Howzit Howard

Music Post: Weapons of mass percussion

Kettledrums go way back in classical music, which has multiple roots in the music of the church and of the royal court. Royal court music included outdoor music, like Handel's "Music for the Royal Fireworks," 1749, and apart from the military connection, drums helped keep everyone playing together.

By the late 1790s, timpani were featured in concerts, and though there were rarely more than two, Carl Christian Fischer composed a Symphony with Eight Timpani. A couple of timpanists toured, playing large batteries of kettledrums, but the more usual practice was a pair of drums with sharp sticks and tuning in fifths. No one ever asked a timpanist to use the tuning pedal to change notes in mid-piece.

The first known timpani solos in a concert piece can be found in the second and fourth movements of Haydn's Symphony No. 100, "Military," 1794. The solos last for one measure. By 1824, in his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven had a timpanist playing two drums at a time to make a chord. And we all know the scherzo from that work which is built on very loud timpani notes.

Six years later, though the first performance had to wait for 1837, Berlioz called for 10 timpani in his Requiem, and he had three timpanists play chords in "Benvenuto Cellini" in 1838.

The "Enigma" Variations of 1899 contain a bit where the timpani are used quietly to make the sound of an ocean liner's muffled engines - second-to-last variation - and though it wasn't Elgar's idea, timpanists traditionally make the sound by dropping coins on the drumhead.

Roy Harris, in his Symphony No. 7, has the timpani bend notes upward with the tuning pedal, but by the time he did this Bela Bartok had already composed more than one work in which the tuning pedal is used to play individual notes, all required to be precisely on pitch. This is especially apparent in Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta, 1936.

Dmitri Shostakovich calls for an endless timpani riff in the finale of his Symphony No. 5, the basis of the "forced finale" that dissidents hailed.

I'll excerpt all of these works and more on this week's public radio program.

Howard's Day Off airs 5am-7am HST Saturdays on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo as well as streaming live on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Join the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook, founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

"Brave New World," "1984," and real-life Big Brotherism

Two great novels from the first half of the 20th century described different views of the future based on what their creators saw in their own time, and both books, despite being deliberately exaggerated, managed to quickly foretell certain aspects of modern life just a few generations after the authors lived.

In Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World," the world in 2540 reproduces in laboratories with fetuses divided by caste. People are bred for their occupations. They are brainwashed through sleep hypnosis to have the views they are supposed to have.  The family unit no longer exists. It's considered wasteful and rude to spend any time by yourself. Physical pleasure, including sex, is the focus of daily living. Movies are called "feelies" and you experience the tactile sensations that the actors do. There are pills for everything. There are "savages" who live outside this system under circumstances more familiar to us.

In George Orwell's 1949 novel "1984," three giant nations make up the world and they are perpetually at war, with shifting alliances that ensure two of them are always ganging up on another. The novel focuses on one of them, where "Big Brother is Watching," as the government surveils and controls virtually all human endeavor, suppressing any sign of individual liberty. The main character, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth rewriting newspaper articles of the past to make them conform with modern thinking. Similarly, war is waged by the Ministry of Peace and people are tortured and brainwashed by the Ministry of Love.

In the actual year 1984, more than a decade after I read both novels in school, a lot of people wrote articles on whether "1984" was prescient. Most said "Brave New World" called it better, arguing that Americans especially were mind-controlled, not so much by Big Brother Watching as by mindless obsession with physical pleasure. But 70 years after "Brave New World" was written, I think "1984" shares honors with the older book.

It's hard to discount the predictive ability of Aldous Huxley in a world full of Viagra, Levitra and other drugs that necessitate a warning to call your doctor if your erection lasts for several hours. But the family unit continues to be cherished, promoted and desired, even by divorcees, singles and gays. What Huxley did get right is that thought control is achieved through persuasive rather than coercive means, at least most of the time. Orwell seemed to anticipate waterboarding, though. And both men correctly expected the powerful to twist and shape the truth to suit their goals.

