(2018-04-15) Kerr The Origins Of Opera And The Future Of Programming

Jessica Kerr: the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming. Or: Collective problem solving in music, art, science, and software. At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins of Opera.

Part 1: Examples

The Camerata

The Florentine Camerata were a group of people who met in Florence in the 16th century. They had a huge impact on history and on each other.

I looked it up further, and came upon Collective “Problem-Solving” in the History of Music: the Case of the Camerata by Dr. Ruth Katz in the Journal of the History of Ideas, and toward the end of it my mind was blown. More on that later. (Some of the excerpts below are quotes from that paper. Also, my own excerpts of that paper are at the bottom of this page.)

Camerata literally means a small orchestra or choir. This Camerata was a diverse group of people who gathered and worked on a common problem: they were bored with polyphony, the esteemed music of their day. (Sample: Palestrina) Polyphony is very pretty: it has around four melodies, each of equal importance. Each has a logic of its own, rather than melody and accompaniment. Polyphony is intellectually rewarding, but you need technical understanding to appreciate it fully. What feeling it conveys comes through auditory qualities.

The Camerata asked the revolutionary question: what if you could understand the words?

Methods

The Camerata included: musicians, artists, poets, astrologers, philosophers, scientists who met informally under the aegis of Bardi and Corsi.

Their aim was to reform the polyphonic music of the day and they believed that the best way to do so was to renovate the ancient Greek practice of setting words to music

Their principal aim was to find the optimum formula for wedding words and music.

Here, “optimum” is measured as “maximally effective in communicating… the specific meanings and emotions appropriate to the text.”

Qualities

The Camerata talked a lot, and listened to each other talk.

But they weren’t all talk: the Camerata constituted not only a forum for theoretical discussions, but also a workshop, a “laboratory” for the creation and performance of music.

The Camerata didn’t always get along. There was rivalry between Bardi and Corsi, the two chief sponsors. Bardi preferred talking, Corsi wanted to play more music.

They did code review! presentations made… were commented on formally by “defenders” and “censors” who were nominated for the occasion.

Outcomes

Over the years, this team changed history. They invented the music-drama, and a style of music that conveyed more meaning. (Sample: Monteverdi

As composers of operas and authors of scientific treatises, these half-dozen people are fewer than half of the Camerata members who have Wikipedia articles. Really, what are the chances, if you’re alive in the sixteenth century, that you have a Wikipedia article today? These people did pretty well for themselves

Also in Science

This pattern of a group of people coming together to solve a problem is not unique to music — it’s the common case.

the Camerata resembles the kind of “invisible college” which is the key to creativity in science.

These invisible colleges share: tacit understandings concerning appropriate methods of research

priority problems

and the shorthand communication (shared language) which shared work implies.

compatible mental models

This is super fun, when I get to this point with my team.

Also in Art

People work together to develop their individual styles. Usually in Paris, it seems: the salon, the coffeehouse, the café as breeding places of artistic creativity

Van Gogh lived in the Montmartre district with the other artists and dealers and critics. When I visited his museum in Amsterdam, my favorite part was all the paintings by his friends and associates; they developed each other as painters.

Picasso was at the center of many social circles in Paris over the decades. Writers, photographers, philosophers.

This brings us to the modern day, where we can find examples of this phenomenon in software teams. (product team)

Also in Software...One camerata emerged in London around 2003–2006. This group gave us Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, DevOps. Many of these people worked at ThoughtWorks.... Jez and Dan and Chris Read produced The Deployment Production Line. Later, Dan went to invent BDD, Sam Newman became a prophet of microservices, and more.

Another example: the early Java Spring team, around the same time.

Personally, I’ve been part of three teams that grew me as a developer and as a person.

The tech meetup scene in St Louis is a source of growth too.

In all of these examples, we can observe a phenomenon: Great Teams Make Great People.

Part 2: Theory

Why? Why do great teams make great people?

I have a theoretical framework to explain this.

It starts with Gregory Bateson.

Gregory Bateson had a camerata: the Macy Cybernetics Conferences, a series of ten conferences over several years sponsored by the Macy Foundation to advance medical research. Gregory Bateson was a pioneer of cybernetics, now known as Systems Thinking.

