Howzit Howard

Who are the world's most powerful women?

Forbes Magazine says the most powerful woman in the world is Angela Merkel, 58, the chancellor of Germany and the single most powerful government leader in the Eurozone.

Originally trained as a chemist and knowledgeable about quantum physics, Merkel was a spokesman for the government of East Germany before reunification. Her father was a preacher, her mother an English teacher. Merkel herself speaks fluent Russian. She has been the single most important force in pressuring debtor nations to endure some pain in return for bailouts.

Forbes lists Dilma Rousseff second. Rousseff, 65, is president of Brazil, which is the fifth most populous nation 194 million, and environmentally perhaps the single most important nation because of the Amazon, the world's largest remaining rainforest and the largest single agglomeration of plants with medicinal value, and a region where Rousseff pushes more much more hydro power.

The next three on the Forbes list are Melinda Gates, 48, and Michelle Obama, 49, and Hillary Clinton, 65, but I question two of these. Melinda Gates, wife of Bill Gates, takes an active role in charitable activities and has done a lot with a lot of money. She is indeed powerful. It's no slam against Michelle Obama to say that her power is mainly her bully pulpit, which is confined to part of America and not that big a deal compared to others on the list. As for Hillary Clinton, she used to be powerful, and she may be powerful again, but at the moment I don't know why she's on the list at all.

I can see Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on the list (8th) and IMF Managing Director Christine Legarde (7th) and Sonia Gandhi, president of the National Congress of India (9th) and Geun-hye Park, president of South Korea (11th).

It seems reasonable to include many captains of industry on the list: CEOs of Pepsi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Xerox, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Mondelez, DuPont, Petrobas, Yahoo. But why is Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, listed 6th, ahead of all those CEOs? The power of Facebook is in the people, and the powers behind Facebook have lately done little except mess with that. Facebook is powerful. Sandberg is not.

But Oprah is only 13th, and Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times Co., is only 19th, and they personally wield far more power than many of these other people.

Arianna Huffington, listed as 56th, probably deserves a higher rating given the impact that Huffington Post enterprises have on shaping public opinion, especially among liberals. With its AOL connection, Huff Post reaches far more people than Slate or the New Yorker.

J.K. Rowling is 93rd, with Forbes pointing out that the Harry Potter novels have now spawned theme parks, games and merchandise in addition to the films. "Far more than just an author by anyone'smeasure," Forbes says. Okay, I buy that.

Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization, 65, is 33rd, and probably deserves to be higher. World leaders listen to WHO. For the same reason it makes sense to mention Margaret Hamburg, 57, head of the FDA (59th).

Opinion shapers like Anna Wintour, Diane Von Furstenberg, Diane Sawyer, Lady Gaga and Beyonce are on the list, and Queen Elizabeth, and Ellen DeGeneres.

Good lists always spur discussion. Discuss.

Yen stops falling after minister's remark

In currency markets, officials can sometimes make their own brand of money rise or fall simply by hinting it ought to. Traders make the assumption that a given remark signals policy action to come and they buy or sell now rather than play catch-up later at a less favorable price. That's what happened to the yen Monday.

Economic Minister Akira Amari, appearing on a Sunday talk show not unlike the ones we have in America, remarked that "people say the excessively strong yen has corrected quite a bit," and added, "if the yen keeps weakening from here, there could be negative effects on people's lives."

The yen has been quite strong for years. Last fall a mere 85 yen could buy a dollar. Retirees on fixed incomes, a politically powerful group in Japan, loved this, and Hawaii reaped a benefit, too, as Japanese flew to Hawaii and shopped till their dropped, their yen buying power as strong as they could remember it ever being.

The strong yen was tough on Japanese corporations, however. Their profits made in dollars and euros converted back to fewer yen. It weakened the Japanese economy at time when it had also been buffeted by the earthquake, tsunami and radiation leak. Japanese manufacturers had also suffered from flooding at factories in Southeast Asia, and chilly political relations in China, which reawakened the traditional Chinese antipathy to the Japanese and made it harder to do business.

