Raga Narendra Modini NAMOstute

Akshaya Nath in The Print

Indian classical music has a grand history of ragas — Melakarta and Todi for the morning, Brindavana Sarang for the afternoon, and Hindolam and Mohanam for the evening. Now the repository has another addition—Narendra Modini—for any time of the day for anyone who wants to pay a tribute to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

It was a casual conversation on 11 March, ahead of a concert in Delhi, between Rajya Sabha MP and dancer Sonal Mansingh and renowned vocalist-cum-instrumentalist N Ravikiran that sowed the seeds for a new raga in the latter’s mind. Within hours, Ravikiran was singing Narendra Modini over the phone to Mansingh.

Eight days later, Narendra Modini, and Ravikiran’s Sanskrit composition “Surendra muneendra narendra modini sangeeta vani” was uploaded on YouTube.

The video has received over 16,000 views so far. “The raga, the Sanskrit composition, all of it was created in an hour’s time,” says Ravikiran. “As she [Sonal Mansingh] was the one who had planted the idea, I wanted her to hear it first,” Ravikiran adds.

A child prodigy, Ravikiran was recognised at the age of two by the Music Academy with a scholarship after he identified and rendered 325 ragas and 175 talas. Ravikiran, who was tutored by his father N Narasimhan, created his first raga at the age of two or three. “It was called Choodamani, a raga that we named after my mother,” Ravikiran says. He later went on to become a 21-string chitravina instrumentalist as well. Ravikiran has also created Indian ragas as tributes to Beethoven (Veetavanam) and MK Gandhi (Mohini).

The Narendra Modini invention, however, has met with a variety of responses, from nonchalance to amusement, with musician TM Krishna even saying that he does not consider it as a “serious work of art”.

A tribute with a message

Ravikiran considers Narendra Modini a “cousin” of popular ragas like Poorvikalyani and Sunadavinodini, also known as Hindol in Hindustani. “This raga has five notes in the ascending sequences and seven notes in the descending sequence,” explains Ravikiran. The composition in the raga was produced by Ravikiran’s disciple, 20-year-old, Samanvi. “It is similar to some popular ragas but very different in taste,” says Samanvi. “It was a bit of a challenge to perfect the feel of the raga.”

The Sanskrit composition praises the goddess of music — Sangeeta Vani. But Ravikiran says that the words Narendra Modini were embedded in the opening line as a tribute to the PM. He also added that the word “namostute” at the end of the song was “pure coincidence that it suggests the PM’s shortened name (NaMo)”.

This new raga is also an appeal to make classical music and arts accessible to every child and initiate a special programme for rural empowerment, says the 56-year-old musician.

In 1992, Ravikiran had written to then-Madras Corporation commissioner pitching for an initiative called ‘Music for Masses’ where school children would be taught classical music. In 2006, under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, he headed India’s largest music camp with over 31,000 children from diverse backgrounds. “Brain drain is typically understood as emigration of the empowered. But, the real brain drain is in the rural segments, where the artistic potential of millions of children remains untapped,” says Ravikiran.

Scope for new ragas

It appears that Narendra Modini arose out of the immense possibilities for new ragas that Indian classical music offers.

“A raga is a set of notes and intervals. There are 12 tones including microtones, and to set it in a scale of seven, it means the permutations and combinations are endless and many ragas are waiting to be explored,” says pianist Anil Srinivasan.

Ravikiran says he has followed due diligence before announcing his discovery to the world. “In theory, there is a possibility to have 7.2 million ragas through permutation and combination. But in practice, not all of them will sound good. There is a database of 5,000 ragas. I went over it, and for Hindustani music, I went through online resources and also spoke to a couple of Hindustani artists,” he adds.

Recounting classical composers from the past, Anil says that M Balamuralikrishna had composed many ragas like Mahati. Ravishankar was very well-known for creating ragas by combining two different ragas and even Lalgudi Jayaram had created many compositions. Although Anil hasn’t heard Ravikiran’s composition, he says that composing ragas is a difficult job. “You need to have a compositional bent and be very much in command of music, which Ravikiran is. Kudos to him for this,” he adds.

Reaction from within the musical world 

Senior vocalist OS Arun, too, appreciated Narendra Modini “as an artist’s creativity,” though he hasn’t heard it.

Several other musicians that ThePrint got in touch with either refused to comment or said they have not heard the composition. “I have not engaged with Narendra Modini seriously. Musicians have a long tradition of singing the praise of their kings, zamindars, politicians, and patrons. This is another in that line. At the same time, we have stories of musicians such as Tyagaraja refusing to sing the praises of a living king for any kind of benefit,” says Krishna.

For the Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, each musician must decide for themselves which route they would like to take. “In 2014, when Modi became Prime Minister, many Carnatic musicians participated in World Music Day where he was described as a king and compositions that had the word ‘modi’ (pronounced with a hard D and meaning something else) were presented! This sycophancy continues,” he adds.

