Gerard Schwarz plans an exit; Sue Perkins wins that TV conductor contest in Britain (which may eventually cross the pond); Jed Gaylin plays ringmaster; JoAnn Falletta plays Dr. Doolittle; Yannick Nézet-Séguin has a drink; R.I.P., Patrick Flynn and Vernon Handley.

Official proclamations of the competitive ways of small entrepreneurs now labor under an enormous burden of fact which demonstrates in detail the accuracy of Thorstein Veblen’s analysis. Competition, he held, is by no means dead, but it is chiefly ‘competition between the business concerns that control production, on the one side, and the consuming public on the other side; the chief expedients in this businesslike competition being salesmanship and sabotage.’ Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has also been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of the big competition and have revealed the mask-like character of liberalism’s rhetoric of small business and family farm.

—C. Wright Mills, White Collar (1951)

One of the interesting things about the music industry is how the sins and virtues of production in other industries often accrue to distribution when it comes to music. Take the Veblen passage Mills quotes (which is from the book Absentee Ownership) and switch out the terms—

competition between the business concerns that control distribution, on the one side, and the consuming public on the other side

—and you have a pretty succinct description of the recording industry over the past 10-15 years.

Mills, writing just after World War II, is bringing this up as part of his analysis of the alienated position of middle-class white-collar employees. Such employees are disenfranchised on the corporate level—working for somebody else, they make wages, not profits—but also, as Mills is demonstrating, on the political level: political power is still attained by appealing to the ideals of free competition and individual entrepreneurship, both of which have become nostalgic illusions.

It’s tempting to regard the rise of the Internet as somehow rendering Mills’ concerns moot, that the global reach and (in theory) universal access of the Web have resurrected the truly competitive and truly independent entrepreneur. This is an especially appealing idea for musicians, who have come to regard the Internet as direct access to a flexible distribution channel—which would explain the seemingly self-destructive response of the RIAA and its ilk: the whole system is in jeopardy if, to do another terminological switcheroo, the workers control the means of distribution. But then again, we’re all paying for Internet access, either directly (the cable to the house) or indirectly (via higher-ed tuition, taxpayer-financed public Wi-Fi, or a jacked-up price at the coffee shop). We’re, in effect, renting the distribution channel, which, in the long run, is a more stable form of revenue for the collective corporate world than if they had to pay themselves to distribute product that may or may not make back the overhead. Record companies may be losing revenue, but eventually, the capital flows away from physical distribution and towards telecommunicative access.

So I sometimes wonder if descriptions of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, as reasonable as they seem, aren’t just rhetorical cover for another generation of corporate consolidation into a government-enabled collusive cartel (*cough*Net neutrality*cough*). And while arts organizations have traditionally enjoyed a much smaller version of the sorts of government subsidies that have kept small businesses and family farms afloat for decades, it’s entirely plausible that such brave-new-world Internet descriptions could create the perception that the playing field has leveled in favor of musicians, even as increasingly monopolistic gatekeeping makes access to that playing field more and more expensive. Small businesses and family farms have the advantage of conforming to a Jeffersonian image of the American ideal; if musicians are the next ones to get caught in a rhetorical squeeze between corporation and competition, how sentimental do you think government is likely to get?

LITERARY BONUS:

In 1940 [record executive Edward] Wallerstein, who was now at Columbia Records, signed me up again. The first recording I made there was “Clair de Lune,” and it had a special role I never knew about until many years after World War II. Wallerstein, who was with the wartime Office of Strategic Services, told me that “Clair de Lune” disks had been used to send messages to American prisoners of war. The device was simple and played on the fact that the quality of recordings in those days was not all it should have been: a Morse code message would be scratched onto a disk, which would then be sent to a Red Cross station, where it was played on the air. The prisoners would know it contained a coded message and listen for it, but to anyone else it seemed like just another record with bad surface noise.

—Andre Kostelanetz (in collaboration with Gloria Hammond),
Echoes: Memoirs of Andre Kostelanetz, 1981

Random picture:


Random news:

Emily Smith, of The Sun (UK), gets the Non Sequitur of the Day award.

