A Master Class by Yo-Yo Ma

  Crowden School—the splendid middle school for young musicians that I've written about—invited me a month ago to observe a master class by Yo-Yo Ma.  He had given a concert in Berkeley the evening before, and was kind enough to contribute his time to Crowden.  The entire student body was in attendance to view his session with two quartets of players and a cello soloist, all youngsters performing compositions by J. S. Bach.  It was a delicious treat for the ears and eyes.

  The first quartet played their piece while Ma listened from the audience.  I felt it was a lovely performance by those thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, who must have been overawed by the musical giant for whom they were playing.  But after it, Ma went onto the stage to engage the players in a conversation about what they were thinking while playing one of the movements.  After some tongue-tied moments by the students, the ever-gentle Ma elicited from one of them that she thought of someone stomping around on the deck of a swaying boat.  Ma liked that, and asked them to replay the movement with that image in mind.  As they did so, he stomped and swayed in a circle around them, in time with the music.  The result was such verve added to their first performance, that the audience erupted in applause at the end.

  Ma then asked the musicians, "Why are you playing?"  When one answered, "For other people," Ma enthused, "Yes!  You are communicating with people, sending your understanding and emotions to them."  He insisted that each of them lock eyes with a member of the audience on their next playing.  When one focused instead on her music sheets, he moved them away.  He then sat next to a fourth-grade student in the audience and pointed to that boy's eyes and his own.  As the players looked into them, a remarkable additional effervescence of spirit grew into the performance.  "You must never forget that you are communicating!" insisted Ma.

  That theme of communication brought me back to my own thirty years of teaching and lecturing.  I always sought to see deeply into the eyes of my listeners, to look for a spark of understanding and a mind-to-mind connection.  If I saw that spark, instead of a cataract of opacity, I knew I was making contact, and my own performance became more exuberant.  Meaning and understanding aren't simply spewed into a vacuum; they are directed toward others with gusto and enhanced by a sense of the audience's response.

  Next up was the cello soloist, not currently in the school, but a 17-year-old studying at the associated Crowden Music Center.  His piece included two movements of a Bach cello suite.  Here, Ma again concentrated on the feeling of the music as a complement to its meter, and again he drew out from the cellist more fire than in his already-impressive and technically correct first performance.

  Finally, Ma engaged in a dialog with the second quartet, again younger students (including a ten-year old), about the occasion at which their piece might be played.  After they decided that it might be for a wedding, he asked the players to immerse themselves in their imagined atmosphere of that setting, to become participants in the festivities, to add their feelings to those of the wedding party.  As in the first two recitals, this quartet's second performance gained a fuller body, which had been lacking in the first playing.

  Ma's motifs of communication and feeling jibe exactly with what I read about him in Jonah Lehrer's book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, which I discussed in a previous posting.  Lehrer reports on his interviewing Ma about the source of the expressiveness in his performances.  "Perfection is not very communicative," said Ma.  "If you are worried about not making a mistake, then you will communicate nothing.  You will have missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something. … It's when I'm least conscious of what I'm doing, when I'm lost in the emotion of the music, that I'm performing at my best." 

  (Detour into neuroscience:  Lehrer goes on to discuss the neural processes that underlie Ma's creativity, and that of jazz musicians when they jam.  fMRI studies show that such performers have learned how to suppress the activity of their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the organ that restrains impulsiveness, in favor of their medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-expression.  How they do this is not known.  Ma retreats alone to a quiet room for a half hour before each performance, from which he emerges relaxed, not clenched up with an overbearing sense of focus that might straiten his playing—in other words, ready to give free rein to his feelings.)

  Back to Ma's master class.  What was so inspiring to me is how the 57-year-old Ma—an Olympian figure to these youngsters who are more than 40 years his junior—could so quickly and easily draw them to himself, have them lose what must have been their fright at being in his presence.  His vibrancy, his tenderness, his ebullient humor, his ease at establishing rapport had the players and the audience gripped for ninety minutes, as if in a séance.  The word "master" is bandied about much too easily, but in this case it was truly appropriate.

Mind and Matter

  An unfavorable but thought-provoking review earlier this month in The New York Review of Books introduced me to both the renowned NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel and his recent book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Even if the review had been favorable, the subtitle of the book alone would normally have caused me to shrug and move on to other things.  Those who follow this blog know I'm not patient with philosophical prattlings about the nature of the universe.  (See my posting Whence the Universe.)  Nagel's book seemed to be of that ilk.

  But I was arrested by a summary of Nagel's perspective given by the reviewer:

There are teleological laws of nature that we don't yet know about and they bias the unfolding of the universe in certain desirable directions, including the formation of complex organisms and consciousness. 

