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Q&A with James Keller, author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide

We sat down with James Keller, author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide, and asked him a few questions about his career and his musical interests. We learned, among other things, which trio of composers he would invite over for lunch and what he would have done if he had not been a music writer.

What was the last concert you attended?

It consisted of a single work: Mahler‘s Symphony No. 3, with Bernard Haitink conducting the New York Philharmonic. A concertgoer can pass quite a few seasons without hearing Mahler’s Third, but, curiously, I have encountered it twice this season. I also heard the San Francisco Symphony perform it, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, back in March — a very different interpretation from Haitink’s. It’s the longest of Mahler’s symphonies, running almost an hour and forty minutes. It requires a huge orchestra, a women’s choir, a children’s choir, and a mezzo-soprano soloist, and the conductor needs to impose a clearly delineated vision in order for the piece to come off successfully. You might say that Mahler’s Third is practically the opposite of chamber music, which typically involves a handful of players working out the interpretation through a democratic approach that does not involve a conductor. But you do also encounter a spirit of chamber music in Mahler symphonies, where very often he spotlights a small ensemble of musicians from out of the huge orchestral resources he has assembled on stage. These passages require somewhat different skills compared to the “section playing” that is the backbone of orchestral work. It’s one of the reasons most major orchestras have chamber music incentives for their members to participate in. Apart from the sheer joy and intellectual stimulation of it, playing chamber music together provides an unbeatable exercise in team-building.

Which composer, dead or alive, would you most like to meet?

Just as I love the music of different composers in different ways and for different reasons, I would doubtless like meeting them in person for different reasons. Of course, I would love to meet Johann Sebastian Bach, just to be in the presence of that magnitude of genius — but I would probably find myself completely tongue-tied and thereby waste the occasion. If I were assembling a little luncheon for four and wanted to have a truly enjoyable time rather than just be in awe, I might send out an invitation to Franz Joseph Haydn and the Mendelssohn siblings, Felix and Fanny. These were all cultured, curious, and, I think, kind people whose careers brought them in touch with their art from different angles. I would buy a visitors’ book and ask them each to dash off a little canon for me.

The big-name composer I came closest to intersecting with was Sergei Rachmaninoff. I lived for a decade in the same Manhattan apartment building he did — 505 West End Avenue — but the time was out of joint and he died 40 years before I moved in. An assortment of his family’s home movies are posted on YouTube, and in one of them he’s walking in front of the building and getting into a car. In truth, he’s not one of my favorite composers, but I nonetheless feel quite proprietary about him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is there a composer you think is criminally underrated?

Yes, there is, and this very year we happen to be celebrating the tricentenary of his birth. It is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian, one of four Bach sons to become notable composers and unquestionably the finest of the bunch. It was perhaps a two-edged sword, being the son of Bach. On one hand, he learned music at the knee of … well, Bach. On the other, he was obviously overshadowed by his father, whose musical legacy C.P.E. worked assiduously to preserve and champion. The bigger issue, though, is that he is the finest representative of a style that proved only fleetingly popular, a transitional style that was rooted in the intellectual contrapuntal methods of the Baroque but strained forward to the Classical esthetic of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, all of whom admired him deeply. In fact, he died in 1788, so only three years before Mozart did. He didn’t display the breadth of Mozart — or of Haydn, who of all the A-list composers is the one he most calls to mind — but within the smaller framework of his art he was superb. His music tends to be hyper-emotive and volatile. It is filled with surprise and can turn on a dime. He’s one of those composers who really depends on his interpreters. Of course, all music benefits from a fine performance, but a Haydn, Mozart, or Brahms can survive a lot of abuse and still shine through. C.P.E. Bach doesn’t really stand a chance without the help of sensitive performers who have taken the time and effort to master what his style is all about. There is no shortage of underrated composers in general. You can encounter quite a few who hit the ball out of the park in a piece or two or three, but who don’t do it consistently throughout their oeuvre. I find that C.P.E. Bach is a relatively consistent figure. You just have to cultivate an appreciation for his particular language, which for many people is not all that familiar. Within that style he is without peer.

What’s your guilty listening pleasure?

I feel no guilt about any music I listen to. People are often surprised to learn that I am a great aficionado of American popular song from the 19th-century through the vaudeville era. So if you want a rousing chorus of “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother is Dead” or “They’re Wearing ’Em Higher in Hawaii,” I’m your man. A few years ago I curated for a historical society in San Francisco a museum show of sheet music that illuminated the history of California from the Gold Rush through the Roaring Twenties, and an offshoot of the show has been touring around the state’s regional museums ever since. I spend a lot of time listening to the National Jukebox, which is an amazing repository of early recordings available to all online through the Library of Congress: my tax dollars at work in a way I really like. I always keep in my car some CDs featuring the late, great Don Walser, the Texas singer-yodeler who was rightly dubbed “The Pavarotti of the Plains.” I am also not guilty about that.

Do you play a musical instrument? Which one? If not, which do you wish you could play?

My principal instrument when I went to conservatory was the oboe. I got pretty good at it. Some of the wind instruments have tended to hold on to remnants of national playing styles, and the oboe is an example of that. I happened to love the French style of oboe playing, so I went to study in Paris with one of the greatest practitioners of the oboe, Maurice Bourgue. It’s one of the instruments that you either play quite well or quite badly; there’s not a huge middle ground. Playing the oboe involves some facial muscles that don’t get much exercise otherwise, so if you don’t keep practicing strenuously you get out of shape very quickly and then it sounds awful. That would be me, at this point.

Of course I play the piano some—not particularly well, but I enjoy it. It’s a useful tool for me, since in my work as a program annotator I often need to read through scores, and the piano is the way to do this. I have a beautiful, ornate, rosewood “parlor grand” piano built in the 1870s by the Weber Piano Company, which was one of the leading builders at the time but shortly after that was eclipsed by Steinway & Sons, which was stronger in technological development. It has a “pre-Steinway” sound, as you might expect. The problem is, I am rather a klutz. That would also get in the way of my excelling on the instrument I would most like to play, which is the organ.