Hurricane Gustav ground to a halt yesterday — as THREE more mega-storms barrelled towards the US.

The hurricane—possibly named after Gustav Holst, the British composer of The Planets—weakened to a depression over Louisiana. (emphasis added)

What basis is there for such a claim? None whatsoever, as far as I know—which doesn’t stop The Sun from including sound clips of The Planets to accompany the article.

Elsewhere in the water, Richard Tognetti, leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is also a surfer, which forms the basis of the documentary Musica Surfica, screening at the end of the month as part of the New York Surf Film Festival. (Tognetti is also fresh off helping to save the Wollongong Town Hall.)

Wolpe! The Musical! No kidding.

The state of Oklahoma has announced the ten finalists for the official State Rock Song.

And New Jersey tenor Philip Alongi, who sang the National Anthem to open yesterday’s session of the Republican National Convention, actually isn’t all that keen on a McCain/Palin ticket, but a gig’s a gig.

If you’re any sort of classical musician, I’ll bet that somewhere, even if you never actually use it, you have at least a small, finely honed sense of disenfranchisement. So if you’ve ever looked at the human penchant for naming geographical features—mountains, rivers, &c.—after other humans, and wondered why they always seem to opt for explorers and politicians and military types rather than, you know, musicians, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, there actually is such a place where creative artists get their eponymous due. The airless, waterless, 400-degrees-Celsius-surface-temperature bad news is that it’s the planet Mercury.


Most things in the solar system borrow their names from Greek and Roman mythology—think of the names of the planets besides Earth. Mercurian geography initially followed suit; the planet’s albedo features—the patterns of light and dark visible through a telescope—were mapped and thus named by the French astronomer Eugène Michel Antoniadi in the 1920s. But in the 1970s, the double whammy of radio telescopy and a Mariner 10 flyby revealed a wealth of details needing names.

Craters on the moon had been primarily named for astronomers and scientists, for example, the prominent southern hemisphere crater Tycho, with its bright ray system, named for the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, or the crater Clavius, named for the German astronomer Christopher Clavius, and made famous as the site of the moon base in 2001. But for Mercury, on grounds of both avoiding repetition and general novelty, the International Astronomical Union decided to go in a different direction.

Mercury is a heavily cratered planet, with perhaps the greatest number of craters of any body in the solar system. After much discussion and no little controversy, the Mercury Task Group decided to name these craters for great human contributors to the arts and humanities, including writers, Composers, painters, sculptors, and architects. This system is consistent with previous decisions made for the Moon, Mars, and Venus, on all of which the craters have human names. In terms of commemoration of human achievement, Mercury will be the complement of the Moon, with the latter honoring scientists and scholars and the former honoring the creative and artistic heroes of mankind. Initially, all craters photographed by Mariner 10 and having diameters of 100km or more will be named, as well as selected prominent or geologically significant craters in the 40 to 100km size range.
…
A number of scholars are assisting the Task Group in selecting these names. The distribution by fields will be approximately 50% for authors, 30% for artists, and 20% for composers. (David Morrison, “IAU Nomenclature for Topographic Features on Mercury,” Icarus 28, 605-606 (1976))

Still bringing up the rear, but better than nothing. The composers selected thus far (you can browse through this list) tend towards the standard European canon, although Charles Ives gets a crater of his own, as do the Indian composers Tansen and Tyāgarāja and the Chinese composer Chiang Ku’i (Jiang Kui) and his legendary countrywoman Ts’ai Wen-Chi (Cai Wenji). Beethoven gets an entire area (the Beethoven Quadrangle, which contains Schoenberg’s crater, as seen above), as does J.S. Bach—the Bach region, near the planet’s south pole, is dominated by large craters named for Johann Sebastian and Richard Wagner. (Mercury’s planetary neighbor Venus, whose craters are named for notable women, actually probably has even more musicians on the list, from Francesca Caccini and Thekla Badarzewska to Kirstin Flagstad, Maria Callas, and Kathleen Ferrier to Patsy Cline and Josephine Baker.)

