Oxford University Press's Blog, page 131

Is it rational to condemn an artwork for an artist’s personal immorality?

There is a long history of concern over art created by people who have done horrible things. (Hitler’s paintings are one classic source of controversy.) The #MeToo movement has shown just how widespread such cases are. It is one thing to condemn Chuck Close, James Levine, or R. Kelly for their alleged wrongdoing, but another to regard their artworks as though they were somehow polluted by association with their creators.

“Magical contagion” is the inclination that people have to act as though the essence of a person can be transmitted to another via some object associated with that person. This inclination is widespread and persistent. In one experiment, subjects were asked to imagine that a sweater had belonged to someone evil, like Hitler, and asked to try it on. Most subjects were reluctant try it on, simply from having imagined an association with Hitler. People don’t want to associate with material things that are associated with evil.

Art, more than ordinary objects, is often associated with the moral character of their creators. For example, Confucius claimed that the music of the great sage-king Shun was superior to the music of lesser kings (Analects 3.25). Art made by virtuous artists is beneficial; art made by vicious and cruel people is dangerous.

While this inclination is widespread, it is not clear that it is rational. There is no plausible physical explanation of how a person’s moral essence could be transferred: first to an artwork, and thereby to an audience.

However, there is another way to make sense of this inclination besides belief in magical contagion. Consider what Ted Cohen called “affective communities.” These are communities of people who care about a work of art, and so come to see one another as members of a community. Caring about an artwork brings the audience into a relationship with others who love the same work, and sometimes with the artist her- or himself.

Some of these communities are well-known and clearly established: Bloomsday, the Harry Potter “Wizarding World,” Trekkies, and so on. But a community need not be so large and well-known: Cohen’s own example is the small but intense group of admirers of Elaine May’s infamous flop Ishtar (1987).

Three features of such communities seem to make the moral character of the artist particularly salient to enjoyment of the artwork.

First, some artists play an active and visible role in those communities. Some artists, particularly performing artists, interact publicly with fans. Bill Cosby, while awaiting trial for sexual assault, engaged his audience at stand-up concerts that doubled as attacks on his accusers. Affective communities around such artists are more likely to be attentive to the details of the artist’s life.

Second, some artists’ works themselves highlight moral ideas in important ways. Many of Woody Allen’s films foreground the problem of how to live morally, and the difference between justice and injustice. Affective communities centered on such works naturally attract attention to moral qualities.

Third, some affective communities are highly salient and the members of the community are visible to one another. Some communities thrive on social media; others have frequent in person events, like Star Trek conventions. Contemporary artists and artworks are more likely to have active, highly public communities than artists and works of the distant past.

The degree to which a community has or lacks each of these features collectively determines whether it makes sense for individual audience members to care about, and possibly distance themselves from, certain artworks. The presence of the artist in the community makes the person of the artist important; the importance of moral ideas in the artist’s work focuses attention on moral questions; and the public nature of the affective community makes the members important to one another.

Consider an affective community centered around an artist who is credibly accused of being a sexual predator. Such a community (if it is large enough) will likely contain some members who have themselves been sexually assaulted and who find it painful to continue to associate with the artist or their work. One way that other members of the affective community can show concern and compassion for them is by refusing to participate in such a community.

So it can be perfectly rational to choose to disassociate from affective communities that form around artworks made by bad people. And such a choice need not reflect a commitment to a belief in magical contagion.

This explanation does not work for a private fan—a person who admires an artwork but who does not see themselves as a member of any kind of affective community. This private fan would not have any reason to distance himself or herself from the work of a vicious artist. And this seems right. A private fan, however, does still have reason not to enrich a bad artist by buying their recordings, attending their concerts, or the like—particularly if they might use these funds to continue their wrongdoings, or evade justice for those wrongdoings. But private enjoyment of works by bad artists is not inherently wrong.

Feature image by Christian Fregnan on Unsplash

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How well do you know the world of theatre? [Quiz]

Gyles Brandreth has been collecting theatre stories since he was a boy—and he has collected more than a thousand of them for The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes, an anthology of entertaining and illuminating stories about every aspect of the world of theatre, from the age of Shakespeare to the present day. How well do you know your theatre? Try’s Gyles’s quick quiz and find out. Curtain up!

Feature image via Unsplash

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Six leadership practices that create an agile organisation

Leadership practices play a key role in shaping the form and outcomes of strategy processes in an organisation. As individuals and collectives to whom others pay attention, broader stakeholder attitudes and activities will be influenced by how leaders are perceived to think, talk, and act about strategy. This leadership influence on how strategy happens can arise from the “tone from the top” set by those in formally held positions, or through others trusting in the wisdom of a highly respected colleague without official standing.

If a leader or leadership team aspires to build adaptive or agile capabilities in an organisation, it then follows that their strategy practices must reflect similar characteristics. By acting in a dynamic way, and with authenticity and openness, organisational leaders can encourage others to follow suit. Leading by example, an environment can be nurtured in which flexible, adaptable strategy processes and practices can flourish more broadly. How this might be achieved effectively will depend on context—there is no specific formula or prescription that will guarantee the development of a flexible strategy process. Instead leaders might want to consider the following points as they reflect on how to best act in their own circumstances if they aspire to build organisational capacity for adaption and agility.

1) Exemplify humble leadership as a key enabler of a flexible process approach to strategy

The humble leader values the opinions of others, making time for candid dialogue and active listening, even if the messages received are challenging. Under the auspices of a planned approach to strategy, leaders often feel pressure to stay wedded to a vision and set of objectives they articulated under very different circumstances. Humble leaders accept that the changing context will often require them to change their thinking, potentially at short notice and to a great extent. The humble leader will talk honestly and often—admitting what they know and don’t know, and how their aims and uncertainties are impacted by changing circumstances and new information. As the leader sets the tone for the rest of the organisation, adopting a humble approach can open up a level of honest dialogue from others that inspires trust, candour, and high-quality information flows that greatly increase the possibilities of effective strategizing. This is especially important in times of uncertainty.

