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I had just got this brilliant idea for a website that would do online what the fabulous book by Barlow and Morgenstern (now selling on Amazon for $185) did for music lovers: enable you to look up the composer and name of a tune that you can write out using the names of the piano keys, e.g. CDE-EGF- and so on. I was just about to contact all my computer geek buddies to see if we could put such a site together.
Unfortunately, I have just this minute discovered that the concept has already been implemented on the Web. The site is called Musipedia, a very simple and effective tool to identify classical music themes. Here's how you use it.
At the website (and why am I wasting your time and mine describing all this? You could easily discover the routine by going to the site) they give you a choice of methods of putting in the tune. There is a Flash-based keyboard that you can "play" with a mouse, which transcribes the tune (not too accurately, since the rhythm you enter is at the mercy of how good you are with a mouse), and then, when you click the Search button, the site looks up the closest match to your tune in its database, and gives you the half-dozen top matches.
I tried to match a certain tune that my mother used to sing around the house, but the words to which I could not remember. (My mother used to sing lots of goofy songs from the thirties and forties, when she was growing up.) Here's the tune, if you're interested:
The software suggested a string quartet by Mozart, and a variety of other losing matches. I wonder whether there is a way of adding entries to their database once you discover the name of the tune and its composer. . . I suppose there must be; there is a disclaimer that suggests that they really can't take responsibility for contributed information, just like Wikipedia.
An interesting problem that crops up is the following: if there is no exact match (and there generally will not be one), how does it measure how close an approximate match is? In other words, every tune --at least conceptually-- can be imagined as being surrounded by other tunes that are close to it. This is the idea of Topology: in a collection of objects, what objects are a given object close to? In fact, topology addresses the idea of what points are next to each other. For instance, if you take a rectangle, and consider the points at the left edge to be right next to the points are the right edge, you turn the rectangle into a cylinder, because you have glued the left edge to the right edge topologically.
By changing the gluing procedure slightly, you can make a Möbius strip. Just consider the points at the left edge near the top be "next to" the points at the right edge near the bottom, and vice versa. This way, it is as if you have glued the two edges after twisting them. (If you give the paper two twists, it may as well be a cylinder, mathematically, which you can appreciate by thinking about who is "next to" whom!)
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
One thing I'm pretty vague about is non-sacred music for the Holidays. At one time I scorned the usual "secular" Christmas tunes, because basically I knew so many carols that I just didn't have time for Jingle Bells, and that ilk. But, over the years, there were a goodly number of holiday favorites that I missed if I didn't hear them once the weather got cold.
The rather small list of songs that I grudgingly got to like are, in addition to Jingle Bells: Winter Wonderland (ugh), Let It Snow, The Christmas Song ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."), Need a little Christmas, Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson, Silver Bells, Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and a few others that elude me at the moment. Oh; John Lennon's Merry Christmas, War is Over; and So this is Christmas. (The Beatles, evidently, enjoyed Christmas hugely, judging from the many gems they dreamed up for the members of their Fan Club. In their Messages, of course, they affected a Tired Of It All attitude, but you can see through it.)
I would like to get myself a CD that has most of the better-known (non-sacred) Christmas and Holiday songs and tunes, but I don't know which one to get. It is actually possible to sing these songs badly; I really prefer not to get get Perry Como singing them all, or even Julie Andrews, though the latter comes closest to the artist who can sing almost anything beautifully. Deck the Halls, We Wish you a Merry Christmas, and a few other songs are really secular carols, even if they are placed in a Christian context. So this is an invitation for anyone reading this to send in their nominations for best Christmas CD (non-sacred)!
Bill Maher, the comedian and abrasive political satirist, wrote a book earlier this year: New New Rules (How everybody but me has their head up their ass). The link takes you to a Amazon Kindle application that lets you read the foreword. This post is more about the review of the book by one Herbert Calhoun.
Mr Calhoun appears to take the view that Bill Maher is a prophet foretelling the doom of America as we know it.
Trying to describe America, in my very humble opinion, is like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant. I have been for thirty years decrying the fact that there is no national health care system, but for thirty years my friends have told me that it would never work. Why? After all, they have it in Britain, and in Asian countries, and it works, despite the rampant corruption in those countries. Because America, they say, is too big.
Well, America is hardly bigger than India, with close to half a trillion souls (half of them as sick as dogs). But, as far as I can tell, in India there is still a sense of national identity. (Those of us who live outside India can't really analyze that phenomenon, but I suspect that it is waning, and only survives in part because of the presence of America on the one hand, and Pakistan and China on the other.) In the USA, national identity is entirely different, and corruption is also entirely different than it is elsewhere in the world. This is an important point, which many Americans will grant right away, without quite understanding the actual differences. Our national identity is bigger and better than any other national identity, we will say, thinking that we have fought harder for it, and we have forged it in the face of massive waves of immigration for several centuries. Well, at least two. (Our corruption, we will be thinking, is also bigger and better than you'll find anywhere else.)
Many liberals --among them Bill Maher-- as well as many conservatives are gazing on current events with horror. If you read Maher's book (which I haven't) you will probably see the reasons why both sides of the political divide are horrified. It appears that many American institutions are being subverted. It used to be that you could depend on real estate investments. No longer. It used to be that a new President could solve at least some of the problems identified by one party or the other. No longer. It used to be that new technologies would reliably result in jobs in America. No longer. It used to be that if you were educated enough, you could always find a job. No longer. It used to be that in both parties, at least one of the candidates was someone whose ideals you could identify with. It used to be that every spring you could depend on a flood of young people flooding the employment market with high idealism. We could depend on Europe as a market for our high-tech exports. We could depend on snow every winter. We could safely take a vacation in Mexico. We could board a plane flight in 2 hours.
Some of us have obviously been taken by surprise. We are better than this, they cry, thinking of the conditions that have changed due to shenanigans on Wall Street and in Washington. It has been a long process, but some of us are just beginning to realize that the murder and mayhem in Mexico is driven by the huge drug profits in America. But wait; can a few little black kids skulking in parking lots account for all that drug money? No; it's wealthy folks whose drug habits are never in the news. Rich Americans are spending more money on drugs than ever before. They're just a lot better at not getting caught.
Lots of things are alarmingly different. Health care is gradually getting worse in the USA. For the very rich, it is true that more diseases can be cured today that in earlier decades. But it is useless for us middle class folks, because inexplicably our deductibles are going up, and our treatment limits are going down. Education is worse, because teachers increasingly have to cope with students who don't really do any work at home, so that the few who do their homework feel that they may as well stop doing it. It's a vicious spiral based on a weird understanding of "fairness". Teacher, be fair: kids who don't do their homework are people too. Dean, be fair: kids who don't study deserved to pass, too. They did pay their fees, after all. We didn't pay $200K to your school just to flunk out, you know.
But it is not the end of the world; things will keep spiraling towards chaos, but we will keep inventing ways of avoiding total disaster. But we're going to see a sequence of disasters that are just a little this side of total.
Is it fair that a few of us should keep our fingers in the dikes, while the rest of us just use our indignation to march around doing nothing? Well, it's always been that way. The average citizen has always been noisy about his or her rights, but not about his or her responsibilities. A few have always gone about cleaning up everybody else's hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts. A few of us have always organized those study groups at the end of the semester, and helped our dysfunctional buddies to learn their periodic freaking tables. Is it fair? It's just what makes us us.
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Before I go into this subject, I want to make it clear that I would much rather live in the USA than in any other country in the world. To be honest, when I visit the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Hem-hem) I do feel ---briefly--- that I would really love to move there; and I would probably feel the same if were to visit, say, Germany or Holland (though who knows how much they welcome foreign folks over there?) but I would sooner or later feel the urge to return to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Bananas.