Systems thinking is to the present era what the scientific method was for the Renaissance. It is a new way of analyzing problems and experimenting.

Another of his contributions: his daughter, Nora Bateson.

She takes systems thinking a step past where it was in her father’s day.

Nora Bateson points out that there’s more to a living system than parts and interrelations: the parts aren’t constant. We grow and learn within the system, so that the parts don’t stay the same and the interrelationships don’t stay the same. She gave a word to this, something deeper than any mechanical or model-able system, a learning system composed of learning parts: symmathesy (sim-MATH-uh-see).

Systems thinking says, we are more than the components; we are also the interrelationships. Agile recognizes that these matter.

But there’s more! Each member of a team learns every day. our environment learns and adapts too, because we change it.

We work and grow in a symmathesy. This growth results in great people.

This also explains why it is important to bring our whole selves to work: to build this living system, we need to be alive in it.

There’s something extra special about development teams: software is the most malleable material we’ve ever used in engineering, by thousands of times. There’s nothing else like it, and this changes the meaning of “team.”

Teams Developing Software

A team consists of everyone required for me to be successful, regardless of what the org chart says. Success is running useful software that impacts the world outside my team.

The software is part of the symmathesy. We learn from it, from its error messages and logs and the data is collects. It learns from us, because we change it!

We form a sociotechnical system, people and running code

My perspective includes our whole software system and team, and surrounding systems too. The scope of the system we can hold in our head is the portion of the system we can change.

Mental models

In order to change our system, we need a mental model of it. Each developer has a mental model of the software we work on. Each developer’s mental model is necessarily incomplete and out of date.

Accurate mental models are incredibly powerful.

They’re also incredibly hard to form and validate

I’ll call out two reasons in particular for this difficulty.

Line of Representation

A developer can’t look down and see the software running

We can only look at screens and type on keyboards; we use software to observe and control other software. Each of these tools is part of our symmathesy. Grow them, and they can grow the accuracy of our mental models.

Downhill Invention, Uphill Analysis

it’s easier to build a system from scratch, constructing the mental model as you go along, than to form an understanding of how an already-built system works.

Why are there a thousand JavaScript frameworks out there? because it’s easier to build your own than to gain an understanding of React.

When you do have a decent mental model of a system, sharing that with others is hard

this system because you built it. The green and blue developers have been assigned to help, but they can’t change the system because they don’t understand it.

the system, and invest attention in transferring your mental model. Until then, Blue and Green get in your way.

*This brings us to the conflict between advancing your own reputation and contributing to the group.

The race to be first has to be reconciled in science with the need and the norm of sharing.*

Individual vs Group Interests

When people are evaluated as individuals, there’s incentive to hold back from sharing. To hoard recognition.

The mental models we hoard make us look good; those we share make the whole team powerful.

Generativity

Productivity is my personal output. Generativity is the difference between the team’s output with me and without me.

If we start recognizing and crediting generative actions, we build our symmathesy.

It’s counterintuitive: to become great, put the team first. Aiming first for my own greatness, I limit myself.

Part 3: Predictions

Obliquity

Surrounding Culture

The Camerata existed in the late Renaissance... there was a sense of innovation in the air

When the world is ready for an idea, it doesn’t come to just one person.

the very existence of such groups as social institutions was a product of the time

Right now, the software industry is letting teams try things. Developers are hard to hire, and the work we’re doing is hard, so we get to experiment, even though companies prefer uniformity.

Ideas from agile development have spread into other business areas and improved lives.

Recognition of Art

During the Renaissance these trade guilds lost power. Competence was harder to guarantee, but individual talent was recognized. Painters and poets specialized in subject matter. People noticed that there was some common factor to music, painting, poetry, drama — some indefinable essence that was more than competency with a brush.

Before, as tradesmen, painters hung out with painters, sculptors with bronzeworkers etc. After Art became a thing, artists studied in academies, and they talked to intellectuals of many kinds.... transformation of homogeneous artistic circles into “cultured” circles: poets, artists, amateurs, and laymen alike.

Software is not a craft. We aren’t housepainters (cf Software Craftsmanship)

We cannot possess all the skills we need; our secret weapon is learning, never perfection.

