Sam's Posts

life and tragic death of recorded music, part 2

2012-02-06T21:39:00.008-06:00

Recently I read this lovely article (subscription required, unfortunately) by pianist Jeremy Denk in (but what else?) the New Yorker, and it reminded me to follow up on this post about recordings and music. In the article, Denk describes how the process of recording is inherently stressful and tortured, more so than performance, because of the finality of the product, as well as the expectation and possibility of perfection (in some sense, at least!).

A while after writing that last post I realized a somewhat surprising fact about the recorded music that I love and cherish: it is, almost without exception, all recorded before 1985. Now that's a strange fact! It's not as if there aren't artists out there today, whom I love and admire from live performances, making recordings of their own. But they never seem to capture my interest in quite the same sustained way, and I almost never return to them after a few listenings. Why is that?

Before I jump to any unusual conclusions, I should note that the effect could be one of mere selection bias: the recordings that survive to this day (or to my childhood) from the more distant past are exactly those that were more popular. In addition, because recordings weren't as common in the past, the artists who were releasing recordings were more likely to be "good" in whatever sense makes them more popular. Maybe I haven't made the time to effectively sort through all the modern recordings that are being made to find the ones that would be my favorites. Add to that the fact that, as I mentioned in my last post, I find it difficult to set aside time anymore to listen to something all the way through, maybe it's not too surprising that I get bored easily with new releases.

But with those caveats in mind, though, I suspect that something more nefarious is ultimately responsible! After all, I've been to piano recitals that I absolutely adore, and heard other people rave about live performances that they found truly breathtaking, from people like Stephen Hough, Radu Lupu, Piotr Anderszewski, Alfred Brendel, Richard Goode (who gave the best recital I've personally ever heard live), and yet, when I hear the same music from the same pianist through the lens of the recording studio, it's never quite the same.

If we grant the truth of this alternative hypothesis, there are still a few possible explanations, none of which I find particularly satisfying.

1. Recordings are inherently worse than live performances. Expecting them to be as good is silly. According to this hypothesis, then, if I had ever heard Glenn Gould or Richter play live, I would have been, compared to their recordings, simply, blown away.

If this is the case, then why is my taste so skewed to pianists from mid-century? Were they really better? If so, why?

2. Something about making a recording in a studio sucks the life out of a performance, and modern recording techniques have only exacerbated this trend.

But Glenn Gould was possibly the worst offender (at least, as bad as he could have been at the time) for stopping, cutting, splicing and dicing his recordings. But I still love many of them.

3. Something about recording technology, which is supposed to give us better, purer sound quality as time passes, actually makes modern recordings less appealing.

If this is the case, then modern live recordings should be comparably uninspiring to modern studio recordings.

4. Maybe I'm the problem, and I just like the static hum or low clarity of old recordings. But why? Maybe I (and others like me?) are biased toward recordings that have the same type of sound (in some sense) as those that we listened to and loved most growing up. If that's true, then transferring modern recordings to less sparkling analog formats should make them sound better to me.

Of course, the real answer could be any and all of these four, or none of them. But they are reasonably testable...

math

2012-02-05T18:21:00.004-06:00

For about half of a (school) year now, I've been teaching math at a private school in CT. How to teach math is kind of a hot topic, what with the school reform movement and the lagging achievement by Americans in the sciences. So far, I've struggled to accommodate, or consolidate, two basic philosophies about how children should learn math. It's made for quite a tumultuous experience! I'd say, on average, I spontaneously re-think the lower school math curriculum at least on a monthly basis.

On the one hand, there's the Tiger-mother-inspired, "achievement"-oriented approach to math instruction, which is based largely on the theory that kids—for the most part—learn unconsciously, and need to practice something in order to acquire a certain skill level. On this theory, math is something not to be too much enjoyed, but to be drilled and internalized. It is, in another words, a set of basic skills involving numbers and computations that, once practiced and learned, will set a solid foundation for future quantitative endeavors.

On the other side of the coin, we have the idealist philosophy on math instruction. An idealist's first question about the drilling approach is always: what's the point? Yes, what we think of as math is hard for children to learn, and in order to learn it they certainly do need to practice it, but why do we think it's so important in the first place? Why should they spend hours learning the finer points of long division, fraction addition, and decimal conversion? They will never need to do those things ever again, even if they become engineers! To the idealist, math is something completely different; it's about patterns and elegance, puzzles and strategies, creativity and exploration, rather than mindless problem solving and following instructions. According to such a philosophy, there's little purpose to teaching children computations, especially if they find them boring and tedious. [For a more complete rendition of the idealist's argument, including answers to various rebuttals, see the essay here).

Perhaps my descriptions transparently reveal my own inner-leanings. As much as I can, I try to make my classes interesting and challenging for the kids (intellectually challenging, that is...examples to come!). This involves, above all, sitting back when they protest that they "don't get" something, and letting them struggle with it, over their fervent protestations. Thus, it can be immensely difficult, both for them and for me because they don't really like having to think things through, or be challenged in math class. They like hearing how to do something, doing it, and being validated by getting the correct answers. Getting them to switch to a different mindset, where the primary importance is in the way they arrive at an answer, or the reasoning they use behind an explanation, is next to impossible. They just keep asking "is this right? Wait, is this right?"

But the idealist approach has other drawbacks. The simplest is: testing. And by that I don't mean that I (or they) will be judged by this or that particular standardized test this year or next. The problem is, the whole system is set up to emphasize, reward and capitalize on a certain type of knowledge, ie, the standard math curriculum. Whether or not a student can learn and master the standard math curriculum is a pretty good predictor of the quality of college he or she will attend, how well he or she might do, and even how well he or she might do in life beyond college! But I don't think people do better in life in because they can do long division, or even that the ability to learn long division is terribly important to learning other important skills in life. But when everybody is judging people, up through college and even graduate school, based on the same skewed criteria, those criteria become excessively important merely by virtue of others' judgments. In other words, the importance of being good at math becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (or a tinkerbell).

As I see it, in my job I face a continuous tension between emphasizing to my students the skills that I truly believe would help them succeed in an ideal world (perseverance, curiosity, creativity, reasoning), and the skills that will help them succeed in the flawed world that we have. Hopefully I'm finding a decent balance!

authenticity and performance practice, part 1?

2012-01-31T21:25:00.007-06:00

To follow up on the earlier post about my recital.....Here are some thoughts expanded from this short introduction I gave before playing Mozart, which you can see here.

Authenticity is a problematic concept when it comes to all art. In the world of classical music, the problem is especially important to address because most of what we do as musicians is reproduce the music of others. We don't typically own, at least in a strictly philosophical sense, intellectual property over our performances, since they're written by someone else. Unfortunately, as the classical music scene struggles with evolving standards of intellectual property involving the internet and duplication, it simultaneously struggles to evolve out of an antiquated and damaging mindset involving all that music in the public domain!

It's one of those things that, if you operate outside the world of classical musical performance, you'll probably say either "huh?" or "who cares?!", and maybe you're not totally wrong. But maybe you would care more if the world of classical music performance weren't so bogged down in its silly performance practices!

Before writing anything more witty about it, I feel I have to lay down the groundwork for what I want to say. Really, it's one of those things that doesn't fit into a blog. But what am I gonna do.

The general attitude among people who play and teach music is that the music of the past is so sacred, so untouchable, that to a greater or lesser degree it should always be reproduced in the manner that best mimics its original conception, that is, however the composer actually envisioned the music being played at the time he or she wrote it.

This general attitude, though, fails on all sorts of levels. First off, it's clearly impossible in practice to determine how a composer conceived of his own music when the composer is dead. The incomplete record left behind by dead composers is far from sufficient for such a task, even for the best scholars (who are most often asking entirely the wrong questions anyway), and in the end, we can't read dead people's minds. Even when we have access to a composer's recording of his own music, the idea that a performance is identical to a conception is, as any artist knows, far from the truth. Anyone who thinks he knows much about what a composer "intended" for his music is usually trying, unconsciously or otherwise, to justify and confirm his own biases.

Epistemologically, it is also in principle impossible to have any idea how a composer conceives of his music. Even if we did have ready access to his thoughts, who's to say they are even stable over time? What do you do if the composer had one picture of his music when he first started writing a piece, another when he finished, and a completely different one for the very same notes, years later? And that's just to consider a composer's lifetime. Who's to say what Mozart would think about his music today, after hearing it over and over, thousands of times? Who's to say what he would have thought about it, after seeing the course of Western music, and the changes wrought upon it by subsequent musicians? Clearly, we can only speculate.

In the end, even if we could summon Mozart from the dead, have him listen to 2 centuries worth of music and performances, and ask him, "how should I play this sonata?", should I be bound by his answer? No! The purpose of music isn't to shackle our own creativity, but to unleash it. Our only goal should be to make the best music possible, whatever Mozart tells us.

Great musicians have thought otherwise. But they're wrong. Even the performer who, for me, best reflects what I've written above—Glenn Gould—preached a different story altogether. He often cited the intentions of the composer as his highest authority while playing standard repertoire in a way that no one had even imagined it could be played. Clearly, his highest authority in performance was himself, and aren't we all lucky for that?

new pieces

2011-12-29T15:57:00.006-06:00

I recently played a recital at the Levine School of Music in Washington, DC. On the program were many of my own pieces. I had to learn them a bit too quickly for my liking, so the performances aren't exactly polished, but representative enough of the compositions that I hope you'll give them a listen if you weren't there! Here they are, with the notes I wrote for them.

Notes on the original works performed tonight:

I've been trying to compose music, on and off, since I was very young. I wrote quite a few “model” compositions—works modeled specifically after the styles of past composers—in college, but I was only ever satisfied with one of them. It wasn't until just over a year ago that I managed to compose with any consistency—or any general success (though I suppose the jury is still out in that regard). The Silent Night fantasy, which you will hear tonight, was cobbled together in two days, one year ago, in the run-up to my recital in this same hall last December, and revised this fall. The Fugue from the Prelude and Fugue in D major, after Bach was written in 2007, when I was a junior in college. The Star-Spangled Banner Fantasy was written in the last week of June, just before this year's 4th of July, while the rest of the pieces were written from September onward.

These pieces were written obsessively and unpredictably, in fits and starts. At times, I would sit down, intent on working on them, and nothing would happen at all. At other times, needing sleep, I would stay awake as long as the ideas kept flowing. All in all, (too) many of them came together in their final form about two weeks ago. You may believe that since I wrote these pieces, they should be easier for me to play, when in fact, the very opposite is true. Because these pieces have in many cases been through multiple revisions, it has taken extra time and care to delete the past versions from my memory and muscle memory, and replace them with the new ones. Accordingly, I put aside my originally ambitious plan to complement my own pieces on this program with other pieces that were new to me, in favor of some music that I'm more comfortable playing.

When you hear my music, you might miss the influence and inspiration of one “composer” if I didn't give her due diligence. Gabriela Montero is not only my favorite living pianist, but a truly brilliant composer, though her “pieces” are all improvised. Since I discovered her improvisations two years ago, they've been a revelation for me. She improvises with the skill of a jazz player, but in a huge range of styles. She can take any tune, from any time, and turn it into something completely different, all seemingly instinctively and almost without conscious thought or foresight. Her playing was critical to making me realize how rhythmic and textural variety can add so much, can indeed completely change the character, of a simple melodic or harmonic idea. She made me realize also that composing is just as much a physical act as a cerebral one. So much of the music I've written came about not from thinking, but just from putting my hands on the keys, seeing what came out, and then refining it.

The “style” of these compositions, if I may claim have the authority or perspective to comment

on them, is eclectic, but they share a conservative outlook, a debt to past styles that is extremely uncommon in modern “classical” music. A good friend of mine heard another one of my pieces (not being performed today), which I wrote and performed in June, and criticized it on the grounds that it “sounded like a hybrid of Mozart and Schubert.” My immediate thought was, that's a criticism?! But at the same time, I feel such a need to justify the existence of this music, that I suspect deep down, at least a part of me shares his criticism.

The question he raises is a serious one, and gets at the heart of what we consider the value of art. Is it, at its core, an aesthetic experience, or do we care about authenticity, about the meaning behind the experience? On the one hand, I believe that music is just music, and all that matters is how it sounds. If it sounds good, it is good, and if it sounds vaguely like Mozart or Schubert, then it's probably really good. People like to say there's no point in writing music in Classical style (capital c-Classical denoting a system of form and harmony in common practice in Europe from roughly 1750-1830) because we already have the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. But if, tomorrow, we discovered a trove of previously unknown, mature works by any of the above, is there any doubt that they would

dominate concert programs all over the world? That if Mozart had lived another 30 years, he wouldn't have written hundreds more works that we would still be playing today? Perhaps this is an irrelevant thought experiment, mostly because I don't claim to be capable of writing music that could be mistaken for that of any of these composers. But that doesn't mean that music that sticks to old styles has to be strictly imitative. Each of the above found a way to express himself within a set of rules that gave his music structure and definition, and I think that's what all composers, indeed all artists, strive for.

That being said, only one of the pieces you'll hear tonight was conceived specifically to sound

like music from a by-gone era (the prelude and fugue that opens the second half). I haven't set out, generally, to write music in any specific style, but rather to play only that which I find good enough to be worthy of repetition. Still, the things I write have a habit of sounding as if they were written for another century, , which, at least superficially, defies the idea that music is a reflection of the culture and the times in which it was conceived. I think people who would make this claim confuse the normative with the positive, the idea that music is inevitably looking back, a reflection of its time, vs. the idea that it must be, in a predictable way, reflective of its time. Nobody in 18th century Europe knew how Classical style was especially suited to its time and place. All I can reflect on in my own music is my own philosophy regarding music; if I am so lucky, perhaps one day people will see some connection to the world in which I lived. But to me, it doesn't much matter.

Sam Post

December 20th, 2011

the life and tragic death of recorded music

2011-12-28T10:53:00.012-06:00

I've already decided on an early New Year's resolution: listen to music. Seems so simple, right? In truth, it is deceivingly difficult, maybe impossible.

I mean, does anyone listen to music, for long stretches at a time, without undertaking any other distracting task, except in a concert setting? Put on a CD or turn on your ipod or other cloud-playing device, sit down and just listen with no other short-term goals in mind?

I suppose maybe most people never did this; certainly very few people, if any, do it today. But I used to do it all the time. It used to be a treasured activity of mine, something to which I would invest real energy and effort. The sort of joy of getting a new CD—or, way back in the day, cassette tape—used to be one of those things I looked forward to like nothing else. I might suspend all other endeavors, putting it on and listening obsessively for a day or two until I had memorized every phrase, every note, every nuance.

Even as recently in college, before I had a laptop, I would go to the music library, check out music, and just listen to it, and it was awesome! I also owned a turn table in college; once I had gone to the trouble of cleaning, and then putting on, an LP, I was damned well going to appreciate it fully.

Once I did get a laptop, it made it so easy to go to the library and just download all the music I wanted, but once I didn't have to listen to it there, and could save it for later, it became that much easier to put off the actual listening indefinitely.

These days, it should be easier than ever to unleash the joy of hearing new music! Instead of waiting for the gift of a new CD or shelling out 15 precious dollars, or even going to the library, I can listen to almost any piece of recorded music for free (or really cheap) on the internet. But because it's perpetually available, listening to it now never quite seems justified. Ironically, the availability of all that music has contributed to the death of listening. It's impossible, in our busy, frenetic modern lives, to sit down and appreciate one recording of music, when there's so much else to do, and we can just listen to it some other time anyway.

So when I decided two nights ago, to try to listen to some new music that I didn't know, I found it to be a much more difficult and anxiety-ridden task than I anticipated. I'm used to listening to new music while driving, cooking or working, maximizing efficiency of the task, but reducing my appreciation. I kept fidgeting about, wanting to open some new page to read on the internet, wondering whether I should be doing something else more productive.

Someone close to me recently contended that recorded music is all but useless next to live music. I agree that hearing music live is, all other things equal, the best way to experience it. But the fault of recorded music lies just as much with us as it does in the recordings themselves. We've essentially chosen to really listen to music only in live settings, thus confirming and fulfilling our existing bias.

But recordings are so often better, that I'm gonna have to give them another real chance. So there's my resolution; listen to music, straight through, undistracted and uninterrupted, for 30 minutes every other day. Can I do it??

music, recordings, and the like

2011-10-19T19:06:00.010-05:00

I wrote the little ditty you see below for a magazine a while back, but as of right now, it still hasn't been published. I was reminded of it again by a recent conversation I had about recordings: are they gateways to musical enlightenment, joy and ecstasy, or destructive pieces of crap that ruin music for everyone? These are, of course, the only two choices. Anyway the article is about Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations, and me, but gets at the question of recordings too....naturally, my answer is: it depends! Recordings can be great, but their influence, proliferation, and the way we listen to them, makes them terrible too.....follow-up to come? At any rate excuse the excessive non-bloggish style of the post below.

The lights dim, the audience grows quiet, and the film begins. It starts so simply, so innocently: two tones, two octaves apart, ringing purely, seemingly alone in a dark room. The camera turns and the scene reveals their source, as the music unfolds slowly, methodically. At first from a distance, we see a man, aged beyond his years, crouched behind a piano, head scarcely visible rising above it. As we approach, we see him seated scarcely a foot above the floor, arms bent unnaturally, his gargantuan glasses nearly touching the keys as he sways back and forth, appearing to speak each note as he articulates it with his long, spindly fingers. The scene is somewhat unsettling; the music, divine.

Thus began my visual introduction to Glenn Gould, at a “concert” screening of his 1981 Goldberg Variations film at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of his death. By then my obsession with Bach, and Glenn Gould in particular, was already well in place. But I had never seen the piece performed live. And I had never seen Gould play, even on film. I was transfixed.

My first encounter with Gould came about eight years earlier with his 1955 recording of the same piece, and the first ever CD I ever called my own. Up until that point in my life, I listened almost exclusively to Madonna—courtesy of my older sister—and I accepted the new gift from my grandmother with skepticism. I had no idea how this strange, eccentric man and this wonderful piece would shape my musical life.

The piece itself is colossal. All of its thirty-two movements (aria, thirty variations, and aria da capo) are based loosely on a thirty-two note baseline. But it is no average listener who will hear the relationship between one variation and the next, as Bach uses everything in his big bag of tricks to create a variety of characters, moods, and harmonic turns throughout the piece. After the calm and peaceful aria, the first variation bursts forth (in many renditions, at least) energetically. There is a famous story—probably untrue—about Bach's writing the Goldberg Variations as entertainment for a rich Duke afflicted by bouts of insomnia. It is often mistold, perhaps aided by the pleasant nature of the aria, to suggest that the piece was meant to put the Duke to sleep. But the piece intersperses peaceful or tragic slow variations with fast, exciting variations where the keyboard player must cross hands in an often dazzling display of virtuosity. And there are the immensely rich “contrapuntal” variations (though they're all contrapuntal, in truth), canons on each successive interval written in three voices. The variations build to a dizzying climax in what would be the tenth and final canon—that Bach has replaced with a chorale based on the interwoven melodies of German street songs.

No one will ever play them like Gould. That's because, as far as I can tell, no one plays the piano the way he did. This is one of those infuriating facts about music, and about the piano, that has such a huge effect on our listening and perception but that we understand so little: just as different composers have characteristic styles or sounds that inevitably mark their music, different pianists can have different characteristic “sounds” that mark their playing as well. We rarely stop to consider just how puzzling this is. With only the varying speed of each individual hammer to control, Gould's playing is almost instantly recognizable as his own and no one else's, no matter what he's playing. It leaves the listener with the impossible illusion that each note he plays is a glowing pearl, shimmering with its own life. His Bach can almost sound as though it's coming from a different instrument, some sort of space-age piano where each note is specially prepared with extra energy and resonance.

Many commentators—critics and pianists alike—often describe Gould's playing as “dry” or “detached,” but for me, they rather miss the point. He generally avoids a traditional legato, where the notes are smoothly connected, like a singer holding a vowel sound between notes, but still plays with little or no space between adjacent notes. Each note is clearly articulated, but somehow the connection between the notes is still scrupulously maintained, giving some illusion of a legato connection.

It may not come as a surprise to you that I prefer Glenn Gould's playing of Bach to any other pianist. But what's odd is other pianists' Bach tends to bore me, even when I like it and find it perfectly worthy of imitation and praise. I've heard many recordings of the Goldberg Variations—Perahia, Dinnerstein, Schiff, Tureck, etc. etc.—but I can't say I listen to any of them for pleasure. Despite their differences, they all sound frighteningly similar to each other, next to Gould's recordings. That space-age piano really sets him apart.

When I first brought the Goldberg Variations to my own teacher, he warned me: beware of the Gould affect! The piece—over and above the rest of Bach's keyboard works—is so closely identified with Gould that it's impossible to escape (ultimately unflattering) comparisons whenever one plays it. People who know the piece very well potentially hear everything you do, and everything you don't do, through the lens of Gould's own playing. What a terrifying thought. To which I thought, I've been grappling with that my whole life!

For me, Gould's playing of Bach has been alternately inspiring, depressing, and naggingly ever-present. As a child I listened to his recordings obsessively, and they drove me to play Bach in a manner—and quantity—that few other young pianists would dream of. But even for the simplest of Bach's pieces, even when I felt completely in control, I found my playing to always lack that magical character inescapably present in his. That may seem like a pretty run-of-the-mill statement for an artist—someone else is better than I am?—but it's the seemingly intrinsic nature of that betterness that's surprising—and frustrating.

I was, of course, warned of the perils of imitation when I was young. Always encouraged to find my own voice, my own convictions, I always tried to approach each new piece I played like a blank slate. To a greater or lesser extent, this is what motivates all artists—no one wants to merely replicate someone else's ideas completely. But the temptation to imitate one's favorite artists is often overwhelming, and escaping that influence can be quite a task. My playing is always its best when it's full of my own ideas and convictions. But those ideas don't arise in a vacuum. Gould has left an indelible mark on my playing—one that, try as I might, I can never escape, because I can never let go of that dream of finding his magical sound. Wouldn't my own playing, my own ideas, be more vivid and more convincing with that immortal touch?

And so the burden fell on me to strike out and find my own Goldberg Variations separate from the “Gouldberg” Variations I know and love. I've now performed the piece twice, and one of the performances went about as well as I could have hoped. But I'm always listening, longing for that Gouldian articulation, and haunted by that golden sound that I know the piano is capable of and that I will never achieve.

And so, forty-seven minutes after the aria began, we hear its opening notes once more as Gould's hands move effortlessly over the keys one final time. After the climactic thirtieth variation, time suddenly grinds to a halt for the repeat of the hushed aria. The melody, now a distant memory, is only faintly recognizable in its wistful, nostalgic return. Some would say that the opening tune has been transformed, changed by everything that passed between its statements. But it is we who have been transformed, changed by the music we have heard. We will never hear it quite the same way again.

coaching!

2011-10-02T17:46:00.009-05:00

Nothing brings out the inner blogger in me like Atul Gawande. I just finished his latest New Yorker piece on expertise and coaching, and as usual, it was illuminating and extremely relevant! Its lesson is one that is all-too-easily ignored: even true experts in a field are easily blinded to their own shortcomings. Even after eight years as a surgeon, Gawande needed a "coach" to point out his weaknesses and help him improve, even if he could spot the very same weaknesses in other people. People are so invested and so involved that when it comes to our own weaknesses, we lose perspective, and the ability of unbiased judgment along with it.

The article talked a lot about schoolteachers and musicians, of which I am now both. Both examples are interesting for me in very different ways. No one will admit more quickly than I will to the value of having a coach for schoolteaching, and yet, teacher coaches are relatively rare.

My feeling about musical coaching is more nuanced. Music teachers so often fail to draw on their students' own inspiration and creativity, and even unwittingly kill said creativity altogether. Many of them are classic over-coachers, using their teaching to enforce their views of performance practice, no matter how standard or idiosyncratic, rather than giving students the tools to display their own ideas.

I don't mean to say I think I'm too good for my own coach. The New Yorker piece reminded me of an experience I had last spring in music school. A fellow pianist-student of mine performed in a chamber music master class for Menahem Pressler. As I think she would be the first to admit, she wasn't quite herself in the performance. But there were also aspects of the performance that she didn't even realize weren't up to her standard. She just didn't seem to be listening closely enough. I smugly made mental notes of things that I thought she could improve upon, and Pressler himself talked about many of them in his critique.

Not more than a week later, I was preparing my own performance for the school piano competition. As we often did before performances, I played for her as a practice run-through and to elicit comments or suggestions. One of the movements I was playing was one that I knew extraordinarily well, by the same composer as her performance the previous week. I had performed the piece and listened to my recordings countless times the year before. I thought I finally had it damn near perfect, and hadn't even bothered bringing it back to my teacher again. But when I played it for my friend, her suggestions for me were nearly identical to everything I would've said to her about her masterclass performance. My first reaction was along the lines of: "No, that can't be, I know how to avoid those mistakes! I listen for them so expertly!" But little by little I realized she was right about everything. I thought I had easily taken care of all the nuances that I heard in my head, when in fact it was all happening only in my head. My playing may have been good, but it wasn't what I had imagined at all. We could each hear the flaws perfectly in each others' playing, and advise the other so well, while we struggled to hear the very same problems in our own.

Part of being a good music student, then, is being able to tell the difference between a teacher's dislike of your interpretation and their assessment that you're not properly expressing, and reacting accordingly. Most criticism comes in a confusing combination. And it's nearly impossible to tell shades of the two categories apart when you don't trust your teacher or coach to distinguish them him or herself. A huge part of being a good teacher is being able to hear the difference between playing that's personally disagreeable and that which lacks the student's own intention.

I love Slate, but....what?!

2011-08-24T17:47:00.006-05:00

Whoa! What's with this article? For something that makes some really good points, and forces me to somewhat re-evaluate my own view of the implication of twin studies, the good points are buried beneath poorly worded (at best) or completely bungled (at worst) statements about genetics and heritability. The argument reflects a common misconception about the very concept of heritability, and is in fact, somewhat self-defeating.

First, here's the real logic behind twin studies (not the bastardized version given in the Slate article). Siblings and twins are more genetically similar than two randomly chosen members of a population. Here's where the confusion typically begins. As a shorthand, people often say, "siblings and dizygotic (fraternal) twins share 50% of their genes." That's sort of true, but also misleading, because all humans have about 99.9% of their genomes in common. Out of about 3 billion base pairs, two people typically vary by a few million only. So siblings clearly share more than 50% of their genomes. A more precise statement about siblings would be "siblings and fraternal twins, on average, have only 50% of the genetic variance of two randomly chosen people."

Monozygotic (identical) twins, on the other hand, are even more genetically similar than dizygotic twins or siblings. For the moment let's assume they are genetically identical, even though it turns out that's not really true. Many studies then look at sets of fraternal vs. identical twins, who encounter similar amounts of environmental variation within pairs. That is, the differences in the experiences of two fraternal same-sex twins is likely to be similar to the difference in the experience of two identical twins. Then when they're adults, you measure them for any number of behavior traits--height, weight, political affiliation, blah, blah, blah. The members of the sample then give you a range of responses, or data points. Take height. In a typical sample of 100 males, you might find a range of height from 5'3''-6'5'', or whatever. If you choose two people randomly from this sample, the likelihood that they are close in height is a random function of the sample itself. But if you choose two fraternal twins, you find a correlation: fraternal twins are much more likely to be close in height than two random people. And if you choose two identical twins, you find an even better correlation.

