Notes on this and that

In Look, I Made a Hat, the second volume of his collected lyrics and attendant observations on theater, Stephen Sondheim writes:

What bothers me [about amplification] is the softening effect it has on the audience’s concentration. [S]itting in those ceiling-scraping seats, hearing an orchestra hundreds of feet away, and squinting at Mary Martin’s face, which was the size of a dime, we had to concentrate. Mary Martin had a small, coy voice, and in order to hear her, we had to lean vertiginously forward. None of the luxury of sitting back and letting the show come to us – we had to lean into it. The concentration required was so great that we had to shut out the real world, and in so doing we became participants in the experience, all of which made it easy to suspend disbelief and enter another world; and the more of that in the theater, the better. With the advent of amplification, ears became lazy and audiences now tend to visit rather than enter.

Sondheim nails it here. I long ago stopped enjoying the act of seeing musicals in the theater (though I still have a great love of the works themselves), and amplification was a big reason why. Even when the amplification is done well, it puts you at a remove from the performance, not much better than sitting back in your sofa and watching it on television.

I’ve experienced this in my performances with the Martha Graham Dance Company as well. When we perform with live music, we are often in halls which are larger than the ones the works were conceived for. Appalachian Spring, for example, was written for 13 instruments and was premiered in a hall which seats 500; we are now frequently asked to perform it with the same size orchestra in a hall 3–4 times as large. So we occasionally do a little judicious sound reinforcement, to make sure that the sound reaches the entire audience. I admit that I’ve come to accept this as a necessary evil when the size of the house requires it, and so long as the primary impression remains an acoustic one.

But I have sometimes been asked by dance personnel to goose the amplification higher than that (or sometimes just to have the orchestra play certain sections louder). That part is too soft, they say; it’s hard for the audience to hear. My response is that it’s soft because Copland (or Barber, or whoever) wrote it soft; it’s a feature, not a bug. These composers knew what they were doing and what effect their music would have, and Graham knew what the music sounded like when she choreographed to it. They wanted to draw the audience into the world of the piece, not just lean them back comfortably in their seats.

I lecture quite a bit on musical topics, often having to do with opera or dance. Putting together one of these lectures, or a set of them, often used to involve traveling with a bag full of LPs/CDs/DVDs/VHS tapes. Over the past few years, I’ve moved to digitizing everything, extracting just the excerpts I need. So now instead of a bag of stuff, I have a folder of MP3s and MP4s which I copy onto my laptop, and I’m good to go. It takes some upfront time the first time I prepare a lecture, but it’s well worth it.

On my old laptop, the video card had a feature which would automatically play videos fullscreen on an external monitor or projector even while they were windowed on my monitor. This meant I could still keep an eye on how much time was left or look for the next excerpt in Explorer while one was playing on the projector. But my new laptop doesn’t do that.

Windows 7 presentation mode is the first part of the solution; Win+X to brings up the mobility center, where I can quickly turn off my wallpaper and screen saver, and then Win+P lets me configure the projector as an extension of my desktop, rather than just mirroring it. The second part is setting up the excellent VLC to play all videos fullscreen on the projector while keeping the controls on my monitor. This isn’t my regular config, so I didn’t want to save the settings – I wanted something I could fire up easily when I was presenting. A little Googling and trial and error gave me the answer. I set up a shortcut called ‘VLC Presenter Mode’ with the following command line:

vlc.exe --fullscreen --no-embedded-video --vout=directx --directx-device=\\.\DISPLAY2

This tells VLC to separate the controls from the video and to open all videos fullscreen using DirectX on the second monitor (the projector). The controls stay right on my desktop where I want them. The DirectX option is needed to allow me to specify the output device; it also means that Windows will turn off Aero Glass (the pretty desktop effects) when I play a video, but that doesn’t really matter in this context.

Although VLC lets me control its output volume with Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down, I also want to give a shoutout to freeware volume control 3RVX. This lets me assign my own hotkeys for adjusting system volume and also gives an onscreen slider that doesn’t emit the Windows default beep when I change the volume, which can be annoying when you’re hooked up to an amplifier. (My laptop does have its own volume hotkeys, but due to some poor design choices by Dell, they’re hard to find when the lights are lowered.)

