Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- The NSA Claims It Can’t Even Search Its Own Emails
- Why Health Care Inflation May Lead to Cheaper Health Care
- Would Amelia Earhart Have Been an Aviator Today?
- What Makes You So Smart, Lord Browne?
- The Cult of Amazon
| The NSA Claims It Can’t Even Search Its Own Emails Posted: 24 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT  The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology. “This is an agency that’s charged with monitoring millions of communications globally and they can’t even track their own internal communications in response to a FOIA request.”“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added. I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts. A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees. I reached out to the NSA press office seeking more information but got no response. It’s actually common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees email as part of internal investigations or legal discovery. “It’s just baffling,” says Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This is an agency that’s charged with monitoring millions of communications globally and they can’t even track their own internal communications in response to a FOIA request.” Federal agencies’ public records offices are often underfunded, according to Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at University of Maryland and a longtime observer of FOIA issues. But, Daglish says, “If anybody is going to have the money to engage in evaluation of digital information, it’s the NSA for heaven’s sake.” This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Why Health Care Inflation May Lead to Cheaper Health Care Posted: 24 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  The recent analysis by Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s Health Research Institute which predicted a drop in health inflation rates from 7.5 percent this year to 6.5 percent in 2014 was hailed by many as good news. And yet, both figures remain significantly higher than the general inflation rate, which stood at 1.1 percent as of April, and represent a continued rise in health-care prices in real-dollar terms. Between 2005 and 2012, health-care spending in this country increased by 40 percent. And even though health-care spending already consumes almost 18 percent of GDP, this assessment and many others seem to indicate that that percentage will only continue to grow, diverting ever-more money into the insatiable maw of the health-care system and away from investment in infrastructure, education, and jobs creation. But could there be a silver lining? As patients start bearing the genuine cost of their care, they will start behaving like real consumers and become much more attentive to price.One of the reasons that health-care spending is so high is because of inflated overhead and administrative costs. One assessment done several years ago calculated those costs to be as high as 31 cents for every dollar spent, almost double the percentage in Canada, for example. Under Obamacare, efforts are being made to rein in these costs. Large-group insurance plans, not including organizations that are self-insured, are required to keep overhead spending at or below 15 percent; for smaller-group insurance plans the figure is at or below 20 percent. Plans that do not meet these benchmarks face penalties in the form of rebates they must pay back to consumers. In 2012, the total amount returned as rebates approached $1.3 billion. While at first glance that may appear to be a lot of money, it's not for an industry that consumes $2.5 trillion annually. These rebates work out to 0.05 percent of total health-care spending. Fifteen percent of $2.5 trillion, however, is much more: $375 billion. Now that's a lot of money. More and more, health-care expenses once paid by employers are being shifted to consumers in the forms of higher co-payments and deductibles. And as the rate of health inflation continues to outpace that of general inflation, these trends will accelerate, for the simple reason that without this migration the cost of providing health insurance at its current levels of coverage will become too prohibitive for employers to bear. And this is where the silver lining comes in. The more this cost shifting occurs, the faster the demise of the current model of third-party payor insurance, which covers everything from flu shots to lung transplants. Health insurance will evolve into something that makes a lot more economic sense: actual insurance that protects against financial ruin because of catastrophic illness. Most routine medical care services, however, will be paid for by patients, out of pocket and through health savings accounts that accrue over years and into which employers and employees contribute. This transformation of who pays for health care, and how it is paid for, will have two very positive effects on health-care spending. The first will be the elimination of third-party payors' overhead and administrative margin from the cost of all but the most expensive care. This will immediately eliminate the need for the built-in 15-20 percent mark-up for administrative costs included in current charges and in future ones through Obamacare (and which in practice is often exceeded, as witnessed by the rebate pay-outs). The second, more significant consequence will be that as patients start bearing the genuine cost of their care, they will start behaving like real consumers and become much more attentive to price. Once health-care services provision is transformed into a true marketplace in which prices are driven both by