That reminded me of my son David's panpsychism, which I mentioned last month in Philosophy, Schmilosophy!  He believes that all of creation is permeated with consciousness and develops with an ethereal, beneficent purpose.  I embrace the polar-opposite outlook, that the cosmos evolves purely randomly, without any transcendental goal.  I decided to read Nagel's book to see if it might shed further light on this dichotomy.

***

  First off, and a little disconcertingly, Nagel acknowledges his debt to creationists for having kept alive the possibility of an alternative to materialistic Darwinism.  He in fact joins them in three contentions: (1) the probability of an accidental formation of self-reproducing living matter from inanimate matter is infinitesimal; (2) even if living matter  did form randomly, against all odds, there hasn't been enough geologic time for life with the biological and physical complexity of humans to have evolved through random mutations alone; (3) consciousness is so incomprehensible under a materialistic approach that a move beyond Darwinism is necessary.  Unlike creationists, however, Nagel doesn't come to a theistic conclusion—an Intelligent Designer—from these assertions.  As an atheist, he instead looks for a naturalistic addition to evolutionary theory.

  Nagel devotes most of his book to the problem of consciousness.  Materialists already have extensive neuroscientific evidence supporting their hope that consciousness will eventually be explained as activity of the brain cells—mind reduced to matter—but even they admit to currently being at a loss for a complete schema.  Nagel contends, as in his subtitle, that such a materialist monism is almost certainly a false trail.  He also dismisses both the dualism of Descartes, which almost entirely separates mind and matter; and the reductionism of such idealist philosophers as Bishop Berkeley, who advance a different sort of monism, that matter is reducible to mind, having no reality other than as a mental construction.  Nagel instead adheres to a philosophical concept called neutral monism—that the elementary stuff of which the universe is made is not purely physical or purely mental, but indivisibly both, neither reducing to the other.

  Nagel's case for neutral monism is intuitive, expressed in assertions like the following, which I have spliced together from several pages of one of his chapters: 

Organisms such as ourselves do not just happen to be conscious; therefore no explanation of the physical character of those organisms can be adequate which is not also an explanation of their mental character. … A naturalistic expansion of evolutionary theory to account for consciousness … would have to offer some account of why the appearance of conscious organisms, and not merely of behaviorally complex organisms, was likely. … It is not enough to say, "Something had to happen, so why not this?"  [Boldface is mine.]

I have boldfaced the word "likely" in this passage to emphasize Nagel's predicate of teleology: he calls for a naturalistic explanation in which evolution is systematically driven toward the development of conscious life rather than just life itself. 

  What could such a bias consist of?  Nagel discards panpsychism—that consciousness permeates the universe, making the evolution of conscious creatures likely.  He opts instead for emergent consciousness—that there are as yet undiscovered natural laws which, together with the laws of biology, chemistry and physics we already know, lead to consciousness in sufficiently complex organisms.

  Nagel offers no clue about what these additional laws might be, only asserting that they must exist in order to explain consciousness and such ancillary concepts as cognition and value-based behavior.  But how can one's skepticism not be stoked by the absence of any elaboration?  And, if his brand of neutral monism is truly neutral, driving evolution toward consciousness in tandem with physical complexity, why wouldn't some complex plants on Earth have developed signs of consciousness as well as many complex animals? Indeed, why does Nagel's teleology strike one as implausibly anthropocentric?

  Despite my skepticism, I am not so negative about Nagel's speculations as I was about the metaphysical pap I decried in Whence the Universe, where I discussed the book Why does the World Exist?  Much in that book consists of wild imaginings which seemed to me to have no gloss of rational thought.  Nagel, on the other hand, rationally postulates a missing element—unknown non-materialistic laws—to fill out our understanding of consciousness, and tries to thrash out the consequences of such a postulate.

  Yet this postulate smacks of others that have been introduced into science in attempts to accommodate the mysterious—for example, phlogiston to explain the release of heat from burning material and the luminiferous æther to explain how light could travel through a vacuum.  Scientists eventually discovered how to remove those intuitive but false suppositions.  Given Nagel's inability, other than through reference to his intuition, to adduce any evidence to support his neutral monism, materialist monists like myself will continue to expect and await an explanation of consciousness based solely on biology, chemistry and physics.

***

  Nagel's book neither changed my conception of the universe nor further illuminated David's for me.  More to the point, I think Nagel presumes on a bygone relationship of philosophy to science.  Many centuries ago, when science was still called "natural philosophy," the ruminations of philosophers about the nature of the universe still had an influence on science's development, if only—as do Nagel's—by raising more questions than they answered.  Since then, that influence has continually diminished, to the point where it is now pretty much nil.  Nagel's effort to turn back the clock is quixotic.