And Krishna says free speech and judgement has taken a hit even in the music industry now.

“The musicians who forwarded me the recording did so in amusement and with ridicule. But I guess in the present political scenario, it is very difficult to say anything critical in public when it has something to do with PM Modi. People are afraid of backlash. Do keep in mind that the Carnatic music world is filled with those who strongly believe in Modi, BJP, RSS, VHP, and anyone else who propagates hyper-Brahmanical Hinduism,” he adds.

Ravikiran who has won Music Academy’s Sangita Kalanidhi award in 2017, was in 2018 named in the #Metoo movement and in the same year Madras Music Academy barred 7 artists including Ravikiran from performing during the prestigious Margazhi festival. Ravikiran too had responded to the allegations and had said, “Taking a stance to suspend my performances until I can clear the air to my satisfaction.”

 

50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music

1 Tchaikovsky - Lo Schiaccianoci: Valzer dei fiori 00:00 2 Strauss - An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314 07:04 3 Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525: I. Allegro 18:30 4 Vivaldi - The Four Seasons, "Spring": I. Allegro 24:31 5 Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 3: I. Allegro 27:48 6 Beethoven - Symphony No. 3 “Heroic”: I. Allegro con brio 33:38 7 Strauss - Frühlingsstimmen, Op. 410 48:29 8 Bizet - Carmen Suite No. 1: VI. Les Toréadors 56:03 9 Strauss - Radetzky March, Op. 228 58:08 10 Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Wedding March 1:00:34 11 Mozart - Die Zauberflöte, K. 620: Ouverture 1:05:02 12 Beethoven - Coriolan: Ouverture 1:12:16 13 Mussorgsky - Night on Bald Mountain 1:20:15 14 Haydn - Cello Concerto No. 2: II. Andante 1:31:31 15 Sibelius - Andante Festivo 1:35:58 16 Tchaikovsky - Serenade for Strings, Op. 48: II. Valse 1:40:05 17 Saint-Saens - The Carnival of the Animals: XIII, The Swan 1:43:51 18 Debussy - 2 Arabesques: No. 1, Andantino con moto 1:46:29 19 Chopin - Nocturnes, Op. 9: No. 2 in E-Flat Major 1:50:36 20 Liszt - Consolations, S. 172: No. 3, Lento placido 1:55:18 21 Satie - Trois Gymnopedies: No. 1, Lent et doloreux 1:59:20 22 Beethoven - "Moonlight Sonata": I. Adagio sostenuto 2:02:08 23 Mozart - Symphony No. 40: I. Molto allegro 2:07:01 24 Rossini - Il Barbiere di Siviglia: Ouverture 2:15:14 25 Vivaldi - The Four Seasons, "Summer": III. Presto 2:22:09 26 Mozart - Requiem, K. 626: Sequentia. Dies Irae 2:24:47 27 Beethoven - Symphony No. 7: II. Allegretto 2:26:31 28 Verdi - La Traviata: Addio del passato 2:35:31 29 Puccini - Tosca: "Vissi d'arte" 2:42:12 30 Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 6 "Pathétique": II. Allegro con grazia 2:44:51 31 Grieg - Holberg Suite, Op. 40: I. Praeludium 2:52:48 32 Mozart - Don Giovanni: "Madamina il catalogo è questo" 2:55:35 33 Mozart - Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492, Act I: "Non più andrai" 3:00:56 34 Mozart - Symphony No. 41"Jupiter": IV. Molto Allegro 3:04:14 35 Strauss - Kaiser Walzer, Op. 437 3:13:11 36 Mozart - Piano Sonata No. 11: III. Alla Turca 3:25:04 37 Chopin - Fantaisie-impromptu 3:28:44 38 Rachmaninoff - Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini: Var. XVIII 3:32:52 39 Chopin - Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52 (Live recording) 3:35:51 40 Schubert - Four Impromptus, Op. 90, D. 899: No. 3 in G-Flat Major (Live recording) 3:48:38 41 Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, Book 1, Op. 19b: No. 1, Andante con moto 3:54:46 42 Debussy - Suite Bergamasque, L. 75: III. Clair de Lune 3:58:35 43 Grieg - Lyric Pieces, Book I, Op. 12: No. 1, Arietta 4:03:20 44 Tchaikovsky - The Seasons, Op. 37b: No. 6, June. Barcarolle 4:04:50 45 Chopin - 24 Préludes, Op. 28 "Raindrop": No. 15 in D-Flat Major 4:10:05 46 Liszt - Liebesträume, S. 541: No. 3 in A-Flat Major 4:16:37 47 Schumann - Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Op. 15: No. 7, Träumerei 4:22:23 48 Chopin - Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor 4:25:39 49 Beethoven - Bagatelle No. 25 "Für Elise" 4:30:25 50 Bach - Orchestral Suite No. 3: II. Air on the G string 4:34:13

 

Struggling with revision? Here's how to prepare for exams more efficiently

Abby Young-Powell in The Guardian


If you’re one to put hours into revising for an exam only to be disappointed with the results, then you may need to rethink your revision methods. You could be wasting time on inefficient techniques, says Bradley Busch, a registered psychologist and director of InnerDrive. “You get people putting in lots of effort, but not in a directed way,” he says. Here are some of the common ways students unwittingly waste study time, and what experts recommend you do instead. 