supply and consumer demand, competition between providers should result in prices falling even further. The existing model, in which prices are determined through negotiation between service providers and third-party payors, leaving patients who pay out of pocket with the highest bills, would quickly collapse. If your doctor had ordered a chest X-ray, for example, you’d make some phone calls and decide where to get it based upon any number of factors, including price, instead of defaulting to the most expensive facility because that happened to be where your physician works. Likewise, even though you currently pay both for the X-ray and for its interpretation by a radiologist, you might elect to forgo the interpretation if your own physician were able to read the film himself, thus saving yourself the additional expense. Clearly, this doesn't necessarily need to be an all-or-nothing proposition. It would be advisable to decide that certain health services would be covered by government funding, whether through the catastrophic insurance policies or bodies such as Medicaid and Medicare for those unable to fund health savings accounts. (Even under Obamacare, the number of uninsured is projected to remain close to 30 million.) Among these services, for example, might be preventive medicine such as prenatal and newborn care; childhood vaccines; and screening for cancer, diabetes, and hypertension in patients deemed to be at higher risk for their development. All of these are cost-effective in that they keep the population healthier and reduce overall health-care expenditures for society. By not shifting their cost directly onto consumers, people will be less inclined to forgo them. Cost-shifting is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it results in reduced overhead costs and leads to lower prices because consumers are more discriminating about what they're willing to pay. And fortunately, this unintended consequence of what now appears to be the unstoppable rise in health inflation may actually lead to significant reductions in health-care spending in the not-too-distant future. |
| Would Amelia Earhart Have Been an Aviator Today? Posted: 24 Jul 2013 09:43 AM PDT  Today is pilot Amelia Earhart’s birthday. With Charles Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers, the enduring figure of American aviation’s golden age was born in Kansas on this date in 1897, and lived only 40 years (or did she…) before mysteriously disappearing over the the Pacific with co-pilot Fred Noonan. The duo’s presumed fatal crash brought a tragic end to their then-daring attempt to circumnavigate the globe, followed by the public of the time the way the moon shot would be decades later, or a middling Jay-Z album is now. Earhart’s large role in the early history of American aviation might suggest that, as an industry, flying offered a more open-minded professional culture than other businesses. Women had only won the right to vote in the U.S. just over a decade before Earhart was helming her era’s space shuttle. Studies of the aviation industry, however, show that a century after Earhart, flying remains an overwhelmingly narrow labor force, with barely five percent of commercial pilots being women, and numbers even lower for most ethnic minorities. Flying remains an overwhelmingly narrow labor force, with barely five percent of commercial pilots being women, and numbers even lower for most ethnic minorities.In the late 1990s, the Air Force commissioned a study, “Difficulties in Accessing a Representative Pilot Force,” looking for the reasons behind its inability to place anyone but a white man in the pilot’s chair. The military, whose trained flyers often work in commercial aviation after leaving the service, found that black officers made up only two percent of its pilot corps, and Hispanics between one and two percent. Despite recruitment efforts, that hadn’t changed by the start of the Iraq War, and the numbers remain low. The study claimed that the problem in part was that flying is one of the military's top jobs, requiring the top recruits. But the country's top minority students showed little interest in becoming military pilots.
Women currently make up between three and six percent of commercial airline pilots, according to Women in Aviation, a pilot’s organization. The U.S. has about 50,000 commercial fliers, of which about 450 are women. The reasons appear in part to be structural. CNN looked at aviation’s lack of diversity in 2011, and noted that it costs about $100,000 to train for a commercial aviation rating. To avoid that cost many would-be pilots enlist in the military, where they can exchange a few years of service for tax-funded flight school. But then the old trap returns. The military is improving its gender and ethnic balance since its first studies in the 1990s, but slowly. Women were first allowed to receive Air Force basic flight training in 1976 and as navigators the following year, but could qualify for fighter jet training starting only 20 years ago, in 1993. The Air Force Personnel Center reports that, as of June 30 of this year, of the nearly 330,000 people in the Air Force, 725 were women assigned as pilots, and 265 were navigators. Even if every one of those people retired and went into commercial aviation, they would represent less than two percent of the country’s professional pilot corps. Among the more aggressive companies hiring outside flying’s usual mode appears to be parcel company FedEx. In March, FedEx pilot Gerry Dupree, a former Navy flier, claimed in an interview he’d given to a curious business school student that the military training issue remains central to the problem.