2) Increase the frequency of decision-making conversations

Commit to making decisions whenever required, rather than on a fixed schedule set by committees, budgets, or tradition. This typically will mean far more frequent decision-making conversations, possibly of a smaller scope. Imagine a navigator’s hand on the rudder of a ship dynamically choosing to adjust left, right, or remain constant rather than maintaining initial settings regardless of conditions encountered. Similarly, continually taking regular small-scale decisions avoids the pitfalls of trying to divine the future in conditions of high uncertainty.

3) Embed learning as a crucial feature of strategy process

Increasing the frequency of decision making also increases the extent to which each decision can be treated as an experiment. If expected results of decisions do not materialise, then the experiential learning gained can be built into the next round of decision making. This learning-by-doing mentality underpins a capacity to navigate or way-find out of unprecedented crisis conditions. If the world has changed around us, then fuel to the process of adaption can be experiential learning insights.

Further, digital disruption from sources such as social media, open data initiatives, and Internet of Things connected devices, now make “big data” a reality for most organisations. Investing in skills, or contracting in capabilities, in analytics can uncover valuable, contemporaneous business intelligence as a learning input to strategy activities. New digital ways of working (such as virtual meetings, social media messaging, and collaborative platforms) also create more opportunities to connect and involve others daily in strategy work. It is important that engagement tools are used to harvest insights and learning, rather than just broadcast leadership perspectives. Deployed carefully, learning through mass engagement by digital means can greatly enable strategic responses to the current Covid crisis.

4) Seek options to help preserve future capacity to act alongside dealing with current issues

In times of stability, holding options open might be considered inefficient and a wasteful use of scarce resources. However, when the future is highly uncertain, there is a process logic to making small investments in options until it becomes clear that they will not be needed.

Consider the apocryphal tale of Microsoft visiting a trade show in the early days of personal computing before Windows became the de facto industry standard. Microsoft brought multiple variants of possible operating systems to the show in stark comparison to their competitors who had invested strongly behind single technologies. Microsoft’s logic was that, with high environmental uncertainty, the only way to be sure of maintaining the winning option was to invest in all possible technological development routes until the context clarified. As events unfolded and contextual knowledge was gained, irrelevant options were defunded and focus was returned to the most fruitful initiatives.

Strategy as a flexible process will attend to the needs of now whilst working to preserve the potential to respond to possible needs of the future. Managing options is possible when a broad range of stakeholder inputs are received that help the strategist gauge the lie of the land and maintain capabilities that enable a range of conditions to be addressed. The use of foresight tools, such as scenario thinking, are valuable as methods to hold strategic conversations that identify options to meet multiple, plausible future organisational needs.

5) Encourage creativity and diverse thinking

To gain most from a processual approach to strategy, invite novel thinking from a wide range of stakeholders. For example, a useful starting conversation could be to ask stakeholders how usage of the asset base might be adjusted to better address the possibilities and constraints of the current situation. This could trigger creative dialogue about the “affordances” of resources—the many possible productive uses of the asset base aside from their formal designated functions.

A Covid-related example is how many businesses in the alcoholic drinks industry have adapted their equipment to produce hand sanitizer. This creative redeployment of resources created new revenue from otherwise idle assets as well as delivering a social good.

6) Know the bottlenecks and constraints to your strategic adaptiveness

When attempting to shift strategy towards a process-focused approach, it is useful to understand what factors currently set the pace for adaption of strategy. Under current operating conditions, how are decisions being made? Where is strategy being delivered, and where are outcomes failing to materialise? In what ways is strategy failing to keep pace with contextual change? Leaders need to be open to the possibility that it is themselves that are the critical constraint in the organisational speed of adaption of strategy to environmental change. With a sense of what is constraining strategic adaptiveness, leaders can take steps to resolve bottlenecks and allow the strategy process to better flow.

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It is likely that organisational leaders will feel pressure to create strategy to guide colleagues in the face of continuing environmental flux. Equally, it would seem unreasonable to think that all the best strategy ideas reside only with those at the top of the organisation. By opening channels of dialogue with a wide range of stakeholders, organisational leaders might install a flexible, continual process which co-creates relevant, impactful strategy. And in these unusual times, for organisational adaption and survival, we need such flexible approaches to strategy more than ever.

Feature image by Mark Fletcher-Brown via Unsplash

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Children’s games and some problematic English spellings

Several years ago, I wrote a series of posts titled “The Oddest English Spellings.” Later, The English Spelling Society began to prepare a new version of the Reform, and I let a team of specialists deal with such problems. Yet an email from one of our regular correspondents suggested to me that perhaps one more post in this blog may reinforce the interest of the public in how we spell English.

This is a knot. Will it survive Spelling Reform?

Most people will probably agree that “mute” letters are a nuisance. Who needs ch– in chthonic, p in pneumonia and psychology, or t in whistle, listen, and wrestle? This is especially true of consonants, and in the past, I have attacked gnaw, gnash, and gnat (gnats are hard to attack; see the header image), but treated know with compassion, because it coexists with acknowledge (aknowledge would certainly suffice!), but knee, knob, knife, and a few others are sad fossils: gn and kn have been silent in those words for at least three centuries. The efforts to reform English spelling are underway, and I very much hope that those efforts will bring fruit and that comunal service will be aknowleged. But in such a momentous endeavor, as in medicine, the most important thing is to do no harm. Perhaps knot might survive the Reform or become nott, to remain distinct from not and, true to its meaning, form an indissoluble union with knotted.