The new Abe government in Japan had vowed to do something about this, the Bank of Japan went along, and in a matter of months the yen-dollar exchange rate had changed from 85 to 100, or parity. And it kept going. On Friday it was 103. In Hawaii, our Japanese guests had lost a third of their buying power since September.

More importantly from the standpoint of the global economy, the weaker Japanese yen led to the Bank of Korea taking steps to weaken the Korean won. The Korean central bank began driving interest rates lower to weaken the won so Korean exports would be price-competitive with Japanese exports. There were warnings of a global "currency war."

In Monday currency market trading in Asia, the yen fell fractionally to 102.59 yen, down a half a yen in one trading session. Monday in Asia is Sunday in Hawaii so the numbers will be different when "Sunrise" is on the air, but there seems to be hope that the rapid change in the yen's Waikiki value might settle down for awhile.

Music Post: Blasts from the past

In 1970, the year I started working in radio and the year I started my senior year in high school, George Harrison came out with his debut solo album "All Things Must Pass," a double album containing "My Sweet Lord" and "Isn't It a Pity?" and "What is Life?" Years later we learned that Harrison had so much great material because he had trouble getting Lennon and McCartney to record his songs as Beatles tracks, so for a few years he had been hoarding what he considered his best stuff.

In 1978, I had a musical and social epiphany one night, reporting to work at the Mutual Broadcasting System for an overnight anchor shift. Much time had passed in my young life - I was married now with a stepson to raise and a daughter on the way, had worked for three radio stations and had "made it to the network," even if it was the smallest of the four legacy networks, and 1970 seemed a long time past. So it blew my mind to step into an elevator and hear an elevator music version of "Isn't It a Pity?" 

If someone was recording tunes from "All Things Must Pass" to play as background music, clearly my youth had passed, because background music was, I had always thought, music for old people. An alarming thought for someone who was 25.

It was about as strange as walking into a supermarket this week, at the age of 59, and hearing "Wake Up Sunshine," an obscure track from another 1970 album, "Chicago."

The second album by the long-lived rock-with-horns band contains the hits "Make Me Smile," "Color My World," and "25 or 6 to 4," giving the band six hits in two years, its premiere album having included "Beginnings," "Questions 67 amd 68," and "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" Even people born decades later know some or all of these tunes. And Chicago itself is still recording with four of the original six members. But only someone who bought the album when it was new was likely to remember "Wake Up Sunshine," the first track on one of the four sides, a short and upbeat number with something like a news theme at the end. It was never released as a single, though it should have been.

On reflection, two things make it possible for this to have happened, for an album cut from 1970 to be suitable as "background music" in a supermarket. The first is that we babyboomers redefined what background music was. The second is that generations coming after us have a different view of the music of different generations.

Background music is an old concept. Much of the Baroque music we listen to closely, glaring at people who cough or open candy in noisy wrappers, was written as background music for royal parties where people talked and laughed and ignored what was being played. In the Roaring Twenties, Erik Satie wrote something he called "Furniture Music" to be played at the intermission of a concert as background while people talked, but, as he told the story later, it was a failure, because people stopped talking and listened to it.

In 1934, George Owen Squier founded Muzak, whose name, he explained, came from the word "music" and the end of another made up corporate name, Kodak. He recorded background music to be played quietly from speakers in stores. In offices, to encourage productivity, he would program a succession of tunes with increasing tempos. In restaurants, to encourage turnover, he would program music with a tempo that suggested a slightly faster chewing rate. Muzak still exists, but in February the company announced it was retiring the word "Muzak."