The statistics for flight attendants are moving much faster toward balance than the ones for the flight crews. A study cited by the Population Reference Bureau, which tracks demographic trends, found that the ratio of male flight attendants to female rose from just over 19 men for every 100 women in the job in 1980, to over 26 men per 100 women in 2007. The profession is still overwhelmingly female, but the trend showed an increase toward parity, where similar measures in the pilots’ positions remained flat. Ethnic and racial representation has also moved drastically for cabin crew jobs, while still far short of representative.
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| What Makes You So Smart, Lord Browne? Posted: 24 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT The windows in the office of Lord Browne overlook the roof of the Royal Academy of Arts. “Whenever I need inspiration I look outside the window and I can see statues of Cicero, Archimedes, Plato, and others,” he says as we talk over Skype. “It’s tough to compete with my view.” Browne, currently the president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, made his name and his millions as group chief executive of BP, a position he resigned from in 2007. He is a man of many talents and varied interests, and “a physicist who went into business, a CEO who prefers collecting ceramics and 18th-century Italian prints, an art connoisseur who understands profit margins, and a political guru who knows the difference between fusion and fission” as the Times of London once wrote. Browne spoke with Pacific Standard about the value of ideas versus execution, old master engravings, and why politicians should listen to artists. When you were growing up in school, did you feel like you were smarter than most people? Did you have a peer group that you would study with to stay intellectually stimulated? When I went to Cambridge, I was a scientist. I did natural science and physics, but a lot of my friends were from outside those subjects. I found it really interesting to talk to them about history, law, and economics compared with physics and chemistry. I found that stretching and exciting, and it’s why I loved Cambridge. That’s interesting that you consciously sought out people outside your field. I have this theory that people equate math and science with genius because it’s much harder to understand than a sentence. I hope I have done that. I’ve just written a book, Seven Elements That Have Changed the World, and I do try and tangle big problems like “Why is uranium unstable and prone to blowing up?” and “How does a microchip work?” without actually talking down to people. I think you can use simple analogies and simple descriptions to invoke someone’s mind as much as you could with language like Shakespeare’s. You’re obviously very smart and that can be intimidating sometimes. Have you ever been in a situation where you had to intentionally dumb yourself down? There are a lot of really smart people around, and I speak to a lot of them. I’m very privileged to do that because I lead these different lives, so I get to meet people who come from extraordinary backgrounds whether that’s science, history, engineering, or the arts. I meet artists who see life in a way that I couldn’t see it until they explain it to me. They look at political problems in a way a politician never would. And then I meet lots of politicians who have an entirely different view. It’s a very privileged life that I lead and I’m very grateful for it. Whatever I’ve learned, I’ve learned from great professors to start with at Cambridge and Stanford, and then mostly through the people I’ve met traveling the world doing business and doing things that excite me. “There’s nothing worse than working for somebody who thinks they have all the answers.”What do you read? Do you do any formal education anymore? One of the things I found most attractive about mathematics is that you can do it from first principle. You don’t have to go in with a huge amount of understanding. That’s why I’m not so good at history. I can’t remember things. I never could as a kid. It was strange how chemistry was taught to me; it was all memory. It’s the same thing with history and art. Great connoisseurs of history remember a tremendous amount of things. I try to do it in a slightly different way. I try to focus on basic themes and basic ideas. That means I understand it a bit better, but I’m not very good at reading a book and remembering it photographically. How did you decide to start collecting those engravings? How many piece do you have in your collection? Do you turn to the same few people for advice or to a wider swath? Who’s the smartest person you know? |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Publishers and writers can lament books becoming an irrelevant part of American culture, but compared to the hermetically sealed world of classical music they have nothing to complain about. Even the most inconsistent of readers will occasionally trek into a Barnes & Noble and be exposed, if only unwittingly, to something current. But how many living composers can you name? And what if you weren’t allowed to say Hans Zimmer? Classical music has reached the point where albums of Thomas Tallis songs now bear the label: “Features Spem in Alium, as mentioned in Fifty Shades of Grey.” Movies are classical music’s primary mode of transmission these days. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has become synonymous with Dignified Emotional Distress. IMDb counts no fewer than 10 uses each of his Für Alina, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, and Fratres variations in movies dating back to the '60s. The Italian romance I am Love (fueled by a fluent Tilda Swinton) is driven by a soundtrack of the American composer John Adams’ greatest hits. And the first of Steve Reich’s Three Movement for Orchestra pops up in The Hunger Games. This isn’t even taking into account the voluminous output of Philip Glass, who seems to have given every third movie of the last 20 years its own matching set of arpeggios. If none of these names mean anything to you, don’t worry; The classical music world has always preferred its dead giants to its living ones and has long resented anyone born after 1850. In Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston you may have a decent chance of hearing the work of one of these composers or their contemporaries performed in a concert, sandwiched between some Beethoven and some Brahms, but if you don’t live in a cultural hotspot (or Houston), you’re out of luck. I still find myself on Amazon, reading reviews, because somewhere in those shoestring years I discovered that there was no better place on the Internet, not even Wikipedia, to learn about Valentin Silvestrov or Pierre Boulez or Morton Feldman.Where the physical world falters, the Internet will pick up the slack. YouTube has become a repository of recorded recitals and ripped albums. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera both offer plans to stream their concerts live. And, of course, Google can help you find anything you want to know about a composer, provided you’ve heard of them before. The 20th century had a profound impact on classical music. It’s understandable that composers would cease feeling obligated to write pleasant music after witnessing Hiroshima and Auschwitz, but it’s also understandable that ticket buyers wouldn’t feel obligated to sit through some of the results—or at least not as many ticket buyers as in the 19th century. Television and movies added alternative options to evening entertainment, and radios meant that those who might have previously dressed up and gone out could now stay at home and do the crossword in their bathrobes. None of these arguments even takes into consideration the influence of Elvis. Dodecacophony, serialism, minimalism, neo-romanticism, post-minimalism, neo-classicism, high mannerist: schools of all varieties sprang up and argued with one another. Inspired by the atonal works of Arnold Schönberg, composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen began assembling music interested with structure and the limits of form that are, in their way, awe-inspiring but not necessarily … approachable. A generation later an American sound emerged, influenced as much by jazz and rock 'n' roll and primal concepts of rhythm as by abstract expressionism, and a movement generally known as minimalism slowly worked its way into the establishment. In the '80s and '90s traditional tonality began to make a comeback, and the 2000s have brought us an ever-deepening dependence on electronics and— We’re getting off course. You can already see the impossibility of discussing the 20th century in any concise, linear way. There was just so much happening: tonality was never completely abandoned, and rigorous atonality is alive and well. ONE LAZY AFTERNOON IN One lazy afternoon in my grandparents’ living room, I was listening to the classical music station in the upper reaches of their premium cable bundle when The Blue Danube ended and the final section of Philip Glass’ opera, Einstein on the Beach, began. I thought the sustained hum of an electric organ was being piped directly into my cerebellum. I was frozen and slack jawed. Frozen until my mother came into the room and said that she had a headache and we were going home. I pleaded to stay for a few more minutes, just so I could hear the end of the piece, but