The Music Man

A fascinating article by John McWhorter in The New Republic on the changes in oratorical styles in the last century.

If Abraham Lincoln were brought back to life, one thing that would throw him, other than electric power and the Internet, would be that audiences disrupted his speeches by clapping after every three or four lines. As ordinary as this seems now, this kind of applause is actually a custom of our times: Wesleyan political scientist Elvin Lim has documented that, in records of presidential addresses since Franklin D. Roosevelt, 97 percent of the applause lines appear in speeches by Richard Nixon and his successors. To speakers in Lincoln's day, a public address was typically a lecture. In our time, it is more often a love-in, more about the speaker "connecting" with the audience than teaching it anything new; hence the constant interruptions for clapping....

Given the standard assumption that our political culture would be better off if everyone would just "stick to the issues," the heavy performative streak in modern political speechmaking could be seen as counterintuitive. Wouldn't we expect the average person, when behind the podium, to simply talk? Why do so many find it natural to slide into a dramatic speaking style alien to their everyday selves when speaking to audiences--and why do they say so little when they do?

(Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan refers to this impulse as "reaching for the marble," that is, the hope of every presidential wanna-be and might-have-been to hope that their rhetoric will be so high-flown and compelling that it will be carved on the walls of their national monuments some day. -ed)

Interestingly, modern speakers have discovered they can play down to their audiences without seeming to. The intonations of casual speech are a kind of music; and, when wielded effectively, they can satisfy in the same way as a good song. Steven Mithen at Reading University has even proposed that language began as strings of musical syllables, gradually reinterpreted as nouns and verbs. Thus, euphonious intonation has a way of sounding like grammar--i.e., logic. In fact, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig have discovered that the part of the brain that processes musical sequences is the same one that generates grammatical syntax.

If our expectation that a subject will be followed by a predicate is founded in the same process that leads us to hear the sequence of notes of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star / How I wonder what you are" as a proper tune, it's no wonder Obama can get so much out of the sheer melody of his delivery. With our brains configured in a way that makes melody feel like logic, the only question would be why Obama's savory intonations would not suggest leadership ability to his fans. In fact, intonation has arguably been as key to Obama's success as his heritage or intelligence. One senses that the women fainting during his speeches are overcome more by the way he talks than what he is saying: With his mastery of cadence and vocal texture, he could rouse an audience reading from a phone book.

However, we must be careful what we wish for. In our sound-bite culture, America not only does not, but perhaps cannot, process logos-based oratory the way it used to. Hillary Clinton's content-rich addresses during the primaries got her nowhere, and Obama's masterfully composed speech on race this spring left his detractors unmoved, many seemingly challenged in even following his lines of argument. For all the complaints from voters about Obama that they don't know "who he is," if he had stepped onto the national stage patiently explaining who he was, how many people would have even been able to listen?

H/T Allah

The 1750 Hit Parade

A nifty review in the Wall Street Journal of The Great Transformation of Musical Taste by William Weber points out that our taste for great classics in concert hall music is rather modern. Up until the mid-1800s, concert programs were primarily composed of recent works by living composers:

Until the early 19th century, Mr. Weber says, no body of European music was viewed as innately superior to any other. Concerts displayed a variety of tastes and styles and rarely featured esteemed composers or particular genres. Having studied hundreds of concert programs spanning several decades, Mr. Weber tells us that the typical 18th-century public performance featured a miscellany of opera overtures, arias, concertos and ensemble numbers – all by living composers. "Variety is the soul of a concert," one pundit pronounced. Mozart's father advised him that success lay in keeping his compositions "short, easy and popular."

What happened to music?

Over the course of the 19th century, Mr. Weber shows, thinkers and commentators came to regard music not so much as a mode of entertainment as a source of truth. Their idealism was of a piece with the views of Shelley, Ruskin and Coleridge, who argued for the higher social purpose of art and literature. The Italian political leader Giuseppe Mazzini demanded that opera serve "art and Christian principle," not base commercialism.

Berlioz and Schumann put forth their own ideas of music as a form of moral responsibility, even suggesting that the world would be a better place if it were run by musicians...

I can think of nothing that would kill the pleasure of music faster than making it moral responsibility. Of course, modernist composers didn't help themselves:

The list of canonical works grew during the late 19th century and early 20th. Naturally, new works entered the repertory, but less frequently. The audience preference for the old intensified into an outright dislike of the new when craggy modernist dissonance started competing for public attention with lush, late-romantic harmonies. Think only of the howls of rage that greeted the works by Schönberg and Stravinsky in the 1910s and 1920s.

Thus the canon became a form of resistance to a turn in concert programming that, with some exceptions, never captured the public's affection. In a sense, we inhabit this world today. Mr. Weber is not a moralist and does not claim that, by preferring Tchaikovsky to, say, the current-day atonalist Charles Wuorinen, we are philistines or reactionaries. But he does show that the dead did not always reign supreme over our conception of the great and the good. And he leaves us to conclude that they need not do so now...

So all that 1950s uproar over Rock 'n Roll being the unworthy music was a middle-brow echo of the musical shifts in the 1800s.

The Future of American Power -- 1

There is engrossing reading over at RealClearPolitics.com in an essay The Future of American Power, by the always provocative Fareed Zakaria.

One characteristic of this article's appeal is that the ideas that crop up every two or three paragraphs call out for attendant essays. I won't have the presumption to write those essays, but I'd like to point out some paragraphs for commentary. Emphasis in the quoted paragraphs is mine.

The first topic is the U.S. educational system:

The U.S. system may be too lax when it comes to rigor and memorization, but it is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind. It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why the United States produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore's minister of education, explains the difference between his country's system and that of the United States: "We both have meritocracies," Shanmugaratnam says. "Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people's talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well -- like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority." This is one reason that Singaporean officials recently visited U.S. schools to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem solving. "Just by watching, you can see students are more engaged, instead of being spoon-fed all day," one Singaporean visitor told The Washington Post. While the United States marvels at Asia's test-taking skills, Asian governments come to the United States to figure out how to get their children to think.

So this gets me thinking about the current revolt against the current U.S. exam-based fashion. In Washington State, this exam regimen is WASL, and it is the bane of students and teachers alike.

The push towards standardized exams came when the current urban school culture proved unable to deal with the cultural demands placed on schools. Children were dumped on the school's doorstep every September; and teachers were expected to perform all of the socialization, disciplinary, and character-building tasks that used to be seen as the responsibility of the parents. It's tough to teach anything when kids can't read. It's tough to maintain classroom order when children haven't been taught self-discipline at home. And heaven help the teacher who disciplines some hysteric parent's little darling.

But apparently we are doing something right. A previous paragraph reads:

But the aggregate scores hide deep regional, racial, and socioeconomic variation. Poor and minority students score well below the U.S. average, while, as one study noted, "students in affluent suburban U.S. school districts score nearly as well as students in Singapore, the runaway leader on TIMSS math scores." The difference between the average science scores in poor and wealthy school districts within the United States, for instance, is four to five times as high as the difference between the U.S. and the Singaporean national average. In other words, the problem with U.S. education is a problem of inequality. This will, over time, translate into a competitiveness problem, because if the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country. But it does know what works.

And so we see that the problem isn't with our educational model, it's with a one-size-fits-all solution that attempts to apply a solution developed to monitor inner-city school performance to all schools everywhere.