Conclusion. Genes determine height. JUST KIDDING. That's the straw man version of the conclusion given by Palmer, which no one who really knows biology would ever claim. The conclusion is that a certain proportion of the variance in height (best estimate: ~50%) across a population sample is correlated with genetic variation. This is very different from the idea that "your genes determine 50% of your height." That statement, about an individual, is utterly incoherent. An old psychology textbook I read used the analogy of a rectangle, with width being its metaphorical genes and area being its metaphorical traits or behavior. The latter statement would be equivalent to saying "a rectangle's area is determined 50% by its width." But that simply doesn't make any sense, because area and width are measured in different units, and the area is entirely determined by the height and width together. What you can do is compare two (or more) rectangles and say "50% of the difference in their areas is due to the differences in their widths." That's what geneticists mean when they a trait is 50% heritable.

So when Brian Palmer says "genes determine half your altruism," or "one quarter of your financial decision," he's seriously mischaracterizing, (in the name of simplifying?), what some study found about altruism and financial management. Genes don't make your financial decisions for you, genes interacting with an environment create a person who makes those decisions. But like the rectangles, differences in genes can account for measurable differences in behavior across a given population, including your behavior with respect to financial decisions. This is not at all surprising.

What's new to me is this idea that identical twins' genomes are actually quite different, and I'd have to read more about it to fully understand "copy number variations." But unfortunately for Palmer, I don't think this fact actually helps his argument at all; if anything, it hurts it! Consider: you take a sample of identical twins (let's say separated at birth so we can ignore the effects of parenting or "shared environment, although *new tab* these effects turn out to be quite small), and a control sample, and find that, for a given trait or behavior (let's stick with height to keep it simple), the twins' scores correlate 50% better than the control sample. That is, identical twins are 50% more similar in height than two random people. Your initial conclusion: height, in this population, is 50% heritable. But wait! It turns out, identical twins aren't genetically identical at all, they in fact differ genetically quite a bit. Does that mean we should downgrade the heritability we estimated for height? No, in fact, it means the heritability is in fact higher. Each twin's environment varies, on average, as much as the people's environments taken in the random sample. That means the 50% correlation coefficient is best explained by genetic similarity (or more precisely, a lack of genetic variation) among the sets of twins. But if that genetic similarity isn't 100%, but lower, then less genetic similarity has to account for more behavior similarity, which means the behavior similarity to genetic similarity ratio has gone up, and genes are more important than the initial conlcusion suggested.

Heritability is something that can only measured in a given population, and genes never "determine" any portion of behavior in an individual. Palmer's other points are largely irrelevant to the value of twin studies, and population genetics more generally.

book club, part two

2011-08-24T11:21:00.002-05:00

While we're on the subject, I was just reading this little guy about religion and morality in the Times. Just in the first two paragraphs it highlights and interesting conflict for most theists: are they really worshipping God, or some moral code that is in fact above God? This tension was on full display in the book mentioned in the post below this one. The most hard-core believers, the fanatics, tend to heed God's word (however they interpret it) with no moral filter, which is what leads to anti-social and seemingly immoral acts on the part of the true believers. Indeed, most doctrines and holy books tend to put God ahead of any moral code; thus the all sorts of gruesome things that God orders in the Old Testament, or the belief that you can only be saved if you believe Christ is your savior, etc. etc.

But for most rank-and-file religious folk, the hierarchy is switched (or so it seems to me). They don't think it's right to murder in the name of God, but see religion as a gateway or a path to a moral life (and so would say God would never have such a desire anyway). They tend not to think it's critical to believe in the one true faith that they adhere to. But then what's the point of religious faith if God answers to some higher moral calling anyway? Isn't that moral framework then, like, the whole point?

book club

2011-08-22T23:12:00.004-05:00

I just read an awesome book about the history of Mormonism and the modern fundamentalists (the latter are really crazy! There are pockets of thousands of fundamentalists living in essentially totalitarian communities, like, right now! In the US!). Somehow I have managed to survive in complete ignorance of everything Mormon through high school (thank you, GDS american history!) and college (well that was my fault I only took one history class...fuck), and despite the fact that Mormons used to live in my basement. In my defense, they moved out when I was five (?) on account of having too many babies.

Of the many aspects of Mormonism that make it so incredibly fascinating is the fact that it was gettin' started recently enough that there's such a rich record of its origins, which, unfortunately for Mormons, this don't make for the most flattering picture. It also makes various claims in the Book of Mormon eminently falsifiable, like the fact that all Native Americans are descended from the Israelites (DNA sequencing has shown their last common ancestor to be much older).

The book's anti-religious argument (which is subtle, but I think, pervasive) goes further. In one of the book's most poignant scenes, two psychologists duel it out on the witness stand, giving conflicting testimony over whether the defendant in a murder trial should be considered insane for claiming to have received revelations directly from God—in this case, revelations ordering the murder itself. The prosecution witness makes the obvious point that religious people claiming to communicate directly with God are all over the place; in addition, people of every religious denomination subscribe to beliefs that can hardly be justified based on evidence; should we consider all of them crazy? But if we don't think the murderer in this case is insane, does that mean we allow for normal, functioning sane people to have consistently detailed delusions?

The whole book makes a great argument against religious faith by inconsistent revelations; throughout the book there are dozens of people claiming to be the one true Mormon prophet, communicating regularly and directly with God, and even willing to stake their lives on their prophethood. But their revelations are all wildly inconsistent, flatly contradictory, and in too many instances, crazy illegal. In the end it's an argument about human nature: we are quick to put faith in ourselves and our own delusions.

Interestingly a lot of people on Amazon seem to take issue with the book's message, which is to say they accuse it of anti-Mormon bias. Of course I'm not historian, so I don't really know whether the book is biased or not, but I think these people are confusing argument with bias. No, the book doesn't paint a flattering picture of Mormonism or religion, but I think that's kinda the point.

Another big theme of the book is polygamy and its role (which is a big fat one) in the LDS and fundamentalist LDS churches past and present, especially leading up to the murders mentioned above. I mean some people really get carried away with the polygamy thing. Krakauer fails to mention and investigate an obvious mathematical consequence of fundamentalist mormons' practice of polygamy (actually polygyny): unmarried, sexually frustrated men. No wonder these communities tend to fracture often! I assume that "plural marriage" is in practice a luxury reserved only for the well-connected and powerful in these fundamentalist communities. Still, it doesn't take too many men with 20 wives in a small community of 5,000 or so to really screw with gender ratios. It's no surprise that the powerful men end up taking younger and younger women as wives, because these communities must be continuously short for eligible women. Krakauer argues, by implication, that polygamy leads to pedophilia through a general lack of respect for women and their choices, but the connection is in fact much more direct.

subjectivity and consciousness, again

2011-07-25T00:17:00.003-05:00

Well now that that whole debt crisis is over and the US economy is back to being awesome! (Oh wait...) Earlier this summer I wrote a couple of posts about philosophy of mind. I got all excited about it, and even bought two books off Amazon while I was away, planning to supplement my uninformed ramblings with some solid backing from knowledgeable sources. Then I lost my backpack with both the books in it, just as I was just getting into them, so that plan was out the window. But back in Evanston, equipped miraculously with a new student ID that they for some reason decided to issue me after my graduation, I've found both books—and many more!—at the library. (My love for Parks & Recreation notwithstanding, it's pretty great to have access to free books all the time, especially with some glitch in the system that appears to have extended that access through 2013. Woohoo!)

Back to the mysteries of consciousness. I argued here that subjectivity, surely one of the most basic and intuitively obvious aspects of consciousness—is a fundamental and often overlooked problem for physicalism, the notion that the universe is comprised solely of physical entities subject to physical laws. But why settle for physicalism in the first place? Why not believe in Cartesian (or substance dualism), the idea that we have separate souls that influence our minds, our thoughts, and our actions? The answers help shed light on what I find so puzzling and frustrating about subjectivity.

First, a clarification on what "physicalism" really entails. A physicalist would not say that the only things in the world are physical things—quite obviously, there are other things, like thoughts, ideas, and abstract concepts—but only that all non-physical things derive their properties, or are dependent on, physical things. For the philosopher of mind, the most interesting things that appear at first glance to be non-physical are mental properties or events, but the physicalist says that all mental properties depend on, or supervene on, physical properties.

The trendiest reason to reject dualism today come in the form of brain imaging studies. They show how physical events in the brain correlate clearly and consistently with mental events (though their claims are often overstated in the media!!) But there are other convincing philosophical reasons to reject dualism.

The idea that there is a separate mental substance, operating outside of physical laws, that governs our thoughts behavior runs into various problems relating to causation. If our minds are comprised of something non-physical, how do they cause demonstratively physical events, when the laws of physics already seem to have that pretty well covered? In other words, where and when does the non-physical soul intervene in the chain linking one physical event to the next, in making behavior a reality?

Since a soul is, by assumption, non-physical, it also can't occupy, or move along inside, a physical body. But this leaves one with the puzzling task of deciding which souls, all presumably operating in some other realm, interact with which bodies. In other words, dualism has a "pairing problem;" there's no reason to pair up one soul with one body and not another, since there can be no physical connection between any of them anyway.

Okay, coming soon: how this pairing problem relates to consciousness; then after that, since I'm so well-read now, back to mental causation and the various physicalist "theories" of mind....it's all really fascinating, i promise

a few more things i don't understand about the f***king debt ceiling

2011-07-23T00:16:00.008-05:00

I've already noted, as have many other people with brains, that the whole "debt ceiling" thing is completely ridiculous. Congress has already approved all the money the federal government spends, as well as all revenue it receives; imposing a debt ceiling on top of existing law is nothing but a cheap gimmick, Congress' way of having its cake and eating it and then shitting all over the country's credit too. If you don't want public debt to rise above $14.3 trillion (or whatever) then why the fuck did you vote to spend so much and tax so little in the first place??

Though this appears to me to be the most fundamentally inexplicable thing about the debt ceiling, there are a number of other things that don't make sense to me. Lil' help anyone?

1. Obama's been talking about Social Security and other checks that wouldn't be sent out by the gov't August 3rd if the debt ceiling isn't increased. If the Treasury has the authority to choose not to disburse statutorily guaranteed entitlement checks, then how do they choose what money the do disburse? Does Obama have some sort of authority to decide, I assume? Couldn't the government continue paying interest on existing debt as its highest priority, at least for a while, thus avoiding a default? It seems like a few weeks without Social Security and Medicare benefits would probably bring the Tea Party caucus to its senses about the debt ceiling (via angry old people), thus providing for a certain increase in the debt ceiling pretty fast, before a default. This would suck for seniors, of course, but it would be a lot better a defaulting, which everyone seems to agree would be the most catastrophic economic event since the Great Depression.
2. Aren't all the negotiations about deficits and spending cuts over the next decade essentially meaningless? I understand there's a certain amount of inertia in spending and in the tax code, but couldn't the next President (God help us if it's not the same as the current one) and Congress just pass their own budget and tax laws if they don't like the debt ceiling deal anyway? What are the Democrats and Republicans really negotiating over, other than the bargaining position each side will begin with when next year's budget is negotiated?
3. If I'm camping in the woods when the economy melts down, do I have to worry about it??

more on medicine

2011-07-20T00:50:00.006-05:00

A few months ago I came across this outstandingly and amazing and fabulously terrific article from a few years ago in the New Yorker. (I don't know how I missed it the first time around in 2008, but my god I made a huge mistake in doing so). In the article Gawande talks about the failure of conventional medical wisdom to explain things like chronic itching or sensations in phantom limbs, in heart-wrenching—and also somewhat terrifying—fashion. He starts to hint at how a not-really-so-recent-anymore revolution in cognitive psychology—suggesting that our perception of bodily sensations is much more brain-directed, or "top-down," than we intuitively believe—is juuuuust barely starting to influence medicine, where that influence is long overdue. The article will fascinate almost anyone but it resonated especially with me due to my history of chronic pain that was for years grossly mismanaged and misdiagnosed—at great cost—by dozens of doctors. If you haven't read the article, do yourself a favor and read the article; it's worth half an hour of your time.

Today I read this article by Thomas Freedman in this month's Atlantic. It's pretty decent, but can summarized much more easily: Alternative medicine, despite its consistent failure to establish its worth in placebo-controlled, double blind studies, is gaining acceptance in medicine because of the failure of the traditional treatment model for many of today's prosperity-driven chronic illnesses. In other words, many people seem to (or at least think they do) benefit more from a genuine interaction with a caring practitioner who discusses the person's overall well-being, than from a drug that tests marginally better than a placebo, even when the ultimate treatment is completely useless. There are, of course, a number of reasons this might be true, but the article focusses on the importance of the doctor-patient relationship, and how the difference in that relationship between alternative practitioners and traditional doctors is dramatic.

Well, then, my reactions! The two articles have some common threads. First, when it comes to lots of common medical problems (as well as other, less common ones), traditional medicine is a bit of a disaster. People get anxious, have aches and pains, digestive problems, skin diseases, and we really don't understand the mechanisms behind either their waxing or waning. We treat them with drugs or other interventions—at great cost—but on the whole, after all the money we spend, we see only modest improvements in many of these conditions, if any, and again, we have little understanding of how or why these improvements happen. M., the woman with the insatiable itch in Gawande's article, is an outlier, but her story is instructive all the same.

Yeah, I know, I've said all that before. Along those lines, though, the Atlantic article really misses the sense of bewilderment that its New Yorker counterpart captures brilliantly. It's easy for us to blame poor diet and lack of exercise for our medical problems, as Freedman does on multiple occasions. But what happens when we eat right, exercise often, and still feel terrible? In this respect, alternative medicine sometimes shares traditional medicine's liability in its incessant search for an intervention or cure that isn't always there.

Of course, that reaction is based largely in personal experience as well, so take it or leave it. A better diet, exercise, and a supportive doctor of any kind probably would help a lot of people with their medical woes, but it sure didn't help me. Those who know me well know I'm a big proponent of mindfulness meditation—which Freedman brushes over and Gawande doesn't mention—not as a cure for illness but as a different approach altogether, and one that has a solid empirical backing. A brief web of science search reveals hundreds of studies, reviews and meta-analyses (oo fancy) showing support for mindfulness-based interventions in controlled studies.

Now interestingly I couldn't find any studies on mindfulness that were double-blind, even though in principle, they could be, since the practice of mindfulness doesn't really depend on interacting with a doctor, or interacting with anyone. Traditionally it's taught and practiced with a doctor, or meditation guide, and often with a group of people, but in my case it has been effective—dramatically so—without any outside help at all, but merely from reading. So how bout it medical community

what's the big deal: mental causation

2011-06-20T20:49:00.008-05:00

Mental causation is something that's so natural, so routine, that we hardly ever stop to think about it. Even when we do, it's often to reflect on how obvious it is, and how it's weird that scientists ever ignored it. It makes perfect intuitive sense to think that mental events—thoughts, desires, beliefs—cause physical events, i.e., make us do things. I think the apple looks delicious, therefore I eat it. I believe the tiger will eat me, therefore I run away from it. Even though the intuition in favor of mental causation is so strong, it wasn't until the "cognitive revolution" in the 1960's that psychologists began to take it seriously. But what could be simpler than the idea that our thoughts influence our actions?

Philosophically, though, it's not simple at all. If we assume that the world only has physical things in it and they are all subject to the same laws, with no Cartesian souls or other supernatural non-physical entities, then all events are caused by previous physical events. The brains and bodies of animals are merely collections of physical particles; therefore every physical state of an animal, including its brain-states (which may correspond to mental states) are the result of previous physical states of the brain and their interactions with the external environment (along with—perhaps—probability too). As long as we believe that the laws of physics govern everything that exists in the world (even if we don't have that complete description of those laws yet), then mental events never become part of the causal chain of one physical event leading to another, and the behavior of any being, no matter how complex the mental properties it may exhibit, can be described simply through physical laws.

Okay that's a bit jargon-y. Put another way: as long as there is such a thing as the laws of physics, and as long as every particle in our bodies obeys the laws, then those laws provide (or at least would seem to provide) a complete description of the evolution of events that takes place in our bodies—and brains. In this perspective, then, mental events are completely irrelevant with respect to causality.

But then we have a major conflict between the common-sense, cognitive view of mental life, and the strictly physical view, don't we? How can we resolve it?

Well, the first way would be to throw out the common-sense view and say that mental events really are irrelevant by-products, or "epiphenomena," of physical events, which a lot of people used to believe. On this view physical states of the brain give rise to our mental life, but that mental life exerts no causal influence back on the evolving physical states of the brain, and thus no causal influence on our behavior at all. But that would be crazy, because it would leave the mental completely outside the realm of biology and psychology. If mental events are causally irrelevant, then they couldn't be subject to natural selection, and it would be a complete coincidence that my thoughts and desires line up so well with my behavior. That coincidence is too improbable to take seriously.

The easiest solution is to say that the physical events in the brain and their corresponding mental events are identical. Thus to say that a physical event causes another physical event is exactly equivalent to saying that its corresponding mental state caused the next physical event, since the corresponding mental and physical event are one and the same. This theory is called, not surprisingly, "identity" theory of mind.

Although it's the simplest, most elegant, and I think, most correct explanation for mental causation within a physicalist framework, it's not the most popular theory among today's philosophers of mind. That award goes instead to "functionalism." The major difference between functionalism and identity theories of mind is that functionalism permits for "multiple realizability." According to functionalists a certain physical state can correspond to one and only one mental state, but a given mental state can correspond to an infinite number of possible physical states. The idea is that you don't need a human brain to get something to feel pain, but it could equally well happen in an animal with a completely different brain, an animal without a brain at all, or even synthetic robot, as long as the system is complex enough and the connections are all rigged up the right way.

Another time I'll explain the pro's and con's of identity theory of mind, functionalism, and why I think the latter doesn't work, especially when it comes to mental causation...woohoo I can feel your excitement....that is, if you're even having any thoughts right now at all!

summer time, part 2

2011-06-16T23:57:00.005-05:00

Okay, so for the time being I'll try to steer clear of anything that could possibly be connected to illegal immigration (see comment here—I feel like the Volokh Conspiracy or something!).

I had a psychology professor in college who used to say science is filled with puzzles of two distinct kinds: problems and mysteries. Problems are those questions that fill up most of a scientist's day-to-day life, and most scientists' entire lives, but mysteries are the sorts of things that require revolutionary theories and ideas. For instance, before Newton came along with his theory of gravity, the orbits of the planets and the pull of the earth were mysteries (notwithstanding some people's continuing state of ignorance). Before Darwin, the complexity of life was a mystery, something not only that science had no explanation for, but that science seemed incapable of ever addressing. The mysteries of the universe have long been the sanctuary of religious and philosophical beliefs; wherever science stops, religion has typically taken over, but the march of science into the domain of the traditionally religious has been constant and unrelenting, leaving less and less room for the mystical and supernatural.

One of the last and biggest mysteries—for me at least—is consciousness. A different psychology professor of mine from college is famous (I use the term loosely) for his contention that humans are "intuitive dualists," that we cling naturally and innately to the idea that our minds and bodies are separate entities. Though I agree with him entirely in asserting the opposite with great confidence, he stops short of conceding that science, like any religion, is hopelessly impotent when it comes to explaining consciousness; ie how a universe of purely physical entities can give rise to subjectivity. I fear it may be something that science will never explain within a materialistic framework, and to me, that's kind of a big deal.

Consider this thought experiment. First, assume Paul Bloom—and science more generally—is right that the universe consists only of physical things, and no non-physical souls or spirits or whatever. Then imagine the universe is exactly like the one we currently live in, with one major exception: you and Paul Bloom (first famous person I thought of) have switched consciousnesses. By that I don't mean you've switched bodies, or brains, or anything like that; each of your bodies and brains remains identical, but you've switched places, so that now you are living the life of Paul Bloom exactly as he is currently living the life of Paul Bloom. You're experiencing it now because it's you. Don't be tempted to object that his life would have been completely different if you were living it, since you would have done things differently; remember you've inherited, along with his body, his brain and all his characteristics.

At this point, in addition to being creeped out, you're probably fishing for reasons this thought experiment is entirely unreasonable, but hopefully you're starting to see the point—what ties your experience to your particular body?—and the implications. If you're still with me you'll have some sense that this imaginary universe isn't identical to the actual one we're living in now. It's identical for everyone else, but for you, there's a major defining difference, since you're living a completely different life. But at the same time there's no physical difference between the imaginary universe and the real one, and thus, nothing to distinguish them; according to our initial assumption that the universe is entirely physical, there is no difference at all. So how could two identical worlds be so different for you?

Point is, in a world of physical particles with no perspective, there doesn't seem to be any room for a collection of particles to form a perspective, since everything is made of the same particles, and should therefore share everything else's perspective. Everything should be completely objective, like the physical laws that make up the universe in the first place.

Next up, more philosophy of mind and another mystery: mental causation. Science, get crackin' and good luck.

SUMMER TIME

2011-06-15T23:09:00.001-05:00

It's summer again! Now that I finally have nothing to do and no employment prospects for the foreseeable future, I figure it's time to go ahead and revive the ol' blog. I miss it terribly. I know you do too. Without a World Cup like last summer, the topics will be varied and eclectic. On the docket and in my thoughts: some amateur philosophy, some current events/politics, and of course, some music. But first up, a quick rant (oh goodie!) about my unfortunate lack of employment prospects for the foreseeable future.

You see there's a major social problem developing in America today. In addition to lots of working-age people suffering from extended bouts of unemployment, lots of young people entering the labor market—high school graduates, college graduates, and graduate graduates, like me—can't find real jobs. Of course a number of things are to blame for this current predicament—John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, other Republicans—but everyone's (non) solution to the problem seems to involve the debt ceiling or Medicare. The effects could be pretty devastating for this generation of graduates—a number of studies, as well as common sense, suggest that extended difficulty finding a job out of school can have negative long term consequences on one's career and mental health. When you have 3 graduating-years worth of depressed people with dim career prospects, well...it's not good for society.

This became a personal problem for me when I applied for a job, had an interview, only to find out the next day that—surprise!—there was no job opening at all, because the person who was supposed to leave in order to open up the position wasn't leaving after all.

It's no surprise to find people unwilling to leave their jobs since the economy is doing so poorly, but it might be good for the labor market overall if we could shrink the supply of labor, leaving the jobs for people who really need them. Supply-side economics gained dubious fame in the 80's for the contention that lowering income taxes could increase government revenue by reducing the opportunity cost of work, and therefore increasing the supply of labor and getting more people to work. The contention that the revenue gained from an increased number of taxpayers would outweigh the revenue lost from the lower tax rate was never really believable, but the effect of the tax rate on the labor market is likely spot on. At the moment we don't want to increase the number of people willing to work, though, because there aren't enough jobs for all the people seeking work. Why not turn supply-side economics on its head and increase income taxes? This would push people out of the labor market who, on the margin, don't really need the work or have something better to do, and leave room for the rest of us, especially those of us starting careers.

Jacking taxes to give people incentive to retire may not be the best long term strategy for a healthy economy, but it seems worth considering in the short term. And the extra money the government gets could actually be used to do something revolutionary: hire more people to fix the nation's crumbling infrastructure! What an idea....for a fantasy universe.

something for everyone??

2011-04-27T23:34:00.000-05:00

Wow, have I been lazy these past few months or what! A brief summary on what has happened in the world—for those of you who use this website as your primary news source—hey it beats fox news, and who wants to pay for nytimes these days anyway?? Neither of them would have covered this illustrious first category anyway:

PERSONAL:

I learned a valuable lesson: when your knee swells to seven times its normal size, GO TO THE NEAREST LICENSED MEDICAL PRACTITIONER. This I learned after spending a day thinking the swelling would clearly subside—it was just bruised, after all!—and then seeing a doctor—at my sister's insistence—who had the worst bedside manner imaginable. Snippets from our initial conversation:

Doctor: Wow...that's really bad. Can you move it?

Me: No.

Doctor: Not at all??

Me: Not really.

Doctor: Huh. Wait, how did this happen?

Me: Playing soccer.

Doctor: Really?

Me: Yes.

Doctor: This??

Me: Yes.

Doctor: Wow, look at the swelling there! Does this hurt?

Me: Yes.

Doctor: That's really terrible, huh. No that's really bad. Have you been to the hospital? I'd better get another doctor in here.

I can laugh about it now, because a) despite the doctor's initial fears, my MRI showed no permanent damage, and no ruptures, and b) I haven't received the hospital bill yet. And I just got off crutches today (sorta kinda almost). But apparently it could have been really bad, and I should have gone to the ER, like right away.

SOCCER:

Barcelona continued to be awesome, but not quite as awesome as they were in the fall. I was lucky enough to see them play Arsenal in the second leg of the Champions League round of 16, and they are really something to behold at their best.

Recent developments had footy fans the world over licking their chops over four highly anticipated Clasico matchups with Real Madrid within a month's time. Barca battered Madrid 5-0 in November in what was surely one of the greatest, if not the greatest single game ever played by a football team. But since then Madrid have found their form, winning convincingly in la liga and the Champions League. We all thought we were in for four classic games, with the two best teams on the planet showing their best. How foolish, how naive we were! Madrid's coach, the great tactician Jose Mourinho, wouldn't have it that way. Too proud to risk attacking Barca again after seeing how it worked out in the fall, he has opted for a very different approach. How disappointed we've been after seeing 3 of 4 games unfold! My take:

The first of the 4 was the Spanish league match in Madrid, and least consequential of the four, given Barcelona's 8 point lead in the league with only 8 matches to play (Barca have only dropped 11 points in the league all season). Madrid came out cautiously and played a very physical game, but still managed to counter-attack frequently. They eventually went a goal, and a man, down, when Albiol brought down David Villa as he closed in on goal and Messi converted from the penalty spot. Interestingly, Madrid played far better once they were down a goal and were forced to attack more openly, and fought back well for a draw (though David Villa missed a couple of late chances to win it!).

The King's Cup final four days later was a totally different game. Once again I was suckered into thinking that maybe Madrid, buoyed by their performance with ten men in the last half hour of the league game, would come out and play and we'd see some real soccer! Instead, in the first half, there was almost no soccer at all, as Madrid played instead with extremely high defensive pressure, fouling at every opportunity. Some of their play, from Arbeloa's "accidental" stamping of two separate players, to Pepe's continuously reckless tackling, was pretty brutal. Barca, unable to settle, responded somewhat in kind. But Madrid were somewhat punished for their energetic tactics in the first half, as they were pinned back for the entirety of the second. For 25 minutes from minute 60 to 85, Madrid literally completed fewer than 15 passes (that's right I started counting), total, as Barcelona completely dominated the game, and forced Madrid's goalkeeper into a number of great saves. Unfortunately, in overtime, Madrid found a chance through Angel di Maria's cross to Ronaldo after some clever dribbling on the left side and found their goal—a game-winner.