If you weren’t a music writer, what career would you have?

Well, I have actually had a couple of other careers. I was briefly a college professor, teaching music history, and then I worked for a decade on Wall Street, which people find quite surprising — nobody more so than me. I did find it interesting, actually, but when the market crashed in 1987, I took it as a sign that I should head back to doing what I had always enjoyed the most, which was writing about music. I keep my schedule full, since for many years I have been the program annotator of both the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. And I also work “half-time” as critic-at-large on the staff of the Santa Fe New Mexican, which is the oldest continuously published newspaper west of the Mississippi. I write columns and reviews on all sorts of things — music, theatre, visual arts, books, ideas — but it grows particularly intense during the summer months, when our remarkable little city of Santa Fe goes into overdrive with its musical and other cultural offerings.

If I were magically able to pursue another career parallel to what I already do, I would become a wildlife manager specializing in big cats, too many of which are becoming critically endangered. I have spent time up close with quite a few interesting felids in southern and eastern Africa, and I suppose cheetahs might end up my focus. Did you know that the fur in a cheetah’s spots is much softer than the fur that surrounds it? That’s an interesting surprise you discover when you pat a cheetah, which you would not do in the wild unless the animal were anesthetized but which you certainly can do in a cheetah sanctuary, if you are the sort of person who relates well to cats. Where I live, out in the country northwest of Santa Fe, I am in frequent contact with bobcats (Lynx rufus). They sleep on my porch furniture, which I might, too, if I were a bobcat.

James Keller, longtime Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, was awarded the prestigious ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for feature writing about music in Chamber Music magazine, where he has been Contributing Editor for more than a decade. He is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide.

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Ten moments that shook the Roman world, in pictures

By Peter Heather

The Roman Empire at its peak was the first great hemispherical power in human history. Over the years, though, this mighty society was torn apart by internal strife and attacks by rival powers. Below, the renowned historian Peter Heather describes the ten most critical turning points which led to the fall of the Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages.




242 AD: The accession of the Persian King of Kings
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The Sassanian Shapur I unites Iran and Iraq to create a Near Eastern superpower that inflicts colossal defeats on three different Roman Emperors. After sixty years of struggle, Rome restores stability on its eastern front, but at huge cost in terms of higher taxes to fund the necessary doubling of its armed forces, and the Persian threat is only parried not defeated. There is now little spare capacity left in the Roman imperial system should another major threat arise.

August 9, 378 AD: Emperor Valens and two-thirds of his elite field army are killed on one day at Adrianople
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The root cause is the rise of Hunnic power on the fringes of Europe which caused tens of thousands of Gothic refugees to arrive on the Danube late in 376. At war with Persia, Valens had no choice but to admit them, and, faced with underlying Roman hostility, they effectively reorganised themselves into the new, militarily powerful coalition which destroyed Valens and his army.

December 31, 406 AD: A huge mixed force of Alans, Vandals, and Sueves crosses the river Rhine into Gaul
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Following hot on the heels of Radagaisus’ invasion of Italy the previous summer, this unprecedented breakdown of order on the western Empire’s frontiers is a sign that the epicentre of Hunnic operations is shifting decisively westwards and, in the process, remaking the balance of strategic power in central Europe against Rome’s interests.

August 24, 410 AD: The sack of Rome by the Visigoths
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At the head of the Visigoths - a new coalition built out of the Gothic refugees of 376 and the followers of Radagaisus – Alaric sacks the city of Rome. The Emperor Honorius is powerless to protect the old imperial capital and soon has to write to the British provinces to advise them to look to their own defence. Faced with both Visigoths and the Rhine invaders of 406, the imperial authorities start to abandon outlying territories to concentrate force where it is absolutely needed.

Summer 418 AD: A treaty gives Gallia Aquitania to the Visigoths
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Fl. Constantius, eminence grise behind the throne of the western Emperor Honorius, is forced to cut the Visigoths a deal. They are settled permanently, with full imperial recognition, in southwestern Gaul. The western Empire no longer has sufficient military strength to defeat all the invaders now established on its soil, and wants to use the Goths, perceived as the lessor of two evils, to help defeat the Rhine invaders of 406 who have occupied most of Spain.

October 19, 439 AD: The Vandals take a Kingdom
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Geiseric, king of a new Vandal-Alan coalition formed from the survivors of the Rhine invasion, ravaged by combined Gotho-Roman assault, leads them off their current Libyan reservation to take possession of Carthage and the richest provinces of the entire western Empire. This is a direct threat to the continued flow of vital tax revenues which keeps the Empire’s remaining armies in being.

Summer 441 AD: The Huns attack
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Attila and Bleda, new leaders of the Huns, attack cities of the East Roman Balkans. This causes Constantinople to withdraw its forces from a joint expeditionary force gathering in Sicily to restore Carthage and its surrounding Tunisian provinces to Roman control. As a direct result, the western Empire has to recognise Geiseric’s control of the richest parts of North Africa and accept the decline in its own military capacity which necessarily follows from this loss of revenue.

July 9, 455 AD: Avitus is declared western Emperor at the Council of the Gallic provinces in Arles
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He wins recognition from the Roman Senate, and is the first legitimate western emperor to rely directly on the military power of recent immigrants – in this case the Visigoths – as a crucial building block of his regime. Rome’s military capacity has declined to such an extent that, from now on, at least some of the new barbarian powers established on west Roman soil will have to be included in the process of imperial regime creation.

Summer 468 AD: Rome’s final grab for Africa fails
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An East Roman expeditionary force led by the general Basiliscus is destroyed by Vandal fireships off the coast of North Africa. The last attempt to win back the riches of North Africa from Geiseric fails and the other barbarian powers established on Roman soil realise that the western imperial centre is nothing but a hollow sham. They therefore quickly grab all the territory that they can, often coming more into conflict with one another than the few remaining Roman armies.