Especially troublesome is gn in the middle of some words. Dignity is of course fine, but deign is not, because modern speakers do not connect those etymologically related words. Let there be Dane and dein or dain (compare ordain) in English! Reign is tougher, since rein and rain already exist, while rane looks totally unfamiliar, and this is bad; also, interregnum preserves a weak link between reign and its Romance past. I am saying all this to reinforce my main point: in a language like English, with its confusing and maddeningly difficult spelling, few changes are possible across the board. The great number of homophones (Dane, deign; rain, rein, reign, arraign) complicates our task even further.

It would be tempting to adopt one spelling (dane) for all the “dein” words (the latter being a phonetic transcription) and, among other things, forget about the useless capitalization of Dane. After all, though we pronounce them alike, in speech we never confuse Dane and deign: context disambiguates such words for us. Perhaps we needn’t differentiate them on paper either? Don’t we have homophones and homographs like junk “trash” and junk “vessel”; “rash “eruption on the skin” and rash “hasty”; hail “salutation” and hail “falling from the sky”, and are none the worse for the existence of this medley? Unfortunately, any spelling reform, even the most modest one, is a serious social cataclysm, and the less people are inconvenienced, the better. Revolutions are exciting events for historians but often less so for victims and survivors. Perhaps, as I have often said, the Reform should be carried out in several steps.

Storming of the Bastille. Revolutions are good to describe. (“Prise de la Bastille” by unknown artist, via Wikimedia)

Yet some things are clear. Align is sometimes spelled as aline, but rarely. Yet it is the best spelling for this verb. French aligner, from à ligne, goes back to Latin ad lineam. In French, gn designates a palatalized consonant, but in English it means nothing (an irritating mute letter). Align is also an ideal example for countering the insistence on the etymological principle as a guiding one for writing English words. The opponents of the Reform bewail a possible loss of historical ties, as though modern spelling is supposed to function as a substitute for a manual of language history.

We have Latin linea and French ligne. Whose heritage should we treasure more? I think we should, wherever possible, forget the past, treasure common sense, and (in this case) write line, aline, alinement, and so forth. A similar case is the spelling of rain. The Gothic for “rain” is rign (the form was recorded in the fourth century. In Old Icelandic, we find regn and in Modern German, Regen (from regan). The Common Germanic form must have had g in the root. In Old English, the word was also spelled with g, even though in this word, g had the value of Modern English y in yes. Should we spell rain as regn, to honor its distant past?

The stimulus for this post was a recent letter in which our correspondent asked me whether feint, faint, fain, and feign are related. The history of all four words is known. Feign goes back to Old French feign-; the situation with it is the same as with reign: in French, the letter g makes sense, while in English it does not. The infinitive of this verb is feindre (no g), and Old French for feint was feinte, the feminine past participle of that same feindre.

Thus, feign and feint are almost doublets, and indeed, feint means “feigned attack.” (It would therefore have been much more sensible to spell those words as fein and feint.) Faint, again from Old French faint or feint “feigned, sluggish, cowardly,” is also a continuation of the past participle of feindre. The verb faint was recorded somewhat later than the adjective faint.

It follows that faint is a full etymological doublet of feint! If we disregard the details, we can say that faint and feint are two variants of the same word, while feign is very closely related to them. Given such examples, perhaps even the most ardent supporters of the etymological principle in spelling will agree that at least sometimes it should be treated without too much reverence. (To avoid misunderstanding: I am not suggesting that faint and feint should be spelled alike. Today, my subject is only –gn–.)

Feigning fainting? Next to it a real feint!” (Left: “A lady fainting after bloodletting”, by Egelon van der Neer. Right: “Korea London Women Team Fencing” by Korean Olympic Committee)

Fains I (a formula of truce in games) is more problematic. Its local synonym feign knights looks like a garbled version of some phrase, and no one knows whether fain or feign is meant in it. The adjective fain “willing” (he is fain to discuss the problem) and the adverb fain “willingly” go back to Old English. They are archaic but still recognizable.

In the indispensable Notes and Queries, a hundred and fifty years ago, a long discussion of faintits fizzled out without a solution (faintits is one of many variants of fains I), but the idea that fain(s) derives from feign (so already in Notes and Queries) makes sense. The connection with fen (from fend) looks less probable. Even less probable is tracing fain(s) to fane “temple,” from Latin, a word almost forgotten, though it was much used in poetry by Byron and his contemporaries. Children’s games tend to preserve ancient formulas. Eeny meeny is a classic example; yet a Latin noun is an unlikely source of fains I ~ fains it.

Questions and comments are always inspiring. The query about feign and its lookalikes resulted in this post on the use of gn in the words of Modern English. If you are interested in such things, look up coin and coign in dictionaries, shed a tear while tracing the history of arraign, wonder at the fortunes of poignant and pungent, but, most importantly, don’t feign indifference when it comes to Spelling Reform and the Spelling Congress announced by the Spelling Society. Other than that, for today the game is over. Fains I!

Feature image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

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Sound relationships: exploring the creative partnership between poet and composer

Composer Cecilia McDowall and poet Seán Street have collaborated on the creation of many choral works in recent years, from Shipping Forecast to Angel of the Battlefield. Here they discuss some of the challenges and pleasures of balancing words and music to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Cecilia McDowall (CM): Writing for choral forces, characteristically, requires text and I feel whatever words I choose to set they must be ‘good’ words, words which give strength to musical expression. For me, the most enriching part of this creative process is collaborating with the poet; it is a chance to fashion something new, something, one hopes, which will have a resonance for our times.

Seán Street (SS): Successful creative partnerships carry a degree of enigma about them, an almost psychic link that the superstitious might fear could be disturbed by too much analysis. Nonetheless recent collaborations have led us to consider the nature of the synergy between text and music in our work together, and it may be, I think, fruitful to explore it at this time.

