Multimedia Mania, and the History of One Piano

The Hands on Pianos project is a community art initiative, sponsored and hosted by the Hopkins Center, the performing arts venue associated with Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Following the lead of other, larger cities (including Denver, Colorado), the HOP published a call to artists in the spring of 2012: what was possible, in the re-decoration of an upright piano?

Fifty pianos were donated, and relocated to a defunct tire distribution warehouse; artists' plans were submitted and approved by May 1st. While many artists sought to use the flat surfaces as a canvas, my partner Jennie Harriman and I devised a new means of collage, to reflect changes in the forms of recorded music: from the vinyl platter to the cassette, the eight-track to the microchip. Materials were gleaned from my collection of recordings and sheet music; the boxy and inefficient 8-track tapes were discovered at the Salvation Army in Rutland, Vermont, and many of the 45rpm singles came from Exile on Main Street in Barre, Vermont. The final physical arrangement of these materials came only after seeing the piano itself, its unique corners, panels, and architecture.

The result is a piano decorated by the physical evidence of music, telling the brief history of 20th century recording-- all of which was a predecesor to the 'de-physicalization' of music, and our final embrace of the digital, and virtual. I've long maintained this analogy: what a manual typewriter (an Underwood, for example) is to a computer's keyboard, a piano is to a synthesizer. The visceral nature of a heavy wood-and-steel construction, emitting its own lavish acoustics, might only be available through these outmoded machines, however cumbersome. The digital production of similar tones has its place, but plastic and microchips may not have the same mystical ability to deliver, and carry, stories of their use.

This piano was donated by Virginia Dresser of Etna, New Hampshire. Through Facebook, on the HOP's piano-directory page Mrs. Dresser recounted her piano's history:

This piano has been in my family for generations. My father turned to this piano and played "The Old Rugged Cross" when he heard his brother was killed in WWII. His mother than closed it down and would not permit any one to play it. Fortunately for us, my father took it with him when he married my Mom. I have fond memories of my Dad playing all the great music from the '40's era with our neighbors in singing and dancing! Music was very much alive in our family. However, when I got the news of a friend dying in Vietnam, I found my way to the piano and through my hands came "Let It Be". My children(now grown) have had lessons.."Edelweiss" and "Fur Elise "bring fond memories. They and their friends played the music of their time. So, I find it really appropriate that you are transforming this vehicle of music with different recording methods! My wish is that when people (young and old) sit to play, they let the music that is within them flow.

The HOP has located pianos throughout New Hampshire and Vermont, for display throughout the month of July. In early August, an adoption program will make these pianos available (first to the artists; second to the public), before each is dismantled, its working parts salvaged. While many pianos are concentrated in the downtown Hanover area, the piano Jennie and I decorated is located at Quechee Gorge Village, in Quechee, Vermont.

TO SEE THIS PIANO, Click Here!

The Aspen Ideas Festival: Altitude, Empathy, and the Future of Games

how does it feel to be

one of the beautiful people

now that you know who you are?

what do you want to be?

--Lennon/McCartney, “Baby You’re a Rich Man”

To complement and enliven my teaching at Vermont Technical College, I was privileged to attend the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival (session one). Aspen itself is worthy of far more discussion than presented here, as was my experience attending programs and conversations. What role may a festival of ideas play in a democracy? 

Aspen is nestled high in the Rockies, at such an altitude as to render its status as a tourist destination unique: the air is thin, the fuel and food are expensive, and the roads in and out of town are scarce. I arrived on the third day of the Waldo Canyon fire, crossing into Colorado from the brittle and dry New Mexico desert, up and over Independence Pass on Route 82 by midnight local time, and descending the two-lane snake of a road down into Aspen. The sudden apparition of civilization—streetlights, shops, wide avenues and sidewalks—establish a sense of oasis, even in the middle of the night. The tranquility and unique arid climate of the high Rockies establishes a landscape of retreat, of introspection, and the contemplation of the deepest of issues: real meaning-of-life, future-of-the-world type stuff. A Bonnaroo of Ideas, a blizzard of intellectual curiosity?

Larger principles and tenets of civil discourse pervaded my schedule (delivered by a customized Android/phone application, as well as by a massive spiral-bound binder). Beginning in a session on recent cultural exchanges between the United States and China, the premise that ‘Washington is in a state of paralysis’ was an unfortunate assumption that riddled all topics: central to the discussion was a short video clip of Yo Yo Ma and Meryl Streep, in a celebrated collaboration onstage during which Ma improvised as Streep read poetry, and the Chinese audience roared in appreciation. At the conclusion of the performance, Streep bowed; Ma bowed lower. The responsive act of humility between the two artists—bowing lower and lower—continued until both were on the stage floor, in awe and praise of one another. Rightly, an attendee asked the panel if cultural exchange is actually effective: what does the exchange of art, and the shared experience of performance, accomplish?

