Howzit Howard

Music Post: American composers for Fourth of July weekend

Because I'm self-taught, and grew up listening to classic rock and my dad's jazz records, my exposure to American classical music started with George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein. But there is a substantial body of work by American composers before Gershwin, composers who studied in Europe and were only lightly influenced by popular music stateside.

These composers wrote interesting, pretty, dramatic stuff, but to appreciate it you have to be careful not to expect it to be something it's not. Think Brahms or Dvorak if you must, but not Gershwin:

• George Chadwick (1854-1931). A self-taught organist who attended New England Conservatory, then studied in Germany and France, returning to America in 1880.
• George Templeton Strong (1856-1948). The son of a prominent New York lawyer, studied in Europe, returning to America briefly before moving permanently to Switzerland in 1897.
• Arthur Foote (1853-1937). A music teacher who composed, Foote wrote "Modern Harmony in Theory and Practice" in 1905. Worked largely apart from others of his generation.
• Victor Herbert (1859-1924). Irish-born but raised in Germany by a German stepfather, Herbert was a cellist in Vienna until he and his singer wife emigrated to New York to work for the Metropolitan Opera. His most popular works came in 1894-1917.
• Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). Studied at the Paris Conservatory and in Germany, moving back to America in 1888, incapacitated after being run over by a cab in 1904.
• Horatio Parker (1863-1919).  Studied in Europe, returning in 1885. A church organist in New York and Boston who then taught music at Yale, where one of his students was Charles Ives.
• Amy Beach (1867-1944). Child prodigy singer-pianist, mostly self-taught. In 1885 she married a surgeon and curtailed her performances, resuming her career after he died in 1910.
• Frederick Converse (1871-1940). The first American to get an opera staged by the Metropolitan Opera, and he put a car horn into a composition before Gershwin did.

Charles Ives was born in 1874, the same year as Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Holst. The composers listed above were all active around the turn of the century, all very much in the late Romantic tradition despite flashes of other things.

Apart from Strong, whose professional career was almost entirely in Europe, and Victor Herbert, for whom America was an adopted homeland, most of these people studied in Europe then came back home with the pedigree to get performed. Arthur Foote and Amy Beach might be singled out for not having the European training at all.

On my Saturday morning radio show, most of these composers will be sampled, as well as the giants of the middle 1900s - Gershwin, Copland, Howard Hanson, Paul Creston, and some composers of more recent decades who deserve to be better known: Lester Trimble, Dan Locklair, Samuel Jones, Carson Cooman, Russell Peck, and more.

It has been my experience that symphony orchestras tend to program "difficult" works when they deign to play something written past 1900, but despite what you may have read in a music textbook there were scores of 20th century composers who wrote interesting tonal works. We have a unique opportunity to explore them because the economics of CD recording have led labels to seek unrecorded repertory, so their newest release isn't competing with a dozen other perfectly good recordings of the same material.

Howard's Day Off, which airs live Saturday mornings at 5-7am HST, is broadcast on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo, and streams live on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org.

The real reason for the Fed to keep pushing interest rates down

You would think price deflation would be a good thing. Cheaper is better, right? But what actually happens in a deflationary economy is that most spending stops, because everyone assumes that what they could buy today will be cheaper next week.

For the longest time I have assumed that low interest rates weren't the good thing they appear to be, because would-be homebuyers are reluctant to make a move, fearing that still-lower mortgage rates in a few months will make them look like fools. I figured that a lot of people would move decisively to buy homes when, and only when, they saw a decisive uptrend in home loan APRs. I also thought that banks, many of which are hoarding cash and giving as few loans as possible, would change their tune if they saw a finite window of opportunity to lend money with cheap interest rates for themselves.

If that were the only thing going on, the stagnant home sales market on the mainland, maybe all that would be correct and there would be no point in the Fed spending uku-billions buying Treasury notes to lower the interest rate the Treasury pays (the Treasury offers a higher return when it has trouble selling T-bills and a lower return in uncertain times when more investors want the security of its notes.) But there another and more important reason to keep interest rates as low as possible.

