One of the great pleasures of my life is working on the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata. It's a life's work.
I was working many years ago with one of the great opera coaches, an African American woman named Sylvia Lee. She was married to the conductor Henry Lee and because there was no work for black coaches in America she moved to Germany to Munich to play and coach for the agents administering the rebuilding of the German opera houses after the war. She became such a success that she was later picked by Maestro Max Rudolf to come to Philadelphia to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music to be his opera coach. Ms. Lee would take trips to Washington, D.C. where she would play for the Frederick Wilkerson studio. "Wilkie" was considered a great voice teacher and was an African American/Cherokee. I was singing in the Army Chorus at the time and studying with Wilkie and coached with Ms. Lee. An amazing experience. One day Ms. Lee took me to the Library of Congress where she looked all through the stacks for a certain book. Finally she found it and sat down to read. I was basically just along to accompany her not knowing why she was there. I heard her exclaim and say "Ray, here it is! You must come read this." It was a passage about Beethoven going to some rich aristocratic SOB asking for a stipend. The Aristocrat asked what he thought he would need. He said: "I understand you give Goethe______. That would be fine for me as well." To which the Aristocrat answered: "You Herr Beethoven are NO Goethe!" Later when the man's carriage came down the road, Beethoven was walking with Goethe and Goethe got over into the ditch to allow the carriage to go by. Beethoven refused to step aside and made the man drive his carriage into the ditch instead and as he rode by, Beethoven looked the man in the face and said, "you see, I AM no Goethe!" Ms. Lee had dragged me to the Library of Congress just for me to read that passage about the composer of the Hammerklavier. The man who after WWII was the hero that brought the German people back from the abyss of Adolf Hitler and all of this after he was dead. The man who wrote the Hammerklavier when he was totally deaf. The stories about Beethoven and the wealthy and the local Burgermeisters are legion. He told them that their grandchildren would be embarrassed to admit their name because he would write something bad about them in his musical scores or have a musical joke around their name if they didn't treat the art properly. Remember that when Napoleon is praised there is always the Beethoven Third Symphony with a destroyed dedication to Napoleon because Napoleon betrayed Democracy and made himself Emperor. That was the first thing I learned about Napoleon. That Beethoven spoke truth to power and made a public show of changing the dedication of a great masterwork because the man betrayed the people. How many butlers and nannies are latent great composers, painters, singers, dancers trapped in the drudgery of the English Manor system? The same system here in the American South that trapped the black Artists of Africa and made them spend their lives chopping cotton and being raped by their so called "masters." A woman who was on the street and not afraid to admit her story and how Wilkie, my Black Washington voice teacher, pulled her out of the horror and put her to work singing and writing is Maya Angelou the great American poet. Wilkie used to say: "How many great voices are trapped in the South?" He rescued quite a few as they filled the opera houses of Europe and the Jazz halls of America. He was the coach for Gielgud's 1964 production of Hamlet, the movie Porgy and Bess with Dorothy Dandridge and taught Paul Robeson, Richard Stillwell and Roberta Flack. I still contend that this list should Redesign work and not just do the same old 19th century word games. The real diamonds are human beings. Economists cast these diamonds before the swine and say that it's nature. Well crawl out of the hole folks. Science today is consigning these economists to the same hole as the over intellectualized philosophers of the 19th century. They love to play and talk amongst themselves but rarely take a serious look at the whole problem and how to design genuine pleasure and not the hokey "ownership society" shallow shit. REH Here's an URL that Mike Hollinshead sent me. It's interesting: REH http://canadastonehenge.com/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sandwichman Sent: Friday, July 23, 2010 4:01 PM To: Keith Hudson; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Servants and Nannies? "there is no reason to believe that these armies of servants and nannies won't earn decent wages..." -- Annalee Newitz Such an oddly magical statement of untruth. There are plenty of reasons to expect less than decent wages, beginning with current wages levels for servants and child care workers, continuing on to trends in wages over the last thirty years and concluding with the projected elimination of other options resulting in a buyers' market for servant labor. On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Keith Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > From Forbes magazine, 23 July > > Will Your Children Grow Up To Be Servants And Nannies? > > Reihan Salam > > > > Why the labor market of the future will be even more polarized. > > Will large numbers of today's children grow up to become servants and > nannies in the homes of the digital bourgeoisie? There is good reason to > believe that the answer is yes. > > The most pressing issue of the day remains sky-high unemployment. There is, > however, almost no consensus about how to think about the the depth of the > problems facing the U.S. labor market. Many believe that the staggering > unemployment rate is purely cyclical. Karl Smith, an economist at the UNC > School of Government, has written a post on "the myth