The most contemporary composer representative on Mercury is Stravinsky. The IAU specifies that geographic features can’t be named for anyone who hasn’t been dead for at least three years, and the last round of Mercurian naming came in 1985, when a lot of possible honorees—Cage, Copland, Bernstein, Feldman, Xenakis, Tippett, not to mention a whole host of jazz and rock composers—were still alive. Their time may be coming, however: amazingly, only half the planet has ever been mapped (Mercury’s revolutions about its axis correspond with its orbital revolutions around the sun, so the same face is always towards the Earth), but that is about to change, now that NASA’s Messenger spacecraft has arrived at Mercury. The craft made its first flyby in January; another will follow in October, and then, in 2011, Messenger will go into orbit around the planet, allowing the first complete map of its surface. Make friends with an astronomer now, and your favorite composer might have his or her own permanent place in the sun.

The news that Governor Oglesby would not commute the sentences of Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer was received by the four men with composure. They had long been prepared for the worst. A deputy sheriff who was with Parsons on the night of November 10 reported that he was in good spirits, indeed “very cheerful and hopeful.” Parsons, in a garrulous mood, talked almost incessantly for several hours. He spoke about socialism and anarchism, about Haymarket, about his wife and children. It was not until he reached the last subject that he manifested any regret, and “the more he talked about it, the more sorrowful he became.” He said that Lucy was “a brave woman, a true wife, and a good mother.”

After the lights had been turned out and the prisoners settled down for the night, the silence of death row was broken by Parson’s voice, reciting Whittier’s poem “The Reformer”:

Whether on the gallows high,
Or in the battle van,
The noblest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man.

Later in the night, Parsons broke the silence once again, this time with the melancholy strains of “Annie Laurie” (“And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I’d lay me doon and dee”). In Parson’s clear tenor voice, verse after verse of the Scottish ballad rang through the gloomy corridor, while other inmates listened “as if to the death-song of a dying hero.” Deputy Hawkins suggested that Parsons ought to get some sleep. “How can a fellow go to sleep with the music made by putting up the gallows?” Parsons joked. The sound of sawing and hammering could be heard late into the night as the scaffold was erected in the north corridor. By two o’clock, however, Parsons was sleeping “as soundly as he ever did in his life.”

—Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy

Happy Labor Day.

Living in a consumer-oriented culture, it’s hard to imagine that it hasn’t always been this way, but in fact, that culture only dates from the 19th century. In order to tell this story, it’s useful to review Karl Marx’s labor theory of value. Remember that? It’s the one where Marx analyzed the price of a product as the sum of three factors: constant capital (machines and factories), variable capital (paying people to operate the machines and factories), and surplus value (essentially, the marked-up profit). Now, if you think about the history of management-labor relations, it’s kind of the first two factors fighting over the third. Especially in America, that battlefield initially was dominated by populist sentiment that supported labor; making money off of capital investment was widely viewed as less honorable, fair, all-American—choose your epithet—than making money by actually directly producing a product.

But there was another shift underway. Marx also divided products into three categories: means of production, subsistence goods, and luxury goods. Marx was analyzing data from early in the Industrial Revolution, when the main problem was one of production, of increasing the industrial capacity; Marx saw that economies would be driven by capital investment in the first category, means of production. As more capital went towards means of production, the economy would expand, which would create more surplus value, which would increase the ability of people to consume the other two categories of products. But here’s the thing: the financial virtues of an economy driven by the first category are investment and saving. If more surplus money is going towards factories than the products those factories produce, eventually supply catches up with and surpasses demand—which is exactly what happened in the later 19th century, just as the “labor problem” was coming to a boil. Marx saw it coming:

Thus the production of surplus-value, and with it the individual consumption of the capitalist, may increase, the entire process of reproduction may be in a flourishing condition, and yet a large part of the commodities may have entered into consumption only apparently, while in reality they may still remain unsold in the hands of dealers, may in fact still be lying in the market. Now one stream of commodities follows another, and finally it is discovered that the previous streams had been absorbed only apparently by consumption. The commodity-capitals compete with one another for a place in the market. Late-comers, to sell at all, sell at lower prices. The former streams have not yet been disposed of when payment for them falls due. Their owners must declare their insolvency or sell at any price to meet their obligations. This sale has nothing whatever to do with the actual state of the demand. It only concerns the demand for payment, the pressing necessity of transforming commodities into money. Then a crisis breaks out. (Capital, volume 2)

19th-century capitalists were getting squeezed from two directions; overproduction was eating into the amount of surplus value they could claim, while political sentiment, even pro-business political sentiment, was still based on the assumption that the price of a product reflected the amount of labor put into its production, and the government’s role was to enable investment and improvement in that production. Even before Marx, classical economists tended to think in terms of production. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, famously contrasted diamonds and water:

The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use’; the other, ‘value in exchange.’ The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.

Smith’s solution to the seeming paradox was that more labor was required to produce a diamond than to produce a drink of water. The labor theory of value, be it Smith’s or Marx’s, was firmly ingrained in the 19th-century mind.

American pro-capitalist economists thus saw a need to get around the labor theory. They did this with an idea called marginal utility: the value of a product reflects the difference in utility that comes with one more or less unit of that product. A gallon of water has less value than a diamond, according to a marginalist, because an increase or decrease in the world’s water supply of a gallon makes far less difference than the increase or decrease of the diamond supply. For products with a more complicated provenance than that, the market is the arbiter of value—irregardless of the amount of labor required to manufacture the product. Products with a low labor-value might have a disproportionately high marginal utility value, and vice versa, based on how useful consumers viewed them to be.

Marginal utility originated in Europe, but American economists jumped on it, and it’s not hard to see why: the theory is entirely dependent on consumers, completely sidestepping the labor theory of value. Here was coherent economic cover for a political solution to overproduction, shifting government attention to stimulating sufficient consumer demand to soak up whatever supply capitalists could produce. What’s more, the focus was firmly on the macroeconomic level, on aggregate, rather than individual behavior. Here’s how the leading American marginalist, economist John Bates Clark, put it:

Exchanges are always made between an individual and society as a whole. In every legitimate bargain the social organism is a party. Under a regime of free competition, whoever sells the thing he has produced, sells it to society. His sign advertises the world to come and buy, and it is the world, not the chance customer, that is the real purchaser. Yet it is equally true that whoever buys the thing he needs, buys it of society. Under free competition the world is seeking to serve us, and we buy what the world, not a chance producer offers.

When market valuations are made, society is primarily the buyer. Goods in individual hands are offered to the social whole, and the estimate of utility made by that purchaser fixes their market value. In the process the social organism is true to its nature as a single being, great and complex, indeed, but united and intelligent. It looks at an article as a man would do, and mentally measures the modification in its own condition which the acquisition of it would occasion, or which the loss of it would occasion, if once possessed. “With the article my condition is thus; without it, thus; the difference measures its effective utility;” such is the mental process by which individual or society makes a valuation. (John Bates Clark, “The Philosophy of Value”, 1881)

The historian James Livingston has provocatively, but I think correctly pointed out how conveniently the marginalist revolution in American economics dovetailed with the need to reorient the country’s economy around consumers in order to alleviate capitalists’ suffering at the hands of overproduction. Now, whether that reorientation was inevitable makes for an interesting though probably inconclusive debate. The point is that, from the beginning, the focus on consumers was as much a cultural shift as an economic one. It involved reshaping society so that acquisition took the place of thrift as a societal virtue.

One of my favorite soapbox tropes (here’s a recent appearance) is the lousy job the free market does at matching up price and value in the arts. You can see how utility factors into this: paintings and sculpture command higher prices because of their possible utility as investments; going to the movies, though equally ephemeral as live performance, has the advantage of reproducibility, which enables the opportunity cost of a ticket to remain low enough to make up for the lack of utility. (I’ll grumble at putting down ten bucks at the multiplex, but I’d have to bust out an old student ID to get into a concert for that money.) And the emphasis on the aggregate ensures that finding aesthetic utility in something other than the lowest common denominator means paying a higher price, which, over time, increases the barrier-to-entry for potential consumers of non-majority tastes.