I keep meeting wonderful people here. So there's no shortage of them. A person I never knew turns out to be someone wonderful, and we sit together and deplore the state of things. Lovely women mourn the difficulty of finding men with a liberal attitude; all the guys seem to be conservative-leaning. (On the surface the guys are quite reasonable and well-balanced, but there does seem to be dissatisfaction with social welfare programs, spending on education and the arts, impatience with environmental initiatives, and hostility towards women, immigrants and ethnic minorities. All the liberal guys seem to be married. What does that tell you?)
This was brought home to me strongly just this morning when I read about a little 2-year-old Chinese girl being knocked down by two vans in heavy traffic, and lying there bleeding, ignored by all the bystanders. It appears that Good Samaritans have, in the past, found themselves liable after interfering in similar cases. Such things do not happen here in the US very often, but I cannot say whether people are just that much nicer, or whether the laws are that much more strict about hit-and-run accidents. In addition, the enormous population of China has a negative effect on the social responsibility of average citizens, it appears to us from here. The phrase "Life is cheap" seems to take on a whole different meaning ...
However, if you read the websites of organizations that study such things, we learn that poverty in the US is on the rise. Bread.org, for instance, gives a quite dispassionate but depressing account of the picture of hunger in the US.
The causes of hunger, says Bread.org, is economic. Their lead article describes various technical states in which a household can find itself, one of which is food insecurity, which describes a household that struggles to put food on the table at least once a year. There is no shortage of food; only a shortage of money to buy it.
Poor, uneducated families tend to spend their money on food that does them little good in the long term; very poor folks are often overweight. The effects of low incomes are complex and varied, and in the US, in particular, families seem not to have the cultural resources to cope with poverty. Because of the American lifestyle which focuses on nuclear families, and which minimizes interference from older (and very occasionally, wiser) relatives, poor families have few or no ideas about how to ride out a hard patch. The Village does not help. The Church does not help much, since the intellectual liabilities of belonging to a church are so vast, that most people who might be able to cope with the church's incessant demands for money (by just saying no, for instance) tend to keep away from it. Increasingly, too, the churches have no use for people who are too poor to tithe to them.
Preparing for Affluence
Ok. We're really far down this particular post, and not at a very good point at which to start a completely new idea, but that's exactly what I want to do.
I suspect that most of the affluent "fiscal conservatives" come from families of so-called "self-made" men. These are working-class men who have worked very, very hard, and made their money. They pay their taxes very resentfully, and the money they make is earmarked for their spouses and their (often quite undeserving) offspring; after all, blood is thicker than water (whatever that means), and why should the Government distribute their hard-earned wealth among the undeserving poor?
In my last post, I addressed the issue of what Education is for; here I'm musing about what Money is for. The Ignorant are convinced that money redistributed by the Government is ill-spent. My money, they say, is for my kids, and my grandchildren, to splurge on whatever they want. I shall give some of my money to my church (which will bankroll missions in Darkest Africa, ostensibly, but which really goes to support the church bureaucracy), and some money to my golf club, and that's all I'm going to do.
But can we really live well while our fellow-citizens, some of them very probably thoroughly lazy people, are on the brink of hunger, our schools are sorely short on equipment, school canteens are serving junk food, the orchestras and bands are going bankrupt, the libraries are shortening their hours, the police force is laying off officers, the city cannot afford to replace burnt-out light fixtures on the streets, and public TV and radio has to beg for funds to keep operating? We are rapidly becoming a nation of newly-rich surrounded by newly-poor. Neither component of the population knows how to deal with its new circumstances.
Part of what we must learn is how our spending impacts our life in ways that are not obvious. It is difficult to persuade children that the welfare of others is important, that it is satisfying to see our neighbors healthy and comfortable. I really don't know how to do this; it must come from constant exposure to the idea. Public-spiritedness is very rare; and we must study it when we see it: where does it come from?
Arguably, the children of today know neither how to deal with affluence nor with poverty. Our community organizations are inept both with addressing needs here in the US as well as with needs in the world abroad; it is a miracle that anything gets done anywhere.
On July Fourth, 1890, one Albert Pillsbury gave a speech in Boston. Evidently 120 years ago, he felt that public spirit was in the decline, and he deplored it eloquently. A search on Public Spirit brought up a link to his speech, and I give it here: Public Spirit.
Comrade Pillsbury pursues his theme at length. But he says:
If public spirit is declining, the decline must be stayed; if it sleeps, it must be awakened. We need not lose confidence; we must not omit caution, nor forget the maxim, which contains the essence of all political wisdom as applied to popular government, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We have fairly entered upon a period which, to the republics of ancient times, has proved to be the period of decline, — a period in which new sources of mischief are opened, different from those to which we have hitherto been exposed, — the period of wealth and luxury, in which the people are liable to be seduced from proper attention to their public interests by the pursuit and enjoyment of riches. It has been said by a political philosopher that while danger to a small republic comes from without, to a great republic it proceeds from within. We have nothing to fear from foreign power; we must turn the eye of vigilance upon ourselves. It was long ago foreseen that one result of the unexampled opportunity for the acquisition of wealth, afforded by our resources and our laws, would be to divert the attention and the energies of the people from public affairs to the pursuit of private gain. We are beginning to realize this result. It is not a source of danger if it is met with a quickened sense of public duty on the part of the whole people. We cannot expect to enjoy the fruits of the prosperity which has made the United States the first nation in the world in aggregate wealth, and in the annual production of wealth, without the difficulties which seem inseparable from such a situation. We are reaping its benefits in every avenue of enterprise and philanthropy; in the march of industrial development, moving at a pace and upon a scale of which history affords no example, and in the boundless liberality of private munificence, manifested in the endowment of schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, and in every form which can increase the comfort and promote the progress of society. These are all proofs of public spirit, but to be effective for the security of popular government public spirit must be carried into the actual work of government by the whole body of the people.
A few months ago, I wrote about what use Education was.
By now most of us must be tuned in to the fact that, though, on the face of it, getting an education is --at least mostly-- still a voluntary thing, people are out there furiously getting an education. (At least, when they do expend the least bit of effort getting their education, they certainly let everybody know about it.)
I had been firmly of the opinion that, among other things, an Education was all about what to do with oneself when one was home from work; in other words, it is all about one's leisure time. In the light of the terrible unemployment picture that obtains presently, this attitude is laughable: how in the heck is one supposed to enjoy one's leisure when one hasn't got a job in the first place?
This brings out an enormous contradiction in our society. The vast majority of people are in occupations that merely give them a living: sales, services, management, whatever: be it an office job or a floor job or a job in the outdoors, most employed people keep their jobs just to bring home a paycheck. This means that they use, possibly, a very small proportion of their education in their actual workplaces: a little arithmetic, a little language capability, a little knowledge of law and accounting principles, and that's all; all the rest they pick up on the job, so it's a common complaint that the education they received was "useless".
My claim was that the education was for when you really began to live each day, when you came home. Surrounded by your family, you can focus on the things you choose to do, rather than the things you have to do to earn your bread.
I completely recognize that most people are exhausted by the time they come inside the house and slam the door shut. You know, this wasn't always the case: half a century ago, a middle-class citizen spent a moderate amount of energy at work, and came home with a certain amount of energy left to talk to the kids and the spouse, cast an intelligent eye on the newspaper (if it hadn't been read at breakfast already), and possibly had a friend or two pop over in the evening, to play a hand of cards, or go out for a night of bowling, or whatever. If you look around you, those who have the energy to do any of that are rare, except for those who have some fun on the weekends. The Great American Business Boss has gotten much better at sucking every last calorie of energy out of you before you head home.
Given that this is the case, it is perfectly true that one's education is useless. It is preparation for your leisure time which you simply do not have the energy or even the time to enjoy anymore.