Re-reading and highlighting notes

Re-reading and highlighting notes may feel like work, but it often won’t achieve much. The same goes for spending hours drawing up a revision timetable. Instead, psychologists recommend a technique called retrieval practice. This is anything that makes your brain work to come up with an answer. It can include doing quizzes, multiple choice tests, and past papers. “To really learn something, you’ve got to transfer information from working memory into long term memory, where you can store and later retrieve it,” says David Cox, a neuroscientist and journalist. “Committing something to long term memory isn’t easy, so it shouldn’t feel easy.”

Last-minute cramming

Beware of the planning fallacy, which is our tendency to underestimate how much time we really need to do something. It leads to sitting outside the exam hall with two hours to spare, desperately cramming. This is not an effective way to learn. “The information you gain quickly, you can lose quickly too,” says Busch.

The opposite of cramming is spacing, which is the practice of spacing out your revision over time, doing little and often. So one hour a day for seven days is better than cramming seven hours into one day, for example. It’s also good to incorporate interleaving into your revision. This is a fancy way of saying you should mix up your subjects during a revision session. “It forces you to think about the problem and the strategy you come up with,” says Busch.

Making a study playlist

Sifting through the recommended study playlists on Spotify, trying to work out which songs will help you to concentrate, is usually a waste of time. But while listening to music can help you relax, and some students may have “trained” themselves to concentrate with it on, it’s still better to study in silence, Cox says. “You’re never going to be as productive having music on in the background, because it’s preventing your brain from acting at maximum capacity.”

Checking your phone

We may check our phones as often as once every 12 minutes. Obviously, this is a major distraction. That’s not all: research has shown that just having your phone in sight when you revise is enough to negatively affect your concentration, even if you don’t use it. And it’s a common trap to fall into. “I usually have my phone on silent mode, but to be honest, if it’s there I always check it,” says Chiara Fiorillo, who studies at City, University of London. Ideally it’s best to banish your phone to another room altogether.

The beat of cricket

PETE LANGMAN in Cricinfo


 Getting the timing right, when playing and elsewhere, sets you free


Time, as a wiser man than I once said, is the author of authors. No matter how fast we run in the hope of outpacing it, it always catches up with us. This is because it is attached to our heels with elastic. And it always has the last word, just as it does the first.

Cricket also has an elastic view of time, packing its excitement into barely a quarter of the actual minutes available. In Test match cricket, each ball bowled is in motion for between six and 12 seconds, with the important bit, from hand to bat, taking up barely an entire second. A typical hour's play, containing, say, 13 overs, thus involves barely 15 minutes of action, of which around two minutes are ball to bat to field. They also serve, as Milton would say.

And yet, within this game of contradictions built on dichotomy, this game that challenges us on every level, forcing us into unnatural positions, demanding fluidity when for the greater part of every match the entire field is almost entirely still, within this game the great players appear to manufacture their own time. Time is the umpire of umpires, if you like.

It's no wonder that when we are struggling with our personal game we explain it in temporal terms: we can't time the ball; the rhythm in our run-up has gone. It even works for keepers: a mistimed take bounces out of rather than buries itself into the glove.

I was once at a milonga, an organised event where you dance the tango, where tradition has it that the women choose their partner for each dance. I noticed one gentleman, maybe in his late fifties, who was in high demand. He danced a simple dance, little more than the basic walk of tango, but he was obviously preferred over the younger and flashier leaders, all leg flicks and twirls. I asked one of his partners why he was so popular (even though I thought I had it nailed), and the response was that he just felt better. I'd been watching his feet, however. The reason he felt better was because he knew where the beat was. This meant that his dancing partners could predict when his feet were aiming at, which made for a dance in which coordination was total, where two dancers merged into one. The others were merely there or thereabouts.

But cricket revolves around the ball, and specifically getting the ball to bend to our will rather than somebody else's. And to do that we need as much information about it as possible. In fact, we need to predict where it's going to be at any given time in its trajectory. Only in this way can it be propelled to just the right length, hit with just the right amount of force into just the right gap, clasped at just the right moment.

 When you play music (by which I mean contemporary popular music; classical music, with a conductor, is a different kettle of fish), the living and breathing heart of the music is the drummer, for they define the groove, they create the contingent time in which the music exists. For the ensemble to work, each instrument must find its place within that time, as asserted on the drum kit. The bass, for example, will find its home in the kick drum, not played at the same time, but inside the drumbeat. The bass must make the kick drum play a note. In similar fashion, the guitar must make the hi-hat or snare play a chord. For a drummer to play at their best, they must be balanced, relaxed and confident in every stroke. They must feel themselves inside the beat and avoid second-guessing their instincts. The best drummers produce a groove so big, so fat, that each beat acts as though it has its own gravity, with the default placement of a note being in the exact centre of each beat.