In the 1940s, a Dallas radio station programmed orchestral music to be heard in the background in stores and homes. Its call letters were KIXL and announcers called it "Kixel." The format was much copied, along with the idea of choosing call letters that suggested a nickname. As late as the 1970s background music stations included WAYV, "the never-ending wave of music," in Atlantic City, WPCH ("Peach") in Atlanta, WLIF ("Double-U-Life") in Baltimore, and so on. To encourage lengthy listening sessions, stations like this avoided any music that was noisy or intrusive, and each track was close to the tempo of the last, a pre-echo of what club deejays have done since the first days of disco.

Because "elevator music," "background music," or "beautiful music" often featured lush strings, which were anathema to rock-and-rollers, this music came to be regarded by babyboomers as the very worst music that our parents' generation had to offer. We babyboomers would never grow old enough to listen to, much less to enjoy, soothing arrangements of "Isn't It a Pity?"

But what we did instead was, we embraced other forms of quieter and more soothing music. The same babyboomers who liked the slogan, "Never trust anyone over 30," who would die before they tuned in a Muzak station, fell in love with Pachelbel's Canon and Claude Bolling's "California Suite" and Chip Davis's "Fresh Aire" albums and anything New Age on the Windham Hill label. Because it wasn't soothing arrangements of music that existed in louder and ruder versions, we didn't realize what we were doing. We didn't realize we had become our parents.

We also failed to foresee that our children would not become their parents. My stepson was born in 1969 and my daughter in 1979, so - Gen X and Gen Y. Sean and Leina'ala both grew up with an abiding love of music, but their rock sensibilities were different. Sean, and many of the Gen X generation, revisited the rock repertory, but delighted in finding kitsch in it. He did not reject my music but he made his own decisions about what was cool in it. Thus he enjoyed Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Were Made for Walkin,'" which had been most uncool in my day. Leina'ala and others of the Gen Y generation were more catholic in their tastes, unaffected by what their parents liked, willing to embrace the core repertory of their parents if it was good.

What Gen X and Gen Y had in common was that they were smarter than we babyboomers were - they didn't automatically reject the music of their parents. So when the background music in a supermarket plays "Wake Up Sunshine," some programmer has decided (a) that this passes for good background music to a babyboomer, and (b) there is no reason why it would annoy younger generations looking for the soda aisle.

 

 

Music Post: He composed, she composed

There is a saying in the classical music world that "Anonymous was a woman," the implication being that many works attributed only to "Anon." may indeed have been composed by females during centuries in which a woman's place was not thought to be at the piano, composing.

Practically no classical music is attributed to women before the 1800s, when Robert Schumann's wife Clara and Felix Mendelssohn's sister Fanny wrote some excellent piano pieces.

Even the Mendelssohn family, so educated, so broad minded, so open to new ideas, repressed Fanny Mendelssohn's talents. This is not in doubt, because the repression was sometimes done in writing and the letters survive. Her father said music could be Felix's profession "but for you it can and must be an ornament only." Felix himself said publishing under her own name would disrupt her duties as a housewife "and I can't say I approve."

Clara Schumann may be said to have repressed her own compositions to a degree because she devoted herself to promoting her husband's music, especially after he died - and she lived 40 years past that tragedy. Only a few works by Clara and Fanny are readily available but in both cases it is immediately evident that these were authentic voices. (Clara's music doesn't sound like Robert's and Fanny's doesn't sound like Felix's.)

Amy Beach, who was in her thirties when the 20th century began, was a child prodigy who married a prominent Boston surgeon. This gifted pianist thereafter gave a single concert annually, always for charity, and otherwise composed, with her husband's support. She called herself Mrs. H.H.A. Beach and saw her works performed and praised. Her much older husband died in 1910 and she sailed to Europe, concertizing there for three years before returning. She enjoyed, if not equal treatment in the modern sense, at least recognition and praise for her compositions for 30 more years.

In the Roaring Twenties, Paris became congenial to a few female composers. Germaine Tailleferre was one of Les Six, with Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric and Louis Durey. Ravel befriended and mentored her. She lived alternately in France and America and continued to compose until her death in 1983, and each new recording whets the appetite for more of her work.