Today was the first leg of the Champions league semifinal, back in Madrid. Mourinho clearly realized his luck in not conceding a goal in the second half of the cup final, and his team came out much more cautiously, allowing Barcelona near total possession from the opening whistle. Madrid hardly ventured forward at all with the exception of Ronaldo, who at one point in the first half was so frustrated at being the only player to chase the ball that he practically threw a hissy fit near midfield. You could understand his frustration: a team with so much attacking talent and so many good players, and no attempt to play at all! Early in the second half, Pepe was harshly sent off for what was probably no worse than a yellow card foul. I have little sympathy, though, as he was lucky to stay on the pitch in the previous two games. At any rate, the game opened up slightly (though Madrid still didn't look like they had any interest in attacking), and Barca finally got their long-awaited goal from some neatly-worked passing and an exquisitely-timed run from Messi.

Then Messi struck again. Watch the highlights here (the second goal all the way at the end). Despite all of Madrid's negative, ugly play, the genius of the little Argentine still came through with a stunning individual goal. Really one of the best individual goals I've ever seen. Maybe Ronaldo is a better all-around player, as Sir Alex Ferguson insists—but you'd never know it from the shackles Mourinho puts on him. Hopefully we'll get to see him really play in the second leg. It should actually be a decent game now that Madrid have to score!

THAT DISASTROUS THING WE CALL OUR COUNTRY:

Looks like those clowns in Washington have done it again! What a bunch of clowns. (How do I keep up with the news like that?)

So how about that debt ceiling thing? What a joke! Wouldn't it be obviously unconstitutional for Congress to force the US into default (14th amendment section 4?). When did Congress even get to start setting a "debt ceiling" and what's the point if Congress passes all the laws that appropriate money for all that debt anyway?

Really, though, the debt limit thing makes me wonder couple of few other things:

1. Political game theory: why are the Republicans so damn good at it? In game theory, we learn that often, by being completely and utterly irrational, or at least appearing as much, you get the upper hand in certain types of interactions. By convincing Democrats that, no really, they will vote against the debt limit increase, Republicans appear likely to reap all sorts of political gains, even though by their own recognition this would be completely insane and throw the country to the dogs. And they would be blamed for it!

2. Of course, they'd only be following the polls! It turns out, a massive majority of Americans support voting against the debt limit increase. Clearly, they are wildly misinformed. But it's not-so-rare case where it seems the voters have been strongly influenced by the political conversation, rather than the reverse. I mean before last year I only had a vague idea that Congress had to sporadically approve an increase in the debt limit, as did most people, I'm sure. But all of a sudden Republicans start harping on about not increasing the debt ceiling, and the whole country is on board! There must be studies out there that track timing lags between shifts in polling data and political agendas....generally we tend to think that the politics follow the polls, but I wonder how often it is actually the opposite....

Oh man am I tired now! I'll get to the rest of the world's important developments next time....so much to look forward to, right?!?!

Top 10??

2011-02-04T00:36:00.014-06:00

I was recently referred, by several people, to the long-winded discussion of the NYT's music critic Anthony Tomassini about the 10 greatest composers ever. Rather than try to argue endlessly, as I could (and reserve the right to), about why list would be superior, I'll sidestep the issue and instead make a list of favorite and perhaps under-appreciated recordings that everyone should cherish as much as I do, 'cause they're awesome.

There's a general progression that I've gone through in life as a listener. After I discovered Bach and Glenn Gould, around the age of 7, I listened to almost nothing else (by choice) for quite some time. When I finally branched out, I made it my goal to acquire and listen to as much music—by the composers I liked and approved of—as I could get my hands on. Whenever I got a new CD, I would either get bored with it immediately or listen to it compulsively until I knew it by heart.

It took me a long time to realize, though, that my reaction didn't depend solely on the music being played, but on who was playing it—something that was obvious the whole time, but I had never fully grasped. In the next phase, I finally came to realize how important the performance and the performers were. Of course, the best way to truly appreciate a piece's greatness is by playing it or studying it yourself. But at the same time, music still has to be heard, has to fill the air, to be real. Great music is relatively useless unless someone can bring it to life. I used to think it was ridiculous that my family had approximately 5 recordings of the "Jupiter" symphony, by Mozart. Then one day I found myself feeling compelled to acquire at least 5 more (unfortunately, I only ever found one of the 10 truly compelling, and I lost it when my computer crashed).

It always sucks when you're looking for a CD on Amazon, and every single performance of a piece has a 5-star user rating. I suspect that there are two reasons for this annoying phenomenon. The most obvious is a selection bias—the people who are willing to go review a CD are the ones who really loved it anyway. But there's also the primacy effect. People tend to become attached to their first recording of a piece, because it's what they're used to. I know, 'cause it used to happen to me! It's hard to know what exactly shapes anyone's preferences precisely, but I can say that though some recordings used to be the piece for me, that's not true anymore. When one knows a piece exquisitely well and can really conceive of and consider it, apart from any performance, then, usually, primacy isn't much of an issue anymore.

So with that in mind, here are 14 of my absolute favorites (yup couldn't narrow it to 10) recordings, in the order that they just occurred to me. If you've got better ones, let me know!

The Salzburg Recital, Glenn Gould—Has the GBV, along with a completely weird, but enchanting, performance of Mozart's K 330 sonata. I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say it made me completely reconsider how I think about, and play, Mozart's music.

Bach concertos, Glenn Gould-My second favorite GG recording. The E major is the best of the bunch, but most people seem drawn to the D major. When I was 8, I once spent four hours in the Reyjkjavik airport with two cassette tapes of these concertos and a Walkman for company. I listened to them the entire time.

Glenn Gould, Beethoven concertos, live CBC recording (can't find it anywhere!)-My desert island Beethoven concertos recording, of GG when he's just 20 years old. For everyone who thinks Beethoven 2nd and 3rd aren't as great as 4 and 5, this performance is for you! I thought the very same until I discovered this CD in my house when I was 17. Or actually, I discovered it well before that, but never listened to it because of the lame disclaimer on the cover that says something along the lines of (I've since lost it, but as I recall) "the sound quality on this CD is garbage but we thought it was worth the historical significance." Um, way to sell your product.

Schumann quintet and concerto, Serkin, Ormandy, and Budapest quartet—I've heard too many performances and recordings of the Schumann quintet to count, but I never truly loved the piece until I heard this one. They take two completely different tempi for the two first movement "themes," which you don't really hear these days. All I can say is, it works. (The concerto that comes along with it is great too, but not on the same level.)

Mozart clarinet quintet, Neidich and L'Archibudelli--Sadly, the only other Mozart to make my list. I have high standards.

Brahms quintet, Rubinstein and Guarneri-My favorite piece of chamber music, probably because of this performance. On the CD I had growing up, the Brahms came along with the Schumann quintet, which just wasn't as well done. The Dvorak is better on this CD, but still not Brahms territory, in piece or performance quality.

Chopin Ballades and Barcarolle, Ivan Moravec-I think I've written about Moravec before. His interpretations are idiosyncratic, but his voicing and control are, I think, the best of any pianist, ever. The 3rd and 4th ballades on this recording are the best!

Brahms 4th symphony, Kleiber and Vienna-An astounding blend of passion and control.

Schumann, Dichterliebe, Aksel Schiotz and Gerald Moore- I like Schiotz's voice so much better than the other classic tenors/baritones like Wunderlich or Fischer-Diskeau, but he didn't get to record much, after suffering paralysis early in his career. This one is a real gem.

Wagner, Walküre Act 1, Lauritz Melchior, Lotte Lehmann, and Bruno Walter-The two best Wagnerian voices (Hundig kinda sucks by comparison), and as far as I know, the only decent recording (sound quality wise) of their collaboration.

Mendelssohn trios, Stern, Rose, Istomin-I used to be really annoyed that they make the piano artificially soft in this recording. But I've come to realize that it's actually a great idea. On modern instruments, the piano tends to overpower the strings if it plays out, or just sound totally not awesome if it doesn't. And the piano part in these trios is nothing if not awesome. Of course, that's not the only reason this recording is phenomenal, but an important point to consider.

Mahler and Brahms songs, Kathleen Ferrier-Such an entrancing voice!

Mahler 1 and 10, Bernstein-Not my favorite Mahler symphonies, but my favorite Mahler performance. The first and last movements (of 1) tend to sound so square in modern performances. Never with Bernstein. People don't stretch the tempo anymore the way. Case in point: have you ever heard anyone else speed up the coda of the last movement?

Brahms 2nd piano concerto, Emil Gilels and Fritz Reiner-My favorite piano concerto. I've never understood why anyone would ever consider the d minor (Brahms' first) a rival to it. Growing up, I was taken with Serkin's playing (somewhat lacking in power in hindsight), and also familiar Fleisher's (similar problem), Pollini's (lacking imagination), Kovacevich's (just terrible). I came across Gilels' playing on LP in college (for some terrible reason the CD is out of print), and it totally blew my mind. Richter's recording, made a few years later with the same orchestra, is much more famous, but really isn't as good—partly because Reiner, who was supposed to conduct with Richter as well, was ill, and Leinsdorf is no replacement.

Science in trouble?

2010-12-19T23:40:00.004-06:00

Because I like to throw around the latest trends in social science, I read this awesome article in last week's New Yorker with great interest and more than a bit of dismay. Lots of scientific experiments report significant effects that turn out later to be kinda bullshit. What could be more damaging to my worldview?

That was my first line of thinking, at least. The magnitude and pervasiveness of the "decline effect," by which certain "proven" trends decline precipitously over time, is troubling for those of us who put a lot of philosophical stock in the scientific method and see it as the basic, and most trustworthy, gateway to truth.

After thinking back to my own forays into the world of scientific research, I realized that the decline effect isn't terribly shocking after all. What people often fail to realize about science is the pervasive biases that could exist in most experiments--even the well designed ones--without ever showing up in the final draft of the scientific paper. Because the popular press, and even scientific papers, never report every detail of their experiments, these biases are easily lost on the reader, and only reveal themselves years later.

I saw the messy details of experimentation at work in three front-line research areas in college: a comparative cognition (monkey) lab, an unconscious cognition lab, and in my own senior research project in theoretical astrophysics. Each research setting exploited the potential ambiguities of the scientific process in a different way. Taken together, they are enough to convince me, in retrospect, that most areas of research have serious flaws. That's not to say that these labs and professors weren't doing valuable work, that their results are necessarily invalid, or that anyone was doing anything to rig any results, but that, as I'll try to explain, there were ample opportunities for subtle or unconscious manipulations.

For the monkey lab, I spent four weeks one summer doing an experiment on an island in Puerto Rico populated by hundreds of rhesus macaques. Because of the elaborate nature of the procedure for the experiment, it was rife with subtle but significant methodological problems. For instance, the other person involved in the experiment (the "camera person") who filmed the experimental trials was supposedly blind to the condition--she had to look away for a portion of the trials. Because she was blind to condition, she was responsible for "calling" unsuccessful trials when something went wrong. In reality, though, she wasn't really blind to condition because she had to protect me from onrushing monkeys with verbal warnings, and I had to call off lots of trials due to various logistical problems. Apparatus failure, experimenter error, and general monkey uncooperativeness were so common that we ended up throwing out about 80% of the trials, often already equipped with knowledge of the condition, the monkey being tested, and the likely--or actual--result of the trial. When such a high portion of the trials are discarded, blindness to the result and condition is crucial to keeping the remaining results untarnished, but strict compliance with this standard was simply impossible in our case. Our results were in the direction we expected, but not significant enough for publication.

In the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Emotion) lab, I ran an experiment that was testing the "reverse Macbeth effect." Previous research had shown that people feel morally cleansed when they have an opportunity to physically cleanse themselves. Our experiment was a pilot study that explored the opposite: do people feel physically cleaner if they are permitted to morally cleanse themselves? The problem was that our study involved a lengthy survey, and in our statistical tests, we looked for correlations in the data that we weren't initially expecting, to find certain parts of the survey that turned up significant results. In other words, we gave people a a lot of questions in the hope that something in the data would turn out to be statistically significant. Not surprisingly, some stuff was, but not so convincingly. I'm not sure what the status of that experiment is now (I left the lab after the pilot study).

Then there was my astrophysics project. Where do I begin with that one! Two things, above all, left me completely disillusioned with the entire field of research by the time I was done. First, the literature is completely and utterly opaque (I promise I'm not just too dumb to understand it). Second, everyone's research is ridiculously co-dependent on previous models, of which there are usually dozens to choose from, among which there are widely varying results, and none of which is independently tested or verified. In other words, one's own calculations are so dependent on what other papers one chooses to reference that virtually any results could be could be handpicked by careful selection of previously published models and data sets.

My own project depended critically on empirical data regarding the mass-to-light ratio emitted from galaxy clusters, and on models that calculated the quantity of metals ejected by supernovae of different types and masses (don't ask). Looking into current literature, I encountered such widely varying data that it made the whole endeavor seem rather pointless. And what's worse, all the papers written on my topic (or closely related) would merely cite previous research, without any explanation, justification, or explication of the math involved. How is anyone supposed to figure out what's going on?!

So in the end, that New Yorker article really just convinces me that scientific research needs some reform. There's so much pressure to publish papers, it seeps into people and makes their work into a search for results, rather than a search for truth.

emily howell, cont'd: essentialism

2010-12-11T13:13:00.012-06:00

Okay then! Before I start rambling on about essentialism, let me just say that I've now listened to a bunch of music composed by David Cope's programs. Most of it is terrible (the older stuff, where EMI is trying to imitate composers of the past). But the newer CD is intriguing to say the least, and certainly worth listening to if you have any interest in the future of music. To argue that the Emily Howell project and artificially composed music isn't at least a worthwhile venture, or that it doesn't have the potential for making beautiful and powerful music, is absurd.

Anyhoo, I've recently made the claim that humans' natural inclination toward essentialism distorts our perception of art, and indeed, lots of stuff.

Essentialism, roughly defined, is the idea that things have intrinsic properties that go beyond their more obvious external, analyzable properties, and that these intrinsic properties are in some sense or another irreducible and essential to the things themselves. The classic example is a species like a tiger: there is some essential "tiger-ness" to every tiger that has nothing to do with the way any individual tiger looks or behaves. Rather, "tiger-ness" is an invisible but necessary property that all tigers share, and that all non-tigers lack.

Psychologists have shown how people--cross-culturally, and from very early in life--believe this idea of species essentialism despite the fact that it is, strictly speaking, false. That is, it's a decent practical way of categorizing the world of living things, but there's no biological truth to it, since all life on earth has a common ancestor and all intermediate forms between species have existed at some point in time. Tigers and humans exist on a continuous spectrum of life on which there are no discrete categories, only discrete organisms. While we can ascribe unique categories to the organisms we call "lions" and "tigers," there is nothing intrinsically different between those two categories; rather, each species is just a bunch of organisms grouped more closely together on the continuous spectrum of organisms.

Psychological essentialism in humans applies to much more than species categories. (Here's a really good discussion on essentialism from my former psych prof at Yale!) As Mr. Bloom argues, our essentialism affects all of our pleasurable experiences. For instance you can systematically manipulate--unconsciously--people's judgments of wine and food by manipulating their knowledge of price or origin. People like expensive wine and more natural food better--or at least they'll tell you they do--even when the wine or the food doesn't change.

The specific mechanisms underlying these findings are unclear, but the general reason for them isn't: people's judgments are affected by what they see as intrinsic, essential differences between categories of products. A food or wine's origins, then, affects people's judgments even when they believe they're merely judging a sensory experience.

Isn't there some sense that these people are wrong and crazy? You can't like two things differently, after all, when they're in fact one and the same. Doesn't it make more sense, then, if you want to assess people's judgments about food and wine themselves, to ask them to taste them blindly, without giving them information about origins?

That's what I would argue about music, at least. Getting back to the issue at hand, then, most people are unduly swayed by the origin of Emily Howell's music. For whatever reason people are predisposed to dislike music composed by a computer. But we can't accurately judge Emily Howell's music unless we do so blindly, or at least attempt to do so blindly.

This raises several new questions (woohoo!). First, can we do so blindly under any conditions that aren't absurdly experimental and far removed from the real world? In other words, is my whole argument extremely naive? The answer to that question depends critically on the answer to the following questions: Where in the process of cognition does the "essentialist interference" take place? That is, does our knowledge of something's origins fundamentally affect our lower-level perception, or does it merely affect our higher-level judgment? Can these two be distinguished? And finally, how flexible are our cognitive biases of this sort? The idea that inexpensive wine and computer-music are less worthy came from somewhere; can these ideas be easily changed?

People will no doubt argue that even to an unbiased listener any computer is still incapable of composing music that is as emotionally rich and powerful as human-composed music. Now that I've argued that there's no intrinsic difference between artificially composed music and human-composed music, what about the actual, external differences? Can a computer ever live up to the human standard, even to an unbiased listener? This is an entirely separate question about computer science and the complexity of music, and I'll address it in time as well.

DADT repeal: am I missing something here?

2010-12-10T02:20:00.007-06:00

I just emailed a bunch of senators urging them to repeal DADT. Did you???

The Senate's failure, earlier today, to repeal the military's DADT policy is the latest and worst case of "Oh my God if they can't pass that then what can they do?" type legislation that has met its recent death in the Senate.

What's most frustrating is that DADT is not only cruel, discriminatory, and harmful to the military and our national security, it's also opposed by an overwhelming majority of the public and the military.

What's strange, moreover, is the shocking and inexplicable lack of political calculation by Republicans holding up the vote. There they were today, attempting to kill a military spending bill for the first time in forty-eight years in order to cling to one policy that 75% of Americans, and 70% of the military, now oppose. Seventy-five percent! You can't get 75% percent of Americans to agree that the President isn't a fascist Muslim Commie terrorist. You can't get 75% percent of Americans to agree on the nonexistence of ghosts and UFO's. You can barely muster up 75% to say they haven't personally seen a ghost.

And look at the trendline! For senators coolly calculating their votes to position themselves for reelection, the derivative matters. (Though it's held steady for two years, it's clear, looking at the larger trend, that support for repeal will rise significantly in the near future).

Public opinion has risen in favor of repeal by about 10 percentage points in the last six years alone. And yet Senators like Mark Kirk and Lisa Murkowski, who are on the fence about the bill, but aren't up for reelection for six more years, effectively voted against repeal. Do they think public opinion on gay rights is going to reverse? Don't they realize they're going to look foolish (not to mention prejudiced!) in the very near future for their no votes, especially when they will (probably) be forced by the sheer weight of public opinion to change course?

what is music? a debate sparked by emily howell

2010-12-07T20:31:00.005-06:00

Over the past year or so a performer-turned-scholar musician friend and I have debated on and off about our various philosophies regarding what we call "art music" or "classical music." I think I've written a little bit about the matter at hand a few times before, but given his conversion to scholar, I can no longer shrug off his ideas. Here is my initial attempt to organize my own thoughts thoughts, with the ultimate goal of perhaps putting them in some more tangible form, as a rebuttal to my friend's crackpot theories (don't worry, the mutual respect runs deep).

Emily Howell, for those who don't know, is a computer program created by computer scientist and composer David Cope. David Cope's previous program, Emi, analyzed music in a given style and was then able to compose music in the same style. Emily, however, purports to write music in her own style.

The reason Emily Howell is such a controversial figure--well, at least in the world of art music--is that she (it?) makes us question what music is, why it's important, and ultimately, why we value it.

To cut to the chase and lay down the gauntlet, I believe that music is--or rather, should be (more on that below)--perception, while many people would argue that music is something much more complicated than that (be it communication, intentionality, emotion, or whatever). What ultimately matters about music is how it sounds and nothing more. That's not to say that the sounds of music themselves don't create emotion in the listener or communicate emotion between performer and listener, or between composer and listener. The critical point is that they do so through a medium--ie, sound.

Most people will say that music--and indeed all art--has a lot to do with the intention of its creator, that its creator endows it with essential properties that are somehow mysteriously imparted to it and communicated to its audience. For this reason people are so concerned with authenticity in art, whether it has to do with faithfulness to a composer in music, or to forgery in painting.

People's essentialism rather complicates my thesis, because no matter what I think, most people are, on some level, essentialists, and perceive art through its lens. People generally don't judge a piece of music merely by how it sounds.

My point, then, is that music is perception at its core, and that it cannot escape this basic reality, despite all the essentialist notions that people throw into it. I believe we would enjoy music a lot more, and it would be more meaningful for us, if we could listen to it without being affected by everything that surrounds it, because essentialism doesn't make any sense.

Clearly, I have to explain what I mean by essentialism, and why it's both innate and non-sensical. There's a whole psychological literature on that that I'll get into soon (yup, school ended today, so I can hopefully not be lazy about it). Then on to Emily Howell, whose music I haven't actually listened to yet, but just purchased on iTunes. Yay for the instant gratification of technology.

An unforgettable game!

2010-11-29T23:15:00.014-06:00

If you are a soccer fan--but especially if you aren't--do yourself a favor and watch the Barcelona-Madrid game from earlier today. I just finished watching it. It was outrageous. Don't just watch the highlights! You'll miss the best parts.

Simply put, Barca played soccer at its awe-inspiring best. In the beautiful game, a scoreline isn't always indicative of how the match played out on the field. But 5-0 is a perfect reflection of Barca's dominance--maybe even flattering to Madrid. Barca have ripped teams to shreds before. But to do it with such conviction, such assurance, and such swagger, against one of the best teams in the world! Remarkable. Madrid, after all, had not lost a game all season. Rarely do you see a team put 20 consecutive passes together in a game. Barca did that at least half a dozen times, including in the run-up to the second goal. And all the while they were enjoying themselves, expressing themselves, and putting on a show for the Camp Nou fans, who ate it right up. It wasn't just the sheer number of passes or quantity of possession that did it; it was all the heel flicks, one-touch passes, and nutmegs that Barca inflicted on hapless Madrid defenders. The crowd was already ole-ing passes within the opening 20 minutes. And I haven't even said anything about the goals.

Madrid's midfielders, supposedly among the best in the world, looked like they were from a different planet than Barca's. Xavi and Iniesta were turning past and playing around Madrid's midfield five with confidence and consistency. And Xavi, who gave the ball away twice in the entire match, completed 110 passes, half as many as the entire Madrid team. All this despite being substituted 5 minutes from the end! Barca on the whole completed over 600 passes, a number that would have been higher but for Madrid's consistent fouling (they racked up nine cards, but I couldn't find a fouls stat...probably upwards of 20).

Perhaps for the neutral, Madrid's embarrassment isn't be so deliciously satisfying. But for me, it is well worth relishing. World cup winners like Sergio Ramos, Xabi Alonso, and Casillas, promising youngsters like Ozil and Khedira, and the world's former best, Ronaldo, all looked clueless on the field. Madrid may be a talented group of players, but you would have to be crazy to think they are anywhere near as a good a team. Mourinho has tried to save face for them, claiming that the match wasn't an embarrassment. But if he doesn't consider that an embarrassment, then he obviously doesn't think much of his team.

Madrid players, and fans, will likely moan about the offside calls (Casillas did plenty of that during the match). The third goal was marginally offside. The others were not. And of course, assistant referees botch offside calls regularly; we're just used to them being botched in favor of the defenders. It's a relief to see them giving the advantage in marginal calls to the attacking team; and I'll always say that, no matter which team benefits!

On that note, it's become increasingly clear to me that the referees in Spain are a lot better at calling offsides than anywhere else in the world. I could tell from early in the game, from Messi's run in about the 5th or 6th minute I think, that that assistant referee knew what he was doing. Four of Barca's five goals could have easily been disallowed for offside, and hardly anyone would have raised a finger. In fact, goals like these are disallowed all the time, but because the whistle usually goes before the ball goes in, people don't notice. So a gracious hat tip to the assistant referees--well done!

advantage rule and diving, again

2010-11-18T11:19:00.005-06:00

On the eve of an important soccer event in my own life, to soccer we turn again. Right now I can't resist but make an argument I've already made, only more emphatically and with renewed conviction: that diving in soccer is largely a product of the inadequate advantage rule.

I probably should have talked more about this during the World Cup, because diving seems to be Americans' preferred reason for disliking the beautiful game and dismissing out of hand. I could hardly read anything last summer about soccer in the US without coming across some disdainful comment about how diving makes soccer un-watchable. And that now infamous challenge by Carles Puyol on Arjen Robben in the final would have been a perfect way to explain the real deal with diving.

In addition the issue comes come up so often in my own playing, with my being consistently the most fouled player on the field, and what can I say... it makes me extremely angry.

So first, let's think about that Arjen Robben play again. Robben is through on goal in the second half of the World Cup Final, and feels contact, which he knows is illegal, from Carles Puyol. Because he knows the current advantage rule is in force, he knows he has two choices: go down, take the foul, earn Puyol a probable red card and himself a free kick well outside the area, or go on and try to score. To Robben's credit, he chose the latter course, figuring his chances of scoring were still rather high, despite having been fouled by Puyol. Unfortunately for him (but thank God for soccer) he failed to score. It was probably the only moment in which I sympathized for him in the entire game.

Robben's situation illustrates perfectly what's wrong with the advantage rule: when the player goes on and tries to “play the advantage,” the referee is obligated to go along with it and not call a foul. Which is often why, when players are fouled, they don't go and try to keep playing. They know that if they go on and try to keep playing, they might gain just enough of an advantage that it isn't obvious to the referee anymore that they don't want to keep playing and not take the foul. What's the best way to signal to a referee that you don't want to try to play an advantage, that you just want to take a free kick? To stop playing altogether, and to hit the deck.

Now, if this argument is close to correct, we should also see players “signal” that they've been fouled in other ways, not just by going down. And that's exactly what we see, often with shirt pulling. Lots of the time, for obvious fould, players will literally stop trying to play, again with the same intent. They're saying to the referee, “I'm done trying to gain an advantage through open play, and I'd like a free kick now.”

The ultimate problem with this system is that the referees have the power to decide for the players whether they will keep playing or whether they get a free kick. But there's no way a referee can know what choice a team really wants to make. What if the team has a player who can hit great free kicks from 40 yards? Then the team will be less likely to want to play the advantage. What if the team has no free kick takers at all? Then they might want to always play the advantage no matter how small.

The game would be so much better if the players could continue trying to play, even after they were fouled, knowing that if their advantage didn't work out, they would get the free kick. The referees could signal this by raising their arms or flags without blowing the whistle to stop play. In this case Robben wouldn't have had to make a terrible choice between “diving” and between trying to score: he would have known tht he could go on and try to score and still get the free kick even if he failed.

From my own playing I know that it's an all-too common problem. All the time I'll get fouled, with a player swiping at my feet or ankles, even if I want to continue playing, to see if I can still win the ball, it's not worth it if there's only a 50-50 chance that I will. In those instances, I'll go down and take the foul instead. Opposing players will accuse me of diving. Really it's soccer's fault for having such odd rules. And of course, their fault for fouling me in the first place.

Meter, ct'd

2010-11-04T23:16:00.006-05:00

A friend of mine wrote me this long email discussing the philosophy of music. I wrote back, telling him the discussion was arcane, and sent him the link to my meter post, below. He accused me of irrelevance.