It is this knowledge of the beat's precise centre that allows the ensemble player freedom to make a rhythm that is irresistible, a rhythm so simple, so beyond mere precision that it enters the realms of inevitability. From this place, the note can be placed a little in front of the beat, a little behind, on top, underneath... the player controls the note, and thus the music.

And so it is in cricket.

When a bowler's run-up goes, the suggested fix is invariably technical, but what is needed is for them to tap into how it felt when all was dandy. They must feel like the drummer - relaxed, balanced, confident. They must feel that the ball is part of them, on a string, as is said of Jimmy Anderson when he's in the groove. The game is not the time to practise but just to kick back and play.
For the batsman, the process is the same. As you wait for the bowler to deliver the ball, so you tap into the feel of the game, allow your body to connect with it, and as the ball traces its arc towards you, your instinct knows where the centre of the ball is. Then control is yours. Play it early, play it late, play it spot on. Close the face, open the face, show the maker's name. Whichever you choose, the ball will obey.

Cricket is all about timing, and timing is not technique, it's feel. Perhaps, just perhaps, if we learn to feel differently, to trust our instincts to place the ball, bat or gloves just so, it might just help us to slot back into the groove.

Music to celebrate Irinjalakuda's Koodalmanickyakshetram Ultsavam starting 18 April

Panchari Melam

Pavizhamallithara Melam

Nadappura Melam

Pandi Melam

Ilanjithara Melam

Pro athletes cannot be bullied into better performances

Valuable notes from a book that explains the intricacies of coaching and captaincy without once mentioning either

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

November 9, 2014

C

Coaches must remember that practice isn't an end in itself © Getty Images

I've just read a brilliant book about captaincy and coaching. It might be the best book ever written on leadership in sport. The author not only studied many of the greats at first hand, he also did the job himself. There is a surprise, however, and I'm not going to spoil it. So guess, by all means, but I'm not giving away his name until the end.

I've gone through the notes in my book, collecting his advice into several themes.

Mystery
"The better a captain is, the less you know why. You certainly can't get the qualities from a textbook, and they can't be faked by copying a great captain. But there is also a practical side: however much talent you're born with, there's a lot to learn. All the best captains and coaches work hard at their craft, developing their own individual ways. They all do it differently, so there can't be only one "right" way. To put all young leaders through a training course only means that a mass of mediocrity will be let loose on the world."

Instinct
Intuition rather than rationality often drives inspired decisions. "Some captains and coaches are totally instinctive and can't describe what they do. [After one game] I was so impressed that I complimented the captain on a detail. 'Oh! Did I do that?' he replied."

See the big picture
Being preoccupied with details can't be allowed to obscure what really matters. "Skilful captains and coaches can transform the way a team plays in a very short time, even though some of them wouldn't be able to tell you much about tactics or technique. Before modern video and analytics, there was far less emphasis on precision and more on capturing the overall mood of a team. Captains were listening for bigger and more important things. We've lost something in demanding total accuracy."

Show, don't tell
One great captain "could tell me what he wanted with his eyes," the author writes. "It's important to look at players as if you expect the best, not as if you fear the worst. Many inexperienced coaches seem to be "looking for trouble", a real turnoff for a team. When I look at players during a match, I'm trying to involve and communicate what I'm feeling rather than police them."

Authenticity
Waving your arms around and acting for the cameras doesn't fool anyone. The author advises captains to have the integrity to stay focused on the game situation rather than get side-tracked about the impression he's making. If the captain is "naturally flamboyant, then it's a natural expression of his feeling". But when his self-conscious gestures are just acted out, "and don't have a real relationship with the game… then it's just a circus."

Practice is not the real thing
"The most important thing about a practice session is that it's not an end in itself. Everything a coach does must aim at a good performance on match day. Take a chance and leave some things fluid. Don't cross every "t" and dot every "i". This may feel risky, but it keeps a team on its toes and gives the match day an "edge". Don't practise a team to death; I've never had much sympathy for coaches who "program" a team at practice and then just "run the programme" during the match. There is more to it than that."

Seek authority not power
"Captaincy and coaching are like riding a horse, not driving a car. A car will go off a cliff if you "tell" it to; a horse won't. A team has a life of its own, based largely on the players sensing what each other will do."

	Be true to your captaincy instincts © Getty Images  Enlarge

Some coaches have an "unfair" knack
"An assistant coach told a story about how he couldn't get the team to work together at practice sessions, despite giving crystal clear instructions. Some time later he attended a practice led by the brilliant head coach, who began with the same practice drill. The head coach gave his characteristically vague and wobbly advice, and the whole team played together perfectly. It's an unjust world."

Allow room for mavericks
However good you are, some players won't listen - and nor should they. "One of the greatest players in history said he never looked at captains in the field as he couldn't understand what any of them were doing."