That’s old news. More intriguing is matching up the shift from production-based culture to consumer-based culture and the coincident decline in the status of composers. Composers are, after all, producers, and the staggering amount of music produced and published in the early 18th century would suggest that demand was not a problem. A great deal of that was due to domestic music-making; once recordings took hold, the need to actually make music at home disappeared. But that’s a matter of utility as well: the pleasure in performing didn’t change, but recordings required less effort, less practice—less labor-time—and convenience comparatively won out. And note the increasing market share of popular music—a largely performer-driven genre—and the corresponding increase in the performer-centric marketing of classical music. Capital moving away from the means of production and towards the product. (If you’re inclined to view performers as the means of production, and the music as the product, feel free to substitute the shift from live performance towards recordings.)

Is this a capital-letter Bad Thing? Well, for me, characterizing it as good or bad isn’t really the point. I mean, I wish the mass media was just packed with avant-garde music, because it would save me a lot of effort and money to hear it, but that’s just my own preference. For now, the world is the way it is. But I think the recognition of the basis for the consumer culture we live in—and a recognition that it’s historically quite new, relatively speaking—casts a lot of the controversies we bat about so much in an interesting light. Take the common charge that atonality scared away the audience for classical music: one could argue that the cultural shift towards consumerism meant that something was going to scare away a lot of the audience for classical music after the 19th century, and atonality just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Livingston quotes Richard Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears:

[T]he new professional-managerial corps appeared with a timely dual message. On the one hand they proposed a new managerial efficiency, a new regime of administration by experts for business, government, and other spheres of life. On the other hand, they preached a new morality that subordinated the old goal of transcendence to new ideas of self-fulfillment and immediate gratification. This late nineteenth-century link between individual hedonism and bureaucratic organizations—a link that has been strengthened in the twentieth century—marks the point of departure for American consumer culture. [emphasis added]

If Fox and Sears are right, that would seem to increasingly disadvantage any genre of music as it requires/expects more reflection and/or critical engagement than your most basic pop song—which might explain why Copland, Barber, &c., didn’t counterbalance the supposed serialist hegemony, why minimalism didn’t restore classical music to the status of its pre-Schoenberg glory days, and why people are starting to worry over jazz the way they already worry over classical. Is that a better explanation for recent musical history? A more useful one, perhaps? Maybe, maybe not—and I’m certainly not inclined to think that the social organism is true to its nature as a single being when it comes to historical causes célèbre. But it does introduce a datum into the calculation that I, at least, have not much seen previously.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please,” Marx wrote, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” That transmission can happen over a rather wide band, and on a lot of different frequencies.

Today’s cautionary tale concerns the Ukranian-Russian composer Vladimir Shainsky, who moved from Russia to California in 2006, and, according to a lawsuit, promptly became the victim of a real-estate swindle.

It all started when an Armenian woman, a stranger, claimed to recognize the composer in a mall in Carmel Valley. She and her husband befriended him, her husband saying he was the son of a KGB vice minister, all to curry favor with Shainskiy to the point that he unwittingly surrendered control of his finances to the husband and a web of associates, his attorneys say.

At the end, Shainskiy, who’d never had a mortgage in his life, was left holding $1.2 million in mortgage debt in late 2007. He faced unaffordable loan payments on not only the condo he’d previously owned outright but also a house in Santaluz, a North County subdivision, sold to him by the man’s son at an inflated price. His bank accounts had been tapped; his mental state was in shambles.