Lili Boulanger, a contemporary of Tailleferre but one who died in her twenties, was the sister of Nadia Boulanger who taught so many American composers. Her limited output includes some excellent pieces. If you like Impressionist music it will please you, but that's a poor attempt to describe her particular brand of music.

This week on my public radio show I'll feature pieces by all of these composers, along with Meredith Monk, Lucie Vallere, Pamela Harrison, Rebecca Clarke, Joan Tower, Sofia Gubaidulina and other composers who have to be women.

"Howard's Day Off" airs live 5am-7am HST Saturdays on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo (Big Island) and streams live on www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Max Cacas posts these essays on the Day Off page on Facebook.

 

Behind the curtain: Shaping the Benghazi message

The only fair statement that can be made about the content of 100 emails released by the White House on Wednesday is that they support the longtime allegation that administration officials purged the written guidance for State Department spokesmen after the Benghazi attack, to leave out the part where the CIA warned something bad could happen. This, we now know, is the truth.

"The emails show that after an interagency meeting at the White House, Obama administration officials crossed out sections of the initial narrative provided by the CIA to be disseminated to the public," writes Orel Dorell in USA Today.

The original drafts of talking points from the CIA all refer to Egyptian extremists, one day before the Banghazi attack, calling on demonstrators to break into the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Often criticized for not seeing crises coming, the CIA made it clear that it did raise a timely warning this time.

"While the emails portrayed White House officials as being sensitive to the concerns of the State Department, they suggest that Mr. Obama's aides mostly mediated a bureaucratic tug of war between the State Department and the CIA over how much to disclose," write Mark Landler, Eric Schmitt and Michael Shear in The New York Times.

Even if you put the most sympathetic possible reading on these emails, which in some cases it is possible to do, you still come out at the other end realizing that there was real concealment going on.

"Some of the emails expressed caution about what should be said publicly during an FBI investigation while others centered on the strength of intelligence at the time," write Jack Tapper, Sherissa Pham and Kevin Liptak on CNN.

The emails also show a fascinating glimpse in the shaping of a public message behind the scenes that will be familiar to officials of past administrations both blue and red, and more generally to anyone who has worked in public relations or crisis management or dealt with those types as a reporter. The human urge to hold back the bad bits seems irresistible even though it hardly ever works.

"This is the first hard evidence that the State Department did ask for changes to the CIA's original assessment," writes Mark Mardell, North American editor of the BBC. "There's little doubt in my mind that this will haunt Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for president." He's probably right even though the main players in the emails are lower-ranking officials.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland expressed concern in one email about naming a particular extremist when a U.S. investigation of his role wasn't finished. According to the Reuters news agency, Nuland said, in the middle of this process, that changes made up to then "don't resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership," presumably referring to her superiors, but not naming Secretary of State Clinton. Nothing in the emails specifically fingers Clinton, but for her not to know this was going on would raise a separate set of questions about leadership.

According to Fox News, Nuland also wondered if administration officials wanted to feed information to members of Congress that could be used "to beat the State Department for not paying attention to (CIA) warnings." Fox said Assistant Secretary of State David Adams agreed, and, later, then-CIA Director David Petraeus got a note from his deputy Mike Morell that relayed State's "deep concerns" about mentioning CIA warnings. Petraeus didn't like it but went along when White House officials finalized the talking points. Among those White House officials: counterterrorism advisor John Brennan - who now heads the CIA.

Because the emails include explicit concern about prejudging an FBI investigation of terrorist involvement, while Nuland expressly refers to the possibility of Congressmen slamming State for not responding sufficiently to CIA warnings, the email release provides ammunition for both sides in the partisan debate over the handling of public statements on the Benghazi attack.

