Marlowsphere Blog (#141)

There are two reasons why I am focused on Veterans Day.

The first is the Vietnam War. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from what is now known as Herbert Lehman College in the Bronx, NY in 1966. Two weeks later I received a draft letter from the United States Army. This led to one of the most important decisions of my young life. Instead of being drafted into the Army, I decided to voluntarily join the United States Air Force in June 1966. It meant four years of my life, rather than two, but I perceived I would have more control over my life in an Air Force uniform than in the Army. I was right as it turned out.

This decision leads to the second reason: The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill—signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt—a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I.s). The bill has been updated several times by the United States Congress and is still providing benefits to ex-servicemen and women.

As a direct result of this bill, FDR, and the Vietnam War I was able to complete an MBA for almost no expense, and then several years later a Ph.D. for almost no expense. That Ph.D., plus extensive experience in print and electronic media helped me land a position as a professor in the then journalism program at Baruch College, CUNY. This position further gave me the opportunity to garner two more degrees: in music composition. I have now completed 30 years of teaching courses in media and culture at Baruch College.

In effect, a man by the name of FDR, together with the GI Bill of 1944—a year after I was born—plus the advent of the Vietnam War and the attendant draft had a direct impact on my personal and professional life over several decades that I could not have imagined when I was in high school or starting an academic pursuit in 1961.

Talk about unintended consequences!

I’d like to point to another unintended consequence that is directly related to the draft. The nation’s first military draft began in 1940, when President Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act. The draft continued through war and peacetime until 1973. More than 10 million men entered military service through the Selective Service System during World War II alone.

One of the consequences of the draft and military service is that it creates a universal and immediate bond among those men and women who serve and have served in the military, regardless of branch of service. Whether in wartime or peace time, whether in combat or behind the lines, so to speak, putting on a uniform immediately creates a universal experience that can be shared with those who have also worn a uniform. This shared experience cannot be easily explained or even described to those who have never worn a uniform. And even though in today’s time the expression “Thank you for your service” is much more in vogue and prevalent than when I returned from active military service in 1970, when I hear it from someone who is too young to understand, it does not have the ring of authenticity in the saying of it.

In my opinion, the end of the active military draft in 1973 has resulted in the unintended consequence of at least two generations of Americans who do not share the universal military experience. And it is the absence of this shared experience that has contributed and does contribute to the economic and social divide in the United States.  As the most recent national election showed the United States of America is not united: it is two countries. One country on the east and west coasts, together with a smattering of states in the north Midwest, and the rest of the country, essentially the middle of the country—those sections of the country that either don’t directly experience the influx of immigrants from all over the world or are perceptually threatened by so-called illegal immigrants taking away job from those who are already here. Campaign rhetoric to the contrary, it’s been a while since this country was a manufacturing dominant country; this is primarily a service-oriented economy requiring higher levels of education and inter-personal and technical skills.

During the draft, young men from many walks of life, from different parts of the country, with varying levels of education, with a spread of ethnic backgrounds came together for basic training, further training, and living, working, and fighting together. It was a melting pot environment and surviving it, dealing with it, and profiting from the experience was an opportunity for personal and professional growth.

Further, in the 2001 book The Millionaire Mind by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley, among the many lessons presented there I was struck time and time again by how many of the multimillionaires described in the book had military experience. It came up as part of their backgrounds over and over again.

The Selective Service is actually in force today and men up to the age of 30 are required to register with it, but it is not an active draft. The question is: should it be? There are many reasons for and against. But I think there is a strong argument to be made for this country to institute some kind of national service, whether military or not. I perceive this kind of service would re-kindle the experiential homogeneity brought home by the GIs after WWII, and more recently the regional conflicts in the Middle East. Over 70 countries out of 196 countries in the world have some kind of mandatory military or national service. Perhaps we should take their lead.