Stage Mom

[Editorial note by George Turin: My younger granddaughter goes to the lovely Hamlin elementary school in San Francisco.  Its Head, Wanda M. Holland Greene, writes a blog addressing issues in education and parenting.  A posting there last month struck me as a particularly wise reflection on a dilemma faced by many parents: how to help those of their children who are very different from themselves find their own worlds and flourish in them, and to do this non-judgmentally.  I asked Ms. Holland Greene for permission to publish that posting here, which she graciously gave.  It follows, verbatim.]

***

 My son Jonathan turned five on Saturday, January 12th.  I still can’t believe that the baby boy that was five months old when I started working at Hamlin is now five years old.  Watching our children grow up is a great blessing, and raising them to be happy and confident children is a great responsibility.  I love the wisdom and practical advice found in parenting books, and I am currently reading author Andrew Solomon’s extraordinary new book called Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.  As I was reading, I was struck by the following line: “Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.”  Let me take you back to Saturday, January 12th for a moment.



  A couple hours before Jonathan’s birthday lunch, he attended the birthday party of a dear friend.  A children’s theater company in Fort Mason hosted the party, and the parents were asked to drop the children off and return in 90 minutes for pick-up.  In 90 minutes’ time, a production would be rehearsed, staged, and ready to perform for a small audience.  My husband Robert and I were eager and ready with our video camera to capture the special moment of seeing our son Jonathan on stage.  At home, Jonathan is a dancer, an athlete, and a comedian; surely, he would find joy and comfort on the stage.  I arrived at the party at the designated time, only to discover that Jonathan had refused to participate in the show.  He was nervous and shy and did not want to act.  He did, however, agree to be the “stage manager,” and he proudly worked the lights during the brief and charming production of “The Lion King.” 



  This experience is not new to me as a mom; my older son David has also refused to participate in any show of any kind—in preschool, David was in charge of music and sound effects for the class play.  He was the only child in the class who was not “in” the class play, and his teachers supported his decision.  Thus, when David learned that his little brother Jonathan was the stage manager for the play, he looked at me with glee and exclaimed, “Mom, aren’t you proud to be the mother of two stage managers?”



  For my two sons, “audience participation” is an oxymoron. They prefer being in the audience.  They do not wish to participate in the show.  I am stunned (and sometimes a bit saddened, as Andrew Solomon observes) by how different my children are from me and my husband, and I am learning to accept my children’s differences without the slightest show of frustration or disappointment.  I want to see them on stage as animated performers and passionate public speakers, but that is my dream, not their reality.



  Andrew Solomon talks about two kinds of identity: vertical and horizontal.  Vertical identity encompasses all of the attributes, values, and traits that are transmitted from one generation to the next.  Race and culture, language, and sometimes religion are examples of vertical identity.  Parents are overjoyed when they see traits and behaviors both in themselves and in their children.  We are comforted by the familiar, and we are certain that we are part of the same lineage when we consider our vertical identity. Horizontal identity—traits, values, and preferences in children that are not similar to their parents’— “catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Solomon asserts.   Horizontal identity is affirmed not by parents, but through close association with a peer group.  Thus, our children are familiar to us in many ways (vertical) and can be foreign to us in others (horizontal).



  Far From The Tree is beautifully written and explores far more significant aspects of horizontal identity than my “stage mom” anecdote: Solomon interviews hundreds of parents whose children are deaf, dwarfs, transgender, autistic, prodigies, or born under traumatic circumstances.  In a very real way, these parents live in a different world from their children, and their children must find “their tribe” in order to affirm who they are and to support their healthy transition into adulthood.  When the proverbial apple falls far from the tree, parenting may be harder yet often more rewarding.



  Are you an accomplished athlete parenting a daughter who is physically uncoordinated?  Are you a former spelling bee champion parenting a child with dyslexia?  Are you a choral singer whose child can’t carry a tune?  Are you a straight parent with a gay child?  Are you a superbly organized and focused adult who is parenting a child with ADHD?  Are you a passionate and confident public speaker whose two children want to be the stage manager?  Ultimately, it is our job and our joy as parents to accept our children for who they are, viewing their differences as distinct features and not character flaws.  We must strike the necessary and delicate balance between allowing them to be exactly who they are and encouraging them to be more than they could ever imagine.

Wanda M. Holland Greene

Head, Hamlin School

Following Rules

  I've several times written here about how complementary my late wife Helen's and my temperaments were.  She was ebullient, extroverted and social; I am reserved, introverted and, if not exactly anti-social, at least not a mixer.  We were also extremely different in our approach to the rules of officialdom.