What we still don't know is whether there is anyone in the State Department who can avoid the political debate and, working in the shadows, make damn sure U.S. embassies and consulates around the world are adequately prepared the next time there is trouble like this.

 

Federal deficit shrinks: What's driving it

The Congressional Budget Office, which as recently as February thought the fiscal year 2013 federal deficit would be $845 billion, today revised it to $642 billion. It was $1.1 trillion last year.

"The government's annual deficit is shrinking far faster than anyone in Washington expected," writes Anne Lowrey in The New York Times.

"The Treasury will be able to pay the nation's bills until as late as November without seeking additional borrowing authority from Congress," writes Lori Montgomery in The Washington Post.

There is still a long-range budget problem, caused by my generation aging, but, as David Lauter writes in The Los Angeles Times, the new forecast "pushes the crunch point for that problem off into a considerably more distant future: well after the 2020 presidential elections."

What's driving this? Lots of factors:

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac no longer need huge bailouts and even paid $95 billion back.
• Health care inflation has slowed, slowing the increase in the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.
• The economy is recovering, increasing tax revenue without increasing tax rates.
• The Jan. 1 measure that delayed the fiscal cliff to Mar. 1 did increase some tax rates.
• The sequestration cuts that did kick in on Mar. 1 reduced federal spending.
• The war is winding down.

It's excellent news that the deficit is getting smaller, and even better that economic recovery is a bigger factor than what Congress has done: economic recovery made it possible for Fannie and Freddie to pay back so much money, the number one source of deficit reduction, greater than all the sequestration.

But the long-term issue of babyboomers gradually becoming old and infirm will remain, and will still need addressing. Seniors especially should read up on that, particularly since much of the issue has been misrepresented or simply misunderstood by people in Congress. For example, Social Security is sound, no matter what you heard, but Medicare-Medicaid is gonna be a big problem.

Let the investigations proliferate

Now we have three different investigation paths in Washington. There's the search for the decision maker in the decision not to call a rapid response team to Benghazi. There's the probe of IRS investigations of Tea Party nonprofits. And now there will apparently also be a probe of the Justice Department decision to investigate a news leak by quietly subpoenaing phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press.

Republicans think the administration should be investigated when it does anything wrong. Democrats think Republicans are trying to smear the president.

Both are right. But so what? Let the investigations proceed. As the English say, "Do your worst." The fact that Rep. Darryl Issa, R-Calif., the Torquemada of the right, has a thing about Barack Obama is, as far as I'm concerned, irrelevant. Let him investigate. He'll succeed or he'll fail. When he overreaches, people will say so. If he pretends that the actions of bureaucrats are somehow tied to the Oval Office, someone will call him on it. The acting director of the IRS, a Bush appointee, has in fact done so. Rereading my post, I realize I left out part of my thinking, which is that someone having it in for someone else (especially in politics where this goes with the territory) does not automatically mean they're wrong.

I don't understand what is served by stonewalling. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the Republican investigators don't care about anything except making Benghazi stick to Hillary Clinton. She either was directly involved in the decision not to call the rapid response team or she wasn't. If she wasn't, that should come out. If she was, even her diehard supporters would, I assume, rather that come out now rather during a presidential campaign later.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that when we learn all there is to be learned, it remains arguable whether Clinton did anything wrong. Even then, it will have been in Clinton's interest to let it all out, and then argue the point, without the side issue of whether there was obstruction of the truth.

Suppose, for the sake of further argument, that some lower-level official is to blame, and a full airing of the facts will make this evident, but more senior officials don't want to finger that person because of the chilling effect it would have on other bureaucrats. Even here, it seems to be that the damage done by holding back is greater.

Which brings me to the Justice Department looking at AP phone records. You will notice that even Issa, who holds the mainstream media in low regard generally, is standing up for the AP in this case because of the First Amendment issue. Some stories about this say, and I have not yet seen it contradicted, that any investigation of reporter records requires the direct approval of the attorney general. Eric Holder is scheduled to testify before a House committee Wednesday - this was previously scheduled - and can answer questions about this.