The evolution of a partnership

CM: Seán’s poetry has given inspiration in some very different and interesting ways as in these examples; a string trio based on the poem, Time between Tides; a setting of poems in the cantata, Shipping Forecast; and most unusually, when copyright was denied for the use of poems by Borges and Neruda, Seán created text to replace the forbidden poems without my altering a single note in the score of the already premiered orchestral song cycle, Theatre of Tango. His sleight of hand enabled this work to be recorded with impunity. Our more recent collaborations have taken a new direction…

SS: Looking back on our working relationship to this point, it’s interesting to reflect on how it’s evolved from settings of pre-existing texts, to recent more collaborative and interactive works. This has been enabled as I’ve become increasingly familiar with Cecilia’s ‘sound’, and way of musical thinking. It’s a type of teamwork that has refined into a hybrid connecting composer, writer, and subject in what I’ve found to be a highly rewarding method of collaboration. To blend a text in a shared thought with someone from history, and hear the two elements interpreted through music, is a thrilling experience.

The practice of musical and textual collaboration

CM: Any creative process is a solitary business so working with the poet, for me, brings an added dimension and great enjoyment. I’m also interested in finding ways of bringing some historical element to the music I write, hoping this might communicate directly with the listener and perhaps encourage further exploration of the subject matter as in the Red Cross commemorative Brightest Star. There has always been a sensitive partnership between Seán and me; one where I might suggest including words from a historical figure and then leave him to get on with the hard work of incorporating them into the text!

SS: Words written specifically to be set are not the same as a piece of writing designed to be read silently, interpreted by the eye and brain. For one thing, the listener can’t turn back the page! And where the subject is a person from history, as in the case of Edith Cavell (Standing as I do before God), Rosalind Franklin (Photo 51), and Clara Barton (Angel of the Battlefield), the relationship between the sounds becomes even more significant. Words spoken or written by the subject and incorporated into the text, carry equal weight with created text in the musical interpretation, so it becomes a three-way partnership.

Sound and meaning

CM: The balance between composer and poet, I feel, is an equal partnership; the words are crucial to the essential expression of the music and the music should not obscure the meaning of the words in any way. And if we can succeed in achieving this creative equilibrium then the possibility of communicating with our performing artists and our audience becomes more assured. If one is lucky, the performance can become an immersive experience, one which may perhaps continue to resonate with the listener.

SS: This is where the real interpretation takes place, where marks on paper become sounds and express themselves through time and space. An auditory response to those sounds is as individual as each person who makes and experiences them. And that is the key word: experience. This whole process from idea to performance is a journey; we offer our words and music to the performers and they pass them to the listener. Theirs is another partnership, and what is heard and felt at that point is a fusion of many things, which, when it functions at its highest level, defies analysis.

CM: The fusion of words and music is a magical process. The text gives so much richness and depth to the meaning behind the musical idea and I feel it is incumbent on the composer not to get in the way but to try to enable the listener to inhabit another world, a sphere of the imagination.

SS: We’re the servants of the subject; this must never be lost sight of, because what we’re telling is their story, and while a version of their voice is heard when it comes to the performance, they don’t have a say in the process. That’s a responsibility for us to take very seriously.

Featured image: extract from ‘Naming’, Movement III of Shipping Forecast , composed by Cecilia McDowall, words by Seán Street

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The enduring mystery of how galaxies grow up

Astronomers have discovered that there are two different types of galaxies in the Universe: elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies. Elliptical galaxies are dead galaxies full of very old, red stars that move on chaotic random orbits around the centre of their galaxy in such a way that makes their shape look like fluffy footballs. On the other hand, live spiral galaxies contain both old stars and many new, freshly formed stars. They appear as beautiful spiral galaxies as their stars and gas move on nearly circular paths around a common centre in a thin rotating disk. These spiral galaxies extend to distances from the centre of 30 thousand light years or more, whereas elliptical galaxies have a typical radius of 10 thousand light years. When counting all of the galaxies that are heavier than about 10 billion suns, only 3% are dead, while the very vast majority today are spiral galaxies full of young stars. Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy such as this and our Sun lies about 24 thousand light years from its centre.

Our own Milky Way galaxy has about 50 billion stars and continuously forms more of them. Around four suns are born every year, and this phenomenon has been going on for 12 billion years. There have been ups and downs however, sometimes the Milky Way has made more stars and sometimes it has made less depending upon whether neighbouring galaxies came close. The nearest big galaxy to us, Andromeda, which is about 2.2 million light years away and falling towards us, contains more stars but is otherwise quite similar.

Stars form from the gas which such galaxies contain, but if we calculate all of this gas, it can be estimated that a galaxy such as ours would run out of gas within 3 billion years. Our Sun is 5 billion years old, so, since the time it and our Earth formed, the Milky Way should have completely run out of gas. And yet, astronomers see star-forming gas clouds only about 300 light years away, suggesting that the Milky Way is making stars today as if it was not consuming its gas. When considering this fascinating situation, it is important for astronomers to develop a theory to understand how the gas is replenished and solve this deep cosmological problem.

Astronomers and physicists today are convinced that there was a hot Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago which made all of the matter and catalysed the continual expansion of the Universe. As the gas cooled after the Big Bang, the first galaxies condensed, thereby merging with others to make the large galaxies we see today. According to this theory, the rate at which new stars are born in a typical galaxy ought to have increased to a maximum value about 8 billion years ago. The production of stars should have gradually decreased over time as the gas in the galaxies was consumed, as the supply of new gas from the surroundings dried up, and as newly merging galaxies became more rare in the increasingly diluted Universe. In addition to this, dark energy, a largely unknown form of energy, appears to be ripping the Universe apart ever more rapidly. So, in theory, galaxies should stop growing up.

