of it. To do a Rhapsody-like indulgently-slow-then-double-time move is completely foreign to this context. Any momentary freedom on the part of the performers is immediately yanked back into Kontakte‘s grid by the necessity of synchronization with the electronic component. And that seems to conflict with what we’ve come to accept as communicating musical expressivity. The notion was concisely stated back in 1925 by psychologists Carl Seashore and Milton Metfessel:

This deviation from the exact is, on the whole, the medium for the creation of the beautiful—for the conveying of emotion. That is the secret of the plasticity of art. The exact is cold, restricted, and unemotional; and, however beautiful, in itself soon palls upon us.

Obviously—given my enthusiasm for the exacting emotional world of Kontakte—I don’t buy that. But for all the modernist effort to demonstrate they are, in fact, two different things, the conflation of expressivity and emotionality persists. The more expressive emotions are not false; but mere expressivity is not the end-all of emotional experience. And a sidelong glance into the worlds of politics or nationalism or fundamentalisms of various kinds offers no end of warning signs for exclusively associating emotion with expressiveness.

It’s interesting that, after Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin came around to the greater precision of metronome markings. The only one of his subsequent concert works that doesn’t include them is An American in Paris, and the experience of hearing Walter Damrosch conduct it too slowly apparently converted Gershwin. The Second Rhapsody is diligent with metronome indications, as is the Cuban Overture, as is the Variations on “I Got Rhythm.” And it’s equally interesting that none of those works has ever attained the place in the repertoire of Rhapsody in Blue. It might just be a coincidence—or it might be a measure of the general equating of performer freedom with communicative effectiveness. My own heresy: as much as I love Rhapsody in Blue, I kind of think that the Second Rhapsody is a better piece of music. But, then again, I know that I’m at the margins of the mainstream of perceived musical emotion. I don’t mind—I may not get swept off my feet quite as easily, but the payoff is a view of the world made just a little more lucid.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Do you remember a guy that’s been in such an early song?

Licht: I heard a rumor from Ground Control.

Moses und Aron: They got a message from the action man.

Der Freischütz:

Aennchen: I’m happy; hope you’re happy, too.

Don Giovanni: I’ve loved all I needed to love; sordid details following.

Elektra: The shrieking of nothing is killing.

Madama Butterfly: Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis.

La Bohème: I ain’t got no money.

Samson et Dalila: I ain’t got no hair.

Götterdämmerung: I’m hoping to kick, but the planet—it’s glowing.

Thaïs:

Thaïs: Strung out in heaven’s high!
Athanaël: Hitting an all-time low.

Tannhäuser: Time and again I tell myself, “I’ll stay clean tonight.”

The Merry Widow: I’m stuck with a valuable friend.

The Midsummer Marriage: One flash of light, but no smoking pistol.

Mefistofele: I never done good things.

Albert Herring: I never done bad things.

Der fliegende Holländer: I never did anything out of the blue.

The Ice Break: Want an axe to break the ice.

Tosca: Want to come down right now.

Wozzeck: My mother said, to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom.

Smoked meat (full-fat) at Schwartz’s.

This summer’s annual fall-off-the-blogging-bicycle was brought to you by Soho the Dog’s brief all-staff jaunt to Montreal and Québec. And also this week’s Boston Early Music Festival gauntlet. But mostly the trip north, during which we spoke French extremely badly but still ate extremely well. Très bien! The best restaurant music we heard was in Québec City, where, after hiking all day through St.-Roch, we wandered into the Cafe Abraham-Martin in the Complexe Méduse just as the owner put on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust—the whole album. *pompe le poing* (The worst was also in Québec City, when an otherwise lovely lunch at Laurie Raphaël was accompanied by this—in a remix that Went. On. Forever.)

Anyway, one of the happenings I missed was the announcement that the board of directors of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra had re-signed president Anne Parsons for another three years. Parsons was the face of management during the orchestra’s six-month strike—in fact, the deal was agreed to back in March, before the strike had even ended.

This sort of thing, it turns out, is something of a minor DSO tradition. Back in 1919, the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch gave the DSO an ultimatum: he would only sign on as music director if he got a new concert hall.

The directors of the Orchestral Association decided that they had no choice but to build a new hall. A hastily assembled building committee selected C. Howard Crane as the architect. Within two weeks the committee had purchased the site of old Wesminster Presbyterian Church and raised half a million dollars in building funds. Crane’s general contractor—prepared to work day and night to rush the building to completion—promised that it would be finished on schedule…. The contractor further showed his zeal by starting demolition of the church at a corner of the roof while a final wedding ceremony was still going on inside.