Big Brotherism is here. It arrived more than a generation ago when AT&T began to use microwave relays for long distance telephone transmissions. NSA immediately set up secret installations near these through-the-air pathways to harvest conversations that could not be conventionally wiretapped without court orders. The law never caught up with the new technology. But to be on the safe side, the government set up a secret court issue secret rulings on requests for wiretaps in secret cases. Didn't know that? Of course you didn't: it's secret. Sort of.

Big Brother gained even more reach when judges without Internet savvy made a number of rulings that failed to make Internet activity analogous to telephone calls. The increasing ubiquity of surveillance cameras has further intensified the trend, while also demonstrating several non-nefarious and even beneficial applications. Smart phone video has sharpened what has come to be called "reverse surveillance," where the little guy keeps an eye on Big Brother, a trend that began with the Rodney King beating and came fully into its own during the Arab Spring.

And now we come to the Hawaii Legislature.

Jill Tokuda and John Mizuno introduced bills in their respective houses to require ISPs - Internet service providers - to keep records for two years of all Web site visits by all users. Mizuno, in a classic example of the Ministry of Truth, called it a consumer protection bill. Tokuda said she introduced the bill at the request of fellow lawmaker Kim Pyne, who experienced an attack Web site after a pay dispute with a Web designer. It does appear Mizuno and Tokuda were well-intentioned. Nevertheless, it was a bad idea, and the bill was tabled after a hearing Thursday where some witnesses got to explain that.

Let's keep it tabled. Forever.

 

 

Get it first, but first get it right

Joe Paterno, who coached 409 football wins and two national championships before being fired by Penn State for not doing enough about an assistant coach's alleged sexual assault, died Sunday morning of lung cancer.

But his death was reported Saturday night, 14 hours before it actually happened.

A student Web site called Onward State reported Paterno's death based on two sources confirming an internal email at the university. The Web site founder said the email was later found to be a hoax. But by then major news media, knowing the end was near, had picked up the story.

One online account of the screw-up mentioned the newsroom adage, "Get it first, but first get it right," attributing it to Walter Cronkite.

Actually, the phrase dates back to 1923, when it became a slogan of the International News Service. INS merged with United Press in 1958 to form UPI, which kept using the phrase.

Walter Cronkite worked for United Press from 1937 to 1950. If he didn't hear the phrase before, he would have seen it on UPI Stylebooks in the 1960s when CBS was a UPI subscriber. UPI was still using it when I went to work for the company's radio network in 1984.

Some older commentators have made much of the fact that this is nothing new, that news organizations got big stories wrong long before there were Web sites and tweets and the like. This is true to an extent. Every few years, commodity markets are briefly jarred by false reports of some major world leader dying or having a heart attack.

We've all heard the line, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," attributed to Mark Twain, who actually did say something similar, though not identical, after a New York newspaper published on obituary for someone else named James Ross Clemens. Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens.

Warning: People are always attributing to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill clever remarks made by others. I would almost call it a coincidence that Mark Twain actually made the exaggeration remark.

Despite journalism's long history of getting things wrong, there is really no question that the chance of error has increased as a result of Twitter and Twitter news aggregators.

UPI used to drill into its employees the fact that the company had "a deadline every minute," but a minute seems like an eternity these days.

More importantly, in my opinion, the format of Twitter makes it harder for a report to be couched or caveated. Alleged information is punched out without detailed disclaimers.

An official announcement from the State Department appears in the same type font and point size as a report from a Web site operated by students.

The modern news anchor, news editor or news aggregator of any sort needs to have a sense of caution about the very real possibility that an early report on anything may be wrong. This affects whether you run it, how you run it, and what tone of voice you use if you run it.

 

Hawaiian Airlines tries "crowd-sourcing"

The Hawaii Legislature is notorious in the business community for fiddling with local business operations. Every session there are proposals to create expensive new requirements for employers.

One requirement - health insurance for workers - has been great for workers and now seems to be a significant benefit that helps find good employees, and the only employers who wish they didn't have the requirement are those who delude themselves into thinking that without it they would get employees who were just as good for the same wages.

