Smooth Pebbles

Alex Ross on how the web is good for classical music

Music is alive and well

I long ago grew weary of complaints about the demise of classical music -- a demise based on dropping sales and and market share. Similar complaints had been voiced about tennis, another thing I love. In both cases the hand-wringing about falling ticket or record sales or TV viewers ran on the assumption that the truest measure of a sport's or art's vitality is how many people pay to consumer it. It's silly to feel classical music or tennis are failing because they don't constantly grow or attract as many spectators as pop music or baseball. Complaining about the lack of popularity is all the sillier if you've taken pains to associate your "product" with BMWs and expensive clothes; those who aim at the $100K+ demographic and should not wonder why they've failed to draw the masses.

A splendid antidote to this negativity (I mean the negativity of those I'm complaining about, not my own) is the writing of Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical music critic, who grows better by the year, and who this month brought out two nice offerings: a great piece in the New Yorker about how the web is good for classical music and a new book that is drawing rave reviews, and which I plan to have in hand shortly.

The New Yorker piece is nicely contrarian: Ross argues that the web, which many handwringers say is destroying classical music by building a more distracted populace, has invigorated discussion of classical music. His book, The Rest is Noise, is about 20th century music -- a subject about which Ross writes beautifully.

Ross also has a nice web site, also titled The Rest is Noise. It's as fresh, funny, and unpretentiously intelligent (or intelligently unpretentious?), as is his criticism. The best way to appreciate him is to check out these links. If you'd rather have it on greater authority, there's always the Times review.

Genes, Environment, Depression, and the Free Will Squabble

This week's post at Mind Matters, the Scientific American blog I edit, looks at an intriguing study of gene-environment interactions in abused children. Charles Glatt, who wrote the review, outlines the rather encouraging results of this study, which suggest -- with all the usual caveats about wider applicability and replication of results -- that some reliable nurturing can often override even a triple-whammy of two "bad" genes and an abusive home.

Some readers objected, however, to Glatt's assertion that the study argues well for the idea of free will. One reader wrote:

I see no impact on any discussion of free will in these findings. Are you saying that people who are abused can choose not to be depressed? I don't think that's what you mean.

I see the point of the complaint -- and I don't think that's what Glatt meant. I believe Glatt's broader point is that to the extent that the idea of free will is incompatible with the idea that genes trump experience, the strong and encouraging role that nurturing played in the study he reviewed argues in favor of free will. That argument is strengthened, if in roundabout fashion, if you recognize that gene-environment effects don't merely flick genes on and off but also create a dynamic in which the changing person (changed, i.e., by genetic response to environment) may change in a way that better enables him or her to behave differently, thus changing the environment. A nurturing presence gives me some resilience, increasing my ability to behave constructively.

It gets a bit slippery. Ideed, it starts to erase the fate v. free-will distinction, just as the looping quality of gene-environment interactions (in which environment affects gene expression, which changes behavior, including the ability to change the environment, which in turn affects gene expression) makes moot the either-or choice between nature and nurture. In the end, each is eternally modified by the other, and thus parent and offspring of the other, not terribly unlike an Escher drawing.