[Update: Minutes after I wrote this, the Associated Press reported that Holder recused himself from the AP records decision, leaving it to a deputy. The initial report did not say why Holder recused himself. HMD]

Most people don't know this, but for decades the federal government has had a secret court and a secret judge in Washington, to whom officials go with wiretape and search warrant requests that are classified for one reason or another.

 

Stephen Colbert and the way Internet news works

Are you inadvertantly screening out news and commentary from sources that don't agree with your existing political views? And when you argue with someone about politics, is it possible that they're affected by the same problem? Let me tell you about an experience I had today with some websurfing that wasn't political but had keywords to suggest it was.

When Stephen Colbert was a "reporter" on The Daily Show, I didn't find him all that amusing. I was found him funnier as the host of his own show. I still don't watch him often. That's my fault, not his. I spend hours a day reading news; in the evening, newsed-out, I catch up on DVD'ed dramas instead. The Daily Show loses to Game of Thrones, Hawaii Five-0, Elementary and Person of Interest. But because I don't watch Colbert often, when he pops up in online news digests I sometimes click to see what he's up to.

So it's the weekend and I'm trolling for interesting stuff for Monday morning, and reading about the Benghazi hearings, with coverage focusing on Republican efforts to prolong the investigation and the House Intelligence Committee chairman telling Fox News some new potential whistleblowers have approached the committee. Interesting, but the key words here, even though the story came from the Associated Press, are "Fox News."

At the bottom of the page, as one can find at the bottom of many news pages on the Internet, are links to content on other sites, chosen by a computer program, guessing what else you might like to read, based on what you've read already. And one was a link to Colbert reacting to his sister losing the special Congressional election in South Carolina to "disgraced former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford." The quoted words come straight from the story, which was on FoxNews.com.

In one of his trademark facetious rants, Colbert said he was turning his back on South Carolina and was now from North Carolina - complete with a parenthetical diss of North Carolina barbecue sauce that was not only hilarious but drew equally hilarious online comments from Carolina Treet partisans faking outrage at the fake criticism. Colbert and his mock attackers both know that people take their barbecue seriously, so smile when you say that. Maybe it was reading the comments that brought me to the bottom of the page, where the "Also on the Web" links were to be found. And every single one of them came from a partisan site, attacking Obama.

The computer algorithm, in other words, has guessed that I was a Republican, and not merely a Republican but a hard-right Republican.

I am actually neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am a political independent whose views are all over the map and who votes the candidate, not the party. It's not easy being non-aligned in modern society, where partisans are both sides like to identify their foes and flame them. Some are so good at it that they pinpoint 10 out of every two of their enemies. How can you have mixed views of Neil Abercrombie and Linda Lingle? Easy, but some people don't see it that way. Still, I sometimes get attacked by people who accept my opinions that they agree with as simple fact and those they don't agree with as evidence of bias. How can this be? In part, I think, it is because we increasingly get our news and comment from sources that reinforce whatever opinions we already have.

But this does not result simply from you making conscious choices to read liberal or conservative commentary online. It also happens covertly as a result of the links that are offered to you online by software that has assessed your political views based on previous online reading. I read two stories in a row mentioning Fox News. If I had read two stories in a row on Salon, or clicked on the Borowitz Report on the New Yorker website, I might have been offered links of the opposite persuasion.

It's probably a good idea for everyone to make a conscious effort to read whatever you regard as "the other side." If you are a partisan person, you might even regard it as surveilling the enemy. But for whatever reason, a variety of sources is a good thing for all political stripes.

BTW, North Carolina barbecue is vinegar based with mustard flavoring and goes well with pork and chicken. From the western part of the state to Memphis and Texas, barbecue sauce tends to be more tomato based and go better with beef. My favorite ribs are the dry ribs at Red Hot & Blue, a regional chain in the Washington D.C. area. Feel free to attack any of these opinions or simply weigh in with your own.