****

It's a very good list. But here is a confession. The book, though real, is not about cricket. The words captaincy and coaching are not mentioned at all, not once. The book's real subject is classical music, the title is Inside Conducting and its author is conductor Christopher Seaman. In quoting from the book, each time the term "conductor" appeared, I changed it for the word "captain"/"coach".

First, I want to demonstrate that cricket is not a ghetto, a special case that cannot learn from other disciplines. The art of performance is largely universal. As I found out when I made a series for the BBC comparing the life of a cricketer with that of a classical musician, the differences are dwarfed by the similarities.

Secondly, given the evolved state of professional sport, we need to rethink the outdated assumption that the way to inspire better performances is to threaten, bully, intimidate and scream at players. It's not wrong because it is undignified (though there is that too), it's wrong because it doesn't work. As I've argued before here, instead of seeing sportsmen as a rabble of unmotivated shysters in search of a sergeant-major to whip them into shape, professional athletes have more in common with surgeons and musicians.

Above all, captaincy and coaching are collaborative. No one, no matter how brilliant, can lead without followers. So I'll leave my favourite anecdote from the book in its original form, "untranslated" into cricket-speak:

"A famous conductor was conducting a major work without the score. At one point in the concert his memory failed him, and he gave an enormous downbeat in a silent bar. Nobody played, of course, and he froze in horror. A voice at the back of the violas whispered, 'Aha! He doesn't sound so good on his own, does he?'"

You're more biased than you think – even when you know you're biased

Nobody’s political opinions are just the pure, objective, unvarnished truth. Except yours, obviously

‘Even when people acknowledge that what they’re about to do is biased, they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.’ Photo: Spencer Platt /Getty

When it comes to the important issues, I’m pretty sure my opinions are just right. Of course I am: if I thought they were wrong, I’d trade them in for some different ones. But in reality, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we’re all at least somewhat subject to bias – that my support for stricter gun control laws here in the US, for example, is partly based on wanting to support my team. Tell Republicans that some imaginary policy is a Republican one, as the psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did in 2003, and they’re much more likely to support it, even if it runs counter to Republican values. But ask them why they support it, and they’ll deny that party affiliation played a role. (Cohen found something similar for Democrats. Maybe I mentioned Republicans more prominently because I’m biased?)

Surely, though, if you tell people you’re giving them biased information – if you specifically draw their attention to the risk of being led astray by bias – they’ll begin to question their own objectivity? Nope: even then, they’ll insist they’re reaching an unbiased conclusion, if a new paper by five Princeton researchers (which I found via Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard) is anything to go by. 

Emily Pronin and her colleagues asked Princeton students, and other people recruited online, to look at 80 paintings, and to give each a score from 1 to 10 based on their artistic merit. Half of the subjects weren’t told the artists’ identities. The other half were allowed to see a name, purportedly that of the painter of each picture. In fact, those names were a mixture of famous artists and names pulled from the phone book. As you’d predict, those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result. 

Even when the risk of bias was explicitly pointed out to them, people remained confident that they weren’t susceptible to it; indeed, they actually rated their performance as more objective than they’d predicted it would be at the start of the test. “Even when people acknowledge that what they are about to do is biased,” the researchers write, “they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.”

This is more evidence for the “bias blind spot”, a term coined by Pronin which refers to the head-spinning fact that we have a cognitive bias to the effect that we’re uniquely immune to cognitive biases. Take the famous better-than-average effect, or Lake Wobegon effect, whereby the majority of people think they’re above average on any number of measures – their driving skills, their popularity, the quality of their relationship – when clearly they can’t all be right. It turns out the bias also applies to bias. In other words, we’re convinced that we’re better than most at not falling victim to bias. We seem to imagine we’re transparent to ourselves: that when we turn our attention within, we can clearly see all the factors influencing our decisions. The study participants “used a strategy that they thought was biased,” the researchers note, “and thus they probably expected to feel some bias when using it. The absence of that feeling may have made them more confident in their objectivity.”

This helps explain, for example, why it’s often better for companies to hire people, or colleges to admit students, using objective checklists, rather than interviews that rely on gut feelings. As Jacobs notes, it’s also why some orchestras ask musicians to audition from behind screens, so that only their music can be judged. It’s no good relying on the judges’ sincere confidence that they’d never let sexism or other biases get in the way. They may really believe it – but they’re probably wrong. Bias spares nobody. Except me, of course.

When Brian Eno met Ha-Joon Chang

Brian Eno has a new album out. How best to explain it? By hooking up with radical economist Ha-Joon Chang to debate everything from finance to free jazz and dogs in parks. Caspar Llewellyn Smith joins in

• Caspar Llewellyn Smith
• The Guardian, Sunday 11 November 2012 19.00 GMT

‘Let’s find a place in between’ … Eno and Chang in conversation. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

It's a very Brian Eno notion: rather than submit to a normal interview, the 64-year-old polymath wants to talk about his new album through a conversation with the economistHa-Joon Chang. Inevitably, the discussion, which takes place in Eno's office in Notting Hill, London, barely touches on the record, Lux; instead, it ranges over another of his new creations (an app called Scape), the value of art, and why numbers are like sausages. We also cover the real reason why rightwing Americans won't admit that the war in Iraq was a mistake.