  I grew up in New York City, where there were official rules galore, emanating from an elaborate bureaucracy.  I learned as I grew up that observance of them came under the rubric "Don't fight City Hall"—one just lived with them.  My mother for much of my youth managed the then-famous Luxor Hotel and Baths in midtown Manhattan, which had plenty of rules to follow.  I remember her annoyance at the sometimes-incomprehensible and pettifogging application of them by city inspectors.  Her bile would rise further when those same inspectors appeared at the holiday season to collect their "gifts,"  disregard of which would result in the discovery during the next year of yet more-minute "infractions," many  of questionable authenticity.  She would choke on her anger, but then she would shrug and accept the "rules" as they were.

  Helen grew up in a town of a few hundred people in Utah.  There the rubric was a pioneering "Don't tread on me!"  Her father, not a good driver, would frequently get traffic tickets.  He would appear in court and chastise the judge: "I've known you since you were a boy.  Don't be so high and mighty now that you're a judge!"  (The judge once in response threw him in jail for contempt of court.  The family story goes that one son, trying to visit him in jail, found him instead polishing brass handrails in the courthouse.  Going over to chat, all he got was a growled, sotto voce, "Hush!  I'm getting time off for good behavior!")

  Two examples in Helen's and my life together show how these different backgrounds brought us into conflict. 

  When we married, we honeymooned in the Caribbean, hopping for two weeks among a number of gorgeous islands.  In those days, passports were not necessary in returning from some neighboring tourist locations, but a proof of U.S. residency was required.  Helen had no passport, but she had been to Mexico, and her driver's license had always done the trick.  I didn't think that would work this time, so I pestered her to get a copy of her birth certificate, and she eventually (and exasperatedly) asked her mother to go to Salt Lake City to get one for her.

  When we returned to the U.S. through Puerto Rico, we found ourselves in a long, slow-moving line.  Immigration officials were carefully examining documentation and shunting some people aside.  I nudged Helen to show how right I had been to insist that she have her birth certificate with her.  But when we reached the head of the line, the agent's face lit up with a bright smile as he said, "Helen Green!  What are you doing in Puerto Rico?"  They had gone to high school together in Utah!  What are the odds against that?

  The second example also concerns foreign travel.  About two years after we were married, we headed to France for a year-long sabbatical.  I, still the rule follower, called the French consulate in San Francisco to find out whether we would need visas for that length of stay.  The answer was yes, so I got one.  Helen, now having a passport, refused to follow suit, saying that it would involve her with the French bureaucracy, of which she wanted no part.  She was right again.

  When we got to French immigration control at the Paris airport, Helen breezed through a different line than I, declaring that she was on a tourist visit.  I, with a visa in my passport, was interrogated at length about the purpose of my stay, whether I would be earning money in France, and so on.  When asked whether I had a radio with me, I dutifully produced an early $5 Sony transistor device from my luggage, for which I was later billed a 50-franc ($10) radio tax.  I was told to report to a police station within a week to get a carte d'identité (three hours of shuffling through lines, plus a visit to another police station when we moved from our initial hotel to an apartment we rented).  When I went to pick up the Peugeot I had ordered, one look at the visa in my passport led the salesman to delay delivery of the car until I had my carte d'identité, and prompted him to get different, more expensive license plates than had already been mounted on the car.

  The landlady of the apartment we rented was on the same page as Helen, although in a much more aggressive book.  When I asked her what I should do about the radio-tax bill, she looked at me in amazement and said, "Ignore it!  Don't ruin it for the rest of us."  When I got my first parking ticket and asked how to pay it, her answer was the same.  She showed me three cubby holes in her desk.  One was filled with a thick sheaf of blue parking tickets, the first notice; a second was filled with a thinner sheaf of orange notices, warning that she would be subject to arrest if the original fine, now increased, wasn't paid; a very small sheaf of red notices said she was now subject to arrest.

  "But," I asked, "how can you possibly ignore the red notices too?"  Her face showed that she was astonished by my naīveté.  "Look," she said, "the bureaucrats have done their job by sending out three notices, and they don't always do even that much.  Now there is nothing left for them to do, so that's the end of it."

  Helen looked on bemusedly at the annoyances my visa caused me, especially since she lived in France for the year without any repercussion for lacking one.  Even though I admit that her attitude turned out to be better, or at least less aggravating, to this day I haven't rid myself of the habit of rule-following that was ingrained in my youth.

  Damn it!  I'm due for a makeover.  I think I'll become a libertarian.