A team of astronomers from the University of Bonn and Charles University in Prague have now made a strange discovery: they took the many hundreds of galaxies that are well observed as they are close by, being within 30 million light years, and tested the above theory. The galaxies in this small chunk of the Universe were found to behave very differently to the aforementioned theory as they have not changed the rates at which their new stars are being born. A heavy galaxy today, for example, is making ten stars per year, and when it was born 12 billion light years ago, it was also making ten stars per year. A smaller galaxy may be making only one star every ten years today, a rate that has not changed since it had been born. This shocking discovery upsets the previously supposed theory and makes little sense, since this means that when a galaxy was born by making its first star cluster, the gas it was receiving then and the gas it receives today may conspire to be about the same. There is no indication that the galaxies follow the above theory. If anything, the telescope observations appear to suggest a weak trend according to which the galaxies are, if anything, slightly increasing the rate with which new stars are born within them.

This now reveals a new mystery: how can galaxies continue to grow up? How can the environment in which a galaxy lives arrange this amount of gas to be supplied to the galaxy at the exact right rate so that the number of stars being born in the galaxy over its whole lifetime of 12 billion years remains quite the same? Neither astronomers nor physicists know the answer to this question. In fact, since this question is brand new, much original thinking and research will need to be done in order to try to answer it. Some astronomers will try to answer this question by enforcing it into the above theory, but it is not at all clear how this can work since the same theory would need to give different results for the nearby galaxies and there is nothing in the theory that can arrange for this. Others might try to develop entirely new theories of how the surrounding space feeds gas into its galaxy. The outcome of this remains wide open, but it seems assured that some of our theories of physics may change fundamentally.

Featured image: NGC 7331 Galaxy by Edward Conway, Nathan Horleston, and Steve Maddox (University of Nottingham) and Nik Szymanek (University of Hertfordshire) via Issac Newton Group of Telescopes

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Beethoven’s virtual collaborations

Since the onset of the pandemic, online platforms like Facebook and YouTube have become indispensable hubs of musical collaboration. Simply scroll down your Facebook feed to encounter collaborative virtual performances of everything from “Over the Rainbow” to Mahler’s Third Symphony, each one painstakingly assembled from individual recordings of sequestered singers and isolated instrumentalists.

While physically distant musical collaborations might seem shockingly new, they actually have a long history. Beethoven, who turns 250 this year, participated in a variety of such collaborations, sometimes across vast geographical expanses. His dozens of arrangements of Scottish, Welsh, Irish, English, and continental European folksongs, produced for the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson, offer a particularly compelling example of early nineteenth-century virtual collaboration.

The arrangement process, unusual for the time, was a bit like creating a TikTok duet chain: Thomson, in Edinburgh, dispatched the folksong melodies via post to Beethoven, in Vienna, who arranged them in elaborate fashion for voice (or voices) and piano, often with optional string accompaniments. Beethoven then mailed his arrangements back to Edinburgh, where Thomson added a final link to the chain, outfitting Beethoven’s musical settings with freshly commissioned texts by British poets such as Lord Byron, James Hogg, and Sir Walter Scott.

As with TikTok duets, these virtual collaborations often resulted in striking reinterpretations of the original. Take Beethoven’s setting of “The Monks of Bangor’s March,” commissioned for Thomson’s A Select Collection of Welsh Airs (1817). The folksong was first printed in John Playford’s 1665 Dancing Master as “The L. Monck’s March,” probably a reference to the English general Lord George Monck. By the time Thomson discovered it, however, it had become associated with the medieval monks of Bangor, famous for having been slaughtered during a prayerful procession in the year 613. Thomson may have sent a brief note about this context to Beethoven, who devised a macabre, funeral march-like accompaniment and transposed the song from D minor to the darker key of C minor.

With these changes, Beethoven transformed a spritely 1660s folk tune into an unequivocally nineteenth-century work, a work whose trajectory Walter Scott then completed with his chilling poetic meditation on the doomed procession: “When the heathen trumpet’s clang round beleaguered Chester rang, veiled nun and friar grey marched from Bangor’s fair abbaye.” The complete arrangement, a little-known gem, is impressively imaginative and remarkably cohesive, especially given that its co-creators Beethoven and Scott—two giants of the early Romantic period—never met or even corresponded with each other.

Around 1806, Beethoven took part in a different kind of virtual collaboration, one with an extraordinary origin. It began with a piano improvisation at a salon in Baden, Austria, some 25 kilometers away from Vienna. The improviser was not Beethoven but a Polish dilettante named Countess Rzewuski. Rzewuski improvised a short aria on the piano, to which Giuseppe Carpani—a celebrated poet and early biographer of Haydn—extemporized some gothic verse. The subject concerned an embittered spirit chastising his former lover from the grave:

In questa tomba oscura
Lasciami riposar.
Quando vivera, ingrata,
Dovevi a me pensar.
Lascia che l’ombre ignude
Godansi pace almen,
E non bagnar mie cineri
D’inutile velen.

In this dark tomb
Let me rest.
When I was alive, ungrateful woman,
You should have thought of me.
At least let the naked spirits
Enjoy their peace,
And no, do not bathe my ashes
With useless venom.

Carpani’s little poem, stimulated by Rzewuski’s piano playing, was an instant hit. From the salon in Baden, the verse went viral, spreading first to Vienna and then further afield, and inspiring numerous composers, amateur and professional alike, to try their own hand at setting it to music. Eager to see “how many different colors and styles of music could animate the same subject,” Carpani soon invited other composers to musicalize his poem and arranged for all of the settings to be collected in a single volume. By the time of its publication in 1808, the volume comprised 64 arrangements by 46 composers from across Europe. Among the most recognizable of Carpani’s virtual collaborators: Antonio Salieri, Carl Czerny, Vincenzo Righini, Carl Zelter, Franz Xaver Mozart (Wolfgang’s youngest son), and, of course, Beethoven.