September 4, 476 AD: Romulus Augustulus is deposed, ending the empire
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Odovacar, commander of the last Roman army of Italy, exploits discontent over pay arrears among his soldiers to depose the last western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus. He pays them off in land because so many provinces have now been lost that the surviving tax revenues are insufficient. He also persuades the Roman senate to send the western imperial vestments and diadem to Constantinople with a declaration that the west no longer needed – in fact could no longer support - an emperor of its own.
(Pictured: "Romulus Augustulus resigns the Crown," from Mary Yonge's "Young Folks' History of Rome.)

Peter Heather is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. He is the bestselling author of The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe, and numerous other works on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

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Image credits: 1. Coin with profile of Shapur. Permission via GNU license via Wikimedia Commons. 2. Statue of Valens. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 3. “Vandals Plundering,” from Mary Charlotte Yonge’s Young Folks’ History of Rome. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 4. “Sack of Rome by the Visigoths” by JM Sylvestre. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 5. Map of Roman territories; Gallia Aquitania highlighted. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 6. Map of the Vandal-Alan Kingdom. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 7. “Attila, the Scourge of God,” by Ulipano Checa. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 8. Coin with profile of Avitus. Permission via GNU license via Wikimedia Commons. 9. Cap Bon, site of the Roman defeat. Photo by Sergey Prokopenko. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons. 10. “Romulus Augustulus resigns the Crown before Odoacer,” from Mary Charlotte Yonge’s Young Folks’ History of Rome. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Splash! What kids discover in a puddle

By Siu-Lan Tan

It’s spring and about this time each year, a little ritual takes place. After the winter melt, many children encounter their first puddle with the zeal of an explorer discovering a new land.

Indeed, a puddle of water is a microcosm. In it, you find bits of sky, some leaves and a little froth, your own reflection. It is shallow and deep. It records your every step, augments your every move, but eventually leaves no trace that you were ever there. It is both moving and still. A mysterious thing is a puddle, and worth investigating.

After watching hours of YouTube videos of infants and toddlers stomping puddles of different sizes and shapes, I have come up with my list of “Eight Favorite Videos of Kids Discovering Puddles”—and will comment on them briefly as a developmental (child) psychologist. Take a moment to slow down and enjoy this mesmerizing medley, my ode to Spring!

#8   Boy meets first puddle

This toddler does a double-take when he first sees a puddle that has suddenly appeared in the front yard. What is that? He puts his toe in it, gasps, and takes a step back. His mother labels the experience (“Water. Puddle”), encouraging further exploration. He falls into the puddle, and gets back up again. It’s all of life in short review.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#7   Puddle splashing in Cape Breton

Ben, well-equipped in rain-gear, epitomizes Piaget’s portrait of the child as mini-scientist. Discovering a puddle for the first time, he performs repeated “tests” on this new watery universe—just like a scientist would, trying many new things to see the different effects. Piaget referred to these as circular reactions: actions repeated over and over again by the infant because the interesting effects compel the infant to try it again. Through these ‘circular reactions’, he repeatedly explores the shallow borders, touches the water with bare hands, wades into the deep middle, and examines the effects of moving in different pathways and stamping with alternating feet, on the responses of the water. His babbles punctuate his discoveries.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#6   Athena splashing in puddles—Spring 2014

Athena finds a puddle and exclaims “I’ve never seen it before!”. Piaget referred to our earliest kind of intelligence as “sensorimotor” as an infant uses her senses and motor actions to explore, and build a storehouse of knowledge about the physical world. Athena coordinates sight, touch, hearing, and action to examine the new puddle. We witness circular reactions again, this time with very fine variations. She intentionally alters the angle and speed of her foot taps, and is engrossed in observing the effects on the water—the contingencies of her actions, just like a scientist immersed in an experiment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#5   Charlie discovers puddles 

Charlie’s mother gives him time to explore on his own, and then responds to what has seized his interest. Developmental psychologists call this a joint attention episode, as child and parent are focused on the same thing. This’ joint attention episode’ is a natural teaching moment for acquiring new knowledge about the world, as well as developing language and expanding vocabulary—as the child learns all about the shared object of attention from his mother’s running commentary. “You’re in a puddle. Charlie, what does it feel like? Is it hot or cold? Is it wet or dry?”. (Charlie learns about properties of things, and new words, by direct experience). ”Do you see all the ripples you’re making? Just like the rain”. (The focus is now on cause and effect, perhaps a new word ‘ripple’). This is a master class in progress.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#4   Freya’s first puddle

Freya stops stomping puddles intermittently to look up and giggle with pure delight. While adults often dichotomize emotion and intellect, and researchers have focused mainly on the negative effects of emotion on learning, studies are beginning to suggest a link between positive emotions, such as joy and hope, and academic success (see, for example, Reinhard Pekrun). Freya’s gleeful responses show the natural joy that comes with learning, the exhilaration of discovering something new about the world around us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#3   What if you encounter a mud puddle…when you’re driving your John Deere tractor?

This is an opportunity for Karsen to develop his cognitive skills—problem-solving—with a little advice from his father. Rather than running up to help and rescue the boy, dad instructs him on what to do from a distance. More than just the purely cognitive aspects of problem-solving, Karsen gains a sense of self-efficacy which may boost his ability on future tasks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#2   Little girl in pink snowsuit discovers ice for the first time

This video has gone viral with almost one million views of the original post. The toddler finds a puddle that has frozen, and experiences ice for the first time. She’s somewhat younger than the other infants, and as she explores the ice patch with her feet and hands, she is constrained by her puffy snowsuit and proportions of her body. At this age, her head is one-fourth of her height (it is 1/8 in the typical adult) and her limbs are still relatively short. The consequences are worth seeing twice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the #1 video is…   A Kid, a Dog, and a Puddle.