Buy it from 

1. Buy the CD
2. Download as MP3
3. 
4. Brian Eno
5. Lux
6. Warp Records
7. 2012

Eno met Chang through an editor at the latter's publisher. The 49-year old economist is something of a star in that increasingly starry calling, ever since the publication of his 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism – a book described by the Guardian as "a masterful debunking of some of the myths of capitalism". Born in South Korea and now teaching at Cambridge University, Chang admits to being a fan of early Roxy Music – but, as soon becomes apparent, he and Eno have more in common than that.

Brian Eno: There's an issue we're both interested in – this middle ground between control and chaos. Some economists say you can only have a control model or a chaos model, that you're either a socialist or it's all about the free market. Whereas you say: "Let's find a place in between."

This happens to be an issue with the music I make. It's made for a place somewhere between architecture and gardening. It's not a situation where I'm finessing every tiny detail. I basically set a process in motion and then watch it happen. A lot of the design work is prior to the thing starting, rather than trying to keep control of it once it has started. You try to design the process carefully enough so you get the results you want and don't have to intervene.

Ha-Joon Chang: That's the approach I use in my economics. Central planners thought they could control everything, but there are always elements of uncertainty and surprise. But they then try to control even those. At the other extreme, we have those free-market economists who think there need to be no rules – even that it's OK to kill your competitor. Then you have a system that runs amok because everyone is cheating everyone in trying to beat them. The illusion that this rule-less system can organise itself has been proven completely mistaken – but we still have people wanting to believe in these extremes.

BE: And people saying, well, if you don't believe in that one, you must believe in this one.

HJC: I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, "Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning." I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking – which has really been harmful.

BE: One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right. What gets the results you want? And for me, it isn't top-down architecture that does that – but it's not chaos, either. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do. It turns out that anything that is called free anything isn't really. It's just constraints that you don't recognise.

HJC: It's a point I make in my book, when I say there's no such thing as a free market. The argument being that in all markets, there are some rules about what you can trade, how you can trade. We think some markets are free only because we totally accept those underlying rules. We just don't see them any more.

BE: You talk about child labour, don't you?

HJC: That's right. In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: "These children want to work, these people want to employ them ... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them ... " But today even the most rightwing economists don't advocate bringing child labour back, because they've got to accept the idea that children have the right to enjoy their childhood and a proper education.

BE: This turns out to be something that happens a lot. Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer. We don't even think that not employing children is anti-free market.

So whenever you talk about the free market – or free jazz! – what you really mean is "constrained by rules that we've stopped thinking about". This seems a long way off music, but when you set out to make something, you might just inherit all the ways of making it. If you're a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, you don't question the fact that there are 84 notes on the piano. You're not bothered by the fact that you can't get in between two of them – these are just the ground rules of the working situation. But I did want to question something about composition, and not just because I am a disagreeable sort of person, but because I noticed I liked music that wasn't made by either of these sets of rules. It wasn't command-economy music and it wasn't free-market music. It wasn't top-down architecture, and it wasn't free jazz. I'm referring in particular to things in the mid to late 60s like Terry Riley's piece In C. Have you heard of this piece?

HJC: No.

BE: It's a very interesting example of some very simple rules that produce something very rich. There's a score, and there are 52 bars, and each bar is a slightly different phrase in the key of C. It can be played by any number of musicians, and the rule is that they all start together, all playing to the same tempo, and they keep playing the first bar as many times as they want – each one. But then when you want – say you're playing clarinet – you can move on to bar two, and then you keep playing bar two. And then when you want to move on to the third bar ... well, the piece starts to separate out, and if there are 20 musicians, they might all be playing a different bar, but on top of one another, and it's all in C, so everything works together. So the piece has this beautiful characteristic: it starts out in unison, and gradually it becomes richer and richer and richer. And then they all have to end together, so they gradually converge back.

To make that piece by top-down writing would be impossible … but it's very beautiful.

HJC: And it's different every time?

BE: Yes. That's important. So this is one of the things that the composer has to accept: he or she can't precisely predict the outcome. This is what command economy people have trouble with.

HJC: Exactly.

BE: They're not happy with uncertainty.

Caspar Llewellyn Smith: You talk about a top-down process, and I can imagine what you mean with a composer – someone like Mozart, or even Riley … but where does something like folk music fit into this?

BE: Closer to Riley, I would say. There you have certain musical memes that get passed around, and never faithfully copied. That's the interesting thing. He hears a tune of mine, and thinks, "Oh, that's good, I'll play that." But his version is going to be different from mine. It's very genetic, actually. Whereas classical music was supposed to be perfectly replicable: the score was the ultimate authority.