of structural > unemployment", arguing that "the structure of the American economy hasn't > changed that much in the last 24 months." > > Yet one wonders if the last 24 months are the right place to look. In Wired > for Innovation, MIT economist Erik Brynjolffson and Adam Saunders of Wharton > offer an insightful portrait of how the U.S. economy has evolved over the > last decade. Their analysis strongly suggests that the shift toward a more > IT-intensive economy will lead to even more polarization of the U.S. labor > market. Brynjolffson has dubbed the "Great Recession" a "Great > Restructuring," adding gravitas to arguments advanced by thinkers like Jeff > Jarvis and Richard Florida who've argued in a similar vein. "As growth > resumes," Brynjolffson writes, "millions of people will find that their old > jobs are gone forever." > > Smith is undoubtedly right that we can't neglect the cyclical dimension, and > that journalists and would-be visionaries have a tendency to grasp at > sweeping rather than narrowly tailored explanations for high unemployment. > In Smith's view, for example, construction employment will likely recover, > as the building boom of the 2000s was not out of step with the earlier > building boom of the 1970s. But consider the following counterfactual. As > Barry LePatner argued in Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, the > trillion-dollar U.S. construction sector is unusually fragmented and > undercapitalized, and thus ripe for consolidation. Economic as well as > environmental imperatives could drive consolidation, leading to a > construction sector that is leaner, more skill-intensive and more > IT-intensive. This would mean far higher productivity. And it would also > mean that the labor market position of less-skilled construction workers > would deteriorate. > > There will, of course, always be a place for less-skilled workers, albeit at > low wages. At a certain point, wages in the informal sector might look like > a more attractive alternative. Discouraged workers who've stopped looking > for work in the mainstream economy would, in this scenario, remain on the > margins. Indeed, the steady deterioration in the labor market position of > less-skilled men is one key reason why male labor force participation has > declined so markedly over the last 30 years. The pressing question is > whether we are likely to see this trend accelerate. > > Between 1973 and 1995 U.S. labor productivity grew at an average rate of > 1.4% a year, a rate that means living standards would take 50 years to > double. In contrast, the 2.7% growth rate in productivity from 1948 to 1972 > doubled productivity in 26 years. And that earlier period is remembered as > an economic Golden Age, when working and middle class Americans saw > extraordinary progress in their living standards and the U.S. economy was > without peer. > > From 1995 to 2000 the productivity growth rate increased to 2.6% per year, > almost matching the Golden Age. As Brynjolffson and Saunders observe, this > productivity boom was traced to the deployment of IT investment across a > wide range of sectors, particularly retail. The more interesting > productivity boom, however, occurred between 2001 and 2003, when the > productivity growth rate hit 3.6% per year. This productivity spike was > driven less by investments in IT than by investments in organizational > capital, a catch-all term for productivity-enhancing business practices. > > The authors observe a sharp divergence between firms that successfully > transformed themselves into effective digital organizations and those that > did not. Very bluntly, digital organizations flourish while others wither > and die. Brynjolffson and Wharton economist Lorin Hitt identified the > defining characteristics of digital organizations, and the most striking > were those centered on valuing the strongest performers within an > organization: In digital organizations, employees are empowered to make > decisions and they are subject to performance-based incentives. Recruiting > and investing in top performers is a high if not the highest priority. > > The logical implication is that the transition to digital organizations is a > recipe for even more inequality. In "Performance Pay and Wage Inequality," > economists Thomas Lemieux, W. Bentley MacLeod, and Daniel Parent maintain > that the increasing use of performance pay can account for "nearly all of > the top-end growth in wage dispersion". Assuming this pattern holds, there > is no reason to believe that we will see any decrease in wage dispersion. > Quite the opposite: The most skilled workers will cluster in digital > organizations, and wages at the top will continue to expand at a healthy > clip. > > This raises the question of what will happen to those trapped in the low end > of the labor market. Recently, the cultural critic Annalee Newitz offered a > provocative hypothesis: "We may return to arrangements that look a lot like > what people had over a century ago," Newitz writes. As more skilled women > enter the workforce, and as the labor market position of millions of > less-skilled workers deteriorate, we'll see more servants and nannies in > middle-class homes. While this future might seem disturbing at first, there > is no reason to believe that these armies of servants and nannies won't earn > decent wages. But let's just say that this isn't the future most of us > envision for our children. > > Reihan Salam is a policy advisor at e21 and a fellow at the New America > Foundation. The co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the > Working Class and Save the American Dream, he writes a weekly column for > Forbes. for Forbes. > > Keith Hudson, Saltford, England > > _______________________________________________ > Futurework mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework > > -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