The suit claims that Angelika and George Vartan convinced the octogenarian Shainsky to take out a mortgage on his condominium to finance a down payment on a house being offered by the Vartans’ son, broker Michael Vartani—without disclosing that the house in question was owned by their other son, Michael’s twin brother Andrew. The group allegedly took advantage of Shainsky’s age and poor English, and even went so far as to forge signatures and documents in order to secure the mortgages in Shainsky’s name. The defendants’ attorneys deny all the charges, but a settlement is currently being negotiated, and Shainsky and his wife are now back in their condo.

All this is as good an excuse as any to spotlight one of Shainsky’s best-loved works, his score to the thoroughly awesome 1971 animated film Чебурашка (Cheburashka), directed by Roman Kachanov. The tune sung by Krokodil Gena at the beginning is a certified standard in the former Soviet Union, eliciting a Proustian response among Russophones of a certain generation similar to, say, Schoolhouse Rock songs in the United States.

Part 1:

One of the more common avant-garde music kvetches is the seemingly disparately high public prominence of avant-garde painting compared to music. The usual explanation is temporal—a piece of music forces you to experience it over a given length of time, in a given order, but a painting is experienced on your own time, for as long as you want, lingering over whatever details you choose. (A while back, I speculated on the philosophical genealogy of this argued divide.) Personally? I’ve always found that explanation a bit suspect.

So it’s an ego boost to find out that none other than Charles Baudelaire agrees with me. Kind of, anyways. Baudelaire made his initial splash as an art critic; in a long essay reviewing the Paris Salon of 1846, he rather infamously included a section explaining “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse”—why sculpture is boring. Subject matter, mainly: Baudelaire was weary of sterile neo-classicism, an 18th-century holdover. (Baudelaire thus characterizes the sculptor Pradier: “He spends his life fattening ancient torsos, adjusting the coiffures atop their necks to those of kept women.”) But sculpture itself suffers for being more primitive than painting.

La sculpture a plusieurs inconvénients qui sont la conséquence nécessaire de ses moyens. Brutale et positive comme la nature, elle est en même temps vague et insaisissable, parce qu’elle montre trop de faces à la fois. C’est en vain que le sculpteur s’efforce de se mettre à un point de vue unique; le spectateur, qui tourne autour de la figure, peut choisir cent points de vue différents, excepté le bon, et il arrive souvent, ce qui est humiliant pour l’artiste, qu’un hasard de lumière, un effet de lampe, découvrent une beauté qui n’est pas celle à laquelle il avait songé. Un tableau n’est que ce qu’il veut; il n’y a pas moyen de le regarder autrement que dans son jour. La peinture n’a qu’un point de vue; elle est exclusive et despotique: aussi l’expression du peintre est-elle bien plus forte.

Sculpture has numerous disadvantages which necessarily result from its means. Brutal and positive like nature, it is at other times vague and imperceptible, because it shows too many facets at once. It is in vain that the sculptor tries to put forth a unique point of view; the spectator, turning about the figure, might choose a hundred different points of view—all except the right one—and it often happens, which is a humiliation for the artist, that a trick of the light, an effect of the lamp, discovers a beauty not originally intended. A picture is only what it wants to be; there is no other way to regard it except on its own terms. Painting has one viewpoint; it is exclusive and despotic: thus the expression of the painter is that much more forceful.

Baudelaire privileges painting over sculpture because there’s less room for the spectator’s subjectivity to interfere with the artist’s intent.

You might think that Baudelaire’s century-and-a-half remove from the current media landscape might invalidate his priorities, but consider that film, which is even more despotic than painting in Baudelaire’s terms, ended up trumping both music and painting in terms of cultural market share. The progression is towards less room for the spectator to maneuver, not more. My new BFF Walter Benjamin quoted part of the above passage approvingly, commenting, “Baudelaire makes exactly the same point about sculpture from the perspective of painting as is made today about painting from the perspective of film.” And yet the current cultural landscape—fractured into millions of self-serve niches via digital technology—seems to contradict that. What does that spectator really want? To be in control? Or to be controlled? Put it another way: does 21st-century culture privilege an objective viewpoint, or a subjective one?