It is our leisure time that makes us human, and civilized. When our ancestors were out hunting and gathering, they had to be on the alert every moment, to keep from becoming food for some wild animal. Once we settled down in villages and in farms, it was the leisure we found that enabled art, and music, and literature. The whole point of education was that every new generation did not have to start from scratch.
But I'm seeing a different side to the story. Everything I teach seems immediately forgotten by each class. Every semester, I have to start from scratch. Starting from scratch has become a way of life for everyone, even young people who haven't started working yet. Somewhere they have got the idea that it is better to learn the same little thing in their ten mathematics classes than to learn ten different things.
My students, are, by and large, a lazy bunch. A few of them forget themselves and find themselves actually learning something in a class, to their extreme embarrassment. They recover quickly, and manage to forget the material quickly in time for the appropriate ignorance they have to display the next day.
At one time, this country truly was civilized; it is difficult to put one's finger precisely on the era in which this was true. There was a recognition of the higher things, the greater good, the dignity of labor, the equality of Man, and the things held in high esteem by the Founding Fathers were in fact truly admired by all educated citizens. But in the course of time, people found themselves professing these high ideals, while not actually understanding them, or even understanding the vocabulary that was required to explain the ideals. Today, it is very likely, even if the great Preamble to the Declaration of Independence were to be translated into the modern idiom, that a large proportion of the population would not have the background for understanding what it is saying. Isn't it obvious that everyone should be able to understand at least that? After all, it encapsulates almost everything that Americans hold dear. But I doubt that, in fact, it is any longer the body of axioms that holds this nation together.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that it is the enormous influx of immigrants into the country that has diluted this knowledge. It is simply the fact that the vast majority of people have been trapped into working so hard that they have no leisure to think about anything but work. They cannot convey their ideals to their children because they simply have no time. They could not learn the ideals of their parents, because their parents had no time for passing it on.
From being the Land of Plenty, the USA has become the Land of Plenty of Work for those who have jobs, and Plenty of Worry for those who don't. We are working in the Mines all over again.
Those in upper management work a lot less, it is true. All their time is spent appearing to be a lot busier than they are. In principle, they should be perfectly able to interact with their families in culturally meaningful ways: convey family values, engage in cultural pursuits, interact with their friends in civilized ways. But I suspect that mostly what gets done is a lot of drinking, smoking, and boasting about fictitious achievements. Things are set up in this society in such a way that most people get to be wealthy because their parents worked extra hard, which means that those parents had even less time to engage with them in ways that allowed family values to be meaningfully transmitted. So once junior gets to be a big shot on the shoulders of Papa's labor, junior has hardly any family values to speak of.
Perhaps the complaints about the irrelevance of education are true. A typical American liberal education is perfectly suited for a society in which obtaining a job is not a desperate thing. The fact that the American economy is uncontrolled to the point where every young person cannot be guaranteed some sort of a job, is deplorable. In this situation, where the economy is based on public mood rather than rational decisions, it is obvious that young people will insist that their education should guarantee them a job. In other words, most students will migrate towards narrow, technical educations, leaving only upper-crust kids --who typically do not worry about obtaining employment once they graduate-- to seek a liberal education: i.e., an education focused on understanding civilization. This is a situation that will lead to an even greater stratification than we have now. No doubt there are those who think this is a good thing. I think it is a very bad thing, because the most affluent students are by no means the ones who are most capable of understanding civilization. We shall be throwing our civilization before swine.
Suites, as a genre, seemed to have emerged in the late Renaissance and the early Baroque. I'm just guessing here, but I can imagine some feudal lord listening with satisfaction to a bunch of dances performed by a roving band of musicians, and calling one of them over. "So what was that you fellows were playing?" The leader, half in fear of being decapitated, would have looked over to the drummer, who was a little braver than the others, and the drummer strolls over. "Hi, Lord! Hi, Toots; what's up?" You can imagine Toots glaring at the impertinent young drummer, shooting an embarrassed smile at the nobleman, and mumbling to his colleague that they were being asked what the music was called.
The dances were probably called things like Kick the widow while she's down, and Jumping on the chickens, and so on, so of course the last thing Toots wants is to disclose the names of the dances. Upon reflection, it was a bad idea to get the drummer over.
"They're just some dances we play, you know, when folks want to dance, you know, like ..."
"Yeah, like on May Day, and stuff," adds the drummer.
"Yeah, that's it, your lordship," adds Toots.
"But it's got to have a name," insists the lord, or maybe the laird, and so they decide to call it The Mudheap Dances, since it was the Lord of Mudheap that was insisting on a name for the dances. He insists that the next time they come through, he wants to hear the same set of dances, and they had better remember the name of the set.
A suite is basically just a collection, such as a suite of furniture, or a suite of rooms, but most definitely a musical suite is a collection of movements that are intended to be performed together, and, moreover, performed in a designated order.
By the end of the Baroque, when Telemann, Handel and Bach were doing their stuff, they took as their models the suites being performed at Versailles, with Lully and other court composers playing grand-sounding music for the entrance of the King (the Overture), followed by a set of about five dances in contrasting meters, for actual dancing, or for eating to the sound of.
In the time of Mozart, of course, there were the Divertimentos (more properly divertimenti) and Serenades that he wrote for the amusement of the aristocracy of Vienna, and all of Europe, really, since he was invited to Czechoslovakia and France, being a celebrity in a small way. Nobody really wanted to hear his symphonies and concertos; they preferred the Serenades by far. These were lighthearted pieces, intended to be enjoyed with half an ear (in contrast to symphonies and concertos, to which the audience was expected to give their undivided attention).
By the time Beethoven came along, the Suite made a comeback. Composers were writing Operas like fury, since they were all the rage. (Just as musical theater is more popular than classical music today, so it was then.) Once the opera had finished its run, composers discovered that they could write several movements from the music of the opera, and call it a suite. Hence the Egmont suite by Beethoven. [I have just learned that the Egmont suite is not an instrumental work, so it perhaps does not quite belong in this discussion.] I'm not certain that Mozart did not do something of the same sort, but some of the most popular of suites written in the 19th century have been derived from operas and ballets. (I must mention here that Purcell, in 17th century England did the same; his suites written for various plays of his time are still frequently performed today, and are among the most accessible music Purcell ever wrote.)
Let me place here a reference to Suites that I found on the Web, the only really useful one: Suites, on Wikipedia. The need to be precise, and the requirement of satisfying Wikipedia's self-imposed, and rather defensive, standards of documentation make filling out a Wikipedia article an exercise in frustration, I imagine, and so all we can find is this compendium of links to existing articles in Wikipedia.
Mendelssohn wrote at least one orchestral suite that I am aware of, namely one inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. Schubert also wrote at least one suite, whose name eludes me. Schumann wrote collections of pieces, not intended to be performed all together, and so do not really qualify for the name of "suite", e.g. Kinderscenen. Weber wrote the Oberon overture, but possibly not a suite to go with it.
Before I forget, let me mention the major suites that inspired this entire post: The Mother Goose Suite, by Modest Mussorgsky, originally for piano, but subsequently orchestrated both by the composer, and by Maurice Ravel; I could not get a decent clip of this one; sorry! I'll keep trying...
Pictures at an Exhibition, also by Mussorgsky (also orchestrated by Ravel, among others); This is a grand and brilliant work that is very accessible and entertaining.
Pines of Rome, Ancient Airs and Dances, Roman Festivals, and a few other suites by Ottorino Respighi; Ancient airs is lovely. Festivals is noisy and brassy, evidently very influential; you can hear echoes of this style in film scores.
The Enigma Suite of Variations, by Edward Elgar; Nimrod is by far the most popular variation.
The Wise Virgins ballet suite by William Walton, based on chorales by J. S. Bach; The clip contains movements 1-4; the first is from Bach's harmonization of "What God hath done is rightly done."