© Eugene Marlow November 11, 2017

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The Marlowsphere Blog (#130)

[Over time] Man’s communications technologies . . . have moved from the verbal, to the alphabetic, to the typographic, to the filmic, and to the electronic . . . , [I]t would be absurd to presume that “electronic” is the end of the. . .technology chain. . . .The next significant [and dominant] medium will be based in some form of light.

I wrote the above in 1990. They appear on page 155 of Shifting Time and Space: The Story of Videotape published by Praeger in 1991 (Eugene Secunda, Ph.D., was co-author).

Since the publication of this book, I have evolved a paradigm of the invisible affect of dominant media that posits, in part, that photonic technologies—first developed in the 1960s—have emerged as the dominant technology in the latter half of the 20^thcentury and the early part of the 21^st century and are slowly but surely combining with or supplanting electronic based technologies. In turn, I posit that in no small measure this emergence accelerated the advent of “globalism,” and this has resulted in the re-emergence of “tribalism,” this time on a planetary scale with several attendant challenges.

“Globalism” is defined as:

1. A national geopolitical policy in which the entire world is regarded as the appropriate sphere for a state’s influence.
2. The development of social, cultural, technological, or economic networks that transcend national boundaries.

A “Tribe” can be defined as:

1. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

“Tribalism” is defined as:

1.  the organization, culture, or beliefs of a tribe.
2. a strong feeling of identity with and loyalty to one’s tribe or group

Clearly, globalism is in sharp contrast to tribalism. The former takes on the whole world contextually, whereas, the latter refers to a much smaller grouping.

In 1844 A.D. Samuel F.B. Morse commercially introduced the telegraph, launching the so-called “electronic age.” It is my contention that a little more than a 100 years after the birth of the electronic age and shortly after World War II we entered yet another “age” in Homo Sapiens’ technological evolution; this one based not on electrons, but on photons. To put it another way, we have already entered the age of “light” or what I am calling “the photonic age.”

Photonics is the science of light (photon) generation, detection, and manipulation through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.

The use of “light” technology has spread “silently” into various aspects of society. And as Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill 1964), has stated: “Once a new technology comes into a social milieu, it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.” This is true of orality, early writing, typography, electronics, and now photonics.

The evidence that we are now living in an age of photonics is all around us. One can find photonic technologies in a broad spectrum of human activity: 

• Consumer equipment: barcode scanner, printer, CD/DVD/Blu-ray devices, remote control devices
• Telecommunications: optical fiber communications, optical down converter to microwave
• Medicine: correction of poor eyesight, laser surgery, surgical endoscopy, tattoo removal
• Industrial manufacturing: the use of lasers for welding, drilling, cutting, and various methods of surface modification
• Construction: laser leveling, laser range-finding, smart structures
• Aviation: photonic gyroscopes lacking mobile parts
• Military: IR sensors, command and control, navigation, search and rescue, mine laying and detection
• Entertainment: laser shows, beam effects, holographic art
• Metrology: time and frequency measurements, range-finding
• Photonic computing: clock distribution and communication between computers, printed circuit boards, or within optoelectronic integrated circuits; in the future: quantum computing

And many of these photonic technologies are not only becoming more present, they are also replacing older, more familiar technologies.

The National Academy of Engineering has pointed out:

“From surgical instruments and precision guides in construction to bar code scanners and compact disc readers, lasers are integral to many aspects of modern life and work. But perhaps the farthest-flung contribution of the 20th century’s combination of optics and electronics has been in telecommunications. With the advent of highly transparent fiber-optic cable in the 1970s, very high-frequency laser signals now carry phenomenal loads of telephone conversations and data across the country and around the world.”

George Basalla, professor of the history of technology at the University of Delaware, cogently points out in his book The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge History of Science Series, 1988), all technologies have antecedents. In other words, they do not just appear, like mice via spontaneous generation in straw as those in the Middle Ages surmised.

Similarly, photonic or laser technologies did not just appear in the mid-1950s. In 1917 Albert Einstein proposed the theory of stimulated emission—that is, if an atom in a high-energy state is stimulated by a photon of the right wavelength, another photon of the same wavelength and direction of travel will be created. Stimulated emission forms the basis for research into harnessing photons to amplify the energy of light.