But there are also annual attempts to legislate what unions could not successfully negotiate, like financial incentives for sick or injured workers to stay out longer. These are not serious attempts to improve the lot of workers, most of whom don't abuse leave and resent coworkers who do; rather, they are self-serving attempts to get political contributions from labor unions by doing something that is allegedly on their behalf.

Say this for the unions, though: they have always engaged with lawmakers. Until recently, business owners tended to ignore the Legislature until it passed something, then complain.

Chamber of Commerce President Jim Tollefson tried for years to get his members to join him at the State Capitol, getting to know lawmakers and offering to answer their questions. This year he finally got more than 100 of them to agree to do it. They'll find, I predict, that lawmakers are far more willing to hear their views than they expected, and that most of them truly want to do the right thing, now more than ever with the economy still slumpy.

Hawaiian Airlines, which pays 20% of all its revenue on taxes - more than payroll, though not more than the jet fuel bill - is concerned that lawmakers might pass something that interferes with the airline's rapid expansion. Hawaiian has nearly 4,000 employees based in Hawaii and has been hiring by the hundreds, and the best thing the Legislature can do is stay out of its way. Yet there are rumors of plans to spend taxpayer dollars to lure a competitor to the islands, hoping to bring down interisland fares.

At the moment, Hawaiian has about 85% of the interisland market, thanks to the limited success of Mesa Air Group's go! Mokulele subsidiary. The last time there were three carriers, there was a fare war that drove Aloha Airlines out of business, throwing thousands of people out of work in March 2008 just as the recession was hitting. The last executive team at Aloha tried to get help from state officials but found no interest in helping.

One notable factor in the cost of interisland airline operations is that jet fuel refined by the Tesoro and Chevron refineries in Campbell Industrial Park is considered an export when sold to airlines as fuel for flights going to other countries, but is taxed on interisland flights. The geographical layout of the state creates an uneven playing field, tilted against local airlines.

Every time I read a Web board conversation on the subject of interisland fares, someone has posted a comparison between a high local fare and something cheap to Vegas. The tone of the message usually implies, and sometimes asserts outright, that Hawaiian is ripping you off.

It was not anyone at Hawaiian but Thom McNulty, the last marketing vice president of Aloha Airlines, who explained to me that the lion's share of fuel consumption on any flight is on takeoff, with almost no cost to cruise compared to the usual pedal-to-metal ascent. Accordingly, the shorter a flight is, the more inefficient it is, fuelwise. No flight in America is costlier for fuel bills, mile by mile, than interisland flights where you do not cruise at all, proceeding from takeoff directly to descent.

So with Hawaiian working on close margins, what does it do to ask lawmakers not to raise any more obstacles?

Rather than rely entirely on professional lobbyists behind closed doors, Hawaiian has decided to crowd-source the issue. It sent a note to its thousands of Hawaii employees inviting them to get to know their state lawmakers and explain anything they want to know.

I like the idea. They'll lobby openly, using regular employees. Their arguments will stand or fall on logical and practical grounds, not on glibness. The rest of us can easily find out what they're saying. And it is actually quite possible that the lawmakers will have the wit to stand aside and let this local company continue to expand and hire.

 

 

Music Post: Remembering Etta James and "At Last"

Etta James died today of leukemia. She would have been 74 next Wednesday. The blues singer was best known for her 1960 rendition of "At Last," one of the few songs used in mass media as often as Bruddah Iz's "Over the Rainbow," and equally a part of our mass consciousness.

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles to a 14-year-old mother, and her father may have been the pool player known as Minnesota Fats. (Friends said he was; he told her he couldn't recall.) As a teenager she was part of a doo-wop group which had a hit record in 1955 and toured with Little Richard. She dated B.B. King.

Her recording of "At Last" charted in 1961. It was a cover of a song written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren in 1941 for a movie musical called "Orchestra Wives," first performed and recorded by Ray Eberle and Pat Friday and backed up by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. Mack Gordon and Harry Warren also wrote the love songs "You'll Never Know," "The More I See You," and "There Will Never Be Another You," and the novelty hits "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and "(I've Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo." Gordon also wrote the words to "You Make Me Feel So Young" and "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" Frank Sinatra had a hit with the former; the latter was featured in a Popeye cartoon.