she said, “Now.” As I forced myself to turn off the TV I heard a violin setting in. In my room back home I didn’t even set down my backpack before searching Amazon for “philip glass einstein.” That was all I could remember about the song. I spotted, on the first page of results, the album art that had been on the screen. The name of the album was Songs From the Trilogy. According to J. Anderson, in a review dated January 19, 2006, “Glass’ best work may be found in his opera scores, and this disc represents the cream of the cream…. It’s a great introduction disc for those seeking to learn more about [his] operas without having to invest in the full length recordings.” The $12 (after shipping) CD emptied my bank account. More, more. A few months later I spent my Christmas money on Steve Reich’s Different Trains and Music for 18 Musicians (both on the Nonesuch label) and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (the ECM recording). These purchases were the product of literal hours of agony. I had 40 dollars (it was a lean year) and didn’t want to waste any of it on a “bad” piece. Knowing nothing about any of these composers except what I’d gleaned in a single semester of music appreciation at the community college, I wallowed in their backlist on Amazon. I read review after review, trying to quantify and catalog this music that so perplexed all of the people to whom I played it. So perplexed me, too. I, who am just this side of tone deaf. Matters grew even thornier as I tried to locate not just a composer’s “best” piece but the “best” recording of that piece. I settled on two compositions by the same composer (Steve Reich) because my other option was the Nonesuch recording of John Adams’ opera Nixon in China and it cost $25 for a used copy. Reviewer “new music guy” said that the Nonesuch recording of Different Trains was “perhaps both Reich’s best work and the Kronos Quartet’s finest performance.” But reviewer “Dan” said that the “greatness” of Music for 18 was “hard to describe” and that “if you are seeking an introduction to experimental music, there is no better place to start.” I chose the Arvo Pärt because I was trying very hard to be a Christian and thought that God might be displeased if I spent all of the money He’d granted me on secular music. (I’m conscious, now, of the anti-Semitism inherent in this line of thought: Reich has composed some rather sacred Jewish music, but to my mind this didn’t count.) From 2006 to 2008 I collected albums all in the same way: brutal deliberation followed by a heady, impulsive plunge (PROCEED TO CHECKOUT > CONFIRM ORDER) and then a week of buyer’s remorse until the disk arrived. Eventually I started downloading .mp3s, but this brought with it a new wrinkle: sometimes it was cheaper to still order the used disk; often, after shipping, I could save a dollar. I was crippled with guilt whenever I bought a digital album; I saw that extra dollar I’d spent for convenience as frivolous. These days, I have Spotify. I pay $10 a month and have access to almost everything I want to listen to. I also have another $10 every now and then for albums not in Spotify’s catalog. And yet I still find myself on Amazon, reading reviews, because somewhere in those shoestring years I discovered that there was no better place on the Internet, not even Wikipedia, to learn about Valentin Silvestrov or Pierre Boulez or Morton Feldman. HARLAN ELLISON SAYS THAT he doesn’t “take a piss without getting paid for it.” I am not quite so indispensable, but I still don’t like to write for free. I don’t maintain a blog and and I produce, maybe, three tweets a week. I have not posted a review on Amazon since I was 14 years old and determined that Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders was “not her best, but still good.” I found the experience of writing this and my five other reviews to be unsatisfying because they brought me neither money nor notoriety. And yet thousands of people post reviews on Amazon every day, often highly sophisticated reviews and ones written at great length, for nothing. “I am a frustrated intellectual and writer,” says Robin Friedman, recently retired from the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. Scott Morrison, retired doctor, played piano as an amateur his entire life. He has recently retired from the piano, as well, due to arthritis in his hands. “But I remain an enthusiast,” he says. “I love music as I’ve always loved it … and write three or so reviews every week. I have all this free time now!” Grady Harp has reviewed on Amazon for 15 years and, as of July 5, 2013, has 9,415 reviews to his name. (Robin Friedman and Scott Morrison have 1,617 and 2,554, respectively.) Harp can’t remember the first item he