Numerous ballet suites by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, including Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, as well as a Serenadefor strings, which is a suite pure and simple; The clip is of the second movement of the Serenade: a waltz.
The Rite of Spring, and Firebird, both ballet suites by Igor Stravinsky;
Smetana's The Bartered Bride, and Ma Vlast; The clip is the dance of the clowns.--Pardon me: the Dance of the Comedians. I realize that the two categories are not the same, and not knowing Czech I cannot tell which word is appropriate, and must defer to the documentation on the clip.
Peer Gynt, by Edvard Grieg. The clip is of the movement Morning, also known as Morning Mood.
To be accurate, suites of variations are a slightly different animal from orchestral suites generally. The fact that the variations are linked by being variations of a common theme is an additional structure that is absent in a typical suite. Because suites are such loosely-linked collections of movements, there is usually --but this is by no means a rule-- a non-musical, or more correctly, an extra-musical idea that holds the movements of a suite together. In Bach's time, for instance, the movements of an orchestral suite needed have nothing in common except key. (The only reason the tune of movement 4 pops into my head at the end of movement 3 is because I have heard the entire suite so many, many times before.)
OK, girls and boys, I'm getting a little hungry, and I'm going to postpone adding some YouTube links for a later date. I can't think of pictures that go along with this post, so if I do add images later, they will be completely gratuitous.
I was given a copy of Little Men by Louisa M. Alcott when I was about 10 or 11. I can't remember the occasion; perhaps it was a birthday. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I took it as a "school story", and could not quite understand the central position Jo Bhaer occupied in the story, because in all the school stories I had read, it was the kids who were central to the story and never the adults. Still, I began to understand Jo's affection for all the children in her school, gradually working my way past the slight sentimentality that occasionally got in the way.
A few months later --or perhaps years-- we were taken to see the movie of Little Women, the version starring June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor. I was instantly in love with all the girls, but most especially Jo. I was furious at Rossano Brazzi, who played Professor Bhaer, but I was by then accustomed to falling in love with older women, only to have them snapped up by older guys, some of them with outrageous sideburns. Anyway, of course I had to go home and read the book. (At this time Dad was away at Yale, and did not have the money to come visiting during the breaks. Everybody was glad that I was reading Alcott, and not James Bond, etc ...)
Reading Civil War era novels is heavy going. But through it all, Louisa May Alcott's storytelling shines through. My mother observed my progress through the book (I think I had gotten sick with something serious, but I kept reading), and explained how autobiographical the book was. Looking back, I think I was impressed at how open-hearted Jo March was, a very likely genuine portrayal of the character of the author, Louisa Alcott herself. It was certainly in the spirit of the times for women to be overly sentimental about children and poverty, but there was just enough of a touch of restraint to give Alcott's characters the weight of authenticity.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
At times, the author makes her characters just a little too perfect. When they have faults, even the faults are perfect, and there is a veiled glamor over even the humblest of personalities in Alcott's account. After a while, you forget the sentimentality. Unfortunately, some of those tricks of writing have attached themselves to me, and the observant reader will know just how much I have been influenced by L. M. Alcott.
It is interesting to read just how engaged the middle-class was in national affairs, to the extent that they were able to obtain news of current events. The Alcotts in Boston were far better informed of the events of the war than folks further west must have been. I'm still trying to get a clear idea of what gave solidity to Alcott's boundless enthusiasm. Even in the Little Women, Little Men series, she is already half in jest about her enthusiasm, but she is beginning to see her attitudes about education and the new society she was envisaging, and presumably the vision of whoever inspired the character of Friedrich Bhaer, taking shape. All the way up unto that time, the idealists who were the successors to the founding fathers of America were keeping alive the idealism of those founders, even if some of that manic idealism must have been fueled by the cheap labor provided by slaves and former slaves, and the leisure it brought the propertied classes. Labor was no longer cheap, but the open Western frontier was enough to keep driving the vision of a good society that lay just beyond the horizon. This is the most attractive thing about Louisa M. Alcott: her belief in the boundless potential of young people. This is attractive to me in anybody.
Charles Dickens
The almost contemporary books of Laura Ingalls Wilder are set just after the War, and refer to it rather distantly if at all. Wilder is more concerned with the details of life in the West than with the personalities of those beyond her immediate family. Gifted with equal charm, Laura Ingalls makes her very restraint lend her the glamor that Louisa Alcott must craft with Dickensian deliberation. (I don't know that Dickens was all that deliberate about anything; I only mean that Alcott admired Dickens greatly, and seems to have set out to emulate him in depth of feeling. And she certainly succeeded.)
There is something delicious about how music sounds with just sufficient instruments to fill out the harmony!
Back in Bach's day, I think it is fair to say that rhythm and syncopation were really the driving engines of the musical scene. Though some of Bach's melodies are among the most lovely ever written, the vast majority of his orchestral works appeal to us ---to me, at least--- because of the rhythm. The harmony does certainly play a major role; in fact, the harmony actually plays a rhythmic role, which is a phenomenon that is just a bit too subtle for me to describe.
Alongside the rhythms and the harmony, is the texture created by the interweaving melodies of the parts, or the voices. This texture is characteristic of the contrapuntal era, beginning before Palestrina, and culminating probably with Mozart. Some, of course, insist that Bach was the crowning glory of Counterpoint, and how are we to argue? Chacun á son gout, as they say.
Let's leave that aside for the moment.
Imagine a lovely composition for just three voices! Many composers have contemplated this very ideal, but Bach went further: what if the three voices were perfectly matched? One of the ideals of chamber music is to have a small ensemble of perfectly matched voices.
Homogeneous Ensembles
At the end of the Renaissance, and up to the beginning of the Baroque, there was a genre of composition for a small set of matched instruments called a consort. Two major consort types have come down to us: the Consort of Viols, and the School of Recorders (or consort of recorders). Noble houses commissioned skilled instrument-makers to create a set of matched instruments of sizes ranging from a high treble size (or even a tiny descant), down to a large bass size (or larger contrabass size). Then, the patron hoped, the jaded court composer would be spurred on to write new and better music for this matched set of instruments.
Among the consort pieces I enjoy the most are those of William Byrd and John Downland. Here is an In Nomine by Byrd:
(The performer appears to have played all the parts himself.)
The homogeneity of the tone-color of the instruments --in this case, the single instrument-- enhances the contrapuntal texture, or the weaving in and out of the parts. Syncopation, especially --where different voices sound at different times, on the beat and off-- is particularly effective.
Bach wrote a number of Trios for the organ, where the two hands and the pedals played a single voice each, constituting a trio. The important thing in Bach's Trio Sonatas was the delicacy of the texture and the lively rhythms, and not the weight of the sonority. The Trio Sonatas are almost invariably performed with very light registration (very few stops), most performers understanding the esthetics of the Sonatas perfectly. Here is the Trio Sonata in E Flat major played on an organ. Here it is, played by a modern string ensemble. It is just as charming, but the neutral organ tones lend themselves more towards enjoying the music independently of the performance (though an organist would be indignant at taking second place to the music itself, perhaps).
The famous Loeki Stardust recorder ensemble from Amsterdam is one of the few recorder ensembles that I am familiar with, and the following is this group playing the famous (incomplete) last fugue from The Art of Fugue of J. S. Bach.
Joseph Haydn, you may know, developed the musical structure called Sonata Form. This was a plan for writing the large-scale first movement of a symphony. (Subsequent movements contrasted both in mood and complexity with the First movement, so their forms were correspondingly simpler, usually, though often the last movement, too, was in a variant of Sonata Form.) Another genre Haydn brought to full development was the String Quartet. In some ways, the String Quartet, both the ensemble consisting of two violins, a viola and a 'cello, and the String Quartet form, consisting of a first movement in Sonata Form, followed by up to three more movements, was a successor to the Viol Consort, and the multi-movement pieces written for them. The instruments were perfectly matched, and the music written for the ensemble exploited to the fullest the homogeneity of tone of the instruments. (It must be noted that the three sorts of instruments do actually have a degree of distinctiveness in their tones, even if they sound very similar indeed. Some composers exploit this slight variety in their sonorities, especially modern composers.)