For this one, please read the commentary after watching.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This remarkable video has gone viral and is approaching eight million views. Okay, perhaps it’s not his first puddle but small bodies of water have not lost their luster for this boy. What’s most striking is the uncanny coordination between the boy (Arthur) and his dog (Watson), a sort of interactional synchrony (a matching of emotion and behavior, which allows for a ‘dialogue’ to take place through action). Arthur does not drop the leash carelessly but places it down gently, looking back at Watson twice—and the dog returns his gaze. The dog seems to sense the boy’s intentions and waits patiently for his companion. Arthur is immersed in sensorimotor activity through circular reactions, repeatedly running through the puddle. But he keeps his loyal dog in mind, and reunites quickly with his pal to continue their journey in step together.

As I sifted through scores of videos of infants and children stomping and splashing in puddles, I was reminded that play is a child’s work. The foundations of everything a child needs to learn across the domains—cognitive, emotional, and social—are learned through play.

This is so beautifully illustrated in a moment of curiosity, discovery, and joy of a child, evoked by a small pool of water left after the rain.

Siu-Lan Tan is Associate Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, USA. She is primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford University Press 2013), the first book consolidating the research on the role of music in film, television, video games, and computers. A version of this article also appears on Psychology Today. Siu-Lan Tan also has her own blog, What Shapes Film? Read her previous blog posts.

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Image Credit: Jack in Puddle Photo by Robert Murphy. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Robert Murphy Flickr.

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Gene flow between wolves and dogs

By David Tarkhnishvili

Rapid development of molecular genetics in recent decades has revolutionized our understanding of life and the natural world. Scientists in the 1970s suggested that the grey wolf might be the sole ancestor of domestic dogs, but it was only in 1997 that Carles Vilà, Peter Savolainen, Robert Wayne, and their co-authors provided the conclusive evidence on this based on the analysis of molecular genetic markers.

It is generally assumed that dogs domesticated in East Asia; however, several recent studies challenged this hypothesis. In 2013, a team of scientists showed that the alleles (i.e. different versions of the same gene) of both modern dogs and the fossilized remains from Europe are in fact shared with local wolves.

One can suppose that genes of European wolves are descended both from the animals domesticated thousands of years ago and from wild grey wolves, which might hybridize with domestic dogs for thousands of years after domestication. The role of ongoing hybridization in the evolution of dogs is not easy to infer, even with our advanced molecular methods. In Europe and the US, since at least the 20th century, the mating of non-feral dogs (even large-bodied breeds) has usually been under human control. In many tropical countries, where dogs are not controlled so tightly, grey wolves don’t exist at all.

Natia Kopaliani and her co-workers from Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, have been studying wolf-dog conflict in the Caucasus since 2007. During recent years, they collected and processed samples of both wolves and dogs from the region with molecular genetic methods. Georgia, like other countries of the Caucasus, eastern Turkey, Iran, and Central Asia, has large livestock-guarding dogs, usually called here Caucasian or Georgian shepherds, which are traditionally free-ranging, and have uncontrolled contacts with grey wolves common to the area. The vast majority of the samples in this study were taken from the shepherd dogs guarding herds of sheep in the Central part of the Greater Caucasus Mountains.

Sequencing mitochondrial DNA showed us that as many as 37% of the dogs shared maternal haplotypes with the local wolves. The proportion of wolves with recent dog ancestry, detected using microsatellite markers, was almost two times higher than that of wolves studied earlier in southern Europe, where feral dogs are still present. More surprising still was that almost the same proportion (nearly 10%) of the guarding dogs possessed the detected hybrid ancestry. These results suggest that mutual gene flow between wolves and dogs in the Caucasus (and, possibly, in other mountainous regions of West and Central Asia) is common, most likely continued for millennia, and had a substantial impact on gene pool of both the domestic and the wild Canis lupus. It does not appear that the hybridization had any negative impact on the dog features important for humans. It is probable that shepherds used to exterminate the hybrids that demonstrated undesired behavior, but that most of the dogs with recent wolf ancestry were integrated into the dog population without problems.

This study may help our understanding of the process of the domestication of dogs and some other domestic animals. Attributing the ancestry of domestic dogs to a few animals from a small area is an oversimplification of the real pattern. Indeed, some domestic lineages may expand faster than the others may. However, wherever both the wild and the domestic forms coexist, they regularly hybridize and we have no reason to think this was not the case all the time since the earliest domestication events. Hybridization may produce animals with undesirable traits, but the owners rapidly eliminate them; occasional hybridization increases effective population size and may help to avoid inbred effect. This isolated, tightly controlled way of dog breeding is a more recent development. Modern dog-keepers select the animals with well-known pedigrees and keep them away from wild animals. Nowadays, it may sound strange to allow a pet dog to interbreed with a wolf. However, the permanent intensive selection of dogs with desirable features was most likely an instrument to keep the breeds “in shape” rather than a peculiar selection of the pedigrees.

David Tarkhnishvili is from the Institute of Ecology, Ilia State University, Georgia. He is a co-author of the paper ‘Gene Flow Between Wolf and Shepherd Dog Populations in Georgia (Caucasus)‘, which appears in the Journal of Heredity.

Journal of Heredity covers organismal genetics: conservation genetics of endangered species, population structure and phylogeography, molecular evolution and speciation, molecular genetics of disease resistance in plants and animals, genetic biodiversity and relevant computer programs.

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Image credits: Both images courtesy of Natia Kopaliani, co-author of the paper.

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The Roman conquest of Greece, in pictures

This sequence of photos roughly outlines the progress of the Roman takeover of Greece, from the first beginnings in Illyris (modern Albania) in 230 BCE to the infamous “destruction” of Corinth in 146 BCE. The critical figures of this swift takeover were two Macedonian kings, Philip V and Perseus, who were determined to resist Roman aggression. Many famous generals of the middle Roman Republic were involved with the Greek states as generals and diplomats, but the most critical of them was Titus Quinctius Flamininus. And then off in the wings, especially when he was fighting the Romans in Italy itself and monopolizing their resources, was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general. But Carthage too was destroyed in 146 by the Romans. Their grip on the Mediterranean was secure.