CLS: Ha-Joon, presumably every economist has their own idea of how the world should be organised. So isn't it a very real problem when politicians come along, with their own agendas, and screw everything up?

HJC: Oh yeah, but my view is that we don't live by bread alone. We have to accept political considerations, and cultural and social considerations …

These days, economics has become such an all-encompassing way of thinking that everything is supposed to justify its existence by how much money it makes. Are you making enough money as a university? Are you making enough money as a classical orchestra? I think it's a fundamentally wrong approach to life. Because economics might be the foundation, if you like … but if you try to create a world in which everything is driven by money and the market, the world will be a much poorer place.

Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music … we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to "waste time" is a miracle – but that's exactly what art is for.

BE: Ha-Joon came up with a good title for a book that I might write: "A Total Waste of Time"!

CLS: Are these questions increasingly urgent, because over the course of the last couple of decades, that rightwing mindset has won out – we have rightwing figures now who, 20 years ago, would have been beyond the pale?

HJC: Absolutely. These ideas have penetrated so deeply into our society, it's poisonous.

BE: It's not only money, it's also other forms of accountability. Look at education in this country. I've just had two daughters go through the system here, and nothing mattered at all, as long as they could get through their A-levels. It doesn't matter if you don't actually understand a word. I could see some of their friends who were good at remembering things, but had no clue at all about what they were talking about, who got A stars.

HJC: In that system, curiosity is actually a great disadvantage. Which means that any creativity gets lost.

BE: It's to do with the act of quantification. It's part of the money thing: something that you can put a figure to immediately assumes a sort of authority, even if it doesn't deserve it.

What is the value of a park? You can't quantify it. We keep them because we've inherited them. But I'm sure there'll be a rightwing movement in the future that says, "Parks? What are they for? People just wander about in them – and there's dog shit all over the place. What's the point of that? A great big piece of real estate in the middle of London that could be generating income – we can quantify that." Quantification is a big temptation for society because it looks like control.

HJC: People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them. Once you know, you become very sceptical ...

I'm not against numbers. You need some numbers, to work with. Life would be impossible otherwise. But we've made these numbers into fetishes.

Of course, the more obscure a number is, the more people tend to think it is objective. If you say that the average American goes through three tubes of toothpaste a year, they kind of believe you. But if you say it's 3.72 tubes, they think: "Wow – that must be correct."

Art is not the only area affected by this quantification – education has been affected, family relationships, too – but I think art is the most endangered area of life. It's not obvious how something makes money. Sometimes, you have an artwork that you think is terrible, but then some billionaire is prepared to pay a huge amount for it, and suddenly it becomes valuable. And you are supposed to like it because it's expensive, and it must be expensive because it's worth it. So even the values within the art world are distorted.

BE: When I went to art school, the choice was to enter the art world or the pop world, and a lot of my teachers were disappointed I took the pop route because they thought I was a promising fine artist. But one of the reasons I did is because I thought it was inherently healthier. It had a quasi-democratic basis that the art world doesn't have at all. Tom Wolfe says something in his book The Painted Word about how four curators, 12 collectors and six critics determine an artist's career. Something like that.

This is why the art world has such incredible inertia, because once those people have invested their highly important opinion in something, they're very unwilling to change it. Whereas if you've bought an album by a band but then you don't like their second one, you just say, fuck it, the second one isn't any good.

CLS: And of course, today, you wouldn't even buy that record, you might just stream it.

HJC: Once again, you have to strike a balance between control and the market. Without some very rich guys a lot of great art would never have existed – so control isn't necessarily bad. But if you have only that, then art stagnates; it rots, if only a few powerful people are in charge. So you need a combination.

Your way of encouraging people to make their own music with your new app, Scape, is a good example of a different sort of approach to working.

BE: You drag shapes on to a screen to create a picture, and each shape has its own sound, with its own set of hidden rules. For instance, "when a lot of things are happening at once, I'm going to default into another mode of playing"; or "I only play in the evenings" – that sort of thing. Each piece of music becomes a little musical ecology.

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HJC: I've been a big fan of your music over the years. When I was growing up in South Korea in the 70s and early 80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged. The sound would be terrible: we used to call them tempura shop records – it sounded as if someone was deep-frying them.

This new album, Lux, was originally created for a specific space in Turin [the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria]. It's very interesting to think of a building as something more than just a physical structure: it's also about its surroundings, its light, and its sound. People don't tend to think of this, but our sense of a building can really be affected by its sound.

BE: Especially with this building, because it has the longest reverberation you can imagine. You snap your fingers, and the sound goes on for 11 seconds. It's a gallery connecting two palaces, actually. It's about 100 metres long, 15 wide and 10 high and any sound you make in there just spreads ... Treating sound as a physical material was only really possible from the time of recording onwards. As soon as people started making recordings, they took sound out of time and put it into space. It goes from being transitory and ephemeral to being something you can almost handle. I call that the materialisation of music. So everything I've been doing, really, has been to do with realising sound can be a material: if you're now thinking about a building, this can be one of the materials you can consider.