An often-repeated story: In 1993, still a couple of years away from getting to the major leagues, future Yankee captain Derek Jeter was in spring training with then-captain Don Mattingly.

The shortstop and the veteran first baseman were finishing up a workout on a back field, all alone, the seats empty, not a player or team official in sight. A spent Jeter had started walking off the field – no urgency or bounce to his step – when a jogging Mattingly came up behind him and in passing said, “Let’s run it in. You never know who’s watching.”

This is a screenshot from the iTunes page of a handy iPhone app called Quotebook which allows you to collect your favorite quotes from different sources. I especially like the way it includes two autocorrect-induced typos.

A wistful adieu to Andy Pettitte, one of my favorite Yankees. He always showed up and did his thing, and were it not for those three seasons in exile in Houston, he would very likely be the winningest Yankee pitcher ever.

Let’s say I’d like to accomplish the following task with some code: I’ve got a list of names of fruits, and I want to know how many contain the letter ‘a’. Back in the day, this might have been done in assembly language, very low-level instructions which directly tell a CPU the details of which bytes to move into which memory locations and how to examine them in order to find out the answer.

A more recent way of doing this in a typical high-level structured programming language (like C#) would look like this:

int CountOfA = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < FruitNames.Count; i++)
{
   if (FruitNames[i].Contains("a"))
      CountOfA++;
}

Now we’re laying out for the computer a repeated sequence of logical steps to follow. What this says is, “Start with a variable to count the number of  ‘a’ fruits we find, and set it to zero. Then loop through the list of names, looking at each name in order, and if the name has an ‘a’, increment our counter.” This is very straightforward, the kind of code that developers write all the time. But to a non-programmer looking at this, it’s not necessarily clear what steps the code is carrying out or what the goal is.

Here’s a slightly more legible version, using a different syntax that many languages support:

int CountOfA = 0;
foreach (string fruit in FruitNames)
{
   if (fruit.Contains("a"))
      CountOfA++;
}

We’ve dropped that pesky index variable (the i), and the use of foreach makes it a little more clear what we’re doing. But it’s still 4 lines of code (6 if you count the braces) to ask the simple question, “How many of these fruit names have an ‘a’ in them?” Can’t we do better? Well, nowadays we can:

int CountOfA = FruitNames.Count(f => f.Contains("a"));

If you’re used to the older style of telling a computer to loop through a list, this syntax takes a little getting used to. It basically says, “Take the list FruitNames and count all the fruits f such that f contains ‘a’.” Which is only slightly more complex than posing our task in plain English.

But in addition to getting more concise, there’s something very interesting going on here in the way that we’re giving our instructions to the computer. We’ve moved from a syntax which tells the computer what steps to perform while somewhat obscuring the goal, to a syntax which just tells the computer what we want to know and omits the details of how to find that out. In doing this, we’re also in a sense being more trusting that the computer knows how to do what we want, so that we can just say “count these things” without explaining that this means examining each item and looking for an “a” (or, to go back to the assembly level, explaining how to move bytes around to accomplish this).

I’ve been thinking about this since my post about Leonard Bernstein conducting with his face. The essence of what a conductor does is to communicate his musical ideas to the orchestra as efficiently as possible; by “efficiently”, I mean simply, directly, and with a minimum of extraneous information. In the context of this particular performance, it turns out that the beat itself is largely superfluous, and Bernstein can tell the orchestra all they need to know through his expressive and well-timed facial expressions.

This relates to the above programming discussion in a couple of ways. First, like the FruitNames.Count example, the most effective way to let the orchestra know what he wants is for the conductor to indicate to them what the music should sound like, not how they should produce that sound. In rehearsal, for example, it’s often better for the conductor to sing a little of what he wants rather than trying to explain it in words, because that’s a more direct representation of the desired effect. Here, Bernstein’s face, free from any other distracting gestures, mimes the  character of the music.