Phoenice
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This wealthy Greek town was the first to fall to Illyrian expansion, in 230 BCE. The Romans became concerned and sent an army across the Adriatic to quell the Illyrians. Thus began the Roman takeover of Greece.

Philip V
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The chief power on the Greek mainland was the kingdom of Macedon, ruled by Philip V. A vigorous young king, he was determined to drive the Romans from Greek soil. The clash of the superpowers became inevitable.

Hannibal
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At the same time as fighting Philip in Greece, the Romans were engaged in Italy itself with the Carthaginian general, Hannibal. When Philip and Hannibal entered into a treaty, the purpose of which was the defeat of Rome, the Romans became truly alarmed.

Flamininus
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The Second Macedonian War was managed for Rome by the young consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus. A competent general and a ruthless diplomat, he soon brought Philip V to his knees.

The Roman Senate
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After the defeat of Philip V in the First and Second Macedonian wars (214-205, 200-197), Macedon was a shadow of its former self. The Greek states began to turn instead to the Roman Senate for advice and help. In this way Rome retained power in Greece even when it had no army there.

Perseus Surrenders to Aemilius Paullus
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Philip V died in 179 and was succeeded by his son Perseus, the last king of Macedon. The Romans bullied him into war, and after his defeat he was imprisoned in Italy and what remained of Macedon was divided into four republics.

The Destruction of Corinth
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Twenty-two years after the final defeat of Macedon in 168, it was the turn of Greece itself. The Roman takeover was completed by the destruction of Corinth, symbol of Greek resistance.

Robin Waterfield is an independent scholar, living in southern Greece. In addition to more than twenty-five translations of works of Greek literature, he is the author of numerous books, including Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire, and most recently, Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece.

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Image credits: 1.  Phoenice, courtesy of Robin Waterfield. 2. Philip V. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 3. Hannibal by Sébastien Slodtz (French, 1655–1726). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 4. Quinctius Flamininus by PHGCOM. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 5. Cicero Denounces Catiline by Cesare Maccari. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 6. König Perseus vor Aemilius Paulus by Jean-François-Pierre Peyron. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 7. Le Dernier Jour de Corinthe by Tony Robert-Fleury. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Monthly etymology gleanings for May 2014

By Anatoly Liberman

As usual, many thanks for the letters, questions, and comments. I answered some of them privately, when I thought that the material would not be interesting to most of our readers. In a few cases (and this is what I always say) I simply took the information into account. My lack of reaction should not be misunderstood for indifference or ingratitude.

Spelling Reform

As could be expected, the question about what to do with spelling has attracted considerable attention. I view our discussion with a measure of wistful concern. If a miracle happened and tomorrow someone said that society wants to reform English spelling, we would begin fighting among ourselves and never come to an agreement. We would behave like all revolutionaries in the world: there would be Bolsheviks/Montagnards (“All at once,” “Off with his/her head,” and the Kingdom of Heaven on earth built according to the first five-year plan), Mensheviks/Girondists, and the rest. In this discussion I represent only myself and prefer to stick to several propositions, not because they are supported by some profound linguistic theory, but because in all scholarly work I am more interested in results than in methodology, though I understand that without methodology there can be no results. This attitude comes from observing half a century of linguistic research, mighty long on theory and woefully short on memorable achievements, except for producing an army of tenured faculty.

So here are my propositions.

The public will not accept a radical break with the past, so that, if we hope to get anywhere, we should work out a step-by-step plan and try to implement the reform gradually. I witnessed the fury of the opponents of a moderate spelling reform in Germany and the horror of the conservatives when a couple of hyphens were introduced in Russia about fifty years ago. “Step by step” should be defined. I only say: “Look well, O Wolves” (no trouble finding the source and context of this quotation).
Phonetic spelling is out of the question. The base (the Roman alphabet) should remain untouched. Transcription as a teaching tool is fine, but it has nothing to do with our goal.
The first steps should be extremely timid, almost unnoticeable, for instance, replacing sc in words like unscathed with sk, abolishing a few especially silly double letters, perhaps tampering with such low frequency bookish words as ph thisis and ch thonic, and so forth.
Once the public agrees to such innocent changes (assuming that it does), we may perhaps go on. Here is a list of other painless measures: Americanize words like center, color, program, dialog, canceled (this experiment has been tried, so that such forms are by now familiar on both sides of the Atlantic) and the suffix -ize; abolish some superfluous letters: acquaint, acquiesce (or acquiesce), g nash, k nock, intricate, and so it goes. My order is arbitrary, and the examples have been given at random.
At present, we have to find influential sponsors among publishers, journalists, politicians (especially those who deal with immigration), and lexicographers. So far, despite my plea, no one from the staff of our great dictionaries has participated in the discussion. Perhaps our best bet is to get publishers interested: after all, it is they who produce books. If someone knows whom to approach and how to begin, don’t keep your information secret. Under a bushel candles are invisible.

A word of thanks

I have never been able to understand how Stephen Goranson finds things. But the fact remains that he does. Many thanks for the references to pedigree and many others!

Why do words change their meaning?

To answer this question I need a thick volume titled Historical Semantics. Unable to provide such a volume in the present post, I’ll give two examples from our recent experience. Everybody knows that kid is a young goat and a child. The sense “child” appeared much later. It was first slang and then became a regular item of everyday vocabulary, though we still say that so-and-so has no children or that children under five are not admitted, rather than kids. Since we more often speak about young boys and girls than about young goats, dictionaries now sometimes list the sense “kid” before the original one. A person who is twenty years old is no longer a kid except when he (probably always a he) burns tires or throws bottles at cops. Then newspapers speak about drunken kids who misbehaved after their team had lost (or won). Hence a new meaning: kid “a criminal of college age.”  We seldom notice how such shifts occur.