The first page of Beethoven’s “In questa tomba oscura,” WoO 133 (Vienna, 1808). Public domain via International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) / Petrucci Music Library.

In contrast with many of the other settings, which prefer the minor mode and tease out the text’s gothic import, Beethoven sets Carpani’s poem as a poignant operatic scena in A-flat major. He repeats the first four lines of text, creating an ABA structure in which the middle section provides a striking contrast by plunging down a major third into the remote key of E major. This highly expressive move is also used to great effect in another work of 1806, the Fourth Piano Concerto (first movement, bar 105). Beethoven’s contribution to Carpani’s project is, of course, on a different scale from the grand instrumental works of this remarkable year, but it is highly effective in its own right. The only setting of “In questa tomba oscura” still performed today, it has been recorded by superstars from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to Luciano Pavarottito Cecilia Bartoli.

Beethoven is often thought of as solitary genius whose music transcends the context in which it was composed. “What do I care about your wretched fiddle,” he supposedly asked violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, “when the spirit seizes me?” But the reality is that his art was rooted in collaborative relationships, with performers, publishers, patrons, poets, instrument-makers, critics, and the concertgoing public. These relationships, physical as well as virtual, not only energized his creative process but also mediated the very design of his artworks.

Feature image by Spencer Imbrock via Unsplash

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The senses in an increasingly digital world

We interact with the world around us with all our senses—such as sight, hearing, smell, but also much more! The senses are fundamental to our experiences. The research area of multisensory experiences considers the different human senses and their interactions when designing human experiences. This area is growing in academic fields such as Human-Computer Interaction, marketing, and the arts, but also marks a growing trend beyond the academic world. Many practitioner initiatives are now placing the human senses at the centre of their design process such as chefs, marketers, and technology developers.

But what exactly are multisensory experiences?

We define multisensory experiences as “impressions formed by specific events, whose sensory elements have been carefully crafted by someone.” For instance, to create the impression of a sunflower, colours, textures, and specific smells are considered. The senses are situated at the centre of the formation of the impression, even in the absence of a real flower. That is, although you may not have a real flower, you may still use specific sensory elements to evoke the impression of the sunflower.

The multisensory world of a sunflower field

Though most of our experiences can be described as multisensory, multisensory experiences are different in that there is intentionality in them. While, say, walking in a forest or jungle involves several sensory elements (specific colours, aromas, textures), a multisensory experience is carefully designed by someone—a walk in the woods that has been designed by a landscape architect in order to evoke specific impressions, for example.

Multisensory experiences are increasingly transformed by advances in technology

Multisensory experiences are increasingly changed and enabled through technology. The sensory elements that are crafted in an event can be physical, digital, or a combination of both (mixed reality). Multisensory experiences move along the reality-virtuality continuum, where they can go from real through mixed reality (e.g. augmented reality) to fully virtual (e.g. virtual reality).

The reality-virtuality continuum

Let us consider the following example. A group of friends have a new project of growing sunflowers and they want you to experience them and they have three options to do so: (1) take you through their sunflower field without any technology, (2) take you through the field with the aid of augmented reality (AR) to obtain information about the sunflowers, or (3) take you through the field in virtual reality (VR). In the first, there may not be technology, in the second technology augments the experience, and in the third the experience is created through technology. Here, technology can influence the event or become the means for creating the event itself.

The future of multisensory experiences

Considering the ever-growing technological advances and increased understanding of the human senses and experiences, how may multisensory experiences be used in future to tackle some challenges that individuals and societies face, such as exploring new planets beyond Earth? Imagine a future where life has shifted from Earth to outer space, onto a new planet or solar system. What would life be like? How would we experience these new environments, through some or all our senses, or more?

Global efforts to prepare humanity for life beyond Earth can be observed and although it is not known yet what those future “outer space” experiences will be like, they will be different. There are efforts to make the interaction with the astronaut’s surrounding as fluent as possible exploiting all the human senses. For example, the concept of “earth memory bites” is designed to help astronauts have a shared eating experience of their favourite Earth foods together with their friends from Earth or people on the spaceship. This concept involves small bites that contain distinct flavours from different regions and cultures, or even flavours that one remembers from a specific event on Earth such as a wedding or birthday. By combining eating with VR and AR technology, it is possible to eat together with friends and family remotely. Music, atmospheric light, temperature, and humidity can also be used to recreate distinctive Earth settings. Emerging multisensory technologies makes it increasingly possible to imagine and create such experiences.

Possibilities and responsibilities when designing multisensory experiences

In recent times, there has been a growing digitization of human experiences, accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Purely offline and real experiences have shifted to mixed and virtual reality experiences where both the physical and digital worlds merge. However, many of the senses are still left “unsatisfied”, making it clear that there is still much to be done to create multisensory experiences in an increasingly digital world.

The excitement about multisensory experiences opens a plethora of opportunities but also challenges that need to be met with responsibility. Indeed, some of those challenges refer to how many businesses, individuals, and communities may not be ready for a digital transition and may potentially be left behind. In addition, issues that are already in the public’s eye, such as privacy, security, universal vs. exclusive access to technology, increased predictability, and controllability, will only become more and more salient.

Considering this and our definition of multisensory experiences, we have developed three laws of multisensory experiences, inspired by science fiction author Isaac Asimov and his three laws of robotics.

Our three laws focus on acknowledging and debating publicly different questions that are at the heart of the definition of multisensory experiences, namely, the why (the rationale/reason), what (the impression), when (the event), how (the sensory elements), who (the someone), and whom (the receiver), associated with a given multisensory experience.