When I was a kid, ingesting television culture like free Froot Loops, the main framework for thinking about media in general was still that promulgated by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, particularly in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. McLuhan famously divided media—or at least arranged them on a continuum—using categories of “hot” and “cold”; hot media included print, radio, and film, while cool media included the telephone, conversation, and, interestingly, television. Why put television and film into opposite categories? McLuhan’s explanation is that hot media exclude audience participation, while cool media encourage it. Film fills in all the information the spectator needs—correlating with Benjamin’s analysis vs. painting—but television presents a lower-resolution image, one that (unlike the distinct frames of film) is always in flux, lines of electrons continually scanning across the screen. For McLuhan, the increased effort needed to parse the image results in a tactile experience, the use of a greater number of sensory imaginations. (McLuhan pointed to the increased popularity of Westerns as evidence for this, the necessary presence of leather saddles, metal six-guns, horseflesh and dust dovetailing with the medium’s increased tactile engagement.)

Um, okay. As interesting as that idea is, I sometimes wonder if McLuhan isn’t reversing causality a bit, defining values as inherent to the medium that the medium is only reflecting. He would often point to politicians—Kennedy’s successful use of TV, as opposed to Nixon or Goldwater or LBJ, all of whom were, in his analysis, too “hot” for television. From a 1969 Playboy interview:

MCLUHAN: Kennedy was the first TV President because he was the first prominent American politician to ever understand the dynamics and lines of force of the television iconoscope. As I’ve explained, TV is an inherently cool medium, and Kennedy had a compatible coolness and indifference to power, bred of personal wealth, which allowed him to adapt fully to TV. Any political candidate who doesn’t have such cool, low definition qualities, which allow the viewer to fill in the gaps with his own personal identification, simply electrocutes himself on television—as Richard Nixon did in his disastrous debates with Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. Nixon was essentially hot; he presented a high-definition, sharply-defined image and action on the TV screen that contributed to his reputation as a phony—the “Tricky Dicky” syndrome that has dogged his footsteps for years. “Would you buy a used car from this man?” the political cartoon asked—and the answer was no, because he didn’t project the cool aura of disinterest and objectivity that Kennedy emanated so effortlessly and engagingly.

PLAYBOY: Did Nixon take any lessons from you the last time around?

MCLUHAN: He certainly took lessons from somebody, because in the recent election it was Nixon who was cool and Humphrey who was hot. I had noticed the change in Nixon as far back as 1963 when I saw him on The Jack Paar Show. No longer the slick, glib, aggressive Nixon of 1960, he had been toned down, polished, programed and packaged into the new Nixon we saw in 1968: earnest, modest, quietly sincere—in a word, cool. I realized then that if Nixon maintained this mask, he could be elected President, and apparently the American electorate agreed last November.

McLuhan’s analysis is spot-on, but he doesn’t consider, at least here, the possibility that society is driving the media and not the other way around. McLuhan is right to point out that the technology’s ubiquity does have an effect on how we subsequently interact with the world, but the “coolness” of the medium may just be an artful illusion, one that caters to a societal need or wish, one that would have been utilized whatever the medium.

There’s a bit of a linguistic elision here, too. McLuhan himself refers to Kennedy’s “cool aura of disinterest and objectivity,” careful to characterize that as an appearance, not necessarily a fact. But there has grown up around McLuhan’s ideas the sense that cooler media are more objective, that the participatory aspect somehow ensures a greater objectivity. Within the regime of “hot” and “cool” media, subjectivity becomes an assault from without. Baudelaire’s “despotic” viewpoint takes on all the negative aspects of a despot.

Last week, Nico Muhly was comparing molecular gastronomy and minimalist music:

When done right, molecular gastronomy can be unspeakably evocative. There is a drink at WD-50 which consists of tequila, dried thai long chilis, and smoked pear juice, which all sounds too cool for school, until you taste it. I got the tiniest sip down and was immediately reminded of the smell of an censer a friend of my mother had sent me when I was a child: it was a little pueblo house with a couple of poncho-clad figurines standing out front of it; this same friend later wrote a book in which she analyzed gruesome fin-de-siècle crime scene photographs of mutilated bodies in Paris; all of these memories were immediately available to me on first sip.

