Big Ideas in Music: Musical Language

Here are two pieces on musical language, inspired by a blog post in which music critic Carl Wilson (author of a new book on why he hates Celine Dion when so many people love her and what that tells us about the way musical taste operates) argues that there's a connection between the unofficial Obama campaign ad, "Yes We Can" being played on YouTube and the compositions of Steve Reich.

The first piece looks at the work of Steve Reich and how recording a simple phrase - "It's gonna rain" - led to his invention of musical phasing.





The second piece comes from the fascinating radio show Radiolab.



Listen to the rest of the show here , download the episode, or subscribe to their podcast on itunes.

Big Ideas in Music: David Byrne and Thom Yorke discuss the Music Business

Everyone knows now about Radiohead's recent coup in the music business. They dropped their label and released their newest album, In Rainbows, via their own website for anyone to download. The price you pay is up to you.

Wired explains:

It turns out the gambit was a savvy business move. In the first month, about a million fans downloaded In Rainbows. Roughly 40 percent of them paid for it, according to comScore, at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Plus, since it owns the master recording (a first for the band), Radiohead was also able to license the album for a record label to distribute the old-fashioned way — on CD. In the US, it goes on sale January 1 through TBD Records/ATO Records Group.

While pay-what-you-will worked for Radiohead, though, it's hard to imagine the model paying off for Miley Cyrus — aka chart-topping teenybopper Hannah Montana. Cyrus' label, Walt Disney Records, will stick to selling CDs in Wal-Mart, thank you very much. But the truth is that Radiohead didn't intend In Rainbows to start a revolution. The experiment simply proves there is plenty of room for innovation in the music business — this is just one of many new paths. Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song "Radio Head" from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.

In the interview, Byrne and Thom Yorke discuss how the music industry is changing and what those changes might me for aspiring musicians and fans.

From David Byrne's companion article,"Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars":

What is music?

First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

Continue the thread on David Byrne's remarkable website here and here.

Listen to the New York Philharmonic's Historic Concert in Pyongyang

Via WNYC:

Big Ideas in International Relations: The UN General Assembly.

In this weekend's NY Times Book Review, Francis Fukuyama, the famous theorist of "The End of History" and a one-time "compagnon de route" of the Neo-conservatives, reviews a book by Samantha Power, who among other things is now a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama,. Power's new book is a biography of Sergio Viera de Mello, who was the UN's special envoy to Iraq until he was killed by a suicide bomber in the summer of 2003.

For Fukuyama, his book review is a chance to offer his own judgment of the UN:

On Aug. 19, 2003, a Kamash truck pulled into the alley behind the Canal Hotel in Baghdad and a bomb detonated, crumpling a corner of the United Nations’ mission in Iraq. Inside the building was Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian-born United Nations official who had previously served in Vietnam, Lebanon, Cyprus, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor. More than anyone else at the United Nations, he embodied the organization’s idealism, as well as its limitations. Vieira de Mello was pinned under the rubble and hung on for several hours before dying. The ineffectual efforts of American forces to save him were a harbinger of the larger American failure in Iraq.

Samantha Power, whose earlier book, “‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” won a Pulitzer Prize, has written a comprehensive biography of Vieira de Mello that explains how his personal evolution paralleled that of the United Nations and how his contradictions and failures were rooted in those of the institution he so loyally served. Vieira de Mello was born in 1948. The son of a Brazilian diplomat, he was a prototypical global cosmopolitan who grew up in Europe and, as a student, manned the barricades during the événements of 1968 in Paris while studying Marxist philosophy. The young Vieira de Mello was instinctively anti-American and cringed when he heard an American accent. After earning his degree, he found work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, traveling to southern Sudan, Mozambique and Vietnam, and passionately embracing the United Nations and international law as the embodiments of global justice.

But the organization’s approach was fraught with internal contradictions that were rudely exposed in the genocidal crises of the mid-1990s. Before the end of the cold war, its peacekeeping operations involved interspersing lightly armed international troops to separate combatants who had signed peace deals and providing humanitarian assistance. The United Nations racked up some successes in places like Namibia, El Salvador and Mozambique, where security conditions were not terribly demanding.

After 1991, however, the number of peacekeeping initiatives exploded, painfully revealing the United Nations’ limitations. Its ethic of strict political neutrality between warring parties ended up favoring aggressors like the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. Moreover, the peacekeepers’ restrictive rules of engagement prohibited them from firing their weapons, even in self-defense. This led to disgraceful episodes like the one in Rwanda in 1994 when Belgian peacekeepers abandoned the Tutsis to rampaging Hutu militias.

[Read More]

Samantha Power will be appearing at NYU's Center for Global Affairs on March 10 at 6:30. [More Info]

Big Ideas Upcoming Events: Reserve a Ticket for George Packer's acclaimd new play on Iraq after the fall of Saddam

This month I'll be taking a group of students to see George Packer's critically
acclaimed new play on Iraq at the Culture Project, just a few blocks away from Broome Street.

Date: Wednesday, Feb 27th at 8pm

From the official website:
Betrayed, based on Mr. Packer's interviews in Baghdad,
tells the story of three young Iraqis - two men and one woman -
motivated to risk everything by America's promise of freedom.
Betrayed explores the complex relationships among the Iraqis
themselves, and with their American supervisor, struggling to
find purpose while a country collapses around them.
More Here:

You can read Isherwood's review in the Times here.