Software is not an art. Neither are we creating a portrait or a poem, where there is such a thing as “done.”

Serious software development is the practice of symmathesy. Software is not Art. Software is the next thing after art.

And that implies that our current time is the next thing after the Renaissance. We are developing whole new ways of being human together. (cf network enlightenment)

The only problem with this idea is that it has my name on it. Ideas are only valuable when they’re shared, spread, contributed to the common knowledge. Every person who spreads an idea is part of it. So join me, spread this. Do you have a camerata? Can you help build one? (cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress)

Collective "Problem-Solving" in the History of Music: The Case of the Camerata. By Ruth Katz

the social circle most closely associated with the origins of opera-the Camerata-resembles the kind of "invisible college" which is the key to creativity in science

The following re-examination of the Camerata stems from and lends support to the conviction that the crystallization of problems and their solutions in art are analogous to the development of a "paradigm" in science

The Camerata as Invisible College-The geography of the Renaissance is dotted with groups of learned laymen and professionals who came together for serious talk. In his often quoted letter to G. B. Doni (1594-1647), Bardi's son, Pietro, tells how his father, "who took great delight in music and was in his day a composer of some reputation always had about him the most celebrated men of the city, learned in this profession, and inviting them to his house, he formed a sort of delightful and continual academy from which vice and in particular every kind of gaming were absent

Like the Alterati, whose theoretical discussions reached a very high level, the Camerata constituted not only a forum for theoretical discussions, but also a workshop, a "laboratory" for the creation and performance of music. Even if the Camerata were a mere example of such groups, it would be worthy of our attention; but, clearly, it is more than that, for Daphne, the two Euridices, and other similar works are its products. Above all, it is marked by a determination to find a new way, as far as the composition and performance of music is concerned, despite differences over how to get there. In the parlance of the sociology of science, the Camerata fits rather closely the model of an "invisible college."20 This concept refers to a group of scientists who share a focal problem or "paradigm" and by addressing themselves to the problem and to each other to create the kind of "continual academy" which the younger Bardi invoked as a description of the Camerata. In modern science this means shared laboratories, a system of mutual criticism, a specialized journal, a water cooler, a faculty club, periodic conclaves and the like, together with tacit understandings concerning appropriate methods of research, priority problems, and the shorthand communication which shared work implies. Science is a "community based activity" and a paradigm governs not only a subject matter but a group of practitioners. Thinking of the Camerata as an "invisible college" may be helpful

Yet even here one has only to think of the impressionists to realize that they were coping-as an "invisible college"-with a puzzle which they, separately, and as a group, tried to solve. Gombrich notes how, in the Renaissance, new pieces of art came to be viewed as "contributions" and "solutions" to problems, and thus another analogy between work in the arts and in the new arena of experimental science should not be overlooked.24 Indeed, as Crane notes, "the similarity between this [Gombrich's] concept and Kuhn's idea of paradigm is startling."

Similarly with the Camerata. The puzzle was to discover the ideal combination of words and music such that text and music, each in its own way and in juxtaposition to the other, could be maximally effective in communicating not just sensory pleasure, vaguely defined, but the specific meanings and emotions appropriate to the text

Peri and Caccini had their differences, too, and their differences provide a nice illustration of the "working out" of a paradigm. Both accepted that their main goal was to enhance communication through singing, and that modern tragedy might be effectively presented by adaptation of the manner of ancient tragedy. Peri sought to bring singing nearer to speech, allowing the text and the action to dictate to the music; Pirrotta calls this recitar cantando. Caccini, more concerned with the perfection of singers and the art of singing, was committed to "affective reactions to dramatic situations" 30-the words must find expression in the music; Pirrotta calls this cantar recitando.31 Galilei, influenced by Mei, tried his hand at applying the theory of the predominance of words; the results, says Palisca, were more lyrical than dramatic. Outsiders, says Pirrotta, would have been impressed by the similarities rather than by the differences

Even the competition over "priorities" is reminiscent of the behavior of scientists. The race to be first has to be reconciled in science with the need and the norm of sharing. The scientist's role is above all to advance knowledge, and knowledge advances through originality

Although this kind of property shares with other types general recognition of the owner's rights, it contrasts sharply in all other respects. Once he has made his contribution, the scientist no longer has exclusive rights of access to it. It becomes part of the public domain of science. ... In short, property rights in science become whittled down to just this one: the recognition by others of the scientist's distinctive part in having brought the result into being. (reputation graph)

The term "aria" was much used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the notion of aria underlies the attack on the inability of polyphony to move its audience. However pleasing, polyphony was thought to be unable to communicate the emotional message of a text.