I remembered this piece I heard last year. My friend plays in a wind quintet. They played this piece, "Aires Tropicales." I heard it twice, once in a masterclass scenario, and then in their concert. Now listen to the beginning of the second movement. Where's the downbeat? Now when I first heard this movement, in the class, I heard it, as I'm sure you did, as the first image shown above. It's the only way anyone would ever hear it! After the bassoon goes on for a while, the other instruments join, but if you'll listen through to the youtube video, the rhythm just doesn't sound right for the entire movement. Then, in the masterclass, they projected the score on screen, and it all made sense. The bassoon ostinato is actually written as the second image above. But once you get it in your head the first way, it's impossible to get rid of it. Every time I heard it, for the rest of the class and then again in the concert, I tried really hard to hear it the right way, in this case not just because it was right, but because the whole piece sounds so much better the right way. But I couldn't do it.

(Apparently, neither can the clarinetist in that youtube video, who keeps tapping his foot on the faux-beats.)

Anyway, the point is, the metrical tension should be one of the most important aspects of this music, but it's completely lost when it's impossible to hear it the right way.

My suggestion: the basoonist should stomp at the start of the second movement to signal the downbeat, or at least breathe to the downbeat. I don't know if that would solve the problem, but it couldn't hurt. I mean, he's got to do something, right??

Point is: this happens all over the place. It's far from irrelevant!

Meter

2010-11-01T20:18:00.011-05:00

Something's been bothering me for a while, and that something is meter. Meter is a fundamental attribute of most music, something so basic we're usually completely unaware of our effortless perception of it. But I get it wrong all the time. Is it just me, or are you all in the same boat? Quick survey: How do you hear the following excerpts? At 0:29 here, is the strong beat on a) the triplet, or b) after? What about 7:20 here (strong beat with a) the winds or b) before) or 2:13 here [beats on a) the first of the three note motif or b) the second]? (This kinda thing happens all over the place in Brahms...please also note the ridiculous-looking, yet absurdly effective conducting in the first link). But it also happens in Bach (are the 8th notes here grouped in a) 3's or b) 2's?) What about this one? Go to the end of Variation 25 (maybe 5:10 on)....where are the downbeats? Or where's the beat in this one [with a) the bass notes or b) just after? Don't peek at the score, not that it will really matter!]. Just a few examples of the thousands available!

So did you botch the listening quiz like I did? (answer b is correct for all the questions). How much did it matter if you've played/seen the scores to the pieces in question? For me, the Brahms excerpts go in and out, often depending on how actively and engagedly I'm listening (see below). But I can't hear Hilary Hahn's Bach "correctly" no matter how hard I try (though I can play the correct auditory image afterward in my head). Ditto with the Schumann.

So maybe the composer's really botched it? Or the performers? Or is it us listeners?

Or is it just me.

For today, two basic questions to consider about meter: how does a listener "decide" what the meter of a piece is, and, delving deeper into the realm of the unexplored and unexplained, what's the role of the performer or the composer in deciding what the "right" meter is, or making sure the audience "gets it"?

Short answer to question #1, which has received a fair amount of research. There are some basic things that signal to us as listeners where the beats are in music, most of which you could probably guess on your own: longer notes, louder notes, and lower notes are all more likely to be found on strong beats, and are taken as cues to those beats by listeners. Articulation and phrasing matter too; we hear phrases starting on stronger beats more easily.

But that can all get pretty boring. Music is at its most rhythmically vibrant (maybe?) when various aspects send us in different metrical directions and leave our final perception on the fence.

That being said, what a composer writes on the page isn't necessarily what we hear, nor is it sometimes even possible to hear it the way it was written. Quick thought experiment: if we scanned a Beethoven symphony into Sibelius and then added a quarter rest at the beginning, therefore shifting every single beat throughout the whole thing, and then played the thing, would it sound any different? Of course not! The score just wouldn't match our perception anymore.

What are we to do when such mismatches arise in real life? First of all, there are different degrees of mismatch between score and perception. Sometimes a remedy may be desirable, and sometimes it may not. But these are the types of questions I rarely hear anyone raise, even when playing Brahms, where these types of mismatches are so common. Is that section of the 3rd symphony, 1st movement "better" if the listener understands that the beginning of the phrases are actually on the 3rd and 6th beats of each bar, not the 1st and 4th? Not sure. How hard should the conductor try to make the audience understand this fact, or should he or she play it as "counter-metrically" as possible (which is more or less how it's written)?

I'm not sure. And incidentally, just "knowing" where the beat is usually isn't enough to change our perception. Even seeing isn't believing (as in a conductor giving a downbeat). But this you can probably figure out introspectively. In order to change one's metric perception, atually moving your head (link forthcoming...too lazy at moment) turns out to be really important, which, incidentally, makes it really easy for the performers to get it right in their minds, but not the audience.

I'm also fascinated as to the extent of these perceptual mismatches, especially in Brahms. 'Cause it really does change how you hear the music to put the beats in different places. It's pretty fundamental. But he makes it so damn confusing.

Political Rant, ct'd

2010-10-20T16:35:00.019-05:00

Okay, in case you haven't seen this, please watch it and be horrified. Hopefully the Sarah-Palin-2008-effect hasn't completely habituated us to the outrageous ignorance of aspiring politicians forever, because everyone should be shocked and appalled.

There are, of course, several ways to interpret her remarks and how they reflect on her and the Tea Party movement in general. Maybe she's just an ignorant fool and her ascendency to a Republican Senate nomination is a fluke. Maybe she knows the Constitution decently well, and just got her numbers mixed up. Naturally I suspect that her problem, and the Tea Party's problems, with Constitutional interpretation, are far more substantial.

It's not merely that the movement, at its worst, tends toward "ignorant, know-nothing Yahooism." Beyond that, even the intellectually credible aspects of Tea Party conservatism manifest an ignorance of the history and evolution of the Constitution that, while certainly less farcical, is no less dangerous. Tea Partiers wax poetic about the importance of the Founding Fathers and the original intent of the Constitution in their calls (feigned or honest?) to curb federal spending and reduce the size and scope of the federal government. But in addition to conveniently distorting those founding principles to fit their various ideologies, they also ignore the transformational changes made to the Constitution during Reconstruction [not to mention the economic consequences of fiscal conservatism in the Depression]. The 14th Amendment (was supposed to) fundamentally re-apportion political power between the states and federal government, shifting the burden of protecting people's liberties from the states to the feds. When the Constitution was written, most people assumed the federal government would be the biggest threat to individual liberty, and the states would be its best defender; the 14th Amendment was our collective acknowledgment that we had it backwards. It was a reflection of the fact that the states failed spectacularly at protecting minority rights, and thus was a fundamental restructuring of American government. In their misinterpretation of history the Tea Partiers are certainly not alone; Southern governments and the Supreme Court --with the help of all-around apathy--effectively nullified Reconstruction for generations (a tradition continued today by Justice Thomas et. al), but at least the likes of Thomas can muster some sort of justification for his views. Christine O'Donnell doesn't even know what the 14th Amendment is.

There's a reasonable political debate to be had about reducing the size and power of the federal government; indeed, the prospect of a Senator O'Donnell is perhaps her own best argument for said reduction. But how can we have that debate when one of the relevant parties doesn't know what it's talking about? Even the debate moderator in the video tells O'Donnell the 14th Amendment "guarantees citizenship." Umm, yeah, that and like a whole lot more. What about equal protection, due process, privileges and immunities, incorporating the Bill of Rights, etc. etc?

Even Chris Coons, in repeating the Establishment Clause from the 1st Amendment over and over (or his slightly modified version), probably should have mentioned to O'Donnell that just because it says "Congress," the Establishment Clause applies to the states as well because of the 14th Amendment.

Okay, O'Donnell is a convenient straw man for this argument. She's obviously not the brightest. But her brand of Constitutional literalism (the words "separation of Church and State" aren't in the 1st Amendment....BAM!) combined with its misreading of history is scary, 'cause a lot of people seem to be playing along to the same general tune. Her misreading of the 1st Amendment is absurd. But her ignoring the 14th is far more common and just as troubling.

Guest Post: World's Worst Monopoly

2010-10-19T13:24:00.009-05:00

It's not Microsoft in the 90s, Standard Oil in the 1890s, or the Dark Greens by Boardwalk and Park Place. It's Crown Street Towing. Sure it "competes" with several towing companies in the greater New Haven area, and with thousands across the country. Yet Crown St. has all of the worst elements of a true monopoly: a protected revenue model that's completely insulated from customer choice or recourse.

My story begins last Friday when my car was towed from outside my house. My crime: I owed excise taxes. Oops. To retrieve my car, I was told that I needed to pay my taxes in cash, plus the tow fee, and they'd release the car. Quick trip to the ATM and back, I'm told that I also owe some unpaid parking tickets which also (surprise!) need to be paid in cash.

"Anything else I need to know?"

"Nope, that's it"

So back to the ATM. I'm greeted, on my return, with the news that my registration had expired. I would need to renew that before paying off my taxes and tickets, and the DMV would only be open from from 8:00 - noon the next morning.

So I confirm: "I renew my registration, then I can come back and pay my taxes, my tickets, my towing fee, and I can drive off?"

"That's it."

I wake up Saturday morning, bike to the DMV, where I discover that I can't re-register my car until I've paid my taxes. Surprise! Back to the tow yard, where they say: "Oops, forgot about that, sorry!" At this point it's 11:30, the DMV's doors are closed, and it doesn't open again until Tuesday.

Which brings me to today. I went to town hall, paid my taxes, tickets, and late fees, went to the DMV, re-registered my car, and finally returned to the tow lot. At the tow lot, I get my best surprise yet: they're charging me $20 per day of storage after the first day, an extra $80 fee resulting from their misinformation.

I had a delightful conversation with the manager, that went about as follows:

Me: description of what happened

Manager, to employee: "Did you tell him that he needed to re-register before paying taxes?"

Employee: "Yes"

Manager, to me: "Well, why did you listen to her? If you don't know the rules, why should she?"

Me: "I figured she would know, since you guys deal with exactly this issue every day."

Manager: "We're a tow lot, not the DMV, so that was stupid."

Me: "Small business to small business owner, if one of my employees makes a mistake, I take responsibility."

Manager, with a smirk: "You'd offer a refund, right?"

Me: "Yes."

Manager: "Well, who messed up here? You. Wasn't us. Your car, your responsibility to know the rules." to employee: "Charge him for everything."

She then walked away, muttered, and I quote: "funniest thing I've heard all week." To add salt in the wound, they claimed their credit card machine was down and I'd have to pay the entirety in cash. Which I did.

Total damage:

* $524

* 2 bike trips to the DMV

* 1 hour of dealing with the most unpleasant, conceited people

Amount I deserved for being an idiot and failing to keep up to date on my car:

* $444

* 1 bike trip to the DMV

* 15 minutes of dealing with the most unpleasant, conceited people

-------------------------------------

Fundamentally, tow lots are completely unaccountable. I can't control where my car is towed, I can't encourage other people to have their cars towed to an alternative lot, and once it's in the a tow lot, I'm completely at the mercy of the tow yard. They have no reason to be pleasant or even honest. In this case, their dishonesty netted them an extra $80 in cash. What other business works like that? Towing is a twisted, monopolistic industry that mints money for its owners and, as far as I can tell, there's nothing to be done about it.

Much as I'm incredibly frustrated, I'm also lucky that I can absorb an extra $80, that I have enough cash in my account to pay these fees in cash, that I'm self-employed so can take off a weekday, and that I can live without my car for an extra 4 days. What about a person who can't be as flexible? What about a father or mother who works two jobs, relies on his/her car and lives paycheck-to-paycheck?

Lawyers, scholars, Sam, I need your advice. Have you gone through anything similar? What should I do in this particular situation, and what should be done about the towing industry in general to give the "consumer" back a touch of control?

(1) Small claims court. Do I have a case? Is it worth the pain in the ass? Will one minor inconvenience have any effect on their practices?

(2) Systemic changes. I was brainstorming ways to introduce accountability, and thought of one easy-to-implement solution. For any city with more than one convenient tow lot, drivers should be able to put a sticker on their car indicating the preferred tow lot. When police call in a car for towing, they'd need to call that lot first. A particularly bad experience would encourage a consumer, and their friends, to change their preferred lot. Tow companies would have some inducement to be civil, helpful, and fair. Could it work? How to proceed?

Thoughts? Gentle words? It's been a rough few days.

-Eli

New facebook groups? Who cares!

2010-10-11T01:03:00.013-05:00

Facebook is all the rage recently! What with the new movie (interesting commentary here and here), the New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and my witty status updates, it's really all anyone can talk about. And then to top it all off, apparently there's some new feature being unveiled this week that's supposed to go a long way toward solving facebook's awkward privacy problem, (or the NEB--Not Everybody's Business--problem).

The feature is a new version of facebook groups, the difference from the old lame groups being that other people can tag you in groups, and you can control which of your information is shared with which groups. In other words, you could end up in groups with your high school friends, your college hall-mates, and your nerdy "set" club-mates and share information privately within each group, all without doing any work to assemble or join any of the groups because other people have already tagged you in them (ya know, the same people who already uploaded and tagged hundreds of photos of you since you don't even own a camera).

Though the new groups feature may seem ideal for restricting who sees that photo of you rolfing off the balcony, I predict it won't change people's facebook behavior much at all. There's this weird thing about facebook communication: more openness seems to make it easier, and less awkward, for people to communicate with each other. Like, when facebook first started, I don't think anybody divined the destiny of the facebook wall post. Originally, your "wall" was just a place for friends to post text. It seemed logical to post something about someone, to tell a story to add to that person's profile. (Incidentally I am appalled to find out that facebook wall posts before 2006 year have all been deleted, so my quick ten-minute research project into the original flavor of wall posts will have to go unfulfilled for now.)

Soon enough facebook walls became--or maybe always were--a place for direct (and boring!) communication (along with thousands of bland birthday wishes from people you will never communicate with ever again). What's the deal with that? There's no logical reason people should communicate via facebook wall posts. Anyone who can post on someone else's facebook wall could just as easily send an email or a facebook message, sparing the rest of the world the burden of reading our lame personal questions. I mean what's the point of adding "hey how's Chicago?" or "happy bday" to someone's profile, if all you want to do is actually find out how Chicago is or wish someone a happy birthday?? Clearly, the defining aspect of the facebook wall post is not communication itself, but some sort of meta-communication. You're not just asking a question to get an answer, you're also, in effect, saying something else.... possibly: "well I was already on facebook, and since I was already looking at your profile since you came up in my news feed, I thought I'd say hello, meanwhile saving myself the extra 3 seconds it would have taken to send a message instead. In fact, our relationship probably couldn't handle a personal message; that'd just be weird! I'd rather let everyone else know that we're communicating, to make this a more casual interaction." Or something like that. Isn't that weird?! Well, now it's pretty normal.

The point being, I think people dig this general openness of their communication and status updates. Sure, some things we want to keep more private. But most of those things we put in e-mails, text messages, and calls anyway. Facebook is the place where we project ourselves to all our friends, even, and especially the ones that we don't communicate with through more traditional means. Take this status update I just saw: "To the clubbers who park on my street on the weekends: shut the f*** up." It's a quintessential, complain-to-everyone-type update, with no real chance of ever reaching its intended faux-audience. In the new era of facebook groups, who among her friends would this person exclude from seeing this status update? No one! Perhaps because she hopes that one of her thousands of "friends" is one of those assholes who goes clubbing on her street on the weekends. It's a put-it-out-there-for-all-to-see-type thing. As is most facebooking.

Maybe I'm wrong and the new groups will totally change the way we use facebook. But I won't be surprised if people just get annoyed with groups and pretty much ignore them. I know I will!

Gouldberg Variations?

2010-10-10T23:14:00.009-05:00

When I first brought to my teacher the idea of playing GBV, he embraced the idea...with caution. His warning: beware of Gould! The piece is so closely identified with Glenn Gould that it's impossible to escape (ultimately unflattering) comparisons whenever one plays it. People who know the piece very well potentially hear everything you do, and everything you don't do, through the lens of Gould's own playing. What a terrifying thought.

There are four complete, as well as three excerpted GBV recordings Gould made (that I know of, at least). The complete versions: 1955 studio recording, 1959 Salzburg recital performance, the 1981 audio recording and the 1981 video (all on youtube--the video and the audio recording are composed mostly of different takes). Everyone's favorite Glenn Gould question: which is the best Goldberg recording??

Like I've said before, there's something so characteristic and so different about Gould's playing that makes it instantly identifiable, and, to me at least, instantly more attractive than anyone else's. Far from being replicable, this aspect of his playing is also a total mystery. Though I and other people claim to recognize other pianists' playing as well, for me the sounds of piano-playing can almost be divided to two distinct categories: Gould and everyone else. This is largely why I don't really enjoy listening to any other recordings of Bach (besides Rosalyn Tureck, an interesting exception to be discussed later). Perahia, Schiff, Dinnerstein, et al don't really stand out from each other. (Dinnerstein's recording in particular made a big splash when it came out a couple of years ago, but I really don't hear what's so special about it. The out-of-tune notes also bother me a lot!! Unfortunately I can't find it on youtube...just don't listen too closely!) They all play nicely for sure. But there's that something special missing...

Anyway, my favorite way to keep from comparing my own playing to Gould's is naturally to compare his own playing to itself. For those who don't know much about Gould, he was an eccentric character to say the least. I recently saw this documentary, which was a great movie for someone who knew about him mostly through his own playing and writings. Just from listening to his recordings, one can get a sense of the general story of his life: an incredible genius who kinda got steadily derailed by his own craziness as his short life progressed. My favorite Gould recordings are mostly the early recordings of his 20's: the Salzburg concert, the Beethoven concertos with Toronto Symphony, the Bach concertos with Golschmann, etc. The later recordings--eg the English suites or the Mozart sonatas--sound like the playing of someone who's just trying too hard to shock us, to prove that he's different and unique. Gould was famous for saying Mozart lived too long--a typical type of public statement from his later years, and one that I have no doubt he didn't fully believe, given his phenomenal early performances of Mozart.

The documentary confirmed this general storyline. Cornelia Foss, who left her husband for Gould, and in turn left him, tells the story of Gould's growing paranoia, caused by or perhaps causing his deepening dependence on cocktails of prescription drugs. Particularly interesting facts I learned: in the early years, he would often give interviews without prepared notes or remarks. Later on, he insisted that entire interviews be scripted in his obsessive attempts to fastidiously censor his public image. According to Foss, he became decreasingly charming as a result; he almost lost his personality in his attempt to control it. (He also, incidentally, became extremely conceited and pretentious in said public statements...examples forthcoming...).

So Gould's recordings generally reflect his declining health and social circumstances, BUT...the 1981 GBV recording is, I have recently come to believe, a spectacular exception. The debut recording and Salzburg performance are fantastic, of course, but they seem just a bit too flippant for GBV. If you asked me just a few months ago, I would have told you the 1981 recording is too slow, too strange, too measured, and too calculated. After all, the aria is as simple as could be; I'm sure Bach had in mind the 1955 tempo over the 1981. But Gould transforms the aria completely; he plays it as if it's the last thing he'll ever play, as if it's the most stunningly beautiful thing ever written. Which, of course, it is. Some of the variations are a little crazy, there's no doubt. But there's this constant sense of grandeur that runs through the whole thing that is, I think, altogether fitting, and missing from the early recording and performance.

A final fact from the documentary: According to Cornelia Foss, Gould always said he would die when he was 50; the stroke that hospitalized him came just days after the GBV recording was released, two days after his 50th birthday. To me, it looks like he's about ready to kick it right here at the very end. Coincidence?? Who knows....

goldberg variations, ct'd: cheating

2010-10-01T23:50:00.009-05:00

So aside from the fact that I'm obviously really gung-ho about cheating in general at the piano, what does it have to do, specifically, with Goldberg Variations? As I talked about here and here, Goldberg Variations is unusual in that it was written specifically for a two-manual harpsichord. Indeed the piece is unusual, almost anomalous, for Bach's writing, in other respects: the multiple-of-three-minus-one numbered variations are virtuosic show-pieces with lots of hand-crossings. These hand-crossings often take the form of voice-crossings of the second type described here, and they present a unique challenge to the pianist playing on a single keyboard: when to respect Bach's part-writing, keeping a continuity of voicing with each voice in the "correct" hand, and when to "cheat" and switch voices to make the execution simpler? What makes GBV unusual is the added "visual element" of the performance. I am not referring to the mere spectacle of seeing someone play it, which is pretty awesome, but rather how the brain integrates visual information along with aural input in separating counterpoint into its different parts.

A couple of examples out of many. In this vid, Glenn Gould is revealed as the cheater he really is! Variation 11 starts at 2:56 (third image above), and where the voices cross in bar 4, Gould just switches which hand plays which voice to avoid the awkwardness of playing the right hand two octaves below the left. Compare that video to this one (start of video), where this dude, despite apparently having somewhere better to be (soo fast!), keeps the continuity of both voices through the section highlighted above. He does his own bit of cheating in the very last measure of the variation (1:30 in the video, second image above). Gould also cheats at 7:47 here, penultimate bar of variation 5, first image above, whereas Andras Schiff goes to the trouble of keeping the voices in the hands Bach wrote them (12:08). (Incidentally, Schiff's excessively and uniformly placid, serene take on GBV is especially evident in his creepily dreamy facial expressions...eg see 6:23 and 11:57....weird).

Okay, so what am I driving at here? What are the pros and cons of cheating in a piece like GBV? There are basically three relevant considerations. First, does one a fighting chance of keeping the voices "distinct," that is, of making them sound like separate, continuous auditory streams, even while switching the voices between hands? In other words, can one make it sound right even in cheating mode? Second, how convenient does cheating make the passage? Does it matter that I might struggle to get the voice leading just right in practice, but then mess it up every time I play it in a concert because it's that awkward?

The third consideration is the visual, and strictly concerns a live or video performance. How does the visual movement of the hands affect the audience's perception of the different voices?

That is a rather open, as far as I know, unstudied question, but from things like this, we know that the brain is pretty good at putting together information from different senses in affecting our cognition (watch the video first, then close your eyes and just listen....whoa!!!).

For me, then, Gould's decision in variation 11 is unwise; watching him play it that way, it's hard to hear the voices crossing, and that makes this section less compelling. Variation 5 is a different matter altogether, given the speed (is it really going to affect anyone's perception either way? dubious) and difficulty playing it "correctly."

piano-playing and CHEATING

2010-10-01T21:07:00.011-05:00

Cheating: it sullies the world of sport, ruins reputations, tears families apart, and can get you a lot of student loan money, but what does it have to do with playing the piano?

Well, a lot actually! Cheating, roughly defined right now by me, is the act (or art) or re-writing music for technical convenience, ie, to make it easier to play or execute. Now, a lot of self-called purist-types will frown conceitedly on the very idea of cheating in music. They usually come from the heretofore discussed "authentic" school of performance that holds a composer's intentions and historical accuracy in the highest regard. Like the whole idea of "authentic" or "accurate" performance, however, their concerns over cheating are misguided and impractical.

Cheating can be a pianist's best friend, but only when done with care and consideration. Pianist and Macarthur fellow Stephen Hough gave a series of classes the pianists at Northwestern last year. His first class basically devolved into a pianist's guide to cheating after his advice to three consecutive students, upon asking him specific technical questions, was more or less the same: "Oh I just re-write this section."

So when is cheating okay, and when is it not? As with any musical decision, the biggest (but not the only, as I'll explain) deciding factor is how it sounds. For instance, I confess that in my spring recital, I cheated a lot on this little ditty toward the end (excerpt shown above), as Chopin's writing for the left-hand is borderline unreasonable. From 4:48 to the end is among the most difficult sections of music I've ever played; bringing out the melody over all the other notes going on is next to impossible, but it's significantly more possible if you cut the middle note from all the three-note left hand chords! Trust me, no one missed them, or ever noticed/commented on their absence.

Okay, well, that explanation took longer than expected. Coming up, why cheating matters so much in the Goldberg Variations, and when it's not okay, for visual reasons.

A quick political rant

2010-09-23T02:21:00.014-05:00

Okay, by now, plenty of writers out there have already come to the entirely reasonable, possibly unavoidable conclusion that Tea Partiers, and Americans in general, are a bunch of selfish unrealistic hypocrites. They hate big government but blame the government for everything that goes wrong, and expect it to help them, specifically. And they definitely don't want to pay for any of the help they get. Maybe election advertisements aren't the best place to look for anything sensical in politics, but every Republican or Tea Party-type ad I've heard or seen has promised two things above all others: that the candidate will dramatically reduce government spending, and also help create a shitload of jobs for everyone.... through magic (or something)! I heard a story on NPR the other day where they interviewed all these people who were thinking of voting Tea Party because they weren't seeing enough jobs created. Ya know, by the government. But god forbid the government should create jobs by hiring people and paying them money to perform societally beneficial work. That would be economic stimulus.

Other than craziness, though, what's behind this crazy logic, and where does it lead us, besides into a future of maddeningly inane political advertising? I was reminded of an article in Reason (fake out! that's just a link to the home page, not the article, which I don't remember specifically) from a while back about the perverse incentives of government deficits. We might think intuitively that, when the government runs a deficit for an extended period of time, people will seek to reduce government spending (a la starve the beast ideology). But, empirically, you find the opposite correlation--and it makes economic sense, sadly. When the government spends more but people aren't paying more in taxes, their perception is that they're getting more stuff from the government for less money, and so their perceived opportunity cost of government actually goes down. And when the cost of something goes down, you generally demand more of it. After 10 years of W madness, maybe people feel so damned entitled to getting everything for no increase in taxes, or indeed, any noticeable sacrifice whatsoever, that they just keep wanting everything for nothing, and sadly, still think they can get it.

So, what's gonna happen? Republicans come to power, pass their damn tax cuts, maybe actually cut spending, but probably not, and while the economic outlook may improve somewhat, unemployment stays high because the problems with the economy are waaay beyond cyclical. In other words, things don't get that much better, and not just because the government won't do a thing to help. And then back come the Democrats, riding a wave of anger, railing against Republican failures! To accomplish....minor improvements, if we're lucky. Meanwhile, will people will continue to be angry, unhappy, and blame the government? How many election cycles will it take before they realize we have to pay more for less, and that the economy isn't going back to the way it was? That's the real question. Will we as a society make that realization before it's too late to address real problems like health care spending and climate change? Or will America's decline be all but written already?

Okay, and while I'm ranting here, judging from the inactivity that this generated when I posted it on my facebook, I don't think people adequately appreciate the absurdity of this. Now if I give O'Donnell the benefit of the doubt, what she meant to say was, "I will approve a bill only if it is constitutional." But what she effectively said, twice, was, "I will approve a bill if and only if it is constitutional." Does she realize, then, that by her pledge she would vote in favor of bills to allow unlimited immigration, triple postal service spending, and ban commerce between the states, if such bills ever crossed her desk? 'Cause those are all constitutional (article 1 section 8)! It's all part of her weird, Bible/constitution worship conflagration.

And just like that....

2010-09-23T00:59:00.004-05:00

A new blog is born with a little help from friend, colleague, and competent writer Alissa. Motto: "because there's more to life than soccer, science, politics, and the arts...ie, New Yorker cartoon captioning."

goldberg variation rankings, ct'd

2010-09-14T23:25:00.002-05:00

When I decided to take my sister's advice and rank each of the Goldberg variations 1-30, I didn't really stop to think how difficult it would be after 29 and 30. They're all brilliant to start with, but from here on out they're, like, really brilliant. So we'll see how long I can keep up this farce.