 

Music Post: The riddle wrapped in the Enigma

Edward Elgar said this: that alongside the theme of his Enigma Variations there was another theme that was not played. He told no one but his wife what this theme was and both of them went to their graves with the secret, which has enthralled classical music lovers ever since, aided by the fact that the Enigma Variations is a jolly good piece of music so talking about it is fun.

Elgar (1857-1934) had only regional success as a composer until 1900. That year, Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan died, and England began searching for a new composer to adore. Elgar, who turned 43 that year, obliged with his first "Pomp and Circumstance" march and a great choral work called "The Dream of Gerontius" at a time when great choral works denoted great composers in England.

Just as the great English composer Sullivan had been half Irish and half Italian, his great successor Elgar, more influenced by Schumann and Wagner than anyone English, was the son of a music shopkeeper and a farmer's daughter, in a society where the upper class looked down on both of those occupations. Elgar married above his station and his wife's contacts helped him rise above that, but it took awhile. It wasn't that he was a late bloomer: his earlier compositions are perfectly good.

In 1898, the Elgars went to a concert at which Mozart's "Prague" Symphony was performed. There is a theme in the second movement that resembles the Enigma melody. A couple days later, Elgar was sitting at his piano noodling around when his wife called out from the next room that she quite liked whatever he had just played. Elgar said later this was the genesis of the Enigma Variations. The completed work premiered in 1899 and was the first Elgar composition to be widely performed outside of England.

From the start it was Elgar's idea to vary the usual theme-and-variations format by making each variation a sketch of a friend. And he dedicated it to "my friends pictured within." Each variation is titled with a nickname or initials, although one just has three asterisks, the English convention for information that was deliberately withheld. In 1929 Elgar provided information about all of them.

The opening statement of the theme leads directly into...

1. C.A.E. Caroline Alice Elgar, Elgar's wife. He quotes the love theme from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde."

2. H.D.S.-P. Hew David Steuart-Powell, an amateur pianist. Elgar said he threw in a lot of short, chromatic notes he knew his friend would not care for.

3. R.B.T. Richard Baxter Townshend, author of the "Tenderfoot" novels. Townshend played old men in plays, with a deep voice cracking. Elgar sought to portray that.

4. W.M.B. William Meath Baker, whom Elgar described as expressing himself energetically. This is shortest variation and very fast and forceful.

5. R.P.A. Richard Penrose Arnold. Another amateur pianist.

6. Ysobel. Isabel Fitton, a viola pupil. The viola has the lead.

7. Troyte. Arthur Troyte Griffith. Mimics this architect's enthusiastic incompetence at the piano, and describes an incident in which the two men are walking and get caught in a cloudburst.

8. W.N. Winifred Norbury. Elgar said the variation was about his easygoing friend and her pleasant home, which was the play when he and Troyte sought shelter from the cloudburst.

9. Nimrod. Augustus J. Jaeger, an editor at Elgar's music publisher who urged Elgar on when he was low and compared him to Beethoven. Elgar returns the favor by quoting the theme of the slow movement of the "Pathetique" Sonata. Nimrod is a Biblical hunter; Jaeger means hunter in German.

10. Dorabella. Dora Penny was a friend, related to both W.M.B. and R.B.T. She stuttered.

11. G.R.S.George Robertson Sinclair, a church organist. Out for a walk, the two men watched with amusement as Sinclair's bulldog fell down an embankment into the river, paddled upstream until he got to a place where he could climb out, and barked. I'd like to see you set that to music, Sinclair said, so Elgar did, pointing out in his 1929 notes that the variation is really about the dog.