Leaping forward over 90 years, in 1997 the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and provides infrastructure for the next generation of Internet applications. The 17,500-mile cable begins in England and runs through the Strait of Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily, before crossing the Mediterranean to Egypt. It then goes overland to the FLAG operations center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, before crossing the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Andaman Sea; through Thailand; and across the South China Sea to Hong Kong and Japan. (Copyright © 2009 by National Academy of Engineering).

What are the effects?

To quote Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration (Huffpost, “The Blog,” 5/26/2014):

We are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from nation states. The same pattern can be seen even in America–especially in American politics. . . .

Over the last several decades, though, technology has whittled away the underpinnings of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that economic security depends less on national armies than on financial transactions around the world. . . .

News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker’s garage.

The nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe–which seemed within reach a few years ago — is now succumbing to the centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking part. The Balkans have been Balkanized.

Separatist movements have broken out all over—Czechs separating from Slovaks; Kurds wanting to separate from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; even the Scots seeking separation from England.

The turmoil now consuming much of the Middle East stems less from democratic movements trying to topple dictatorships than from ancient tribal conflicts between the two major denominations of Islam—Sunni and Shia.

To this list we can add: the Catalonians have long wanted to separate from Spain.

When early writing systems appeared in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago the inhabitants there did not all of a sudden observe “Hmmm, we’re not just an oral-only society anymore. We’ve entered the age of early writing.” In the early 21^st century, however, with global literacy at an all-time high of around 85%, we have the benefit of much hindsight. We have also had the benefit of such media scholars as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, et al. Their collective scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for looking at the world with a wide view.

It is from this perspective that I conclude we have entered a new “technological” age—the age of photonics. Photonics have accelerated the evolution of “globalism” and has resulted in an equal and opposite response: “tribalism.” As the speed of information has accelerated, and corporate entities have fostered homogeneity on a global scale, people have retreated into their tribal cultures to regain some semblance of unique identity.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
October 12, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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The Marlowsphere Blog (#113)

The last blog described my relationship with Maestro Maurice Peress with whom I studied “performance practice” for a semester in a doctoral level course at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2001. In the blog I also referred to several other musicians who have over a course of several decades influenced my composing, arranging, and playing.

There are many others, but one of those who remains to be mentioned is Ralph Hunter. Hunter was an outstanding musician: as a pianist, arranger, and especially a choir director. He died on June 3, 2002 at age 81 in Grinnell, Iowa, where he lived in retirement. I knew him as the director of the Hunter College Choir between 1963-1965.

The New York Times obituary reads as follows:

Known for his passionate conducting of polychoral and spatially stereophonic music, Mr. Hunter also worked in radio and television and recorded five albums with the Ralph Hunter Choir.

In 1954 Mr. Hunter became head of the Collegiate Chorale, an amateur choir in New York. From an ensemble of eight women and 10 men the group swelled to a 100-member chorus known for performing polychoral works by composers like Thomas Tallis and Henry Brant.

Mr. Hunter led a choir giving a series of NBC television performances with the conductor Arturo Toscanini and later conducted a campaign choir called the Voices for Nixon. In 1970 he was named professor of music at Hunter College after serving as an associate professor for one year.

In addition to teaching choral literature, conducting and arranging, he led biannual choral concerts. He retired in 1987.

A native of East Orange, N.J., Mr. Hunter began his music career with a position as a church organist at the First Reform Church in Newark. After serving in World War II, he attended the Juilliard School.

He had lived in Grinnell for four years after moving there with his wife, Louise, from Cresskill, N.J. Besides his wife of 54 years, he is survived by two sons, Richard Hunter of St. Croix, V.I., and Christopher Hunter of Grinnell; four grandchildren; and a sister, Doris Dugan of Philadelphia.

My association with Professor Hunter was as a member of the Hunter College Choir. I auditioned for the bass section, but what they needed was tenors. I became a tenor. The experience actually stretched my voice.