Here is another example. A correspondent has recently thanked me for a short and concise answer to his question. I was not surprised, for I had been exposed to this usage before. Concise (which means “brief, condensed,” as in A Concise Dictionary) has been confused with precise; hence the change of meaning. The correspondent was undoubtedly grateful for my “short and precise” reply.

Not particularly unique.

Very unique

In a way, this is a continuation of the previous rubric. Another correspondent expressed his dismay at the phase given above. Very unique has been ridiculed more than once in my posts. Not long ago, I ran into the phrase particularly unique and rejoiced: here is something new. But, to make sure that I was not reinventing the wheel, I Googled for particularly unique: thousands of hits! Obviously, unique has almost lost its sense “one of a kind” and come to mean “unusual; exceptional.” We may rage, the way the heathen always do; however, the world will take no heed of us. A similar catastrophe has befallen the verb decimate “kill every tenth in a group.” Now it means “kill a large part of a group.” The etymology of both unique and decimate is still transparent (compare all kinds of uni- words, unicum, and decade). When the origin of the word is forgotten, it is even easier to fall into a semantic trap. But then this is what traps are made for.

Rather unique?

Hubba-hubba, copacetic, and gook: their etymology

A correspondent sent me a letter with suggestions about the origin of those three words. His letter is too long to copy here, so I would be glad if he posted his remarks as comments. He is aware of my post on hubba-hubba (March 5, 2008) but missed the one on copacetic (“Jes’ copacetic, boss,” July 5, 2006). Like many of his predecessors, he believes in the foreign origin of those three words. Here I should only say that the Hebrew etymology of copacetic has been refuted quite convincingly, but the main problem with borrowings is this: If we believe that an English word has been taken over from another language, we should show under what circumstances, in what milieu, and why the process took place.

Family names like White and Black

Walter Turner has already clarified this point in his comment. I can only add the name Green and say that I lost faith in human decency after I discovered the family name Heifer. Meet the Heifers!

Agreement the American way

(By the Associated Press) “Russia is one of the few countries in the world that harbor vast reserves of the untapped hydrocarbons.” This is perhaps a borderline case. One can argue that harbor goes with countries in a legitimate way. But this is probably not what was meant. After all, Russia is one of the countries that harbors…. Never mind what it harbors. It is only grammar that interests us. Right?

Triggering the world and explaining individuals, or how university administrators write

“It’s just a process to have that individual come into the office so they can be explained their rights and they can understand the process better.”
[Ms. X urges Mr. Y] to re-evaluate “rules and regularities that allow outside community members to so heavily trigger and target students and faculty on this campus.” That is why administrators are paid so well. Who else would try to explain inexplicable individuals or try to so gracefully and without compunctions split an infinitive for the sake of triggering and targeting students and faculty? Unique examples? Not particularly.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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Images: 1. Monstre by Rama. CC-BY-SA-2.0-fr via Wikimedia Commons. 2. Two-headed California Kingsnake by Jason Pratt.

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Memorial Day and the 9/11 museum in American civil religion

By Peter Gardella

Unlike the 4th of July with its fireworks or Thanksgiving with its turkeys, Memorial Day has no special object. But the new 9/11 Museum near the World Trade Center in New York has thousands of objects. Some complain that its objects are for sale, in a gift shop and because of the admission fee. Together, the old holiday and the new museum show what has changed and what remains constant about American civil religion.

For a century after Memorial Day began, it had its own date, May 30. That was lost in 1968, when Congress passed a law moving Memorial Day to the last Monday in May. Rather than interrupting the week whenever it falls, as July 4th still does, Memorial Day became the end of a long weekend. A search for Memorial Day parades finds as many parades happening on Sunday as on Monday. Some happen on Saturday.

These parades are not nearly as important as they were in the decades following World Wars One and Two, when veterans were much more numerous than they are now. The unpopularity of Vietnam also hurt Memorial Day parades. In my childhood, all grammar school children in my town marched on Memorial Day, but now even high school bands march reluctantly. Having parades to honor war dead came to seem to be celebrating war, and after Vietnam celebrating war was unacceptable. Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day, a day for visiting and decorating graves, and this quieter ceremony persists. On Memorial Day, the president still lays a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and a small crowd gathers for a speech.

Memorial Day Flagged Crosses, Waverly, Minnesota, by Ben Franske. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But the site of the World Trade Center drew large crowds in the first weeks after the attack. The 9/11 Memorial has been drawing millions since it opened in 2011, and the new Museum will draw millions more. It will become a pilgrimage site of American civil religion.

As Mayor Bloomberg said at the dedication ceremonies, the site of the World Trade Center will join Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a “sacred marker” and a “solemn gathering place.” The word “sacred” was used by many at the dedication, and this sense of being set apart marks the sites of civil religion. The word “solemn” was identified more than a century ago as an aspect of religious feeling by the psychologist and philosopher William James. Expressions of religion involve solemnity, respect for what is held sacred, even when triumphal pride or ecstasy may also be expressed. Such solemnity can be felt at older sites of American civil religion, like the Capitol or the White House, the Washington Monument, and the memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson. The new Martin Luther King Memorial continues a mood of solemnity combined with triumph. It’s a place where clean white stone invokes eternity.

But the 9/11 Memorial belongs to another tradition, finding the sacred in dirty objects. Twisted beams of steel and mangled fire trucks dominate a seven-story atrium. More intimate objects, like displays of sweatshirts that were for sale on that day, now covered in ash, and shoes worn by survivors as they fled the Twin Towers, and melted fax machines and rolodexes, are displayed under glass to help visitors identify with the human victims and their suffering. Voices from last cell phone calls can be heard. This power in everyday objects has appeared before in memorials to the Holocaust and in the museum on Ellis Island. Leaving objects on graves and memorials is new to American civil religion, but it is a practice with old roots, seen on the graves of slaves in the South and in the tombs of Egypt. Visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial surprised groundskeepers by leaving objects at that memorial when it opened, and people left objects along the fences that separated the streets of New York from Ground Zero in the months after September 11.

