- Thoughts on the relationship between money and Innovation -
Essay for the University of Michigan
Innovation is a process that does not last a year, or five but it is
an ongoing quest that could take a lifetime. Behind every innovation,
there are many things: The innovator and his/her idea, the will of
developing an idea and the tools the innovator may need to bring the
idea to reality. But there's also a key factor an innovator should keep
in mind: Money. Through human history, we could see many cases of people
being benefactors or patrons of innovators, no matter the area of
expertise of the innovator.
We know the cases of Leonardo Da Vinci being supported financially by
the Medici family, and many cases of great composers like Bach,
Beethoven, and Stravinsky being supported financially by people who
admired their work. Without the support these brilliant artists
received, we may have missed some of the greatest artistical and
philosophical innovations of the last 600 years.
Scienctific Innovators have received financial support just like
their art colleagues as well. One of the most notorious cases was Nikola
Tesla, who was financially supported by J.P. Morgan and John Jacob
Astor IV while building the Wardenclyffe Tower in order to be an
infinite supply of electric energy using wireless technology. While
Morgan and Astor cut Tesla's income and discouraged anyone interested in
funding Tesla's effort, Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower never reached it's
true potential. Sometimes I wonder what the world could be nowadays if
Tesla's Wardenclyffe project came fully operational.
Sometimes I wonder as well, if our governments choose to increase taxes and low people's income, in order to cut their innovation-related thoughts, and keep us chained in dead-end jobs. The less resources people have access to, the less innovation we will see in our society.
Since
the beginning of mankind, there has been a need of sharing our
knowledge and information through different ways, as well as different
ways to keep it secure or encrypted, be it through oral tradition,
homing pigeons, morse code, etc. In the last century, especially in the
1930's, this need became an urgent necessity due to the times of war and
the impact the speed of information delivery had on the warfield. Up to
this day, the most developed nations keep this "information war" going,
and back in the 1930's, the efforts to make the information delivery
quicker were totally fundamental for a nation's victory in the warfield.
That's why projects like Bletchley Park got great ammounts of
governmental funding.
The interesting thing is, that information
encompasses a lot of different disciplines and points of view, ranging
from mathematics to encrypt the code to philosophy in order to
understand the nature of the information that may be provided or
received.
The key elements of a good informative process have always been the
quality of the message to provide or receive, the source of the
information and the media used to provide or receive the information. In
my opinion, I consider that these factors have been crucial to the
development of a big information network, since the beginnings of
Information Technology. Through all its different phases, the emphasis
has always been to keep the information as secret as possible, but what
happens when you (as a scientist or philosopher) start to think "Why not
use this same technology to improve the way our society works?".
You
may have an ethic question in the top of your mind, and that's what
happened in the early days of internet, when people like Larry Smarr and
Douglas Van Houweling questioned the almost exclusive nature of
high-tech equipment, that was only available to a "Privileged Few"
(Usually, the Military and the Government) and proposed the use of these
equipments for Academic and Research purposes in colleges, and even
considered (and suggested) the domestic use of this technology for the
sake of improving the ways people communicated and worked.
As usual, they met initial counter-action. It is no surprise that the
social elite tried to keep the best technology for themselves only,
whatever their reasons are. But fortunately for everyone in the academia
and domestic world, Smarr and Van Houweling were people who never gave
up and keep their efforts going, and without them, maybe we would not
have access to technology for academic purposes and high-speed
communications through the internet as we know it today. We may still
use Homing Pigeons.
- Experiencing the Roots of Music: The San Bushmen of the Kalahari -
Essay for the University of Pennsylvania.
Since I was a kid, I used to think all the
news I watched on TV were about my place. While I heard about the
ongoing war between Palestine and Israel, I felt very sad for all the
kids my age who weren't able to spend their childhood playing, and being
with their family, like any regular kid does, despite living in the
same place as I did. While I heard traditional music (still being a
kid), no matter where the music came from, I used to think it was from
my place, and I thought how wonderful the place I lived in was, unaware
of the fact that the world is divided by frontiers or cultural barriers.