Minimal composition, for me, should aspire to evoke similarly specific emotions; whereas Romantic music appeals to the Jungian journeys we “all” supposedly can relate to (the home, the woods, the lover, the villain), minimal music, for me, is unspecific in origin but specific and very personal in destination. You take six pitches, and oscillate between them in some sort of pattern, and one person in the audience remembers playing a broken pump organ, and another remembers a childhood spent playing underneath high-tension electric wires.

This is a description of a McLuhanesque “cool” medium par excellence: presenting a surface that seems to need filling in. The idea that Romanticism appeals to universal stories that “we all can relate to” is a refraction through a society favoring ubiquitous, “participatory” media; Baudelaire would insist that the power of Romantic art is that you are irresistibly pulled into the artist’s journey, an absolutely subjective viewpoint. But that’s not to say that Romantic music has to be experienced in Baudelaire’s terms; each generation reinvents the past for its own purposes. Nonetheless, it points up what we perceive today as a contrast: Romantic music presents a “subjective” surface, minimalist music an “objective” one.

But then again, all music is more objective than subjective, especially if you take those terms a bit literally, to match Baudelaire’s analysis: sculpture produces objects, and it’s the “object”-ness of the sculpture that is the immediately perceived surface. Paintings are, of course, objects as well, but the immediately perceived surface of the painting is its subject, be that a figurative or an abstract subject. Music in general tends closer to sculpture than painting in that regard; the listener is left largely free to perceive a piece of music’s status as a sonic object in time to whatever extent they wish, while even the most subjective compositional viewpoint leaves ample room for individual interpretation on the part of the listener. I caught a bit of Strauss’s Don Quixote on the radio yesterday, one of the most programmatically pre-determined works in the repertoire, yet I was still struck by how much imaginative participation is invited from the listener on a moment-to-moment basis—yes, the cello is Don Quixote, but hearing that line, that phrase, what does it mean? What is he feeling at that point of the story? What are we?

Baudelaire’s analysis of painting as what McLuhan would consider a “hot” medium is the exact opposite of the contrast of avant-garde painting with avant-garde music, which sets up painting as the “cool” medium, one in which the spectator retains control over the participatory apprehension of the artistic intent. Yet the experience of music remains so vague as to beg the question of which, in fact, is the more participatory medium. What if avant-garde music seems more forbidding to certain audience members than avant-garde painting because it requires too much participation, if, in McLuhan’s terms, modern music really is too “cool” for school?

One more example, a tangential one. If you’ve watched any of the American coverage of the Olympics this month, you’ve been hit full-blast with NBC’s penchant for human-interest background stories and endless dramaticizing hype. I’m not going to deny that it makes for good TV, but I do find it interesting that television, that supposedly “cool” medium, has taken what originated as an essentially neo-classical event—a spectacle of athletic competition, for which an in-person audience probably doesn’t have very much sense of the competitors as individuals, except in isolated instances—and changed it into a rather Romantic artifact: hundreds of individual dramas of triumph, or redemption, or perseverance, or heartbreak, each of which provides pre-packaged water-cooler conversation fodder. The thing is, NBC presents this highly subjective interpretation of the games—dramatic structures and narratives imposed on the competition—with a highly objective veneer: reporters, interviews, an anchor’s desk, medal counts, scores calculated to a thousandth of a point, times calculated to a thousandth of a second.

It would seem that we want the illusion of objectivity, but not the subsequent responsibility to fashion that objective data into our own subjective viewpoint. We want McLuhan’s “cool” participation and Baudelaire’s despotic force. We want the freedom to interpret, but the authoritarian confidence that we’ll arrive at the “right” interpretation. But those wants are also in response to what society and technology present to us, and on some level, we remain unsatisfied, knowing that what’s presented to us isn’t entirely “true.” Maybe that’s why music, in spite of constantly seeming to finish second to this or that other artistic pursuit, persists with such tenacity.