Here is a string quintet movement by Mozart (not a quartet, as I had originally written!).
Heifetz, Primrose and Piatigorsky were famous performers of their time, and we can tolerate the poor recording quality to hear these folks play!
Heterogeneous Ensembles
In contrast to string quartets and viol consorts, a different sort of ensemble became popular in Mozart's day, namely the Woodwind Quintet. The woodwind quintet consists of a flute, a clarinet, an oboe, a bassoon, and, of all things, a French Horn. On one hand, these are five very distinctive voices, but on the other hand, they are similar enough to be able to blend together to a certain extent. Quite honestly, I know little about this particular sort of ensemble, and the genre of music written for it (except that I have been scoring a movement that I wrote for various groups of instruments, including a wind quartet). Let's look for examples of Quintets from about Mozart's time.
Well, I couldn't find any! What a shame. But here is a quintet anyway. They're playing a movement from one of my very favorite modern suites: Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Maurice Ravel. (It was originally written for piano solo, and subsequently orchestrated for orchestra. Ravel was a genius at orchestration):
This is a piece by Anton Reicha:
And my Serenade. This is scored for Flute, Clarinet, English Horn (Cor Anglais) and Bassoon.
As I was fooling around with this piece, I was fascinated with the dual problems of scoring it (that is, assigning instrumentation to it) on the one hand, to make the strands of the harmony blend, and on the other, to make the strands of the harmony not blend too much. For instance, if I had one instrument looping upwards past other melody lines, I didn't want the motion to be obscured by those other melodies. This sort of thing happens beginning at 2:24, where the flute spirals past the rather laconic melody in the clarinet.
I also realized something directly that I had only read about up until last winter: the Clarinet has two entirely different "voices" in different parts of its range. (Yes, I know everybody knew this but me, but ... never mind.) In the higher register, which is beautiful in its limpid simplicity (or jaunty and perky, when playing popular or jazz music), the tone is actually uninteresting and sort of characterless. In the lower register (more reminiscent of the ancestor instrument from which the Clarinet was developed: the chalumeau, the clarinet has a unique reediness different from the oboe and the bassoon. In other words, the flute, clarinet, oboe, French horn and bassoon are really six quite different instruments, which can be made to blend together beautifully, but also keep their individuality.
Beginning in the time of Mozart, music that was essentially classical (using the word "classical" to distinguish from popular dance music) was being played by commoners: ordinary folks, tailors, cobblers, carpenters, farmers, etc. Music, until this time, was played for the nobility by professional musicians, or played for dancing by musicians while they were off-duty, or by completely different musicians, who played for contributions from the dancers, e.g. street musicians. But now, groups of serious musicians had obtained instruments for themselves, such as clarinets and bassoons and such, and played serious music on the street; or at least semi-serious music. They formed themselves into clubs and Harmonies, and Mozart wrote some of his most brilliant music for them. Some of Mozart's serenades are for these sorts of groups, including this one, K 375 in E flat:
This movement is incorrigibly jolly --it is the Finale-- but you can hear clarinets high up, bassoons earnestly keeping the bass going, and horns occasionally splashing chords in the middle. (Flutes seem to have been used rarely, since it was probably too difficult to play flutes while marching along.)
It appears that there is no place for caution in today's world. In a world that is ruled by economics (and not very rational economics, at that), the moment that growth stops, or even slows, everyone begins to panic.
It is reasonable and proper that those who are without work should panic. But the approach furiously advocated by Big Business and its friends: unloose the fetters on Big Business!!! --and reduce government spending-- simply makes every little locality desperate to grab at any economic opportunity it sees.
In our little town, for instance, since we're close to the center of all this --highly destructive-- shale gas exploration, there is a great deal of bustling around, meetings everywhere, promotions, interviews, big shots from Texas coming in to gloat, big shots from Washington and Harrisburg hovering anxiously. There is a scarcity of hotel space; not a single room is available some weeks. Four new hotels have been put up recently, now competing with the grand old hotels of yesteryear. The new hotels, of course, are essentially all plasterboard and steel girders; that's why they can be put up so fast. Everyone in the hospitality industry is crazy about build, build build.
But all this frantic busy activity will peter out within a couple of years. Once the gas companies bludgeon the local authorities into coming to terms with the pollution that simply cannot be alleviated, and once the local authorities begin to come under pressure from locals who benefit (alas, only temporarily) by the boom, the necessity for bigwigs from anywhere coming to our little town will cease, and the hotels will lie empty once again.
It would seem that all the gas will be extracted within five years. At that point, even the low-level gas-rig jockeys will leave town, and only the blighted gas fields will be left. But, on the bright side, there will be a lot of really cheap rooms for Little League families. I suspect that the hotels will be very poorly maintained, since there will be no money in it.
Nobody wants to listen to any voice that suggests that furious building will be wasteful. The voices of the nay-sayers are ignored, or worse, the pessimists are shunned. Nobody can stand anyone who "isn't part of the solution," because, of course, they're part of the problem.
When America first hit the stands as the biggest thing since paved roads, it was Henry Ford's assembly line that headlined the news. The better mousetrap became essentially sidelined, and the fabulous economies of scale took over the thinking of economists and businessmen.
Industries had been around for a long time; craftsmen were, for instance, making dresses for wealthy customers back in the time of King Arthur and Queen Betty Lou. The sweat shop that makes dresses so inexpensive that even I can afford one were a recent invention. Horse carriages, likewise, were being turned out in factories all over Britain and the USA. The assembly lines of Detroit made them a lot cheaper.
Books were hard to find in the Middle Ages. Gutenberg's invention made them affordable to everyone (and ultimately created the new occupation of the Bible-thumper, surely a good thing, eh?). So we're all hung up on mass-producing things for good reason. Small farms are disappearing, and instead we have these giant businesses which, if they produce anything, will only produce a million of them.
We in America, in particular, have a tendency to equate progress with growth. A new breed of "geniuses" has come into existence: the kind that will take a good idea to make something useful, and increase your profits by (1) marketing them to people you never thought could use the bloody things, and (2) help you make far more of the things than you can easily sell. At this point (3) you need them to find new and better ways of making money out of the things, e.g. use them as toys for pit-bulls, for instance. Infuse them with bone essence, and here you go: a toy for Rover. (Never mind that it was supposed to be a nail-clipper.)
Our brave new world is now filled with a number of millionaires (apparently most Congressmen are), but also trillions of flavor-infused nail-clippers that nobody wants. So, in my humble opinion, this breed of genius must die. Actually, we have choices: we can fill the planet with surplus products, or we can change the advice these geniuses give the idiot entrepreneurs. It's time we pursued a more imaginative way of being productive than that of simply mass-producing everything, and persuading those who aren't interested in a product that they should purchase one anyway, and give it a temporary home on the way to the landfill, ---that is to say, the Planet--- which will be its final resting-place.
But for many reasons, we're going to have to abandon this view of the world. There is not scope for endlessly expanding everything, just as everyone cannot be above average, and just as the population cannot expand without limit. Today, landfills are wild places in which nobody, supposedly, wants to live. Tomorrow, these will be the places where the poor will have to build their homes. The more landfills expand, the greater the proportion of real-estate that will be "converted" blighted land.
In the future, not everything that expands is bad: information and technology will continue to improve and spread wider. Living conditions should improve. An increasingly larger proportion of the population should have access to medical resources. But once education was identified as something that was suitable for economies of scale, we lost a great deal. Certainly, education is important for the citizen to fit him- or herself into society in the most effective way. But we cannot make education into an assembly-line process, though it is very tempting to do so.