The federal debt is trillions and trillions of dollars and growing all the time, the result of soaring medical costs, Social Security and wars. A key component of the federal debt is the interest on the debt, the cost of constantly refinancing that debt through the sale of Treasury bills. Interest rates are currently in the low single digits. What if they were twice that much? That would still be a moderate interest, something seen all the time in a normal economy. But this one change, an increase in interest rates to a more usual level, would expand the deficit by more than the savings of the most draconian federal spending cuts you've heard anybody propose.

 

Blast from the past: the oldest known quasar

Until this week, someone writing an astronomy textbook would have written that the oldest known quasar began emitting the light that we see today 870 million years after the Big Bang. But now they're going to have stop the presses and replate the page: a telescope on Mauna Kea found an older one.

The Friday edition of the journal Nature reports that the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope discovered, and the Gemini North telescope confirmed, a quasar that was born when the universe was a mere pup of 770 million years. Both telescopes are on Mauna Kea.

Quasars are created by gas sucked into a massive black hole. It may be true that the gravity of a black hole is so great that not even light can escape, but the stuff being sucked toward the hole throws off plenty of light before gazing into the abyss.

You will note that I have expressed all of this with certitude: 870 million years, 770 million years, I'm describing the precipice of a black hole like we sent a space probe out there with a smart phone to snap some pictures. That's the beauty of astrophysics. Nobody can be sure, really, of anything. The most they can do is produce books full of mathematics which conform to their own theory of all this. Then, having satisfied themselves with chalkboards full of math, they talk about their theories as if they are fact...until some discovery shows they had it wrong.

Nine tenths of the people who subscribe the the journal Nature couldn't doublecheck that math if their tenure depended on it, never mind the rest of who barely passed Algebra I.

If you find a detailed report on any new astrophysical discovery and read it all the way to the end, you'll invariably find something that shows how much astrophysicists are guessing.

In this case, the real discovery, the bit that is being focused on by the people who do understand the math, is that this quasar, dating back to 6% of the universe's presumed age, surrounds a black hole which must be 2 billion times more massive than our sun. It's way bigger than they expected.

So something was wrong with their math. This Mauna Kea discovery could show us something we didn't know about the growth of black holes, or the Big Bang, or the expansion of the universe in the first billion years of time.

Who knows? Maybe the only way this is possible is for the time-space continuum to bend so much that a wormhole is created, changing the energy dynamics that otherwise would work fine.

In the meantime, the new data reconfirm a hypothesis of my own: I should have paid more attention in science class.

 

Let me just lower your expectations here...

I'm planning to return to work Thursday morning. About half of my voices is back, enough to work with if I'm careful. I still have an annoying cough but nothing like before.

But there's another symptom that I didn't even notice until I rose from my sickbed Tuesday with the intention of writing enough material to allow me to return to work Wednesday. 

It's like my brain lost a bunch of I.Q. points. I had trouble remembering the names of people I know, or I would stop writing, rummaging around for the right word, knowing I knew it, but unable for several seconds to recall it.

This is the pits for someone who lives by his wits.

I could easily spend a few more days in bed but I don't dare. My job is hard and I need all the brains I can bring to it. My news doesn't spill into the TelePrompTer from someone else's head.

So, barring an overnight setback, I'll be back on the air Thursday, but I just turned 58 and might be acting my age, or older, for a few days.

As someone who has gone years without taking sick leave but has had occasional serious bouts with flu (1993), pleurisy (1972) and even mono (2006), I can tell you that there are three kinds of illness:

1. Stuff you can and should simply bull your way through. For these, the majority of illnesses, your body senses that you don't have time to be sick and mobilizes to quickly vanquish it.
2. Stuff too major for the first solution, which your body cannot readily defeat without giving it some time to work on the problem unmolested by work.
3. Stuff in the middle, which needs undivided attention for awhile but will make an invalid of you if you don't eventually get up and fight it.