28: Variation 19

27: Variation 8

Variation 19 (8:40) is a nostalgic break in the action from the charming, echoic canon on the sixth and the bustling, energetic variation 20. Two distinct motives are shared between the three voices throughout: a six-note sixteenths figure, and a syncopated eighth-note/quarter note figure. The genius here is in the tied notes that are suspended over the bar lines; these held notes give the variation its unique rhythmic and harmonic character. Beautiful indeed!

Variation 8, like variation 19, has two main ideas which are repeated measure by measure and passed between two voices. In the first four measures, the top voice plays rising arpeggiated sixteenths (with one sixteenth note "missing" at the end of each bar), while the bass plays four falling eighth notes, followed by three falling sixteenths. In the second phraselet (bars 5-8), both parts are inverted, or turned upside down. This is a common technique Bach uses, especially in GBV, to change things up within a variation while maintaining its rhythmic character and give the listener something to latch onto (it happens to a greater or lesser extent in variations 1, 5, 11-17, 20-21, 23, and 26-28 aka all over the place). Variation 8 is a doozy for pianists; look what GG has to do in the last measure (0:50)! Gah!

Atheism; or, why does everyone think I'm so amoral??

2010-09-14T21:37:00.009-05:00

As is my tradition, I now take a break from something I (profess to) have authority over to make room for a new topic altogether. Hey, if Richard Dawkins can do it, then why can't I? My writing may not be quite on the same level, but I can surely be less of a dick. Before getting into the treacherous philosophical/political side of the whole thing, a simpler question: what's it like for me, being an atheist/agnostic in this religious society we call America?

The reason I bring it up is that in these troubled times of increasing intolerance, Americans are somehow more distrustful of atheists than any other group of people. A friend of mine (Eli) recently asked whether I thought we would first have a gay president, or an atheist one, and it immediately reminded me of these posts from the Volokh Conspiracy. Atheists are regarded with disfavor by Americans at roughly twice the rate of gays or Muslims! Whoa! That's a lot of disfavor! Furthermore, there are no openly "non-believing" members of Congress, the Supreme Court or the cabinet. So the way things are going, people seem a lot more willing to vote for gays than atheists (but don't worry Eli, you still won't get my vote for numerous other reasons).

Meanwhile, coming from just about the most liberal elitist background you could imagine, I've had a pretty smooth ride. Looking back, I don't think I had any close friends or family who attended weekly religious services, or were deeply spiritual, all the way through high school. I mean, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't have many friends, in a country where >80% of people describe themselves as very religious, that's a feat.

That doesn't mean I didn't have a few religious crises of my own growing up. I have a distinct memory of making my mother take me to church at some point before I was 10 or 11, the very idea of which is now so strange it's hard to believe it was really me. (Speaking of things that happened to me but really, couldn't have actually happened to me, I once received a certificate from the NRA, like, for shooting guns, at this place [actual quote from website: "Increased self-esteem, making new friendships and gaining social competence, learning to work as part of a team, responsibility and building positive values are just some of the life skills gained from participating in Camp Friendship programs..." What version of that sentence could they possibly have turned down in favor of that one??]).

Anyway, college and grad school have been different. I spent one summer in Ecuador, with fifteen other students, including three serious Christians (one of whom narrowly selected college over a convent). Maybe it was the the clean mountain air, or the fact that none of us knew any Spanish, but we had some good frank discussion amongst ourselves. Don't get me wrong, it was no Camp Friendship, but it clarified a lot.

Fist off, people have strikingly different definitions of atheism and agnosticism. Is an atheist someone who merely disbelieves in a benevolent creator or creators, or is it a more deeply held belief about metaphysics and and the power of science? Okay, for instance, this dude at Slate claims that the so-called "New Atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc.) are so enamored of their own scientific reasoning that they believe science will eventually explain existence. That's quite an accusation to make! And I think it mischaracterizes their beliefs, and atheism in general.

What the "New Atheists" do believe is that whatever is the source or nature of existence, it has no purpose or benevolence behind it, and it doesn't effect on the functioning of the universe. And I find that almost everyone I know rejects these two beliefs, even those who don't believe in God or gods of any sort. That is, I find that most of my friends believe in karma, superstition, or something like them. As for me, I believe the universe unfolds according to physical laws, nothing more, nothing less. Physical reductionism--as one might call this belief--is greatly misunderstood and widely rejected, and deserves a lengthy explanation of its own. But why the hell is the world here in the first place? That's an entirely different, and entirely metaphysical, question.

I was recently shocked to find out that for whatever reason (they're smarter? amoral? rational? communist? anti-social?), scientists in the US are much less likely to believe in God. That poll just really makes me want to know more about the beliefs behind those beliefs. Are scientists really atheists in the strong sense, or do they have other supernatural/metaphysical beliefs that are harder to summarize?

goldberg variations, ct'd

2010-09-08T10:44:00.015-05:00

Okay, enough "Handel-lambasting" (as Brett accused me of in his last comment). Let's do some Bach-lambasting instead.

Wha??? But I thought GBV was, like, the greatest? Well, it is....but Bach does some nasty things in there that just make it really hard to pull off, on harpsichord or piano. Especially on piano....but especially on harpsichord. One of the difficulties in performing, listening to, or understanding GBV is voice-crossing.

When two separates lines of music "cross" pitch paths, we call it a voice-crossing; one starts out above the other in pitch, but ends up below. If one person started singing a scale up from below, and another person down from above, there would be a voice-crossing somewhere in the middle.

Voice-crossings are, in general, a big no-no in counterpoint. Why? In counterpoint--or music or two or more distinct lines--the ear, or more precisely, the brain, has to keep track of more than one "object" at a time, while also fusing them into one coherent whole. But since the brain can't attend to more than one object at any specific moment, it goes back and forth between objects quickly (or slowly, or not at all, in which case you're not a good listener). In order to parse two lines of music perceptually into two different objects (or "streams"), the brain needs a way of distinguishing them. One of the easiest ways is pitch level or fundamental frequency; in our natural environment, streams of sound separated by large gaps in frequency usually come from different sources. If one line of music is consistently above another, then the brain reckons, it comes from one source, while the other line comes from another. Perceptual separation achieved!

But what if one line of music isn't consistently above another, and they cross once, twice, or over and over? In the case of different singers or instruments, we can also segment by tone or timbre. And there are also other, more subtle ways of parsing counterpoint, by the consistency of note lengths, articulations and volume. But on one instrument, parsing voices accurately is much more difficult because the timbral cues are gone.

Unfortunately, Goldberg Variations, unlike most of Bach's keyboard music, is full of 'em! They come in two distinct types: within-hand and between-hands, and the two types present different challenges for the pianist as well as the listener.

Above I've pasted an example of the first type (second half of variation 6), which is easily, and I suspect, nearly universally, misheard, when played on the piano or harpsichord (yeah I can't get the image down here for whatever reason....you can listen to it on piano here [variation 6 starts at 7:52 and the part I pasted at 8:17]). Starting in the 8th measure of the image, the voices cross back and forth, with each voice alternating between sixteenth notes and a dotted quarter held through the bar. But it's easier to hear a sequence where one voice carries a rising melody on top with an alto voice playing sixteenth notes underneath. Now listen to and watch this (variation 6 starts at 4:10, the image at 4:42). The selection is much easier to perceive correctly because the violin and viola, which have distinct tones, carry the two lines separately. In addition, watching the separate instruments bow correctly adds visual cues which the brain can integrate with auditory information to stream the two lines separately. (Visual evidence will turn out to be of critical importance even for performance on the piano when we get to between-hands crossings and issues of "cheating.")

If Glenn Gould doesn't voice this section "correctly," what hope do I have???! On the one hand, maybe a "correct" voicing--ie, one that induces accurate contrapuntal perception in the listener--isn't especially necessary or desirable. But maybe it is. I've got some ideas. One thing that for some reason I've never heard any pianist do, and seems relatively simple, is to articulate the two voices differently, or play one of them more loudly. More on that later. This little section is just the tip of the iceberg of course....lots more to consider!

goldberg variations, part 2

2010-09-04T21:58:00.006-05:00

While I'm still on the theme of proof by contrast, those who know ol' Golby should listen to this Handel chaconne. Despite obvious differences from the Goldberg Variations, most notably length and, well, quality, comparison is just too easy given the superficial similarities. A chaconne is like a continuous theme and variations light, and Handel treats theme and variation as most composers do: the harmonic progression stays the same more or less throughout, but the melodic rhythm increases steadily, with more and more "flourish" as the piece unfolds. There's also, as is customary, a couple of variations in minor. It's just unfortunate for Handel that he had to write the piece in G (the same key as Goldbergs) and make the opening progression identical to the opening progression in the Goldbergs. Because although the piece is lovely and all, it's a perfect illustration, by contrast, of Bach's genius. This piece, by another giant of the Baroque era, is so vastly inferior to the Goldberg variations in every possible respect, it's astounding. No one could listen to it without feeling the repetition; the variations are different, but only incidentally and ornamentally; there's little fundamental difference of melody, counterpoint, and overall character. In contrast, each variation in the Goldbergs has its own identity, and could stand on its own if it had to (even variations 11 and 18).

vacation PLUS goldberg variations, part 1

2010-09-03T23:56:00.011-05:00

Coming off the high of a long vacation isn't easy. For those who don't now, I recently spent a whole week "off the grid," by which I mean, "off the grid by virtue of sheer determination to avoid friends' smart-phones," in Utah, Idaho, and Montana. We were camping, hiking, driving, getting speeding tickets, taking precautions against bear attacks (by speeding), and eating lots of dried foods. Since every time I try to describe how amazing it was I use the word "amazing" a half dozen times per sentence, I will instead complain about various aspects of returning home, and you can infer how, um, amazing the trip was in contrast. Grievance #1: the lack of mountain scenery in Evanston, Il. Also, humidity. Yuck.

Okay, now that that's over with! Among the more comforting privileges of my so-called real life is that of playing the Goldberg Variations, which, if you didn't know, is the greatest piece of music ever. Well, at least it's up there! I generally divide music up into four categories: great, good, bad, and incomprehensible. More and more, I believe that all great music is more or less created equal, that it just takes someone to give it life and realize its potential. (Thus, why my favorite pieces used to so predictably follow my favorite recordings...and maybe still do a little). Bach's music, however, has always stood out above the rest. So while 11 of my favorite 12 composers are always jostling for position, based on what I've listened to in the last day, the top spot's pretty much a done deal.

Of course, that may be a mere artifact of my bizarre childhood. The Gould '55 recording of the Goldbergs was actually the first CD I ever owned (a gift from my father's mother), and it came to me during that long stretch of my life where the music I listened to consisted exclusively of Bach played by Glenn Gould and Madonna. People are often surprised at how much of the Well-Tempered Clavier I can play, but given the number of times I listened to it as a child it's sad that I can't the play whole damn thing. (I can, however, still play and/or sing the entire Immaculate Collection).

In addition to having the advantage of being one of the first pieces of music I ever knew, the Goldberg Variations have a lot of other stuff going for them. Though I still can't play the whole WTC, I can, as of like a week ago, play the whole damn Goldberg Variations. As I prepare to perform them, I'll try to tell you all about how amazing they are. But really you should just buy this...or come hear me play them! Hmmm, on second thought, just buy Glenn Gould's versions.

With my sister as inspiration, I'll go ahead and start ranking the various variations, with the disclaimer that they're all amazing and talking about them individually borders on non-sensical anyway. But it'll still be fun. Starting with the outliers on the bottom end:

30. variation 17

29. variation 11

So how can I heap such praise on a piece of music and then pick out about two loser variations in the mix? Well, first of all, every piece of music has ups and downs, and needs points of release. These are the lightest of the Goldbergs, positively carefree and whimsical in the case of 17, honest and unassuming in the case of 11. They are breaks in the action, relatively speaking.

But there's more to the story. The 30 variations are grouped in 3's, with all but the first group of 3 and the last group of 3 following this pattern: the first variation is a standard baroque form, the second is a virtuosic piece written for the hands to play on separate keyboards (or manuals), and the third is a canon. The two manual movements are a bitch to play on piano, because they involve all sorts of hand crossings and doublings of notes between the hands. On a harpsichord with two manuals, these repeated crossings are no particular problem, because the hands are playing separate keyboards, but on piano, they're nearly unplayable without resorting to "cheating" (I'll explain later). Part of the reason these two variations above make the loser list is that they make the worst use of my instrument of choice, and it's hard to hide. These two-manual movements are also generally the most energetic and lively of the variations, with 11 and 17 being the exceptions. But it's all uphill from there.

music, form, and perception, cont'd

2010-08-01T13:57:00.010-05:00

Well, this post certainly generated a conversation! Okay, admittedly, one of the comments is mine and one is a repetition, but still. I feel delightedly compelled to address them.

Sarah says:

"ALSO, if there's one thing med school has taught me, it's that one study does not a phenomenon make. (also: spinal cord pathways)."

There's actually a surprising number of studies, all of which have their issues, but converge on the same basic conclusion. The one thing these studies seem to lack is repetition, mostly for understandable logistical reasons. At the bottom here I included a bunch of references I used in the paper I wrote about this last year. The studies can all be found on web of science with an academic subscription.

Alissa says:

"i'd be interested in knowing what the results of that same survey would have been back in the 18th/19th/early 20th centuries..."

Well, the point of the studies, if you believe them, is not just to assess how people listen to music in a "naturalistic" setting, ie, just listening for funsies, but also to assess how they listen in "attentive" conditions, even testing musically trained participants, who supposedly have plenty of experience with that kind of listening and know how to listen to classical music. With some caveats, the same types of results are relatively robust, even for that population. Now, if you give a non-Western listener the same type of music, their perception is completely different, but music hasn't changed that much over the last few hundred years, in the Western world at least, to suggest that people's perceptions of it has fundamentally changed.

Charles Rosen actually writes a lot about this, but as a musicologist he gets the psychology of it all wrong. The idea that a general audience in the past could better perceive various structural aspects of the music they were listening to despite significantly less exposure is highly dubious at best.

Ellen says:

"The studies don't consider unconscious response, and unconscious response is probably even more crucial to hearing music (or the other art forms) than conscious and measurable replies."

Although it's impossible to assess every possible unconscious reaction to a stimulus, these studies do a pretty good job of looking at the variance between people's unconscious perceptions of different stimuli by looking at a range of responses after the stimuli. In any psychology experiment that's looking at unconscious perception, the goal is to find a behavioral or conscious manifestation of the unconscious response. For instance, in this famous study (from a lab I worked in at Yale!), the subjects' unconscious reaction to the temperature of the drink they were holding manifested in their later assessment of the experimenter.

Most of these music studies come in one of two types. In the between-subject experiments, the experimenters present two different groups of listeners with different musical examples, one of which (the test stimulus) is manipulated in some way, either to end in the wrong key, or fragmented, or whatever, the other of which is in its original form (the control). All the listeners then evaluate their given excerpts in a questionnaire. Even if the test subjects don't realize that their stimulus is manipulated, we would expect them to react unconsciously to the manipulation and later rate the musical excerpt lower in the post-experimental evaluation than those in the control condition. In the within-subject experiments, the listeners directly compare the manipulated and the control stimulus. One of my biggest criticisms of this literature is actually that most of the experiments are done with a within-subject, rather than between-subject, design, but that's another story....

i'll get to andy's and dad's comments later.

some studies:

Bigand, Emmanuel and Parncutt, Richard. “Perceiving musical tension in long chord sequences.” Psychological Research 62 (1999), 237-254.

Cook, Nicholas. “The perception of large-scale tonal closure.” Music Perception 5:2(1987), 197-206.

Eitan, Zohar and Granot, Roni Y. “Growing oranges on Mozart’s apple tree: ‘inner form’ and aesthetic judgment.” Music Perception 25(5): 2008, 397-417

Gotlieb, Heidi and Konecni, Vladimir. “The effects of instrumentation, playing style, and structure in the Goldberg Variations by JS Bach.” Music Perception 3:1 (1985), 87-101.

Karno, Mitchell and Konecni, Vladimir. “The effects of structural interventions in the first movement of Mozart’s sympony in g minor K. 550 on aesthetic preference.” Music Perception 10(1):1992, 63-72

Marvin, Elizabeth W and Brinkman, Alexander. “The effect of modulation and formal manipulation on perception of tonic closure by expert listeners.” Music Perception 16(4): 389-408

Pollard-Gott, Lucy. “Emergence of thematic concepts in repeated listening to music.” Cognitive Psychology 15 (1983), 66-94.

Tan, Sui Lu, et al. “The Effects of repeated exposure on liking and judgments of musical unity of intact and patchwork compositions.” Music Perception 23:5 (2006), 407-421.

Tillmann, Barbara and Bigand, Emmanuel. “Influence of global structure on musical target detection and recognition.” International Journal of Psychology, 33 (2): 1998, 107-122.

Tillmann, Barbara, et al. “Effects of global and local contexts on harmonic expectancy.” Music Perception 16(1): 1998, 99-117.

living with pain

2010-07-31T16:39:00.003-05:00

Time for a brief foray into something completely new—medicine!—well, sort of, at least. Really what I want to talk about is our society's approach to pain, suffering, and disease.

Whoa, that's a hefty topic! Well, there's a personal experience behind it, one that's affected me significantly over the last few years. Hopefully I can convince you that my story is relevant more generally.

I've suffered from chronic pain for about 7 years now, and I can tell you that every traditional and alternative approach I've tried to make the pain go away has been a complete and typically expensive (sorry mom and dad!) failure. For those who don't know me well, I didn't play the piano or soccer for about 3 years, due to pain in my hands, legs and ankles. I had MRIs, EMGs, cortisone shots, acupuncture, alexander technique, physical therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, you name it! I even tried some Freudian shit for a while. Luckily my story has a happy ending, but not one that involves any type of cure.

The fact is that we approach medicine as a quest to find what's wrong with us and make it better. Seems pretty obvious, right? We assume that every discomfort is our enemy and every problem has some sort of solution. From a certain perspective, this makes sense. Our bodies are adapted to navigate their environments such that the usual discomforts of life, like hunger, thirst, cold, and pain, are signals from our bodies to our minds that something is wrong and that we should change our behavior accordingly.

On the other hand, the relationship and interaction between our bodies, our minds, and our environments is much more complicated. In particular, the manner and degree to which our psychological state affects our physical state is poorly understood. There's the mysterious placebo effect, by which mere belief in the efficacy of a treatment enhances its effectiveness. This is true not only for merely subjective measures, like pain or mood, but completely objective ones, like the level of cholesterol in one's blood or the maximum amount of oxygen pumped through one's heart. The latter effect is so incredibly awesome in comparison with the former; people can manipulate processes in their own bodies about which they are completely ignorant. That is, most people don't even know what cholesterol is, or how it works, or what it does, but if you tell them a pill will improve their cholesterol, it will! If I'm not mistaken, this is due to some sort of general health boost that people get from placebos. How cool is that?

For another great example of how profound is our misunderstanding of our mind's effects on our physical health, see this recent (and awesome) article in the New Yorker about end-of-life care for terminally patients. The phenomenon the article gets at is our instinctive and never-ending desire to fight our illnesses to the end, and squeeze out as much life as we can. But it turns out that people who accept their fate and stop treatment, opting instead for hospice care at home, outlive the people who try to live as long as possible, treating every new malady as it arises. To most of us, author included, this is a really counter-intuitive effect, but to me, it's no surprise. The patients who opt for home care and less treatment have a much healthier perspective on their condition. They accept that, though they could die at any time, they would lose more, in quality of their existence, in trying to cheat death at every turn.

This perspective pretty much saved my own life. My incessant search for a cure, for a way to get better, was my worst enemy. I've found that, little by little, as I learn to be more open to my physical and mental states, whatever they are, that my pain has become less and less of a burden. It's actually a liberating idea, one that's so obvious, yet so difficult to live by, that has brought me back to life the past couple of years: reject the goal or the aim of eliminating pain, and living with it becomes much easier. Like the terminally ill patients mentioned above, this attitude also results in the most awesome catch-22: my willingness to feel pain and accept it ends up dramatically reducing it. And the same line of reasoning starts to bleed into other areas of life too. In that way, it's become an opportunity more than a curse.

Stepping away from the philosophical and back to the medical, though, what's remarkable is how many people could use a basic dose of the above idea and how much suffering (not to mention money) it could save them. I used to think I was alone with this condition that seemed intractable and untreatable, and that was severely affecting the quality of my life. I thought I was the only one who's body was so messed up it just wouldn't let me live my life. But it turns out, these types of conditions are common, whether they come in the form of pain, or other chronic health problems. Who knows, maybe my situation is really atypical (I'm certainly no doctor!), but it’s hard to know, because mainstream medicine doesn’t track, or treat, people with chronic pain very effectively.

Why is that? One of the problems is lack of negative feedback: though every single doctor I've ever seen about my pain has been no help whatsoever, none of them really knows this, because I would often improve in the short run, but would never go back to them in the long run ('cause they were more or less useless). None of them will ever know that I was a treatment failure, that they diagnosed me all wrong, and that most of what they did for me was unnecessary and wasteful.

Anyone who's interested in what really changed my life should check out these books on mindfulness and meditation...More to follow...

shameless self-promotion, balanced by shame-filled self-criticism

2010-07-30T01:46:00.001-05:00

A little more summer reflection, this time, in the form of self-evaluation of some of my performances from last spring. After a few months, I feel prepared to listen to them with open ears and resist the urge to instinctively cringe. Instead I cringe now as a real response to what I'm hearing! Just kidding...mostly...

Anyway, I start with what was I think my biggest over-achievement of the whole year: the Chopin Scherzo that closed the program of my recital.

Pros: It's fiery, fast, and uncharacteristically accurate. Through my whole life of playing piano, I've forgone most of the "big" repertoire in favor of Bach and Mozart, partly because I love Bach and Mozart, but also because I lack the time, the will or the technique to get the big stuff together. Most piano music written after 1830 terrifies me. But this performance turned out well, with exceptions. It's the second fastest tempo I've yet heard from anyone (Richter's live recording being the exception), and it matches the character of the piece perfectly. Most people treat it too lightly. But the outer sections aren't light, or nice, or delicate, at all. They're violent, angry and brutal. I really like the parts the move ahead and rush in the opening as well, giving it a general feeling of unsteadiness.

Cons: Well, it wasn't all clean, for instance the 9th chord at 1:02, or, more unfortunately, the e# in the 3rd to last chord (gah!!). Some habits of timing really annoy me in the repeated sections and sound generally uncreative. 0:14-0:15 sounds just like 1:19-1:20 sounds just like 2:25-2:26. Though I like the character of the outer sections, it's a bit pedantic and lacks variety.

Compare the recital performance to the other one posted [okay, so i wrote this as the track was uploading from my itunes, unsuccessfully....hopefully I'll actually get it together soon], which I'm now ashamed to say was made for and played on the radio in Chicago. It lacks the same security, comfort, and character of the recital performance. It's slower and heavier. It's less sharp and biting. And on top of that it has all the problems of the recital performance. Trust me, it more or less sucked.

Next up: something else from the recital if I can stomach it....which ps is posted here.

how do people really listen to music?

2010-07-29T09:55:00.006-05:00

In my post-World-Cup attempt to find some other meaningful aspect of life, I'm going back tomy one tried-and-true blogging topic: soccer....wait, I mean, music! Life has indeed been hard the last few weeks, but it's time to move on and explore some new things musical and otherwise...For today, a quick reflection on some stuff I learned about music this year...

Going to school for performing "classical" music is rough, because it turns out most people don't really like classical music, at least not enough to pay me to play it for them. As a result, I spend a lot of my time wondering and trying to find out why people don't more closely share my taste--especially in an effort to understand my future audiences, but especially to see if their taste could be re-classified as some sort of medical disorder.

In all seriousness though, I discovered something this year that is at once completely startling, but also one of those things I kinda knew all along: people in general don't listen to, and are incapable of comprehending, form in music at anything but the smallest scale. In general, people listen to music moment-by-moment or minute-by-minute without making meaningful cognitive connections between larger segments.

More specifically, it means people don't hear key relationships in tonal music, and don't listen for tonal closure at intervals longer than about a minute. I remember going to a concert at Marlboro a couple of years ago where they played the Trout Quintet, by Schubert. The last movement is actually really unusual for a piece of that era, but relevant to this discussion, it divides into two parts, which are identical except that the first part starts in the home key and ends a fourth above, and the next part starts a fifth above and ends back in the original. Schubert also wrote repeats for both sections, making a total of four big sections of music about 3-4 minutes each. The audience applauded wildly after the first section, thinking the piece was over, and not realizing it had ended in the wrong key, and then tried to applaud again after the repeat, though this time Mitsuko Uchida was ready and waved a warning finger in the audience's direction after the cadence. Thankfully they didn't take the second repeat. Anyway the point is this: people don't get, or at least don't care, the whole key-relationship thing in music.

This phenomenon is replicated in controlled experimental settings, along with other unexpected ones. Perhaps the most heartbreaking study I read chopped up the first movement of Mozart's g minor symphony k 550 into eight parts and arranged them randomly, and subjects, musically trained or not, showed no significant preferences for any order over any other.

These experiments are a real kick-in-the-face because they purport to show that all the tireless effort that goes into constructing musical masterpieces goes more or less over our heads. For scholars of Western music theory and music history, form in music is taken to be its most distinguishing, characteristic factor, what separates the merely good from the great. Is it all just an illusion that we've accepted based on composers' own descriptions? Do we really know what we're talking about and how we're listening to music at all?

My take: musical form in its various aspects is definitely important to me, but I think these studies generally underplay the effects of repeated exposure....like, a lot of repeated exposure (as some studies do make their subjects listen to something 2-5 times).

At the same time, though, I've known for a long time that what separates great music from the mediocre isn't large-scale, but something much more essential. From when I was young, in my family we would regularly turn on the "classical" radio station whenever we'd go anywhere in the car, and we could almost always tell whether what we were hearing was worth listening to within 5 seconds. Even individual composers, most notably Bach, Mozart, Brahms, leave an indelible mark on their music on the smallest timescales. How do they do it? What makes their music so great, so quickly? That's the greatest mystery of all....

world cup final, part 2

2010-07-11T18:50:00.005-05:00

Thoughts on the refereeing: it wasn't good, but it could have been worse. Howard Webb probably didn't help himself by unnecessarily booking van Persie and Ramos early on, but a lot of the critics are a little harsh to suggest he should have stayed out of the game. Yes, we'd all like to watch games where we don't notice the referee, but it's hard for the referee to avoid attention when players make challenges like this. That's a red card if I've ever seen one, and was one of Webb's mistakes. Other crucial ones: Puyol should have been booked for his challenge on Robben in the second half...Webb played the advantage, but it's one of those where the foul should have been called after Robben lost the ball, or at least the booking should have been given to Puyol after the play. It would have been his second and he would have been sent off as well.

In the aftermath of the goal, the Dutch players were complaining a lot....since they were directing most of their attention at the assistant referee, I can only assume they wanted the goal called back for offside. Are they crazy? Why did they assume that they were right about the offside decision when they were so blatantly wrong?