(Source.) Orchestra Hall—now part of the Max M. Fisher Music Center—is today one of the orchestra’s biggest financial headaches, the collateral on a $54 million balloon loan taken out in the face of what was revealed to be the financial bubble of the last decade. Decisions like that have not exactly reflected well on the prowess of the DSO board, and while the Music Center debacle predates Parsons, when that board expresses its confidence in her (“proven expertise in navigating challenging economic climates,” according to the board chair, who also runs a commercial real-estate company—hmmmm), it does create a bit of a with-friends-like-these situation. Hence the head of the orchestral committee calling Parsons’ contract extension “disappointing and puzzling.” (Definitely puzzling timing—was a change in management on the negotiating table? Outside supporters were calling for it, at least.)

A change of leadership would seem to be a common-sense move in Detroit, if only to clear the air of lingering bad feelings. But, then again, there are plenty of organizations—orchestras included—that are rife with bad feelings yet still hold up just fine. It might be a little more trenchant to say that a change of leadership is necessary based on a political-scientific analysis of European fiscal policy in reaction to the OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s. No, really! Well, maybe only kind of, but still fun to think about. Consider the work of Fritz W. Scharpf, emeritus director of the Max Planck Insititute for the Study of Societies. For a long time, Scharpf’s main research topic has been European integration and the difficulties and contradictions therein, but along the way, he’s come up with a nicely trenchant way of thinking about the relationship between varying approaches to economic policy and political legitimacy.

Back in the 1970s, the decision by OPEC to pump up oil prices put a severe strain on the then-prevalent Keynesian model of macroeconomic management—government spending and tax cuts to stimulate demand, spending cuts and tax increases to keep demand (and inflation) from overheating. As Scharpf explains:

Under these conditions, governments committed to Keynesian demand management were confronted with a dilemma: If they chose to fight unemployment with monetary and fiscal demand reflation, they would generate escalating rates of inflation; but if they would instead fight inflation with restrictive fiscal and monetary policies, the result would be mass unemployment.

What’s more—

In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast, governments were unable to reflate the economy because monetary policy was determined by an independent central bank that was unconditionally committed to the defense of price stability—in which case the bank’s tight-money policy would neutralize expansionary fiscal impulses…. Under these conditions, major job losses were unavoidable. They could only be softened if real wages were quickly adjusted downwards, which was true in Germany and Switzerland but not in the other hard-currency countries practicing an imported (and perhaps less clearly understood) version of the Bundesbank’s monetarism.

The Bundesbank—Germany’s central bank—was long marked (pun—ha) by its devotion to monetarist policies: basically, focusing on maintaining price stability via control of the money supply rather than aiming for full employment by stimulating demand. It’s supply-side, rather than demand-side policy, the kind of thing that can lead to massive deficits (e.g., Reagan-era US) or massive unemployment (e.g., Thatcher-era UK). In Germany, though, it worked pretty well for a lot of the 1970s and 80s. How come? In a talk he gave at the London School of Economics last month, Scharpf sums up:

[The Bundesbank] took great pains to explain, to the government, the unions and the public, how coordination by monetary policy would not only ensure price stability but also produce economically superior and politically justifiable macroeconomic outcomes. Once rampant inflation was brought under control, it would precisely monitor the state of the German economy and pre-announce annual monetary targets by reference to the current “output gap”. Maximum non-inflationary growth would then be achieved if fiscal policy would merely allow the “automatic stabilizers” to rise and fall over the business cycle, and if wages would rise with labor productivity…. In other words, responsibility for the management of the economy would be assumed by the “non-political” monetary policy of the independent Bank, whereas non-inflationary fiscal and wage policies could be conducted with a low political profile.

In Scharpf’s analysis, Keynesian policies have high political salience—because they directly involve taxes and government services, they tend to produce strong and immediate political reactions. Monetarist policies have low political salience—they’re pretty technical and behind-the-scenes, so there’s some insulation from the churn of the political surface. But monetarist policies require that such low salience be maintained—which is why the Bundesbank did so much legwork getting everybody on board, ensuring low salience down the line. (Compare with the period of German reunification, when the Bundesbank was pulled into more highly politically salient waters against Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with resulting damage to the Bundesbank’s reputation.)