I declared a Type 3 emergency on my ailment today.

The silence of the ham

It's so strange, for one used to hamming it up on TV, to be silenced by laryngitis.

But it could have been worse. I missed my Friday broadcasts, but by Friday afternoon I had one low note of my voice back. When I try to use an upper register it cracks, but it could be worse.

Bernadette and I are still going to the Green Gala at the Waikiki Aquarium and she'll stand with me, helping me read stuff.

And tomorrow morning she's also coming with me to Hawaii Public Radio in case my voice goes during "Howard's Day Off."

I slept for a really long time, until 1 p.m., dressed far more warmly than usual to sweat out whatever buggu caused this, ate a tuna fish sandwich and went right back to bed for two more hours, then took a lengthy, scalding hot shower, which, it now occurs to me, wasn't a very green thing to do.

But it worked. I feel a little better and the low end of my voice is back.

Music Post: Classical music you didn't know you knew

In one of the Marx Brothers movies, Harpo sits down at the piano and plays the beginning of a serious classical piece, but his exaggerated pounding busts up the instrument, leaving the strings inside, which turn out to be playable as a harp, and then Harpo plays a beautiful piece, as he does in almost every Marx Brothers movie. Self-taught and left-handed, he was still good enough to do concerts.

The piece in that scene is Rachmaninoff's Prelude No. 2 in C sharp minor, Op. 3, a five-minute work that will open my radio show Saturday morning. The entire show consists of classical music that is familiar to many ears because of its use in movies, cartoons, TV shows and commercials. I can mention Von Suppe's "Light Cavalry" overture, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours,"Debussy's "Golliwogg's Cakewalk," or Inesco's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, but the whole point is that you won't recognize the titles - you'll recognize the music.

Familiarity differs from generation to generation. The best example of the this is the first movement of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony. The first theme will be familiar to Gen-X-ers who watched the Smurfs but the second will be familiar to babyboomers who watched the Disney cartoon about a mouse helping Schubert finish the music.

This show was inspired by a recent concert of the Hawaii Youth Symphony, which opened with the overture to Herold's opera "Zampa." Bernadette, looking at her program, said, "I don't know this piece." "Yes you do," I replied, and she did, once she heard it. I'll play this at 6:30 on the show Saturday.

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

Jeff Stone's deal with Kamehameha Schools may not be dead

[Note: More articles have been written about this matter in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Pacific Business News. It's getting even more complicated. But I still get the impression that all the parties involved may still want to do something like the original deal. Now on with the original post. HMD]

A close reading of statements by all parties in the Leeward Oahu school campus flap suggests to me that this deal might eventually be salvaged.

Kamehameha Schools is the state's largest private landowner and revenue from these lands funds the educational mission of the former Bishop Estate. It's a very rich organization, and in recent years it has carefully been using more of that wealth to expand its educational facilities and teach more students.

The people who manage KS's land holdings are as tough as any landlords you'll ever meet. They're nobody's sweetheart, as Firesign Theatre would say. Sometimes they get into the habit of toughness to an extent that leads to callous action when something warmer and fuzzier might do. Anyway that's what all the tenants will tell you.

Jeff Stone, the developer of Ko Olina, wanted to give 300 acres in Makaha Valley to Kamehameha Schools and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. The idea that was that Kamehameha Schools would build a big campus there. Stone is a hardnosed businessman, too, but he likes to find ways to help the Leeward side without cutting off his own nose.

Everybody was happy about the deal for awhile, but the devil is in the details, and it got a lot more complicated than perhaps it needed to. What tore it for Stone was a June 13 letter from Kamehameha Schools, over the signature of its CEO, indicating that the nonprofit would use the land at "its discretion".

"I'm not going to give it to them to land-bank with their other 100,000 acres," Stone told Janis Magin of Pacific Business News. "This is a gift to get a school and a community and housing back on track." KS indicated it would put a small preschool there, but that wasn't the original deal.