RSVP with me at Eric.Ozawa at nyu.edu

Big Ideas in Politics: An Update on Superdelegates in the Democratic Primaries

I wanted to follow up here on something I posted last month about the potential role of superdelegates in the nomination process for the Democratic party. Back then, superdelegates were barely in the news, now they seem to be everywhere. Will superdelegates end up picking the nominee? Are they undemocratic? Are they fair?
From the New York Times:

Former Vice President Al Gore and a number of other senior Democrats plan to remain neutral for now in the presidential race in part to keep open the option to broker a peaceful resolution to what they fear could be a bitterly divided convention, party officials and aides said Friday.

Democratic Party officials said that in the past week Mr. Gore and other leading Democrats had held private talks as worry mounted that the close race between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton could be decided by a group of 795 party insiders known as superdelegates.

The signs that party elders are weighing whether and how to intervene reflects the extraordinary nature of the contest now and the concern among some Democrats that they not risk an internal battle that could harm the party in the general election.

But they also provided an early glimpse at the complex set of tradeoffs facing party leaders, from their desire to make their own influence felt to their worries about offending the candidates and particular constituencies — not to mention the long, sometimes troubled relationship between Mr. Gore and the Clintons.

[Read More]

Big Ideas in Politics: The Bradley Effect and Race in the Election

Does the so-called Bradley Effect still exist? If so, how is it effecting the Presidential election? What does it reveal about race in American society? What does it reveal about the psychology of polling and voting?

Here's some background on the theory from the PBS program Newshour:

These results suggest that the "Bradley effect" -- a term used to describe the fact that pre-election polls often overestimate support for black candidates -- may still play a role in elections, according to a new analysis by University of Washington researchers Anthony Greenwald and Bethany Albertson. But, the researchers say, the Bradley effect is complicated, and there may be evidence for a "reverse Bradley effect" in which pre-election polls underestimate support for black candidates in states with large black populations, such as in Alabama and Georgia.

The Bradley effect is named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who narrowly lost the 1982 race for California governor to his white Republican opponent, George Deukmejian. Polls had suggested he had a comfortable lead, and researchers theorized afterwards that while many white voters told pollsters that they would vote for Bradley, they behaved differently once they entered the voting booth.

[More here]

The article also contains an interview with a social psychologist and a political scientist who are analyzing the polling inaccuracies in the recent primaries for evidence of the Bradley effect or the "Anti-Bradley effect."

Last week, they compared pre-election polls to actual results in the 13 states for which they could find multiple late pre-election polls, analyzing data in 11 Super Tuesday states plus New Hampshire and South Carolina. They found that in states where less than 10 percent of the population is black, including California, Arizona, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, polls over-predicted the Obama vote by as much as 12 percent. But in states where more than 25 percent of the population is black --Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia -- polls under-predicted Obama's lead by 15 percent or more.

Those numbers are intriguing, but they raise many more questions than they answer, the researchers and others say.

Big Ideas in Politics: Your Generation - More on Turnout

From Rock the Vote: [Register to Vote via their website]

According to CNN’s exit polls and the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), in nearly every state holding their primary or caucus last night, youth voter turnout increased significantly- doubling, tripling and even quadrupling turnout from 2000 & 2004!

Here are some highlights:
* In Tennessee young voters quadrupled their turnout, up from 35,000 in 2000 to nearly 140,000 young people between the ages of 18-29 casting a vote in last night’s primary.

*In Georgia young voters tripled their turnout with more than 280,000 individuals casting a ballot last night compared to approximately 92,000 ballots cast in 2000.

* In California, more than 850,000 voters under 30 cast ballots, far surpassing 2000 and 2004 levels.

Youth turnout was the winning margin of victory in several states.

*On the Democratic side, Barack Obama won the state of Missouri by just 10,000 votes, propelled to victory by 75,000 young people casting ballots in his favor. And on the Republican side, 45,000 young people voted for Mike Huckabee, far surpassing his 23,000 vote margin of victory. [Read More]

[Register to Vote via their website]

A bit of history (or a pop-culture diversion disguised as history) prompted by this paragraph from the Time Magazine cover story on your generation's role in this election:

If you want to feel old, just tell a group of teenagers today that you can remember a time when the Clintons were hip. There was this guy on TV, see, called Arsenio Hall, and Bill Clinton went on wearing sunglasses and playing a saxophone, and, well, no, it wasn't on YouTube — this was before most people had heard of the Internet — oh, never mind. There's nothing new, for today's young people, about a Clinton replacing a Bush.

Well, I looked, and it turns out that that clip isn't on YouTube. It is, however, available on Arsenio Hall's personal website (though in a mediated VH1 Behind the Music format).
Here's a flashback from the 1992 Presidential Campaign: Bill Clinton woos young voters by playing the saxophone on The Arsenion Hall Show.


Bill Clinton on the Arsenio Hall Show

Big Ideas in Politics: Your Generation

PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ROBYN TWOMEY

There has been a lot of press recently about the role young voters are playing in this election. The Politico reports:

By recent historical standards, youth turnout is having a banner year. In every primary or caucus so far the youth turnout percentage has been the same or — almost always — greater than it was four or eight years ago.

Older voters are coming out in greater numbers, too, thanks to the competitive races in both parties. But young people are increasing their turnout more, and as a result their share of the electorate has risen in every state. [Read More]

Now that's true of all of the Super Tuesday states EXCEPT for New York. What happened here? What was your experience on Super Tuesday? Did you vote?

Check out Time Magazine's cover story on the influence of young voters on this campaign or watch this video from the Wall Street Journal on the role of young voters might play in the upcoming Texas Primary.