When the armies of production-line jockeys entered the planning of academia, we outsourced the business of publicity, admissions, raising money, etc, to a large number of well-meaning folks (a.k.a. "production-line jockeys") with wives, and children with teeth that needed straightening, and jets that needed fuel, and weekend getaways in the flood plains ... you get the idea. Soon, students were paying for a lot more than instruction. (They had to bankroll the very means whereby they were being exploited. I say this even though some of my best buddies are recruitment specialists.) College was costing more, the Government had to subsidize it, and now Congressmen could get up on their hind-legs and demand that colleges prove that they were effective.
On the one hand, it is as well that teachers at all levels keep an eye on just how well they're doing. But there has to be a fine balance between using Assessment as a useful feedback device, and pushing this fad of assessment as a way some idiot politicians can convince his electorate that once they get to Washington, your kids are going to do better in school, taxes are going to get lower, jobs are going to be more plentiful, and America is going to whip the pants off those pesky Asian teenagers at math and science. I doubt that teachers at any level respond well to the whip. Teaching is not something that can be delivered to order. If you turn the screws on teachers, you will get kids who are screwed up in complicated and invisible ways, which will only emerge down the road. It's a little like waterboarding.
The time may have come for us to go back to being a bunch of impecunious gurus holed out in a commune somewhere, where students can come to learn whatever we're interested in teaching. No accreditation, no student loans, no federal aid. We may have to scale down our lifestyles, but those of us who think we need 5-figure salaries (in constant 2011 dollars) are probably not happy teaching, anyway. All this preoccupation about whether students are actually learning what we're certifying them to have learned is due to the fact that it costs so damn much. The phrase "economies of scale" only means that there's a lot of cash for expenses that have to do with education and learning only very tangentially, such as football. Sure, some kids won't come to a school that doesn't have football. So much the better.
When the results of the "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)" came out, US politicians and bureaucrats were appalled at the implied inferiority of US students, and by further implication, the inferiority of US teachers, and US Education generally. (This is typical of the culture: the well-known fact that American kids were coming out of school not knowing very much did not alarm people until it was demonstrated that Japanese kids were showing our kids up in international tests.)
In the early years of this century, following some excitement in the nineties, politicians began clamoring for the hides of school teachers. A heap of tests of students at various grade levels was mandated by the States and by the Federal Government. Obviously, these tests were indirectly tests of the teachers.
This same culture of trying to get data of education outcomes has been gaining ground in colleges as well. Are students really learning what the colleges claim they're learning? So now in colleges, too, we have furious testing going on, with a view to estimating the efficiency of professors (and, to be honest, the overall curriculum, and how it is connected together).
Honestly, it is a sort of Consumer's Reports approach to education that was inevitable; it was bound to happen. The Government will now step in and say that unless colleges can prove that they're successful at teaching students what they need to know, they will have to re-think student financial aid, the non-profit status of colleges, and soon we will be hounding college professors as much as we hound schoolteachers.
In my (oft-repeated) humble opinion, hounding teachers does not have a good result. Teachers will tend to teach less and less, and teach it more carefully. Students will start doing better and better in a narrower set of skills (e.g. "I can really do addition and multiplication and spelling good, but grammar and subtraction I can't do at all.")
On one hand, it seems unreasonable to give teachers carte blanche on what and how to teach. On the other hand, interfering with the teaching process does lead to contradictions that are impossible to resolve.
Let's agree on one thing: teachers always do brilliantly with highly motivated, intelligent students. As long as we stay with students who are interested in a particular subject, teachers and students make progress like a couple of houses on fire. But when universal education enters the picture, the trouble starts. The Public want teachers to teach all students a little of everything, despite the fact that the vast majority of teachers are reluctant to teach a large class of reluctant students. Make no mistake: I am not in favor of reserving the highest wisdom for the deserving few. There is a subtle difference between elitism, and recognition that without motivation, learning and teaching is impossibly difficult. Today teachers are required to motivate the unmotivatable student, which even the gods cannot do with 100% success.
So we have a problem. The public feels that it has a right to information about how successful a teacher (or a school, or a program) is, but the very act of obtaining that information interferes with the very thing it is measuring. There is a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle operating here.
Note:
A consumer approach to education is what resulted in all these Online Courses and For Profit Universities all over the country, with designer majors. The majors advertized were on the lines of Engineering of Video Games, Fashion Swimsuit Design, etc. Unfortunately, many of these schools have found that their graduates do not do well in the employment marketplace, and are unable to pay their student loans.
Why is this? Young people who refuse to entertain the possibility of taking any course unless it is directly required in his or her major are likely to be impatient with a large number of skills and requirements that make them generally useful as employees. In a depressed economy where one might not be able to find a job that fits one's (possibly very narrow) interests, it is necessary that one has a broader training that allows one to keep body and soul together doing something that is remunerative, but possibly not very inspiring.
But these broad skills are provided by traditional Liberal Arts schools. Once these schools are pushed through the wringer of accountability, few of them will survive, and the boutique-major schools will have to take up the slack with education that most students will not be able to use.
But that's free enterprise. Someone will surely provide a good education for reasonable cost, right? Surely it is a niche market that someone could fill? Sure. Just until you assess the crap out of the place.
Tomorrow: Answers! Just kidding; I have no answers.
For a hundred years, our school has been giving thousands of students a variety of skills and attitudes. Our faculty have been telling them about the wisdom of the ancients, the opinions of sages and cranks (not always making clear which is which), a variety of procedures for doing things, analytical tools, insights, and occasionally, prejudices! When they graduate, students are often grateful to their school, and later in life, respond with generosity.
The generosity of alumni and well-wishers gives our school a slightly greater degree of permanence. The permanence of their alma mater is valuable to alumni, but it is desperately important to those of us who work here. College faculty are understandably preoccupied with generosity for this reason.
Thinking of generosity, one associates it with earlier times: the industrialists of the golden age of America, names associated with steel, coal and oil. But in these difficult times, it seems as if purse-strings are being tightened with great determination; doors are firmly bolted at night, as we peer anxiously through cracks in the shutters at what seems an inhospitable, even a hostile world. But others are hurting far more than we are. Soon it could be time for food banks, for soup kitchens, for free clinics, and homeless shelters. The need for generosity does not wait on convenience.
But generosity is learned, not born with. It is here, in college, that the young people see examples of going the extra mile, staying that extra hour, giving that extra review, and summoning up that one last smile when you would really rather not. Generosity goes hand in hand with education. Education, on the face of it, is enlightened self-interest, spiced with generosity. In reality, it is generosity of spirit, masquerading as self-interest!
Well, if you thought you were confused about whether you could afford a major purchase, imagine the quandary in which Lawmakers find themselves!
For instance, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives has been asking itself whether it can afford to have various gasoline companies from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc, develop the so-called Marcellus Shale Gas deposits. Can we afford the ruined roads, the polluted rivers, the destroyed property values? Well, sure, provided these companies hire people locally. That would ensure that the grateful newly-employed workers will vote for their representatives who pimped for the gas companies, giving them a free ride without additional taxation or any sort of excise burden. Unfortunately, it is the unemployed workers from Texas and Arkansas, etc, etc, who are getting employed; the local kids just get the least well-paid, most dangerous jobs. On the plus side, bars and brothels are doing a great business, but on the whole, the total infusion into the economy of Pennsylvania is miniscule; the State still hurts for revenue, and education funding has been severely cut.
When the Federal Government decides on a particular project, it is with great difficulty, because the true cost of the project is difficult to estimate. Why is this? Because it is essentially paid for with credit, by floating bond issues, or printing paper money. When the government decides on lowering taxes, again they do not know the exact value of the loss of revenue, because the true value of these taxes (which technically have not even been levied yet) is impossible to estimate. You can state it exactly in dollars and cents, but you're using a unit whose value, in turn, is uncertain.