And now for the question that explicitly or implicitly comes along in at least 75% of posts in this space: So where exactly is this going? Well, it’s hardly an exact analogue, but orchestras respond to fiscal crises with policies that are more or less monetarist. While it might be fun to see what would happen if an orchestra tried to spend its way out of a crisis in the Keynesian manner, it can’t really happen because orchestras can’t issue debt. Instead, they cut—they cut costs, they cut wages, they cut performances, &c. But, as in Germany, that only works in an atmosphere of low political salience—the exact opposite of what the DSO has managed to achieve. Even if you happen to think that managerial brinkmanship was the DSO’s best plan, if we borrow Scharpf’s ideas, it fairly guarantees that there’s no way to get back to a low-salience situation without either a change of management or a change of orchestra—severely curtailing the possibility of any further monetarist solutions to any subsequent crises. (Again, perhaps not an exact analytical fit, but pointing in an interesting direction.)

High political salience really brings out a lot of the more curious organizational aspects of orchestras—for instance, the way the players are not just employees, but also the product, and a crucial political constituency. It also points up that boards and, by extension, management, are not always terribly accountable—high political salience demands such accountability in governmental situations, but boards are largely self-governing. This is not to say that all boards are untenable; some boards, at least, appreciate the value of low salience. This is, again, a pretty fancy justification for what would seem to be common sense. But it does hint at how, if this kind of non-profit doesn’t happen to have either an institutional history or a managerial interest in maintaining deep, representative, competent governance, it can be pretty hard to get that to change, even when the need is obvious.

Detroit’s Orchestra Hall and the bit of land it sits on—the corner of Woodward Avenue and Parsons Street—has some interesting accountability karma. Woodward Avenue runs along the original Saginaw Trail. The plot was originally one of the so-called Park Lots, created in 1806 when the U.S. Congress authorized the “Governor and Judges’ Plan,” an appropriation of land that was previously a common. The lots were supposed to be distributed to settlers who had been displaced by the massive fire of 1805, with the remainder to be sold to raise money for a courthouse and jail. Instead, officials repeatedly dragged the process out, in order to squeeze out the original inhabitants, buy up lots for themselves, and fuel a speculative real-estate boom. Silas Farmer, Detroit’s 19th-century city historiographer, was rather elegantly sarcastic about it in his History of Detroit and Wayne County:

The Governor and Judges, first in charge, undoubtedly assumed unlawful power in giving away lots to various churches and societies, and exceeded their authority in many particulars. None of these powers were included in the Act creating the Land Board. The ease with which their sessions changed from land-board to legislative, and from legislative to judicial, as the exigencies of the case seemed to them to demand, was something marvellous even for that time of transition.

Only twenty years after its 1919 construction, the DSO vacated Orchestra Hall, the financial pressures of the Depression being too much to handle. The city seized the hall in 1941 for non-payment of taxes, then sold it to Ben and Lou Cohen, who already owned a chain of theatres; the Cohen brothers re-opened the Hall as the Paradise, which played host to some of the biggest jazz acts of the time. When, in 1970, the structure faced demolition at the hands of the fast-food hamburger chain Gino’s, a concerned-citizens committee was able to buy it and begin restorations.

The Orchestra moved back in 1989—which means that Orchestra Hall has only housed an orchestra for well less than half of its existence. On the one hand, the Hall is a tribute to the DSO’s perseverance; on the other hand, it is a fount of cautionary tales. But the board seems disinterested in learning from the past, once again throwing a wedding while knocking down the church.

My original copy went missing in a move sometime during the Clinton administration, but I am happy to report that the single greatest photograph of the Cold War is once again in the library at Soho the Dog HQ:


In honor of such an auspicious reacquisition, some random, politically-angled links.

Curtis Hughes‘ Say It Ain’t So, Joe, an opera starring Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, is looking for Kickstarter money for a planned recording. Selling point for disillusioned cynics: none of the money will actually go to any candidates!

After 22 years on the 4th floor of City Hall (just longer than his father), Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley spent his last day in office taking in a concert.

A primer on Russia’s emerging political pop underground.

Ah, Jersey.

The 2nd District Court of Appeals ruled that week that a Florida state law making it illegal to play your car stereo too loud was unconstitutional. (In possibly related news: Luther Campbell, mayoral candidate.)

A Newt Gingrich scholarship for music students? A Newt Gingrich scholarship for music students.