It is time now to ask where these ideas came from. How did it happen that creativity in music found itself a focus of attention in salons like that of Bardi and Corsi and in groups like the Alterati? Why were they concerned about reforming music? These questions require explanations from the domain of intellectual and social history

The urban commercial economy began to take shape in the late Middle Ages and led first to the political and cultural independence of the middle class, and ultimately, to its intellectual predominance. The allegiance to region and locality which accompanied this process clashed with the universalist striving of the Church and its attempt to maintain a uniformity of culture (monoculture). It was the insistence on differentiation-of collectivity from collectivity, of individual from collectivity, and individual from individual-that bridges the late Middle Ages to the baroque. The ethic of "free competition" which accompanied the rise of the urban middle class in Italy inevitably led to the granting of recognition to those who "made it". The rural aristocracy adapted itself very early to the new urban financiers. Trying to enlist the support of the public for the ruling houses, the courts were bound to take cognizance of this new power and to use it to their own advantage

In contrast to the exclusive moral community of court chivalry," says Hauser, "a comparatively free, fundamentally intellectual type of salon life develops at these courts which is, on the one hand, the continuation of the aesthetic social culture of middle-class circles . . . and represents on the other, the preparatory stage in the development of those literary salons which play such an important part in the intellectual life of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

Laymen, Artists, and Nobles.-The route to the salons traversed by the merchant or banker is implicit in the rise of the middle class to social station and to cultural pretension, simulated and real.49 Laymen had an important voice in the salon and their presence, obviously, directly influenced the quality and content of the discussion

The artist, too, had a long socio-economic route to traverse on his way to the salon. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as is well known, artists were typically organized together with craftsmen in trade guilds of glaziers, saddlers, goldsmiths, and the like.51 Art and artists neither commanded special recognition nor were they treated with awe.

The guilds maintained their hold on the artist as long as he was viewed primarily as a craftsman. The guilds, for example, were able to control the number of artists and keep artists out of the market simply by increasing the required years of apprenticeship.

new arrivals began to compete with guild members, as unorganized labor, by offering to work at reduced prices

With the strongly shaken position of the guilds, technical proficiency, which was never doubted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was no longer taken for granted in the fifteenth and sixteenth. Proof attesting to proficiency was often required of artists applying for work, since many tried to execute works of art without any formal training whatsoever.56 At the same time, the individuality of artists was no longer ignored and artists then began to "specialize" and to do that which was most expressive of their personalities and technical abilities.

emphasizing the power of the artist's personality rather than his "know how" changed the conception of art itself. The role of true art was no longer to imitate nature as it is, but to express it as it appears to be.

If the presence of the layman and the artist in the nobleman's salon needs explaining, the nobleman's presence seems self-explanatory. Yet, it is worth recalling that period when the nobility itself underwent a transformation of its "class consciousness", when hereditary nobility opened its ranks to new recruits and the fact of "noble origin" made way for the idea of "noble character." This transformation was accompanied by the rise in the status of the court poets, whose origins in the lower strata were also submerged. "Now that the words 'gentle' and 'simple' had come to signify not merely differences of birth but of education, so that a man was not necessarily gentle by mere birth and rank but must become so by training

follows from the fact that non-artists were engaged in the discussion of art that the technical aspects of art were relegated to a lesser place. Aesthetic and philosophical problems rose to the foreground instead, and became the common ground. "Theorizing" of this kind increasingly gained in importance. It led, ultimately to the discovery of the affinity among the arts, that is, to the idea of Art as a concept cutting across the several branches of art and their technical peculiarities, it was a curious characteristic of music reformers, the Florentine reformers included, to state their music theories in prefaces, letters, or even complete books discussing music primarily from an aesthetic-philosophical point of view.