Many economists will ask me right back: what do you mean by the "true value" of anything? And, quite honestly, I don't know myself! The word "value" has almost no meaning as it is, though the economists will insist that it has exactly as much meaning today as it ever did, namely a subjective quantity that each person must decide for themselves, but about which there can be some consensus by averaging over a large population.
After MortgageGate, however, in the eyes of many observers and mine, the process of arriving at an averaged figure for an aggregate risk for a large collection of risky ventures has tainted the whole idea of aggregation of values.
The ability of an individual to assess whether he or she can afford a purchase is compromised by the constant use of personal credit. Similarly, the Government --though its resources are far greater then those of an individual-- nevertheless finds it difficult, or even impossible, to assess the affordability of such steps as lowering or increasing specific taxes, or providing or ceasing to provide a particular benefit.
Despite all this, however, I presently believe that the Government should spend whatever is necessary to increase employment. This would normally involve creating government jobs, but the current political climate makes expanding the public sector repugnant to the top income portion of the population, those few hundred souls who earn most of the money in the USA. So the administration has to resort to leaving it in the hands of Small Business to hire new workers, and giving the businesses tax incentives for doing so.
But the hiring of a new worker is a huge risk for a small business. Even if it thinks it could use a new worker, the conservative lobby has persuaded it that the hire means huge expenses in Health Insurance and unemployment insurance, and all the sorts of costs the Business Lobby keeps working to eliminate. Business would like the hiring of a worker to be a trivial thing: hire today, fire tomorrow. But society has an interest in making the firing of a worker something that is done with due caution and consideration, and not lightly. So liberal politicians (and liberals, generally) would like there to be a certain amount of inertia in the process of hiring and firing, to reduce uncertainty in employment among the smallest-income sector of society.
So, as President Obama pointed out in his Jobs speech, there is no point in reducing taxes across the board for all businesses, and expect them to go into a hiring frenzy. Instead, it is better to offer tax reductions precisely to those businesses that actually hire unemployed workers. The Republican opposition will certainly find something objectionable in that plan.
I have blogged before on this issue: how can we make decisions on the quality of a product before we buy?
The economists say that the value of a product is how much the public is willing to pay for it. More accurately, the value of a product to a particular person is precisely how much money he or she is willing to part with to procure it. This simple view, initially perpetrated on us by some economic fathead in the late eighteenth century no doubt, is beginning to lose any residual validity it might have had.
Firstly, the money anyone is willing to pay for anything depends entirely on his or her credit situation. We pay for silly things that are really not worth very much simply because we're not thinking very hard, and we pay with a credit-card. Impulse purchases dilute the strength of the "value-willingness to pay" paradigm because it would suggest that very similar people with different credit situations will respond differently to the same product---indeed, the same person would respond differently--- other things being equal. So the value of a product becomes entirely a matter of psychology and financial liquidity. Economics is based on this value paradigm, and their insistence that the value of a class of things averages out over the market into something that is objective is hard to accept in a post-October-2009 world (or whenever the hell the economy of the USA went south, and stayed south, and don't give me any crap about how great it is today).
Secondly, Manufacturers have stumbled onto the trick of making every product a new product. Even an automobile model that was assessed as being a great value in July could be altered in December, to use inferior parts, assemble it in a less reliable location with poorly paid workers, so that the half-year model is significantly different from the model you thought you had inspected carefully, and about whose worth you were satisfied in the Summer. Shoes, cameras, computers, printers, paper, everything is an untried and untested product. Bait-and-switch is built-in into the system. Services. TV sets. Music Records; DVDs. Two identically labeled items might be quite different when you open up the packages.
In short, we really have no objective basis on which to base our assessment of value.
The manufacturer might be reputable. But over the years there have been numerous instances of reputable manufacturers who have compromised quality at some point, leaving a vast number of consumers owning a worthless product for which they had high hopes. Toyota. Drug companies. Credit card companies. Mortgages. Phones.
Consumer's Union tests products, and their members read the reports to decide which products to buy. But manufacturers discontinue the products the minute they get a bad rating, and market the identical product under either a different product label, or a different model number. "Model x15 was discontinued; there were some design errors. Model y53 is completely different! Try it! It has fabric softner, and makes you smell nice, too! And it comes in this handy toxic bottle!"
The same kind of thing, of course, happens with service companies. Vice President X comes up with a fabulous plan for earning the company millions of dollars at the expense of the customers. (The upper management pretends to be completely ignorant of what X is doing.) As soon as customers stumble onto the deception, X is fired with much noise (though, of course, his contract gives him a fabulous golden parachute), and a new face, Y, is hired to replace him. The kindly face of the company president assures the public that the company is now completely worthy of trust, and will uphold its high standards once more.
But my original topic was: how to decide on a major purchase. Do I have a method I can recommend?
Well, nothing really novel. You have to research the product twice as hard as you would have some years ago. You must learn where the product is actually manufactured; for instance, a Toyota might actually be manufactured by Ford, or an Oster product actually manufactured by Black & Decker. You must read all the consumer information (including Consumer Reports, or similarly reliable publication, as well as reviews on Amazon, and on the Internet generally, bearing in mind that Internet reviews are often planted by the manufacturers themselves, and cannot always be trusted). You must ask around your friends and colleagues, but be careful to measure their recommendations against what you know of their reliability and good judgment as well as how different their use patterns might be from yours. For instance, a backyard chef might label product A as poor, while an occasional barbecuer might consider product A quite reasonable. Your mileage, clearly, will vary.
Don't be shy about asking a question on FaceBook, or on your personal network. (On the down side, Facebook will inundate you with advertisements for the product in question.) Finally, ask the salesman candidly, when his or her supervisor isn't watching, and study their expression carefully.
It appears that there are only cynics and megalomaniacs running for office throughout the world. Let's face it: Barack Obama seemed just the ticket four years ago; why can't he keep up? Answer: Government is just too big for anyone to steer.
We used to think that the bureaucracy was too big, and Reagan began the first wave of outsourcing back in the eighties (or 80s, if you prefer, or even 80's). This is basically what privatizing government services is: you outsource it to private companies.
What does this entail? You send home (i.e. fire) a whole enormous office of inefficient pencil-pushers who are paid by the taxpayer, and over whom you have some slight control. Instead, you employ a private company, which then hires a whole heap of employees ---over whom you have absolutely no control, and about whom you frankly do not care---and they, in turn, hire smaller private companies to do menial work (like make the coffee, fill the water coolers, replace the toilet paper, send out the mail, etc, etc), and each of these companies are, in turn farming out the work to several other smaller companies.
All this provides a lot of very low level employment for a lot of disgruntled people. But you have no control over the way the job is done, just over the final product.
What control do you have?
If you don't like what they come back with, you can fire them. It is not easy to fire government employees, but you can fire outsourced work.
So far, there is a lot of dissatisfaction about outsourced government work. Work for the Armed Services outsourced to private companies have been unpopular (the private workers have been poorly behaved, and supplied some poor quality services ---I can't remember the exact complaints--- and have been a public relations problem for the Services specifically, and for the country as a whole). Security work ---for instance at air terminals etc--- have come under fire for various reasons (dissatisfaction with the public relations of the security agents, i.e. rude security people; allowing countries other than the US to handle American security, e.g. companies based in the Gulf, which happen to have shares in American airport terminals, etc. NASA, for instance, has outsourced its services to other companies for decades; the shuttles, for instance, were built by private companies.
Does outsourcing reduce the size of government? Yes, and no.