The first law “Multisensory experiences should be used for good and must not harm others” particularly aims to guide the thinking process related to the question: what impressions and events do we want to design for and why? What is good or bad is not for one person to decide but must be subject to public debate. The second law “Receivers of a multisensory experience must be treated fairly” encourages reflection about who are we designing for, with the important reminder that different individuals need careful considerations, as a child needs to be treated differently from an adult. Finally, the third law “The someone and the sensory elements must be known” aims to address the specific question of who is crafting the multisensory experience and how that someone needs to ensure transparency of the use of sensory elements in the creation, especially when the someone cannot just be an individual, but also a company, maybe a government body, or an AI system.

Even if there are challenges, there are also great opportunities. As Henry David Thoreau noted, we also believe that “This world is but a canvas to our imaginations”. By considering and reinventing the multisensory worlds in which we live in, we can be the artists that paint the experiences that we imagine.

Featured image by Jessica Lewis via Pexels

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Idioms are fun

I have chosen this title for today’s post, because in our life everything is supposed to be fun. Grammar, as I have often noted, is no longer studied at our schools, because grammar is not fun. Neither are math and geography. I am happy to report that, according to my experience, idioms are fun. Even my Zoom talks on them attract big crowds. In the nearest future, I expect to choose some of the most attractive idioms I have in my modest collection and “publish” them here.

The aftermath of the fox’s wedding (by Peter Trimming via Flickr)

The most amusing examples occur in dialects. I have an 1879 phrase, recorded in Berkshire (South East England): “There she lies fast asleep with hands full of pancakes.” This is a description of a child fast asleep. In such cases, I always appeal to native speakers. Perhaps someone in Berkshire reads this blog (this is not impossible: I occasionally receive letters from New Zealand and Brazil, so why not from Berkshire?) and can tell us more about this wonderful expression. In Devon and Cornwall (again in the South West), when one sees sunshine through rain, people speak of “fox’s wedding.” This weather phenomenon has highly individual names all over the world. People refer to animals, the Devil, and many other creatures, as well as to improbable entities, at the sight of water and light, which is indeed a union (wedding) of two elements from heaven. According to the conclusion of a knowledgeable scholar, the idea of the fox’s wedding arose in India and spread from there to diverse points of the globe, adapting on its journey to different cultural backgrounds, linguistic environments, and patterns of thought.

European folklore owes a great debt to India. Tales from there traveled west, and sometimes only the punchline stayed in human memory as an idiom. Also in Devon and Cornwall, people say (or said a hundred years ago): “That beats Ackytoashy, and Ackytoashy beats the Devil.” This is a description of something almost incredible. Another variant has Acky Baugh instead of Ackytoashy. Apparently, Ackytoashy outwitted the Devil, a plot celebrated in many folk tales. We don’t know how and where he performed his deed. The fact that Acky is short for Hercules and Archelaus (both names having been sometimes confused in the county) may be true but does not go far, because Toashy remains unexplained, and nothing is known about his deeds. Across some water, in Ireland, they used to say (1874): “That beats Akebo” (an expression of surprise). As far as I know, those two phrases have never been compared. Yet Acky Baugh looks like a variant of Akebo.

An image of St. Muiredach’s churchyard (by Phil Champion via Geograph)

Nor is it improbable that Akebo is a place name! Consider the phrase: “That bangs Banagher, and Banagher beats the world.” The phrase implies something unbelievable (my references go back to the notes published between 1872 and 1883, but the adage seems to have lost none of its freshness since that time). The legend tells about the miraculous qualities of the sand in the churchyard surrounding a tomb erected to the memory of St. Muiredach O’Heney. Allegedly, a horse sprinkled with the sand from that churchyard was supposed to win in a race, and, if it lost, the winner was said to bang Banagher. The Internet is full of information about Banagher and this phrase (see especially the idiom “to beat the band”). A different story has it that Banagher conquered everything including the Devil. Whatever its origin, the expression follows the same model we have seen above. Bangs of course alliterates with Banagher, but at the core of the idiom is a migratory tale. In the context of the present discussion, it does not matter whether some hero defeated the Devil or returned home safe from fighting with an enchanted place. The roots of the tale may be hidden in the depths of Celtic folklore.

Mihály Munkáksy, “Woman carrying faggots”, 1873 (via Wikimedia)

Now a short journey east, to the Midlands: “He that would eat a buttered faggot, let him go to Northampton.” This is puzzling advice. I am quoting from Athenæum 1898, I, p. 812 (Athenæum was an excellent periodical; all the volumes of it have been combed for idioms, but they yielded incomparably fewer examples than Notes and Queries). Here goes:

“‘There can be little doubt that this proverb refers to the former scarcity of fuel in the country town, and implies that a faggot was a choice delicacy’ (Fuller) [the reference is to Thomas Fuller’s 1662 book History of the Worthies of England]. Ray, whose collection of proverbs was issued only a few years subsequent to Fuller’s ‘Worthies’ [in 1668], supports Fuller in this view, adding that King James [James I, 1566-1625] is said to have spoken thus of the Newmarket, but that the saying was more applied to Northampton, as the dearest town in all England for fuel. There is little question that ‘faggot’ can mean, as Christopher A. Markham (in his The Proverbs of Northamptonshire) says, something like ‘a mediæval porcine preparation’; but why any preparation of pig should want buttering is not explained.”