I think they were also angry about the botched corner kick call from Sneider's free kick only moments earlier. For this I sympathize with them fully: it was quite clearly a corner kick, and everyone in the stadium saw that. But those kinds of calls are botched all the time. Get on with it and play the game!

Spain were the dominant team, but the Dutch had their chances as well, and each side was shockingly inept in front of goal. Robben should have had a pair of goals. Ramos missed the easiest chance of the game with his header off Xavi's corner. And David Villa's chance! I was sure he'd scored.

The real difference-maker, for me, was Cesc Fabregas, who came on for Xabi Alonso about midway through the second half. Except for the one-on-one chance he missed (did he see Navas to his right??), he completely changed the game in Spain's favor, and eventually provided the winning assist. He may have only played 40 minutes, but he might edge out Iniesta and Xavi for my man of the match. David Villa was disappointing again, losing possession here and there, and not really creating much for himself.

I just found out Diego Forlan won the Golden Ball....umm, really? Xavi and Iniesta were the players of the tournament for sure, and I'm shocked they didn't win, especially having played on the winning side. At any rate, I'd expect them to go 1-2 for European and world players of the year after that final. Congratulations Spain!!

The world cup final: "Don't you love this game in the most hateful sort of way?"

2010-07-11T18:04:00.005-05:00

That's what I texted my sister right after Andres Iniesta FINALLY gave Spain the winner in today's game, and it sums up my thoughts pretty well.

As I said earlier in the tournament Spain are a difficult side to support, and watching today's game was 115 minutes of torture followed by a moment of bliss. It would have all seemed like such a waste of a tournament if it had gone to penalties, and especially if Holland had won. Why spend so much time agonizing over a sport when the winning team kicks and fouls its way to victory in the ugliest manner possible? Iniesta, like he did against Chelsea, saved the day again. In the inevitable and everlasting battle between between artists and kick-boxers, between style and ruthlessness, the right side won. A victory for soccer!!

That being said, it wasn't the greatest match I've ever seen, especially when compared with Spain's semifinal against Germany which ended with the same scoreline. In that game, there were no fouls for the first 28 minutes. In this one, there were 3 fouls in the first minute, and they didn't stop there. Although both sides were playing rough, the Dutch walked onto the pitch with the intent of killing the game and making it as ugly as possible (committing 28 fouls overall to Spain's 19, and collecting 9 bookings to Spain's 5). Needless to say I was not such a big fan of these tactics. I also found that of the few of my friends and family who started out supporting the Dutch, most were appalled enough to switch allegiances in the course of the match. Before the final, my Dad commented: "No pity for the long-suffering Dutch??? Ach, you're a cruel man..." I certainly don't pity the Dutch team after that display! I do, in retrospect, pity their fans, who had to watch a group of perfectly capable footballers turn into a bunch of maniacs on the pitch.

Naturally, most of the post-match commentary has focused on the excessive roughness of the game, claiming there was little artistry on display. I think that consensus kind of misses the point, as Spain attacked relentlessly, whenever they weren't busy being kicked. They carved a number of good chances and kept the ball exceptionally well for long periods. Xavi gave the ball away approximately three times, and probably completed over 100 passes. Iniesta was likewise brilliant, and saved himself from his own embarrassing lack of finishing--what was he doing on those other two chances, trying to dribble into the goal??--with a wonderful strike to end the discussion.

more thoughts to come....

the final is coming!!

2010-07-09T12:29:00.004-05:00

The final is coming!!

Spain were brilliant against Germany, and should have had more goals to show for it. Germany, on the other hand, didn't play a great game for a few reasons. The first was the unfortunate absence of Muller, who was dubiously suspended for a second yellow card against Argentina. Trochowski, his replacement, doesn't have the same quality. The next reason was the rather poor play of Oezil, who had been, I think, Germany's best player so far in the tournament. He looked quite nervous from the start of the game, and never really settled. With his frequently botched touches and poor passes, Germany couldn't get much going forward.

And what about their tactics? It's hard to say whether they were pinned back unintentionally by Spain's possession and passing, or whether they sat back purposefully, looking to go forward on the counter. There was a stretch in the second half where Germany could hardly keep the ball for more than three passes, and you can hardly blame tactics for that. At the same time, I think they didn't quite push forward as much as they naturally would have, and were punished for it. It seemed that Schweinsteiger in particular limited his forays into Spain's half, and I think that was another factor in their lack of attacking bite.

Anyway, for reasons excellently echoed here, here and here, I'll be supporting Spain with all my heart and soul on Sunday. Any neutral, or football purist, should do the same. The Netherlands used to be my favorite team on the planet in the late 90's, playing the old Dutch style of "total football, "exemplified by players like Bergkamp, Overmars and Cocu. But that team is long gone, and though they still have great attacking players, they play a more defensive style. Nowadays, the mantle of beautiful soccer is carried on by Spain. As many have pointed out, Spain can thank the Netherlands of the past for its attacking style, since Johann Cruyff, the great Dutch player from 1974, brought total football to Barcelona, where it has for nearly two decades been a guiding principle, even more important than winning trophies. Spain's line-up Wednesday featured seven Barcelona players. From the midfield forward the only difference is Xabi Alonso for Lionel Messi (with that difference making Barca far superior of course).

Mark van Bommel, Netherlands' midfield enforcer, used to be a different type of player when he played at Barcelona, where he played as an attacking midfielder. In this tournament his most notable contribution has been to commit a lot of fouls, including a few really cynical ones against Brazil for which he was lucky to escape further punishment (remember him taking down Lucio right outside the penalty area with five minutes remaining?).

Other interesting notes for the final:

If Spain win, Xavi will surely win player of the tournament and world player of the year, finally. His first touch on the ball is stunning, and his passing is nearly perfect. He can receive the ball in any position, and thus he is able to get more touches, and completes more forward passes, than any other player. Iniesta is the only other midfielder who's within a stone's throw in terms of quality, and their only real weakness as players is their finishing. What's most remarkable is that they are the two best midfielders in the world without having a single notable physical characteristic: neither is tall, fast, strong, or even especially quick. They're just damn good with the ball at their feet.

If the Netherlands win, then Wesley Sneijder will probably win World Player of the Year. He's an excellent player, and a good goalscorer too, but he can't control a match the way Xavi and Iniesta do, as we'll all see on Sunday.

David Villa has likewise received a lot of praise this tournament, with good reason: without his finishing ability, Spain would be a bunch of playmakers with no chance at ever scoring. But though he's been excellent in general, he owes most of his chances, and the general tempo of every match Spain plays, to his midfield compatriots. He was also far from his best in the semifinal, and was duly substituted with a few minutes remaining.

I hope, and expect, Spain to start the same way they did against Germany, with Pedro again playing in favor of Torres. Pedro, another Barca man, was energetic and ever-threatening against Germany, despite his one unfortunate decision in the 85th minute or so, where he made a terrible decision in a 2 on 1 counterattack. Still, he's well worth another start.

I expect the game to be a lot like all of Spain's games in the tournament: they'll possess the ball and pin back the Netherlands, who will defend with everything they've got, and make rare attacks. But Spain will find a way through. final score 2-0.

Come on Spain!!!!

more on Suarez handball, and why it matters for the rules, the integrity of the game, etc.

2010-07-08T01:35:00.006-05:00

This Suarez controversy may be more complicated than I my original reaction implied, and it's definitely useful as a thought-provoker about what has quickly become a theme on this blog: the economics and psychology of soccer.

A reader commented on my last post about Suarez:

"Can someone please explain to me how this handball was fundamentally different from other fouls in soccer? (Personally, I don't think that it was)...You say: "The whole point of having punishments for breaking the rules is to deter players from breaking the rules." This is definitely not true in soccer. For example, if two players are fighting for the ball in midfield and one of them is holding the other's shirt because he is about to lose the ball and a foul is called, it will not deter the player from doing it again."

Now, to get to it, there are two basic answers to the reader's question of why Suarez's foul was different. Without even getting into any philosophy about rules, infractions, and punishment, the first reason is largely procedural: only because of the unique situation of the game did Suarez's foul make rational sense; in 99.9% of soccer matches he wouldn't have made the same play, because of the suspension he would receive combined with the risk of the penalty kick. In other words, the rules generally function well enough to deter this kind of blatant foul, but not in this particular situation. It's as if Suarez found and exploited a loophole in the system of punishments to break the rules in a way that otherwise wouldn't pay off.

My point about the purpose of punishments for rules is true, but I guess needs some explanation with respect to soccer. [I personally believe, as I've been stating on this blog from the beginning over and over and over, that the rules of soccer could use some improvement, mostly to more efficiently deter fouling ... although yellow cards are the extra incentive not to commit the given foul you cite, or at least not repeatedly.]

The problem is, when designing a set of punishments for infractions in soccer, you can't make the punishments so severe as to deter all rule-breaking, because in making them so severe you would also make it nearly impossible to play in a rule-abiding manner. If you punished every foul with a red card, defending players wouldn't be able to make even the cleanest attempts at tackles out of fear that they would miss the ball and be tossed from the game. In addition, overly draconian penalties lead to a loss of marginal deterrence of the severity of the infraction...(if you commit a foul and are gonna get tossed from the game, you might as well take a chunk out of a player's leg too!). There's an optimum level of punishment for infractions that carefully balances these opposing considerations: allowing teams to defend vigorously, but punishing them adequately for unfair play. Soccer might not quite reach that optimum level on all occasions, but it functions pretty well.

So to get to the other half of my short answer: most of the fouls committed in the course of a soccer game are committed in good faith, as a result of honest attempts to win the ball fairly from the other team.

Doping, intentionally injuring players, and diving to save a goal with one's hands are all examples that are, I think, generally considered cheating and unsportsmanlike, because they have no relation, incidental or otherwise, to "good-faith" play. Because of this, they should be severely punished, should never be rationally desirable, and should more or less universally deterred, unlike fouling in general. The existing punishments generally reflect this need for increased deterrence.

This whole controversy also requires a discussion of "norms" that supplement "rules" in soccer (as discussed here), especially regarding "professional fouls" and other misconduct that are generally punishable with yellow and red cards, because I think those are closer to the sorts of fouls the commenter is getting at, and complicate the situation somewhat, since many professional fouls aren't made in honest attempts to play the ball. Suffice it to say for now that there are different levels of professional fouls, and that there are different levels of "intention" when we're talking about fouling.

The general point is this: even the cleanest players commit fouls, and even get cards, without any prior intention to break the rules for their own team's benefit. Fouls and cards are inevitable, even in the normal course of play. Suarez's play is as far from this category as you can get!

world cup thoughts of the day, part 2: the other quarterfinals and my final predictions

2010-07-04T20:48:00.006-05:00

Told you so about Germany-Argentina! The team I've been touting since their first game against Australia came through again, though even I didn't expect them to destroy Maradona's side so comprehensively. Do you know when the last time was that a team scored 4 goals in a row in two straight games in the World Cup? It was Brazil, in its two final first round games against Scotland and New Zealand, way back in 1982. This was Germany, in two straight knockout phase matches, against two of the pre-tournament favorites. England had only given up one goal prior to facing Germany, and, let's be honest, it wasn't much of a goal. Argentina paid dearly, I think, for sticking with Higuain in attack over Milito. He was decent, and even created one good chance for himself, but in the end I just don't think he's nearly as good technically. Messi was brilliant as usual, but even he couldn't win the game by himself.

Spain again didn't live up to their quality, but did enough to beat Paraguay. They really started to play sometime after that bizarre sequence of play with the two missed penalties, and after Torres was replaced with Fabregas, who was excellent after coming on. The big question for Spain will be who starts in attack against Germany. Will del Bosque stick with Torres, who has yet to do much in this tournament except give the ball away, or go with Fabregas in a 4-5-1? Based on what I've seen, I'd have to go with Fabregas.

I'll still have to give this one to Germany though. Even without Muller, who is suspended for the semifinal after a really dubious yellow card for handball, they are too dynamic in attack. Never have I ever seen a team look so comfortable in the final third of the field. The tactics in this one will be interesting. Will the Germans let Spain possess and then break on the counter, or press the game, as they have done against all their other opponents, and as Paraguay did against Spain? Either way it has the makings of a classic game.

Netherlands are in the semifinal courtesy only of Brazil's self-destruction. Before their lucky fluke of a first goal, Brazil looked like they were going to double their lead at any moment. Credit to Netherlands, though, as they kept their heads, and Brazil certainly didn't. What was Felipe Melo thinking when he stomped on Robben? There were nearly 20 minutes left in the game, and Brazil again looked threatening, even if they were still rattled.

So there you go. Germany-Netherlands final, and Germany to win it all! But if Spain really get it together in the next few days, they could win it as well.

world cup thoughts of the day: end penalty shoot-outs!

2010-07-04T20:18:00.007-05:00

Possibly the worst part about the World Cup is the fact that penalty shoot-outs are still used to decide the winners of knockout-phase matches.

Like their problems in the run of play, the first problem with using penalties in a shoot-out is that they're too damn easy to score (about 80% success rate). Any professional player should make his penalty, and thus, a penalty shoot-out inevitably produces villains, and rarely produces heroes (except for, occasionally, a goalkeeper). More often though players miss the target or hit mediocre penalties and have to live with it for four years.

The other reason penalties make a poor tie-breaker is that the skills involved in taking penalties have little or no relation to being a good soccer player, or being part of a good team. In that sense, even if penalty shoot-outs are less random than a coin toss (which they probably aren't) then their non-randomness is useless anyway.

A few alternatives to penalties, in descending order of conservatism:

1. Just move the ball back to 18, or 20, or 25 yards. Now it's much less random and actually takes some skill to score.

2. Use the number of goals scored, or goal difference, up to that point in the tournament as a first tie-breaker (this change would of course be consistent with any other change too).

3. Start taking players off the field in extra time, and keep playing. That is, after 105 minutes, play 9 on 9...after 110, 7 v 7, 115, 5 v 5. Someone will score eventually.

For some reason, penalties make even less sense for deciding the final as opposed to the other knockout matches, as in 1994 and 2006. I guess passage to the next knockout game retroactively legitimizes the penalty shoot-out, but how could something so random really be the final decider in the world cup? It just leaves you thinking both two teams might as well have split the trophy...

Suarez handball, continued

2010-07-03T18:01:00.003-05:00

Apparently FIFA is considering extending Suarez's ban. The more I think about it, the more I think it would be absurdly stupid to leave the suspension at just one game.

The whole point of having punishments for breaking the rules is to deter players from breaking the rules. What punishment would be adequate to deter Suarez, or another player in his place, from doing the same thing in the last five minutes of the semifinal, or god forbird, the world cup final? Certainly a one match suspension isn't gonna do it. I'm thinking five at least, and probably more like 10-15 international matches. (In these instances, a ban that extends beyond the World Cup would mean the player would miss his country's following competitive games...in this case those games wouldn't be nearly as important as the World Cup games, but a large enough suspension would keep most players from pulling a stunt like Suarez). If FIFA leaves the suspension at just one game, then I suspect we could see some other teams start playing with 11 goalkeepers instead of one toward the ends of their World Cup knockout matches.

world cup thoughts of the day, part 1: Ghana-Uruguay

2010-07-03T12:18:00.008-05:00

As I lay awake last night, unable to sleep, I was thankful for the fact that I didn't see the Ghana game live, and thankful that, prior to hearing about the game, I didn't really care about the result. Even as a disinterested neutral, watching the replays was almost too much to bear.

For those who don't know yet, Suarez was recently handed a one-match suspension for his handball in the final minute of extra-time.

It is another horrendous decision, this time made by the FIFA board almost a day after the match was completed. Watching the replay, it's obvious that Suarez is guilty of blatant cheating, and should play no further part in the World Cup. His decision to block the goal was calculated and deliberate, intended only to give his team a fighting chance of progressing to the semifinal. How is it any different, then, from doping, which carries a much larger mandatory ban? I'm also appalled to find so many people condoning or praising Suarez's actions, or comparing to Torsten Frings' handball (2:15 into the video) that was missed by the referees against the USA in 2002. While I have no doubt that Frings' handball was deliberate in a loose sense of the word, it's a different type of play altogether. For me, Suarez's handball is cheating of the most despicable and cynical sort. If I were playing on the Uruguay team I would have refused to take a penalty in the shoot-out, and if I were Uruguayan I wouldn't celebrate the victory at all.

I think we can all agree that, with two shoot-out wins, one the result of horrendous unsportsmanlike play, Uruguay don't deserve to be in the World Cup anymore. Let's go Netherlands!!

Interesting note, however: The goalmouth scramble that ended with Suarez's handball should have actually been flagged for offside, as this replay clearly shows. The offside is on the initial header, with the player who takes the initial left-footed strike at goal the culprit, since he is closer to the goal-line than the goalkeeper....doesn't change how I feel about Suarez: it's one of those borderline decisions, and there's no way Suarez knew about it at the time, and no one seems to be pointing it out in the aftermath either...

world cup sidetrack: what the hell makes a good attacking team anyway?

2010-06-30T00:58:00.006-05:00

You'll notice if you watch much soccer or read much about it that everyone likes to talk about creativity in attacking play without ever explaining with any sort of precision what that means (a sin I've been guilty of too). In reality, it's quite a complicated matter, which is why it's so hard for teams to be good and score goals. Pure technique is a huge factor in good attacking play (that is, the ability of individual players to make the ball go exactly where they intend it to go with individual touches and passes). But aside from technical ability there is large variation in the degree and the quality of movement that separates teams as well. I know of nobody who systematically and comprehensively thinks about what constitutes good "movement off the ball," even though it's a critical factor in scoring goals.

One of the most important aspects of movement is the ability to deceive defenders and get them to "lose track" of one's path. Any time there's a defender "marking" a player, that defender has to attend to the player's path in order to "stay with" the player, but also has to track the path of the ball in order to know how to position himself and generally know what's going on in the game. This requires a constant shifting of visual attention between the ball and the relevant player. The most effective runs, therefore, are often initiated while the ball is moving. That is, a defender is much more likely to lose track of an attacker, and not follow his run, when the run is started while the ball is being passed from one player to another, because it's harder to track two moving objects than one moving one simultaneously with another stationary one.

In addition, there's one type of run that is particularly difficult for defenders to track while they track the ball: runs that cross the path of the ball. I'm quite surprised that I've never heard anybody make note of this fact, whether commentators, coaches, or writers. [For two random examples that just popped into my head see Germany's second goal against England (~1:10 in the video) from Monday, and Holland's first goal against argentina in 1998 (~50 seconds into the video). Notice how awesome these goals are because of the cross-ball-path runs by Muller and Kluivert respectively...they completely catch their defenders "ball-watching"] The reason these runs work so well is the same reason that crossing voices are hard to follow in counterpoint...apologies for the convoluted music analogy, but it works really well here. What happens is it becomes much harder to identify the two paths accurately as separate "streams" or separate "objects" in the mind because as the player's head turns to track the ball the path of the player goes in the other direction. As long as the paths remain distinct and separate, the defender's task is much easier; when a player's run crosses the path of the ball, the two paths become confused, and the defender inevitably attends to the ball over the player.

Germany are the best team so far in the World Cup at making these types of runs. Spain and Argentina are more technical, and also good at confusing defenders with their movement, but Germany are really shockingly good at it.

Of course there are other relevant things to talk about here, especially coordinated movements between different attacking players to intentionally distort an opposition team's shape or positioning. That'll be for another time.

penalties penalties penalties

2010-06-29T13:36:00.002-05:00

If ever there was a reason to change the rules for penalties, we just saw it in the 5th minute of the Spain-Portugal match. Torres was clearly fouled and anywhere else on the pitch it would have been given. Come on!

world cup thoughts of the day

2010-06-27T23:43:00.005-05:00

1. Overall the play has improved a lot since the first set of games, and the matches have been much more exciting. A lot of the teams that sat back and played for draws in their opening matches are out, and I suspect, rueing their engative tactics (eg France, Ivory Coast, Serbia, etc.). The second round matches have so far been pretty awesome (despite today's refereeing). We'll see if things continue this way, or revert to 2006 low-scoring, defensive-style games. It's great to see teams attacking, but I still think the format of the tournament could be tweaked, and the rules modified to make the game that much better.

2. As I predicted, Germany were well worth their victory today against England, and I fancy them to knock out Argentina in the quarterfinal. They attack with real confidence and flair; their second goal was the best team goal of the tournament so far. Argentina, meanwhile, were a bit lucky to get by Mexico so easily, but are always threatening in attack. I continue to wonder about Maradona's preferring Higuain over Milito. At this point, there's no turning back, given his four goals in the tournament, but three of those goals were served on a platter for him by Messi, or today, Osorio. The quarterfinal should be a cracking game, but I think the Germans will come out on top.

3. Unfortunately, the three best teams (Argentina, Germany and Spain) are all on the same side of the draw. Brazil are still joint favorites, but for me, look much less inventive in attack than the above three countries. With Kaka playing poorly and Elano questionable for the next game, Robinho is the only real creative threat. Brazil only managed two goals against a weak North Korea, stole the game against Ivory Coast with Fabiano's double handball, and failed to break down the Portuguese defense. I think Chile will give them real trouble, and I'd give them a 40% shot at taking out the favorites.

4. What will happen with Spain? At their best, they're the best team in the world, with all the attacking prowess of Germany or Argentina minus the defensive problems. But will they choke again, or succumb to dodgy finishing as they did against Switzerland and as they have in recent world cups? They looked terrified in the first half against Chile, until the second goal, and after getting really lucky with the first. They were certainly due a bit of luck, but they might find it hard to come by in the knockout phase. Portugal, meanwhile, will try to kill the game against Spain as they did against Brazil. Don't be fooled by the North Korea game. They've turned out to be a real bore, and I expect them to continue where they left off in 2006, scoring just one goal in their three knockout phase games. Let's all hope Spain do better than Brazil did. If they can get past Portugal they should make it to the semis, where we should see another great game against Germany/Argentina.

5. The referees: what the hell were they doing today? Everyone in the stadium saw Lampard's shot go over the line. On the offside at least, I will plead the assistant's case and remind everyone that offsides are impossible to call if your eyes are following the ball, which in this case the assistants' assuredly were. All this is to say that another person is needed to help judge offsides, as I've argued before. And the Lampard non-goal makes the best argument for goal-line cameras to judge whether a goal has in fact been scored. More on that later

US-Ghana thoughts: Why, Bob Bradley, why???

2010-06-27T18:35:00.006-05:00

Another good game, between two evenly matched teams, and in the end, I think we were unlucky to lose. It was a tale of two halves once again: in the first half we were woeful and could hardly find a pass; in the second, especially leading to the goal, we looked really dangerous. But we decisively lost the tactical and psychological battle that the match became. For some reason, this US team just can't seem to motivate themselves to attack with real commitment except when they're behind or chasing the game. And it would have helped to have the right players on the field from the start!!

We were totally out of sorts for the first twenty or so minutes. Ghana dominated the game and could have had more than a single goal. Bradley decided to play Clark in the center of midfield for god-only-knows what reason, and quickly realized it was a mistake. Edu was superior from the moment he stepped on the field. Findley wasn't awful, but when Feilhaber came on to start the second half our midfield play took a giant leap in quality. The second half started with the team I would've chosen to start, and the team looked like a real force to be reckoned with for the first time in the match, and were soon rewarded with the goal. But about 10 minutes or so after the goal, we completely lost the momentum. Some credit is certainly due to Ghana, who stepped up their play after we tied the match; but we stopped finding passes, committing players forward in the same numbers, and looked to be a bit satisfied with the draw. And it cost us. I just can't imagine why we would be at all happy with the draw in that situation and not play the rest of the game as if we desperately needed another goal. We looked like a really solid team for about 20 minutes in the game, but apart from that, Ghana were well worth their victory.

If we had started with Edu and Feilhaber, maybe some fresh legs would have helped in overtime. Maybe not. Also, Altidore's substitution perplexed me. He was visibly tired, but even so, was much more of a threat, especially in the air, than Gomez was once he came on.

Oh well, on to the rest of the tournament.

USA-Ghana

2010-06-25T23:23:00.004-05:00

The internet is abuzz with the possibility that the US team could make the semifinals of the World Cup. It's certainly the best chance we've ever had! (Well, since 1930 that is, but that one hardly counts). The bookies have us as favorites to win the game at 2.7/1, with Ghana at 3/1 and a draw after 90 at 3.5/1. I'll take it! What's slightly puzzling is that every match preview I've read puts Onyewu, Clark, and/or Findley back in the US starting lineup. Are you kidding me??? I assume this is a result of poor observation skills, and not some actual hint from Bob Bradley that any of those players will be back in the team. Bradley does seem to fancy Findley, who may have missed out on the Algeria game only because of suspension, but our other attacking options are far superior. Here's my starting XI:

Howard

Cherundolo, Demerit, Bocanegra, Bornstein

Donovan, Edu, Bradley, Feilhaber (or Dempsey)

Dempsey (or Buddle), Altidore

Once again, if Onyewu starts, I'll be disappointed and terrified. Bradley doesn't seem to like Feilhaber, so I don't really expect to see him until the second half, but it's no coincidence that our midfield play in the Slovenia and Algeria games improved when he came on.

Should be another good game!

Since all I can do right now is think about soccer anyway....

2010-06-23T22:28:00.007-05:00

In honor of today's inspiring goal from Donovan, a look back at ten goals that, by a combination of quality, timing, chance, and of course, being for the right team, are forever etched in my memory.

10-Maxi Rodriguez for Argentina v. Mexico in 2006 WC second round

The best moment in a disappointing World Cup. Argentina, dominating against Mexico in a game tied at 1-1 since the 10^th minute, couldn't find a winner until extra time, the 99^th minute, when a long ball from left back Sorin found the chest of Maxi Rodriguez, whose left-footed volley dipped into the upper-left corner. The goal sent Argentina to the quarter-finals where shoddy coaching and negative tactics cost them the game against Germany. (Messi languished on the bench in the quarterfinal.)

9-Marco Etcheverry for DC United vs. Tampa Bay, 1996

It was the middle of the first season in MLS, and DC were sitting in mid-table. On a rainy Friday night, my Dad and I, loyal as we were, made the trip to RFK to witness the turning point in DC's first season. A hard-fought game that we dominated went until the 75^th minute or so, when John Maessner's cross from the left side found Etcheverry, the future-United legend, who shot low to the near post from 12 yards. I actually couldn't find this goal online, so we'll have to trust my memory on this one, unless someone can find it.

8-Tab Ramos for USA vs. Costa Rica in world cup qualifying, 1997

Without captain John Harkes and forward Eric Wynalda, the USA were struggling in this crucial home World Cup qualifier against Costa Rica. I don't remember the exact points situation, but we needed a win, and weren't getting many chances. In the second half, coach Steve Sampson brought on Preki, and his creative play finally paid off. In the 80^th minute or so this lefty put in a weak right-footed cross that somehow made its way to Marcelo Balboa in the box, who laid the ball back to Tab Ramos, who was playing his first national team game after ACL surgery. He shot low and hard to the far post, beating the keeper, and keeping us on track to make it to France '98. [again, no record online....what gives?] My Dad and I celebrated from our basement, where back in the day we got espn2 from a satellite dish!