Second, by limiting his instructions to conveying what the music should sound like, a conductor trusts his players – who almost certainly know more about technique on their various instruments than he does – to handle all the implementation details of how to make it sound that way. This kind of trust is important here because orchestral music-making, unlike computer programming, is a collaborative endeavor; the conductor who insists on dictating every last jot and tittle of a performance will often find that what he gets out of the orchestra is just exactly what he puts in, while the conductor who gives the musicians their share of responsibility gets the benefit of the sum total of all the artistry and years of experience sitting in front of him.

A friend of mine linked to an NPR story called “What Happened to Leonard Bernstein’s Hands?”, which includes this wonderful video (skip ahead to 3:43 if you’re reading this on a Flash-less device):

As my teacher, the late Frederik Prausnitz, used to say, “You just have to figure out where you need to beat. It is a myth that orchestras need every beat of every bar. Some bars they don’t need it altogether.”

Giving a clear beat is in some sense both the most fundamental and the least important thing that a conductor can do. This Bernstein video is kind of an edge case, but it’s very illustrative nonetheless. Bernstein was a great conductor, and the Vienna Philharmonic is a great orchestra, and they worked together often and had a close relationship. Haydn’s music is not technically challenging for this orchestra; they could probably play it quite well with their eyes closed. And in this particular case, what the video shows is an encore of a movement they had just finished performing, with Bernstein conducting normally.

So does all this mean that Bernstein is doing nothing and just letting the orchestra have at it? Not at all. A conductor’s face can be as important as his hands in communicating with an orchestra (if not more so), and Bernstein had a very expressive face. What he is showing, very clearly, is the desired character of the music, along with an indication of how different parts of the orchestra take the lead at different times.

Most importantly, his face telegraphs changes in the music right before they take place, just like a good preparatory beat with the baton.

The tree is silent.
It has many leaves today;
Soon there will be none.

Don Mattingly was one of my favorite players when I was younger. How can you have been a Yankees fan in the 1980s and not liked Donnie Baseball? I saw his last regular-season game at Yankee Stadium in 1995, and a couple of weeks later I was there for his very last home game, the epic 15-inning Game 2 of the ALDS against Seattle, won by Jim Leyritz’s walkoff home run.

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Mattingly batted .417 in that series, his only taste of October baseball in 13+ major league seasons.

When Joe Torre left as manager of the Yankees after the 2007 season, I was a little disappointed that Mattingly didn’t get the job, even though I wasn’t sure that Mattingly was necessarily the most qualified candidate. And I was disappointed again when he decided to follow Torre out to Los Angeles, as though he was somewhat diminished in my eyes by giving up his Yankee For Life^TM status.

Still, some of this seems rather petty:

And so, after nearly three seasons of managing the Dodgers, Torre decided, at age 70, that this would be his last with the team. He will be replaced by Don Mattingly, who has been the Dodgers’ batting coach since midway through the 2008 season …

In his stints filling in for Torre, Mattingly has done little to inspire confidence.

In spring training, while Torre was in Taiwan, the Dodgers were penalized for handing a lineup card to umpires that did not match the one in their clubhouse. In a July game, after Torre had been ejected, Mattingly went to the mound to talk to Broxton with one out, the bases loaded and the Dodgers clinging to a 5-4 lead in the ninth inning. As he turned to leave, Loney called out to Mattingly, who headed back to the mound. That constituted a second visit, and Broxton had to be replaced. George Sherrill, the subsequent reliever, gave up the winning hit.

As batting coach, Mattingly has presided over a group that is 12th in the N.L. in hits after leading the league last season.

My brother writes:

Google has this new tool, Google Scribe – “Get autocomplete suggestions as you type.” But apparently they haven’t worked out the kinks, or added punctuation that would end a sentence.

I started typing “Now is the time for all good men”, and then I just kept taking every suggestion Google dished out. Here’s what I’ve got (so far):

Now is the time for all good men to stand upon their feet and their wallets to help Britain in the early stages of their careers and their lives are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I'ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I'ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective ...

I guess since it’s in a loop I can quit.

Looks like others have been having fun as well. I’d love to know whether there’s some seed phrase which allows Google Scribe, like the proverbial infinite monkeys or Borges’ Pierre Menard, to produce some extant well-known text.