CLS: Ha-Joon, what do you make of the success in the west now of Korean pop: K-pop?

HJC: Gangnam Style! Initially a lot of it was really bad imitation of what was going on in Britain and America, but now they've found their own voice. Watch this space, because I think there'll be more interesting stuff coming out of it.

BE: Nearly everything good starts from imitation.

HJC: It's actually a good illustration of how art can be done in a very non-hierarchical way. The success of this guy, Psy, is because he didn't try to protect his work too much: he let everyone copy and create their own versions. So you have versions with Voldemortfrom Harry Potter ... my children are hooked on finding Matrix versions. Some are actually brilliant!

BE: It's a brilliant idea to make something that, like a module, can be plugged into any part of the culture.

CLS: Ha-Joon, in your book you write about different varieties of capitalism.

HJC: One of the general themes is that there are many different ways of organising the system. Different countries do things in different ways. Types of capitalism have different strengths and weaknesses. The problem is that in the last 30 years, we've been told there's only one way of organising capitalism, and it's the American-style free-market way. Countries are put under pressure and they have to rely on, especially if they're poor, foreign aid from rich countries, or they have to borrow money from the IMF. It's one of the reasons this crisis has happened.

There have been a lot of discussions about what needs to change, but there's been a lot of resistance, and popular sentiment hasn't been as coherent as it would have been in an age with strong trade unions and so on.

I'm not too hopeful. But if not now, when? If you can't learn the lessons from the biggest financial crisis in three generations, then we have a problem.

CLS: Ought culture try and shape the debate, or is that not its role? Brian, you've taken a stand on a number of political issues.

BE: I think the way culture changes things is slightly different from that. I've always disliked propaganda and shied away from artists' using their ability to manipulate emotional triggers – which is what artists do - in support of a political message, because I think it's a trick. I would like people to agree with me because they agree with my arguments, not because I'm good at music. So if I take a position publically, of course I get attention because I'm known through my music, but I don't try to support the position in that way.

Culture does change the way we think, just not in the propagandistic way. Art can be a model of how otherwise something could be done. How else it could be? When you see a piece of art, and you think, "Wow, that's wonderful", part of you wants to know, "And how did it get to be that way? Ah, it got to be that way by that mechanism. This is how it's done."

To give you an example of something I don't particularly respond to myself: Jackson Pollock was the expression of a philosophy, and that philosophy said, "If I just let it all come out of here and I'm not going to try to control it all, that's going to work." I don't particularly agree with it. But that picture is a way of thinking about that idea. And very often a work of art is a way of looking at the outcomes of an idea. It's very clear in novels – in fact, the most clear example is in science fiction: you describe a world, and you try to describe how if things were like that, they would turn out. That "what if?" question is a central question that makes human beings successful creatures. We are capable of saying what if this, and what if that, and comparing those outcomes. We love that question, and art is one of the ways we keep rehearsing our ability to answer it.

HJC: It's a great point. The problem is more with the way people think and not the content of it. Human beings are very prone to this black-and-white dichotomous thinking, so if you're a socialist country you allow no market and squash any dissent, if you're a capitalist country you're supposed to – although in fact, many countries don't – you're supposed to put profit and economic growth before any human values. But paradoxically, these two ways of thinking are the same, in the sense that they have this one grand principle to which they are willing to sacrifice everything. This is why when many communists give up communism, they become ardent free-market supporters.

BE: It's a cliche: the ex-Trot.

HJC: I know quite a few ex-Trots who work in the IMF. So if you understand art in the same way Brian does, it gives you the ability to think about alternatives, think about possibilities.

BE: It allows you to think about uncertainty. One of the characteristics of people, whether on the left or the right, is that they can't tolerate uncertainty. They don't want a system with any leaks in it. They want to think they're capable of battening everything down – and if only people would fucking stick to the rules, it would work. When those systems don't work, it's always because, in their opinion, somebody didn't play the game correctly.

HJC: Yes, it's never their principles that are wrong, it's the people who are the problem.

BE: This is why so many rightwing Americans still say Iraq would have been a good war, if only we had sent in more troops in the beginning, if only we'd done this or we'd done that … They will not admit that Iraq wasn't a good war.

CLS: There is explicitly political art – look at the case of Pussy Riot at the moment, for example. So there's a range of ways of going about things.

BE: Well, of course there's a complete spectrum. Although I do often wonder how much of the politics of Pussy Riot the people who support them understand.

HJC: As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you. I like all kinds of music – classical, pop, rock, electronic. Somehow, as a consumer, you know when something is good and when something is bad.

CLS: It's interesting that you use the word "consumer" – that we live in a world now in which art is something you consume, not something you practise. Art becomes a ready-made lifestyle.

HJC: Yes, but I took two years of piano lessons when I was seven and eight, and that was it.

BE: That's more than I took.