reviewed for the site. “It could have been a book, a CD of classical music, a film—I would try to find out from Amazon but it has become such a huge megamonster that they simply do not respond to any questions about anything.” He says that LiteraryAficionado.com, where he also posts reviews, “is the most pure site I know.” But it’s difficult to tell how Harp defines “pure.” Of the first 12 reviews on LiteraryAficionado.com (all of them effusive praise for either self-published or small-press books), 11 are written by Harp and one by “Joe Madia,” who ends his glowing review of Ronald Brown’s Memoirs of a Modern Day Drifter with the disclaimer, “Ronald Brown has studied creative writing with me for 3 years. I served as editor on this book from concept to final draft.” While Harp offers no similar disclaimers, Garth Hallberg wrote a profile of him for Slate in 2008. About the five-star review Harp gave Hallberg’s debut novel: “My publicist confirmed that she’d solicited Mr. Harp’s review.” In the world of self-publication, solicited reviews seem to have become, if not standard practice, then at least not unexpected. Even I, if only unwittingly, paid for glowing, if lumpy, reviews of my self-published erotic paranormal thriller. But it’s hard to imagine there’s enough money in the modern classical music industry for practitioners to afford light bulbs or toilet paper for their offices, let alone whatever the going rate is for Amazon’s top reviewers. It seems more likely, then (call me naïve), that Harp’s five stars for the recordings of Pierre Boulez conducting his own work, or his four stars for Simon Rattle conducting Schönberg, are rooted in genuine enthusiasm. He does likely receive his CDs for free. Scott Morrison tells me that he got his start in reviewing after some musical friends encouraged him to send a few “audition” pieces to the Naxos record label in 2000 and, 13 years later, he still receives “box after box” of disks. Morrison, however, insists that he “calls ‘em as he hears ‘em.” He recently called pianist Ignay Lisieki’s recording of Schumann’s Fantasie, “possibly the worst I’ve ever heard.” “This is not a list of the most popular or influential contemporary composers, but rather the BEST, according to my personal aesthetic judgment. It includes music that appeals to me either emotionally or intellectually, in varying ratios.”Not only do top reviewers frequently receive free product from distributors hoping for their blessing; Amazon does, in a way, compensate their top reviewers with its Vine Voice program. Those who are invited to participate in the program are sent free product, but they are not otherwise paid for their participation. Amazon collects money from the participating vendors (which they choose not to disclose) while reviewers receive another form of compensation. The classical fields can be blood sport. Robin Friedman says that “passions on Amazon run high.” Grady Harp puts it another way. In his first email to me he said that he has to “put up with the occasional diatribes from the Dark Group of Negative People… (you probably know who they are as everyone seems to be burned by the same gang on their periodic KKK type rides).” It was this passion that first seduced me, when I was a kid with 20 dollars to my name, into believing there was a “best” version of anything. I longed for the security of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs my grandparents left on their breakfast table; they featured “The Best Inflatable Mattress” and “The Best Nose Hair Trimmers.” This Toaster Oven earned the highest rating from the Hammacher Schlemmer Institute because it quickly cooked pizza and cookies and maintained a constant cooking temperature. But I could find no such peace of mind on Amazon. Thomas Plotkin of West Hartford, Connecticut, calls the Sony recording of Berg’s Wozzeck, “The Best Recording of the First True 20th Century Opera.” But reviewer E. Lyons of Anne Arbor, Michigan, says that Karl Böhm on DG “…even makes Wozzeck, a violently atonal anguish-fest, sound mellow to my ears (at least as much as is possible with this opera) and really, really beautiful … I can’t stop listening to this recording.” And yet, Alexander Z. Damyanovich of Flesherton, Ontario, Canada, says, “While there are a few things I could like Böhm for in terms of individual instruments’ expression … there’s no question that” the Claudio Abbado recording (also on DG) “beats it hands down.” And God help you if you want to buy something even more mainstream. There are arguments in the comments sections of reviews for Georg Solti’s Ring Cycle on Decca that literally span years. “The concept of the ‘best’ recording is fraught, even specious,” says Morrison. “I’m sure I’ve rated some recordings