Buttered faggots (via Wikimedia)

I always wince when I see the words certainly, obviously, little question, there can be little doubt, and undoubtedly in explanations of etymological puzzles. And, like the anonymous contributor to Athenæum, I wonder why a preparation of pig should want buttering. However, I remember that buttering inappropriate foodstuffs was at one time proverbial. Fried parsnips do indeed need buttering, even though fine words cannot substitute for butter. Let us not forget what King Lear’s fool says to his distressed, disillusioned master: “Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ’em i’ the paste alive; she knapped ‘em o’ the coxcombs with a stick, and cried, ‘Down, wantons, down!” ’Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay” (II, 4, 121-28). Could it be that faggots in the old saying meant what the word was supposed to mean, namely, “a bundle of sticks or twigs,” while that porcine preparation only resembles such a bundle in form?  Fool’s sayings refer to the popular genre ridiculing the people who do good things at a wrong time or perform acts of outrageous stupidity. International folklore is full of such anecdotes (remember the ship of fools).

The wise men of Gotham also resided in Nottinghamshire. They could have indulged in buttering faggots or hay. Didn’t the king say: “If you want to meet fools, go to Northampton?” At that time, the joke would have been understood in London and Stratford, but, possibly, not many people knew it. In any case, Shakespeare did (King Lear was written in the early 1600s); yet half a century later neither Fuller nor the well-informed Ray seem to have had the slightest notion of it.

Wise men of Gotham (via Wikimedia)

I sincerely hope that, while reading this post, you had some fun.

Editor’s note: updated on 24 September 2020

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A tribute to the fallen

President Trump is reliably reported to have referred to soldiers who have fallen in battle as “losers” and “suckers.” Supposedly, on November 10, 2018, he refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial, outside Paris. It was raining and he feared his hair would get mussed. On hearing this—reported in the Atlantic magazine—I was totally surprised at the strength of my emotion. Anger, yes, but sadness too. I want to write about this. Not about Trump. Enough people are doing this already. But about why I feel so strongly.

In a way, you might think it odd. I was born in England, at the beginning of the Second World War, just at the time of the fall of France. The cemetery at Aisne-Marne is the final resting place of American marines who fell in battle in what was then called the Great War, and now the First World War. Why would it be things connected with that war that had such an emotional effect on me? In the 1950s and 60s, in Britain as well as America, so much popular culture was about the Second War. Movies for instance. The Dam Busters. The Longest Day. Why would it not be the Second war that affected me? There is reason enough for such an emotion. Those men who fell in the Battle of the Bulge, and at Iwo Jima.

That is misleading. Growing up in Britain in the 1940s, it was the Great War that defined us. My teachers in elementary school were single women whose boyfriends had fallen in Flanders. The books we read at school—Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon—related back to that war. As did the poetry, from Rupert Brook—“If I should die think only this of me”—to Wilfred Owen—“Gas, GAS, quick boys.” In many front parlors was a picture of Uncle Fred, aged 18, so proud in his new uniform. Dead at Passchendaele.

And then, 1962, I went to Canada. To this day, for that country—as for Australia and New Zealand—it is the Great War that defines it. Huge numbers of its young men went to fight for the mother country, never to return, sleeping now forever in one of those vast cemeteries in Northern France. Everywhere there are reminders. For thirty-five years I walked to and from my university, passing the birthplace of Colonel John McCrae, author of the best-known poem of the war: “In Flanders fields the poppies grow/ Between the crosses, row on row.” Vimy Ridge, where the Canadians on Easter 1917 took a hitherto-impregnable escarpment, has the iconic status for that dominion as Gallipoli has for the two southern dominions, Australia and New Zealand. And then Newfoundland, that did not join Confederation until 1948. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1917, 780 men of the Newfoundland Regiment went over the top. Next morning, at rollcall, there were 68 men. July 1 is Canada Day. Except in Newfoundland. There it is Memorial Day.

What of those young men who died? Most of them weren’t obviously heroes, winners of the Victoria Cross (equivalent of the Medal of Honor). They were motivated by the call of king and country; but, at the crunch time, it was mainly a sense of not wanting to let down your buddies. “If he’s going over, then so am I.” They were heroes, nevertheless. Although it seems trite to say so, German expansionism—started by the unification of that country in 1871 and fueled by the militarism of the ruling Prussians—had to be stopped. It took two world wars finally to accomplish that. Those young men who died in Flanders gave their lives so that, eventually, people like me could live in peace and have full and happy lives.

I have just turned 80 and retired, after 55 wonderful years teaching philosophy in universities in Canada and the USA. As I came to the end of it all, and of course sensitized by the centenary events marking the Great War—1914-1918—I realized that I must do something. One thing, as a teacher, was to take a dozen American graduate students to the battle fields, spending a week in Ypres. None of them knew that twice as many young Americans died in that conflict as in the whole of the Vietnam war (120,000 vs 60,000).

A second thing, as a scholar, was to write a book on war. I work on the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, so it was natural to write a book comparing Darwinian views on war to more conventional, Christian-influenced, views on war. Traditionally, the former are taken as somewhat bloodthirsty—“Nature, red in tooth and claw,” supporters of so-called “Social Darwinism.” Traditionally, the latter are taken as reluctant to go to war—Just War Theory hedges the times when conflict is allowable. As is so often the case, I found that popular conceptions are far from the whole story. Darwinians stress again and again that the reason why humans are so successful is that we are social, not by nature warlike. Christians to the contrary could sometimes give Attila the Hun a run for his money. Anglican bishops in the Great War* instructed: “kill Germans”; “kill the good as well as the bad”; “kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded.”

I am not sure in the end I came to any earth-shattering conclusions, but I was able to show that thinking in this century has already moved us well beyond both extremes. Finally, people of science and people of religion and other movements can speak constructively about war and its causes. That is not going at once to prevent it. But, as a philosophy teacher, I have always told my students that understanding is the first move to solving. If I have been able to do even the smallest thing towards an understanding of war, then will I have paid my debt to those young men who lie in Aisne-Marne and the other cemeteries of that and subsequent wars.

*Source: Marrin, A. 1974. The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. P 175

Featured image: Photograph taken by Lizzie Ruse during a trip to Flanders, and used with permission.

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