Etta James toured with the Rolling Stones in 1978 but her career was almost derailed by heroin and alcohol, which led to legal trouble from bad checks. In 1987 she appeared with Chuck Berry in the documentary "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll." She was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Hame in 1993 and the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine put her in its 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Beyonce played her in a movie. Sadly, her health broke soon after, with her leukemia complicated by Alzheimer's, an addiction to painkillers, and a 2010 MRSA infection.

It is a curious thing, but "At Last" was not that big a hit when new. Etta James had a bigger hit with "Dance With Me, Henry," under the title, "The Wallflower," a 1955 number one R&B hit that was covered so many times it appeared in such diverse places as "Back to the Future" and BBC Radio's "Goon Show" with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, and inspired the title of an Abbott and Costello movie.

Etta James progressed from being a teen talent to a cult favorite to a mature artist with a broad following, her rock-jazz-blues crossover style reflecting the increasingly broad musical interests of her fans.

 

Music post: It's the Brahms brahmins, brah

Classical music lovers tend to put Johannes Brahms on his own particular pedestal: the conservative composer of music with beautiful melodies and rich harmonies. His chamber and symphonic works are held in equal high esteem, especially adored by musicians who play the inner parts of his sweet chords.

But it is often said in CD liner notes and concert programs, without challenge, that Brahms (1833-1897), who made his living as a women's chorus conductor and pianist before achieving success as a composer, founded no school and was not much copied by other composers, who seemed more influenced by the progressive music of Wagner.

That's only partly true.

Brahms was enormously influential in Britain, for example. Hubert Parry (1848-1918) and Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) made up the musical establishment in London at the turn of the century and both of them were greatly influenced by Brahms. They are the missing links between Brahms and Elgar. This can be heard in Parry's "Overture to an Unwritten Tragedy" and the symphonies of both.

We know Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) was influenced by Brahms. The younger Dvorak was befriended by Brahms, who found him a publisher and helped edit his works for publication. Dvorak's personality is so strong in his music - for me even the "New World" Symphony sounds Czech - that Brahms' influence on him is not always readily apparent, but it's there, especially in the harmonies.

An even more interesting example, because he's virtually unknown even to the classical cognescenti, is Heinrich Herzogenberg (1843-1900). Half-French but raised in Vienna, he was a friend of Brahms whose relationship with the more famous composer suffered when he married one of Brahms' piano pupils. Brahms liked Herzogenberg's wife better than he liked Herzogenberg and doesn't appear to have extended to Herzogenberg the kind of help he gave to Dvorak.

On my public radio program Saturday, I'll feature three movements of Herzogenberg's Sym. No. 1 in C Minor, the same key as Brahms' first symphony. You'll also hear music of Dvorak, Parry, Stanford and, for those who accept no substitutes, plenty of Brahms himself.

"Howard's Day Off" airs live 5am-7am Saturdays on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo (Big Island) and streams live on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org. All of the music on the program comes from Howard Dicus's personal CD collection. Max Cacas of Washington D.C. founded the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook.

EPCOT: Exceptional politics, concord over tourism

President Obama is fair game for just about everything else, but apparently one thing he can do without any serious criticism or controversy is to propose a tourism initiative.

Which he did, today, at Walt Disney World in Orlando, promising expedited efforts to do more visa waiver programs and expedite the processing of visas in countries where we don't waive them.

The Obama administration was already ramping up staffing at the U.S. embassy in Beijing to process visas - Chinese citizens currently spend time and money seeking visas without any guarantee they'll get one. Not a good way to begin planning a trip. But today's speech sounded like a policy change. The president now sounds warm to the idea of an outright visa waiver even for China, though that's a big step and likely will be buffeted by whatever other policy disputes Washington and Beijing are having.