as being the ‘best’ but I try to steer away from that unless I’m being lazy in my thinking.” Friedman tries hard to avoid describing a CD as the “best” as well. “I am seldom familiar with ‘all’ the recordings of a work," he says, "and, even if I were, it seems to me presumptuous and unhelpful to describe one as the best.” David Bryson (1,110 reviews) says that a “best” recording is “always best according to whatever criteria I think appropriate in the given instance, and I state what those are. It’s not usually some ‘absolute’ although there is sometimes a runaway winner.” One man not afraid to throw around “best’s” is Richard Hutchinson (“Autonomeus”), author of 1,042 reviews. He begins his Listmania List “The Best Contemporary Composers” with, “This is not a list of the most popular or influential contemporary composers, but rather the BEST, according to my personal aesthetic judgment. It includes music that appeals to me either emotionally or intellectually, in varying ratios.” He even goes on to rank this best-of list, naming Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, and Gyorgy Ligeti as the top three composers in the world since World War II. It’s difficult to tell if Autonomeus is being presumptuous or just honest. Either way, after that musical appreciation course, his lists and reviews of modern music formed the basis of my knowledge and admiration of the genre. And it was Hutchinson’s reviews that inspired this article in the first place. Who on Earth would write, almost daily, these 1,000-word overviews of composers and music that most of the general population has never heard of and probably don’t care to know about? He writes with an assurance that is simultaneously off-putting and seductive. “Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei (1993-96) is Elliot Carter’s greatest symphonic work since his 1969 Concerto for Orchestra.” And on the 1969 recording of Pierre Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli: “I decisively prefer this 1969 recording, which I find to be bolder, sharper, more dramatic, and more powerful [than] the later recording of Christine Schafer and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, [which] is nearly ten minutes longer. [The later recording] is also smoother, less dramatic, and less powerful, dragging especially in the longer fourth section.” I still don’t know why he writes them. While Hutchinson politely responded to a piece of fan mail I wrote him a few months ago, he ignored my later emails asking him to answer my questions for this article. I also wrote to Christopher Culver, another titan of the modern music review scene (2,626 reviews). (Culver’s reviews often rest beside Hutchinson’s as the only two on a strange or obscure recording.) While he was polite, Culver told me “I spent some time drafting a reply [to your email] but in the end I felt that my complicated motivations for and approaches to reviewing are best kept to myself.” David Bryson, who describes himself on his Amazon profile as “boring beyond belief,” told me that he won’t expand further about himself because “social media are not my thing.” He does mention, however, that reviewing is “a hobby I enjoy in retirement.” That brings the total number of retirees among the reviewers I contacted to four out of six, if we are to trust Hallberg’s Slate article on Grady Harp (perhaps Hallberg is included in Harp’s “Dark Group of Negative People”), which describes the man as a retired surgeon. Culver, as far as I can tell from the pictures I’ve seen of him, doesn’t seem old enough to be a traditional retiree, and while Hutchinson reviews voluminously, he might still work and just possess strong time management skills. I don’t know what to make of the fact that five of my interview subjects were white (Hutchinson is the only one of whom I haven’t seen a picture) and all of them men. Indeed, in all the reviews of modern music that I read I could not find a single female byline. Classical music today is trying so hard to appeal to a broader audience than it is stereotypically known for, and yet: white men retired from comfortable professions. The knowledge settled over me as I began this article that my subjects were exactly who you would expect them to be, right down to the redirected enthusiasm. “I listen to music a lot … enough to close my study door in deference to my long-suffering wife,” says Morrison. “Growing up in rural Oklahoma is even worse than [living in] Waco (yes, I Googled you)…. I thought I was going to be a big-time pianist until I heard Arthur Rubinstein play in a recital and I realized I could never be that good. So I changed my plans and went to medical school instead.” |
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