I walked through the resort town, breathing in the money, and the thin mountain air. The first person I encountered was an eight-year veteran of the Ideas Festival—a supporter since Walter Isaacson and others began the gathering of great minds, in partnership with the Aspen Institute. I asked him how the Festival had changed: he said the ability to “have a spirited debate” may have been compromised by the participating interests. While the Festival’s mission aligns with the Institute’s (“to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues”), I could understand the gentleman’s observation regarding the evolution of an intellectual and ideological think tank, nestled carefully within the social fabric of one of America’s most affluent communities. Not associated with any educational institution except itself, the Aspen Ideas Festival’s underwriters are likely those who helped make possible these presentations—and they (Mercedes-Benz, Allstate, Shell, Bank of America’s Private Wealth Management among them) may or may not have played a role in the extent to which “spirited debate” would take place: the security of ‘soft’ questions. Isaacson’s keynote address named “balance” as the greatest original idea in the United States, between, among other dichotomies, our “divine providence and our own rationality.” Atlantic magazine editor David Bradley avoided any allegations of ‘soft’ questions completely, in his keynote, which was all about the bears and increasing bear attacks in the Roaring Fork Valley, where the wild animals have become “no longer afraid of human contact.” Short of a very cheap joke about hiking the Aspen Trail with Governor Chris Christie, Bradley’s speech appeared to demarcate the blurry line of content and context, an exaltation of form—a bland jubilance that we all arrived—over using his minutes to identify and construct any argument at all.

A flurry of ideas followed the pair of theoretical/entertaining introductory remarks. Among these: the development of our moral imagination, and thus the generation of empathy in society, through arts education—the leaderless nature of online communications and the subsequent revolutions—the need for a ‘TiVo of ideas,’ a coordinated effort to gather our virtual and electronically-derived thoughts—further investment in mobile device applications to increase willpower-training, towards a ‘quantified self’—the notion of films, and extended visual narrative, as “weapons of mass construction”—a 41-live-bodies rule, restricting the use of Senate filibusters, thereby blocking excessive uses of Congressional power and voice—digital citizen journalism, and its threat to traditional media, and the advocacy for mandatory Journalism 101 for high school seniors (a crowd favorite, it seemed)—contextualization for the metaphor ‘if a project were a jet, its story would be the fuel,’ that pride in ownership may return to the marketplace (and that we may “start keeping things longer and we might start loving the things we own”)—a paraphrase of the old talking dog joke, naming the need for humor in conversation. An executive from PepsiCo, also a major sponsor of the Festival, described his company’s plight as having 300,000 employees at present, and that success in this economy may depend on their conversion: into one critical mass of 300,000 inventors.

Events took place on the campus of the Aspen Institute, the ballroom of the Hotel Jerome, and a handful of other locations. One may find a belabored description of who attends the Aspen Ideas Festival easily rendered: within the quaint storefronts, I never found an “Occupy Aspen” sticker. I did see signals of status and luxury amongst participants—clothing that costs as much as my beloved used car; watches of gold and silver that glinted at audiences from beneath stage lights; unspeakably-sized diamond jewelry. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, included in his presentation on design a snapshot of the original masked Occupy marchers—because the leaderless movement represented not a successful catalyst to a struggling economy,  or even the galvanization of wealth, but because that movement had no leader. Historian Robert Putnam advocated for the creation of what one organization has named “bridges out of poverty,” carefully framing an argument for the shared experience of society, and the investment in social capital—for this, Putnam gained much esteem and respect from the erudite crowd, and wins my award for advocating the best idea towards the improvement of our economy, our values, and our quality of life. Using Port Clinton, Ohio as an example, Putnam described a loss of opportunity across lines of class, not race: the evidence for early childhood education’s efficacy was “incredibly hard,” yet such investment is critical to the continuation of our social capital. “I am really worried,” Putnam said, “about how much the new upper class has contact with the rest of America.” For naming this fear, Putnam became my Aspen Ideas Fest superhero, identifying economic inequality not seeking its source but to discern its ramification.

From the stage constructed in the Hotel Jerome, I heard someone else say that they “blame the public a lot,” while advocating for ‘the Romney notion’ that an emergency hold on all payouts based on derivatives-trading from U.S. banks are suspend until further notice. The illumination of specific policies was rare, compared to discussion of larger, theoretical frameworks for the improvement of society: blaming “the public” helped reinforce the exclusivity in the room.

Yet not everyone in attendance was an educator or talent-hungry CEO. Jane Shaw, director of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, rephrased Martha Nussbaum’s argument in support of the humanities, fearing greater commoditization of ourselves, not as humans, but as a specific kind of means-of-production: the notion that one today may be more likely to claim that their religion inhibits an inherent grace in its truth compounds and invites such a brutal landscape. Calling for the specific and intentional grasp and expansion of communities, Shaw challenged the crowd to cultivate “imaginative love for people we don’t know or know very little.” The orderly representation of morality in Christianity and elsewhere does not prohibit the sharing of art, though it may, and may have already: the diversity of the crowd that assembles to examine a painting, or to hear a work of theater or music, may reflect on the art’s actual ability and effectiveness. As illustration, Shaw posed: how can we save the environment, if we don’t know or can’t comprehend what exactly it is we’re talking about?