President Obama also seems open to the idea of visa waiver programs for India and Brazil. The State Department has already put paperwork through to seek a visa waiver for Taiwan.

Linda Lingle, running for the Senate, will likely feel the need at some point to align herself with GOP money by attacking the Democratic president on something, but today wasn't that day: the Republican moderate praised the initiative and pledged to support it if she is elected.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has taken Republican positions on so many issues that the White House might have given up on expecting support on any of its programs, heaped praise on the tourism initiative and asserted that rebuilding U.S. tourism to year 2000 levels would create 1.3 million jobs.

In Hawaii, it's estimated that a visa waiver program for China alone would create more than 150,000 jobs, or ten times as many jobs as the current number of Hawaii residents drawing unemployment.

Let me tell you what the thinking is about visa waivers behind the scenes. This is what officials will never say publicly.

When you're concerned about espionage, visas help you surveil visitors from sometimes hostile countries and keep an eye on potential spies. The thinking has always been that waiving visas will mean a bigger crowd of visitors for spies to hide in.

But that was before we started making every single airline passenger walk through a scanner and subject every bag to an x-ray. That was before the invention of face recognition software. That was before someone wised up and realized that there are better ways to spot enemy agents than having bureaucrats read visa applications.

Some people think exporting all those industrial jobs to China brought revolutionary change in China, turning a communist society into a market economy and neutralizing a strategic threat. If that's true, if it's even partly true, imagine what it will mean for peace if more Chinese visit America and more Americans visit China.

 

 

 

I'm glad to be home, I don't care how muggy it is

Well, I'm back from visiting my son and his family in Los Angeles. It was cool and pleasant there - my son actually lent me his Redskins  jacket. Back here it's muggy and oppressive. Meanwhile, in Seattle, they've gotten more snow in 24 hours than they typically get in an entire winter.

I sense a disturbance in the force.

The disturbance was especially evident on the flight home from L.A., which felt like our Airbus was skipping rope with the jetstream. It reminded me of sailing in a storm, when you aim for maximum speed because speed gives you more steering control. I didn't spill anything so it was fun.

I flew coach on the way over but splurged on first class on the way home (it was much cheaper westbound than eastbound, dunno why) and was really impressed with what Chai has done with the cuisine of Hawaiian. I know just enough about airline food preparation to know that it's very, very hard to do it consistently well.

The big story over in L.A. was  a severed human head that some dogs were playing with. "Rover! You put that severed head down right this minute. I'm not kidding. Do you want your Kibbles or not?" Some of the local TV stations in L.A. have so many violent crimes and accidents to cover, they never get any other news in. I did see a great deal of badly-written medical news. But mostly it was gang murders and stuff. L.A. has gang murders the way we have funeral urns stolen.

My grandson and I both like trains so his dad likes to arrange outings with train themes. You wouldn't know it to see my model planes, but trains have always been a hobby of mine. This time we went far east of town to a museum that was filled with several excellent model train layouts. The museum's permanent collection included a really good collection of stuffed birds, which I wouldn't have thought would interest me but it did.

The hotel where we stayed, in Hollywood, was hosting some kind of Australian conference and a bunch of people who were going to the Golden Globes.

Motorists are so much more aggressive in L.A. They will go to almost any lengths to get from immediately behind someone to immediately in front of them. No one gives an inch. I was astonished on my third day there to see someone brake to let someone in - and then I noticed the map of Hawaii stenciled on the back of his van.

Music post: Chord change masters of the 20th century

Western music is built so much on two conventional scales, major and minor, that anything which veers from those scales can sound exotic or tasty or wrong, depending on the context.

The "diatonic" scales, which is to say, the regular ones, are the white key scale that begins on C (major) and the white key scale that begins on A (minor). The notes represented by black keys in those two particular instances are considered "chromatic" rather than diatonic and add color when used.

One way to use those other keys is to "modulate" a lot, using chord changes that change into new keys, or feel like they do. I'm talking about how it sounds, not how it's written down. Roy Harris wrote a lot of his music "in C" even though it wasn't, really, forcing himself to notate all the accidentals (sharps and flats) individually.