Here is a link to Magin's piece:

http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/news/2011/06/23/developer-says-kamehameha-schools.html

Kamehameha Schools CEO Dee Jay Mailer, a former Kaiser executive, is a socially-aware woman of brilliant intelligence and warm heart. Given that Stone says he is still ready to give the land under the original terms, I will be surprised if Dee Jay and Jeff cannot salvage this deal, even if it is delayed for a time.

 

An unusual pullout plan, but then it's an unusual war

President Obama says the 33,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan will be withdrawn by September of next year and about a third of them will leave this year. Our involvement will end. Did we win or lose?

Neither. It wasn't that kind of war.

Our instinctive belief that we should never pull out of anywhere until we can have a ceremony on the Battleship Missouri is derived from the joy of winning World War II, and the mixed feelings the nation experienced when we pulled out of Vietnam. 

In those days wars progressed until someone won. We beat Japan and then befriended them and now we're pals. The two nations are trading and cultural partners, each enriched by the other and not ashamed to say so.

North Vietnam beat us and now Americans are tourists and warmly welcomed by the Vietnamese people, most of whom weren't even born when the war raged. Americans are gainfully employed in the growing Vietnamese economy and ethnic Vietnamese are among America's hardest workers.

Fast forward to the present, where America is the only military superpower and, despite ceaseless criticism from every direction on every little policy tweak, widely regarded as an honest broker that actually cares about peace and freedom in addition to the economic interests every nation pursues. So we take action in Iraq, we get Saddam, we descend on Afghanistan, we get bin Laden, and we're currently helping out while letting other nations take the lead in Libya, where Ghadafy will most likely be got. You can call them wars, but they're different from the old kind of wars.

We're prepared to send soldiers and engineers and money, much, much money, in the cause of nation-building, but we're not going to stay forever and no one expects us to, no matter what they say. We're not altogether happy with deadlines, and that's understandable, because bad guys might try to outwait us, moving back into power when we leave. But we can't stay forever. And once you accept that eventually we're going to leave the people of a foreign place to their own devices, you begin to realize that once you've achieved a certain amount, it's actually better to pull out sooner rather than later, to husband resources for the next hot spot.

Something really bad could happen tomorrow in another place entirely, and right now we're overextended. We gave Afghanistan our time, our attention, our blood, and our billions, and now we will see what the Afghan people do with it. And we will particularly see whether the most powerful people in Afghanistan, including the generals, will help turn Afghanistan into a nice place or descend back into corruption and cynicism.

Hmm... maybe the call for resignations should have been less courteous

I'm fascinated by this whole thing where Neil Abercrombie wrote letters to 28 members of five state boards - the Public Utilities Commission, the Board of Land & Natural Resources, the Land Use Commission, the Housing Authority, and the Stadium Authority - seeking "courtesy resignations" so he could make a fresh start in a new direction, or maybe it was a new start in a fresh direction.

In my original post I didn't have much to contribute to the discussion except that the term "courtesy resignation" was misused because it applies to people the chief executive can fire - the courtesy lies in giving them the chance to jump rather than be pushed - and the governor can't fire these people. They were nominated by the last governor, confirmed by the state legislature, made adjustments to their personal and professional lives to meet the obligations of these boards, and got specific terms. If Dan Inouye, the acknowledged leader of his party in Hawaii, asked Abercrombie to submit a "courtesy resignation" so he could move in a fresh direction - well, I'd like to be in the room when the governor gets the letter.

(Think it's not analogous because the governor was elected? These appointees were named by an elected governor and then approved by state senators mostly of the opposite camp. Hawaii elected officials, and by extension the electorate itself, decided to have agencies and boards with firm terms for board members, staggered to stretch across administrations.)