7-Thierry Henry for Arsenal vs. Manchester United in the EPL October 2000

The only goal in a 1-0 victory. The amount of creativity, imagination and flair that went into this goal is mind-boggling. What a strike.

6-Ronaldinho for Barcelona vs. Villareal in October 2006, la liga

After the disappointing 2006 World Cup, people say Ronaldinho was already past his prime. But the fall of 2006 he played the best 6 months of football I've ever seen from any player, period. Messi and Eto'o were both injured, so he was leading a makeshift Barca frontline with Gudjohnsen and Giuly, and creating goals out of nothing. In the spring of 2007, Barca would lose their form, but the fall of '06 saw them top of the Spanish league. This game, and this goal, were the highlight of that run. It's probably the greatest goal I've ever seen, and from the greatest player.

5-Dennis Bergkamp for the Netherlands vs Argentina in 1998 World Cup quarterfinal

In this World Cup, my Dad and I were really pulling for the Dutch, who I still think were the best team in the tournament, playing gorgeous soccer and finding themselves unlucky to lose to Brazil on penalties. Tied at 1-1 deep in the second half and down a player, Holland got a lift when Ariel Ortega, Argentine striker, was sent off for headbutting Edwin Van der Sar. Minutes later, Frank de Boer played an inch perfect 70-yard ball to Dennis Bergkamp, who somehow tracked the path of the ball over his right shoulder, took one touch to control, another (with the ball still hovering in mid-air) to nutmeg Roberto Ayala, and a third to half-volley past the Argentine keeper. Bergkamp's first two touches are out of this world, and the third is decent as well. My Dad and I were watching at some friend's house somewhere(?), but were the only ones watching...we had to stifle our screams excitement.

4-Donovan and Bradley against Slovenia-great comeback. Donovan's will be one of the goals of the tournament.

3-Brian McBride and Landon Donovan for USA vs. Mexico in 2002 World Cup round of 16

The best game ever played by the US national team. Reyna was moved to the right for this second-round match, and his run on the right created the first goal, along with a brilliant flick on the by-line by Josh Wolff. John O'Brien's ball to Eddie Lewis for the second was perfectly weighted, and what a cross from Lewis! He picked out Donovan's run perfectly. We got robbed in the quarters against Germany, but that second round match was one to remember.

2-Iniesta for Barcelona v Chelsea-champions league semifinal 2^nd leg 2009

After Chelsea played the most negative, disgraceful 180 minutes of soccer, Barcelona Iniesta finally put things right with his last gasp away goal at Stamford Bridge. All the drama was there: missed chances, poor refereeing, etc etc. Barcelona played the last third of the game down a player after a phantom tackle earned Eric Abidal a red card. But still they maintained about 80% ball possession and attacked relentlessly, with Dani Alves doubling as right winger and right fullback. His cross eventually led to the sublime finish that sent Barca into the final and on to the historic treble of trophies.

The commentator in that video put it perfectly: "No es Andres Iniesta, es el dios de la justicia del futbol."-It wasn't Iniesta, it was the God of Justice for football.

1-Donovan vs. Algeria 2010-What more is there to say?

USA-ALGERIA POST-GAME POST #2

2010-06-23T21:16:00.005-05:00

My prayers were answered with Onyewu being left out of the side, and my god did it pay off despite the early jitters from Demerit and Cherundolo. Bornstein came in at left back and played the best game I've ever seen him play for the national team, and thus our defending was finally solid, if not perfect, especially as we had to push forward for that winner. Gomez started and was dangerous in attack, but when Feilhaber came in he was again excellent in the second half. Altidore ever-present and dangerous, using his strength to turn and run at the Algerian defense. Every time he received the ball at his feet our attacks looked promising. But the real heroes today were Donovan and Michael Bradley. Bradley worked tirelessly from end-to-end, was always a threat with smart runs going forward, and always there to cover in defense. Donovan, well... I'd still be crying in a corner if it weren't for his finish.

The biggest problem for the team remains getting the ball from the back line into midfield, and too often we resort to aimlessly hooking it long. I think a bit more commitment by the midfield players to make creative runs, especially second runs off the ball (that is, getting in a position to receive the ball from the midfield player to whom the ball is currently en route) would make all the difference. Where does this leave us for the next round? I think we should start the same way, with the exception of Feilhaber in for Gomez, and Dempsey moving to forward. Dempsey is a good midfielder, but Feilhaber will better link up with our defenders, get the ball to Donovan, Altidore, and Dempsey where they can be dangerous.

In terms of the draw, the other results worked out perfectly for us. Germany beat Ghana, putting them on the much tougher side of the draw. Not only will we see a rematch of last year's classic Argentina-Mexico second-round game, but also probably a repeat Germany-Argentina quarterfinal. The USA, meanwhile, face Ghana in a rematch of our last group game in 2006. They played a decent game today against Germany and had many chances, though they couldn't finish (and both teams were content with the score in the last twenty minutes or so anyway). If we can manage to beat Ghana, we face the winner of probably the weakest second-round matchup, between Korea and Uruguay. One step at a time, though. Saturday, 2:30 eastern, all eyes to South Africa!!

USA-ALGERIA POST-GAME POST #1

2010-06-23T19:23:00.006-05:00

I've watched this goal a few dozen times now, and it gets better every time. About a year ago I witnessed what I thought would forever be the most remarkable, exhilarating moment in the history of sport when Barcelona scored against Chelsea in the 93rd minute of the Champions League semifinal. I could barely focus on anything for days. But Landon Donovan and the USA have topped it. The timing of the goal, its importance for the team and for US soccer, and the extra save by the keeper on Dempsey's shot just before it (thinking to myself, AGAIN??) all contributed to the ecstasy of the moment. But more than anything, it was the frustration, the anxiety, the sheer injustice of being held scoreless for the whole game, and the creeping sense of despair. For so long I resisted the belief that we had blown it with our terrible finishing, the referees with their awful calls, and Algeria with its stubborn defending; but I was finally trying to come to terms with defeat. And then when it finally seemed too late, that final chance came our way.

There's really nothing in sports comparable to that last-gasp goal in soccer. After playing for so long, doing everything except scoring, the swing in emotions is indescribable. And for it to happen to the US team, in a decisive World Cup game! Even if they didn't play the best soccer, team USA treated us to the two most dramatic examples of soccer matches in the last two games: a two-goal comeback, and a last-minute game-winner. We're all lucky to have witnessed it.

I'm sure my own suffering is far from over at this World Cup; after all, Spain have at least one match to play, and watching them play so well without scoring is just painful. The soccer gods are fickle, and may not give us justice again for some time. But today was the best reminder of why we suffer through countless games, and why we suffered today for 91 excruciating minutes. For now, it all seems worth it.

more thoughts to follow

us-algeria pre-game thoughts

2010-06-23T01:06:00.003-05:00

First, a starting XI:

Howard

Spector, Demerit, Bocanegra, Cherundolo

Donovan, Edu, Bradley, Feilhaber

Dempsey, Altidore

If Onyewu plays, I don't think we can keep a clean sheet and thus we probably won't be able to win the game. I've never been so worried about a player singlehandedly destroying a team's ability to defend.

The temptation for Bob Bradley, and for the team, will be to come out and play a very cautious first half hour, considering the blunders committed against England and Slovenia and the early goals conceded. This would be another colossal mistake. There were early blunders in the last two games, but the biggest one was coming out and playing like we were scared to take risks. Tomorrow morning we should come out and attack, attack, attack right from the start and take control of the game. When we play without inhibition is when we've played decently, after England scored their goal, and in the second half of the Slovenia game. Playing with caution has only gotten this team into trouble.

[Praying Bob Bradley doesn't muck this up....]

Oh, the irony: Keita and Kaka's red card

2010-06-21T00:51:00.005-05:00

Ya know, from everything that I've seen and read about the incident today, no one has pointed out the most ridiculously absurd part of it, which is that Keita's writhing in agony will surely turn out to hurt, rather than help, his team. Maybe he was hoping that, with a man advantage, Ivory Coast could manage a second goal in the final three-odd minutes against Brazil. But he evidently didn't stop to think during his dramatic fall to the ground that he needs Brazil to defeat Portugal in the final group game, and that Kaka is--despite his current form--one of Brazil's best attacking players. So not only is Keita a jackass for feigning a blow to the head, he's an idiot too! He should be fined and suspended by FIFA for diving, and by his own team for hurting their chances of advancing.

I'll feel awfully sorry for the rest of the Ivory Coast team if Brazil tie Portugal and Ivory Coast beat North Korea, but I won't feel bad for Keita.

world cup thoughts of the day

2010-06-20T19:57:00.008-05:00

The refs keep getting worse! Okay, well, they couldn't be worse than they were Friday, but they continue to be poor after a good start. Did everyone see Fabiano's blatant double handball on Brazil's second goal? The first one wasn't too obvious, but how could both referees miss the second one? Kaka's second yellow card was extremely harsh, and the same player who embellished that bit of contact could have been sent off for his earlier tackle on Elano, which left him in a stretcher. If FIFA want to seriously crack down on simulation or diving, Keita should be their first retroactive target, and he should be suspended from the third game for trying to deceive the referees into thinking that Kaka had struck him in the face.

Meanwhile, Brazil, who have already qualified, will do fine without Kaka in their third group match considering he's been playing the least inspired soccer of his career. Despite setting up Fabiano today for Brazil's first goal, he's been completely mediocre in the two group games. What a horrible shame that Dunga didn't see fit to include on his team either the in-form Ronaldinho, the most creative player of the decade, or Diego as backups for Kaka. Though Brazil have looked good in their first two group games, they've hardly been playing the kind of soccer to match their overwhelming surplus of offensive talent.

Overly defensive player selections and tactics have been a theme of the World Cup, exemplified by the perpetually uninspiring Raymond Domenech, who has somehow managed to take one of the most talented teams on the planet and turn them into a colossal bore. Today, word spread that the French squad boycotted a training session, and after he sent home their top striker, it's hard to blame them. Domenech had a ridiculous run of luck in 2006, which, combined with inspiring play from Zidane, led France to the final, and unfortunately to him somehow keeping his job this whole time. It's about time France hired a manager who will use their talent to score goals.

rule changes for soccer, part 6: free kick placement

2010-06-19T00:32:00.004-05:00

Soccer needs a new and better rule for where to place the ball on a restart after a foul has occurred. Once again the real reason has to do with perverse incentives for defending teams: because a free kick is always taken from the spot of the foul, it's often in a defending team's favor to foul. But a priori the whole point of having laws of the game and awarding free kicks is to provide incentives not to foul.

This problem has a few levels, and so a couple of revisions to the laws are in order.

What we want to look at, from the defender's point of view, is the likelihood of conceding a goal under two circumstances: foul and concede a free kick, or don't foul and let the attacker continue with whatever advantage he has gained in the run of play. The likelihood of conceding a goal under both scenarios varies greatly and systematically with the exact spot on the field we're talking about. That is, there's an average probability of conceding a goal from a set piece from any position on the field, and there's a (harder to estimate, and measure) probability of conceding a goal after an attacking player has beaten a defender, again for each spot on the field. In a perfect world, the probability function for set pieces would be at all points higher than the other function, and the functions would be identical in shape. In truth, this is far from true.

A simple example: today, Altidore was held back cynically right outside the Slovenian penalty area, on what would have been a clear chance at goal. A curious fact about free kicks outside the penalty area is that they are actually much more difficult to convert to goals when the ball is placed closer than about 21 yards from goal than if it is in the 21-25 yard range. For a free kick so close to the goal, it's much harder to get the ball up and over the defending "wall," but down under the crossbar. In this case, the Slovenian defender had a positive incentive to foul. [This particular instance relates also back to my earlier post about penalties.] The important point is this: obviously, the closer an attacking player is to goal in the run of play, the more likely he is to score, on average, but defenders have increasing incentive to foul as the player approaches their penalty area because the chance of converting on the resulting free kick actually declines.

So what to do? Again, a simple, elegant solution: However far a foul occurs from the center of the goal, the attacking team should be allowed to take the free kick from anywhere of equal or greater distance to goal. This would allow attacking teams to play to their strengths, and would eliminate any increased incentive to foul as players get closer to the goal, or if they wide instead of in the center.

This questions is also ripe for empirical study. What are the relevant probabilities, and how acute is the problem I've highlighted? I'd love to see some data here. At least for set pieces, this should be relatively easy to collect.

The other level of the problem concerns fouling far from goal when there's no chance of a goal from the resulting set piece. But it's late, so I'll write about that next time.

US-Slovenia: an instant classic

2010-06-18T20:19:00.004-05:00

Wow. Just when I was absolutely fed up with the World Cup, it lures me back with the most dramatic, exciting, agonizingly heart-wrenching game I've ever seen. I think my friend put it best: what are we supposed to feel right now? Elation? Disappointment? Extreme, unadulterated anger? I certainly feel all three. Over the course of 90 minutes, we felt it all: disappointment at another slow start, disgust at the poor display of the first 30 minutes, hope as we started to get into the game, despair at Slovenia's second goal. And then the comeback began, and what a comeback it was. Donovan's goal was magnificent. Bradley's run before meeting the header from Altidore was genius. Altidore was the man-of-the-match, continuously terrorizing the Slovenian defenders with his strength and power. And if it weren't for the stunningly incompetent Koman Coulibaly, who, according to wikipedia "hates the United States with the burning passion of a white hot sun," we would have completed the first ever comeback win from 2-0 down at half time in World Cup history.

The foul call on the 3rd goal is one of the most inexplicable decisions I've ever seen in a soccer match. Watching the replay, what's remarkable is the lack of normal jostling by US players for position. Meanwhile, at least two clear fouls are being committed by Slovenian players (most notably the player bear-hugging Michael Bradley). What gives? Apparently the ref called the foul on Bocanegra, who in addition to being nowhere near the flight of the ball, was clearly in a six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other struggle with his marker. It was the worst decision of the World Cup, seconded by the yellow card given to Findley in the first half, when the ball, catching him completely unawares, struck him squarely in the face.

Luckily, Findley has been pretty invisible in the minutes he has played, and shouldn't be missed much in the Algeria game. Hopefully, Bradley will make some other adjustments to the team that started today. Most importantly, he should keep Onyewu as far from the pitch as possible, as his play has been disastrous. He's been culpable on all three goals conceded, and is absolutely incapable of playing cohesively with Demerit. Over and over, he gets caught drifting too far back, too far forward, out of line with the other three defenders. He leaves huge gaps in the middle and doesn't cover well for Demerit. He is far too slow to step up and pressure the ball when it is finally played into his area, and to recover when it leaves his area. His passing is atrocious. Goodson or Spector should start in his place, pushing Bocanegra to center-back if necessary. Feilhaber should also start in place of Torres, who took no risks at all going forward.

Algeria looked decent against England, and the last game will be a serious challenge. Recent history is not encouraging: we've lost the last group game in every World Cup we've played with a group phase. In the last 5 world cups, we've lost to Austria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Ghana respectively. We'll have to do better on Wednesday! A win guarantees that we advance. A draw will be enough if England and Slovenia draw and as long as we have more goals than England (right now, winning that count 3-1). Can't wait.

before I never mention that Spain game ever again

2010-06-17T00:10:00.002-05:00

Okay, they obviously deserved better than 0 points given the sheer number of chances they created, but at the same time, I sure hope del Bosque had a word with the team about Jesus Navas' play after the game. For such a good player, who actually played decently, he somehow managed to kill the game for Spain. Every time he got the ball, that was it for any creative movement: they just stood in the penalty area, hoping he could get to the by-line and put in a decent cross, which he did a few times. But were they really looking to beat Switzerland in the air? They really should have left the game in the hands of Xavi and Iniesta, who played fabulously, except for their weak finishing. But they were certainly getting the ball to David Villa and Torres once he came on.

Let's hope we see Fabregas next time instead of Navas!!!!

world cup part 5, "and then it really started to suck"

2010-06-16T23:04:00.008-05:00

My first post about this World Cup, as well as my post right after the draw, were both reactions to what I saw as basically the decline of international soccer as we know it. The problem is this: the World Cup is the greatest sporting spectacle on the planet, but the play never lives up to the spectacle. People who watch the European leagues year-round will realize soon, if they haven't already, that World Cup soccer just isn't as good or as fun to watch as European club soccer.

And the Spain game today was definitely the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back for me. This World Cup has a long way to go, of course, but after every team had played one match, only twenty-five goals were scored, for an average of just 1.56 per game. Compare that to 1990, which was the lowest-scoring World Cup in history, and in which teams' tactics were so negative that FIFA made important, if modest, rule changes afterward (the new backpass rule, and the increase in the value of a win from two points to three). In that World Cup, after each team's opening game (which was only twelve matches, rather than sixteen, because only 24 teams participated), there were 28 goals, or 2.3 per game.

In 1994 the opening matches yielded 2.5 goals per game, in 1998, 2.3, and 2002, 2.8, and in 2006, 2.4. Hopefully this year's opening matches are a statistical anomaly, but in every tournament mentioned except 1998, the goals per match went down after the opening games. That's because all you need to do is tie matches once you get to the knockout phase. A team could win the tournament without scoring a single goal after the first round, and winning matches on penalties.

It's also well worth mentioning that the goals haven't been coming despite the fact that, for the first time, assistant referees are calling offsides correctly, rather than systematically favoring the defending teams. And need I mention the number of goals that have been just plain garbage (think Green)?

As I see it there are two fundamental problems right now: most teams don't want to press forward and attack, and of the teams that do press forward and attack, even the ones who do it with competence and even a bit of creativity, aren't getting many goals.

So what should be done? I've already proposed various rule changes for soccer: most importantly regarding the awarding of penalties, offside enforcement, and the advantage rule, none of which require elaborate or complex fixes, which FIFA could easily implement.

In the next two posts I'll talk about one more rule that, in my view, desperately needs revising (the placement of free kicks), as well as how to change the World Cup tournament itself to encourage teams to play more like club teams (that is, well).

If Spain don't make it through the group phase I'm never watching another World Cup game I swear to God.

world cup thoughts, part 4

2010-06-14T13:55:00.009-05:00

One bright spot so far: the refereeing. With the exception of Tim Cahill's ejection from the Germany-Australia match (for a clear yellow card tackle), it has been excellent. Nothing would have made me more annoyed than to see the very best plays of the tournament so far, that is, Germany's delightful through passes against Australia, called back erroneously for offside. These were the type of plays that look offside at first glance because the attacker is sprinting past the last line of defense, but are actually perfectly timed. These calls, are, unfortunately, incredibly difficult to get right (in fact impossible based on the limits of visual attention), and so it's inevitable that there will be errors. The important thing for me is that these errors not be systematically biased toward the defending team, which is too often the case. Only time will tell if this aspect of good fortune holds up.

And of course the one offside call that the commentators were all moaning about, calling back a Mexico goal against South Africa, was actually correct: there need to be two defenders between an attacker and the goal line; one of them is usually the goalkeeper, but in this case, he had stepped out ahead of the attacker.

world cup thoughts, part 3: US-England

2010-06-14T13:42:00.004-05:00

Let's face it, neither of these teams should end up going very far in the tournament. England may yet turn things around, but too many of their star players were virtually anonymous in the opening game, and in the first half they could hardly complete a pass. Given some regrettable defending by the USA, I expected much more pressure from players like Rooney, Lampard and Ashley Cole, in particular. Gerrard was okay, but only Aaron Lennon and Glen Johnson were threatening throughout the game.

As for the USA, we had moments of decent play, but ultimately will be undone by two things. The first is poor combination in the center of the field. Bradley and Clark are good players, but Clark especially is not good enough technically to be useful going forward. Findley is fast, but is a disaster trying to hold the ball up with his feet. If Torres gets on the field, we lose a certain physical presence, but gain someone who can actually play a bit of soccer. Hopefully we'll see him sometime soon.

And unfortunately, DeMerit and Onyewu look nothing like they did last summer in the Confederations Cup. Onyewu was caught out of position and ball-watching on the goal, letting Gerrard slip in behind him while he turned the other direction and stood still. Far too often the gap between the two of them was a gaping hole. Slovenia and Algeria might not take advantage, and I do expect us to get out of the group. But if we come in second, Germany will rip us to shreds.

world cup thoughts, part 2

2010-06-14T13:37:00.009-05:00

The new ball: It's pretty obvious after watching several games that players are struggling a bit with the ball, which raises an obvious question: why introduce a new ball for every World Cup? The canonical answer is always that the new ball travels more unpredictably through the air, and will result in more spectacular goals from distance. But the actual result is that the players aren't used to the ball, and that goes for goalkeepers and attacking players. In this World Cup, the new ball seems to bounce unnaturally high, and travel a lot farther than any player predicts. I don't think I've seen a single free kick on target yet. A new ball takes getting used to, and even if players have been training with a new type of ball for a month, they'll still be working with implicit memories they've built up through years and years of playing. They train day after day for years to perfect their technique with a standard type of ball (with small variations). Introducing something new just before a massive tournament is a recipe for throwing them off.

world cup thoughts, part 1

2010-06-14T13:12:00.004-05:00

The World Cup is well underway. Some initial thoughts to follow:

1. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: World Cup soccer is too defensive, and always disappointing. Watching the first few games just convinces me more and more that something has to change in the rules of soccer or the structure of the tournament to encourage more attacking play. Through nine games so far, even after many of the best teams and best players in the world have already played, only one team has actually attacked with much flair and confidence, and that was, somewhat surprisingly, Germany. I hate to say it, but so far, the opening matches look too much like soccer straight out of that Simpsons episode: fast-kicking perhaps, low-scoring for sure, and ties, you bet!

With games like this, you too often have teams losing games, instead of winning them. For instance, Robert Green lost for England (goalkeeper blunder), Algeria's goalkeeper for them (another blunder), Kozmanovich for Serbia (stupidly conceded penalty), and Poulsen for Denmark (own goal). I want to see more players, like Oezil and Podolski for Germany, actually earning their teams' victories.

Apologists will say that it's opening game jitters, that teams are especially cautious in opening games, that the best attacking teams have yet to play, and that players are struggling with the new ball (see below for more on that). Though those all may be true, shouldn't we hope for attacking play throughout the tournament? If this really is supposed to soccer's greatest exhibition, is it too much to ask that more than a handful of teams actually come out and try to score goals and win games? If teams are really that cautious in the opening games, then shouldn't we change the group phase somehow so that a third of the group games don't suck?

piano sound, part....5?

2010-05-24T11:30:00.005-05:00

A little research has pretty much definitively answered the question from my last post: in terms of the vibration of the string, the only thing a pianist has any control over is the speed with which the hammer hits the string (and the pedal...). It turns out, this was a simple physical problem, solved by learning about piano action. The relevant fact is this: after you push down a piano key, but before the hammer actually hits the string, it loses all contact with the rest of the action, so that the only force on the hammer for some duration of time before it hits the string is gravity. Then the only forces on the hammer during contact are gravity and the force of the string itself; nothing with the piano action is involved anymore at all. Therefore, if the hammer strikes the same string twice with the same velocity, it will produce the same sound spectrum.

Okay, but there's still more to it, because there's also, surprisingly, a lot of white noise that goes into piano playing. This includes not only finger to key white noise, but more importantly, the noise all the stuff bouncing around inside the piano, which resonates on the soundboard just as the string vibrations do.

Without getting into that too much for now, let me re-state an important question: Who cares? Well, okay, here's something that will never apply to most people, but applies to me: should pianists play chamber music with the lid of the piano raised, or not?

The general, modern consensus is yes: the piano sounds better and "fuller" with the lid raised. But there's an inherent trade-off with balance, because raising the lid also makes the piano louder. When playing with string players, who just can't produce as much sound as a piano, especially with thickly written piano parts, this is an important concern.

For instance, I'm playing the Mendelssohn second cello sonata in a recital tomorrow night, where, on the first page, the ratio of total piano notes to cello notes is about 15:1. We played a practice run-through the other day, with the lid of the piano not raised, and one of my professors suggested that I play softer in order to avoid covering the cello, and raise the lid of the piano. What gives? I think the suggestion stems from a mistaken view of the nature of piano action: that is, that I can play softer, but still have an equally loud of louder-sounding "tone," so that the overall impression of the music isn't lost. (To the professor's credit, a lot of it has to do with voicing individual notes over other ones as well.) However, the main fact remains: for any given timbre of playing, raising the lid will produce a more sound, so as long as covering other instruments is an issue, playing with the lid closed seems like a reasonable response for me.

Of course, lots pianists don't like the insinuation that they can't adequately "control" their sound, and think that playing with the lid closed is an affront to their playing ability. But this just seems kinda silly to me. I'll be playing with the lid down tomorrow night at any rate....

piano sound, ctd

2010-05-05T09:30:00.009-05:00

Expanding on my earlier posts on this topic (as it keeps me up at night more and more often):

After doing some basic research, it seems that there is a fair amount of scholarly work on physical modeling of the piano, attempting to figure out exactly what physical parameters affect the production of sound. Most of this work has to do with the physics of damped string oscillations and the acoustics of the soundboard, etc. etc., i.e., what is common to all piano tones. This is all very interesting, but comes at the issue from an altogether different perspective from what is, practically speaking, most useful to pianists and musicians.

The big question for me remains: how much do variations in "touch," or the pianist's physical approach, affect variation in the sound spectra of individual notes? In particular, after glossing through some articles, one specific question seems particularly urgent and no one seems to be close to answering it: In affecting the timbre of a sustained note, can a pianist vary anything other than the velocity of the hammer just before it hits the string?

When the hammer hits the string, the interaction is actually quite complex. In the few milliseconds that the hammer is actually in contact with the string, it exerts a variable force on the string, which affects the vibration of the string and therefore the spectrum of the sound, but it's extremely hard to measure how this force varies over that small time. And, apparently, it's unclear whether anything farther up the stream of the piano action systematically varies the time-varying force that the hammer exerts on the string.

First, before proposing how to actually answer this question, I can't help but express my complete and utter astonishment that no one (to my knowledge) has studied it closely, nor can anyone support a solid argument on either side of the proposition. It's one of those questions that lots of people pretend they satisfactorily understand. I recently learned about the history of this "debate" in a lecture (that's right, I still learn things at school!). From one perspective--the "artistic"--pianists assume they can affect the tone of individual notes based on experience. But based on my earlier post, this experience could well be an illusion created by the presence of other notes, both simultaneously and through time, and pedal. From the more scientific perspective, it's generally assumed that there's no nuance at all to the sound produced; with the keystroke, the pianist can only control loudness through controlling hammer velocity.

Next time: how can one approach this problem experimentally, rather than through dynamic modelling?

Also, I realize this question is analogous to another aspect of music in that the traditional position of music theorists is so wildly off-base, and that everyone assumes they sort of understand, and that is, perception of musical form. For another day.

rule changes for soccer, part 5 or so....diving and the advantage rule

2010-05-04T10:22:00.006-05:00

Naturally, Barcelona's champion's league loss from last week has renewed my annoyance with soccer's faults. One of these faults that's been crying out for revision recently and that most people grossly misunderstand, is the problem of diving.