12. B.G.N. Basil G. Bevinson, a cellist who played trios with Elgar and H.D.S.-P. Cello gets the theme.

13. ***. Dora Penny wrote that this variation was about Mary Lygon, a friend who sailed with her brother to Australia when he was appointed governor of New South Wales, in such a hurry that she did not have time to respond to Elgar's letter asking permission to use her initials. But there is an alternate story that the variation represents a woman to whom Elgar was once engaged, who also sailed from England. Elgar quotes Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," and mimics the sound of a steamship engine with timpani, an effect heightened by placing some coins on the drumhead. A timpanist thought this up while Elgar was alive and he approved it.

14. E.D.U. The last variation is a self-portrait, Edu being his wife's nickname for the composer. The variation quotes the C.A.E. and Nimrod variations, spotlighting the importance of his wife and Jaeger in his life, and ends with a big finish with organ that was added after the first performance when Jaeger suggested the ending should be longer.

Elgar did two other variations that he dropped - both were of fellow composers, one of them Sullivan - both were pastiches of the styles of the other men and not, Elgar decided, in keeping with the rest of the work.

And what of the Enigma? "I will not explain," Elgar wrote in his 1929 note. "Its 'dark saying' must be left unguessed." He said, "Over the whole set another and larger theme 'goes,' but it is not played... the chief character is never on stage."

The most common "solution," that the unplayed theme is friendship, runs up against the fact that Elgar made his remarks in the same notes where he revealed the identities of the people depicted in the variations.  Elgar once said Dora Penny of all people should be able to figure it out, and this suggests to me that if it is a musical theme than she may have attended a concert with the Elgars where that tune was played.

Dora Penny's husband thought it was "Auld Lang Syne," a musical theme that also alludes to friendship. Elgar said it "won't do."

Troyte Griffiths wondered, and even asked Elgar, if it was "God Save the Queen," to which Elgar replied, "Of course not."

Yehudi Menuhin thought it was "Rule, Britannia." Some think it's "Pop Goes the Weasel." The reference to a "dark saying," has some suggesting "Now the Day is Over."

Everyone who knew Elgar in those days seemed convinced he did mean a musical theme, and it seems unreasonable he would be referring to friendship as a "dark saying" when he's listing his friends in the very same notes, removing any mystery about them. It does seem suggestive that Elgar put "dark saying" and "goes" in quotes.

I'll play every movement of the Enigma Variations at least one on my public radio show this weekend, including a couple of piano reductions, as well as excerpts from other works that Elgar quotes.

"Howard's Day Off" airs live 5am-7am HST Saturdays on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo (Big Island) and streams on www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Max Cacas of Washington D.C. collects these essays on the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook.

 

Sunrise on the Windward side

"Sunrise" is blowin' in the Windward side this Friday as we make our home the Castle Medical Center for this one morning. Castle is marking its 50th anniversary this year, as good an occasion as any to learn more about hospital renovations now underway. Actually we'll talk about a bunch of medical topics but the hospital renovations are the subject of my interviews.

We've got a lot of Windward-centric stuff programmed as well, and one of the things we were all asked to do was to come up with a one must-do thing, one thing we love about this side of Oahu.

For me that is Waimanalo Beach.

For many years before I started life a new in Hawaii, I came here on vacations, dating back to 1978. That year or soon after, I acted as chauffeur to my Auntie Colleen, attending her high school reunion at a home on Aloiloi St. (turn makai at the McDonald's.) Not knowing anyone, and still too much of a mainlander to mingle, I wandered to the ocean, and found a whiter, prettier beach than any I had ever seen on the Atlantic.

This is where Waimanalo Beach meets Bellows. The military people are farther up the coast and the civilians are farther down the coast, so this part of the beach is, for Oahu, fairly empty. There is something very calming, and at the same time invigorating, about simply standing in the surf, smelling the salutary salt air, listening to the magnificent white noise of the surf.

Your beach may be another. But if, like me, you have not been to your beach in a long time because of the press of work, perhaps it's time for the particular healing that a quiet beach can provide.