Questions have been raised about the stress on objects in the new museum. Some think that unidentified human remains should not be in the same building as a museum visited by tourists. According to some family members of victims, the gift shop profits from the deaths of their loved ones to support the salaries of administrators. Some object to the cafe. Even more object to the $24 admission fee. One answer might be to keep the gift shop and cafe but to eliminate any admission fee, following the examples of Smithsonian and National Park Service sites, some of which also contain human remains.

Many new forms of American civil religion stress death and the ancestors, not God and the future. The new museum goes down into the earth to bedrock, rather than rising toward heaven. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which follows the line of its landscape and honors the dead, and the Pearl Harbor Memorial, which centers on the sunken wreck of the U.S.S. Arizona and the dead that it contains, the 9/11 Memorial and the 9/11 Museum both emphasize descent. In the Memorial, cascades of water, the largest man-made waterfalls in the world, flow from bronze parapets etched with the names of the dead into the former footprints of the Twin Towers. The sound of the water cancels street noise. The sight of the water falling into the squares at the center of each footprint suggests the underworld journey.

But next to the Memorial and Museum rises the spire of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. This pairing echoes the rise of the Statue of Liberty, next to the buildings of Ellis Island where immigrants were examined and sometimes rejected. However much expressions of American civil religion change, they still affirm personal freedom, the triumph of the human person over all difficulties, and even over death.

Peter Gardella is Professor of World Religions at Manhattanville College and author of American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (Oxford, 2014). His previous books are Innocent Ecstasy (Oxford, 1985), on sex and religion in America; Domestic Religion, on American attitudes toward everyday life; and American Angels: Useful Spirits in the Material World. He is now working on The World’s Religions in New York City: A History and Guide and on Birds in the World’s Religions (with Laurence Krute).

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How to change behaviour

By Adam Ferrier

So, recently there was another report from the scientists of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) telling us that climate change (what used to be called global warming) is upon us and there are real changes happening now. The scientists urged us to heed their warning and change our behaviours, and we ignored them in droves. Why we ignored them is interesting. The information they are giving us is dire. The environment is already changing for the worse, and will continue to change. We must all act now to avert some pretty disastrous outcomes.

However, the real issue is that humans just don’t really care about the information they have to hand. We never have. We’ve just lived through the wonderfully coined ‘information age’, a time where all of the world’s information was organised for us and made available to all of our fingertips. How many of the world’s problems did all of this easily accessible information solve? None.

The presentation of information alone is rarely a powerful enough motivator to get people to change. Especially when the information is complex, negative, or about the future (such as information about climate change). Due to various cognitive biases and a desire to believe everything is ok just the way it is we tend to tune out. How then can scientists get their message across, and effect genuine behavioural change within the broader community?

Well, there is a very handy behavioural change tool in existence, one that has proved itself capable of changing behaviour en-mass time and time again. This tool has been used to get people to loose weight, make them move more, volunteer their time to good causes, and cook healthier meals for themselves. This tool is one that if scientists could get hold of it, and use its powers effectively could get people to change their behaviours and start to look after the environment. The tool is called ‘reality TV’.

It pains me to say this, but over the course of the last 15 years, high-rating reality TV shows have continually proved themselves to be the best changers of mass behaviour. In my country of origin, Australia, we only need to look at what Bondi Rescue did for surf club enrolments, what The Block has done for the home renovation industry, and what Masterchef has done for the sales of Wagyu beef. Every country would have its own proven examples of reality TV changing the behaviour of the masses.

Reality TV is a great behavioural change agent because we like to be entertained first and informed second. An entertaining platform helps to make information that will be useful easier to digest. However, this is not all. To change people’s behaviour, you need to consider their motivation to do something and how easy it is for them to do it. Reality TV shows are a great way of increasing motivation for a particular activity as they make something feel like it’s already popular and thereby change the social norms (i.e. if there is a reality TV show about something it must be popular; therefore, I should get involved). People like to conform so if they think others are already doing something, they’ll do it too. However, reality TV shows also make a new behaviour easier to do by modelling it. Ever watched a reality cooking show? They model how to do the behaviour. So reality TV, in more ways than one, increases people’s motivation to undertake that behaviour and makes it easier by skilling people up via modelling.

So, the people who can make us start taking proactive steps towards saving the environment are the producers of reality TV. They will also need to convince the broadcasters that a TV show about the environment will rate. Thus, the show needs to be an extremely compelling reality TV series where you have lovable winners and lots of losers battling it out to save the environment.

Those who come up with good ways to make a difference to the planet will, just like the contestants on the cooking shows who dream up a great way to cook cous cous, act as models for all of us. We, too, will adopt the winning behaviours, and momentum will build to start acting in a pro-environmental way, becoming mainstream very quickly.

Unfortunately, there is a saying in TV that states ‘green doesn’t rate’, and this is largely because they have been treated as overly worthy, or blandly in the past. No one has sensationalised and popularised environmental issues as only reality TV can. This means, even more so, that we have to dumb down the environmental messages and turn them into a reality TV show. There you go Simon Cowell, here’s your new big challenge. You got the world singing, now get us all to take positive action to save our wonderful planet.

Adam Ferrier is a consumer psychologist and Chief Strategy Officer at independent creative:media agency Cummins & Partners. His book Can we end poverty? 

Mary Lou Williams, jazz legend

Wednesday, 28 May marks the 33rd anniversary of the death of Mary Lou William. Williams was an African-American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and contemporary of both Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, is often overlooked as a key contributor to the jazz movement of the 20th century.

Born in Atlanta, Williams had her first taste of arranged music while attending church in her hometown. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1915 only spiked her interest in music, specifically jazz, as the city was a stop on the Theater Owners Booking association route, a vaudeville circuit for African-American performers.