The college choir course was only ½ a credit per semester, but it was one of the most enjoyable ½ credits in those two years. While I might have lumbered to some of my other courses, I raced to choir practice.

Here I must pause just for a moment to explain that at the time I was attending Hunter College (uptown). There was, of course, a downtown campus at 65^th Street and Park Avenue. Hunter College (uptown) ultimately became Herbert Lehman College. Hunter College (downtown) ultimately became Hunter College.

Ralph Hunter must have possessed the patience of a saint. The reason: most of us in the uptown campus could read music on a scale ranging from “just barely” to “very well.” The “very well” singers were in the vast minority. In effect, Hunter taught each section of the choir—soprano, alto, tenor, bass—our specific musical lines note-by-note, or more accurately, phrase by phrase. At home I would attempt to read the lines in the score and sing it in preparation for the weekly practice sessions.

He was short of stature with a constant gleam in his eye. He could sit at the piano and sight-read each line of the score with great ease. I was envious of his skill. My own sight-reading skills at the time were almost non-existent. But my tenure as a tenor in the choir was, in part, the beginning of a more formal musical education. By the second year I had gained sufficient confidence in my singing, that I had become the de facto leader of the tenor section. There was also, on occasion, opportunities for me to take the lead of the entire 200+-voice choir. We were meeting in the large auditorium in the Hunter downtown campus. Hunter was late to the rehearsal. I stood in front of the somewhat disorganized choir members, called them to attention, and conducted the opening of one of the pieces we were to perform at our annual Christmas concert. I loved it. I had never led a musical group before.

Another aspect of Hunter’s influence was the repertoire we performed. It ranged from the very classical to the popular—from Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, to Gabrieli, Vivaldi, traditional Christmas songs and selections from the Harry Belafonte opus and other recordings. This is an aspect missing from Hunter’s obituary.

Among his recordings as composer and arranger were “The Wild, Wild West” (RCA 1959), “Living Voices Sing Moonglow and Other Great Standards” (RCA 1964), “Going Down Jordan” RCA 1975), and “All the Things You Are” (Pro Arte 1984).

He also served as a conductor and arranger for the likes of Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba in the early to mid-1960s: “Jump Up Calypso,” “Jump in The Line/Angelina,” and “The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba.”

Whenever we performed something from the Belafonte repertoire I brought a pair of bongos from home. How they came into my possession I have no recollection. It gave me great delight to perform on the bongos during these pieces. Whether I was playing the correct rhythmic pattern of not, I also have no recollection, but it must have sounded somewhat authentic. Hunter made no objections.

One last story about him. It was Tuesday, November 9, 1965. The Northeast blackout of 1965 was a significant disruption in the supply of electricity affecting parts of Ontario in Canada; and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the United States. Over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles were left without electricity for up to 13 hours.

The uptown campus section of the choir—about 80 of us—was rehearsing on a stage in a below ground level auditorium. It was around 5:35 p.m. We saw lights flicker for a moment but didn’t think much of it. Then, a few minutes later the entire room went completely dark. There could have been panic but Hunter kept us calm. Good thing too because it was at least a six foot drop to the floor of the auditorium from the stage. Anyone falling off the stage would have been hurt.

Hunter did the right thing. He led us in a rousing rendition of the “Halleluyah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.” It brought everyone together. Instead of panic, there was a high level of morale. After we got done singing, a few of us whose eyes had adapted to the darkness (including myself), led everyone, line by line, down the steps on each side of the stage, through the auditorium and onto the outside campus. Even though it was November and shorter days, there was also a full moon which helped light our way.

In retrospect, it was an extraordinary evening. People on the street volunteered to direct traffic. The level of cooperation was very high. The feeling all around contradicted the usual perception that New Yorkers are nasty, self-centered folk.

Ralph Hunter provided that musical spark of leadership that helped us deal with the unprecedented situation.

He was a person you wanted to spend time with and sing your heart out for.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
December 8, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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