I used to think the world was like a big
neighborhood, where everyone knew each other, and helped each other if
they wanted and were able to. While looking at the Kalahari Bushmen /
Khoisan Trance dance, I return to these times of my childhood, where I
saw the world as a big neighborhood. I could definitely hear how
spiritual (or trance-like) dances relate to each other, no matter the
place of origin of the performed dance. Every trance dance has the same
purposes, heal the individual or the community that undergo that
experience. The Bushmen people of the Kalahari have faced land trouble
just like Palestinian people. Despite being the oldest habitants of the
lands they inhabited (and the oldest habitants of the world), they have
been forced to leave their own territory, the same they have been part
of for a long time.
Listening to the Kalahari trance music I
experienced a lot of things. I felt a strong connection with the core of
the earth and the universe we're part of. The trance the shaman (or
healer) undergoes reminds me of the trance people in the Amazonas go
while doing Ayahuasca rituals, where the participants ingest the
ayahuasca extract in order to heal themselves spiritually, in order to
set themselves free from their fears, even the ones deeply rooted in
their subconscious. The interesting part of Kalahari music to me is that
most of it seems to have an spiritual background, and the shaman is
something of a vehicle between enlightment and darkness: He is the light
of the individual, guiding him through the darkness of his own
thoughts.
My thoughts of what is achieved through this ceremony have
been somehow confirmed. I think sacred ritual ceremonies where music and
the performer (the shaman in this case) try to enlighten or heal a
certain group of people are really working towards it. The importance of
sound and how it resonates in our body (which is composed by some
resonating areas) is clearly a concept shamans understand very well, and
they know what kind of sounds they could use to evoke a certain state
of mind in a group of individuals. The San Healers of the Kalahari feel
they have a big task in their hands, which is to preserve their people
healthy, without any kind of spiritual remorse. In this case, I don't
think authenticity preclives accesibility.
Ceremonial rituals are not
popular music, or anything of that matter. Those rituals are here to be
witnessed and experienced for everyone who wants to be part of it. I
don't think there's any type of soffistication behind these rituals, in
fact they are very intuitive. And intuition is something we all people
have in common, some have developed it more than others though. As for
accesibility, if shamans are open to let everyone be part of the
experience, why we listeners (or audience) wouldn't join the performance
? Every shaman in this world, no matter his/her background seeks a
common goal: The healing of mankind, no matter their race, color of skin
or anything. It's we people who live in the "civilization" who try to
rationalize something that is something beyond our understanding,
instead of respecting it and sharing it with as much people as possible.
Rather than differences of culture,
I believe there are similarities of
background, thought, purpose of artistic manifestations in every single
culture of this world. Kalahari Bushmen are no exepction, and I may add
that our own cultures have inherited something of their traditions. The
fact that there is always a certain type of chant, or dance considered
sacred in every culture of the world, no matter its religion,
geographical situation, etc. is somehow a direct connection of the
ancient people of the Kalahari and us, their descendants.
Music, whether it is made for commercial meanings or not, is
something that is written or composed in order to be listened by as much
people as possible. For every living musician, composer, this is
something that actually is one of the reasons they keep making music. To
create an impact, a deep effect, to give a message, to change (and
challenge) the world and the audience. In my opinion, native musicians
or traditional music composers try to seek this goal as well. In most
cases, aboriginal music has been used (by the natives) for ritual
purposes, spiritual healing, as "incidental music" (For example, Pigmy
music and hindenwhu) just like western classical composers do. I believe
they certainly want to reach more people, if possible, no matter the
language or geographical barriers, considering the role of aboriginal
music of spiritually healing the listener through the drone-like sounds,
chants, etc.
in the case of aboriginal art, myths, rituals and musical instruments I
believe that it should be shared to the whole world to see and
experience. This would not be an economic exercise. This would be
something that should be done in order to reach other cultures, so the
audience could have a better understanding of the world outside their
countries or cultural background. It would be something done in order to
integrate more the diverse cultures of the world. And I think it would
even help people find that we are not so different than people living in
other cultures, or ethnicities. Bringing the experience of rituals
outside their original context may be affected, but if the performers of
the rite focus on the real intention only, and not in the intention of
making a "big display of costumes", the audience may engage into the
experience as the performers originally intended.