Don't forget the large proportion of services that are the responsibility of the individual states. The States administer a large proportion ---if not all--- of the welfare services, the housing, medical insurance control, education. Additional opportunities for adding bureaucrats arise when each department of each State has to interface with the corresponding department of the Federal Government. Remember the Baby Bells? That was initially a Good Thing. Then Washington decided (under the supervision of a Democrat president, I do think I remember) to allow the Baby Bells to offer services across the nation, and now we have Verizon and AT&T (the largest Baby, and Ma Bell) set to become so big that they can legally proceed to fix prices, once they become effectively a Monopoly. However, when government services are outsourced, it seems to me that they become still harder to keep track of; like herding cats.
We (my wife and I) were just talking over the seven large Government agencies that between them provide all the services: HUD, HEW, Justice, State, and so on. How many of the Secretaries of these do we know by name? Hilary Clinton is one of the few that springs to mind; many of the others are anonymous figures about whom we know very little. President Obama, of course, must know them all, and consult with them regularly. These agencies are staffed, by and large, with people who are in the Government game for the long run, and are expected to take responsibility for the success and or failure of each aspect of their charges.
The legislative branch, meanwhile, seems to bumble along, with most congressmen more anxious to be noticed than to support good legislation. Why is this? They get re-elected for those things that they claimed to have done than for the things they actually achieved. This great democratic nation has a bunch of voters who don't really know what actually took place on Capitol Hill, but rather what their favorite news sources say took place on Capitol Hill.
Congressman: Vote for me! Any questions? Yes, from that intelligent-looking gent over there ... ?
Voter 1: Hey, man, you guys did not pass a decent Health Care Reform bill. You suck.
Favorite News Source: No, actually, the Congressman saved you from a bill that would have cost millionaires a lot of money. And everybody would have been forced to get insurance.
Voter 1: Well, I have insurance.
Favorite News Source: Sure, as long as you have a job. What happens when you get laid off?
Voter 2: I got laid off!!! I would have to get insurance?
Favorite News Source: Sure would. These Health Reform bills are bad for poor people and for millionaires.
Voter 3: Is that really true?
Congressman: Yes! It was terrible! I didn't vote for it very much at all, really! I was totally thinking of my electorate.
Voters: I guess you don't suck.
Great. All's well that ends well. The poor congressman doesn't really see any of the money that the Party bigwigs get from the Insurance Industry lobbyists. But Congressmen are not elected for their intelligence anyway.
One approach to improving the achievement of the United States of America in the Olympics has been to introduce American sports into it, sports that are not widely played outside the USA. (This would certainly improve the profits of the TV channels that carry the Olympics.)
And now for something completely different.
A recent article in the NY Times by two quite respectable mathematicians and educators suggest some changes to the mathematics curriculum in American schools.
For instance, [the authors ask,] how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a 'group of transformations' or a 'complex number'? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.
The broad thrust of the article can be reduced to the following assumptions:
Every child doesn't need to be taught the same (science/engineering - type advanced) mathematics.
Concrete applications are more useful to students than abstract mathematics.
The useful mathematics (listed in the article) is not being taught now.
All this, of course, is being driven by poor results of American student samples on standard international tests.
The fact of the matter is that ALL THREE ASSUMPTIONS ARE WRONG.
Certainly, all children do not need to know the same mathematics (or the same social studies, or the same history, for that matter). But there is no harm in teaching all students the same principles, while you allow for expected variations in interest. It would be a big mistake to try to predict the precise sliver of mathematics a child is likely to need and teach him or her only that. First of all, we can't predict needs that accurately, and people change careers so often that the prediction simply cannot be correct. Finally, with the insistence that Education should cost society the very minimum it possibly can, (and that the majority of education dollars should be spent on building-beautification and athletics) we cannot afford to give a highly individualized education at lower levels. But teachers can, and do know how to, adjust for individual interests in students, and the better teachers supplement their basic classwork with enrichment activities focused on student interest. But, of course, that instruction cannot be easily tested in standardized tests.
Secondly, the concrete vs. abstract debate is so out of place here. It is human to abstract; that is, to generalize. Two chickens and two chickens is the same number of chickens--four--as two cows and two cows are the number of cows: four. No one can possibly protest the most common abstraction of all, namely number. Our parents tolerated quite well a large degree of abstraction (though, of course, it was a small elite that went on to college in their day). In these times, we all recognize, we want the students to learn considerably more. Why? Because a lot of what our parents considered to be advanced knowledge has now been demoted to material that is accessible to kids, and which they must know. A "complex number" might be regarded by Professor Sol Garfunkel as something mystical and specialized (though I know for certain that he is no stranger to them), but it is an easy enough concept for the typical student, and moreover, an easy way of teaching various topics in calculus. [Easy for the teacher, but also easy for the student.] Geometry is these days taught via the idea of transformation, where transformations was a topic reserved for mathematical black belts in the earlier part of the 20th century. Abstraction is another way of killing several birds with the same stone, and hardly something to be deplored.
Finally, useful mathematics is being taught now. As early as grade four, with the recommendations of the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) that were announced by a taskforce as early as 1980, and adopted by the full NCTM shortly thereafter, and widely adopted in schools across the country, basic descriptive statistics was to be taught to children of about the age of ten or eleven, and in classrooms across America you can find displays of various pieces of data in bar charts and pie charts. These fellows should get out more.
The fact of the matter is that if we were to change the curriculum to be exactly what Garfunkel and Mumford recommend, the chances are that within a few years, this curriculum would be --in its essentials-- adopted by all foreign countries, or even taught in addition to their own, and foreign kids will be trouncing American kids once again.
Why is this?
In an insightful comment (Mike O'Shea?) says that a possible reason why academics in the US are weak for the majority of students is that excellence in academic subjects is valued less than excellence in athletics and sports. He concludes with: "And if our teenagers aren't practicing sports, they're working at part-time jobs after school for pocket money for themselves. Competing against sports and money, academic subjects don't have a chance."
Ah, yes, just what we need: a math for the masses and a math for their masters. This argument presupposes that the common people don't get it, don't need it, and don't want it. It echoes the argument that has gone on in the humanities and foreign languages for a generation now: why teach complex subjects and abstractions to the herd who don't need such instruction? Teach them what they need to know to become, at best, good Wal-Mart managers.
A time there was when math assumed not only a utilitarian function but also a theoretical function, teaching children not just what they need to know to get by, but also how to think logically--to make them better workers, neighbors, voters, parents, and citizens of a increasingly complex world.
Garfunkel and Mumfords's assertion suggests an unhealthy elitism. Worse, it smacks of classism.
Perhaps Garfunkel and Mumford were careless in their writing, and laid themselves open to severe criticism because of a number of poorly-reasoned, or poorly thought-out remarks. It is true that weaker students destined to be highway-repair laborers or construction workers will probably not get motivated to study mathematics that are in the least abstract, even at the level of, say, elementary geometry. But they are butting their heads against cultural principles that dictate that every child must be considered to be potentially a professional or an artisan of some sort. To relegate a child to an easy curriculum based on an assessment of his or her ability may make life easier for him or her, and for his or her teacher, but it is a choice that we cannot ethically afford. We cannot both take the high road about the Equality of Man, and take the easy way to education, and get high scores for our kids in standardized tests. I'm not saying our curriculum (and we do not have a national standard curriculum, but rather a core curriculum that is a sort of "back-to-basics" nucleus that, as G & M claim, has been adopted by at least 40 states) is perfect; it has to be adjusted from time to time. But good teachers can do a better job within this curriculum, and they are doing so. But statistically, they are a minority.
The vast majority of teachers are poorly-paid and poorly prepared underachievers. You cannot improve the quality of teachers in the USA by picking on the weaker members of that profession and making life miserable for them. I suspect that the better ones among our young people do not go into the teaching profession precisely because it is a scapegoat for all that is bad in society. Let's stop bullying our teachers, and concentrate on rewarding the best of them, and appreciating all of them.
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