This week the Maui News and the Big Island's West Hawaii Today tracked down some of their local residents who sit on these boards, and Civil Beat has been trying reach all 28 of them, and the quotes I've read leave me with a sense, not merely that they are all inclined to courteously ignore the letters, but that they are a little puzzled by the whole maneuver. What was the governor thinking? Did he really figure most of them would resign? Did he think that they would tell him to go fish, and then he could rally fresh support from the populous? If he couldn't achieve one of these objectives, then what was the point? Mufi Hannemann and Charles Djou, who usually agree on approximately nothing, came on "Sunrise" this morning for "Across the Aisles" and they both seemed mystified, too. Since Djou is a Republican and Hannemann suffered a bitter defeat by Abercrombie, I wasn't expecting either of them to give the governor an attaboy, but they both were reasonably restrained in their criticism, as if they didn't fully understand what Abercrombie was up to.

I voice support for Abercrombie quite often, and usually it goes like this: When you get a politician who blurts out what he really thinks, that's to be cherished, because it beats having a politician who is so careful in what he says that you don't know where he stands until he acts. I like blunt politicians and will forgive a lot to get the candor. Now it occurs to me that this is precisely what was strange about the letters. If Abercrombie had said, discourteously, these people are all Lingle appointees and I don't trust them not to obstruct me and I think they should step down and give me a chance to put my own people in, you might not have agreed with him but you would have known where he stood. Some Republican appointees who were willing to step down might have done it just to set the precedent for a future Republican governor to do the same thing. And if, as now seems to be the case, most or all refuse to step down, Abercrombie would have had something to give rousing speeches about.

Instead, he gave no reason. I'm sorry, but a fresh start in a new direction isn't specific enough to do anything but arouse suspicion. This is the way management consultants talk when they parachute in from the mainland. In the corporate world it means, "I'm going to make changes but I'm not going to tell you what they'll be." It's not very... Abercrombiesque.

Was it better to be a fief than to be a tenant?

I just watched the season finale of "Game of Thrones" on HBO, and I'm on the third book in the series on my Kindle, so forgive me for applying a Middle Ages analogy to the Foodland flap in Hawaii Kai.

Tenants hate landlords in Hawaii. Residential tenants say landlords never do the repairs they promise, and if you pressure them to do the work, they then raise the rent. Commercial tenants say landlords seem to think tenants can come across with any amount they want, and if the tenant folds or moves away, and the property is empty for months or years, landlords never blame themselves.

The guy who owns the local Jack-in-the-Box franchises closed his unit at McCully and Kalakaua years ago because the landlords wanted a huge increase in the rent, and the property did indeed remain unused for most of the past couple years. I know a retailer in Kailua who is closing his pet supply store forever because of a big increase in the rent. Now we have the Foodland slated to close at Koko Marina Center because a drug store chain offered better terms for the same space. Unless community pressure reverses the decision, Hawaii Kai residents will have two nearby grocery choices, where they had four just a couple years ago.

I was thinking how we always refer to "the business community," but there is a big difference between the business of being a landlord and the business of doing almost anything else. That's when the "Games of Thrones" analogy popped into my head.

The HBO series closely hews to a series of novels under the imprimatur "Fire & Ice" which describe a fantasy world of warring kings. Though the world, its geography and its animal species are invented, most of the story seems set in an alternative universe Dark Ages. The kingdom of Westeros is really seven kingdoms loosely held together, and sometimes torn asunder, by wars, alliances, arranged marriages, backstabbing, and commerce. Each component kingdom is its own economy, with the regional king taxing his people. The king can be an army general or a judge dispending justice, but mostly, it seems to me, he is a landlord, and his fiefs owe allegiance and must pay what he demands.

In the modern world, the landlord is the king, and businesses that make things or sell services are subjects. Most of the differences involve our being more civilized now, but not all: in the real Dark Ages as well as "Game of Thrones," kings considered themselves special and sometimes would be good, as evidence of this. Landlords regard themselves as business people, and if they do something good it would be difficult for them not to regard themselves as chumps.

Having an army of warriors made a difference in those days, of course, and in a sense that hasn't changed much; today it helps to have an army... of lawyers.