I believe this would
not be a problem. I think this actually would help both parties (The
aborigin musicians/performers and the audience). It will help the
aborigin musicians to keep doing their art and be funded to expand their
project, and it will help the audience to understand that our world is
so diverse, but similar at the same time. We may find that our cultures
share a lot of things, be it the same musical scales, clothing style,
physical attributes, etc.
To give you an example, I'll discuss briefly how Andes aboriginal
people (formerly known as the Incas) have a lot in common with ancient
Chinese people. The Incas were a powerful culture back in the day, it
was an empire that covered almost all South America. The Inca society
had a perfect social structure, where everyone had access to any kind of
resources, be it food, gold, or clothing. And they had one of the most
advanced numerical methods of their time. Their music was (and still is,
preserved by Incas descendants) pentatonic, very minimalistic (just
like the Minimalist music created by Steve Reich and Philip Glass) but
also very powerful. If you know something about chinese history, you'd
know that Chinese society was pretty much ahead of their time as well,
that it was an empire that covered almost all Asia, their social
structure was kind of feudal, but their music was pentatonic as well.
Not made by the same instruments as Incas, but pentatonic in the end.
Traditional music has always an inherent value of innocence and
purity in it. Maybe because it is not altered by any kind of
technological device, or the stress of modern-day life. Pigmy music is
no exception. While listening to it for the first time, you could hear
the story and heritage of an ethnical group that has been largely
misunderstood, abused and marginalized in many ways by the most
“developed” (and fittest, if we see it through a Darwinian perspective)
races. You could hear the voice of people who actually are so rooted to
nature, that they consider noise an offense to the rainforest, you could
hear the sounds of people who actually use sound as a way of doing
certain things, be it hunting, talking in a social situation, or
dancing, according to the sound generated by them.
To me, the quality of
Pigmy music is almost child-like, it’s something I felt while listening
to hindewhu. Even if hindenwhu represents the return from hunting, it
reminds me of childhood. Imagine you took your bicycle and went out of
your house and returned with a big smile after some weird adventure or
experience, be it gathering fruits, meeting other kids, your first kiss,
anything. The innocence of children and the joy of coming back home is
something I could hear in hindenwhu, and considering that Pigmy society
is egalitarian, it definitely must be a joyful experience to go and work
with your friends, with a big smile in your face, and return home to
meet your cherished ones.
It’s good that our “Civilized Nations” know about this kind of
musical manifestations. But what happens when traditional music is took
out of its original context? Being myself a musician, composer and music
student, I certainly find inspirational when another musician finds
sounds like this, produced by traditional instruments or certain
phonetics and incorporates them into their own works, because in my
opinion, it’s a way to break cultural barriers, and it also exposes this
wonderful sounds to a larger group of people. Of course, I believe it
is the artist’s responsibility to give credit to the real creators of
the sounds, chants, whatever sound they find, in case he or she uses
samples from it.
If I were a pigmy musician, I’d be definitely happy to hear my music
and sounds played though the world, because listening to a cultural
manifestation is a way of understanding, and of course, they would feel
less marginalized by their “fittest” counterparts. Their egalitarian
vision of society is present as well in their sound, and as a non-pigmy
musician, I learned from listening to hindenwhu that you should give
space to both your technique and your imagination, and you could create
an amazing, non-describable mysterious sound.