Diving is what we generally call a player's attempts to deceive the referee into calling a foul when none has been committed, either by falling down or gesticulating in more dramatic manner. Here's the first problem: players don't fall down just to deceive the referee into calling a foul; in fact, more often they fall down to indicate to the referee that a foul has occurred, merely to make it easier for him to call it.

Now why would a player ever need to do that? The first part of the answer is that referees are simply less likely to call a foul when it's not as obvious. Unfortunate but fair. The second part of the answer is more pernicious. Referees are also less likely to whistle for a foul when a player still has any sort of control over the ball, because of the advantage rule. That is, players often suffer minor fouls, but because they more or less still have the ball, the referee lets play continue.

Therefore, players are often (unconsciously) making a choice when they flop: continue with what measly advantage I may or may not have continuing with the ball, or cut my losses and take a free kick now.

If I could draw a really convoluted analogy to game theory, the situation is like a Nash equilibrium from which neither player nor referee has much of an incentive to deviate, because of the convoluted rules of soccer and the way referees traditionally call games. That is, referees are faced with a false choice that they have to buy into: call a foul, and ignore the attacking player's role in making it obvious, or call a dive and ignore the fact that a foul may have occurred.

The worst part is, players who don't play along with this little game are punished along wiht their teams. Here's where we go back to the Barcelona game. Before Inter's third goal in the first leg, Leonel Messi was carrying the ball up the field and was clearly fouled, as he was time after time in the match. But instead of flopping, he tried to carry on. Instead of then receiving a free kick for his trouble, after a he subsequently lost control of the ball, the referee was forced to decide that, since he had already played advantage, play had to continue. From the counter-attack, Inter scored their third goal.

So what's the solution? First: disambiguate diving from fouling. Both can take place simultaneously. Secondly, referees have to start calling fouls when players don't dive, or they remain complicit in the epidemic of diving. And third, change the advantage rule.

soccer, and the mysteries thereof

2010-04-28T18:09:00.006-05:00

I had a startling realization today while watching the second leg of the Barcelona-Inter Milan champions league semi-final: Watching soccer is torture.

Okay, I don't mean that literally. Maybe I'm just depressed right now about Barca losing the tie and bouncing out of the Champions League. The game was a microcosm of everything that's wrong with soccer. One team was playing soccer, while the other was engaged in an exercising of time wasting. The refereeing was awful for both sides. Offside calls were missed all over the place. In the end I can't help wonder why I'll repeatedly subject myself to games that are so horribly unpleasant, the results of which have no bearing whatsoever on my day-to-day life.

One year ago, Barcelona were in the semi-final of last year's Champions League. The second leg was an astonishing game, and one that I'll never forget. Barca were losing by a goal after fifteen minutes or so, and needed just a tie in order to win the two-legged match. For 90 minutes they pressed forward, never changing their style of attack, despite Chelsea's unwillingness to leave their own half, despite the hostile crowd, despite having a player sent off. And then, finally, with only seconds remaining, they got their goal. And that moment was, possibly without exaggeration, the most acutely emotional moment I've ever experienced. I've watched and played in thousands of games (in addition to doing, ya know, other stuff with my life too), but never can I remember wanting something so badly, and then, all in one moment, depressed that it was finally out of reach, getting it.

What madness! How could I become so invested in something so inconsequential? How could I come to the point where yelling at my TV caused my upstairs neighbor to knock on my door repeatedly and ask if everything was okay? That last one, by the way, is a true story from today.

All sports take advantage of our quirky psychology this way. They throw us into battles where we have nothing personally at stake. They make us feel so loyal to one side or the other that the game becomes the most important thing in our life.

But could any of them be as awful as soccer? If anyone is in more pain watching the beautiful game, it is my Dad. It's not uncommon for him to declare during a particularly heart-wrenching match that he will never watch soccer ever again. I know he'll feel that way after watching today's game, probably more strongly than ever. The pain of today's game will last a while, but his declaration certainly won't. And the cycle repeats.

Redesigning the piano for the 21st century

2010-04-11T15:51:00.005-05:00

[warning: ego boost. Sam: skip to paragraph 2]. Sam had his first Northwestern recital last night, a fantastic, virtuosic performance. Hopefully you'll hear more about this from Sam (recordings, even?), but my two cents: the Chopin pieces, particularly the F# major and C minor Nocturnes, were the best I've heard him play Chopin-- exhilarating and tender. The Lieberman was also great fun, and surprisingly beautiful. For some reason, I expected those impromptus to be egocentric, obnoxious, and droopy. But enough about Sam. This is my guest post.

The 400 person (estimated) space was packed to the brim. Well, there were only ~60 of us, but we completely saturated that narrow band of optimal piano-performance enjoyment: the left side of the center aisle, where you can see the performers hands & face without the subpar acoustics & feng shui of the left aisle. I explained this predicament to another of Sam's Yale guests, Adam, a music muggle. "Why don't they just rotate the piano?" he asked. I hopped right up on my high horse, and explained that the cover projects outward and rotating the piano would defeat the entire purpose. But Adam's idea got me thinking and I arrived at an elegant solution (perhaps it was Adam's epiphany, but my post, my story): just angle the keyboard!

Here's the classic keyboard design:

And my modification:

This redesign would obviously take some getting used to, and we know that classical musicians can be conservative (hi, Noah!). But the design makes so much sense: the visual sweetspot (face & hands visible) should be aligned with the acoustic sweet-spot (center of the auditorium). Never again would audiences scrunch to the left, threatening to capsize the room. This redesign piano would offer a further benefit for concerto performances, with a more direct line of sight between the pianist and conductor. The design would be awful for chamber music, but you can't win every battle.

No doubt, there would be substantial technical challenges to implementing this change, most notably from the angle between the action and the strings. But, as we can see in the first picture, this is a problem that piano designers have already had to contend with for low notes (strings near the top). With the angled keyboard, the low strings could extend horizontally, and the angle would be only slightly more extreme than it already is.

I think that it's at least worth a try. Be on the look-out for the new Tutor Trove brand pianos in a concert hall near you!

performance practice, contd

2010-04-07T01:40:00.007-05:00

The article I mentioned in my last post, which I still can't find online, accuses a lot of serious musicians and music critics of condescending snobbery in their distaste for artists like Tchaikovsky and Horowitz. Richard Taruskin makes many points, (not all well-connected): first, that people dislike Horowitz for his idiosyncratic interpretations that deviate from composers' notations. Second, they dislike Horowitz because his approach was overly audience-oriented, or geared toward "the performance," rather than the music itself, or the composer who wrote the music. Third, that these people are pretentious for putting themselves above their audiences, for claiming not to even care what their listeners think of their interpretations, even while depending on those very same people for their own livelihood.

To make a straw man of Taruskin's own argument, what he's saying can be summarized as follows. There are two basic types of performers: those who don't care at all what their audiences think, because they see themselves merely as media through which the composer is communicating, and those who are trying to make music for an audience to enjoy. (You'll have to trust me that my oversimplification is nothing compared to his own caricature of the music world.) In reality, the situation is much more complicated, and he only captures a small portion of it in his article.

In the real world, there is music like Tchaikovsky's, which, in my humble opinion, though often pleasing enough, generally doesn't compare (with a few exceptions) to the music of his superior contemporaries, tuneful as it may be. There's the music of Mahler, which, though it's often impossible to appreciate on first listening, or to a novel ear, reveals its greatness with a little work on the part of the listener. But there's also pop music, which, obviously, listeners enjoy a lot, but we don't perform at Carnegie Hall.

The point Taruskin tries to make is that, since audiences like Tchaikovsky and Horowitz, we must be snobs if we criticize it. But does that make us snobs for not appreciating Tik Tok and Taylor Swift the same way we revere the Goldberg Variations? Taruskin's problem is that, while he rightly acknowledges that performances of classical music often miss the whole point of appealing to an audience and sharing great art with them, they can also be overly indulgent of an audience's baser desires and tastes. People love it when a pianist goes on stage and wows them with the sheer physical achievement of something like "flight of the bumblebee," but the whole point of "art" music, whatever the point is, is to get beyond an obsession with the performer and get an audience to appreciate music for its own sake. This distinction is, after all, what separates the world of "classical" music from the world of popular music. (That's not to say that pop music can't be good, or even great, but just that it isn't generally composed to be listened to with full attention on the music.)

Where then, do we draw the line, then? Surely what we want is a middle-ground, where performance is about music, not about a mythical composer, or about a mythical performer.

more on performance practice

2010-04-05T21:24:00.007-05:00

So, my recital's really soon! That's really my only excuse for abandoning my efforts to post on this site more often. Here's to redoubling those efforts!

I'm taking an awesome class this quarter (taught by my awesome piano teacher) about performance practice and piano playing. His basic thesis is that modern pianists, at least the most famous ones, as good as they are, don't have distinct playing styles the way pianists did in the early 20th century and before.

For me, this idea rings true, and as my multitudes of loyal readers already know, judging from this post and this one, the idea of distinctive performance is something that I think about a lot. You might even say it keeps me up at night. If true, what are the reasons for this modern lack of individuality, or style?

The first explanation is the modern idea, previously mentioned, that the performer's responsibility is more to a composer, or to a score, than to the music itself, or the audience. How did this idea become so pervasive, and why?

The other reason, I suspect, is that the proliferation of recording technology has a two-fold effect on people's interpretations. First, it tends to stunt creativity, because they get used to hearing things certain ways. I know lots of teachers who explicitly instruct their students to listen to great recordings for ideas about interpretation. Most teachers encourage listening, but not to fore imitation. Even so, as any performer will tell you, it's incredibly difficult to fall in love with a great performance and listen to it over and over, without imitating it to some extent in one's own playing. Thus recording technology tends to cause people's ideas about interpretation of certain pieces to converge.

The other way recording technology may influence performance (as another colleague of mine pointed out) is that the prospect of having one's playing repeated thousands of times curtails one's individuality and generally tempers risk-taking.

We read a really interesting article along these lines by former NYTimes critic Richard Taruskin, backlashing against other critics' lambasting of the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz. (I can't find a link to the article somehow on the NYtimes website...sorry) His main argument is that people who criticize pianists like Horowitz, and composers like Tchaikovsky, are pretentious dicks. I think he's on to something, but don't agree with him completely. But I'll get to that tomorrow or Wednesday....

notes on key

2010-03-17T00:25:00.002-05:00

In talking about music, it's common for people not just to remark on the general character of a piece, but to relate said character to the particular key the piece is in. This is, I'm convinced, one of those conceited things that trained musicians do to try to say something consequential about the music they're playing when they can't think of anything more substantial.

I'm not trying to deny that various composers impugn certain characters to certain keys. Especially before the widespread use of equal temperament in the late 1700's, different keys were actually made up of different intervals, and so really did sound different. The association of different pieces with certain keys by later composers clearly affected their own compositions. There's also the psychological anchoring of our pitch universe around C major, which generally causes us to think of sharp keys as "brighter" than flat keys. We make this association because modulation within a piece of music to a sharper key area sounds "bright," but the C major anchor is completely arbitrary. Thus, Beethoven once remarked that he could tell whether a composer had penned a piece in g-flat major or f-sharp major, without looking at the score, simply by the character of the piece, even though the keys are enharmonically equivalent. It all depended on whether the composer was thinking of the key of the piece as six fifths on the flat side of c major, or six fifths to the sharp side.

In addition, the physical characteristics of different instruments clearly affect the way music sounds in different keys. Pieces written for b-flat clarinet will sound different in other keys because of the different fingerings and other stuff about clarinet I don't understand; similarly for piano pieces that include more black notes than white, etc.

Nevertheless, the rather widespread notion that scales on different pitch levels have intrinsic characters of their own can't possibly be true. In an equal-tempered system of tuning, all the intervals in every major scale are identical, and all the intervals in every minor scale are identical. The only intrinsic difference between scales starting on different pitches is, of course, the pitch level.

I hear people remark all the time about why a composer would write a piece in a given key, but rarely does anyone ever mention the most obvious reason given above: it sounds "right" at that pitch level. Any piece you know would probably sound really wrong if displaced by an octave. Most pieces would sound weird displaced by a fifth in either direction too. Displacing something by a half-step or a whole step is a much smaller change, but still affects our perceptions. [This is, incidentally, why composers often include a lot of octave jumps in the second section of the recapitulations of sonata movements, but rarely in the expositions. They composed the theme for the dominant key in the exposition; in order to make it sound "right" in the tonic in the recap, they often include it in different octaves as a sort of balance.]

As ridiculous as South Dakota?

2010-03-12T16:40:00.006-06:00

Check out this article from today's NYTimes. Okay, probably not as ridiculous as claiming that astrological factors affect the climate. But obviously it's not enough for conservatives to deny evolution anymore. They're taking aim at every subject! The scariest example here is Christianist revision of US history. Students in TX will now be instructed that America's founders weren't committed to a secular government, but a Christian one. In case you didn't read to the end, the amendments to the curriculum "cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century." Thomas fuckin' Jefferson!

This reminds me of Tim Pawlenty's speech recently at CPAC. Pawlenty, formerly a moderate Republican, had this to say about secularism and the Constitution:

"God’s in charge.' 'God is in charge.' There are some people who say, ‘Oh, you know, Pawlenty, don’t bring that up. You know, it’s politically incorrect.’ Hogwash.' These are enshrined in the founding documents and perspective of our country."

Luckily, if students actually read any primary sources at all, like, for instance, the US Constitution, they'll realize that their Board of Education, and Tim Pawlenty, are delusional. The US Constitution was actually the most radical attempt in the history of mankind to create a government that excluded God altogether. With any luck, they'll delve a little deeper and come to realize that the most influential members of the Constitutional Convention, like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Franklin, leaned towards Deism, even if they could accurately be described as Christian.

recital musings

2010-03-11T22:16:00.011-06:00

In putting off the two or three assignments I have due tomorrow, I've been instead going over ideas for my upcoming recital (April 10th at Northwestern!). A theme in this blog's short life, if you haven't noticed, is dissatisfaction with the current state of performance practice in the world of "art music." I recently wrote an article all about this for my friend's supposed magazine (ALISSA ARE YOU READING THIS?), but I have no idea if she'll ever publish it. I might have to just post it here eventually.

Anyway, for now, watch this video instead, which was helpfully pointed out to me by my mother. It's a TED talk by conductor Benjamin Zander, who as you'll see, is a charming guy who really likes to listen to himself tell stories. However, to his credit they're pretty good stories. He also believes, as do I, that most people's aversion to "classical" music is more a cultural, societal, or "meta-musical" phenomenon than anything. He takes this idea a bit too far, but his basic point is right: 95% of people (give or take) who grow up in Western culture unconsciously acquire the necessary pitch categories and hierarchies to "understand" (on a basic level) the majority of Western music written between 1700 and 1900, because they naturally acquire the necessary pitch hierarchies from exposure to popular music.

But "classical" music is still much less accessible to so many people than pop, probably for a variety of reasons. Pieces are longer, harmonies are generally more complex and varied, there are usually no words, and people often aren't as familiar with the specific harmonic or textural language. I mean, I've loved classical music when I was a kid, but it's still hard for me to enjoy lots of pieces the first time I hear them. This was even more true when I was younger and was less familiar with what I was dealing with. I can only assume a similar phenomenon is behind a lot of people's general aversion to the classics.

In the video Zander gets his audience over that general aversion by familiarizing them with a few simple concepts, and playing a couple of examples from Chopin's e minor prelude. Long story short, I'm pretty settled on doing the same kind of thing for my recital, only shorter and with less British charm. But I'll do it somewhat apprehensively because I know that kind of thing can fall really flat, especially when targeting a mixed bag of listeners. I recently went to a CSO performance where Michael Tilson Thomas talked about Berg's orchestral piece op. something-or-other for like twenty minutes, and for latter fifteen I was really hoping he would get to the point. But I want to familiarize people just enough with what they're going to hear so that they'll have something to grasp onto as they're listening. Let's hope I don't screw it up!

the "al qaeda seven"

2010-03-11T00:55:00.013-06:00

In case you haven't been following this story, an organization called "Keep America Safe," headed by such worthy statesmen as Liz Cheney and William Kristol, recently released this gem of an ad insinuating that former attorneys of terror suspects share the values of terrorists. Even for most defenders of the criminal Bush regime the ad goes too far, but then again that might just be because multiple high-ranking members of the Bush administration, including Michael Mukasey and Michael Chertoff, former Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security respectively, fall into the same category as the alleged "al qaeda seven."

But then again, there's plenty of conservatives who defend the ad, thus opening themselves up to ridicule! And so, ridicule I shall. Partly for fun. And partly because the defense of such an absurd attack exposes the absurdity of "conservatism's" positions on terrorism in general. For instance, this article from National Review draws a parallel between Islamism's and the Left's "need to condemn American policies and radically alter the United States." I quote below:

"[I] supported such counterterrorism policies as indefinite detention for enemy combatants, military-commission trials, aggressive interrogation of top jihadists, warrantless surveillance of enemy communications, and who hold the general view that jihadist terror is driven by Islamist ideology."

And then, wait for it....

"But before they can impose their utopias, Islamists and the Left have a common enemy they need to take down: the American constitutional tradition of a society based on individual liberty, in which government is our servant, not our master... If lawyers choose to volunteer their services to the enemy in wartime, they are on the wrong side of that fault line, and no one should feel reluctant to say so."

So, the person who wants the President to have the power to indefinitely detain people without charge or representation is the defender of the constitutional tradition based on individual liberty, and the people who represent terrorists (or rather, accused terrorists) against an unrestrained executive power are trying to impose a society in which government is our master? Could that be any more incoherent of an argument???

[For the record, the names of the "al qaeda seven" were recently made public by the DOJ.]

wow, this is ridiculous

2010-03-10T09:17:00.001-06:00

In case you missed this, it recently passed the South Dakota House of Representatives. Notice point 2 toward the bottom.

sad news on torture

2010-03-09T22:58:00.008-06:00

For a while now, I've been gearing up to write something about torture and the legacy of the Bush administration, but honestly I don't know where to start. This issue terrifies me for two reasons: I think torturing someone is just about the worst thing you can ever do to him or her, and at the same time torturing people seems to be gaining an enormous amount of political momentum.

Torture is unique in its ability to strip someone not just of his freedom to move or act without restraint, but even to think. It concentrates every aspect of a person's existence on his own suffering and pain. Isn't that obviously inherently wrong? Not according to most Americans anymore. Recently, a number of polls have shown increasing willingness of Americans to accept torture of terrorism suspects. This is either driving, or driven by, the fact that conservative commentators don't even have to hide their embrace of torture anymore. Dick Cheney bragged about his "strong support" for waterboarding on national TV, and the Washington Post hired torture-enthusiast and former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen to write on its op-ed page. As any number of sane writers have pointed out, there has never been any internationally or domestically recognized court decision that has ever denied that waterboarding (among other things) is torture. And yet the former VP has admitted to playing a role in its implementation for the whole world to see!

A policy of torture has to overcome four hurdles to be worthwhile: It has to yield valuable intelligence. Even if it yields valuable intelligence, it has to yield more valuable intelligence than traditional methods of interrogation. Even if it does that, it has to be worth the strategic costs that the policy entails. And even if it's worth those strategic costs, it has to be worth the moral cost. Torture fails at all four levels. According to every single intelligence expert who doesn't have a specific political or legal interest in the legitimacy of Bush-approved torture, it fails spectacularly to clear first three hurdles. Only people like Cheney and Thiessen have claimed otherwise. And their justification of the moral question is purely utilitarian, and thus rests on their dubious claims about the first three issues above.

Even if all their ridiculous claims about torture were true, and their actions cleared all moral hurdles, all the acts of torture they helped promulgate were and are illegal. A year ago I wrote in a letter to the Washington Post, "The point is, if the administration truly believed that these techniques were necessary and justified, then why didn't they go through the standard channels (that is, lawmaking) that we use in democratic societies to make them legal?" The obvious point I was trying to make is that they would have failed miserably. What's mortifying is that if Republicans regained control of the government, they might take that very strategy to heart. What if they succeeded?

Usually, when in the past, the US government has committed atrocities in times of duress, there's at least some perspective, condemnation, or general shame that follows. As a society we're really far from that point. When, and how, will we get there?

back to it

2010-03-08T16:11:00.003-06:00

So I realized one of the problems with having a blog is that the more time I go without posting, the more I feel like whatever I post has to be really informative or useful. This was obviously not the point when I set out to do this. For those who missed my first post, it was meant to be entirely self-indulgent from the start. So I'm gonna try to get back to that. As an experiment, I'm going to start posting something every day. We'll see how long this lasts.

Apologies for the busy weeks. I'm not apologizing to you, of course, but to myself. It was really busy, as evidenced by the absurd back-log of reading to do in my google reader...I haven't even finished last week's New Yorker, and another one is probably coming tomorrow! Luckily, it didn't turn out all for nought...[shameless self-promotion alert]....I was preparing for a couple of concerts, and as a result that preparation, or more likely, luck, I'm playing on the radio sometime soon! Here's the link to the station website, which streams through itunes or quicktime or windows media player, etc. etc. I think I'll be playing two nocturnes and the first Scherzo by Chopin.

Unlike classical radio where I hail from (DC), this station doesn't suck (it's non-suckiness is so pronounced that I actually gave them money), so I'm pretty psyched to be playing on it. Shameless promotion aside, if you're actually a music person you should download the itunes link and stream it more often than that one time I'll be on it, as they have lots of interesting stuff. Perhaps I'm tainted by my experience growing up in DC, where classical music on the radio regularly consisted of only three things: Vivaldi, second-class Mozart imitations, and Beethoven's fifth. At the very least, everything fit into those three general categories: "easy-listening," bad, generic music by someone you've heard of, bad music by someone you've never heard of, and pieces you've heard a thousand times.

On WFMT, I regularly hear music that I've never heard, by composers I've never heard of, that is enjoyable on first hearing, and motivates further listening. For instance, a week ago I heard a clarinet quartet. I usually fancy myself at guessing the composer when I hear a good piece of music from the late 18th/early 19th century, but I was flummoxed. It sounded astonishingly Mozartean for a piece I knew wasn't by Mozart. Turns out it was by some Finnish composer named Bernhard Crusell, and I felt really dumb for never having heard of him. Now I know all about him! He's mostly known for clarinet music, but I reckon he should be a bit more famous. I may be ignorant, but if I'd never heard of him, I'm guessing a lot of musicians are in the same boat.

'Til tomorrow!

hilarious thievery

2010-02-18T11:25:00.000-06:00

If you ever want to shoplift, don't do it like this.

call a convention cont'd

2010-02-16T22:43:00.003-06:00

Or we'll end up like Greece.

Also, while we're on the subject of our depressing future, described in otherwise awesome Atlantic articles, what's a twenty-something to do?

call a convention?

2010-02-16T17:57:00.004-06:00

If you've been reading the news lately, you know that talk of America's decline is all the rage. Jacob Weisberg at Slate thinks we the people are mostly to blame. He makes a good point. On most important issues, poll results display the shocking failure of Americans to recognize trade-offs and generally stay even minimally informed. Can you blame politicians when voters send them such mixed and incoherent messages?

Most of the concern has been around the filibuster and Republican obstructionism. If 40 senators, representing less than 30% of the population, can block any important legislation, then it’s no wonder that the government is putting off a lot of problems. From a game-theoretical perspective, the Republicans are playing predictably irrational strategy and hoping that it will pay off down the line. They’re like a ganster who says he’ll kill you if you steal his apple, even though he’ll end up in jail for it. If he can convince you that he’s serious, you won’t go near his apple, even though it would be irrational for him to kill you afterward. If the Republicans can convince Democrats that they’ll let the country collapse before they vote for any Democratic legislation, then they might just end up with a lot more Republican-looking legislation.

More generally, though, there’s a feeling that everything wrong with America comes back to shoddy government at all levels, (brilliantly and depressingly argued here!), especially in light of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning most of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation. That decision has inspired calls for a convention to amend the constitution. So far, all the amendments to the Constitution have been adopted through a vote in Congress and the legislatures of the states; a convention bypassing Congress altogether would be a first since the Constitution's adoption.

The page linked above, started by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, proposes specifically an amendment that would relate to the financing of elections. But while we’re at it, why not go further? The Constitution has served us well, but let’s be honest, some of it needs an overhaul. For instance, the Senate. I realize, that, realistically, there’s no way the Senate will ever go away, because small states wield way too much power to ever go along…which is precisely the problem. The “great compromise” that created the Senate made sense because the US really was more a collection of states with regional interests than a nation.

Since the Civil War, though, it’s become more and more integrated. And that means another facet of the national government doesn’t make much sense anymore: direct, as opposed to parliamentary, representation. Actual voting patterns bear this out pretty clearly: the US is divided along ideological, not regional, lines. A Republican in New York would be better represented by a Republican representative from Oregon than a Democrat in New York. Not gonna happen anytime soon, I realize. But a convention would get the ball rolling…so sign up and support it!

piano sound, part 2

2010-02-10T16:58:00.003-06:00

A friend complained to me the other day that my original post on this topic sort of built up to something, but never quite arrived. He was surely right; but let's be honest, it was getting a little long. You probably didn't even read the whole thing. Anyway, so what's the big deal? Why does it matter if I or anyone can recognize the sound of certain pianists?

First of all, it's totally awesome that, on an instrument with seemingly so little possibility for individuality, it turns out it's still possible. I can recognize as many pianist's playing as I can violinists, or cellists. That obviously would be different if I listened to more violin and cello music, but still, those instruments are played in a completely different manner: more analog, less digital.

Second of all, it's depressing. Given the personalized nature of each pianist's sound, there's no way no one can ever hope to replicate any of them. They can't even replicate each other! So to the extent that our enjoyment of Moravec's Chopin or Gould's Bach depends on their characteristic voicing or articulation, well, that may be lost forever.

Third, and most of all, it's fascinating! And as far as I can tell, not terribly well-studied. As I mentioned, I'm not really sure what's responsible for the effect, whether it is really a note by note phenomenon, or whether it has more to do with phrasing and combinations of notes. But that actually shouldn't be that hard to figure out, right?

random not-watching-the-super-bowl super bowl memory

2010-02-07T20:38:00.002-06:00

For some reason I just remembered this rendition of the national anthem from the super bowl a few years ago. For a really great tune it's butchered way too often. This is definitely the best I've ever heard live at a sporting event, and an interesting arrangement to boot. Maybe I could have done without a 4-3 suspension on every phrase ending, but what're ya gonna do.

Anyone know a better one?

music in the modern era

2010-02-06T15:44:00.002-06:00

First, support my friend in his innovative project.

Recently, I've been thinking about performance practice and public attitudes toward "art music" more generally. A couple of specific things have influenced me, that I'll talk more about, but I wanted to mention them quickly. One is Emily Howell, a computer program developed by UCSC professor David Cope. (JFGI and read all about it).

The other is improvisation, especially by Gabriela Montero, of whom I was just made aware three days ago, and have not stopped watching obsessively since. My favorites here and here. I've never seen anything like it. The most shocking part for me is that I had never heard of her before! This kind of thing just isn't really encouraged much in the conservatory world that I inhabit, which is a real shame.

More generally, though my friend and I have our disagreements about what music is all about, I think we agree that something is off about the modern concert hall experience. More to follow soon!