Does the inclusive slogan of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco (“feel free to belong without believing”) apply to the populations that attend the Aspen Ideas Festival? In principle, the event does not seek to exclude specific groups; the target audience for many proposals was the general consumers of education, art, and media. Education threaded most discussions, and perhaps most useful was the summation that however schools have failed children, we (that is, those in the room) have failed to adequately support the schools.

NBC played a role in the moderation of forums on education, including a panel featuring AFT President Randi Weingarten, and a professor from Stanford, enumerating the school’s embrace of no-cost, no-credit online course offerings. Acknowledging the value to not only being a provider of course content, but a moderator to the informal and social interactions that take place in schools, higher education’s ability to achieve excellence within its populations depends on its flexibility and its embrace of new pedagogy. “Most of the jobs our kids are going to have haven’t been invented yet.” Asked how Stanford’s implementation of online education differs from The University of Phoenix, the prof provided slightly different ratios of faculty-to-students (one for every twenty at Stanford, one for every twenty-four at U. of Phoenix), and sought explanation of how “live professors add value” while defending computers for having “the patience” to deliver course content at a pace established and endorsed by the learners themselves. His one wish was for a new system of “one-on-one, personalized access to tutoring” through the current evolution of our digital pipelines.

The future of education may rest as much in the hands of software designers as educators: how have video games—from Pac-Man to World of Warcraft—captivated the imaginations of our K-12 populations? One session sought to make public new collaboration between Electronic Arts, the Institute of Play, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, to discern how a new market for the ‘game-if-ication’ of our concepts, curricula, and—to some extent—our challenges may be solved through the employ of virtual environments. If game-obsessed youth are successful at consuming knowledge through the captivating and data-rich platforms, the manifestations of video games we have experienced previously may enable new approaches to complex problem solving and “model-based reasoning.” While I may have experienced the first generation of educative video games (‘electronic worksheets’) during the 1980s, the Games and Learning Assessment Lab seeks to reinvent the interactivity and collaboration available in classrooms.

The development of character and “values-based leadership” became the unstated thesis of many presentations, whether the topic was arts education, categories for character building and assessment, or the culture of celebrity we have let pervade our society: one discussion sought to identify how a combination of extreme will and extreme humility may together form a new code of character (Dorothy Day served as a primary example). Good advice, rendered from this frame: keep a list of five admirable people in your field, in case you get depressed, that one may bear in mind examples of “impressive people in a rotten business.” 

While one panel on entrepreneurship described a bleak culture of 21^st century perseverance (describing how, among Internet startup companies, Google Analytics may “track how you’re feeling that day”), one of the largest buzzwords in Aspen is empathy, or the ability to place oneself into another’s shoes. From this, some arguments were made in support of liberal arts education, widespread mentorship, and the libratory implementation of technology beyond intended uses (“we are recovering,” one successful inventor said, “from the fact that we still call these things phones”).

In one conversation following a presentation, someone asked me to be in touch: “let me know if you do anything with empathy” in my teaching at Vermont Technical College. Driving back across the center of the United States—with Aspen, and the rising smoke of wildfires at my back and in my rear view—I identified two means of engendering empathy; thankfully, there are more as well.

In teaching an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course, I discovered new purpose for a collection of black-and-white photographs, found at a flea market in New Jersey. After spending a fifteen-week semester discussing the creation and sustaining of culture, kinship, and a general curiosity in human activity, I produced this collection of photographs, challenging the class—as one team—to establish what knowledge may be available about the people pictured in the photographs. Who were they; where did they live? What relationships were made clear; what was left uncovered? I have executed this activity twice, and both incidents ended in students suggesting we locate and contact some photographed relative via Facebook; both classes concurred, that if we did hear back, we would be ethically bound to offer to return their family photographs. Neither family returned our Facebook messages; the photographs still live in my office.

My second method of engendering empathy jives with pop star Moby’s two rules for urban and suburban development, delivered during a conversation in Aspen’s only pop music venue: no stadiums, and no “big box retail” (one could have heard a pin drop, within the smallish rock venue Belly Up). In traveling from Vermont to Aspen, I sought to financially support as few chain stores, restaurants, hotels, etc. as possible: this premise has led to rewarding and cherished interactions, with real people who work hard (these include the Hillside Motel near Skyline Drive, Virginia; a thrift shop in Shamrock, Texas; a Kodak, Tennessee mechanic with a yard full of dismantled Subarus; a family-run oil change business in western North Carolina, whose second location has been open nearly a dozen years). The promotion of empathy may come only through one’s experimentation, literally, with their interactions with the world: how gently, and with what model of care, may one communicate, employ, and work with and for, those of us with which the planet is shared?