Williams was first able to truly experiment with her musical talents as the pianist and arranger for the band Andy Kirk’s 12 Cloud’s of Joy. She came to this opportunity through her husband, who was the saxophonist for the band. Williams continued to arrange for the group creating household hits like “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Little Joe from Chicago,” and “Roll ‘em” until her departure from the band in 1942.

Mary Lou Williams by William Gottlieb, c. 1946. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Williams’s arrangements were not limited to Andy Kirk’s band. Her compositions were featured by jazz greats including, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford. The New York Philharmonic performed Williams’s Zodiac Suite at Carnegie Hall in 1946. The Suite was composed of twelve arrangements, each labeled for a sign of the zodiac and all inspired by different jazz musicians.

Facing gender barriers in the states that hindered wide-spread success, Williams traveled to Europe in the 1950s. After performing in both London and Paris, Williams’s returned to the Unites States and simultaneously entertained a brief intermission in her musical career to concentrate her efforts on more religious pursuits.

Returning to music in the late 1950s, Williams reentered the scene with more of a devout lens. Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Williams composed a number of religious arrangements and musical masses including “Hymn in Honor of St. Martin De Porres,” “Mass for Lenten Season,” and most notably “Mass for Peace and Justice” which was later renamed “Mary Lou’s Mass.” This last mass was the musical backdrop to Alvin Ailey’s series of dances presented under the same name and was also performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1975 as the first jazz music performed in this iconic cathedral.

Williams returned to secular composing in the last decade of her life and also worked as an artist-in-residence at Duke University up until her death in 1981.

Grove Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its lengthy entry on the renowned jazz singer Mary Lou Williams. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Pulling together or tearing apart

By Bruce Currie-Alder

Is thinking on international development pulling itself together or tearing itself apart? The phrase ‘international development’ can be problematic, embracing multiple meanings to those inside the business, but often meaningless to those outside of it.

On the surface, the Millennium Development Goals and debates towards a post-2015 agenda imply a move towards consensus. The past 60 years saw the development agenda embrace political independence, economic growth, human needs, sustainability, poverty reduction, and human capabilities. Each represented a particular understanding of what constitutes “development” and how to achieve it. Once dominated by economics and political science, the ideas and concepts used to explain development now draw on insights from across the natural and social sciences. Beyond academic debate, such ideas motivate real-life organizations and practitioners and shape their actions.

A female doctor with the International Medical Corps examines a woman patient at a mobile health clinic in Pakistan. Photo by DFID/Russell Watkins; UK Department for International Development. CC BY 2.0 via DFID Flickr

After interacting with over 90 writers over three years, I am convinced that thinking on development is tearing apart. Contemporary thinking comes from an increasingly diverse set of locations, with Beijing, New Delhi, and Rio de Janeiro challenging and enriching the ideas emanating from London, New York, and Paris. The rise of regional powers and localized approaches to development are reshaping our understanding of how human societies change over time. Fundamentally, the policy space for “international development” is tearing into three separate dialogues.

Sovereign problems concern the use of national wealth. All polities face real constraints in public finance and our societies face analogous challenges, such as: expanding access to and improving the quality of education and health, designing social protection to ensure a minimum wellbeing for everyone, or encouraging opportunities for entrepreneurs and minorities. Dialogue and action on sovereign problems involve national treasuries, political parties, and (mis)informed citizens. One can be inspired by experience abroad, but solutions must be tailored to fit within local cultural, political, and economic reality. This aspect of international development is growing.

Common problems concern international public goods. A sizable portion of our problems spill across borders and potential solutions require cooperation among different polities. Climate change, emergent diseases, and trade regimes surpass the ability of any one country and are affected by the choices made by others (indeed the nation-state is seldom the most useful unit of analysis). Common problems involve separate actors, ranging from municipalities and hospitals, to trade negotiators and the alphabet soup of international forums (IPCC, WHO, IFIs). After the rise of globalization, this aspect of international development is holding steady given the reality of a multi-polar world.

Foreign problems concern how to respond to troubled places abroad. Six decades of development saw substantial increases in life expectancy, human rights, and literacy. Yet there remains a stubborn set of poverty hotspots, ungoverned spaces, and fragile states where life continues to be nasty, brutish, and short. Dialogue and action involve foreign ministries, aid agencies, and NGOs. There are encouraging signs that this aspect of international development is in decline. The long-term trend witnessed a decrease in inter-state conflict and a dwindling list of low-income countries reliant on foreign aid. As such, the agenda is narrowing towards humanitarian relief, rural development, and state-building in remote locations.

This triad of sovereign-common-foreign offers one potential typology for the future evolution of thinking currently gathered under “international development”. Put more simply, when world leaders meet, the problems they discuss fit into the categories of mine-ours-theirs: those involving dialogue at home, those that require coordinated action across borders, and those related to hotspots beyond our borders.

In short, the label of “international development” has outlived its usefulness and is tearing apart in both academics and practice. For example, in the United Kingdom there is a tension between “development studies” focused on low-and-middle income countries, and “development sciences” applying technology to the needs of the poor. Meanwhile the range of organizations that engage in development has expanded, diversified, and coalesced into specialized communities. Once the exclusive purview of aid agencies and international organizations, there is an increasingly role for national treasuries, domestic charities, and diasporas in addressing different problems.


Looking forward, it seems likely that what is described as “international development” is destined to become a historic juncture, describing a period when we jumbled things together differently.

Bruce Currie-Alder is Regional Director, based in Cairo, with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). He is an expert in natural resource management, and on the policies that govern public research funding and scientific cooperation with developing countries. His previous experience includes facilitating corporate strategy, contributing to Canada’s foreign policy, and work in the Mexican oil industry. He co-edited International Development: Ideas, Experience and Prospects (Oxford 2014) which traces the evolution of thinking about international development over sixty years. Currie-Alder holds a Master’s in Natural Resource Management from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in Public Policy from Carleton University.

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