And once you're notating so many notes as accidentals anyway, it's really no bother to throw in a lot of weird chord changes. And he did. Prismatic chord changes are the hallmark of Harris's music, more than his single-note crescendo punctuation, more than his use of tuned percussion instruments to create a timbre he called his "bell orchestra." 

Harris's Third Symphony, by far his most famous work, opens with a very long theme using a very diatonic scale - at first - and gradually begins throwing in other notes until the work has a chromatic quality that has been described as sounding like twilight, not quite major, not quite minor. Many of his other symphonies have other examples of his unique melodies and chords.

Harris was one of the many American composers to study composition in Paris with the organist Nadia Boulanger, and I must say that Harris's chord changes sometimes remind me of the chromatic noodling you can do yourself at an organ keyboard by playing any long chord and then changing one note at a time to see how the chord is affected.

A New York church organist who wrote even more chromatic music was Paul Creston. There is enormous beauty in his restless modulation, especially when he dials back the bombast in his orchestration so you can savor those chord changes, as is the case in what I consider Creston's greatest work, his Partita for Flute, Violin and String Orchestra.

Howard Hanson, the longtime music director of the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, who recorded more American classical music premieres than anybody, wrote several excellent symphonies of his own, which sounded fairly good when he recorded them but really good when Gerard Schwarz did so more recently with the Seattle Symphony. He, too, had a penchant for chord changes that sounded fresh and colorful despite frequent declarations by critics and annotators that he was "traditional."

William Schuman, a student of Harris who became a great symphonist in his own right and is even more widely known for his "New England Triptych," is best-known for amping up the energy in his works, but he, too, had a fondness for those restless chord changes.

I'll play the music of all these composers and some other chromatic American composers as well, on Saturday morning's public radio program.

Howard's Day Off is the title of a program of "classical music and related materials, packed in authentic juices," which airs live every Saturday, 5am-7am HST, on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku, and KANO Hilo, and streams on http://www. hawaiipublicradio.org . Please join the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook, founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Urine: a lot of trouble

It seems to be human nature to be "for" or "against" entire groups of people. Just writing it down makes it look stupid, yet we all do it sometimes.

You probably know someone who hates cops, as if all police officers are the same, and someone else will take criticism of a crooked cop as a denunciation of all police. Neither position is defensible. Most police are fine citizens, and the ones who aren't do their brother officers more harm than the rest of us.

You probably know someone who is distrustful of members of whatever political party they don't belong to. Those of us who are politically independent believe there are too few gifted public servants to confine our support exclusively to those from one camp.

And now there is the case of the U.S. Marines videotaped urinating on a corpse in Afghanistan. The Defense Department appears to have identified the guys thought to have done it, and today it was reported that several of them have retained legal counsel and declined to have their quarters searched.

You have only to think of how easily some of our fellow Americans have found it to think of all Middle Easterners as extremists, terrorists and enemies of America, to realize how easily the Taliban will be able to use this video as a recruitment film.

If what happened is what appears on video to have happened, the guys who did it are going to feel really stupid if, in some future incident, U.S. military personnel are mistreated as a direct result of the reaction to this stunt.

The death of Osama bin Laden was an understandable action, no matter who said otherwise at the time. Even our most intractable enemies understand that the World Trade Center bombing invited the most serious retaliation. They weren't surprised when American got Osama and they understood, even if they said different. This, on the other hand, was a gratuitous statement by a handful of morons who arrogated to themselves the dubious decision to reinforce the enemy's worst impressions of us.

I don't blame this on this administration or the last one, but I do think the legal shenanigans used to justify torturing people at Guantanamo Bay are analogous, and could also lead to self-righteous mistreatment of Americans by our enemies in the future, if it hasn't happened already.

Wearing the white hat is part of the military arsenal. Why are we offering it to the other side?

Let's say hypothetically that some otherwise good Marines chuckled when they saw the video. Let that pass; but now let's think about this seriously. This is not good for the Marines who go into harm's way tomorrow.