Chasing The Over-a-Hundred Prize

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new innovation is a "breakthrough," that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. ...

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later, turn out to be breakthroughs.

So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the "ten hottest papers" in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.

If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist "under forty," a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value... The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don't get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

Should we have a prize, it should be for "over a hundred": it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher's stone. His work stayed obscure all this time."

N.N. Taleb
Antifragile (2012)
pp. 329-330

These prizes have their counterparts in the music world, and there too they are well-known as strong "reverse indicators of value," at least to everyone outside the immediate social orbit of the committee and the recipients. A certain amount of focus on the under-forties arises from a good-faith response to a good-faith criticism: lifetime achievement awards are obscene when the elderly achiever really could have used that money to stay afloat during their starving-artist years. This, together with the realization that many small grants to individual artists would do more good than a few massive grants to superstars and large organizations, has (re)shaped the landscape somewhat for the better. I suspect there are good intentions behind this; yet NNT's observations here supply the necessary damned if you do caveats. Radical postmodernists get the most attention for rejecting the cleansing effect of time, for junking the Thirty Year Rule that historians formerly observed, etc., and yet functionally the bourgeois mainstream has also rejected these things, much more quietly but with equal thoroughness and equally strident rationalizations. In one respect it is obvious that people need the money more when they are younger. The problem, though, is that it is not so easy to see the future. To attempt to do so is a fragilista maneuver through and through.

In borrowing this Talebism, I am certainly wary of embracing Taleb's peculiar brand of Darwinism. He is not the least bit convincing when he claims, after all else he has written here and prior, to be content with merely passing on his genes and riding off into the Darwinian sunset. Clearly he lives to read, argue, eat and drink, put mice down people's shirts, and so on. (How I wish I'd had this last idea when I was sitting in Dr. Damschroder's theory classes!) I'm not in favor of a full Hunger Games approach to artisthood. The point, rather, that Taleb's arguments reveal, and which is in my experience simply not yet acknowledged in artists' circles, is that the fragilizing effects of awards are even worse than the trappings of a pure survival competition. They compound "cumulative advantage," lead to "Matthew effects," and claim to see the future. They "penaliz[e] those who don't get them and debas[e] the field by turning it into an athletic competition." I'm sure we will continue to have them even so. We all might as well apply just in case. But please don't believe anything anyone involved says about the recipients or the process, and please don't believe that competitions and awards are about supporting the next generation's finest practitioners. They cannot be about that. The list of Pulitzer winners speaks for itself here.

Synchronically, lifetime achievement awards are indefensible; diachronically they are the only defensible kind of award in fields that are, for our purposes here, the opposite of math, where the value of results is very rarely immediately seen, indeed where this value is all but guaranteed to change, and where this guarantee in and of itself does not need to be elevated to a risk by our having previously bet against it. Of course we can collectively decide to redefine value as strictly limited to that which can be immediately seen. It may seem like this has already happened; but watch those pomos carefully, especially when they don't know they are being watched, and you will find all the evidence you'll ever need that this presentism is no more a part of who they really are than their mismatched tube socks.

Solo Night

Last night, I attended the first of this season's six "Engine 408" concerts by members of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. The program consisted entirely of Berio Sequenzas (nos. I, IXa, and XIV) for solo instruments, and Davidovsky Synchronisms (nos. 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12) for solo instruments with electronic sound. This was my first contact with each of these pieces, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Kudos to the SPCO for creating a space (both literally and figuratively) for new music to be heard performed by world-class players (which increases the chances that people will actually dig it), and for only $10 at that (ditto).

As with each of these that I've attended, the seats were nearly full, which I would estimate represents at least 150 people. While I'm sure that the concert didn't pay for itself through ticket sales (I'm assuming they weren't expecting it to, and if they did, they would charge accordingly), it at least goes to show that prominently featuring a name like Berio does not in and of itself guarantee lackluster attendance. In fact, this was the second performance of the week, which puts the total number of people who did not turn and run screaming in the opposite direction even higher. And while I for one would always like to see more such programming undertaken by the full orchestra, I also believe that forcing it on people who don't want to hear it is the wrong way to go. I have little tolerance for the now-perfunctory pairing of classical warhorses with token contemporary pieces that holds sway in the orchestral world today; it would be nice if there were a subscription series concert every now and then that heavily featured modernist works, but failing that, putting us off in our own little corner with exceptional space, performers, and pricing isn't a bad deal either.

Upon first hearing, my favorite piece of the bunch was without question Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 6 for Piano and Electronic Sound...which is why I was a bit surprised to learn that it won the Pulitzer Prize...in 1971. Reasonable people seem to have reached a consensus that the Pulitzer doesn't really mean anything, or perhaps even that it merely tells us what to stay away from (this irreverent summary of Pulitzer-winning pieces has made the rounds before, but if you haven't seen it, it's pretty funny; never mind that the writer obviously is not a fan of the Davidovsky). I actually can't claim familiarity with most of the pieces, and I probably could not name another piece composed in 1971 off the top of my head, but I really enjoyed this one, and I fully intend to invest in a recording when time and finances permit.

Sadly, until I stumble on another performance locally (not likely, I think), I won't be able to delight in the various reactions of middlebrow audience members. One gentleman a couple of rows in front of me would turn and look at his family with eyebrows raised and a smirk on his face every time the soloist or the tape tossed off a particularly gnarly riff. But the best by far were the people who forgot about the tape part while it was tacet for a minute or more, then were so startled by its next entrance that they jumped a couple of inches out of their seats. Perhaps we will know for sure that electronic music has become mainstream when this is no longer the norm.